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tripadvisor.co.kr — The Beverly Wiltshire Hotel, Los Angeles, California, United States
a_sensitive_kid’s review, written May 2019
The Beverly Wiltshire is a good hotel. The level of service from the desk staff, room staff, and room service is great, as expected for a luxury hotel of such a high standard.
The interior design of the hotel is not modern, but the ornate decor has a Hollywood vibe like old American movies. I liked the large crystal chandelier in the lobby and the calm mood of the gray marble bathroom.
I have removed one star from my review because I think there’s something wrong with this hotel’s sound insulation or air conditioning system. I often work in my hotel room and appreciate that it was very quiet and that noise I made did not seem to disturb my neighbors. However, I found it difficult to sleep when every tiny sound of the air conditioner running and going on or off woke me up. A few nights during my stay, someone else slept in my room. This friend has issues with rhinitis and often sniffles or has other trouble breathing during sleep. I found it more comfortable to sleep with that noise in the background, but it doesn’t make sense that it would be easier to sleep when someone is sniffling in your room than when you are alone. Therefore, I think there must be a problem with the construction of this hotel’s rooms.
The Korean food prepared by the staff was not as good as it is at home but it was very good.
As interview games go, this “most likely to” isn’t bad. The host asks who’s the most likely to do some benign, funny thing, and they all choose a member and hold up cards with that member’s name on it. Fiddling with the seven cards is a hassle right at the edge of Yoongi’s patience, but the lag time makes it easier to process a few words of English for little jokes, and the questions don’t seem designed to humiliate anyone or catch them out.
The host asks who’s the most likely to put a smile on your face, and Yoongi joins most of the team in lifting the obvious and correct answer—J-HOPE—but Taehyung picks up the card that says “SUGA” and holds intent, ferocious eye contact with Yoongi across Namjoon’s lap. That’s not true, but it’s kind, and Yoongi likes it, even though he’s holding himself too carefully still for the cameras to show it.
Even Yoongi doesn’t know why some interviews are easy for him and some are so, so hard, but at least the categories in his head for this sort of thing are very simple—safe, not safe. This interview is safe enough. He picks Hoseok for everything that even slightly fits because Hoseok is good at being funny and charismatic in the micro-moment of each answer, and if Yoongi keeps choosing the same few members, he doesn’t have to move the cards around too much. The spotlight avoids Yoongi through some combination of luck and his members’ grace.
“Who’s the most likely to crash someone else’s hotel room?” the host asks.
Yoongi doesn’t smile with his face but a small, smile-shaped warmth flickers inside him. He searches for the card that says JUNGKOOK and thinks of Jungkook’s sideways-squished face as he wheezed into Yoongi’s pillow this morning.
He holds up his card with an exhale of workmanlike satisfaction—and stops. Everyone else’s cards say JIMIN. Yoongi wasn’t expecting to be caught out alone, and as that image of Jungkook’s face in the pillow flashes in his mind again, it looks different. Brighter.
Not safe. All at once, he is too exposed. Faltering, he almost drops the card again, but that will draw even more attention. He sits through it, no more than one breath, really, and no one talks about his card—Namjoon is making fun of Jimin again, which is what Jimin gets for being so cute when he’s embarrassed. They move on.
“I’m not late anymore!” Jimin wails as they head out of the building. “I work so hard!”
“You do, we know,” Hoseok coos, squeezing Jimin up and making kissy noises around his head. “It’s just fun to keep the joke running.”
“You’re a joke,” Jimin grumbles, but he’s happy to stumble along in Hoseok’s hug. “And you all love when I come to your hotel rooms! I’m charming company.”
“How come you don’t hang out with Yoongi-hyung, huh?” Taehyung asks. “He’s stuck with Jungkookie.”
Yoongi doesn’t know where to look. He presses his lips together to keep his face from doing anything too strange.
“I hang out with Yoongi-hyung,” Jimin says, belligerent about everything now.
“Jimin comes over for dinner,” Yoongi says. “But Jimin—”
Yoongi’s about to say, but Jimin goes to sleep in his own bed.
Jungkook just doesn’t like to sleep alone in big, cold hotel rooms. He crashes with everyone, rotates or something. He comes to Yoongi’s more often than one out of every six nights, but Yoongi is quiet and way too indulgent with the younger members, so that makes sense.
Yoongi’s always thought it was like that, but he’s never actually asked. Jungkook has never said.
