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You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.
Richard Siken
Ϟ
The most important day of Kim Taehyung’s life starts with someone pounding at his door.
He doesn’t know it’s an important day, not yet, so nobody can blame him too much if he drags his feet getting out of bed to answer it. He stumbles up, blearily, barely even opening his eyes. When he wrenches the door open, he’s greeted by Jimin’s annoyed face and ignores it, choosing instead to focus on the colourful bags of what must be pastries that he’s holding in his left hand.
“I can’t believe you.” Jimin snaps, only half-joking, judging by his expression. “I told you we needed to leave by noon and now it's eleven forty-five and you’re not even dressed?”
“Mmmph— ” He makes grabby hands at the pastry bags, and feels a rush of victory when Jimin hands him the powder blue one. “Still got time, then.”
“You have fifteen minutes, and I bet you’re not packed, right?” Jimin retorts, rolling his eyes. Normally, Taehyung would assume that this is just their standard banter, but there’s something to the way that Jimin is shifting his weight back and forth, glancing at the clock, that makes Taehyung think maybe he shouldn’t push too hard today.
But Taehyung is still half-asleep, so he ignores that rational part of his brain and instead gives Jimin his most charming grin around a mouthful of pastry. “What’s there to pack, Jimin-ah, I’m just coming for moral support because you didn’t want to face all your Aunties by yourself.”
“We are going — ” Jimin forcefully shoves him back towards his bedroom, towards his closet. Taehyung chokes, just a little, around the food in his mouth. “To my brother’s wedding. Which means that you need to pack. Because I will not have you showing up looking like a slob.”
“You’re the family member, Chim. Nobody is gonna care what I look like.” Taehyung replies, shrugging and taking another bite of his pastry, once he's sure that his airways are clear. It’s some kind of rose and strawberry concoction, not something that he would have picked for himself but he decides that he likes it. Jimin always can judge his taste better than he can.
“I care what you look like, Tae. So go, pack that grey suit, the one that looks nice on you.” Another point towards Jimin’s good taste. Taehyung nods along with the suggestion. Not looking convinced, Jimin continues before leaving the room “We’re gone for four days, so also please pack enough underwear.”
Taehyung throws enough boxers to last at least two weeks into his bag just to spite him. He packs quickly, a handful of casual outfits and some jackets that he can use to make them more formal, if he needs to attend any pre or post wedding events. Delicately, he zips up the ironed grey suit into a garment bag and tries not to crease it over his arm. He may have slept in, but this, at least, he’d prepped the night before.
He pulls his suitcase and his garment bag into the main part of the apartment and is putting on his shoes to leave when he’s distracted by a weather alert that pops up on his phone. It flashes yellow and alarming and starts with:
[WARNING: MAJOR STORM SYSTEM EXPECTED THROUGH NORTH GYEONGSANG PROVINCE THIS AFTERNOON, TRAVELLERS ARE WARNED… ]
“Hey, Jimin-ah, are you sure we want to head out today?” He asks, looking worriedly back down at his phone. “They’re expecting a pretty big storm.”
Jimin doesn’t look worried, and in fact looks mostly just annoyed with the question. He says, “Tae, I need you to know that I will literally have the skin stripped from my body if I miss another day of wedding preparations.”
“Okay, okay, whew.” Taehyung replies, putting both his hands up in a mockery of a surrender gesture. “I also don’t think your mom would like it very much if you died in a typhoon.”
“It’s not a typhoon— ” Jimin says, flapping his hand dismissively. “It’s the wrong season for that. It’ll just rain a bit and blow over. We’ll be fine.”
“Jimin-ah, I love you, but if I die on this trip it’s your fault.” Taehyung says, and tries not to put too much emotion into it. That’s a conversation that he wants to have, but he’ll have it after the wedding. Or if not after the wedding, he’ll have it later. Not now.
“Kim Taehyung, I love you too, but if we don’t leave right this second, I am personally going to cut your balls off.” Jimin is, potentially, a little closer to where Taehyung keeps the cooking scissors than he had been a few seconds ago.
“Kinky.” Taehyung replies with a smirk, before he notices just how serious the expression on Jimin’s face is. “Also, terrifying.”
“Don’t think I won’t.” Jimin wags an accusing finger in his face before he latches onto one of his wrists and starts to pull. “Now come on, let’s go!”
Taehyung laughs the entire time Jimin forcefully drags him out of the apartment and doesn’t stop until long after he’s settled into the passenger seat of Jimin’s rusted car.
Ϟ
They’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere down highway forty-five when it starts to rain.
It starts slow, starts steady, a wash of steel blue that rolls in over them from the mountains on their left side. It’s okay, for a while, until the rain starts to come down in formations that are closer to sheets than drops and the first flashes of lightning begin to make themselves known on the horizon.
