Chapter Text
After midnight, the sound booth took on an otherworldly quality from prolonged silence in a normally noisy place, emptiness in normally crowded halls. The bright student center filled with familiar students became dim and empty like a horror movie—doors with windows like eyes, hallways branching off and casting patches of darkness on the floor.
A group of freshmen drunk on the high of orientation week crashed through, hooting and screaming and the hallways went back to normal for a few jarring seconds.
Namjoon had gotten used to the after-midnight hallways during his first year on the student radio when he worked the shift between two and four in the morning. Yoongi still worked midnight to one a couple nights a week. At the end of summer, the campus was still empty, normal radio shifts reduced to Namjoon and Yoongi camped in the studio until the early hours of the morning, getting their radio voices working again.
Yoongi could have been a wraith himself, stalking from the booth to the vending machine every hour, muttering under his breath, a vampire with the way he spun his seat around and became a dark silhouette in a high seat against the screens behind him. Kendrick Lamar played over the stereo. His headset slid off one ear as he faced the low couch Namjoon sprawled on.
“Didn’t think you liked alphas,” he said with a smirk.
Namjoon rubbed his forehead and grumbled.
“Okay, sorry, sorry, I said I wouldn’t make fun of you. Just…a freshman?”
“He’s a sophomore now.”
Yoongi nodded, turning back around. The song came to an end and Yoongi hit the On Air button to drawl the name of the last song and the next song into his mic. Something by Post Malone came on, and Yoongi spun his seat back around. “So you’re into alphas. No big deal. What does it for you? The smell?”
“I’m not into alphas,” Namjoon said. “Alphas turn me off. I said Jungkook is hot. Like, physically attractive. That’s all I said. And it’s definitely not the smell. That’s something to get over.”
Yoongi shrugged. “Taehyung likes it.”
“Taehyung is an omega. He’s supposed to like it.”
Yoongi considered this, then pulled his phone out and started scrolling. Namjoon had missed this all summer, lazing around in the sound booth with Yoongi, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows to the hallway and feeling half like a museum exhibit and half like he sat in the control room of the school, observing and observed, a slow spot just off the fast current of a school with under two-thousand students.
He waited for Yoongi to finish what he was doing and continue his judgment, which was already bad enough just hearing that Namjoon thought the group’s baby was hot. He could tell a bigger story, the full story of the week after finals when only Jungkook and Namjoon were left on campus, one last half-drunk night in Namjoon’s room with Jungkook’s campfire scent so close, heavy on his lap, on his tongue.
“Kook’s getting in tomorrow,” Yoongi said. “So will Seokjin. You already know you gotta clear the house for like five hours right after he gets here, right? It’s been two months since I’ve had a dick in my ass and I’m gonna be loud.”
“Fucking hell, Yoongi,” Namjoon said.
“You can always stay if you want. You’ve got sound-cancelling headphones, right? Can’t promise we’ll stay out of the common areas though. Jinnie keeps mentioning handcuffs and cat ears and I don’t know if he’s kidding or not. I’m planning on at least three rounds.”
“I’ll be here,” Namjoon choked. “Right here in the booth.”
“What do you like about him?”
“Huh?”
“Jungkook. I didn’t think he was your kind of thing.”
“What’s my thing?”
They’d known each other for three years, heading into a fourth. Yoongi had been the club captain the year before and had just handed the position to Namjoon. Aside from countless nights in the empty hallways, they’d spent so many afternoons and evenings together in the studio, met there in the mornings after getting coffee, had spent innumerable nights smoking weed and talking about life. They’d roomed together throughout all of college. Namjoon liked to think he didn’t have ‘a thing’, had been pretty confused about kissing Jungkook, but Yoongi had taught him more than one thing about himself over the years.
“Girls, for one,” Yoongi said.
“You know I’m bi.”
“I know you prefer girls. Remember that rap you wrote about boobs freshman year?”
“Oh my god, don’t bring that up.”
Yoongi tossed a pen at Namjoon for no reason at all. They regarded each other in comfortable silence. “I thought you liked crazy chicks,” he said. “Or really cute but needy girls. Dude—the tiny girl who led the Vagina Monologues last year. The one with the crazy big eyes and the giant butterfly tattoo.”
“She has a name,” Namjoon grumbled. “And can we not talk about her?” He’d met that girl right down the hall in the coffee lounge, saw her ass in her hot pants first, and then the glittering smile. So dreamy but so dramatic. The fling had been chaotic and intoxicating and fast. “She’s not really a type though.”
“She was needy and small and submissive. She called you ‘my big alpha’ and it drove you so crazy it was pathetic to watch. You love girls who want someone to take care of them. I’d be surprised you haven’t gone for Taehyung yet, but he’s pretty non-type and independent for an omega, so I get it.”
“Holy shit, Yoongi. I’m not an asshole.”
“There’s no telling what the heart desires. So why Jungkook?”
Namjoon shrugged. “He’s hot.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that.”
“You don’t see it? That was my first impression of him. ‘This kid is hotter than me.’ And then I smelled him and got an inferiority complex until I figured out he was a total dork.”
Yoongi turned back to his computer, shrugging. “Yeah, he’s cute. In a boyish way. With those big teeth and big eyes and big nose. And the abs. What a brat.”
Namjoon snorted. They went back to comfortable silence. Yoongi’s music changed from Post Malone to “Marijuana” by Chrome Sparks, the good kind of bullshit genre-hopping only allowed on school radio stations. Every DJ had a different style, and some had no style, and everyone got fan mail from the inmates at the prison down the road who were the only people that listened to them regularly.
“I don’t know, he’s hot, and he’s funny. He’s cute more than hot most of the time. I like that.”
“He never really struck me as an alpha.”
“He really doesn’t come off that way,” Namjoon said. “It’s throws me off every time I smell him because that’s not how I see him at all.”
Yoongi grunted. “You actually going to go for it?”
That ship had sailed the minute Jungkook climbed into his lap last year, the ten tequila-tasting minutes with Jungkook’s mouth on his before the alpha scent clogged Namjoon’s nostrils and he froze up. Jungkook had stopped and they’d watched a movie and gone to bed and hadn’t said a word to each other all summer. “Probably not,” he said.
“Why not?”
The scent was hard to ignore. “Not sure it’s worth it,” he said, without really knowing what he meant, except that he knew his friends would imagine him whimpering with a dick in his ass and that made something nasty turn in his throat.
“He acts a little young, you know?” Yoongi said.
Namjoon wrinkled his nose at the ceiling. “Around Seokjin and Jimin I guess. That little triumvirate of chaos. He’s clingy around you and Hoseok. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him interact with Taehyung one-on-one.” The way Jungkook acted around Namjoon had gone from professional to study partners to whatever they’d done last semester. He hadn’t seen him as young since at least Christmas break the year before.
