Dark Matter | JJK

49. Tied

Seunghee took a morsel of the burnt porridge from her cracked wooden bowl and grimaced. Even convicts deserved better than such an excuse for lunch. All around her, famished prisoners garbled down their food like starving travellers stranded in a desert. Sitting across from her in the narrow, netted cell, Min Yoongi pushed his bowl away with a foot.

"Eat up," Seunghee told him.

The slumped journalist spared a fleeting, disgusted glance at the burnt porridge. "That thing tastes like cow poop. I'm not touching it."

Seunghee scoffed. Even the horrors of an injection chamber couldn't strip him of his Mount Fuji-high ego. "Are you expecting them to give you grilled meat main course with free desert in this hell? Stop being a brat and eat that before the guards return for inspection."

Yoongi snapped his gaze to her, glaring. "Oh, so I'm the brat? You do realise that the reason we're here in the first place is because of you, right?"

She crossed her arms against her crumpled shirt and scooted backwards still her spine was melded to the netted wall, desperately wishing their shared cell was larger so she could crawl away from him and his acerbic tongue. "Are you seriously going to point fingers right now? When we're only hours away from forgetting all of this?"

"Well, we wouldn't be if you'd not stormed out of the news centre with your nose up in the air like that!"

"Then you should've thought twice before being such a potty mouth to me!"

"You know what," Yoongi sighed, shoulders shaking with exasperated resignation, "none of this would've happened if you just hadn't –"

He cut himself off, clamping his lips shut before the rest of his sentence could make it out.

"If I just hadn't what?" Seunghee narrowed her eyes at him, waiting with bated breath so he could spit out his words like scalding knives of brutal truth that cut into her flesh. Before she knew it, her eyes were stinging with tears. She was in a prison with tattered clothes and nothing to eat, her wounds fresh and burning with hopelessness, but it was her stupid heart that hurt the most. "If I hadn't joined your news centre in the first place? Is that what you want?"

Yoongi's glare dilated into a bewildered expression, lips turning downwards in a frown as her words sank in. "No," he said after a while, holding her gaze, "that's not what I wanted to say. I was – I was saying that none of this would've happened if you'd just stopped and let me explain myself." He grimaced, as though internally reprimanding himself for not being eloquent enough in expressing whatever he wanted her to know. "If you – if you'd stopped and let me apologize. Clear shit out."

So he was going to break her heart again. "Please," Seunghee said, averting her gaze and fighting to keep her tears at bay. She was sure she looked hideous enough with grease smeared on her jaw and beads of sweat marring her brow. "Save the rejection for when – if – we get out of here alive."

"Rejection?"

Yoongi had never sounded so confused and lost in all of the time she had known him. Was he really going to make her say it out loud? In a prison? On possibly the last day of her life as a sane human?

"Never mind."

"Seunghee –"

"You know what the best thing to do right now would be?" she asked, unable to keep the bite out of her words. "The best thing to do right now would be to not talk at all until one of us is called to get injected and we never see each other again –"

Yoongi leaned in and kissed her.

She didn't even realise when he crossed the one meter or so of distance between them, gripping her thigh to angle his head and press his dry lips to hers. He retreated just as quickly, pulling away but staying close, giving her no time to decide whether the momentary but jolting electric buzz under her skin had been real or just another figment of her imagination.