Jungkook catches Yoongi’s gaze and he looks—well—terrified. Those big, sweet eyes, round as saucers.
Yoongi closes his mouth and stops, but Jimin goes to sleep in his own bed. Jungkook always wants to stay and sleep in ours.
And for the first time, in years of touring and hundreds of hotel rooms, Yoongi wonders if that’s wrong. If ours might just be mine.
Yoongi clears his throat. “But Jimin always leaves as soon as I start working. You know Jimin hates to work,” he says, an arrant and baseless lie that makes Jimin howl and pushes all attention toward him again.
Jungkook ducks down to haul Taehyung onto his back and keeps that human shield in place as he scurries to another in the line of SUVs waiting outside the radio studio.
They’re done for the day. Jin falls asleep on the drive back to the hotel, and Yoongi sits quietly in the back of the car. He watches the traffic, the New York skyline almost as familiar as those of the cities he’s lived in from so many movies and TV shows as it rises past the river. At the hotel, he goes back to his room and eats his room service dinner before settling down to work.
After one too many burnout and injury incidents, they get in trouble for working too much in their hotel rooms these days. But Yoongi’s never had a problem. He relaxes best inside a new beat, building itself around him like the delicate structure of a magical castle.
At home, Yoongi has only recently started furnishing his apartment. He wants to get it just right, so he’s being picky, and between that and his monstrous schedule, it’s taking a long time. They still have their dorm and stay there, especially during busy times when trying to get into different cars to go to different destinations and then back in the morning would just shave precious minutes off the three hours a night they might have to sleep. Yoongi stays with his parents during breaks—less often but more peacefully than he used to—and he has a room in his hyung’s place, too.
He needs to get the apartment done so he can move his things in, but for now, it’s sometimes hotel rooms that feel the most like home. He keeps his suitcase packed exactly the same way with the things he likes and needs, and he has all his work on his computer. There’s always a little desk in the room, and space and quiet to himself.
There’s a small magic in hotel rooms, the safety of their sameness and the potent possibility of travel. It’s exciting that anything could happen, and comforting that only the same things ever do.
Only it’s hard to focus on work tonight, hard to think about anything except Jungkook’s face snoring in Yoongi’s pillow, and then Jungkook’s face avoiding Yoongi’s as they got into cars after the interview. He thinks about finding himself halfway through a mistake on camera, revealing too much, and he’s aware his hotel room is someone else’s space, much more public than he wants to feel. He wants Jungkook to come over and explain something, but he doesn’t know what question to ask, and even if he did, it’s not an answer he can demand.
He waits for a familiar stuttered knock, but the night passes into tomorrow in silence. He’s alone.
tripadvisor.co.kr — W Hoboken, New Jersey, United States
a_sensitive_kid’s review, written May 2019
This is a bad hotel. The staff work diligently to provide a good experience, but the hotel is so poorly designed that they can’t overcome it.
The modern design is cold and bare and the rooms are filled with hard surfaces. It is possible to use interior design to manipulate the way people feel in a room and I think the designer of this hotel must have wanted to make torture chambers. Why would you design a hotel room to be a cold place where people feel lonely? Did they want to trap guests in echo chambers of their own worst memories? It is perverse. Clearly, this hotel is not suited to its purpose.
The Korean food was not very good but the steaks were cooked well.
Are you coming over or what? Yoongi messages Jungkook.
He’s been agonizing for two days over how, exactly, to handle this—what to say, or not say, how to make Jungkook stop avoiding him. How to ask what’s going on without saying something that might take a shadow that ought to stay transparent and make it real between them. He has made good, reasoned decisions, come up with sensible plans.
And now, of course, he’s done none of those things, caught by an impulse and sounding angrier than he feels. Yoongi has grown out of this frustrated, helpless feeling, but sometimes Jungkook puts him back there. The sheer responsibility of Jungkook"s youth and trust puts Yoongi right back in those first years of carrying hyung duties on his scrawny teenage shoulders.
He’ll hear himself, sometimes, intoning hyung will teach you with his whole chest, or he’ll find Jungkook at his shoulder ready to learn everything Yoongi has to tell him, and then he’ll look twice and really see the person standing next to him. Jungkook is this powerful man now, quick and fearless and skilled, and he and Yoongi still turn each other into awkward teenagers.
