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“Could we try again?”
His eyes were huge and blurred with tears. He held out a shaking hand to Taehyung, carrying all his hope and fear in his tiny palms.
“Taehyung. Please.”
Taehyung stared long and hard at his hand and then lifted both of his own, heart cracking at the hopeful sniff he heard.
He curled and uncurled his fingers, hoping to shake out the numbing he felt in his tips. All he had to do was reach forward and allow himself to feel the warmth of his hand. He inched his right hand forward and halted, hearing his father yell in his ears. Feeling his rough fingers on the collar of his school shirt.
On one side were hands who’d always held him with love and safety. He only knew comfort when he was being touched by them. On the other side were hands that felt like thick metallic binds, wounding tighter and tighter on him.
The weight of binds is heavy.
Taehyung looked up and stared Jimin square in the eye, pulling every emotion from his face, from his finger tips, from his heart deep within him in a void they could never reach out of.
“No. Don’t speak to me again.”
—————-
Taehyung revisited the memory whenever he was alone hoping the sting would go one day. But it never did. Right now, he sat on the uncomfortable mattress of his college dorms, holding his girlfriend Yura. Yura smelled like jasmine and coconut. It made him think all the more about the baby soap he smelled on Jimin in the mornings at his old school. Three years passed since that horrible conversation he held with Jimin, the last time he got to see him and yet his brain only went to one place.
“Let’s break up.”
Yura sat up, eyes huge and brows furrowed.
“Taehyung what the fuck?”
Taehyung’s emotions couldn’t swim out of the deep void. He had a pokerface on when he repeated what he said.
Yura looked between his eyes, mouth slightly parted and then turned away.
“Why?”
Because I don’t like women. Because I’m a coward. Because I hurt Jimin. Because I only want Jimin.
“I don’t want to date anyone right now. Too inconvenient.”
Yura whipped her head back towards him with record speed.
“You’re saying I’m inconvenient? You couldn’t have decided that before you asked me out?”
Taehyung shrugged.
“Unbelievable, Kim Taehyung.”
Yura shrugged off his jacket he had given her earlier when they met with their friends and threw it at his chest before she walked out of his room.
The silence was more bearable without her. He felt no guilt towards her, he barely felt anything towards anything.
He lied down on his bed and thought about Jimin’s tear stained cheeks, his shaky breaths, and his pleads from when Taehyung walked out of the classroom and left him alone. He replayed it again and again and hoped it would make him cry. Heck, he would be perfectly fine with a little stinging in the eyes. But it never came, it never happened.
It was exhausting, holding all that grief inside him, not being able to let it out. So exhausting.
Taehyung closed his eyes.
——————————————————
Yura: This is jackshit Taehyung. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I hope you know you humiliated me. We’ve been seeing each other for 7 months now, you owe me a better explanation than some watered down egotistical “you’re inconvenient to me” bullshit. I’m not giving up on us or you. I owe you that. YOU owe me that.
Yura: Talk to me Taehyung. Please.