Somewhere along the line he’d started staying up to tune into Jungkook’s shift so he could hear his voice. They sat in the library together several days a week and encouraged each other, got drinks for each other, bumped legs under the table and didn’t care.
But he smelled a way that made Namjoon want to roll belly up, and he hadn’t ever liked leaving things to trust, especially didn’t like it when someone demanded it of him, didn’t know if it made sense to trust any alpha to be satisfied with that, even Jungkook.
“Yeah, young,” Namjoon muttered. Yoongi started humming to the Shostakovich. Namjoon lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. The last summer night passed on.
.
Jimin had his legs thrown over Jungkook’s thick chest on the main lawn, pinning him to the grass. Taehyung, Seokjin, and Hoseok tossed a Frisbee back and forth across the field as all the new freshman glowered at the upper-classmen for taking their spot. Taehyung patiently wrangled the tosses back and forth to a sporadically decent Hoseok. Seokjin could not be trusted to get the Frisbee further than ten feet, and never in the right direction. Namjoon suspected he was being terrible at it on purpose. As Namjoon walked up, Hoseok yanked it off the ground and beat him with it.
The entire radio crew grew and shrank between twenty to thirty people, but the seven of them had hung on the longest and cared the most, had fallen into the mini clique formed around Seokjin and Yoongi over the years.
“Well hello, director Namjoon, our great and powerful leader,” Jimin said.
“Bow before me,” Namjoon said. Jimin jumped off Jungkook and kneeled with his forehead in the grass. Jungkook didn’t raise his head from his arms, but his lips quirked. Namjoon stopped about ten feet away, unsure.
“We are but humble radio servants,” Jimin said.
Jungkook hair rustled in the breeze, the familiar curve of his big nose accented in his profile against the grass. He’d taken his shoes off, and the hoodie Namjoon was used to seeing on him was absent in the summer sun, knees and calves thick and unfamiliar. “When did you two get in?” Namjoon asked.
“This morning,” Jimin said. “Where have you been?”
“Asleep, mostly. Yoongi and I stayed in the booth until four last night.”
Jimin poked Jungkook with his toe. “I think Jungkook’s asleep, but he got here about an hour ago and hasn’t started unpacking yet. I think he’s planning to live on our couch until he gets around to setting him room up next weekend.”
Jungkook grunted and rolled over. His t-shirt rode up his flat stomach and rippling abs, much to the interest of a small crowd of freshman girls travelling in a pack down the sidewalk. Jungkook absently pushed it a little higher and sighed deeply as a breeze rolled over them. Namjoon would have teased him for it if he hadn’t gotten an odd loss of breath, if he wasn’t half hoping that the show was for him. A shameful thought. A middle-school kind of anxious butterflies.
“We gettin’ shwasty tonight?” Jimin asked
“Yoongi’s in charge of that.”
“So yes.”
Jungkook’s head finally came up with one eye barely open and a blade of grass stuck to his cheek. “Please tell me there’ll be something besides whiskey this time.”
“No promises.”
Jungkook’s head flopped back down into the grass. Jimin gave his firm thigh a fond slap. “Did you tell Namjoon where you’re rooming this year?”
“Hm.”
“Brat hasn’t texted me all summer,” Namjoon said. It came out too soft.
“He didn’t text any of us all summer. Don’t feel special. He’s rooming in Sutherland.”
As far as Namjoon knew, Sutherland was the building with IT and the giant lecture hall. “In a classroom?”
“You didn’t know? The top two floors are dorms, and they used to be apartments for visitors, so they’re fucking fancy. He’s got the nicest room on campus, windows on two walls and twelve-foot ceilings and an elevator and carpet. And he’s got it as a single ‘cause he’s an alpha.” Jimin smacked Jungkook in the middle of his chest with a loud, hollow sound. Jungkook didn’t even flinch. “Fucking perks man. And it’s super close to our townhouses.”
Jungkook very slowly propped himself up on his elbows to give his glare a little more power. His hair had gotten longer, a stylish mess that hung in his eyes until he pulled a hand through it. He flopped back in the grass, still not looking at Namjoon.
Meanwhile, Jimin smirked slowly at him, then darted his eyes back and forth between Jungkook and Namjoon. He slowly mouthed “Yoongi told me.”
Whatever showed on Namjoon’s face made Jimin giggle. Namjoon tried to quickly wipe it away and only made it worse. Jimin gave him the most reassuring little grin and went back to using Jungkook as a footrest.
Hoseok, Seokjin, and Taehyung finally made their way over. Seokjin flopped down and threw handfuls of grass at Jungkook and Jimin.
“You look so weird in shorts,” Namjoon said to Hoseok. “Like, smaller.”
“I feel weird in shorts.”
“They’re fucking short too,” Taehyung said.
“They’re fashionable!”
“You look like your dad’s a lawyer.”
“I’m the dance captain. I can do whatever I want.” Hoseok did a little victory wiggle.
“Congrats again, man. Does that mean you won’t have time for radio?”
“No way,” Hoseok said with an emphatic head shake. “I’d honestly give up the dance captain position faster.”
“Hoseok, don’t say that.”
“I’m serious,” he said, and put a very sincere hand on Namjoon’s shoulder. “I love the dance crew. I love them. But…”
“Dramatic.”
“Well…” he made a cartoonish grimace, the one that meant he wanted to say something nasty, which was as close as he ever got to saying something nasty. “I love you guys even more,” he said with admirable diplomacy.
The chaos triumvirate had picked up the frisbee and headed into the field, Jungkook stretching so his shirt rode up. Jimin turned and tossed it as far as he could, and Jungkook took off on his long legs, bare feet pounding in the grass. He tracked its curve, primed under it like a cat about to pounce, and popped up abnormally high with his alpha muscles to snatch it out of the air. He spun in one smooth motion and shot it low across the field where it passed right through Seokjin’s hands and landed peacefully in the grass a couple hundred feet away.
Taehyung flopped across Namjoon’s legs like a cat demanding attention. This close, Namjoon could just smell the delicate, floral omega scent coming off him, intensified a little by sweat. An hour after they’d met two years ago, Taehyung had slid under Namjoon’s arm, picked up Namjoon’s hand, and put it on his head to ask for pats, making it immediately clear how comfortable he was with getting the affection he needed from practical strangers. He’d only gotten more direct, not demanding so much as intentional, knowing what he needed. He gripped Namjoon’s spare arm as he got head scratches, eyes fluttering shut as chemicals sparked happily in his brain.
Yoongi waddled up behind them in skinny jeans that flapped around his thin thighs, cuffed way too high. “Who let my boyfriend near a Frisbee,” he said. “You all should know better.” Away in the field, Jungkook sprinted with impressive alpha speed again, not looking where he was going as he chased the frisbee. It spiraled and sloped like a boomerang back towards the ground. He did an abrupt, skidding about-face and sprinted in the opposite direction, straight towards Seokjin who wasn’t watching..
