somethin' stupid (i love you) / jinbyul 💜

chapter seven / the first of many

Author's Note: Published on March 7, 2020. Updates will be posted twice or thrice a month. I hope you're all enjoying where this story is going so far, thank you as always for your support. Love you all 🥰

P.S. I might be posting another JinByul fic soon. Just nitpicking some stuff, dunno when I'll finish with that. But of course, this story takes first priority until it's done. Please look forward to it 💕💕💕

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Moonbyul blows the stray hair out of her eyes and pulls up the striped sweater against her chest for the fifth time that night. She scowls at her reflection after a while and shakes her head.

Still a no.

She tosses the sweater onto the bed, misses by a hairline and watches as it slides down to the floor with enviable, fluid grace.

She drags her feet on the way back to her bed and kneels down to collect the sweater, heaving a put-upon sigh like it's taking extraordinary effort to put her things back in order. She frowns at the pile of rejected clothing as she stacks it one sweater higher, noting that she's got nothing left to try on now that she's said no to everything. Again.

Moonbyul leans the side of her head against the mattress and unenthusiastically topples over the pile of rejected clothes with one hand, wallowing in self-pity. She's got roughly thirty minutes left until Jin picks her up and she still hasn't decided what she wants to wear.

She wants to scream.

She wants to burrow under her bedsheets, curl up into a ball and never come out again until the next century. Or at least, until Jin suddenly cancels tonight for whatever reason and the whole thing blows over at her convenience—never to brought up ever again.

Moonbyul already knew that getting ready for this would be difficult. She didn't think it would be this bad though, reduced to her teenage self in her late 20's, pulling her hair clean out of her scalp because she just didn't have the right clothes for a first date.

If you could call it that. She honestly doesn't know at this point.

What she knows though, is that she really doesn't want to do this.

An entire month has gone by since Kim Seokjin has questionably asked her out but time didn't help the butterflies in her stomach shrivel up and die. The morning after that, Moonbyul had temporarily deluded herself into thinking that her weird, newfound feelings for Jin had been an emotional fluke from the lack of sleep. The charade had lasted well enough until Jin had sent a short clip of himself slurping jjajangmyeon for dinner to their group chat. It was only when her cheeks began to ache from smiling that she realized how many times she'd already repeated the uneventful, sixteen-second video without pause.

Moonbyul had cleared her throat and squished her mouth together with one hand, physically forcing herself to stop marveling at how Jin had looked while eating, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk. The way he hunched over his bowl to keep his members from stealing a bite had been quite endearing too.

She muted their group chat until the next day and promptly rolled over, planting her face onto the pillow and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the fact that she was starting to find Jin cute, and not in the completely objective sense that she has only ever seen him as before.

Her inner monologue helpfully supplied from then on that no, it probably wasn't an emotional fluke.

Ever since that night, Moonbyul had begun checking all of her text messages and notifications with such palpable apprehension that even her members had started calling her out on it. She couldn't tell them why she was so jumpy, of course, so she just brushed them off and tried her best not to flinch every time her phone buzzed with god-knows-what.