sighjaebum

[sighjaebum]

— SURRENDER, v.

Somehow, miraculously, your friendship with Jaebum has been salvaged, fractured remnants pulled from the wreckage of your catastrophic breakup and pieced back together. It’s not the same, not quite, but it’s something—and you’re not sure if your heart hurts more or less than it did when you weren’t talking.

         You’re together now, the two of you with Jackson and Jinyoung, the latter of whom is watching you with narrowed eyes, solely responsible for you passing your classes. You’d be lying if you said you aren’t a little distracted, eyes drifting from your textbook to the source of both your pain and happiness.

         Being in love isn’t worth it, this you decided weeks ago. But you think you can handle it if he keeps smiling at you like that, keeps laughing like he does when Jinyoung scolds you for not concentrating on your schoolwork. He talks about a new girl, now that he and Miyoung have called it quits, and it confuses you. Because he’d told Jackson that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, made you believe that he’d finally let himself fall in love with someone—and now they’re over. He must have decided love isn’t worth it, too.

         This new girl, he says she’s pretty. A singer in a small-town band who wants to make it big someday, vibrant purple hair and tattoos that snake all the way up her arms. The kind of girl you’d see on posters in your teenage bedroom.

         “I’m seeing her later tonight,” he says, the words followed by a sigh that has your attention slipping from your work to him again. Your eyes meet, and he’s quick to look away.

         “You don’t sound too excited,” Jinyoung points out in the same instant he taps his finger on your textbook, torn between two stressful friends—three, if you include Jackson, who’s taken to doodling in the corners of his textbook pages instead of actually studying.

         Jackson huffs. “That’s because he’s still torn up over��.” He’s cut off by an elbow to his ribs, Jinyoung quick to silence him with violence while Jaebum just glares at him. You’re at a loss, however, looking between the three with furrowed brows. They must be talking about Miyoung, you decide, letting your gaze linger on Jaebum again. He must be missing her more than he lets on. He must be missing her like you’re missing him, like you missed him when you weren’t talking.

         “If you miss her, you should just tell her,” you say, because you’re a hypocrite who hates seeing him hurting. Mark will call you a masochist when he finds out you’re giving love advice to the boy who still breaks your heart, with every passing second.

         Jaebum’s silent for a moment before he sighs again. “It’s not that simple, Y/N,” he says, finally meeting your gaze. “I can’t just tell her that I miss her—.”

         “He hurt her,” Jinyoung says, softer, and he reaches across to close your textbook. Jaebum nods his agreement, and your heart aches at the guilt you see in his eyes, at the pain.

         “You should still tell her.” You shrug, lips lifting into a weary smile. “She might not forgive you, she might even hate you, but she might also give you a second chance.”

         “What would you do?” Jackson asks, resting his elbows on the table. You want to curse at him, want to throw your textbook at him. He knows what you’d do if you were the girl Jaebum’s talking about, knows you’d forgive him without second. Because it’s Jaebum, because you love him, because you know him and know that he doesn’t hurt people because he wants to, but because he’s trying to protect himself.

         “If I were her?” You hum, tilting your head to the side. “If he’s sincere, I’d forgive him.”

         “You would?” Jaebum asks, eyes wide. “Really?”

         “Yeah.” You nod. “It depends on the situation, of course, but I definitely think good people deserve second chances.” Then, smiling at Jaebum, you say, “You’re a good person, Jae. You’ve just locked yourself away for so long that you’re not sure how to navigate an actual relationship.”

         Jaebum snorts. “Is that your way of calling me emotionally unavailable?”

         You grin. “If the shoe fits…”

[sighjaebum]

50 Angsty Questions Prompt List

“And that makes it okay?”

“Are you afraid to die?”

“What would you do if I didn’t come back?”

“Do you know what it’s like?”

“Hasn’t this addiction done enough damage already?”

“Why are your eyes so red?”

“How do you think this ends?”

“Why would I ever want to be with you?”

“Is that what you think of me?”

“Do you know what a gunshot wound feels like?”

“How am I supposed to go on?”

“Can’t you see how fucked up this is?”

“If I told you I hate you, what would you do?”

“Should you be drinking that much?”

“What if we just crash this car and make it all stop?”

“Do the drugs still get you high?”

“Am I the reason you cry every night?”

“When did you stop loving me?”

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

“How did things go so wrong?”

“When did things fall apart?”

“Which part of me wasn’t enough?”

“How do I make you love me again?”

“How much does it hurt knowing you lost me?”

“We’re you trying to destroy us?”

“How do you want to die?”

“Is the weight of it all finally too heavy?”

“Are you okay with having blood on your hands?”

“How do you sleep at night?”

“Can you still sleep at night?”

“Is being high all the time worth losing everything?”

