Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jimin falls out of love on a Thursday.

Which isn’t the worst thing about the situation, in the big picture, but it’s what she focuses on, because if she doesn’t, then she’ll be faced with the fact that maybe she fell out of love a long time ago. That maybe she’s been painting on smiles and faking appearances for months now.

But nothing major ever happens on a Thursday, and so that’s what she decides to think about after dinner, pushing a stray slice of scallion through the small pond of sauce left in her bowl with the tip of her chopstick, watching intently as it leaves a thin, red-brown trail around the rim in its wake.

Anything to avoid looking at him .

Which becomes a problem when he’s speaking directly to her.

“Jimin-ah?”

A hand in front of her face waves, and Jimin’s eyes snap up. Daewon is looking at her with an expression on his face that’s a hard cross between concern and amusement, but Jimin can see behind it, too—the irritation that would be well-masked if she hadn’t known him for six years, hadn’t been dating him for five and a half of them.

“You feeling okay?” he asks, a brow shooting up as he pulls his hand back to his own side.

“Long day,” she says by way of explanation, resting an elbow on the table, her chin in the palm of her hand. If she closes her eyes, maybe she can feign a yawn, avoid his stare for a little bit longer… only when she does, it springs tears to her eyes, and oh god, she’s going to cry, oh god —

“Jimin?”

The amusement is gone from Daewon’s face, concern taken its place fully now, but Jimin can still see, even through cloudy tears, the underlying exasperation. The way he’s visibly thinking about how he can get the conversation back on track to whatever he’d been talking about earlier that Jimin had missed.

She pushes the heels of her hands against her eyes to stop the impending flood, but all that does is smudge mascara on her wrists and make the telltale pre-crying headache that much more intense.

“Jimin, this is more than just a long day, what’s going—”

“We’re not in love, are we.”

It comes out of her like a bullet, flat and tearing and loud, so much louder than she’d meant it—not in volume, but in the way that it leaves stark silence in its wake, like the room has been stripped of all other oxygen, so no other sound can be carried through the space except the uneven catch of her breath in her throat.

Daewon stares at her like she’s told him something dreadful, and maybe she has. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? Falling out of love? After so long?

“Jimin,” he starts again, like her name is the only word he’s able to say, and Jimin just… can’t. She can’t hear it. She can’t take him trying to placate her, trying to make excuses.

Her eyes meet his, and his jaw is hanging agape, tensed like he’s had to stop himself from speaking before she even can.

“We aren’t,” she breathes. “We haven’t been, not for a long time.”

“What does that even mean?” Daewon presses. He’s sitting up straighter now, spine a ramrod anchoring him to his seat. “Jimin, what’s happened since yesterday, huh?”

And that’s the thing, is that nothing in particular has happened. It’s a Thursday . Jimin went to work this morning, sat down at her desk with the same iced coffee she drinks every morning, pulled up the same file she’s been working on for a week now, took the same subway home, fed the cat the same food that he’s eaten every day for the year they’ve had him.

Nothing about today has been different than yesterday, or the day before, or any other day, except that tonight, when Jimin heard the front door open in the midst of cooking dinner, she had the stray thought that she didn’t want it to be Daewon behind it, and that thought grew and grew until it consumed her entire mind. Until she started crying at the dinner table despite her best efforts.

But she doesn’t have an answer to the question, so she just drops her head into her hands and bites back a cry.

“Oppa,” she murmurs into her hands, hating how small her voice comes out, “when was the last time we spent time, just the two of us?”

Daewon makes a noise of displeasure. “We did dinner and a movie just last weekend, Jimin, don’t be like that.”

“We had dinner at your client’s restaurant.” Jimin lifts her head, meets his eyes, hopes her gaze isn’t wavering too, too much. “You missed half an hour of the climax because you got a phone call, and then you kept checking your phone for the rest of the movie.”

“So I’ve been working too hard,” Daewon dismisses. “I’ll cut back on that. We’ll go on more dates, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t—” An ugly sob tears its way out of her throat. “It’s not you working too hard, and it’s not about fucking dates , oppa. When was the last time we had a conversation that wasn’t idle small talk about work over dinner? When was the last time we kissed each other because we were happy and we felt like it, rather than just during sex?”

If she hadn’t been looking up, Jimin thinks that maybe she would’ve assumed Daewon left the room by the silence that follows. Every shaky inhale-exhale in her chest sounds like a crashing wave between her ears until he speaks, and then it’s like there’s no other sound in the apartment at all except for his cold rasp.

“What does this mean then,” he says, flat. No questions about it. “Is this it for us? Just like that?”

“I don’t know,” says Jimin. “I don’t know. I just—I need to think.”

Daewon makes a noise that’s strangely akin to an impatient huff. Like a child waiting on his turn on the playground, not like a man whose girlfriend of almost six years is breaking down in front of him. Jimin doesn’t have the energy left to comment on it.

“How long?” he asks, and just when Jimin thinks he’s about to add on a how long have you been feeling like this, how long have you been holding this in , or a how long has it been since we’ve been truly happy together , he doesn’t. “How long will it take you to think about it?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats. “It’s—it’s not something I can just—”

“You know the firm is having that party this weekend, and we’ve already RSVP’d.”

