Chapter Text
It’s 2AM and Jungkook’s had too much to drink. His fatal flaw is that he’s stubborn to a fault—and so when Jimin had insisted they take a cab back to his place and sleep off the night, Jungkook slipped out of the bar and started ambling, fruitlessly, along the road.
When Jimin discovers he’s gone he’s going to be equal parts worried, equal parts pissed, but Jungkook is very tipsy leaning on drunk, and there’s another bar that’s open until 4AM, and he doesn’t want the night to end yet. He didn’t wear fishnets under his jeans just to go back to jimin’s place without at least a little stranger-groping.
That’s how he runs into his ex. Of course. No bad deed goes unpunished, and Jungkook had been skirting by on his luck for weeks.
He almost doesn’t recognize him at first. Yoongi’s wearing all black and has his head tipped down, the bill of his skull snapback obscuring half of his face. The 7-11’s lights are dull, but Jungkook recognizes those hands—fingers long and square and curled over his phone—anywhere. It’s been a few years and he still can’t forget those hands.
2AM is more of an abstract concept rather than a moment in time. And Jongno is chilly at night, nipping at his too-hot cheeks, a steady reminder that he’s inhabiting this body, and this body wants him to walk up to his ex and tell him whatever comes to mind.
Jungkook walks up and tells his ex whatever comes to mind.
“I’m twenty-three now,” he says. His voice is way too loud for the side-street’s silence, and Yoongi startles, jerking his head up from where he had it hidden behind his phone. A steaming cup of convenience store ramen sits on the table in front of him. “I’ve had three birthdays since then.”
Yoongi blinks five times straight, mouth hanging open, before he precariously straightens his posture and asks, “Jungkook-ah?”
Jungkook leans a little too far to the left and quickly catches himself. His boots, a thick, black leather, almost act as weights, keeping him upright even as his head spins. Bottom lip pouting out with each word, Jungkook lisps, “It’s been three years since I last had good sex. Can you believe that?”
Yoongi reminds him of a terrified alley cat, ready to leap up and sprint if Jungkook makes another move. If he weren’t so suddenly upset remembering how sexually frustrated he is, he’d laugh at that. But Yoongi’s face, terrified as it is, draws memories Jungkook allows himself to feel when he’s drunk and sad and vulnerable.
There’s no leaping and sprinting. Not like he thought that’d happen, lethargic as Yoongi is. Instead, Yoongi sits at the 7-11 picnic table and doesn’t move a centimeter when Jungkook stumbles closer. His eyes are shadowed by his cap, but Jungkook can see him scraping over Jungkook’s outfit, where the first five buttons of his blouse are open, where the fishnets poke out through the holes of his jeans. The parts of his body that are now filled out, muscled, shimmering with sweat and body glitter.
His voice sounds hoarse when he repeats, quieter, “Jungkook-ah?”
Jungkook flops onto the seat across from Yoongi and sways. “We only lasted, like, eight months, but—you—maybe it’s because I didn’t know any better.”
Twenty and floundering, coming to grips with the fact that he was far from home and now on his own.
Yoongi was Jungkook’s first. First touch, first fuck, first boyfriend. And he’d kissed people before they dated, but never like the way Yoongi used to kiss him. Jungkook told him that he was twenty and a half—the half mattered, Jungkook would argue as they stuck to one another at the bar and their shoes stuck to the sticky tiles—and Yoongi was apprehensive, but how many times could you dodge the implication with your eyes and your trembling hands before your resolve toppled over?
Jimin calls it tenacity when he’s in a good mood, stubbornness when he’s upset. Jungkook doesn’t care what it’s called, as long as he gets what he wants. Yoongi only kissed him that first night. His mouth tasted like liquor and ash, and they stood outside while Yoongi muttered, “There y’go, less tongue now, yeah,” in between kisses and Jungkook whined and pressed closer for more.
At one point, he’d just let his mouth hang open so Yoongi could lick into it.
Yoongi was twenty-seven and blatantly, hopelessly attracted to Jungkook, as hard as he tried to tell himself otherwise—even Jungkook could see that. He took Jungkook home, but they didn’t have sex. In the morning, Yoongi cooked him a quick breakfast and said, quietly, “You’re too young.”