“He’s doing great!” Hoseok said.
“He’ll knock his teeth out!”
“That’s a legitimate worry,” Namjoon said.
“Seokjin brought a whole lasagna from home,” Yoongi said. “We figured we’d avoid the crush of everyone trying to get to the two restaurants in town and just eat in. It’ll need to go in the oven soon.”
“Should we head over then?” Namjoon said. Out in the field, Jungkook barreled into Seokjin and sent them both tumbling into the grass.
“I’ll go round up the asshole squad,” Yoongi sighed, and stomped out into the field like a grandpa with his hands on his hips, a suspicious limp in his gait that hadn’t been there the previous night.
“I could hear them through the walls,” Hoseok said, suddenly grim.
.
Halfway back to their townhouse, Jungkook quietly split off from the group.
“Is he having dinner with us?” Yoongi asked Jimin.
“He said he needed to shower first.”
Namjoon caught sight of Taehyung giving one emphatic nod and quietly agreed. Most of the time Jungkook smelled like wood smoke mixed with something dirtier. When he got sweaty, he started to smell just slightly like literal shit with natural alpha musk. It probably smelled different to Taehyung, a little more captivating.
Jungkook arrived in less than half an hour with wet hair and new clothes to find half the group deep in a game of Settlers of Catan on the dining room table. Namjoon was winning, as usual.
If Namjoon hadn’t been watching the condensation from Jungkook’s hair collect on his temple, he wouldn’t have noticed the way Jungkook took a deep breath, and then another, the way he locked eyes with Taehyung across the table for the briefest moment.
Taehyung very calmly finished his turn, then stood up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, guys,” he said. “Carry on without me.” He handed his cards to Jungkook, then stepped out the back to go to his own apartment next door.
As soon as he left, the delicate floral scent that had been filling the space became conspicuous in its sudden disappearance. Jungkook shook his hair out of his eyes and took Taehyung’s seat. A foot kicked Namjoon’s shin under the table and he looked at Jungkook in time to catch a shy little grin that made Namjoon’s heart trip over itself, uncertain.
When Taehyung returned fifteen minutes later, his hair was wet too. Namjoon took a deep, experimental breath through his nose as Taehyung passed, and smelled only the campfire scent that had filled the room.
After dinner, the seven jammed themselves into the living room, lining the plasticky standard-issue couch and armchair. Yoongi had the same black bucket chair from freshman year along one wall. Namjoon had brought some folding chair from home to keep in the corner.
“To a good year,” Yoongi said solemnly, and raised his wine glass. “Senior year.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Seokjin toasted. The three non-seniors grumbled in half-hearted disagreement. Jimin downed his whole glass like a shot and poured another. Taehyung was halfway through his and already looking a little rosy. Jungkook had a flask like always, since it took nothing short of hard liquor to get him even tipsy, alpha physiology burning it all away and packing it into his dense muscles to be lost in his bloodstream. A third giant serving of lasagna sat half-eaten on the ground next to him that Seokjin kept stealing bites from while Jungkook pretended not to see.
“To a good new set of students for the radio,” Namjoon said. “I wonder who we’ll get this year.”
“I wonder who we’ll lose,” Yoongi grumbled.
“To passing O-chem,” Jungkook said, raising his flask.
“Fucking STEM kid,” Jimin said.
“You’re a math major,” Jungkook whined and got his hair ruffled.
Within a half hour, Taehyung curled around Hoseok like a tenacious vine, both giggly and close as always. Yoongi and Seokjin sat on the floor and tried to explain their new favorite board game to Jimin like he wasn’t three glasses of wine and a gulp from Jungkook’s flask into incoherency.
Namjoon felt a little too close to senselessness, half a glass more than he’d wanted in him already. He surveyed the room with a warm happiness that promised good and exciting things for the year ahead.
Across the room, Jungkook gulped from his flask, neck working. He brought it slowly back down with a flinch and met Namjoon’s eyes. His lips split in a fond smile that flooded through Namjoon’s chest, an un-alpha-like charming sweetness about him like he’d never grown fully into his dominance, had kept his childhood vulnerability. Then he tipped his flask up again and became all strong arms and a sharp jaw and wide knees. For a moment, Namjoon forgot to breathe.
.
The activities fair didn’t happen until two weeks into the semester, which meant the radio club spent the first two weeks of school rushing to cover the shifts left open by the graduating seniors from the year before. Hani and Heechul, their two faculty advisors, only helped a little.
He woke early enough on to have breakfast with Seokjin, but missed Yoongi, who always slept in. They’d done the very brave thing of taking a double room as a couple, and Namjoon felt like the son still living at home. Such had it been for two years now.
Most of his classes would be upper level, circling in on the final sprint of his college career, but he’d saved some core curriculum classes to pad the semester with. He chose Intro to Anthropology because the he’d liked the professor in an ethics class from the year before. “You’re on the school radio, right?” asked a guy next to him at the beginning of the first class at 8:15 a.m. on Monday.
“I am! How’d you know?”
“I know you from around,” he said, shrugging. He was Asian, so Namjoon got it. He’d picked this guy out from the crowd their freshman year. Most of the school recognized Namjoon from his constant presence in the students center anyway. “I hooked up with someone after your broke up with her last year.”
Namjoon snorted into his notebook.
“Forgot her name but she had a butterfly tattoo.”
“Right.”
“She told me you had a—you know, never mind.” He whacked himself on the head and then held out a hand. “My name is Jackson and it’s super nice to meet you. Forget I said anything.”
“Jackson and Namjoon,” the professor said, “I’d love to eavesdrop on more of that very interesting conversation, but I’m afraid you’ll need to wait until after class to talk about your hookups.” She didn’t look up from her notes.
A ripple of shocked giggles went around the room. Namjoon was only tangentially familiar with this group of students, the class made of mostly young students starting their majors and a few older students getting a required class out of the way. It was probably the first class for a few of the freshmen, who seemed stunned that the professor wasn’t going to ignore their exchange or scold like a high school teacher would have.
Namjoon began to realize that he had committed to his upper limit. He had both his philosophy and music production majors to finish, the honors program to complete, and the radio to lead. “I’ll be okay,” he told Yoongi on Thursday, already suffering from sleeplessness and overuse of coffee.
Yoongi dug into his beef stroganoff and grunted. “Was I fine last year, Joon?”
“No.”
“Prepare yourself.”
He met Jungkook at the library that afternoon. They sat in silence under the bright lights in their favorite alcove upstairs, pens moving, text book pages flipping quietly, just grunts and nudges between them punctuated by occasional trips to the downstairs café and the slide of phones across the table with music recommendations. Jungkook’s music tended to make Namjoon sleepy, “Move On” by Garden City Movement that stopped him studying for a whole ten minutes as he watched the video and then nearly fell asleep with his head on the table, brooding about it. A cover of “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire that really did make him fall asleep and drool on his notes on Kant.
