“Is either one of us really ok?”

You were still looking at him with anger and tears in your eyes. Once you were able to catch your breath again, you promptly got off the bed and lumbered towards the nurse station.  

“Hi, excuse me… can I leave now? I’m fine now”, you asked the nurse on duty, eager to get out of this place and get away from that man.  

“Sure, just need you to sign on this and settle the bill”, she replied.  

Right. You didn’t have your wallet or your phone with you. What now? Should you ask her if you could go look for your store manager? Will she be willing to let you go off just like that?  

“Here”, Jungkook handed over his card to the nurse.  

—

“I’ll pay you back for the hospital bill and this taxi fare tomorrow”, you said after getting onto the taxi that Jungkook had hailed for the both of you. You disliked the feeling that you owed him something.  

“Mmhmm, but you actually have a lot more to pay me back for other than just that”, he said cryptically.  

“What do you mean?”  

“Just you know, interest and all that. Nothing’s free in this world, Y/N”, he said as he sat next to you in the backseat.  

His demeanour was subtly different from earlier, just enough for you to feel it. He was looking out the car window, his shoulders slanting towards you, right hand resting on the door’s armrest, tapping his index finger slowly. On the flipside, You were sitting as close as possible to the car door, ready to jump out the moment the taxi reached your university hostel, constantly worrying whether he’ll probe further about you.  

Jungkook was revisiting his encounters with you. You definitely feel something whenever someone touches you. He thought about it some more. Both the times he touched you, you cried. So you could sense sadness? But wait, the pregnant woman touched you and you fainted. So it’s not just emotions?  

His phone was continuously buzzing and he didn’t even bother to check who it was.  

“Don’t you want to pick that up?”, you asked as the constant vibrations were starting to bother you.

“No. It’s probably just Hoseok wanting to know why I’m not answering, which is why I’m not answering”, he replied with his eyes still peeled on the buildings passing outside the car window.  

You glanced at the clock at the front of the taxi, “11.53pm”. It was already that late? But it’s probably considered early for predators like him.  

The rest of the journey was surprisingly quiet, he didn’t pester you, he didn’t ask you more questions, he just sat there next to you as though he thought you needed time to heal from the trauma earlier.  

He only said “I’ll see you tomorrow” as you were alighting.  

“What? Why?”, you were sure the only lecture you shared with him was not tomorrow.  

“What do you mean why? Aren’t you going to pay me back tomorrow? That’s what you said. Now go rest”, with that he reached over easily from his seat with his long arms to close the car door you were still holding.  

—

Early next morning you went to the book store to collect your belongings before class. There were a slew of messages and missed calls from Mirae and Namjoon. You wasted no time assuring them that you were fine, and then slowly scrolled through all the messages until you reached the ones which had triggered their worries:  

“Is that you Y/N, in the video??? Y/N, where are you???  

Why haven’t you been replying the whole night??  

You’re scaring us… You’d better be crashed out sleeping! If I don’t hear from you by morning, I’m going to storm your room!!”  

You opened the video Mirae had sent. It was a video some passerby must have taken of the pregnant lady in the bookstore and it captured the exact moment you fainted from the contact with her. You were just grateful that whoever took the video only had a low-resolution camera.  

As you were about to turn it off out of sheer embarrassment, you saw a figure rush towards your unconscious form in the video. He hovered over you, seemingly shaking your shoulders trying to wake you. That was when the labouring woman grabbed a handful of his dark brown hair and he flailed back in shock. You burst out laughing at the shaky fuzzy footage.  

He somehow managed to coax the woman to let go of his luscious locks and allowed her to grip his hand instead for support. Then, the video skipped to various paramedics descending on the scene. The lady was placed on a stretcher and was being wheeled out from the store. Meanwhile, your store manager was busy pointing towards your motionless body on the ground and speaking in a frenzy to one of the paramedics. They looked like they were arguing over something when that same male figure suddenly barged in between them and just lifted you off the ground, disappearing out of the camera’s sight.

Now what he said to you in the cab yesterday made some sense. At least in the video, he didn’t seem like the cold and distant non-human that the rumours made him out to be.  

Perhaps you have been letting other people’s words affect your judgment too much; you of all people should know how much it hurts when others assumed what they knew about you.  

—

Classes ended monotonously that day and you had a late lunch with Namjoon and Mirae, filling them in on what had happened the day before. Mirae was having a blast re-watching the video knowing now that the guy who had his hair almost pulled out by the suffering mother was none other than the chic and haughty Jeon Jungkook.  