That didn’t stop them from seeing one another.
“Ah,” Jungkook says, running his fingers back through his long hair. Dark strands cascade back into his face. “This makes me sound so pathetic.” He slits his eyes open to look at Shocked & Confused Yoongi. “I’ve had good sex. Really, really good sex. Don’t worry. You used to worry a lot,” he wags a finger at him, “but don’t.”
Yoongi doesn’t speak.
“It never compares, though. Even handjobs,” Jungkook laughs and looks off into the 7-11’s windows. The cashier is sitting on her phone behind the register, young and bleary-eyed. “No one knows… like. Understands my body, except you.”
Before Jungkook asked Yoongi to date him, before they spent those eight months learning one another, they did lots of kissing, lots of touching. Yoongi would lie Jungkook back on his bed and wrap his large, sticky hand around his cock, stroking JK to incoherency. “Better this way?” Yoongi would rasp, focusing where it made JK’s thighs tremble and moans high.
And JK was shy at first, only nodding or shaking his head while he shoved his knuckles in-between his teeth—but as Yoongi taught him, kept giving him gentle encouragements and kind eyes, he unfurled more and more.
“Jungkook-ah,” Yoongi seems to be finding himself now, phone lowering onto the table, “you—“
“I know,” Jungkook breathes. “I was the—I know.”
It doesn’t change the fact that Jungkook’s reality tilted during Yoongi, and now, after him, he doesn’t think he’ll ever achieve that same head-high again. Yoongi knew how to use those long, notched fingers, knew what to do to have JK’s mind fuzz into static.
He used to milk Jungkook dry, letting each glob of precome drip into his mouth while he massaged inside. He used to fuck him the same way, an inside-massage, working his cock into JK’s tight hole and stroking his dick until he came. Only then did Yoongi let himself come, too. JK’s pleasure over his own, JK’s begging be damned.
Teaching him how to fuck, how to move his hips and control his pace. Sometimes Yoongi never climaxed; he stroked along the planes of Jungkook’s chest, shoulders, letting Jungkook tremble and spill inside him.
Then cleaned them up, cooked for them while JK passed out—always exhausted after sex—and climbed into bed with him after, whispering, “Eat before sleeping, Jungkook-ah, c’mon,” in sleepy laughter.
But, love isn’t enough. Jungkook never understood what that meant until he knew he had to move on. There were obstacles they couldn’t get over: Yoongi always treated him like he was delicate, like he was too young and any wind could collapse him like straw. JK never felt like an equal, and as the months passed and Yoongi became twenty-eight to JK’s twenty, the space between them felt that much more daunting.
“That doesn’t mean anyone else can fuck me the way you can,” Jungkook says, throat burning. “You were so—I ‘dunno, you just made me feel so good.”
He’s figuring it out, now. As selfless as his past lovers were, Yoongi gave one-hundred percent of his attention, one-hundred percent of the time. The scales were terribly unbalanced, and it was another point of contention. Jungkook wanted to give as much as he took; Yoongi’s guilt, it felt, kept him from yielding.
7-11 Yoongi blurs into black and neon colors as Jungkook fights to blink the tears away. “I promise I loved you,” he sniffles. “You were so good to me. I’m sorry.”
Much like everything else during their eight months, Jungkook got what he wanted. He broke up with Yoongi, and Yoongi didn’t fight it. He bowed his head and nodded, and they cleaned up the dining table in silence. Jungkook wasn’t sure what he was more upset over: Yoongi not bothering to argue, or Yoongi accepting whatever scraps he’d been given.
Either way, this was what he understood: they were never going to be equals.
“I miss you,” Jungkook’s voice cracks open on a sob. He immediately ducks his head and wipes at his face. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m drunk.”
Yoongi doesn’t say anything Jungkook doesn’t want him to. Yoongi doesn’t run or stand or speak more than three words at a time, because that’s not what Jungkook imagines he does.
This Yoongi—the one Jungkook’s liquor-addled mind conjures up sitting at a 7-11 at 2AM—says, gently, carefully, as he always does, “It’s okay.”