They didn’t talk about the kiss, but the shadow of it lingered, the memory of Jungkook’s thighs around Namjoon’s waist and his warm hands on either side of his neck, his sweet voice moaning breathlessly when Namjoon bit his bottom lip. Namjoon tried to shake it away. Ignoring it was safe. They could keep the comfortable neutrality they’d always had.
He thought he might have been imagining the way Jungkook’s gaze lingered more than it had last semester, that the songs he pushed across the table had more of a romantic theme than usual.
But Jungkook had always been a romantic. He seemed content to ignore their new history.
At ten on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday, Namjoon tuned the radio very quietly to the school station and listened to Jungkook’s gentle mix of indie trance and acoustic moaning, frequently the same music that he passed across the table in the library. He interspersed his music with basic commentary and, at nine and every half hour afterwards, a small chat. “I thought everyone was exaggerating how hard O-chem is,” Jungkook grumbled around one in the morning as Namjoon sleepily put on his pajamas. “Organic Chemistry for all you non-STEM people out there. We had our second class today and I’m already dying.”
Namjoon scoffed.
No listener would ever guess he was an alpha from just his voice, soft and high with such a lovely texture over the microphone. Namjoon suspected Jungkook watched too much ASMR to keep it completely out of his style.
“Yeah, classes are weird this year,” Jungkook said. “My professor for my computer science class is scared of me. I’m not kidding. He backs away from me when I try to hand him things. He’s Chinese and I’m not sure if it’s cultural difference or…?”
Anyone who knew Jungkook was an alpha would know what the problem was. Namjoon wasn’t sure he’d ever told listeners his Type on air.
The next morning as they sat around and ate breakfast, Seokjin said, “Yoongi heard you listening to Jungkook’s show last night.”
“He plays good music to sleep to,” Namjoon said. “He’s perfect for that shift, and he likes it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Seokjin said. He wore one of Yoongi’s shirts but Namjoon’s boxers. They really needed to stop sharing laundry duties. Seokjin dispiritedly flipped a pancake. It flew right out of the pan and landed batter-side down on the stovetop with a wet splat. He stood there with the pan and stared at it.
“He said something worrying last night,” Namjoon said.
“Yeah?”
“He said his computer science professor is scared of him.”
Seokjin nodded slowly. “He told me that, actually. Says he won’t take his questions in class until he can’t be ignored anymore and backs away from him when he gets too close.”
Namjoon sighed. “That’s illegal, right? That’s discrimination.”
“Not sure it’s that easy,” Seokjin said. “There’s no evidence that he’s actually holding back Jungkook’s grades or harming his educational experience.”
“If he’s making him feel unwelcome…”
Seokjin carefully scooped the pancake off the stove with the spatula. “I don’t think that’s enough to actually get him in trouble. You know what’ll happen if he takes that in. Some people are scared of alphas, and for good reasons. Telling him not to be scared just isn’t fair or reasonable. There’s nothing he can do about that. I’m sure that guy has had alpha students before. They’re rare, but not that rare. If he’s consistently actually hostile to them, I’m sure something would have been done about it by now.”
He plopped the ugly, half destroyed pancake back in the frying pan and walked off in search of paper towels. Namjoon drank his coffee and felt dissatisfied.
.
That evening, Jungkook came into the studio for a rare visit. “You’re not on tonight, are you?” Namjoon asked.
Jungkook shook his head. “Are you busy? Should I go?”
“No, no! You’re always welcome, of course. I’m just surprised.”
Jungkook set his backpack down and threw himself over the couch. “I’m not ready to go back to my dorm yet.”
He stretched out, baggy white t-shirt tenting around him, and then curled into a cute little ball with his arm under his head and closed his eyes. Namjoon tore his stare away and went back to his work. The room slowly filled up with the subtle tang of campfire, a little stronger than normal.
“Had a hard day?” Namjoon said eventually.
“Uh huh. How’d you know?”
“Dude, you never come in here when it’s just me. I thought you’d be at the gym by now.”
“I’ve started going in the early morning before anyone’s there.”
Jungkook scowled at the ceiling, arms thrown over his head. He was way on the skinnier side of the typical alpha build. No matter how much he worked out, he couldn’t get much bigger. He didn’t care most of the time, scoffing when someone called him small and showing off his strength whenever he got the chance. He worked out obsessively though, and ate like a starving dog.
“You’re having trouble with one of your professors, I hear.”
That was a real pout with a scrunch between his eyebrows and everything. “I just came from that class.”
“You should report him.”
“Namjoon,” Jungkook said softly, sounding almost disappointed. “He hasn’t done anything worth reporting anyway. I just make him nervous. I can’t really blame him for that.”
“Is he an omega?”
“No, he’s a beta.”
The word “beta” stuck in Namjoon’s head for just a moment, taking a moment for the usual meaning to slide into place. No, he’s normal. Only you weren’t supposed to call it that. Namjoon had never thought of himself or anyone else as a beta. He was just part of the wide majority that wasn’t an alpha or an omega. Type made up only four percent of their entire class, 20 students out of five-hundred. It was already a statistical anomaly that they had anyone with Type within their friend group, let alone two. Namjoon had never been close with another one.
“You’ve never been scared of me, right?”
“You look like a rabbit, Jungkook. What on earth would I have to be scared of?”
“I’m serious.”
Namjoon turned his chair around again to look Jungkook in the eye. He leaned forward on his knees, staring up, pleading. His scent filled the room, soothing more than intimidating, like it wanted Namjoon to stay quiet and safe. “I’ve never been scared of you,” Namjoon said. “Not even intimidated. Well, almost intimidated, maybe. Never scared.”
“That’s good.”
They left the booth when Heechul came in an hour later. “Are we doing anything tonight?” Jungkook asked.
“We’re getting drunk at our place again. Have you set up your room yet? Jimin says you’ve been sleeping on their couch.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Jungkook mumbled.
“How does Taehyung feel about you sleeping on their couch?” Namjoon asked without really thinking, maybe to add a bit of motivation for Jungkook to handle his stuff on time, forgetting for a moment that it had been a long time since he heard anyone in their group bring up the tension between the two. Jungkook looked up from his phone, big eyes bigger with surprise, almost wary.
“Taehyung…doesn’t…mind.”
“Really?”
Jungkook chewed on his bottom lip. He glanced around quickly, then dropped his voice. “He hasn’t said anything about it, but he never says anything. Has he said anything to you?”
“No, but don’t you think it bothers him?”
Jungkook leveled a scowl at the phone in his hands. His screen was cracked to all hell, despite the case, and he fidgeted it back and forth without answering.