“Tae, get your phone open.” Jimin keeps his eyes on what little of the road they can still see through the downpour, but he’s waving his spare hand at Taehyung like he expects him to understand what he’s asking for. Taehyung does.
“I need you to look for any overpasses, or bridges, or mountain caves or— Fuck!” Jimin swears, swerving them back into the main part of the road as they hydroplane just slightly out of bounds. “Literally anything to get us out of this. We’re going to have to stop driving soon and I’d rather not do it on the side of the highway with no cover.”
Ignoring the way the rain seems to be getting heavier, and the clouds darker, Taehyung pulls open the map application on his phone and tries to locate their car. The indicator spins and spins and spins. No signal. Eventually, he forces it closed and asks, “Do you have a paper map?”
Jimin laughs at that, high and sarcastic. “A paper map, Tae? What is this, nineteen-sixty? No, I don’t have a paper map.”
Taehyung cringes. No map and no service, essentially trapped. He says, “I think you should pull over then, Jimin-ah. Middle of nowhere or not, I don’t like the way the road looks right now.”
Jimin makes a low, aggravated, sound in the back of his throat. They’re following a long-haul truck, packed to the brim with a rough-hewn stone that Taehyung doesn’t recognize. It turns on its signal and moves to the side of the highway, settling into the shoulder.
“Jimin-ah, please, let’s follow this guy. At least then there’ll be someone else around if something goes wrong.” Taehyung begs, glancing out the window and trying not to think about the way he can’t see more than a meter beyond their car.
“Fine.” Jimin snaps, and then he seems to come back to himself and he says, softer, “Fine, we’ll pull over.”
They slot in behind the semi, and some part of Taehyung hopes that the weight of it, its sheer overwhelming size, will do something to protect them. It’s not a logical hope, because they’re parked behind the truck and being buffeted by the wind on all sides, but it’s one he holds onto regardless.
And then the hail starts.
The tiny balls of ice bounce off the glass and steel of the car like a tin drum. It’s an inhuman rhythm, harsh and relentless, almost devastating. Taehyung can feel the way his hands go white around the moulded plastic of the door handle, around his knee. The roar of it is overwhelming and all he wants is to reach out to Jimin, to ground himself by gripping onto his forearm or grabbing his hand. Lightning flashes and Taehyung jumps, and holds himself back from what he so desperately wants to do. Jimin mostly just looks angry.
“My mom is gonna kill me, Tae.”
“There’s nothing we can do, Chim. She’ll understand. We just have to wait it out.” Jimin drums his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel, watches the piles of ice build up on the windshield.
They lapse into silence— or the closest thing they can get to silence under the gunfire beat of the hail, and the thunder, and the rain.
Taehyung stares out into the seemingly unending whirlwind around them and thinks about a lecture he once went to on cloud seeding. Planes flying directly into the heart of a storm, trailing frozen pieces of silver, hoping to time it just right to cause the rain to form before the hail. Risking their lives to avoid greater destruction.
He feels a little like those pilots right now, about to do something incredibly dangerous, just so it will maybe save him from something worse. The words start to bubble up and out of him, and he pushes them down, pushes them away, re-arranges them until they feel like something he’s able to say out loud. Thunder cracks around them, shakes them like an earthquake. Taehyung feels it in his bones.
“They can stop it, you know.” He stammers, probably unheard over the ringing sound of ice hitting the body of the car.
Jimin startles, knits his brows and turns his body towards where Taehyung is staring pointedly out the windshield. He looks concerned. “Tae, what— ”
“The hail I mean.” He continues, speaking faster than he’s able to process. He’s not looking at Jimin, can’t look at Jimin, doesn’t want to think about what the look on his face could mean. “There’s this thing that they do, in other places where storms like this are more common.”
“Okay?” Jimin is listening to him intently, still drawn tight, like he’s trying to figure out what Taehyung is trying to tell him. Jimin knows him well enough to know that sometimes when he rambles like this, it’s because he wants to say something else.
“They have these— ” Taehyung isn’t sure why this is the story he’s decided to tell, but there’s something in his chest that desperately needs Jimin to know. About the cloud seeds. About a lot of things. “Pilots. They have these pilots and they fly these little planes, modify them special so they have these flares, but they’re not light flares, they’re full of silver iodide.”
“That’s really cool but I don’t understand— ”
“The silver is ice, or, it’s like ice.” He shakes his head, tries to get the words to come out in the right order. “The molecular structure, it’s really close to ice. So when the pilot sets off the flare, the cloud thinks it’s ice and turns it to rain. That’s how rain works, right? It needs to be seeded.”
Jimin answers with an expression that says he has no idea what Taehyung is talking about at all. “You can use the tech for all sorts of things, even for droughts sometimes. Apparently ski resorts will hire people to do it if they don’t have enough snow.”
“What does that have to do with the hail, Tae?” Jimin asks, kind and bewildered, obviously trying desperately to figure out what Taehyung means.