Jimin’s on her feet before she can fully process what she’s doing, chopsticks thrown into her bowl with a sharp, metallic clang that rings longer as she shoves her chair back beneath the table.

“Fine,” she hisses on her way down the hallway, not another glance to spare back at Daewon and the face he’s probably making, the self-righteous shock. “We’ll go to your party. Whatever.”

She shuts the bedroom door behind herself, and it doesn’t open for the rest of the night.

Jimin met Daewon at the beginning of her last year of university, through a friend of a friend. He was handsome and charming and older, a grad student who already had law firms chomping at the bit to hire him, and Jimin was taken almost immediately with the easy way he spoke, his suave mannerisms, and the way that every room he entered seemed to spark alive with electricity. They hadn’t seen each other very often in the beginning, but a chance second encounter at another mutual friend’s birthday party and a couple of shared drinks later, and they had a date marked in their calendars, their first.

When Jimin graduated and the lease on the apartment she shared with a couple of university friends was up, it was a no-brainer to move in together. Daewon had an associate spot at a high-powered law firm lined up the moment he graduated, and Jimin temped around until she landed a permanent gig doing graphic design for an online fashion retailer, and they’d been so happy . Daewon baked her an ill-fated congratulatory cheesecake that was so bad they’d thrown it out and ordered a brand new one, and they’d spent the night kissing every inch of each other’s skin in sheer bliss that their life— their life, shared—was shaping up the way they’d been dreaming of.

Jimin’s parents loved Daewon, were taken with him just as easily as Jimin had been at the first meeting, just after his graduation. Oh, he’s so handsome, her mother had whispered in the doorway of her childhood home before Jimin could even get her shoes off. Attorney job straight out of law school, that’s impressive, her father had said over a handshake in the living room, Your parents must be as proud of you as we are of our Jimin.

She’d been so happy that they were happy—Jimin was an only child, her parents’ eternal pride and worry, and their satisfaction had meant so much to her. Her mother had nudged her and winked as they packed up the leftovers that night— when should we expect the engagement announcement? —and Jimin had laughed and said it’s only been eight months, Mom , but her mother had just winked again and handed over a container of more yakgwa than she and Daewon could realistically eat.

Her coworkers called them a power couple , though Jimin shrugged it off, said they were just normal people, because they were, prone to the less-than-glamorous as anyone else. Daewon was sometimes too dedicated to his work, and Jimin was sometimes too dedicated to her own vision of what a perfect life looked like.

They fought, and they worked it out, and then they fought some more, and that, well—that was where the problems started.

Now, Jimin lingers around the kitchen of the (massive, luxurious, ostentatious) penthouse that belongs to Daewon’s boss, whose wife is leaning on the other side of the counter in a slinky black dress that makes all 156 centimeters of Jimin feel tiny and inadequate. And she’s eyeing the array of expensive liquor that lines the counter even though she promised herself she won’t drink tonight, because it’s easier than looking at the beautiful woman across the counter who still thinks that she and Daewon are hopelessly in love like they had been four, three, two years ago.

Haeri is her name. Jimin doesn’t remember the name of ninety percent of the people in the penthouse, but she remembers tall, beautiful Haeri with the silk dress and the shiny hair and the rose-painted smile.

“Ah, you’re welcome to have any drinks you’d like, Jiminie,” Haeri trills, having noticed Jimin’s eyes scanning the selection. Her smile turns impish, curious. “Unless…?”

She trails off purposely, but the hand that rests questioningly on her flat stomach finishes her question without another word needed. It makes Jimin feel sick in a way that’s not at all related to the way Haeri is implying.

“No, no, it’s not that at all, my goodness,” is Jimin’s high-pitched, stuttered reply. “Just not in the mood to drink tonight, is all.”

If she’s being honest with herself, the alcohol avoidance is more than that—because Jimin knows that the moment she and Daewon get back home, back to the apartment, she’s packing an overnight bag, sending an email to her boss to let her know she’ll be telecommuting for the week, and getting on the first train to Busan, and she doesn’t need anything clouding her judgment.

The last two days have been miserable. They don’t speak, barely even look at each other. The closest they came to touching was last night, when Jimin was cleaning Kkul’s litter box and Daewon needed to put his work clothes in the laundry hamper after his shower. She tried to make a lighthearted joke about it, to cut the thick tension—it had never been her intention to make him an enemy , just to share her feelings, to figure out how they’d broken their relationship so completely without even realizing it—but he’d just huffed and retreated to the guest room.

She zones back in to Haeri sitting down on the closest bar stool, head ducked close to Jimin’s like she’s going to tell a secret. She smells like spicy perfume, with a sharp undertone of gin from the martini she’s been sipping on all night. It’s intoxicating, and not just from the alcohol—Jimin has to avert her eyes when Haeri leans close enough to her ear to whisper, “Between you and I, your boy is about to get the kind of raise that could make starting a family much, much easier for the two of you.”

And Jimin feels it again, the clawing dread—can’t even force a smile or fake a laugh, just stops mid-breath and says, “I—I need to go,” without any further explanation.