“How about I come by tomorrow and help you set your room up,” Namjoon asked, which sounded annoyingly paternal as soon as it left his mouth.
But Jungkook nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Thanks.”
.
Sutherland felt strange on a Saturday afternoon the way any academic building felt strange on weekends, the realm of professors and classes handed to the students for forty-eight hours to do with as they pleased. Namjoon Skepticism class from sophomore year had been held right down the hall.
Jungkook’s two-story dorm suite took up one corner of the building, closed off from the dorm halls of the top two floors. The suite had its own staircase inside like a proper apartment. Instead of a closed-in, one-couch room with laminate floors, the living room was a big space with a cozy eight-foot ceiling and a carpet, extra furniture, and windows onto the roof outside. A little kitchen sat neatly in a nook by the bathroom.
It stank of alpha, multiple strong scents nearly burning his nose.
“Is this whole suite for alphas?” Namjoon asked as soon as Jungkook opened his door.
“Uh-huh. We get discounts if we live in the alpha dorms.”
“Really? I wonder why.”
Jungkook shrugged. “Sexual assault cases are more unusual in areas where alphas are forced to stay away from omegas and hold each other accountable.”
“Oh.”
“It stinks, right?” Jungkook said. He sat on the arm of one of couches and frowned around at the space. “Literally. Everyone’s trying to scent the space. It’s embarrassing. It’s making all of us really tense.”
“I can smell you all over this place too.”
“I can’t just lose, you know?” he said.
Namjoon had no idea what that was like, having to assert dominance or face undetermined social consequences. He nodded anyway.
“Did you visit me at all last year?” Jungkook asked.
“In the freshman dorm? I did once when I was drunk, but I don’t remember it very well.”
“It was an alpha only floor. We didn’t have a choice. They put us all there. It was so much worse.”
Namjoon hissed in sympathy and patted Jungkook’s shoulder. Jungkook tensed a little and held very still until Namjoon awkwardly removed his hand only for Jungkook to look a little disappointed.
The last time they were alone in a dorm, just the two of them in private, they’d had a bottle of tequila, most of the furniture and decorations stripped from Namjoon’s walls, the spring night coming in the open window, Jungkook so close and heavy.
Namjoon fiddled with his phone and pretended to look around, feeling Jungkook’s eyes still on him.
Jungkook cleared his throat. “My room then,” he said.
Namjoon really had no memory of Jungkook’s room the year before, so he didn’t know if the mess on the floor of the new room was normal or not.
One giant duffle bag with clothes spilling out of the top sat propped in an open dresser drawer. Big laundry baskets filled with stuff lined the two beds that showed that his room was supposed to be a double. Jungkook had stacked all his textbooks, notebooks, office supplies, and papers on the desk with an unplugged desk lamp. A wet shower caddy sat on the desk nearest the door.
Though Jungkook’s scent was clearly discernible in the living room, it barely made it over the generic old-building scent of his room.
Somehow, even with the stereotype of alphas being slobs, even with Namjoon’s expectations that stemmed from Jungkook’s gym rat habits and constant leisurewear, the room was even more cluttered than Namjoon thought it would be.
“Damn, you live like this?”
“It’s so bad. I’m usually so organized.”
Namjoon snorted. When Jungkook looked a little offended, he quickly changed the topic. “What even am I supposed to help with?”
“Moral support? I don’t know. Just keep me company. Being around a bunch of other alphas makes me super antsy.”
The room filled up with a strange kind of awkwardness. Namjoon found himself trying to think of an excuse to leave.
“Let’s get this all out into the living room,” Jungkook decided. “I want to rearrange the furniture.” He lifted one luggage case effortlessly, each muscle straining beautifully in his forearms, and Namjoon forgot his nervousness.
Once Jungkook started moving, he became a machine. Namjoon hovered in corners and watched as Jungkook effortlessly shifted the two beds together against the outer corner of the room, low enough to be below the two windows, all his movements powerful and precise. The process of changing the level of the bed frame, which had taken Namjoon forty-five minutes on the day he moved in, even with Yoongi instructing from behind him, took Jungkook five minutes for both beds. He managed through brute force instead of the careful and scientific figuring that Namjoon and Yoongi had needed.
“I can tell you’ve been planning this,” Namjoon said from his seat on a desk. Jungkook grunted. He hadn’t said more than five words since they’d started, and those five words had been ‘get off the bed, please’ some ten minutes ago when Jungkook wanted to experiment with mattress orientation. Namjoon perched on a desk and tried to keep his long legs out of the way.
From there, the rest of the baskets, boxes, and luggage filed neatly into the available drawers and shelves. Jungkook had brought a king-sized mattress pad and sheets to turn the twin beds into a king, and had tapestries and posters for the walls. Namjoon sat in stunned silence as every item from every box went up with shocking rapidity. Everything had a place. Jungkook moved with such fluidity, not grace so much as ease.
Namjoon rarely had reason to think about Taehyung and Jungkook’s physical differences from the rest of them. The fact that Taehyung needed more physical affection and attention to keep the chemicals in his brain balanced was usually something Jimin took care of, something the rest of them had long gotten used to. Namjoon knew from health class that Jungkook’s muscles were a little denser and more efficient than his, that he needed more calories to function, that his dick size was probably above average and anger might make him manic within seconds, but he looked so normal, so small sometimes when he wasn’t swamped in sweatpants and hoodies, so much like everyone else.
“Put all these books on the bookshelf?” Jungkook finally said, voice lilting up into a question like an afterthought at the end; like it had started out as an order. Namjoon was too distracted to mind, having spent the last ten minutes staring at Jungkook’s very thin, very toned waist where it appeared when he stretched to pin the tapestry to the ceiling. He slid right off the desk and onto his knees to start sorting books.
Dresser drawers started opening and closing rapidly. By the time Namjoon finished sorting everything out, Jungkook was on his hands and knees under the bed, shoving the luggage to the back corner, back bent and thighs straining his sweatpants where Namjoon could see every strip of muscle. “I have so much storage this year,” he said. “I don’t even have to put my winter clothes under the bed. I have twice as many drawers.”
“I’m jealous. The apartments in the neighborhood are so small.”
Jungkook flopped down on the floor and looked around. Instead of a bare white box carpeted in ugly storage, they sat in a very neat, faultlessly organized little space. The enormous starry tapestry darkened the ceiling right over Jungkook’s bed and hung a little down the walls. He’d lined the room with string lights.
“Still need to put some posters on the wall,” Jungkook said.
“This is so nice.”
Jungkook’s face split into his bunny-toothed grin. His campfire scent had begun to fill the room steadily as he worked, and he lay down and rolled over the carpet, spreading it around. His shirt rode a little up his waist and he let it, the V-line of his hips and his delicately veiny lower belly open to the air.
