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viii.
Chaeyoung invites everyone over to her place when Nayeon returns from her study abroad semester. No one has seen her since the day she left, when Jihyo took her to the airport. Jeongyeon had stayed home that night, sick with the flu, watching episodes of her favorite old sitcoms on Netflix, resolutely not thinking about it until Nayeon had texted her personally: it said nothing but <turning on airplane mode now!>, and Jeongyeon couldn’t help but text <have a safe flight> back. But that’s in the past now.
Still as radiant as ever. She can’t stop talking about how amazing America was, how many things she tried and the different people she met, but in the end, she could never stay there, even if she could. “I would miss home too much,” she says, leaning against the kitchen island. “I’d miss everyone too much.”
Jeongyeon watches from afar, waiting for the right chance to speak. Gone are the days where she’d run up to Nayeon before anything else, no apprehension, just the adrenaline rush of seeing her best friend for the first time in ages. Nayeon had arrived late so she could make a grand entrance, but Jeongyeon was stuck in the bathroom, and, well, Nayeon doesn’t wait for anyone, not anymore.
Something crashes to the ground in the kitchen, and by the look on her face it was Nayeon’s fault. Dahyun is patting Nayeon’s dress down with paper towels and Chaeyoung is already bringing over a broom and dustpan. “Clear the way,” she says, “clean up on aisle Nayeon.”
“You really broke out the fancy champagne glasses for this disaster girl,” Dahyun remarks, and Nayeon shoots her a childish look.
“Go socialize,” Chaeyoung says, shooing her away, and Nayeon stumbles aside with a new glass of wine in her hands.
Jeongyeon can't help but talk to herself. “Nayeon needs to learn to stand on her own.”
“You don’t think she already has?” Jihyo asks from behind her. Jeongyeon spins around, surprised anyone was there.
“Her heart,” Jeongyeon explains, “it holds on too tightly, it latches on and never lets go.”
Jihyo’s confusion makes sense: she still thinks this is about Nayeon and her need to rely on other people. Jeongyeon is talking about Nayeon’s effect on those people, those who she gets close to and those who can never escape from the burden of caring about her.
Sometimes Jeongyeon genuinely wonders if Nayeon has the power of knowing when people are thinking about her. The first time, it was Nayeon approaching her at lunch time in elementary school, after ages of Jeongyeon’s envious staring at her popular cafeteria table. This year it was checking her phone constantly to no notifications and then seeing a message from Nayeon pop up, asking what’s up for no particular reason. Now she looks up and makes eye contact with Nayeon instantly. Nayeon breaks away from the crowd formed around her and marches up to Jeongyeon.
She really took her star of the night status to heart and is wearing the most glamorous dress in her closet. Stunning as ever and breathtaking up close, though this is far from the first time Jeongyeon has seen her like this. “Eight months and you can’t say hello? You still prefer Jihyo’s company over mine?”
“I didn’t want to look desperate,” Jeongyeon jokes while Nayeon hugs her, even though the statement is entirely true. Over their teenage years both of them developed a reputation for only knowing each other, only hanging around each other. It was to the point where someone would inevitably ask Jeongyeon where Nayeon was if they weren’t together, and Sana’s completely innocent “You can’t live without her, huh?” was the last straw.
“I guess we all need a little independence,” Nayeon says.
Jihyo smiles, cheeks bright. “It sounds like you had a really good time in America.”
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she agrees. “But it was so weird, not being around you guys. It was weird being without my best friend since childhood,” Nayeon adds, and Jeongyeon stiffens, although she also feels gratified, knowing her presence makes a difference. “I feel like I couldn’t tell you anything, like it wasn’t relevant to you, and I was showing off, or something. But I’m sure you liked that I wasn’t bothering you at all hours, for once.”
Jeongyeon remembers the first few months vividly, Nayeon calling her at three in the morning and five in the afternoon, always so inconveniently that one of them would be up way too late and lose sleep. Suddenly it stopped, and Jeongyeon knew she had finally found her place even in a totally unfamiliar environment. Jeongyeon was no longer necessary.