The rest of the party gets drowned out in the way Jimin’s vision tunnels, blurry eyes and sweaty palms. All she hears is her blood rushing between her ears as she rushes out the front door into the hallway.

Or—

All she hears is her blood rushing between her ears and Daewon stumbling out the door behind her, beer still in hand.

“What the fuck, Jimin?” he calls after her. She’s stopped, back pressed against the wall next to the elevator to catch her breath, but she loses it again at the dark look on his face.

“Oh, so now we’re on speaking terms?” she cackles, loud and sarcastic and biting. The thing in her chest is screaming to be let out, and she doesn’t try to stop it. “Because I made a scene at your big, important lawyer party?”

“You told me you didn’t fucking love me!” he shouts back. It’s slurred—the beer in his hand certainly isn’t his first—and Jimin braces herself against the wall, fists buried in the pockets of her dress. “What the hell else am I supposed to do, Jimin, pretend it never happened?”

“We don’t love each other ,” Jimin hisses back. “You can’t honestly tell me that you thought we were still in the honeymoon phase, oppa, we’ve been out of it for a long time.”

At some point, they’d become each other’s trophies: Jimin was the pretty, smart girlfriend who Daewon touted at work events like a prize he’d won, and Daewon was the handsome, successful boyfriend who made Jimin’s parents proud that she’d snagged the full package. Now, Jimin can’t even stand to hang around the parties anymore, and she doubts that her mother and father will ever see Daewon again.

“I just wanted to know your feelings, oppa,” she half-whispers into the air between them. “I wanted to know if I was alone in feeling the way I do, and all you cared about was if I was still coming to a party with you.”

Daewon deflates. There’s no flat surface around to set his beer on, so he balances it on the rim of a potted plant, where it will probably stay until someone else finds it. He covers his face with both hands, leaning against the opposite wall.

“Office gossip said I was close to a promotion,” he sighs into his hands. His voice sounds tired, defeated. “You know my boss is big on seeing that his employees are stable in their personal lives, too.”

“I know,” Jimin says. She meets his eyes cautiously, and she can see the exhaustion in his that probably mirrors hers. “You got it.”

A pause. “I what?”

“His wife said you were as good as promoted already,” Jimin says, and it comes out as hollow as it feels. “Not in so many words, but.”

They stare at each other across the hallway, not speaking. Jimin knows her eyes are wet, and can see the way Daewon keeps blinking heavily like he’s trying to save himself from the same fate. He takes a step forward, just one, so there’s only a touch less space between them in the hallway, though it still feels like just as many miles as it’s felt all week.

“Where are you going, Jimin?”

Jimin glances at the elevator to her side, the purse slung over her shoulder that’s never left her side all night.

“Home,” she says, and then after watching the questions that swim in his eyes, adds, “My parents’ home. Busan.”

He frowns. “Oh.”

“For a week, probably. Maybe two, if I can work from home for that long.” She closes her eyes, and a tear slips down. “And then I’ll come back, pick up my stuff and the cat, and stay in a hotel or something until I can find a place of my own.”

“You don’t have to stay in a hotel, Jimin-ah.” It’s the first time he’s used the familiarity since everything blew up. It feels like a ceasefire, of sorts. “I can find a new place while you’re gone—you work closer to the apartment, anyway, and we’ve already paid the pet deposit.”

“And you’ll have promotion money,” Jimin concedes miserably. The joke doesn’t land; neither of them can find it in themselves to laugh.

“So this is really it,” says Daewon. He takes another step forward, and Jimin doesn’t fight it.

She manages a nod. “I don’t want to be sad anymore. I’m so tired of being sad.”

Another step forward, like Daewon is going to hug her, but this time, Jimin holds her hand out to stop him. This time, she presses the down button for the elevator, and it dings open almost immediately.

“Can you tell me one thing?” she asks as she steps into it, leaning against the doors to keep them open. Daewon nods, almost imperceptible, and Jimin asks, “ Do you love me?”

He sighs. Frowns. Looks up, like he’s thinking.

“No,” he says, and it’s the most honest thing Jimin thinks he’s said to her in a long time. It stings, but only in a way that the confirmation of something she’s already known stings. “I did, though. Before. A lot.”

Jimin steps backwards, fully in the elevator now, and the last thing she says before the doors shut is, “I loved you, too.”

Being back home is strange.

The last time Jimin was here for longer than a holiday break was before she left for college, and her childhood neighborhood is somehow both the same as it’s always been and infinitely different. The middle school she went to has been closed by now, and the shops that line the streets where her mother used to take her along for the ride while she grocery shopped have closed and swapped and changed, their signs lit up in different colors than before, the facades repainted. But Mrs. Song, older now and aided by her grandson, still greets Jimin when she passes her corner produce stall, like she has since she was a kid hiding behind her mother’s legs, and the same ocean licks at her ankles when she takes the bus down to Gwangalli Beach in hopes that the ocean breeze will carry away some of the weight on her shoulders.

