✔️ Unconditionally [Book 2] | Jeon Jungkook

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This chapter has a soundtrack
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As he stared at the pair embracing in the quad, Jungkook became convinced that his heart had stopped beating for the second time in his life.

She held onto Kwan as if he were the anchor that kept her from floating adrift in the unforgiving current. As if he were the rescuer pulling her from a flame-engulfed building moments from its collapse. As if he were the savior that grabbed her before she walked in front of a dangerously speeding car.

She held on the way Jungkook wanted her to hold onto him.

She held onto him as if there was more to their relationship than he originally thought.

No.
I trust her.

He swallowed thickly. The process of breathing seemed to cease along with his pulse, yet his body refused to collapse lifelessly to the ground. Instead, his muscles locked in place, forcing him to helplessly stand and watch. Time, the kind and considerate concept it was, slowed to a crawl to make sure he didn't miss a single detail of the scene in front of him.

Her head was partially buried into his chest as he stroked her hair the way one does a frightened child. His arms enveloped her, protectively shielding her while providing the comfort Jungkook could see it did.

Every time he'd spoken to her, she'd seemed fine. She'd chatted with him. She'd smiled. She looked just as she did any other day.

Looking at her now, he could see how wrong he was.

'I've been worried about her for a while.'

The tip of her nose was red. Her skin was pale. Her eyes were puffy from crying.

'She never says what's bothering her but I can tell something's wrong.'

Wrapped in his embrace, she looked tiny. Dwarfed not only by his size but by her own clothing, which fit larger on her than he remembered.

'But I guess I don't have to tell you that. I know she shares everything with you.'

Hyun-Ji has been depressed and Jungkook didn't know.

How long had she been like this? Why didn't she come to him? Didn't she know that he would be there for her? That he would want to be there for her?

But the question that haunted him more than any other on the previous list:

Why hadn't he seen it?

His mind replayed every interaction with her. Every conversation. Every video call. It was only then that he could see the sadness that overcast her smile and the melancholy in her voice that she explained away as fatigue.

A part of him wanted to be angry at Kwan but a larger part was angry at himself for not knowing her well enough to notice until now.

Hyun-Ji was his fiancée, the person he would call his wife before the year's conclusion. As her husband, Jungkook should have been the one most in tune with what she was feeling but he wasn't. He should have been the one she went to with her troubles, but she hadn't.