Scandal

What the actual fuck just happened? I stood frozen in front of the mirror, trying to digest that little interaction by the door. "Ya hyung," Jimin called to me, nudging my side. "Did you see that? Yoongi-hyung!" I did. But my brain was rejecting the damn scene. An inner voice was screaming for me to act normally—anything I could say or do would draw attention. So I pursed my lips and commandeered a calm I did not feel. "So?" I huffed between my teeth, unable to say anything more. Thankfully, Jimin abandoned my side to join the others flocking Hoseok. I wanted to ask him how Jiyoung-ssi was suddenly Jiyoung-ie, and how the hell Jhope-ssi suddenly became Oppa. I also wanted to run outside, catch up with Jiyoung, and ask her, instead. I wanted to do both things, but my mind refused to decide between the two. I did neither. I stared at everyone's reflection while they interrogated Hoseok. A flashback of the Club Diamond dance floor cut through my thoughts—Hobi and Jiyoung danced together, yes, but she left pretty much after, and on the rooftop... Were they in contact after the party? "Jung Hoseok, you said you just wanted breakfast," Jin-hyung began, crossing his long arms across his chest. "What are you doing with Jiyoung-ah?" Jhope shrugged, eyes wide open and suspiciously innocent. "I just checked if she wanted to have breakfast and we did." The gasps from the members were just too dramatic. They matched the anchor that just dropped in my stomach. Namjoon-ah visibly bristled, jutting his chin out in indignance. Hobi was being purposely coy and it made me want to smack his face with my water bottle. "And how, pray tell, did that little date happen?" He demanded. Our leader was not having it and he wanted straight answers. So did I. Hoseok held up his hands. "Ya, don't misunderstand," he let on, stepping back slightly from the increasingly agitated members. "We're just friends, arra? Sheesh. Relax. It wasn't a date." I didn't know I was holding my breath until I let it out in one long, choked huff. I scrutinized his face while his attention was still focused on reassuring the others. Hobi wasn't a liar; he wouldn't hide something like a relationship from the members. Unlike someone, my inner voice sneered at me. The eldest wasn't fully convinced, though. "You were being awfully familiar with her during the party. I had to interrupt just so you wouldn't ask her for a slow dance, you know that." Taehyung had been silent the whole conversation, observing, but nodded his head at what Jin said. He was there; he would have seen the whole thing. "Whoa, Hobi-hyung's trying to date a girl," Jungkook exclaimed, almost in awe. Jhope had never attempted dating since we debuted—it was practically a historic moment for our maknae who had next to no experience in seeing his hyungs in a relationship, save for some short flings we older members had before. Suddenly that blasted anchor was back in my gut. But Hoseok just waved them off, giving them a look that said he found them utterly ridiculous. "You guys are the worse than Dispatch rumors," he complained, walking towards the corner where we dumped our bags. He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it to the side. "I'm not stupid. I know what you're harping about. I won't do anything that would cause me or Jiyoung trouble." That shot a painfully true arrow through my conscience. "I repeat: We. Are. Just. Friends. Leave me alone. Where's seonsaeng-nim?" The whole intervention replayed over and over in my head hours later. I ditched lunch with the members and decided to hide inside Genius Lab, hoping to be more productive than my pitiful performance during practice. But after staring at the same loop I opened two hours ago, I threw in the towel. I was too...what was that? Yeah. Too jealous. I never thought I'd be the type. My past relationships were straightforward and short, and I always blamed it on wrong timing and immaturity. I didn't get to properly date the past few years, and Jiyoung...she was in a whole different category. It was useless to deny to myself that I didn't want to date her. It was like we were doing everything in reverse, though—we'd been too intimate to be all virgin-shy and cute, but we hadn't even had a fucking meal together, save for dinners in the office with at least ten other people. Overtime coffee in the conference and meeting rooms didn't count, either. We went straight to hot, heavy makeout sessions and other things that were definitely not first date material. Maybe it was the lack of the preliminaries that was making it so hard. I smirked to myself, pushing at the random pieces of papers with unintelligible scribbles littered around my cramped desk. Who was I kidding? It was just one of several thousand reasons why it was hard. Being an idol made my life everyone's business, and it was foolish to think there wouldn't be hell to pay if news were to come out that I was dating—even with BigHit quietly setting itself apart from other unforgiving, money-hungry companies who gave zero fucks for their talents by not putting a dating ban in BTS members' contracts. Suran receiving hate mail and negative comments online was a testament to that. I cringed at the memory. I supposed I should check in on her. I leaned back in my seat, staring at the ceiling. Deep inside, I knew the jealousy that I was feeling stemmed from not being as carefree as Hobi. He casually made friends with Jiyoung and spent time with her without guilt—maybe because he knew he wasn't doing anything wrong. Truth be told, it wasn't really anything new to see the members with the staff. Jiyoung wasn't a regular part of our entourage, but she'd been around the group for a lot of our activities and was caught in a considerable number of videos for Bangtan Bombs—ARMYs would recognize her like they do our managers and stylists if she was with any of us. There was little danger of her being tagged as a girlfriend. Guilt. It was guilt that made us paranoid. We couldn’t even be in the same room without needing to act so angry with each other. We wanted to play into people's assumptions that we were the infamous creative nemesis. I squeezed my eyes shut; the overhead lights were suddenly too bright. I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling the heaviness that had been keeping me company for the past few weeks. I wanted to be Hoseok at that party. I wanted to be able to dance with her in clubs. I wanted to be able to put my arms around her shoulders as casually as Taehyung did. I wanted to be able to send her off, call her a cab out in the open—hell, I'd drive her home myself. I wanted to be able to do all those and more. I wanted to laugh at the stereotypical pining I found myself doing. It's true what they say—people desired what they didn't and couldn't have. I was a fucking cliché. Exhaling slowly, I straightened up and grabbed the tattered, abused notebook hiding from under the piles of paperwork on my desk. Leafing through the pages, I passed a collection of angry scrawls, lazy doodles, and scratched off verses until I found the lines I carelessly put in there last week: I wish that we could be like that W hy can't we be like that? Grabbing the pen nearest to me, I wrote down the two lines that had been insistently nagging my brain since this morning: Why can't I hold you in the street? Why can't I kiss you on the dance floor? I read and reread the words, now in a physical, tangible form. They were a little too on the nose, but I didn't care. My writing didn't really involve beating around the bush. I turned to my computer screen, clicking my mouse around until I found the music file I'd been toying with last week. Opening the program, I shuffled through the length of the sample, checking if the beat was right for what I had in mind. It was as if puzzle pieces were clicking into place—but I realized I was venturing into uncharted territory. Holy hell, I was about to make a fucking ballad. ------------------ A/N: For those of you who know where those lines were taken from, yup—this is a fictional story in which Yoongi wrote that song. (^_^) The lyrics will be revised just a little bit to fit the storyline and will be a central point to the turn of events that are about to happen. So yeah, our little world here just deviated lightyears away from actual events. Thank you so much for reading—drop a comment and let me know what you think :)

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