Boot soles buried in the sand, wind whipping her hair in every direction around her face until it tangles in her eyelashes and sticks to her lip balm, Jimin hears her name called out and frowns. No one knows she’s in the city, just her parents and her boss and Mrs. Song and her grandson. But the voice sounds surprised, a little questioning, like they’re not quite sure it’s her. Jimin brushes her hair back and holds her bangs out of her face with a steady hand as she rises back to her feet to meet the person calling out to her halfway.

“Jimin?” the voice calls one more time until they’re facing each other, and a buzzing combination of happiness and dread wells up in Jimin’s chest, begins to flood through her veins.

“Sohee-yah,” she says weakly, a facsimile of a smile painted on. The casualness feels wrong in her mouth—she and Sohee were inseparable as teenagers, but it’s been years since they spoke in person, rather than indirectly through SNS. From what Jimin’s gathered from Instagram, Sohee’s become something of a travel blogger, her feed filled with photos of lush forests and serene ocean views. She married a pilot last year—something straight out of a movie, the frequent flyer having a meet cute during an extended layover with the pilot who’s always given her safe travels—but Jimin hadn’t been able to make the wedding, on a non-refundable holiday in Saipan with Daewon’s family for his parents’ anniversary.

Jimin makes a mental note to try and avoid using her name for as long as it takes for the conversation to end, so the feigned familiarity doesn’t burn so acrid on her tongue.

“Ah, I knew that pretty face was yours!” Sohee beams, tucking a long piece of artfully disheveled hair behind her ear gracefully. She looks like the wind bends to her movements, rather than the opposite. Jimin tries to focus her eyes over her shoulder to keep from staring too much. “How are you doing, Jimin-ah? I didn’t expect to see you here!”

“I—” Jimin stops herself before she says something too honest. She slaps on her boldest tone of voice, unsticks her hair from her lips, and tries to remember what the old, confident Jimin used to sound like. “I’m doing well. Visiting my parents for the week.”

Sohee grins, bright and brilliant. She puts a hand on Jimin’s shoulder, and Jimin tries not to stiffen beneath it. “Always so filial, Jiminie,” she coos, and the worst part is that it’s entirely sincere. She’s never been anything but kind, and Jimin is the worst sort of person for wanting this interaction to end as quickly as possible. “If you’re still in town on Saturday night, Junhyeok and I are having a little get-together at our place. Nothing big, just to christen the new apartment, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, and—”

Jimin decides, suddenly, that she’s only going to be working from home for one week.

“Ah,” she says, feigned disappointment, “I’m actually heading back to Seoul on Friday, sorry. I’ll send a bottle of wine, though, promise.”

“Don’t even worry about it, Jiminie,” Sohee placates, the hand on Jimin’s shoulder giving a light squeeze. She winks, sly. “I’m sure your boyfriend misses you. Daewon, right? How’s he doing?”

“Um.”

The fake smile is wavering, and Jimin can feel the corners of her mouth slipping on their own volition.

“He got a promotion this week, actually.” It’s not a lie, necessarily. Daewon is probably in his boss’s office right now, accepting it. And then he’ll probably walk back to his desk afterwards to apartment hunt.

Because they’re not going to be living together after this week. Because Jimin will be in their apartment alone, just herself and Kkul and a spare bedroom that used to be empty, before everything blew up.

If Sohee is about to say anything, then Jimin doesn’t notice, too quick to duck her head, pretend she has a call, draw attention away from the tears building in her eyes.

“Ah, it’s my mom, I should get this,” she manages to choke out, bringing her silent cell phone to her ear. “It was nice to see you, Sohee, but I need to—Mom? Hi.”

Jimin barely makes it back to the pavement before the sob rips out of her, tearing its way up her throat so she has to bury her face in her hands to muffle the sound. A passing family stops to glance in her direction, worried—the mother looks like she’s going to say something to her, maybe try and offer some comfort, but Jimin straightens before she can, rushing away with a ducked head and a hurried, “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.”

By far, the strangest thing about being home, though, is the way Jimin’s parents have started walking around eggshells around her.

It makes sense, really. Two days ago, they were woken up at three o’clock in the morning by their only child slipping through the apartment door in a cocktail dress and hastily thrown on sneakers, makeup cried off and hair a greasy mess from running her hands through it over and over again on the train into the city, a haphazardly packed suitcase dragging behind her. Jimin had been nearly incoherent with exhaustion and emotion, but she’d still seen the way her parents’ expressions clouded over when she explained that she broke up with Daewon, that it was over, yes, it’s really over, we’re done—he’s moving out by next week, Dad—yes, I’m sure, Mom .

They’ve been looking at her differently since then, with an eerie carefulness, like they’re afraid a glance at the wrong time will set her off. That night, her father patted her shoulder on his way back to bed and said, “He’ll come around,” and his hand had gone stiff when Jimin replied, “He won’t, and I wouldn’t want him to, anyway.” She’s kept quiet since then.

Except now, when Jimin shoulders the front door open after the run-in with Sohee at the beach, her eyes must still be bloodshot, because her mother pauses in the middle of cleaning to frown emphatically at her.