That felt familiar. Jungkook lying on the carpet. Namjoon sitting against the desk and staring. Jungkook staring up at him from the floor with his round eyes like he was about to drop the tequila bottle and come crawling over.
“This is perfect,” Jungkook said, “If it weren’t for the way everyone else here smells, I’d never leave.”
“You should buy one of those aroma diffusers that neutralizes people’s scents,” Namjoon said. “And then keep your door open.”
“I should just have people over more often. I could fill this place up with other people’s scents.”
Namjoon took a deep breath. He couldn’t smell the other alpha scents anymore, no more spicy, heavy, or sour notes sneaking in, just soft smoke. “What’s it like, being able to smell everyone so well?”
“It sucks,” Jungkook said, wrinkling his nose. “Well, it’s not so bad actually. Sometimes it’s useful. It helps with memory, you know. Smell and memory are really connected.”
“What do I smell like?”
Jungkook rolled onto his side and took a deep sniff of the air. His waist dipped way down, delicate and a little feminine. His long legs splayed over the carpet, so open, so casual, so free of the authoritative posturing everyone associated with alphas. “People don’t usually smell like things with names,” Jungkook said. “You smell like the library.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, you don’t,” Jungkook said, “but that’s where I smell you a lot so that’s what I associate you with. You also smell like the sound booth.” He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath in through his nose. His eyelashes pressed tight to his cheeks. “You smell like when it’s late at night and things are really quiet. Is that weird?”
“No,” Namjoon murmured. “You’re sure? I don’t smell like, I don’t know, coffee? Taehyung said I smell like coffee.”
“You don’t smell like coffee at all.”
Namjoon snorted and ducked his head. “Great.”
“He doesn’t drink coffee. He probably thinks coffee smells like vanilla and sugar.”
“Do I smell like vanilla and sugar?”
Jungkook rolled onto his back and giggled. Analyzing scent was the stuff of scandalous conversation at middle-school sleepovers, things high-schoolers talked about with their first girlfriends late at night. “Not really. It’s not that sweet. It’s milder, but also sharper. I guess, fresh? Maybe if you mixed vanilla with rain, but also sweat.”
“Gross?”
“People smell gross. I smell gross.”
“You smell like campfires.”
A little hush fell over the room. Jungkook looked up from the floor, chest so thick from this angle, tapering quickly to his hips. Namjoon didn’t even think not to stare. “Do I?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
Jungkook blinked his round eyes at the starry ceiling, the hint of smile making his lips get that adorable lopsided look that he had sometimes. “Mom always said I smelled like fall. I thought it was because I was born in September.”
“It’s nice. Until you get sweaty.”
His whole chest shook when he laughed. “That’s true for everyone though.”
They lapsed into a pleasant silence, something all his friends, loud as they were, had always been good at. The late-night sound booth had taught them all the value of quiet.
“You smell good too,” Jungkook murmured finally. “Even when you sweat.”
So Namjoon lay down on the rug next to Jungkook and rolled his scent around until he came to rest with his shoulder against Jungkook’s. Jungkook didn’t budge, letting him stay there and share the warmth, arms pressed together down to the elbow. It would have been so easy to hold hands.
.
“Student radio,” said a freshman girl with extremely long dyed-blond hair. She picked up one of their club fair flyers, and nodded thoughtfully, hair swaying. “So you all just DJ for the school radio?”
“Yup,” Jimin said, leaning forward on the table with his puffy-cheeked smile.
“Anything you want?”
“Yeah, anything! We’ve got a couple people who play classical music, some rock nerds, some EDM lovers, one guy that runs a kpop hour. Namjoon plays absolutely everything you’ve ever heard of.”
She tapped the flyer against the table. The rest of the students bustled around them, beelining for the Outdoors Club on one side and Habitat for Humanity on the other, leaving their station empty. “So how many girls you got in this club?”
Jimin gave a noncommittal whine. “Not enough, honestly.” She raised an eyebrow. “One of our two advisors is a woman. Several great women graduated last year and we lost them. It’s been fairly male-dominated. We would love more women though.”
“I’ll be back,” she said, and disappeared into the crowd with the flyer, long blond hair whipping behind her.
“What if our lack of women just scares more women away?” Jimin said.
“Don’t you have a class to go to?” Namjoon said.
Jimin groaned and picked up his backpack. “Talking to cute girls is better. I hope she comes back. Text me updates.”
“See you at dinner!” Namjoon yelled after him.
Jungkook showed up for his shift right as the girl came back to the table with two friends in tow. “You just DJ the radio, see?” she said. “The one they were playing orientation week with Heechul on it.”
“Which one’s the cute one?” whispered one of her friends, not quietly enough. Namjoon sat up a little taller.
“He’s not here anymore,” she whispered back.
“Not—Jinsoul, they’re both so cute.”
Jungkook was staring right at them with wide eyes. The girl looked back at them, realized one of the cute boys had heard, and ducked behind her friend with a squeak. Jungkook hid a pleased smirk by staring at his lap.
“You’re always free to bring friends into the booth with you on your shift,” Namjoon said. “I’ve made most of my friends here through this club.”
“What’s your dating policy?” Jinsoul asked boldly.
“We do not have one,” Jungkook said carefully.
“What was the guy’s name that was here before?”
“Jimin.”
“Cool.” Jinsoul picked up the pen and signed up. Her two friends followed.
They walked away into the crowd of curious underclassman and disinterested upperclassmen, a little trio that drew the eye, even in the colorful chaos of posters. After their skirts and long hair had disappeared, Namjoon scooped up the sheet and looked at the names. “Two of those were sophomores actually,” he said. “You ever seen them before?”
Jungkook shook his head.
“Jinsoul’s a Jung, like you. And Yves Ha is the other sophomore.”
Jungkook grunted. “May have seen them that one week I went to the Asian Cultural Club’s meeting.”
Namjoon was already texting the update to Jimin. “And the freshman was Jung-eun Kim.”
“They were so cute.”
Namjoon looked up a little fast. Jungkook gave him a cautious side-eye. “They were,” he said.
“I—yeah, definitely. Bangin. I just—” Namjoon took a minute to search for words. The truth was that he’d never heard Jungkook express attraction to anyone, and had, until last spring, assumed he was type-straight—only attracted to omegas the way alphas usually were. Even after the spring he hadn’t quite readjusted. “I don’t think there’s a delicate way to phrase this question,” Namjoon started, and then froze at the ‘I fucking dare you’ expression on Jungkook’s face. His scent flared like the wind had turned, probably expecting something normal people—betas—weren’t supposed to ask. The tone of it shot an instinctive bolt of fear through Namjoon. “Sorry! I won’t ask!” he said.
“No, please, do,” Jungkook chirped. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned way back in his seat. “Honestly. I trust you.”