“Can you feel the blood draining from your body?”

“Do you know how it feels to wish for death every day?”

“Will you miss me at all?”

“Can I have one last kiss?”

“Do you understand what you’ve done?”

“Is this how you thought your life would be?”

“Did you expect this to turn out better?”

“Can you really blame me?”

“How could you do this?”

“Can you be the one to do it?”

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

“Are you leaving?”

“How do we fix this?”

“Would you hate me?”

“Do you want to die?”

“How many more innocent people have to die?”

“Can you promise me no one else has to get hurt?”

“Are you satisfied now…?”

“Do you even know what love feels like?”

[sighjaebum]

— SURRENDER, iv.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

           You lift your head at the sound of Jaebum’s voice, unmistakably his and undeniably hoarse, coming from the entrance of Jackson and Mark’s shared apartment. Your hands curl into fists on your thighs, fingernails digging in to the fabric of your sweatpants—and there’s a stupid, vain part of you that wishes you had worn something other than these sweatpants and an old, worn t-shirt you’re certain belongs to the very boy your heart is speeding up for.

           “What do you—?”

           “I can’t—I can’t stop thinking about her,” Jaebum cuts Jackson off and the words are a desperate sound, pleading. You hear footsteps and look up in time to watch his entrance, the abrupt stop he draws to when his eyes land on your form. Jackson follows him, shrugs sheepishly when Jaebum turns his glare to him, red-faced and embarrassed.            

           He doesn’t want you to know. You remember a time when he’d tell you about the girls he had crushes on without hesitation. Back when he let himself have feelings that ran a little deeper than attraction. Feelings that he’d long ago locked out, feelings that Miyoung must have been letting back in. You’re not sure whether you should smile or cry. You’d told yourself you’d love the girl that stormed past his defences, and Miyoung had been nothing but nice to you on the few occasions you’d crossed paths, but part of you hates her. Because she has done what you were never able to.

           “Hey,” you say when no one else speaks, and you look to Jackson when he crosses the room to return to his seat. You’re on his floor, textbooks surrounding you, because coursework is boring but Jackson provides interesting commentary. Moreso on the drama he’s watching than your work, but he keeps you awake long enough to reach the next milestone.

           “Are you going to stand there or are you going to watch this episode of When the Camellia Blooms with me?” Jackson asks, turning his narrow-eyed gaze to you. “She kept yelling at me for never watching it, so now she’s supervising me when I should be doing my assignment.”

           You look once to your textbooks, then quickly back to Jackson. “Don’t use me as an excuse.” You huff. “You’re my excuse. We can’t both be an excuse. Am I right, Jae?” You turn to look at him before the question fully registers in your mind. When you meet his gaze, you are met with his blatant surprise. Even Jackson falls silent behind you, and for a second you expect Jaebum to turn and walk out the door. You expect him to ignore you like he has so many before you, to cut you off like a bad joke.

           Instead, he crosses the room to sit with Jackson, settling comfortably behind you. “Why can’t you both be an excuse?” He asks, eyebrows drawing together.

           “What if we both make different excuses to the same person?” You roll your eyes. “We have the same friends—don’t you remember that time Jinyoung caught us out at the arcade when we were supposed to be studying for our exams?”

           He looks to Jackson. “She’s got you there. Jinyoung followed us around for a week after that to make sure we studied.”

           “He’s worse than my Mom,” you laugh. “She stopped caring about my grades when I graduated High School.”

           “Can you blame her?” Jaebum snorts. “You stressed her out so much when we were in High School, I’m honestly not surprised she called it quits before we got here.”

           Turning to glare over your shoulder, you stick your tongue out at the boy. And while you sit there, bickering, it’s hard to tell that anything went wrong in the first place.

[sighjaebum]

— SURRENDER, iii.

She has dyed blonde hair and a bumblebee tattooed on the inside of her wrist, the next girl you see Jaebum with. She smiles at him like he’s everything, and you cannot blame her for that. You know you smile at him the exact same way.

           You’re at another party at BamBam’s house, stolen from solitude by Jackson and his endless worrying. It’s the first time you’ve been with your friends since you and Jaebum ended things, had worried that he might’ve felt awkward with you around, when he’d made such an effort to cut you off entirely. You worried, even more, that maybe your friends would no longer want you in their lives, worried they’d cut you off, too, to make Jaebum feel less suffocated. It’s because of him that you know them, after all. You and Jaebum had been friends for years, but the others came later. The others came at the beginning of your college life, starting with Jaebum and Jinyoung’s first meeting in a lecture and ending with you being invited to a game night hosted by Yugyeom.

           But Yugyeom had hugged you as soon as you set foot in Bam’s apartment, had wailed how he’d missed you, already a little tipsy and as clingy as he always was.