“Jimin-ah,” she says in that gentle, maternal tone that’s always meant worry and care and Jimin feeling infinitely worse about making her worry. The duster in her hand drops to the coffee table with a muffled clatter, and she steps forward to cup Jimin’s cheeks in her hands before Jimin can even finish stepping out of her boots. She doesn’t ask, and Jimin doesn’t say anything, just lets her mother’s thumbs brush away the wetness under her eyes.

“You’ll be okay,” her mother says, but it sounds more like, he’ll come back , and Jimin has to bite her tongue to not say anything contrary. The conversation will start again, the one where her mother tries to convince her that she and Daewon are meant to be and that love will conquer all, the one where Jimin’s stomach bottoms out and her mind wanders elsewhere to keep from having to think about how wrong she is, how there’s no love left to conquer.

Jimin skips dinner that night, can’t stomach the thought of sitting at the same table that’s never changed since she was a kid, a deer in the headlights of her parents’ pity and sorrow all night. She feigns a headache and resigns herself to the confines of her childhood bedroom, stared down by each and every face in the posters that still line the walls years later, even now that the further half of the space is stacked with boxes of old keepsakes and things that have no real place in the apartment anymore.

It’s a little too on the nose for Jimin, who doesn’t belong here either. Doesn’t feel like she belongs much of anywhere anymore.

Dinner, instead, is a bag of Banana Kick from a train station vending machine fished out of her suitcase, eyes locked with a poster of Choi Sooyoung pinned to the wall directly across from her bed by a sixteen-year-old Jimin who’d run so quickly home from the bus stop after her post-hagwon trip to Synnara Records that she’d cracked the heel of one of her school shoes on the stairs back up to the apartment. She had her first kiss in front of that poster, Sooyoung staring balefully over her shoulder while Jimin screwed her eyes shut and tried to drown out the sound of Sohee giggling on the other side of the door in favor of the boy’s lips—a feat that proved hard when she could barely remember his name, just that he was a friend of a friend in another class and hadn’t been kissed before either. Neither of them enjoyed it. He ducked out of the apartment with a sheepish bow half an hour later, before Jimin’s mother got back from work at the tteok cafe down the block.

She sets the half-empty bag of snacks down on her bedside table and sinks down her headboard until she’s flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, arm tossed over her eyes to block out the overhead lighting before she gives herself a real headache.

She keeps replaying the afternoon in her mind: Sohee and her grace, Jimin and her fumbling awkwardness and inability to keep up a conversation with someone she used to call her best friend, once upon a time. Sohee who looks different now than they did as teenagers but is still just as beautiful, tall and leggy and friendly, shining hair and bright smile—

Thinks of tall, beautiful Haeri in her silk dress with her lips like bloody red roses wrapped around the rim of a martini glass, grinning over the counter with dark eyes trained on Jimin, Jimin only—

A hand crests the waistband of her pajama pants without a thought, slow fingertips tracing over her underwear, teasing. Jimin’s hips twitch on their own volition when the edge of a nail grazes a little too low, with a little more pressure over the soft cotton. Breath hitching in her throat, her eyes flick to the bedroom door—locked, thank god—and she throws the arm off of her eyes, letting her hand wander up, up. Up her shirt, across the smooth, flat plane of her stomach, cupping over a bare breast while her other hand nudges its way down, further, past elastic and into the warmth between her legs.

Part of her wishes she’d thought to bring the little bullet vibrator she keeps rolled up in a pair of rarely-worn sweatpants in her pajama drawer back home, just to speed things up, but that hadn’t exactly been on the forefront of her mind when she’d been tearfully packing up to stay with her parents , of all people. Still, she’s embarrassingly wet for how little she’s touched herself and how little she’s let herself think.

Except that she hasn’t thought, not really. Not about the things that would usually get her going: Ji Soo brushing his teeth wearing nothing but a towel in My First First Love, or when she saw Rain in concert in high school and his body rolls in Love Song were two meters from her face. All she’s thought about were Sohee and Haeri and Choi Sooyoung, and they don’t… do that … for her, at least.

Jimin moans, muffled around a bitten lip, as her middle finger circles her clit with growing pressure, the fingers of her other hand pinching her nipple lightly so the surrounding skin pebbles beneath her palm. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine it’s someone else’s hands on her, someone with longer fingers than her short and stubby ones, whose cold rings erupt her skin into goosebumps, manicured nails dancing across her body, painted in pastels.

No, no, not—maybe not that. Definitely not that.

Opening her eyes a crack, Jimin looks again at Sooyoung on the wall, fingers pressing harder against herself, with more purpose, until the familiar, creeping tingle of an orgasm starts to build in the pit of her belly, arching her back off of the bed. She has to pull her hand out from under her shirt and slap it hastily over her mouth to dampen the low whine that she lets out as her body trembles through it.

Luckily, her room is the last door in the hallway, far away from where her parents are probably sitting at the kitchen table still, discussing how their daughter has probably fucked up her future. Unluckily, it’s at this point that her phone lights up on the nightstand next to her discarded snack, four little ping noises, one after the other in quick succession, cutting through the sound of her heavy breathing.

With her clean hand, she reaches across her body for it, if only to switch it to silent mode.