He’s sighing over his phone, wondering what to do next, when the knock comes at his door. Well. He has to open it now.
Jungkook shuffles his feet, swamped in a black sweatshirt that looks a lot like the one Yoongi’s wearing, actually. “I didn’t want to bother you,” he says softly. His eyes are like lanterns, guiding Yoongi closer. Like Yoongi is a ship aiming true for shore, or perhaps a stupid moth.
“Do you want to hear something secret?” he asks, if he’s setting everything on fire tonight anyway.
Jungkook lights up. “Really?”
Yoongi waves him in and drags the extra chair in front of the desk so Jungkook can sit down next to him. He opens the file in his email and starts playing without introduction. His face is hot.
Jungkook gasps when he figures out what he’s listening to. “This is the song you did for Heize?”
Yoongi nods. “It’s coming out in July.” He pauses. “It’s done now, so if you hate it, don’t say anything,” he says, though playing new music for anyone is a brutal self-exposure and he really wants to know if Jungkook hates it.
“It’s beautiful,” Jungkook says. “Her voice has a unique tone.” It’s such a Jungkook thing to notice, to say, to phrase like he’s saying it on camera.
Yoongi nods, and they listen in silence until the song ends. Yoongi puts his mouth in the heel of his hand to stop himself from smiling. He’d imagined it in his vocal line’s voices when he first wrote it, but it ended up where it needed to be, and he liked working with a different R&B sound, and now that he can’t mess with it anymore, he’s decided to be proud of it.
“Did you write the lyrics?” Jungkook asks.
Yoongi nods. “Heize wrote some, too.”
“It’s so sad,” Jungkook says. “Were you sad?”
“No,” Yoongi says. That’s the answer to the question, and Yoongi almost stops talking. He smooths the hem of his sweatshirt over his knee and, instead, keeps going. “It’s about something that happened a very long time ago. I’m not sad anymore. But I didn’t know what to say back then, so I kept thinking about it and writing about it to see if I could figure it out eventually. Sometimes it takes a while.”
“It’s so hard,” Jungkook says, flopping back in the chair and whining.
He could mean either writing lyrics or something more, but Yoongi just says, “Yes.”
“Does it get easier?” Jungkook asks.
Yoongi has a line about making music he could say here, but Jungkook has heard it before, and this isn’t an interview. He would like to talk about something more. “I don’t usually talk unless I’m sure about what I’m going to say,” he starts, slow enough to be deliberate. “Because it can be frustrating when I try and people don’t understand. Some people—Hobi, you know—he always knows what to say. Or Namjoon, he can figure things out while he’s talking. But not me. I need years, sometimes, and thousands of words and all these different versions to figure out what I mean.”
The hem of the sweatshirt is not going to get any smoother. He stills his hands and lifts his face and confronts Jungkook’s bright gaze. “But now, if I have enough time, I can say things right and people will understand. Millions of people will understand. It’s worth the work.”
Jungkook nods, unblinking.
“But I’m still not always sure what to say,” Yoongi adds. “Do you understand?”
Jungkook nods again, and ducks his head, butting his forehead into Yoongi’s shoulder and leaving it there. Yoongi ruffles his hair, soft and smooth with all the product washed out.
Yoongi does not make a joke to get the safe distance back between them, but he has to breathe through each urge to do it as if it’s a spear of pain. If they weren’t alone, he would have to say something—perform a huge cringe to mask the small cringe inside of him.
And if they weren’t alone, Jungkook would already be sitting up. But they are alone, and Jungkook stays, and Yoongi could pretend not to understand, but that’s beneath both of them. They aren’t speaking the same language, right now, and neither of them is saying precisely what they mean, but they are understanding one another. That’s a pure thing, and Yoongi won’t taint it.
“Do you stay in everyone’s hotel rooms the way you stay in mine?” Yoongi asks.
Jungkook shakes his head without sitting up. “I do stay with the others sometimes. But not the way I stay with you.”
Yoongi shifts first, not as rejection but because he just can’t hold the closeness any longer, and takes a shaky breath. The room is teetering. No, that’s not the room, that’s Yoongi’s own head.
“I’m sorry,” Jungkook says, voice small.
“Don’t be sorry,” Yoongi says quickly. It makes him feel a little steadier, saying a strong, supportive thing. Being a good hyung. He hasn’t thought seriously about the thing they aren’t quite saying right now, but he has spent many years thinking about how to be a good hyung. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he says firmly, an order.