“I would have listened anyway,” she answers candidly. To change the subject, she points at Nayeon’s pretty blue fingernails. “Those are so nice, did you get them done with Momo? They match, don’t they?”
Jihyo nods - “Ah, they do!” - and Nayeon laughs suddenly, glancing at Jeongyeon’s oddly clipped nails.
Nayeon’s hands clasp hers without warning, sending paradoxical shivers through Jeongyeon’s body, and then she lets go. “Your hands are freezing! Chaeng, turn up the heat.” She wanders over to the wall thermostat, the hostess showing her how to manipulate the settings. Nayeon’s warmth disappears as quickly as it came, leaving Jeongyeon with the overwhelming urge to reach out to someone again. She doesn’t, and shoves her hands in her pockets.
Jihyo watches this exchange with a frown. “Jeongyeon, do you...?”
She never finishes the sentence. Jeongyeon, meanwhile, shows no indication of acknowledgement of the question.
===
i.
What happened is Nayeon broke her arm doing something stupid, and stubbornly refused to call Jeongyeon, so in the end Sana did it. Jeongyeon has seen her enough times like this, she said, that for once she wanted to learn how to get over it alone.
“You don’t have to,” Sana said, and Nayeon looked out the window.
Jeongyeon storms into the hospital room, visitor sticker misoriented on her jacket because she slapped it on so quickly. “What the hell did you do, Im Nayeon.” Sana had neglected to fill in the details, just shot her a text with an attention grabbing <NAYEON’S IN THE HOSPITAL LOL> and where to go from there.
“I was reaching for something on the top shelf,” she admits, sitting up with the support of her good arm. Her feet are hidden under the linens of her bed, and all Jeongyeon can see is the top of her gown and the dry texture of her long hair. “You know, in the kitchen. Not my fault I’m short.”
“And you fell and broke your arm?”
“I was wearing socks,” Nayeon says. “And, uh, standing on a rolling chair.” She grins to break the tension.
She just looks too nonchalant for all of this. The hospital, and the way Nayeon’s teeth show when she smiles. They don’t match. “I’m worried about you, you know,” Jeongyeon says finally. This might be the first time Nayeon was admitted to the hospital, but it feels like they’ve gone through this over and over again: Nayeon careless, Jeongyeon panicking, Nayeon hurt, Jeongyeon afraid. Rinse and repeat.
Nayeon scratches her head. “I know.”
Jeongyeon takes a deep breath. “When are you getting out of here?”
Nayeon points to the whiteboard hanging above her nightstand. “Today, see? There’s nothing to worry about, they just had to patch me up a little. You didn’t even have to know about this,” she mumbles. “Sana, always meddling-”
“Still, you just... can’t do this all the time, okay?”
“Well, I-”
“Don’t even argue with me, Nayeon. Don’t even try.” Jeongyeon sighs, reaching across the blankets. “Pinky promise. Just promise you’ll be more careful.” Before she even knows what she’s saying, and as if it’ll change anything. But Nayeon has always been a little sentimental.
“Pinky promise,” Nayeon repeats, locking fingers with Jeongyeon. “It’s like we’re in elementary school again.” She laughs, too airily.
“That’s how long we’ve been friends,” Jeongyeon reminds her. “Ten years.”
“I hope we’ll still be friends in ten years,” Nayeon says, lying back on her bed and twirling strands of her hair. Nayeon can’t see the expression on Jeongyeon’s face when she says that.
ii.
This mall isn’t Jeongyeon’s favorite. The stores overlap all the ones in the surrounding malls, so nothing is special about it except that it’s so close to the schools that all the teenagers end up here no matter what day of the week it is. It’s kind of nicely decorated, so it has that going for it, at least. There are some trees planted in the middle of the plaza, and circular benches surrounding her. Nayeon is characteristically late for their meet-up time and finds Jeongyeon making funny faces into her compact mirror.
“Don’t look at me like that. I was bored.”
