Too Good to be True (JHxOC) (J-Hope X Original Character)

Chapter 5: You're kidding me, right?!

He gave me a soft, gentle smile. "I do the same thing." He turned his head a little and I stared at the two silver rings in his ear. "They're not real," he told me. "I kind of love my ears. I don't want to mess them up with holes. I want them to remain pure and natural." He laughs at himself. "That probably sounds ridiculous."

I shook my head at him. "No, it doesn't. I like your ears." I reached out and touched the space between the second ring, then dropped my hand.  "But...why do you wear the fake ones, then?"

"Several reasons," he said, and tugged lightly on one of the hoops. "I have something to pull on. I have something to stop me from doing too much damage when my anxiety or stress gets too bad. All of my friends have them and I wanted to fit in. And my dad really hates it."

"He hates that you wear fake earrings?"

"Oh...he thinks that they're real," he says with a smile.

I busted out in giggles and leaned my forehead against the side of his arm. "Does he really?"

"Yeah," he says. He moves his hand from my ear and slides his fingers lightly through the ends of my hair. "I get so sick of him telling me what to do all of the time. I'm 27-years-old for God's sake. So...this was my act of rebellion. For my birthday, a couple of years ago. And I always make sure to have them on when I'm around him."

"That's some intense, thought-out rebellion, Hobi," I tell him, still giggling a little.

"I just want to be able to live my own life, and he doesn't see why," he said, letting out a soft sigh. "He's always telling me what to do. And I do it, because I'm a respectful and dutiful son. But everything he asks of me just picks at this nerve ending and I want to scream." He pauses and cups the side of my face with one of his hands. "Like marrying you. It's 2021. Who arranges marriages anymore? Though I'm starting to not mind this one particular command."

"Oh yeah?" I ask, sitting up from where I was still leaning against him.

"I'll be honest," he told me, his thumb brushing back-and-forth across my cheekbone. "I was prepared to hate you. Resent you. And to figure a way out of this as fast as I could. But spending time with you..." be stopped for a moment, then he leaned his forehead down to press against mine. "I'm not sure that I will ever want to let you go."

He tilted his head down and captured my lips with his. This kiss was slow, soft, but somehow, full of heat. He trailed his tongue across my bottom lip like he was asking for entrance. I happily granted it to him, then shivered at the moan that escaped from him when he slid his tongue over mine.

"AHEM!" someone loudly cleared their throat from next to the table.

We both slid apart from each other and looked up to see the server looking annoyed. She had set a wooden pirate-ship-looking-boat of sushi down on the table in front of us, and neither of us had even noticed.

"Sorry about that," Hoseok told her, then he winked at me. "But not really."

"Whatever," the annoyed server said. "Do you need anything else?"

"Can I get some extra eel sauce, please?" I asked her.

"Me too, please," Hoseok says. "And extra wasabi."

She huffs and walks away, looking annoyed, and we both started to laugh.

"Oops," he says, and leans over to give me a quick kiss before handing me a pair of chopsticks.

"You aren't going to mix eel sauce and wasabi together, are you?" I ask him, grimacing at the thought.

He laughed at the face I was making and shook his head. "No, sweetheart. I'm not. Did you see the look on her face? I don't trust her to not spit in the eel sauce she puts in front of you. So I ordered a back-up. Though I'm not quite sure what her deal with you is. "

I stared at him for a moment, then busted up in giggles again as I leaned up to kiss his cheek. "Thank you, handsome. And I'm pretty sure that her 'deal' with me, is that I'm with you."

He turned and looked at me like I had three heads.

I blinked at him a couple of times, confused by his quick change in demeanor. "What?"

"You don't have to say that, you know," he said, his tone now so quiet that I could barely hear him.

"Say what?" I asked. My confusion was only getting worse. 

He shook his head and slid the red paper sleeve off his chopsticks. "Nothing. Let's eat."

I reached over to touch his arm. "Hoseok?"

He sighed and turned to me. "You don't have to call me handsome, okay?" he said. His voice sounded almost...bitter? I was so confused. I had called him cute before, and sexy, and he didn't seem to have a problem with it. What the hell was wrong with 'handsome'?

"I...what?" Now I was even more confused.

"I know that I'm not the best thing to look at," he told me. "In my group of friends, I'm the odd one out. They all have women falling over them all of the time." He turned back to the sushi boat in front of us and pretended to be looking over the options. "I'm the one just kind of standing on the sidelines. So you don't have to do that."

I wrapped my fingers around his bicep and tugged lightly until he turned back to me. "You're kidding me, right?"

He shook his head, his beautiful grayish-brown eyes roaming my face. "Why would I kid about something like that?"

I moved my hands to cup his face and tug it a little closer to me, staring deeply into his eyes, hoping that he could see just how serious and honest I was being. "Hobi, I wouldn't have said that if I didn't think that it was true. You're handsome. Hell, you're beautiful, but it's kind of weird to call a guy that."

"You think that I'm beautiful?"

I pulled his own move on him and tilted my head to the side to observe him. "Honey, you do know that the waitress has been flirting with you since we sat down, right? So I'm obviously not the only person who thinks so."

He reached up to cup the side of my head with one hand as he leaned in to press his forehead to mine again. "You really are going to have to marry me, Princess."

I used my hands on his face to pull him into a kiss, then smiled at him. "I am more than okay with that."

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The reformatting is getting there, ya'll! Just a few chapters left. Well...a few on here. I have somewhere around 10 more chapters written, and I'm going to have to go through and fix them next.