Jungkook nods, bitten lip and twisted hands. He won’t look up.
“I thought you had a crush on Namjoon,” Yoongi says, because his head is floating away like a balloon and he’s grasping at fluttering strings.
It might be the right thing to say, though, because Jungkook changes all at once, snorting and sprawling bigger in the chair. “Well, who doesn’t? Jimin-hyung humiliates himself about it, like, every day.”
That wasn’t what Yoongi was expecting, but it’s not wrong. “Namjoon is very tall,” he admits, though he’ll deny it later if asked.
“And smart,” Jungkook says.
“But also dumb,” Yoongi says. “Which is intriguing.”
Jungkook grins. “Remember at the UN, when you said he looked like a young activist?”
Yoongi is already blushing, but that burns hotter. “No,” he lies.
Jungkook is grinning all smug, but his next question is tentative. “Do you love Hoseokie-hyung?”
Yoongi starts. He almost says yes—of course he does—but by that definition, he loves lots of people, and that’s not what Jungkook is talking about. “Hoseok is my person,” Yoongi says simply. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to marry him. Hoseok is the person I’m going to stay with if I ever get divorced.”
Jungkook frowns. It takes him a while to work that out; Yoongi gives him the time. Finally, he says, “I would call Jin-hyung.”
“Hyung would take good care of you,” Yoongi says, nodding.
Jungkook nods back, and they nod at each other into an awkward silence like two toys caught in perpetual motion. These low-backed hotel chairs are good for work but they aren’t comfortable for sitting around. It would be cozier to move to the couch, or get in bed, but this is probably a conversation to have sitting up straight. “So it’s that kind of thing,” he says. They are a group of seven very attractive men, which can be confusing when you’re trying to figure out your queerness. Yoongi knows that all too well. “You have a little crush on everyone. It’s all the same thing.”
Namjoon is an admirable crush; Jimin is a bickering, flirty crush; Yoongi is the crush who sleeps well in a warm bed. That makes sense.
“No,” Jungkook says. “This is different.”
“Oh,” Yoongi says. That’s all he has.
“This is a quiet thing,” Jungkook says. “This is the most—” he touches his own chest and Yoongi doesn’t know what that means, he doesn’t know what that means. “This is just for me.”
A good hyung would have an answer, even if Yoongi doesn’t yet. “I see. It’s like that.” Yoongi can feel every molecule of air moving in and out of his lungs. “It’s good that you have something like that.”
They catch themselves nodding at each other again; Yoongi is staring past Jungkook’s head, because he can’t make the effort to look him right in the eye. He’ll get stuck in that gaze, he’ll never be able to move.
“You can stay here, if you want,” he says.
“Okay,” Jungkook replies.
Yoongi does his skincare and brushes his teeth with more attention than he usually brings that habit. When he finishes in the bathroom, Jungkook is already in bed, shirtless now and lying back with his phone over his face. He puts it on the nightstand as Yoongi crawls in next to him.
He feels like he’s moving through water, conscious and slow, like the atmosphere of the room is thickening around him. Having Jungkook there is familiar, a relief, even if it’s a little strange. Jungkook sniffles as he turns to face Yoongi, tucking his hands under his cheek, and Yoongi’s heart flips belly-up like a puppy.
It’s easier to hold eye contact like this, with Jungkook backlit by the lamp on the bedside table.
“You know what I wonder about sometimes?” Jungkook asks.
“What?”
“What are we going to do if Taehyungie-hyung keeps getting handsomer?” Jungkook’s eyes are round and solemn.
“He can’t,” Yoongi says confidently. “There’s a limit to how much handsomeness one human can achieve.”
“I guess,” Jungkook says. “I thought that two years ago, though.”
Yoongi considers that—how overwhelming Taehyung was two years ago, and how much worse it has gotten already. Maybe he could get even handsomer. It’s a grave possibility, and one Yoongi hasn’t taken seriously enough before now. “Hyung will talk to him. I’ll tell him to slow down.”
Jungkook laughs, one small huff, and sucks his lower lip between his teeth. “I don’t get to talk about this very much,” he says.
You talk about Taehyung being handsome all the time, Yoongi thinks and does not say. He feels like—a hedgehog, maybe, trying not to get so frightened he turns into a ball of spikes. It’s hard to remember how dangerous he can be when all he feels is the softness of his vulnerable underbelly. “Do you have anyone to talk to?” Yoongi asks.
