Lost to Lovers | Taekook

1

“It’s getting really bad out,” Soobin says as he watches the wipers of his cousin’s old, beat-up hatchback attempt to fight off the snow falling thickly on the windshield in front of them.

Jeongguk sighs, nervously gripping the steering wheel. His younger cousin isn’t lying. It’s terrible, scary. 

“I’ve never seen it this bad before,” he replies. And he hasn’t. The snowstorm is the most unprecedented winter storm in nearly twenty years. “I mean, why the hell is this inconsiderate weather trying to destroy my holiday?”

The playful comment is meant to relax Soobin, but it doesn’t seem to hit its mark as he keeps staring straight ahead at the road. 

“I don’t think we’ll make it home before it gets dark.”

Jeongguk doesn’t think so either.

“Maybe it will be safer if we take some back roads? Dad always says there’s a shortcut. I bet we could find it,” Soobin suggests. He’s wringing his hands, anxious, and Jeongguk’s innate instinct is to protect his younger cousin, to find a way to calm him down. 

“That seems like a good idea. Can you map it on your phone?”

Soobin nods and opens up the GPS app to find out where they can get off the threatening interstate and onto safer roads.

“Okay, so, we need to get off at the next two exits and take state road 48. It’s a two-lane that winds around different towns but if we follow the signs, it should be fine.”

Jeongguk feels a slight sense of relief knowing they’ve found an alternative route, one that might lessen his stress from driving in a snowstorm.

It’s Christmastime, and he and Soobin had decided to drive back home from where Soobin attends college in the city, at the same university where Jeongguk had just graduated last spring. Soobin had wanted to leave a couple of days earlier, but Jeongguk had insisted on attending Seokjin and Namjoon’s annual Christmas party, citing his need to wear the “quite tempting and delectable” outfit he had bought for the occasion. 

Namjoon and Seokjin are his favorite couple, after all, and had just recently mated. And Jeongguk secretly envies how easily the alpha and omega had found each other. The perfect couple immersed in their shared happiness.

Granted, Namjoon has always been sought after, omega’s practically salivating over him ever since he presented as an alpha at the age of fifteen. But it was the haughty Seokjin that had won his affection, making Namjoon work for his attention.

It had all started out fairly innocent, with the two initially shy over how they had finally found someone who seemed to be their equal match. And as they’d spent more time together, the love had flourished. 

Where Namjoon was serious and structured, Seokjin was laid-back and carefree. When Namjoon would get stressed out at his job as a legal researcher, Seokjin would use his skills in the kitchen to make his partner his favorite soups. 

They were a team, and they were in love, and Jeongguk could only imagine what it must be like for them as he watched from the outside. 

“You’ll find the right alpha for you someday, Gukkie,” Seokjin had said on many occasions when he saw the melancholy look on his younger omega friend’s face whenever he saw him gazing longingly at couples he would see on the street holding hands, or at a party cuddling in a corner, or at a restaurant sharing an entree over two glasses of red wine. “In the meantime, just have fun with all the wrong ones.”

And he does. Jeongguk has had lots of fun with the alphas he dates. He’s a very popular omega in his social circle, after all, and alphas clamor for his attention left and right. Even at his job at one of the fanciest hotel restaurants as a host, he is constantly hit on and asked out.

Alphas flirt with him, buy him drinks, compliment him on how pretty he is, especially when he wears one of his sparkly skirts he liked to dress up in every so often. 

He basks in the admiration, but the satisfaction of it doesn’t last for long. The empty feeling in his chest always returns, and even with so many options of alphas available to him in the city, he still constantly wonders if he’d ever actually meet the one who is his own perfect match. He wonders if he has a Namjoon to his Seokjin out there somewhere in the world. And if so, when the fuck would he meet him? 

“You’re only 23, give it time,” Jeongguk’s aunt who practically raised him had recently said when he’d been lamenting about his lack of a serious relationship with the alpha of his dreams, but Jeongguk had never been good at being patient. And his life hadn’t been going at all how he had hoped it would by the time he graduated from college.

His own parents had met while attending university together, and he had always imagined the same would happen for him. Mr. and Mrs. Jeon had been in deep love with each other, even dying together in a terrible car wreck when Jeongguk was only seven years old leaving him and his older brother behind and to be raised by his mother’s younger sister and her husband. Soobin had been a toddler at the time, and Jeongguk had always looked after him as if they were brothers and not cousins. 

It had been a struggle to deal with, the enormous change in Jeongguk’s life, one that he had never gotten over, but he’d learned to live with it, had found that romanticizing what his mother and father had once had with each other in life was one of the ways he could deal with it constructively.

So, that romantic part of him had hoped that dressing up extra amazing for the Kim couple’s Christmas party would turn out in his favor, that he would meet someone even more amazing than his custom-made Tom Ford suit with his flashy, ruby and emerald cufflinks.

And sure, he had talked to a couple of alphas, had even kissed one under the mistletoe, but he’d left the party alone, and sulked on his couch in his PJ’s with a pint of double chocolate fudge ice cream, watching Love Actually and crying over the part when the kid runs up to his stepdad after confessing his undying love to the little girl from his school.

That part always gets him. Even a 10-year-old found his true love.

At the time, Soobin had been at home packing for their trip, cuddled up with Jeongguk on the couch, trying his best to offer advice. “We’ll go home and hang with the family and just relax. Don’t think about your love life for a solid week.”