After lunch you went to the bookstore again for your shift. It was still as quiet, as though the whole hoo-ha that was yesterday had never actually happened.  

Jungkook said he’ll see you today, but how? “Don’t tell me he was going to suddenly pop up here”, you thought to yourself, after all this was probably the only place he knew where he could find you.  

Just then the ringing of the counter phone broke your daze and you rushed over to get the call.  

“Hi this is Euphoria Books, how may I help you?”

“Hi Y/N…”, you froze at his voice. He called you on the freaking bookstore main line?!

“… Jungkook here.”

Silence on your end.  

“Didn’t mean to scare you, but how’s the repayment looking today? You might be raking up more interest than you think.”  

You couldn’t leave the store because the manager had gone out to run errands and you were the only one around.  

“I can’t meet you now, I’m working.”

“Yeah ok, that’s cool cause I’m caught up with something too, can you just pay me back the money through a phone transfer, you know how to do that right? You just gotta key in my phone number, and then…”

What the… did he need the money that urgently that he will call you to transfer it to him now-now? But who were you to question since you were the one owing the debt and seriously, you were just glad this meant that you don’t actually have to meet him in person any more.

“Yeah of course I know how to do it”, you took down his number, he quipped a ‘thanks’ and kept down the phone.  

Still puzzled, you fumbled around for your handphone. It has only been a few weeks since you managed to figure this handphone payment transfer deal. Isn’t technology amazing nowadays? You were not that amazing at it though and it took you a good five minutes to do something so simple but when it was finally done, you were relieved. It felt like you had at least paid something back to him. 

You put down your phone and stood up from the counter to get back to work when the face that greeted you almost made your heart jump out from your chest.  

“Oh my goshhh, you gave me a shock! What the hell… didn’t you just say you were caught up with something and asked me to do a phone transfer to you? What are you doing here now?”, you said exasperatedly.  

Jungkook was just standing there, leaning against the counter on his left arm.

“Yeah I was caught up with something”, he placed a cup of iced americano in front of you.  

“And yes, I did also tell you to do a phone transfer…”, he whipped out his phone and placed it on the counter for you to see. The bank app page was opened:    

“[your phone number]         $375  

Received at 4.16pm”

“… because how else would I get your phone number?”, he said while taking a sip from his own drink.  

You were baffled that he would even come up with something like this.  

“Maybe you can just try asking next time?”, you said while looking at him with a questioning frown.  

“I would have tried. But the last few times I asked you anything the reception wasn’t exactly what I would call… responsive”, now he was just leaning on the counter with both elbows and his face a tad too close to yours for comfort.  

Granted, he did have a point though. Perhaps you were needlessly stand-offish to him since the start.  

—

Jungkook ended up hanging around in the store and it wasn’t as if you could just chase him out because he was pretending to be flipping through each of the books on the display shelf.  

You tried your best to ignore his presence but you looked at the coffee he brought for you and noticed a piece of yellow paper stuck to it. Turning the cup around, it said, “Sorry for what I did in the hospital yesterday.”  

—

The next day he came again, brought you a cappuccino this time around.  

He chose to stroll around in the manga section that afternoon, lazily sipping on his own drink, which you have now come to realise looks more like an iced chocolate rather than coffee.

“Are you going to keep doing this?”  

“Doing what?”, he looked up at you quizzically.  

“This!”, you gestured to him sitting on the floor reading one of the manga. “Do you want something from me? Because to be honest, you don’t look like you belong in a bookstore”, you said.  

“No? I thought I would just hang around, you know, in case another pregnant woman comes around.”  

Strictly speaking, there wasn’t anything wrong with what he was doing or what he said, but something was always so off tangent about it.

“Ok that is just bizarre, what are the chances something like that would happen, again?”  

“This is bizarre?”, he got up from the floor, “I thought you are more… bizarre. How do you feel things when you touch someone? Do you sense everything they feel? How does that even work?”  

You rather disliked the fact that he was so quick-witted to deduce such things.  

“I wouldn’t know how it worked, I was just born with it. It’s not as if I could ask the heavens why they made me this way or ask them to fix me, you know.”, you were avoiding the crux of the question.  

“True that, wouldn’t it be good if we could leave a bad review for them sometimes?”, he said rather earnestly while pointing up towards nothingness. And you must be delusional, because you actually felt understood for a moment, by him.  

—  

Another day, another cup of coffee; vanilla latte.  

He was still drinking that iced chocolate from the coffee place though.  