Except when she gets a look at the contact name, her stomach drops.

Of all times.

The first thing Jimin does is change his name in her phone. No familiarity, no emoji, not anymore.

She doesn’t even know what to send back. Doesn’t know if she wants to send anything back, even if she should. He’s being perfectly civil, has been kinder and more accepting than she’d expected, considering she ran out of his office party in a panic and broke up with him in the hallway outside just days ago.

But something about replying to him like this —one hand still halfway down her pants, heart still thrumming in the afterglow of an orgasm at the hands of a fantasy she’s not letting herself entertain right now—feels too wrong right now. Almost like he’d somehow known she wasn’t in a position where she’d wanted to reply and sent the messages on purpose.

So Jimin waits, just a few more minutes, until her heart rate slows and she doesn’t hear the low hum of the TV in the living room anymore, and only then does she stand up from bed, covers peeled back carefully with her one clean hand.

She tiptoes down the hallway, washes her hands, uses the bathroom, washes them again, brushes her teeth. Scrutinizes her face in the mirror: the smeared liner at the outer corners of her eyes, creased concealer giving way to greyed under eye bags from lack of sleep. She’s too exhausted, really, to want to take off the remnants of her makeup, but doing so will stall replying to Daewon even further, so she knees open the cupboard to and blindly reaches for the bag she’d at least remembered to pack filled with her skincare products.

It’s almost calming, the routine of it: three pumps of cleansing oil in the palm of her hand, gentle massage, rinse; cotton pads soaked in eye makeup remover, held over her eyes until her mascara and liner wipe off in a single swipe; one pump of facial cleanser, even gentler massage, rinse; a spritz of toner, a pat of essence, a dab of eye cream, a healthy blob of moisturizer.

The face staring back at Jimin in the mirror after she lines all of her products up at the edge of the counter is dewy, fresh, blessed with her parent’s genes for clear, even skin—but no product can mask the dullness behind her eyes.

Instead, she shuts the light off and pads on cold feet back to the bedroom. The hallway stretched out before her feels somehow both endlessly long and horribly short, her heart jumping further into her throat with each step until her feet meet the edge of the rug around the bed.

Jimin’s phone screen has shut itself off by now, but when she retypes her password, there’s the text again, mocking her. Daewon hasn’t added anything, just the same four messages from before.

Jimin takes a deep breath and types.

She stops herself, deletes the last word, then the whole message.

Stops again. Reads the message under her breath. It feels too… casual? Too friendly. They’re not together anymore, probably won’t even really be friends again.

Which she doesn’t, at least not anything she can’t do remotely, but between Sohee and Daewon, staying in Busan for longer than the week would feel more suffocating than biting the bullet and returning back to her empty apartment.

Also, she misses her cat, which is beside the point, but if there’s one way to make her feel better when she’s as low as she feels now, it’s by feeling Kkul’s gentle purring against her chest.

Jimin sends the message and immediately puts her phone on silent, face down on the nightstand. If he replies, she’ll see it in the morning.

For now, she pulls the covers up to her chin, clicks the lamp off, and tries to fall asleep without making eye contact with her poster for the rest of the night.

The rest of the week is…

Well, it’s different.

If being back in her hometown was weird for Jimin before having a public breakdown, another in front of her mother, and… whatever one would call the poster incident, the aftermath feels even stranger. The toss-up between the sting of disappointing her mother and father at home but wanting to be a good daughter and spend her time in the city with them means feeling suffocated whether she’s at home or not, but going out means feeling bad for turning down Sohee’s party and constant paranoia that she’ll be spotted again, even though it’s a big city and the chances of running into her twice are pretty damn low. Even though they were already low the first time she spotted Jimin across the beach, and, well. That happened.

In the end, Jimin’s mother and father drive her to the train station early in the afternoon on Friday, after Jimin’s guilt had her cooking the leftover vegetables from Mrs. Song’s earlier in the week into enough stew for breakfast and leftovers so her parents wouldn’t have to worry about cooking again for a day or so. This time, she boards the train properly dressed for the mid-winter chill, but she feels no better than she did in the early hours of Sunday morning just days ago, still filled with the dread of opening a familiar door to a familiar place and being filled with the notion of no longer belonging there—only this time, instead of her childhood home, it’s her own home, the apartment she once dreamed and fantasized about.

The only thing that makes shouldering the door open worth it is the almost instantaneous click-click-click of tiny claws on the floor as Kkul winds himself around her ankles, before Jimin can even take off her shoes in the doorway.

“Hey, kitty-kitty,” she coos, scooping the cat into her arms so she can finally step out of her boots. “Did you miss me, baby?”

Kkul protests being picked up with a creaky little meow, but he burrows himself in the crook of Jimin’s elbow anyway.

“I missed you too,” she breathes into the soft fur at the back of his head, rocking him back and forth as she pads through the kitchen to check on his food bowl. “Did you get breakfast, Kkulie? Are you hungry?”

There’s wet food in his bowl, though, still fresh enough for the broth to still be liquid. Daewon must have fed him breakfast before he left.