           Jaebum, however, you hadn’t had the chance to talk to yet—and you didn’t think you’d get to. He’s standing with that girl in the corner, one hand on her hip and a smile on his lips. They’d been a thing since three days ago, according to a sheepish Youngjae, who’d offered you a drink as consolation as he explained this.

           Now, you sit with Jackson and the others in the centre of the room, in a world of your own despite the party raging on around you. He has an arm draped across your shoulder, and you can’t help but lean closer to his side, comforted by his presence in a way that makes your heart ache a little less. You wonder when Jackson became your best friend. Probably the moment Jaebum kissed you. Probably the moment you realised that your friendship with Jaebum laid amongst the ruination of your heart. When did everything between you turn into ruin?

He should never have kissed you, and you should never have kissed him back. Maybe then you wouldn’t be feeling like this; a little too heavy, with a weight pressing down on your chest, rendering you breathless in the most insignificant of moments. Why did you have to fall in love with someone who refused to do the same? Why do you have to hurt so bad when clearly he’s feeling fine?

“Do you want to leave?” Jackson asks, his voice a whisper and barely discernible over the thumping music. You lift your head from his shoulder and meet his worried gaze, his dark eyes flickering across your every feature, trying to find any sign that you need to get out of here. And even though you’d love to go home, to slip beneath the covers and block out the world, your pain, you know that you can’t. You don’t want to. Your friends have missed you, have spent twelve days worrying about you, sending text messages that go unanswered and phone calls that go ignored, and you can’t bring yourself to leave them when they looked so relieved to see you here.  So, you shake your head, and with it try to shake away all thoughts of Jaebum.

 It works for about ten minutes, until he steps into your eyeline with that girl on his arm, and she’s still smiling. Did you look this happy when you were with him? Or were your smiles overshadowed by the knowledge that this was only temporary? You wonder which is worse, the knowing or the not knowing.

           “Oh, hey!” Jackson greets the newcomers cheerfully, though his hand drops down to squeeze yours. “Miyoung, right?”

           The girl nods, enthusiastically, and it’s here you see that her cheeks have turned a little red from the alcohol. She sways where she stands but Jaebum keeps her steadied. How weird that he keeps her steadied when he always knocks you off balance. “That’s right,” she says, “I’ve heard so much about you guys that I had to come over and say hello.” Wrong move, you think, bitterly. Jaebum doesn’t like it when people push their way into his life. He has to let you in, has to be ready for these things himself. He needs to know he can trust someone before he brings them around his friends, has to know things won’t get messy on either end. It’s not for his sake, not really. He just doesn’t want to risk his friends getting hurt by someone he introduced them to. It’s happened before, happened to you. He’d been the one to introduce you to your ex, after all, and you both knew how that ended.

           Come to think if it, that’s when this started. This slow process, the trust issues, the rejection of love. Seventeen. Crying into his shirt because everything hurt so much. You were more concerned the blood on his shirt than you were the pain in your chest, the way you were trembling against his chest. Back then, six months felt like forever—and your forever had been thrown to the gutter, had exploded in a screaming match and Jaebum’s fist against his face, repeating apologies when he was gone and all that was left was the two of you. In ruins, always in ruins.

           You lift your eyes from your cup and meet Jaebum’s gaze. He watches you with his head cocked to one side, searching, pensive. Miyoung is talking animatedly with a slurring BamBam, but their conversation makes no sense to the others around them, and even if it did, you wouldn’t have understood, anyway. Not when Jaebum looks at you like that, not when his gaze slips to Jackson’s hand in yours and his jaw clenches. And you think, oh, that’s new, but you don’t say anything, don’t even move, because you’re afraid that this moment will be over and you will lose him to the silence again.

           You remind yourself that he kissed you first. It wasn’t you who lost him, but he lost you. He lost you, he lost you, he lost you. When he looks away, drawn into a drunken kiss by the girl in his arms, you begin to lose hope that he’ll ever find you again.

[sighjaebum]

— SURRENDER, ii.

You look up at the ceiling of your bedroom, eyes following the cracks in the paint. You’ve been painfully aware of the absence to your left, have been since Jaebum left nine days ago—since he discarded your heart in the garbage can on his way out.

           Nine days. You sigh, it does nothing to dislodge the weight on your chest. Nine days since Jaebum broke your heart. You’d thought—hoped—pleaded with Gods you weren’t sure you believed in—that you’d done enough to keep him as your friend. You hadn’t begged for him to stay, hadn’t demanded a reason for this abrupt end. Because you’d known from the start. You’d known he was going to leave. He always got restless in relationships, hated getting too close to vulnerability. You wish you were an exception, but Jaebum had left and, like he did with all the girls before you, he cut you off completely.

