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𝙲͢𝚑͢𝚊͢𝚙͢𝚝͢𝚎͢𝚛͢ 𝟾͢
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Once I come to the conclusion that Jungkook is either batshit crazy or whipped out of his mind for me, I realize that I'm not going to win this time. Not that I will EVER accept defeat.

We both get out of the car and make a mad dash for the door of the restaurant. For some reason it's suddenly important that we race. In any other circumstance he would beat me there, hands down. But we're in public, and he can't show off his supernatural speed.

The sound of his footfalls slamming into the ground behind me quickly push me to my limit but I refuse to give up. In the end, I barely manage to get to the door first by a hairsbreadth. But that don't mean I'm not gonna gloat.

"Losers first," I open the door and wave my arm for him to go through.

What's seriously annoying is when he doesn't engage and proceeds to walk on through. There isn't even a response when I come up behind and whisper, "winner's second. That's me."

Completely ignoring my goading, he asks for a table at the back so we have the illusion of a little privacy.

The moment we sit down I check my phone to make sure mom got my message letting her know where I am. God forbid we don't know each other's whereabouts every second of the day.

We aren't talking, but often I'll glance at Jungkook, a part of me in disbelief that this is actually happening. This is something I've fantasized about for years and now that it's happening, feels surreal. To think that I would be able to sit with him, eat with him, banter with him and annoy him is something I never thought would become a reality.

And I'd pay real earth dollars to be able to hear his thoughts or get inside his mind for a moment. Things haven't always been cool between us, but he hasn't complained or let on any disappointment that I turned out to be his mate. He even says and does things that makes me think he's happy about it. There's definitely some kind of affection there. I can only guess at how much.

After the waitress brings the meat and Jungkook prepares to grill it, we start off a normal conversation to get to know one another. It's here when we find out that we have nothing in common.

His favorite color is black but mine is lime green.

He's an orphan with no siblings from a genetic standpoint, but is very close to his pack mates and considers them as brothers. His mouth drops open when tell him I grew up in a stable household where my parents are obsessed with each other and I'm the oldest of seven kids.

"Seven?" He gapes. "Your parents are...busy. Doesn't that drive you crazy? Yoongi-hyung moved out of his house early because his younger siblings never let him sleep."

"We're all very family oriented so I can't relate. Sure they can be annoying but I like being their big sister." Except for when they growl at me and leave their train sets on the floor for me to trip over. "There's Atticus and Cassius, my thirteen-year-old twin brothers. Cass is an angel but Atticus is definitely the evil twin. Calpurnia is eight. Lavinia is seven. Peregrine just turned four. And Selwyn is two."

"Your house must be very loud." I nod along, silently feeling grateful for that fact. Silence makes me uncomfortable.

He loves exercise. I'd rather die than go to the gym. The only two physical activities that I'm willing to put any energy into are sex and tennis. In that order.

I don't listen to a lot of music, but if I do, it's whatever someone else has playing. Jungkook pulls out a playlist of pop music riddled with Justin Bieber.

I like the book over the movie but he's the opposite. Not that a lot of books I read are professionally published. I want morally grey and mysterious male leads who would quite literally kill for their woman. Not a coming of age story where life is hard but the protagonist's hope is stronger.

Everything is going great until I open my stupid, beautiful mouth. The conversation is easy, and the teasing from before is almost nonexistent. Insert me, who has little self control. I ask who his ideal type is.

Why did I do that? It's a good question. But you know what a better question is? Why does this fool answer immediately?

"IU." He pauses in the middle of flipping the steak over to eye me nervously as if realizing what he said. He should. I'm fixin' to stab someone. "Well—not anymore. I only see you now." A bead of sweat travels down his left temple. It must be hot working over the heat of the grill.

I fight with my life to push back against the intense feelings of jealousy. Let's be reasonable. Jungkook should have been thinking about me since birth.

Is that logical? No. Is it what I feel? Yes. Conclusion: MY FEELINGS ARE VALID.

"It's fine." I grumble, crossing my arms and looking away.

"What about you?" He asks, sounding hopeful and desperate to move on, despite asking the same question. "What's your ideal type?"

I glare at him, somehow feeling more betrayed than before. "You."

It's not a lie. Jungkook is perfect to me. Apart from when he's mean, literally everything about him speaks to me in a different way. All of his piercings. His adorable laugh. The way he takes care of his body. How he's an introvert and really competitive and has a good sense of humor.

He stares, transfixed until something on the grill sizzles and pops. With a flinch, our eye contact drops and he proceeds to poke and prod at the meat as we go silent. After some time it's finished and he cuts my portion up for me and hands over the bowl with two hands.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking when I said that. You're my type from now on."

From now on but not your entire life? I knew he was blind.