Jimin gently places the cat down in front of the bowl and continues past him, to see what else is different.

The furniture is all still here—which makes sense, Jimin had been the one to pick most of it out. The kitchen appliances are still on the counter, minus the coffee grinder that had been a gift for Daewon’s birthday. Some pictures are gone, emptied or missing frames that used to hold photos of Daewon’s family.

Jimin places one of the frames face-down on its end table, unwilling to be stared in the face by the two of them with arms thrown around each other in front of the Magic Tree at Everland two summers ago.

The dresser drawers in the bedroom are empty on the right side. The closet, too, half wiped out. One medicine cabinet in the bathroom has been cleared of everything but a few stray cotton pads and a bottle of aspirin.

If the breakup didn’t feel real before, it… still feels a bit like Jimin’s living in a long, drawn-out dream, to be honest. And it doesn’t feel quite cathartic just like it doesn’t feel like a terrible nightmare, either. But seeing the half-emptied bedroom and bathroom, hidden behind the mostly untouched kitchen and living room, something shifts in Jimin’s chest that makes her think, it’s over, it really is over .

Kkul curls into a ball near her feet when Jimin sits heavily down on the sofa. It’s like he knows. Cats have a sixth sense for when their humans are sad, Jimin’s pretty sure. She leans down, picks him up off the floor and back into her arms to plop him down on her lap, black pants be damned, and falls asleep there, fingers buried in his fur.

Jimin spends all of Saturday cleaning, just to keep herself busy. Clean apartment, clean mind, or… something.

She unpacks her suitcase, filling up the empty half of the closet with the clothes she’d brought along to Busan after a trip to the apartment complex’s laundry room. When there’s still room, she pulls her camisoles and shorts from the dresser and fills in the gaps. When she realizes how empty that leaves the dresser, she pulls up IKEA on her phone and orders a smaller one.

On Sunday, Jimin emails her boss to let her know that she’s back in the city and will be back in the office in the morning. The reply she gets is almost instantaneous: Hope you’re feeling well, Jimin! You can take all the time you need, but if you’re ready to come back, I’ll be happy to see you around! , and Jimin thinks, if anything, she’s lucky to have a boss who actually gives a shit, who’s been genuinely kind to her since the moment she got hired on. Jimin had been incredibly vague in her first email, just said that she needed personal time, and Jiwoo hadn’t even second-guessed her.

After two days of isolating herself to the apartment and to her cat, Jimin decides to take a walk in the afternoon. She gets off the subway at Ttukseom, picks up a coffee and croissant at the cafe inside Jabeolle, and pulls her coat tight around herself for a stroll around the park.

There aren’t a lot of people out today, for a weekend. Probably because it’s mid-January and freezing cold, but Jimin does nod and bow in passing to an older couple strolling hand-in-gloved-hand near the soccer fields, and smiles at a little brown poodle being walked in its full winter coat and boots. She walks past the swimming pool, converted into a snow slope for the winter, filled with children and families and ducks her head a little further, breathing in the warmth from her coffee cup.

When she reaches the water’s edge, Jimin drops to a crouch, coffee next to her and the little paper sack with her croissant balanced on her knees so she can pinch off little pieces to chew on while she watches the wind make little faux swells on the river’s surface.

It’s weird, she thinks. She used to come here for dates all the time. In the summer, she and Daewon would go to the flea market and then rent a duck boat and putter around the water for an hour or two, and in springtime, they’d take pictures in the rose garden to post on Instagram and send to their parents to brag to their friends with. Being here alone isn’t a new thing so much—her office is just a couple of kilometers away, and sometimes she’ll take a walk during lunch—but being alone now feels different. Not bad, not good, just… different.

She wonders where he’s living now, how long he’s staying with a friend. Wonders which friend, and how much they knew about the night Jimin stormed out of the party, before she stops herself from dwelling. She broke up with him . They weren’t working as a couple anymore, but it was her choice in the end. No more dwelling—or at least she’ll try. At least for right now.

Instead, she busies herself watching a little family of ducks slowly drift across the water, the tiniest, fuzziest ones squawking with every few kicks of their little legs. The mother looks in Jimin’s direction, quacks once, and starts swimming steadily closer.

The bread, Jimin thinks, glancing at the chunk of croissant poised between two of her fingers, halfway to her mouth. Right. Well, she’s not all that hungry anyway.

“You want this?” she chuckles, extending her hand. The duck speeds up a bit, water rippling in its wake, until—

“Wait!”

At the sound of the voice, much louder than Jimin’s half-whisper, the ducks scatter, ducklings flapping their tiny wings after their mother. Jimin nearly topples over with the shock of it, but she manages to stabilize herself with one hand while stopping herself from crushing her paper coffee cup with the other, which she counts as a win.

What doesn’t feel like a win is looking up and seeing… her.

Now, Jimin works in an office primarily filled with women. And the girls in the office are absolutely stunning—hell, her boss was a model and still does shoots on and off in her free time—to the point where Jimin’s gotten used to seeing beautiful women every day. When she was still temping for the company, Jimin would hide herself behind glasses and high necklines, embarrassed for all of these women to see her, plain Jimin with the puffy cheeks and the body she was never happy with, but eventually, she climbed out of her shell a bit, started dressing prettier, started speaking up more. She built up immunity, convinced herself she could almost belong in this office full of pretty girls.