           He’s probably with someone new. The thought brings an ache to your chest, painful and sudden, and you turned onto your side, turned your back to the side Jaebum had made his own in the short time you were together.

           Your phone buzzes from somewhere on the floor, but you can’t find it in you to look. You know it’s just Jackson, anyway—know he’s sending more memes or overly cheesy, heartfelt messages in a feeble attempt to make you smile. He’s probably feeling guilty, you think. He’s the one that encouraged you to face your feelings for Jae, naïvely optimistic that you could be the exception to his ‘no love’ rule.

           Why does heartbreak have to hurt so much every time? Why didn’t it get easier? It’s not like this is the first time you’ve had your heart broken—it’s not even the first time you’ve had your heart broken by Jaebum. He’s broken your heart every time you’ve seen him with a new girl, every time he smiled at you, every time he pressed his lips to yours and made you forget that this was only temporary.

           You close your eyes as the new wave of tears rushes forward. You wonder how long it’ll take you to fix your heart back together this time.

[sighjaebum]

— SURRENDER, i.

Jaebum looks up at the ceiling of your bedroom, arm brushing yours as he shifts imperceptibly atop your bed. “I’m tired,” he admits, reaching a hand up to brush through his unkempt hair.

           Your breath catches in your throat, but you force yourself not to look at him, to keep your eyes on the ceiling. You knew this was coming—you’ve known it since the beginning, since the moment his lips met yours all those weeks ago, in a darkened corner of a crowded room, bass pumping so loud that you could feel it in your bones.

           Jaebum doesn’t do love, and you are not an exception to this rule. It’d be foolish to even hope for that. The exception isn’t you, but you’ll love her when she reveals herself, you’ll beg her not to break his heart like this is breaking yours. Your heart has been splintered since the beginning, but his words and the absence of his hands on your skin has it shattering.

           “Okay,” you say. The way he looks at you when those words leave your mouth tell you that this isn’t what he was expecting, eyes wide and questioning. You’ve heard stories about girls who beg him to stay, who demand reasons upon reasons from him—and you are not going to be another person suffocating him, another person that makes love seem unworthy. “Shall we order a pizza?” Pushing yourself up from the bed, you look over your shoulder at him. He’s watching you like you confuse him, like he’s trying to figure out what’s going on inside your mind. Instead of offering your thoughts and feelings to him on a silver platter, you raise your eyebrow. “Well?”

           “Is that—is that it?” He asks, following your lead in clambering from the bed.

           “Yeah.” You shrug, padding towards your bedroom door. “I’ve always known what this was, Jae. I’m not going to beg you to say.” You look back at him again. “So, pizza?”

           He takes a moment to recover from the shock, eyes narrowed at the place you were just lying. Then his shoulders slump, and he turns to follow you. “Pizza sounds good,” he says, but the smile he flashes is nothing short of exhausted. Like he’d worked himself up for a fight, and all the energy he’d preserved for the confrontation has just bled right out of him.

           The sight breaks your heart even more, but you keep that friendly—that safe—smile on your lips. What good would presenting your broken heart to him do you now? He doesn’t need to see its fractured remains. He doesn’t need to know that you’re one more step to becoming just like him, to swearing off love forever.

[sighjaebum]

THIS IS A MONSTA X HOUSEHOLD

[sighjaebum]

i’m going to combust, thank u very much

[sighjaebum]

yah know what maybe it’s a good thing I can’t afford to go to any concerts..because fanfics put these high ass expections in my head of going to a concert and my bias spotting me in the crowd and instantly falling in love with me then boom we get married and idk all I’m saying is I would be pretty disappointed if it doesn’t happen irl

[sighjaebum]

He looks at you like you’re something important, liquid gold dripping from your fingertips. He looks at you like you’re the one thing on this godforsaken planet that puts him at ease.

           He looks at you like he loves you, but he doesn’t say it. No, this boy is too much angst wrapped in a cold exterior, can’t love you even if he tried, or so he says. But his eyes express things that his mouth won’t, and his fingertips are so soft against your skin, tracing the lines of your body, that it would send him running if he weren’t too caught up in the moment.

           You should count yourself lucky that he’s here at all. Jaebum doesn’t normally love like this, doesn’t normally fall into the same bed more than once, he hates the vulnerability that comes with familiarity. But he comes to you, still.

It’s been months, you think, and he still looks at you like it’s that first night, eyes meeting through the haze of a crowded club, interrupted by the rapid blinking of people dancing between the two of you. He looked at you like you were made of gold then, too—and now, as he kisses your neck and makes you burn, you think that maybe he’s the one that turned you into gold. That he is Midas, and his touch is what made you golden.

You wonder what you’ll become when his fears chase him away from you and into someone else’s bed.