“Why do you always get iced chocolate for yourself?”, you asked while walking up to him who was holding a book in his other hand, trying a bit too hard to look like he could actually be interested in reading about the life of Michelle Obama.  

“I don’t drink coffee. It’s too bitter”, he replied while sticking his tongue out and making a face like Disgust would in “Inside Out”.  

“Hah, as if alcohol doesn’t taste bitter. You don’t seem to have a problem with drinking that.”  

“There’s a difference”, he said. “You endure the bitterness of coffee to become more awake, but you get through the bitterness of alcohol and, hopefully, you are less awake”, he said while closing the book he was holding.  

—

Fourth day, and he brought you a mocha, still chocolate for himself; he might be running out of options pretty soon.  

There were hardly any customers that day and the manager was out again. You were browsing through the music section until you picked out an album and put it into the player. Sure, music can be digital nowadays, but there was something about putting a disc into a player that you just related to; maybe you felt like you were able to feel the music that way.  

Jungkook snuck behind you and suddenly asked, “What’s that?”  

“A CD player?”, you answered.

“Obviously. I meant the album.”

“It’s just a random one I picked out”, actually it wasn’t, you liked that artist.  

He just shrugged and continued mindlessly flipping through the albums aligned perfectly on the sides of the shelves.  

“I think I haven’t thanked you for the other day”, you abruptly said to him.  

“Which part?”, he probably has no idea you saw the video of his hair being almost tugged out. Just having reminded yourself of it made you smile a little.

“For… just, everything”, you replied, “and you can stop buying me coffees now.”  

His hands stopped in the middle of the stack of CDs he was disturbing and his heart skipped a beat.  

He cleared his throat and said, “I was just trying to figure out what kind of coffee you liked, but you didn’t finish any of them… so I’m not sure this is working out very well”, his tone sounding like he wanted to test your reaction.  

“Caramel macchiato, I like that. Next time just ask me. But you can stop buying me coffee for real”, you answered with the tiniest smile still on your face.  

Then, the cogs in his mind started to turn.  

“Well, if you really wanted to thank me for something, why not buy me dinner? How about tonight?”

“Don’t you have better places to be at night?”, you didn’t want to succumb, “pick anything from here…”, you gestured the entire store, “I’ll gift that to you instead.” 

—

“Must say she’s an interesting and difficult one.”

Jungkook muttered to Hoseok who was busy setting up the new Hi-Fi system that he just bought for their school hideout. Given that they are from the rich families sponsoring the university, it was a piece of cake for them to get a private basement practice room to use at their leisure.  

“Who? Oh that one, which you have been trying to land since…”, Hoseok started counting on his fingers when a pillow hit his face.  

“Don’t take it out on me man! You know these people are all interesting until you get to know them. Then you realise they are all the same, just wearing different skins. So why don’t you just pick one that has a prettier skin?”,  Hoseok said while hurling the pillow back onto the couch Jungkook was sitting on.  

“You don’t get it, she’s different.”  

“Oh wow, is she now? How so, Romeo?”, Hoseok was getting increasingly better at his patronizing act.  

“Jung Hoseok, you continue with this and the next thing hitting your face will be my fist”, Jungkook said sternly before calming down, “… she has this ability, I don’t quite get the mechanics yet but it seems like she can feel what you are feeling when you touch her? You know what I mean? Like superpowers of sorts?”

Jungkook can literally make out the words ‘I don’t get it’ on Hoseok’s face. And after a moment Hoseok’s eyes suddenly lit up like when Jack Sparrow saw rum and asked, “ooohhhh, so if you are feeling and you touched her, will she…?”.  

Jungkook glared at him really hard but he had no answer.  

“What? It’s a legitimate question”, Hoseok tried to defend himself. “So what gives? What are you trying to do? The usual modus operandi? Reel in and ditch?”  

“It’s not going to be that easy isn’t it”, Jungkook’s tactics have almost always been physical.  

“How do you catch something that can sense your intentions…”, wondered Jungkook.  

Hoseok laughed at him, seeing how Jungkook is taking the hunt so seriously. “Since your birthday party is next week, can you please get over this one by then”, he said while sitting down on the armrest of the huge couch.  

“What birthday party? Since when was I having one?”  

“Dude! You really think I’m gonna waste a perfectly good excuse to have a party? It’ll be your birthday but it’s gonna be my party, ok? You better be there. And that’s one week for you to be done with your Ms. Superpowers”, Hoseok said while patting Jungkook’s chest with the back of his hands.  

Jungkook looked back at him with a glint in his eyes, he hasn’t felt this motivated in a long time.