He pulls his face together in concentration, tries to fit the words together so they mean what he wants them to mean, tries to find it within himself to be brave. “Sometimes those pilots fly straight into the storms. If they’re expecting a major hailstorm, what they can do is fly straight into them and seed the clouds and sometimes that works enough— makes the hail small enough— that nothing in the aftermath gets damaged. It’s incredibly dangerous, Jimin-ah. Don’t you think that they’re brave?”
Jimin nods, slow and uncertain, like he agrees but isn’t sure what he’s agreeing with.
“And I just think— ” Language fails him completely. He stops, breathes heavy, as every horror of the elements buffers around them.
“Hey, are you alright?” The hazard lights of the parked eighteen wheeler in front of them are flashing orange across Jimin’s face, painting him in high chiaroscuro on alternating breaths. The heartbeat’s worth of time between each pulse is so dark that it could be the middle of the night, or the outer edges of space. Jimin reaches over the centre console and puts a hand on Taehyung’s thigh. It breaks him.
“Jimin— I need—” Taehyung gasps as the storm surges around them. If this is the end for them, if this storm is going to float them away into another world, another kind of being, he’s not going to regret never taking his chance. He chokes out “I need to tell you something.”
Jimin’s hand goes tight around his leg. “Anything, Tae. You can tell me anything.”
“I love you.” He doesn’t look at Jimin as he says it, but he finds himself turning, just slightly, to try and gauge Jimin’s reaction out of the corner of his eye as it hangs in the air, unanswered.
Taehyung thinks he’s never seen Jimin look as confused as he does right now. “I love you too Tae, but I don’t— ”
“No, not I love you like you’re my best friend— I love you like I’m in love with you. Like I’ve been in love with you for years and it’s been so long that I can’t keep it inside anymore.” He holds his hands back from grabbing onto where Jimin’s palm is still pressed into his thigh. Clenches and unclenches them into fists by his sides. Tells himself that this isn’t a decision he’s going to force, that he’ll accept it no matter the outcome. Still, he hopes.
Jimin’s eyes go so wide, and so still, and so vulnerable, that Taehyung thinks he may be about to cry. They sit like this, motionless, with the weight of Jimin’s hand burning through his jeans, for what feels like forever.
Thunder booms and it startles Jimin back into motion. He pulls his hand away, sharp, like Taehyung has suddenly become untouchable. The loss of it aches. Taehyung can see through the murky shadows that he’s unbuckling his seatbelt, twisting around like he’s about to open the door and sprint, desperate to get away. His heart sinks. The intention is clear, Jimin’s answer is no .
And then Jimin is gone.
Taehyung gapes, open mouthed, at the empty space where Jimin used to be, at the way the slam of the door is somehow louder than the rage of the storm around him. He’s not sure what kind of response he’d been expecting, a gentle rejection, probably. Something soft in the way that Jimin can be, when he’s trying not to break someone’s heart. Something along the lines of I’m sorry, Tae-yah, but it’s not like that for me. I hope we can still be friends.
He certainly wasn’t expecting this— Jimin choosing the cruelty of the storm outside over looking Taehyung in the face and letting him down carefully. It makes Taehyung want to do the same, to open the door and face the gale. To guess at the direction that he thinks Jimin would have taken, and force himself to go the completely opposite way. To run and run and run until there’s distance between himself and this car, and every suddenly terrible memory it holds.
He doesn’t go anywhere though, because lightning flashes again and he realizes that there’s nowhere to go. Realizes that he’s trapped here, alone in the middle of nowhere, and Jimin doesn’t love him back.
Suddenly, the passenger side door pulls open and there’s a scream of wind and rain on his face before a dripping, laughing thing collapses into his lap. It takes him several confused heartbeats to recognize the shape as Jimin and several more to realize that he's saying something, breathless— but Taehyung doesn’t understand it, can’t understand it, because his heart is in his ears and he can hardly even remember what a word is because Jimin is here and he’s saying something that might be a yes and might be an I love you and might even be a forever.
“Why— ” He finally manages to croak, words coming to him slowly. “If forever, then why— Why’d you never say it?”
“Never say it?” Jimin laughs at him, presses their foreheads together. “My dear, stupid, Taehyungie— I say it every day.”
Maybe the constant drilling of the rain on the car roof is messing with Taehyung’s hearing because he thinks Jimin just said that he says it every day, and Taehyung is pretty sure that that’s something he would have noticed. He whispers “No you don’t.”
“I do, Tae.” Jimin brings a soft hand up to cup his cheek, runs a finger along his jawline. “You just weren’t listening.”