Namjoon’s head blurred with Jungkook’s scent. “It’s just that I don’t know this even after knowing you for a year, so maybe I shouldn’t pry—” Jungkook’s knee started bouncing. “Hey, we’re in public. We should be paying attention. Let’s do this later.”
“No, it’s fine,” Jungkook shifted in closer so they could make it a more personal conversation. “I trust you. Tell me.”
“What are you attracted to?” he blurted, compelled to take the safe route and obey. Jungkook eyes flicked upwards in confusion. Namjoon floundered. “Like, what demographics.”
“Oh!” Jungkook sat back, challenge fading completely from his posture, maybe even a little disappointed. His scent stopped burning in Namjoon’s nose. “That’s not a weird question. Sorry, I thought you knew.” He glanced around at the crowds, at the habitat for humanity kids explaining their triptych. No one seemed interested in approaching their table. “You’re bi, right?”
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m bi and type-moderate. I like pretty much anyone but other alphas.”
“Ah.”
“Like, obviously I physically respond to omegas, but I prefer men a little. I think that tends to be more important. It’s hard to say.”
Namjoon wondered if it would be insensitive to ask why, or if that was a fair question to ask anyone about their preferences. Jungkook didn’t act like a typical alpha or seem at all interested in omegas usually, but that didn’t account for his biology.
“Sorry if that came out of nowhere. It’s probably not my business.”
Jungkook made a sharp, disbelieving snort, then turned red. Namjoon’s heart broke into a sprint, unwilling to let that line of conversation go further.
“What’s it like as a beta?”
The room had faded a little into the background, all focus directed at each other, regardless of the rush of students and voices around them. Sweat still prickled across Namjoon’s chest. “What’s what like?”
Jungkook fiddled with his phone case and hesitated. “Attraction without, like, Type getting in the way. Betas only have gender to worry about.”
“I wouldn’t say there aren’t preferences for Type.”
“Yeah, but they’re not…biologically enforced.”
“Most attraction might be biological to some degree,” Namjoon said. “Scientifically speaking. Whether Type is involved or not. We just don’t quite know.”
Jungkook bounced in his seat. “You know what I mean.”
“Jungkook, I have no idea how my experience is different than yours. I know they’re not the same. You’re bi, and I’m bi, so if you can imagine that as the only part of your experience you have to worry about, that’s probably as close as anyone would be able tell you.”
With the sunset tingeing the room orange through the big windows along the side of the room, and the hoodie pulled over Jungkook’s downturned head, it was hard to see his expression, but he looked almost bitter. Namjoon felt a little bitter himself, resentful of his still quick heartbeat and damp armpits, the fading remnants of compelled obedience. And Jungkook had asked just the other day if he’d ever scared Namjoon. He probably hadn’t realized he was doing it.
“Jungkook, don’t—oh, hello. Interested in the student radio?”
A gorgeous alpha stood in front of their table, her scent an obvious, heavy spice, almost sweet like cinnamon. She was short and slender for an alpha, but the foxlike face and powerful stance spoke on their own. “Yeah, hey, this sounds cool. What are the hours?”
“Whatever you want them to be, really. It’s a club more than a job. We take you on for a trial period, and then we negotiate hours. You’d probably be taking late night or morning shifts to start.”
She nodded agreeably, and her eyes shifted for a moment to Jungkook, who seemed oddly stiff. “Jungkook,” she said. “Missed you at dance practice. Do we live in the same suite?”
“Do we?”
“You’ve got a really distinctive smell. I think we do.”
“I’m not there very often.”
She regarded him curiously for a second. “Are you the club president?”
Jungkook shook his head and pointed to Namjoon. She refocused on him. “And I get to play any music I want to?”
“Yeah, anything.”
She picked up the pen and leaned down to sign the sheet, unintentionally giving Namjoon a view straight down the front of her shirt. “I see Hoseok and Jimin too. Fuck, is everyone in this club Korean?” she said, scanning the names of current members and the names already on the list. To be fair, there were several obviously non-Korean names in the club list, but the Romanized Hangul stuck out.
Namjoon tore his eyes away from her front. “Uhh our advisors who do a lot of recruiting are also part of the Asian Cultural Club and they’re Korean, so we ended up getting a lot of crossover.”
“Interesting,” she said, and wrote down “Chungha Kim, Junior,” and her email address. “I’ve been kind of thinking about this for the past two years, so what the hell. I’ll try it out.” She stood up and definitely caught Namjoon not looking at her face. She put her hands on her hips and gave him a long, smug look down her nose with one sharp eyebrow cocked.
“Meetings are Wednesday evenings,” he squeaked.
She nodded. “I can do that.” And disappeared into the crowd with a soft, “Bye bye.”
“She’s on dance team too,” Jungkook said. “Fuck, I didn’t know she was living with me.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
Jungkook leaned forward and watched her go, frowning. “We’re the only two alphas on the dance team. I bet you can’t tell, but she’s ridiculously dominant without even trying. She’s intimidating as fuck. She’s the head alpha of the suite and I’m not even sure she even knows it.”
The campfire scent was getting distractingly strong. “So, it’s a competition thing,” Namjoon said with a familiar tired acceptance that this was something he didn’t and wasn’t supposed to understand, an interpersonal ranking that he wasn’t eligible for. He felt himself bristling, biting back a hundred little unfair quips about alphas that he’d heard from his grandmother’s mouth.
Jungkook drummed on the edge of his seat and stared at the table with an intensity that was likely to scare prospective club members away. “Namjoon,” Jungkook murmured, pleading.
“Hm?”
“Nothing.”
Two freshmen boys turned up at their table shortly after, and tentatively wrote their names, but didn’t seem keen on uptake. They kept pointedly not looking at Jungkook, then ruining it by stealing glances and gawking. Jungkook stuttered his way through one sentence about adjustable schedules and then sank quietly into his seat. Probably students from a rural area without the resources to support Type who hadn’t seen many alphas before.
“She liked you,” Jungkook said a while later, after six more names had appeared on their list.
“Huh?”
“Chungha. She liked you.”
“Oh.”
“She’s hot, right?”
Namjoon nodded.
“Would you want to hook up with her?” Jungkook asked.
“Uh…” A year ago his answer would have been a confident ‘no.’ He liked his own independence a bit too much to be compatible with an alpha. They smelled. But his own biology didn’t rule out alphas and omegas, and he hadn’t counted on Jungkook ever coming around and shaking things up. He’d been wondering, for no reason in particular, of course, if his compatibility with alphas could be reconsidered. “I could be convinced,” he said.
Jungkook stayed silent for a few awkward seconds where Namjoon turned more and more red and couldn’t meet his eyes. “The hell does that mean?”