"No, it's fine." I'm so freaking jealous right now but trying to be an adult about it. "I shouldn't have asked the question if I didn't want to hear the answer."

Jungkook smiles. My heart practically flies away. "No, you shouldn't have."

I'M TAKING MY HEART BACK.

"Whatever." I take the bowl from his hands. "You're my type but you're not my first love." Flippantly (I like that word), I throw out this information to rile him up and get exactly what I wanted.

His mouth slams shut and his jaw twitches at the time time he pokes his inner cheek with his tongue. Damn that's hot.

Through gritted teeth he asks me in a tone filled with barely suppressed rage, "really? And who was that?"

Just to torment him I take a bite of the meat, chewing slowly before moaning indecently. When I look to him again he's still annoyed but watching avidly.

"Food."

The anger in his face drains away as he blinks in disbelief. "Are you serious right now?"

"Yeah. Who doesn't love food?" Seriously though, I'm struggling to not eat like the wild animal I really am.

"Actually, I have a friend who-"

"If you're gonna tell me that they don't like food then you shouldn't be friends with them anymore. They're clearly a psychopath."

I like how the waitress took one look at me and thought, 'this foreign bitch don't know how to eat with chopsticks so I better bring her a fork'. Anyway, so I drop my fork when Jungkook laughs. He laughs. I made him laugh again.

What did I do to earn this?

"I'll never speak to them again." He gives a silly little salute and nudges some of the side dishes towards me. "Here, eat all you want. It's on me."

"Thanks daddy."

There's a sigh before he looks at me in exasperation for the 3,729,473 time tonight. "We're gonna have to work on these nicknames."

"Yes, sir."

"No, cause that's not gonna do it either."

"Fine. What should I call you? Oppa?"

Incredulous, he looks at me with a mix of anger and disgust. "I'm not your oppa."

"FINE." I roll my eyes. "I'll call you bro."

"That's the worst one!" He exclaims.

"I don't know why you're being so difficult."

"I-" he stops and huffs out a long breath. "Babe," he gives me a pained smile. "There's a lot of things we can be, other than annoying."

"Oh yeah? You don't like it? Why don't you go run and tell your girlfriend IU all about it?"

"I swear to god." He mutters like he's offended but I can see the corners of his lips trying not to rise. "You're annoying, but I am having fun."

CRAP my heart is running away again. I swallow my next words, of which I'm sure were probably going to be a stuttering, incoherent mess. This man don't know what he does to me.

We go quiet for a while as we eat from there. At one point his foot nudges into mine and he leaves it there so that we're constantly touching. Somehow I manage between the insanely intense emotions that contact gives me to eat normally. Sometimes our eyes meet but I'm always the first to look away. There's so many feelings I get from that small interaction that it's difficult to handle.

Even though I was careful about how I fast I eat so I don't look like a complete pig in front of him, I still finish first. For a moment I contemplate on asking this, but in the end decide that it's ok since the curiosity is eating me up inside.

"Jungkook?" When he acknowledges that he's listening, I go on. "Where have you been the last couple weeks?"

There's a cough from him and he taps against his chest with his fist. When he's settled I can see the blush coating his face.

"Umm...I was in heat." He says lowly. "Then when that was through, Alpha Jung wanted me to train more on mental resistance so that it would be safe to be around you."

That's a whole bomb of whatthafuck. A male going into heat? Training? None of that made sense to me and it must have showed on my face because he goes on.

"I'm not sure how it works for lycans, but for werewolves, only the alphas go into heat. It's once a year and it's not understood when or why it happens because it's different for everyone. It happened for me the moment I got you in my house." His blush deepens and he refuses to look at me. "And I was so crazy during and afterward. Like I told you before, I'm an orphan. I wasn't born in this pack so no one knows who my parents are. No one knew that I was alpha blooded until it was obvious. So I never got the training that normal alphas get from childhood."

"Right. Mental resistance training? What's that like?"

"Basically it's learning to share the space with a dominant wolf. Both of us want control all the time and need to learn how to compromise."

My mind wanders back to the time we had spent together in his house some weeks ago. A lot of it makes sense now. There's not a lot of experience with werewolves that I can draw from, but I know that it's not normal at all for their wolves to take control like Jungkook's did that day. Especially an alpha male. It makes me feel bad to think about how much he must have been struggling back then while my own mind was preoccupied with how gross the whole pee line situation was.

"It is better now? Or easier?"

"A little." He shrugs, for some reason seeming embarrassed about this subject too. "He's been fighting me all day."

Probably because he saw my beautiful ass and knows what to do with it. His wolf is so smart like that.

"Well he has to behave if he still wants to see me. We're friends now, right?"

A long, drawn out sigh comes out of him. After a second he gives me a grim smile. "Right. The best of friends who are each other's ideal type."