Taehyung racks his brain for any moment that could have been Jimin telling him he loves him. He comes up with a thousand examples, but he’d always just thought that—
Because love is just a part of who Jimin is. Some part of Taehyung has always thought that Jimin wasn’t even completely human, but rather partly a being of delicate grace, of hope, of courage, someone or something that holds every piece of the world like it’s precious and worthy of protection. Taehyung had never dared assume that any part of Jimin’s words were special just for him, not in his wildest dreams.
He puffs the realization out in a startled, gentle sound and Jimin giggles at him, glowing. He’s haloed in alternating orange and bright lightning and Taehyung wonders if this is what it’s like to meet god. He reaches his hand up to overlay over the one Jimin still has on his cheek and asks, begs, prays “Can I kiss you, Jimin?”
Jimin smiles back at him, brilliant, somehow brighter than every flash of light around them. He turns his head, and slots their lips together and it feels like coming home. (And it’s wet, and warm, and real, and tastes like ozone and sugar, and every dream Taehyung has ever had.) It goes on for minutes, long minutes, until Taehyung pulls back, gasping.
“Stay with me?” He says, when really he means never leave. Thunder rumbles around them, softer and more distant, but still present. Taehyung shudders with it, grips onto Jimin’s sides, grounds himself.
“Always Tae, always.” Jimin pulls him closer, plants chaste kisses on his forehead, on each of his cheeks, and eventually lays his head on Taehyung’s shoulder.
They sit like that, curled together, and safe, and warm— until Taehyung realizes that Jimin’s hair is still dripping rainwater down his neck. He says “I don’t understand, though. Why did you run away?”
“Run away?” Jimin pulls himself up and back, putting space between their chests. “When I went outside? Did you think that I was going to disappear into the storm and never come back?”
It sounds a little bit silly, now that Jimin has said it out loud. Still, he nods. That’s exactly what he’d thought.
Jimin laughs at him, bright and shining. “It was the greatest moment of my whole life, Taehyung-ah, and I needed to tell someone— so I told the sky.”
He nuzzles back into Taehyung’s neck, and murmurs “It was like in the movies, Tae-yah. When the protagonist gets everything they ever wanted, there’s always a scene outside where they celebrate their victory.”
“So you— ” He stammers into Jimin’s hair.
“Yeah, I had my main character moment and screamed every feeling I’ve ever had into a thunderstorm. Sometimes I can be dramatic Tae, you should know that.” Taehyung can feel the way Jimin’s smile curls against his collarbone, and indulges himself in how right it feels. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t feel the need to. They stay like that, so close they’re practically one and breathing together, for what feels like an eternity.
Eventually, the truck in front of them turns off its hazard lights and pulls back onto the highway. It’s drizzling still, a soft curtain of grey, but Taehyung realizes as it leaves that they no longer need the flashes of orange to see. The clouds are becoming lighter, and the world around them seems to be remembering that it’s early afternoon and not the middle of the night. Jimin’s head is still buried in his shoulder and if he hadn’t been aimlessly toying with Taehyung’s fingers, he would have guessed that Jimin was fast asleep.
“Come on, Jimin-ah. It’s clearing up.” He says, jogging his shoulder lightly. Jimin glares up at him petulantly, sections of his hair drying pointed straight up and sideways. “You’re the one that was so worried about what your mom was going to say. I’m down to sleep here.”
Jimin groans dramatically, and peels himself back. He says “Fine, you’re right, we need to keep going. But I want one more kiss first.”
Taehyung indulges him, indulges himself, and presses their lips together. It’s mostly sweet, and drier than it had been before, but there’s a heat that builds in his gut as it continues that tells Taehyung they need to stop now or they won’t ever stop at all. He bites at Jimin’s lip, just once, just so he can tell himself that he did, and gets a soft moan in response. He files it away for later. He pulls back and says “I mean it, Chim, I would rather stay here for ages, but you’re the one who wanted to be in Busan by dinnertime.”
Jimin slams his head into Taehyung’s shoulder several times like he’s trying to convince himself that disappointing his mother is okay, just this once. Eventually he snaps back and agrees “You’re right, Taehyung-ah, my Taehyungie.” The hand is back on his cheek and Taehyung leans into it. “We really do need to keep moving.”
And then, suddenly, Jimin has opened the door and is out of his lap and is gone.
Taehyung watches him through the windows and the windshield. Jimin dances around, does a dramatic pirouette in front of the car, before he eventually opens the driver side door and slots himself back inside. He does up his seatbelt and plays with the controls before he looks back at Taehyung and says “Hey handsome, fancy seeing you here.”
It makes him laugh, low and joyous. He smiles blindly in response as Jimin turns the keys in the ignition and sets the car back to rumbling.
“Let's get going, we’re going to be so late.” Jimin gives him a smirk and grabs his hand over the centre console. “My mom’s gonna kill us.”
Us. Taehyung thinks, smiling, as they pull back onto the highway. She’s going to kill us.
Ϟ
The next time Taehyung and Jimin need to go to Busan, they take the train.