But this girl… Jimin doesn’t see girls like this one quite as often. She hasn’t built up that kind of immunity. Because this girl isn’t the pristine pretty she sees at work—her outfit looks cozy and baggy rather than sleek, the ends of her back-length honey blonde hair are a little bleach-damaged and split, and her dimpled cheeks are free of any visible makeup—but she’s still pretty . Jimin stares for maybe longer than she should at her long legs and fidgeting hands clutched around the canvas bag hung over her shoulder, wrinkling the rainbow-striped print across the front of it.

Jimin swallows.

“I’m really sorry,” says the girl in a gravelly voice. She sounds embarrassed, and when Jimin finally meets her eyes, she looks it, too, her other hand scratching over the back of her knit beanie. “I didn’t mean to startle you—or them. Or maybe I meant to startle you, but just enough so you didn’t give that duck bread.”

Jimin stares up at the girl through her bangs, dumbstruck, unable to make words. The girl’s smile falters, the corners of her lips falling into something uncertain.

“Because ducks aren’t supposed to eat bread?” the girl throws out. “Because it has no nutritional value to them, and an unbalanced diet can lead to wing deformities, and whatever pieces they don’t eat can… create more algae in the water… and clog the waterways… and like… pollution…”

Her voice grows a little fainter with each word, until the end of the sentence is barely above a whisper. The girl looks like she’s about to turn and hightail it without another word, but Jimin doesn’t… want her to? She doesn’t think. Not just yet, at least.

So she pushes a hand through her hair and says, “Oh,” which isn’t much, but the girl’s hand unclenches a bit from her bag strap, so Jimin tacks on, “I didn’t actually know that.”

And that seems to work, because the girl smiles again, genuinely, and says, “Ah, my first job out of college was with the parks department. Mostly consisted of calling higher-ups about wasp nests in the trees and reminding people not to give the ducks bread.”

“Noted,” says Jimin. “No bread.”

“Peas are good,” says the girl. “And sliced grapes, and lettuce, but people aren’t usually walking around the river with those on hand, so.”

There’s a moment of quiet. Jimin watches the girl, and the girl stares at the ground until she catches Jimin’s eyes and smiles again, sheepish, before extending a hand. Jimin looks at it for a moment—long fingers, wide palms, nails clipped close to the skin and painted a pale, minty green.

“Namjoo,” she says when Jimin finally accepts the hand, the help pulling her back up from the ground. Standing next to each other, Namjoo has more than a few centimeters on Jimin, even in flat sneakers next to the low heels of Jimin’s Chelsea boots.

“Jimin.” She smiles, a little weak, and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Thank you, Namjoo-ssi.”

Namjoo grins, and her dimples sink in even further. Something in Jimin’s chest pangs.

“Ah, no need to thank me. Just being a harpy and accosting you about waterfowl.”

“I meant for helping me up,” Jimin chuckles, only halfway meaning it, which Namjoo must catch, because she does this thing where her eyes open wide and wild for a moment as her smile grows.

That pretty girl immunity would be convenient right now.

“Oh!” says Namjoo, pushing onto her toes for a moment. “Well, anytime, Jimin-ssi!”

She looks over Jimin’s shoulder again, only this time Jimin follows her eyes—a few meters away is a bright blue rental bike, toppled over in the grass. Namjoo threw her rental bike to the ground to keep Jimin from endangering a family of ducks. That’s… adorable.

“I should, uh, probably bring that back,” Namjoo chuckles, soft and airy. She pulls a phone from her pocket, case covered in little drawings of succulents, and flashes the screen on for a moment. “I have like ten minutes left of my rental.”

“Ah, don’t let me keep you, Namjoo-ssi.” Jimin crouches for her coffee cup on the ground, lukewarm by now, but still more comfortable against her fingers than the icy air. Her croissant fell to the ground when she jumped, so she picks it up, too, as well as its paper sack, for the next trash can she passes.

By the time she’s all situated, Namjoo has gotten the bike back upright on the path and slung a long leg over each side. She looks like she’s gauging the best path back to the bike rental station under the bridge, which gives Jimin time to just… look at her. Which is weird, and creepy, and she stops herself as soon as she starts by staring instead at the bread crumbs around her feet, until Namjoo speaks again.

“It was really nice to meet you, Jimin-ssi,” she says in a voice that makes Jimin think she might actually mean it as more than just a nicety.

Jimin can only hope she comes off a fraction as sincere when she manages to say, “You, too,” back, and that she doesn’t look like too much of an idiot when Namjoo calls “Maybe I’ll see you around!” over her shoulder and Jimin’s breath catches in her throat.

In her wake, she watches Namjoo’s long hair flutter in the wind behind her—just like Sohee’s a week ago, thinking the wind must bend around her .

She said she’ll see her around. Maybe. Something about it sticks in Jimin’s mind, repeats itself in an endless echo chamber.

Jimin is, in a word, fucked.