"'From now on.'" I attempt to mock in a deep voice. "But two seconds ago it was IU."

"Can we drop that?" He asks, not knowing that I will drag this to the grave. Every fight from now on, I will bring it up. "Besides, why does it matter to you? We're just friends."

"You're right." He looks surprised but then suspicious by how quickly I agree. "And as friends, we'll be there for each other when we start dating other people."

"We are not dating other people." He states in a terrifyingly calm voice.

"Not people." I shrug. "But I will continue my love affair with food."

"Fine. As long as I get to be included in that."

"Oh?" I ask as though I'm intrigued. "You kinky like that? All three of us??"

He laughs. "Shut up."

Together we giggle over our normal conversation turned stupid banter. When I sober up and he's almost through eating, I speak seriously.

"I know you were just playing, but if you ever meet my mom you can't say stuff like that in front of her. She'll slap the mess out of you because she'll think you're disrespecting me."

"Your mom sounds scary." He laughs again but this time it sounds weary.

"My mother is terrifying. When I was in your cottage I called her because I thought she would come and fight you for me. But instead she was happy about it."

I'm still annoyed over that. Maybe mama is ready for us to start growing up and moving out or something, cause it was the first time she didn't come to save me. That idea really scares me. I'm not grown up enough to leave my mama yet.

Surprise causes Jungkook's eyebrows to lift. "Your mom would have fought an alpha werewolf for you?"

"And won." I don't think Jungkook believes me, but I know it's true. "When I was a kid we lived in the mountains of national parks, far from humans and almost completely off the grid-"

"That...sounds awful."

"How?" I ask, completely baffled that he could think that way. "We're wolves, we're part of nature. That's where we belong."

Pausing, he appears to reflect on my words. "That makes sense. I guess I'm looking at it more from my human side. Go on."

It takes me a few seconds to remember where I was going in this conversation before we took that little detour. "There's a certain number of months where no one is allowed to move separately from the pack because it's bear mating season and the males can get aggressive if they feel threatened."

I pause when he holds a palm up. "Sort of off topic, but do lycans have a mating season?" He asks this in way that can almost be described as shy, but there's something in his expression that tells me that he's not nearly as innocent as he's trying to portray himself as.

I wonder if he's trying to embarrass me. If that's true, he's in for a surprise when he finds out how shameless I am.

With a smile, I put my chin in my hand and tell him unabashedly, "three days in spring, all of us women go into heat."

Blinking rapidly, he leans back and gives me a startled look. "Every spring? Every woman?"

"Yes. That's including me, of course. Hopefully you can handle it."

Something dark melds into his expression for a hot minute. It's only when he's leaning into the table and his hand is grasping my knee that he closes his eyes and shakes his head furiously. Realizing that he's struggling with his wolf for control, I make no moves and say nothing.

After a very long moment, he opens his eyes again to reveal their natural brown color.

It feels like a lightening bolt goes through me when he speaks.

"When the time comes, so will you. I'll be there to give you whatever you need."

And thus, my pussy has popped thrice.

"Anyhoo." He diverts as though he didn't just SAY ALL OF THAAAT. "Please continue your story."

I WAS TELLING A STORY? WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?

Oh yeah.

"At the time, my mom was one of the top warriors in the pack." Is it ok to pretend he didn't just SAY THAT? "I knew she was strong but I never saw that side to her until one day when a grizzly came from no where and charged at me and my cousins. Needless to say, the bear lost."

The only reason I ended the story that abruptly is because I CANNOT BELIEVE-

"Wait! I need more detail than that. What happened? Did she kill it?"

Is he really going to help me through my heat?!?

"That's the scariest part about the story because she came at it so..." I struggle to find the right word to relay what I saw that day while trying to get 'I'll be there to give you whatever you need' DURING HEAT out of my mind. "Violently and suddenly that it didn't try to fight her at first. It turned tail and ran. But she was enraged and chased it down with the other warriors and killed it...we aren't so good at controlling our emotions."

Jungkook nods. "I can understand that. Werewolf moms are very protective as well."

Curiosity eats me up because I want to know more about his personal life. But he's an orphan so I'm scared to offend him and ask what happened to his parents. It's not a subject that's easily brought up. So I settle for a less invasive one. Even though I want to talk more about how he's going to help me during my heat.

"What was it like for you growing up?"

A thoughtful look crosses over his features. "I had a good childhood, I think. Alpha and Luna Jung raised me for a lot of it and Hobi is more like my brother than any of them. But really it was the entire pack that took care of me. Then I lived at Namjoon-hyung's house for a long time. That was really fun."

"No bear attacks?" I ask jokingly, which brings another smile to his face.

"No bear attacks." He confirms. "But Jimin-ie got attacked by a butterfly once. He hates them now."

"Damn...that beats my grizzly bear story by a long shot."