The Thief

Rosé

Our story with Jungkook didn’t begin in the romantic and beautiful way that meetings between main characters are usually described in romance novels. You know, all that stuff like:

"Ah, their eyes met and the whole world ceased to exist..."

And other pink nonsense like that.

With us, everything was completely different.

No, our eyes did meet too, but a split second before I was about to whack him over the head with a frying pan...

Not very romantic, is it?

But let’s go in order.

***

I moved to Seoul right after finishing school and settled into my older brother’s spacious house so I could prepare for university entrance exams close to the institution I had chosen. Of course, I could have lived in the dorms like normal people, but Taehyung was categorically against me living in “that den of debauchery,” as he called student dormitories.

After thinking about it a bit, I didn’t argue. I loved my brother very much and had missed him terribly ever since he started medical school and left home. I was happy to spend as much time with him as possible.

And now I had a whole two months of summer in the capital, and I really hoped that during this time I would fully adapt to my new life.

But I couldn’t even imagine how drastically that very life would change very soon—literally turning upside down—because of one extremely irritating individual.

Tall, gloomy, insanely handsome, and unrealistically CHARISMATIC.

Yes, exactly like that—with capital letters.

But who pissed me off like crazy and constantly deliberately drove me up the wall just to get my attention... I only found that out much, much later, when I myself fell hopelessly in love with him...

***

...That early Saturday morning turned out to be especially sunny and bright, and I stretched contentedly as I fully woke up.

Even though I had stayed up late the night before chatting with my friend, I felt completely rested. And hungry as a wolf.

So, after swinging my legs off the bed and shuffling to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth, I didn’t even bother changing out of my short pajamas into something more decent. I headed straight downstairs to find something edible in the kitchen.

The house was quiet. Most likely Tae was still asleep, or maybe he hadn’t come home at all after heading off to yet another trendy club with his friends—friends he categorically refused to introduce me to, explaining that I was still too young for those “seasoned wolves” who, in his firm opinion, would immediately try to devour me as soon as they saw me. Or rather, drag me into their bed, and definitely not to read me bedtime stories.

I wondered what kind of friends he had.

I was simply lost in guesses, and my curiosity grew stronger with each passing day.

Of course, such brotherly protectiveness was touching, but at the same time it incredibly annoyed me. If he continued to guard me so jealously from everything and everyone he thought might harm me, I would end up an old maid and die peacefully surrounded by forty cats.

But that morning, as I went down to the kitchen, I had no idea that my curiosity would soon be fully satisfied.

Without any incidents, I reached the first floor, opened the kitchen door, and froze on the threshold with my mouth open, not immediately realizing what I was seeing.

In front of the open refrigerator, with his back to me, stood some guy who was thoughtfully examining its contents. And it was definitely not my brother.

I stood there like a salt statue, wondering who he was and what he was doing here, when the alarm bells immediately rang in my head:

“A thief! A thief has broken into our house!”

Of course, at that moment I didn’t realize that thieves were unlikely to break into a rich house just to rob the refrigerator. In my defense, I can say that I was still half-asleep, thinking slowly, and as a result, nothing better came to my silly head than to try to neutralize him myself.

Yes, I admit, such crazy ideas visited me quite often. I didn’t even take into account that the guy frozen in front of the refrigerator—in torn black jeans, high leather boots, and a black leather jacket hugging his broad shoulders, still intently studying its contents—was two heads taller than me, about one and a half times wider in the shoulders, and definitely much stronger.

But that Saturday morning, Rosé imagined herself as a ninja and, headlong, rushed into the attack, grabbing the first thing that came to hand from the table—a rather heavy frying pan.

I had almost reached the hypothetical criminal, raising my hand with the instrument of revenge to strike, but I was unlucky.

I don’t know if the guy heard my socked footsteps on the parquet or if I made some sound vaguely resembling an ancient Indian war cry, but he turned around exactly at the moment when I had already swung to whack the uninvited guest on the back of the head, and my mission failed.

His eyes widened in shock, and right at that moment I, almost reaching him, slipped on the smooth parquet and, with a cry, began to fall... straight into his arms, which he had apparently instinctively thrust out in front of him to catch me when he saw some crazy girl with a bird’s nest on her head and a frying pan at the ready charging at him full speed.

He caught me, wrapping his arms around my waist, and swayed slightly. But apparently due to the momentum, my fall just wouldn’t stop, and in the end we both crashed to the floor. I was luckier though— instead of colliding with the hard wood, I collided with his slightly less hard chest.

The guy quietly grunted and immediately rolled over, flipping us, and somehow managed to slip his hand under the back of my head so I wouldn’t hit it on the floor.

We froze in that position, looking at each other and breathing heavily.

And time stopped...

And the whole world... ceased to exist.