“Hey, fuckers,” Yoongi said, dropping his backpack by Namjoon’s chair and kicking the leg. “Ruined everything yet?”
Namjoon sighed with relief, shift over. “Hi, grumpy cat. Did you skip dinner again?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re gonna be a great spokesperson in this mood.”
Yoongi yanked a protein bar out the pocket of his backpack and took an aggressive bite.
“You’re not you when you’re hungry,” Jungkook said, and Yoongi gave his hair a fond ruffle.
Namjoon packed up and stood to give Yoongi a chair. When he finally turned to say goodbye to Jungkook, he was leveling a devastating pout at him. “We’ll talk later,” Namjoon said. Jungkook narrowed his eyes into something doubtful, but didn’t argue as Namjoon rushed back to his room to lie on the bed and feel strange.
.
Bright lights made drinking seem too much like routine, so Hoseok turned off everything but the string lights around their living room and started pouring shots. Taehyung and Jimin took over the carpet, down there by themselves enjoying how nice the texture was, which they would never give a damn about without the booze.
Seokjin and Yoongi sat together in the armchair, looking less cute and more uncomfortably jammed, both with a glass of red wine. Hoseok perched on the coffee table and kicked at the boys on the floor till they grabbed his leg and pulled him down.
Jungkook had a water bottle of vodka that he kept gagging over and he sat within easy reach of Namjoon’s feet so Namjoon had been poking his firm thigh with a toe at intervals for an hour now as the shots and wine made their way into his head. The room swam in flashes of little lights and shadows moving too fast.
Someone turned up the Bluetooth speaker until it was too loud. Hoseok’s cackle cut through the noise as Jimin tried to shove him into the carpet. Jungkook looked younger than ever. His smile crinkled his face up under his bangs. Namjoon stretched out both legs and put them on Jungkook’s lap, right on those thick thighs, just to see what would happen.
Jungkook looked at him. That seemed like the perfect result.
Namjoon woke from his drunken semi-doze up when Jimin sat on him. The room smelled just a little like campfires and flowers. Yoongi sat on Seokjin’s lap and didn’t look very happy about it. Jungkook had one hand on Namjoon’s knee, legs pulled close to his warm body.
They’d spent a hundred nights like this, some variation of the seven of them over the past three years. Him, Yoongi, Seokjin, Hoseok. Then Taehyung and Jimin. And last year the enchanting little alpha who played soft music on the radio late at night right as Namjoon fell asleep. Every semester had a different feel, but the last two, and now this one, had felt a little like the last nights of summer camp, where the end was coming day by day. They had something too precious to last.
“Weird how none of us are in the studio right now,” Namjoon said, and was surprised when everyone grunted in agreement like they could all hear him. They’d turned the speaker off. Jimin squirmed a little and knocked all the air out of Namjoon’s lungs.
“Wait, is someone missing their shift right now?” Yoongi said, sitting up.
“It’s Hani right now,” Namjoon said.
“Oh right.”
But somehow that led to a stumble across campus, reveling in the warm air like so many other rambling groups of students wandering the streetlight-lit paths under the trees and old academic buildings. Namjoon hung back, watching Jimin and Taehyung scamper off into the moonlit lawn with Hoseok behind them and YoonJin standing under the streetlight, just chatting. Beside him, Jungkook’s alpha presence rolled soothingly over him.
“Chungha keeps visiting me,” Jungkook said softly. “Like, she doesn’t come into my room but she stands at the door.”
“Yeah? You don’t like that?”
“It’d be kind of threatening, but she’s really friendly.” He pulled his cap off his hair and dragged a hand through it before fitting it back on again, and huffed. “She says you’re cute.”
“Cute?”
“You don’t like being cute?”
Namjoon remembered he hated being called cute. “I’m totally cute. I’m so cute. Really? Cute? I’ve never heard that before. I’m not cute.” Jungkook laughed at him in the dark. “Chungha said I’m cute?”
“She did! She said you looked so guilty when she caught you staring down her shirt.”
“Oh no,” Namjoon mumbled. Jungkook punched his shoulder and snickered his awful little fake laugh. Those bare arms were still taking some getting used to when Namjoon was so used to Jungkook making himself look bigger in hoodies and sweatpants.
“You like her?” Jungkook said.
“Dude, I don’t know her that well. She’s pretty. Why does it matter?”
Jungkook bumped into his shoulder. “You said you ‘could be convinced’ or whatever. Is she convincing you?”
“She might,” Namjoon said breezily.
Jungkook bumped their shoulders together again, hard enough to make Namjoon stumble this time.
“What was that for?”
Jungkook just laughed again and pulled his flask out.
“Jealous?” Namjoon asked.
“Huh?”
Namjoon leaned right back in, wrapping his arms around Jungkook’s narrow shoulders and trapping his arms around his chest. Bad idea. Bad idea. Bad idea. “You sound jealous,” he said.
Jungkook said “heurgh,” and wiggled a little. With how much muscle and strength Jungkook packed into his body, Namjoon often forgot that he was smaller. He still could have torn out of Namjoon’s grasp without a struggle, but he relaxed and leaned back.
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Uh huh.”
“She’s cool,” Jungkook said. “Still can’t see you hooking up with her.” His hands had latched onto Namjoon’s arms, holding him there, so Namjoon leaned his head down to bury his nose in Jungkook’s shoulder and breathed in the campfire scent.
Jungkook’s head landed on his shoulder, rolled over the bones there, and came to rest warmly against Namjoon’s skull in a little nuzzle, breath across Namjoon’s cheek.
Taehyung had gotten them all used to physical affection, always climbing onto someone’s lap. Namjoon had spent more conversations with his head on Yoongi’s shoulder than he could count, knew exactly when Hoseok needed to be captured and hugged for ten whole minutes. Jungkook had entered the group late and slowly. He hadn’t fallen into the same habit, tending to tolerate physical affection, but rarely reciprocate and never initiate, especially when Taehyung was around.
In the dark under the trees with the rest of the group away in the field, Jungkook grew heavy against Namjoon, pushing into the hug with a soft hum as if in relief. So Namjoon squeezed tighter and let him rest there for a while.
“I know you’re not into alphas,” he finally murmured with breath that smelled like fruit juice and alcohol.
“What’s Chungha then?” Namjoon asked. What are you?
Jungkook rubbed his cheek against Namjoon’s and elating affection rushed through him. For just a moment, he felt compelled to tip Jungkook’s chin towards him, to hold him close and kiss him until he melted like he’d done with his previous girls and boys.
Normal people. Betas.
Namjoon pulled back. Pretended not to see the glance Jungkook gave him. The way it looked almost calculating.
“If Chungha doesn’t work out, you know who’s waiting for you,” he breathed.
Before Namjoon could overcome the way his whole heart seized, Jungkook strode away, the night breeze in his hair, a creature shining in moonlight.
.