"Are you trying to tell me you're running away from the problem AGAIN? " Jin slammed his bag down on the small wooden table, immediately regretting it because of the prompt rise of eyes towards him from all directions, followed by a more frantic realisation that his mini laptop was inside it.

" Oh !... No, that wasn't for you... " Jin resumed his scolding match, rummaging in his bag, with his phone clumsily balanced between his head and shoulder. The laptop seemed undamaged.

"You know what, Jungkook, I'm fed up. With both of you!" He switched on his lappy and the familiar melody calmed down his escalating heart.

Jin settled down into his favourite olive green chair. "I'm tired of you two creating drama and dragging the rest of us into it. I'm tired of not having either you or him around all the time and even more disgusted with the fact that we have to keep choosing between the two of you...What? No I don't! No i wouldn't always choose you! No you're not my favourite donsaeng! You're a spawn of the devil and more than 90% of the problem in itself is you."As the waitress came over, he had to lower his voice down a few decibels more. "Don't say thank you! That wasn't a compliment." The waitress had reached his table, so he put the call on hold. "May I have your order Sir?"

"For the nth time, your manager is not around Jennifer, so you can drop the sir."
Jennifer flashed a warm smile at him and leaned forward, with a surreptitious glance around the coffee shop, to check whether Jin was right.
 "Same trouble with the boys again?" Jin sighed, "Yeah, those two jerks. Jungkook is on the line right now."
Jennifer blushed slightly and said," Say hello to him from me."
Jin glared at her very pointedly. "A cafe latte please. Please be quick."
Jennifer giggled mischievously and walked away towards the coffee counter.  He sniffed and started to resume his call but noticed that Jungkook had gone off the line." Great!” He thought.
 Within a few minutes of recovering from this brushoff by his junior, he was chipped into the café’s wireless network and logged into his mail and a long succession of notifications had popped up from different sources onto his laptop screen. 
A number of mails from work, a few unimportant commercial ones, most of which he started to delete immediately (he liked his inbox uncluttered) and one mail, recently opened, which his cursor stopped on.
 Almost involuntarily, he clicked on it to view it. In the past 48 hrs he had done this around a hundred times and it still hadn't sunk in properly.
Taehyung is getting engaged. 
 His mind darted back to the memory reel of the time when invitation had come in. Two days back in the evening around the same time of the day as it was now,Jin had been in the same chair, submerged in work, like he usually is at this time of the day. He had almost clicked the "Remove" button when the mail had made its appearance at the top of his inbox. But the name of the sender, vaguely familiar, had stopped him. “Park Jimin!...Where have I... Who... Oh!" Jin remembered the good looking young man, younger than himself, whom he had met at Taehyung's graduation ceremony. Jimin was Taehyung’s friend from college and Jin had heard a lot about him from Taehyung.
 He had then clicked on the mail to read it and what it contained left his mouth open and flung his brain into a brief haze, incapable of processing anything.
 

"We would like to request the pleasure of your company on this joyous day, as we take the first step towards a new life together. 
ENGAGEMENT CEREMONY OF
PARK JIMIN AND KIM TAEHYUNG”

"Jin shi!... Jin shi!! "

Jennifer's voice had woken him up from the puzzled state and he realized he still had his mouth open. Remedying this and trying to appear normal, he turned to her, noticing she had a concerned expression on her face.  This was natural considering he had been sitting there looking like the 3D version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" portrait. 
"Uh... Hi! How u doing?" he said, aiming for a breezy tone. 
"Are you okay? I said hi and you didn't respond, so I thought maybe you were not in the mood to talk. But then I asked for your order, you didn't move a muscle. I kept asking for almost a minute...I was about to poke you with my menu card to see if you've been paralysed."
"Oh.. Hehe… Thanx for not doing that!"
"You were staring at your laptop with a weird expression...Is everything okay? I thought you might have received some bad news over mail. Is someone sick?"
"Yeah…Me."
"What?!"
Jin gave out a long sigh. "Aah... One of my friends is getting engaged."
"Wow!... But isn't that good news?... Unless... Oh, Jin shi, are you feeling like all of your friends are getting married while you're still single and getting old?"
 Jin glared up at Jennifer. 
"Thank you. For your immense sympathy. But NO."
Jennifer looked around to check if the manager was around and being assured that the coast is clear, she lowered herself to sit half-balanced on the edge of the seat across from Jin. “Then go on, tell me what happened. ”
...
Jennifer was an exchange student from America, who worked part-time at the cafe. She was part Korean, part American and she took classes at the same University as Jungkook. She was actually a junior to Jungkook and had also a had a long-standing crush on the latter. In spite of this fact, she was one of the few girls left in Jin's acquaintances whom his friend hadn't dated. 
A year ago, Jungkook had introduced Jin to Jennifer and the coffee shop she worked in and he in turn, had been enticed by the cosy warmth of the place and the aroma of freshly brewing coffee always in present in the air, seeming to welcome him to sit down and take a deep breath.

 "That's there in all coffee shops. Why do you like this one so much Hyung? Is it because of my friend?" Jungkook had asked, with a raised eyebrow and mischievous expression, earning a smack on the back of his head from his hyung.

 His junior was always trying to set him up with girls. He had always been more concerned with his hyung being single than with the fact that his own relationships lasted for a few weeks at the longest. Or with the fact that he always broke up with his girlfriends on the silliest pretexts, claiming afterwards that he was actually the one who had been dumped. The list of girls he had dated was offensively long and diverse and jealousy inducing as well. They were all attractive, glamorous, fashionable and of