Jungkook nods, cheek rubbing his fingers on the pillow. “Mingyu, sometimes. But I don’t like to put it in text. You never know.”
There’s a pang in Yoongi’s chest. “Well, it’s good there’s someone you can talk to sometimes, at least.”
Jungkook nods again, and his hand under his cheek must rub strangely because he huffs and moves it away, thrashing around and settling down even closer. His knee touches Yoongi’s. He doesn’t move away, and neither does Yoongi.
Yoongi lifts his hand and slowly, slowly brings it closer to touch Jungkook’s hair. “Cute,” he says. “Circle boy.”
Jungkook closes his eyes. “Hyung. What would happen if I kissed you?”
I would kiss you back, Yoongi does not say, but it swells inside him like a wave. He wants Jungkook to have what he needs, and he doesn’t want to be lonely in an empty hotel bed like he’s been these past few days. You would stay.
He makes himself give a sensible answer. “Anything you wanted,” he says, because it’s true and does not put pressure on Jungkook. “Nothing you didn’t want. It could be a quiet thing, like you said. Just for you.”
“What about hyung?” Jungkook asks. He doesn’t open his eyes.
Yoongi licks his lips. “Just for us,” he says, correcting himself, and then he shifts forward across the cotton-slick white pillowcase and kisses Jungkook.
Jungkook makes an urgent noise. His mouth is tense, so Yoongi dips in and out with pulses of pressure to give him a chance to back away—he doesn’t—and help him relax—he does, slowly, with a full-body shudder and the slightest parting of his lips.
Yoongi cups Jungkook’s face, thumb drawing a line up his cheekbone, and shifts even closer. His knee slips between Jungkook’s, and Jungkook’s hand moves to Yoongi’s chest and around his shoulder.
Yoongi swipes the tip of his tongue along the seam of Jungkook’s lips and Jungkook opens a little more and returns it, small, shy but not unsure. Yoongi can taste him, the secret sweetness of someone he shouldn’t have.
Jungkook’s lower lip is intriguing, so full and maybe trembling under Yoongi’s mouth, and Yoongi can’t resist nipping, just a tiny bit, just to feel how it gives. Jungkook gasps like Yoongi shocked him, head jolting away.
“Sorry,” Yoongi says. “Did I hurt you?”
Jungkook is staring up at him, pink cheeks and dark hair fanned against the bright white pillowcase. Jungkook, gaping and so young again. He licks his lower lip, slowly tracing the place Yoongi bit, and two different ideas come together in Yoongi’s head. He’s surprised to find they fit. Just one Jungkook, after all.
“No,” he whispers. “Just a little surprised. Don’t stop.”
In a distant way, Yoongi is aware that they should stop, that he shouldn’t have started. This could become terribly complicated.
But it doesn’t feel complicated. It feels perfectly straightforward, a steady line from the way he feels when he looks at Jungkook to the way he feels right now. Many simple, common things are hopelessly out of Yoongi’s reach, but this strange, forbidden thing is easy and right here.
He plants a soft, wet kiss gently on the center of Jungkook"s mouth. Jungkook sighs prettily, and a shiver trickles down Yoongi’s spine as Jungkook’s teeth scrape softly along his lower lip.
Yoongi smiles into Jungkook’s mouth. “Did you learn that from hyung?”
He’s embarrassed to hear himself—he sounds practically lecherous, his voice a satisfied rasp.
Jungkook only nods. “Did I do it right?”
Yoongi traces the line of Jungkook"s full lower lip with his thumb, grinning when Jungkook bites at him again. Just a small thing, mostly a joke, but sharp with teeth. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re doing great.”
tripadvisor.co.kr — Hilton Sao Paulo Morumbi, Brazil
a_sensitive_kid’s review, written May 2019
This is a very good hotel. The staff provide a high standard of service with the enthusiastic courtesy that is common in Brazil.
The modern decor of this hotel communicated a very sleek and urban mood, but warm colors, soft textures, and well-designed lighting fixtures that provide subtle ambient light keep the vibe from becoming too cold.
I was able to get good work done, and to share workspace very well with one of my coworkers. I recommend this hotel for a business trip or for travel with family or friends. The rooms are spacious, quiet, and comfortable to share.
The staff prepared decent Korean food and the steaks were outstanding.