“You look like a clown,” Nayeon says, point-blank. It’s so funny that she gets to say that when she’s still nursing that ugly cast for her broken arm.
“Well, so do you,” Jeongyeon says, making those faces again. “But every day and all the time.”
“I hate you.” Nayeon glares at her, hands on her hips. “I’m not buying you ice cream today.”
“You owe me. Im Nayeon, you literally promised and owe me ice cream today, that’s what you get for literally shredding my exam review-”
She crosses her arms, except she can’t even do it properly because of the cast. “Make me then! Catch me and make me pay!”
The thing about Im Nayeon is that she’s a terrible liar. Nayeon marches all the way to the mall food court in a huff, and Jeongyeon struggles to fast-walk and keep up, just because she knows if she runs Nayeon will childishly run farther.
“What flavor do you want?” Nayeon asks when Jeongyeon reaches her side, already staring up at the flavors board hanging above the cashier’s head.
“I’ll buy,” Jeongyeon says, suddenly remorseful. Sometimes she has to stop and think about the weight of what she’s saying to Nayeon, words that outwardly sound biting and hurtful. Nayeon may know it’s a joke but she’s really quite fragile, anyway.
“Let me keep my promise,” Nayeon demands. “What kind of friend am I if I just keep taking and taking from you and never giving?”
“Nayeon, stop. I don’t think of it like that.”
The blonde girl behind them taps Jeongyeon on the shoulder. “Are you going to order or?”
“Shh! I’m sorry about her,” the other person with her says sweetly.
Nayeon smiles placidly at the duo and then looks at Jeongyeon with urgency in her voice. “Go ahead.”
Jeongyeon orders for the both of them, long familiar with Nayeon’s obsession with strawberry and unwillingness to derive from her regular order. Nayeon meets her at the register, already having given the cashier her credit card.
“I’ll always be one step ahead of you,” she says, smiling. Jeongyeon shoves a spoonful of ice cream into Nayeon’s mouth so she doesn’t have to see that smug grin any longer.
iii.
Jeongyeon thinks existing around other people is a little like looking into a warped mirror. Presenting yourself in public is performative no matter which way you spin it. It's not really you, even though it looks like it.
Sometimes Nayeon looks into a perfectly good mirror, squints at her reflection, and announces, "I'm the ugliest person I've ever seen." Jeongyeon is often there, sitting on the desk chair in Nayeon's room. There's no way of knowing how many times she says it when she's on her own.
"More like the most annoying," Jeongyeon retorts today. Nayeon spins around, flat-ironed hair fluttering in the air.
"You have got to stop commenting on my self-depreciation."
"What else would I be here for? Moral support is all I have to offer."
Nayeon puts down her mascara. “You’re here to agree with everything I say and help me get ready for Momo and Mina’s party.” She blows air into her bangs. “You could be getting ready if you cared what you looked like. Fuck,” she says, realizing what she just did to her hair. “I’ll have to style these again.”
Jeongyeon had tucked her hair under a hat, grabbed a jean jacket out of the laundry and called it a day with her outfit. “Nayeon, you know no one cares what you look like tonight. Everyone loves you already, five extra minutes on makeup isn’t going to change that.”
“You never know, Jeongyeon,” she says. “Do you know how many romantic comedies go like this? The girl’s always been pretty but she meets her first love at a party and suddenly she just looks like the most attractive person he’s ever seen. I need to look good for that moment. You know? I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Jeongyeon coughs into her sleeve. “He’ll have to get to know you eventually, and then he’ll definitely run away.”
“YOU’RE THE WORST.” Nayeon glowers at her from the other side of the bed.
“Kidding. I love you.”
Nayeon rolls her eyes and sets a few colors of eyeshadow into Jeongyeon's open palm. "Here, have these. They look terrible on me."
"My sister offloads enough makeup on me, I don't need it from you too - I know both of you use me as an excuse to buy whatever you want, you just give me what you don't like." Jeongyeon closes her hand over the plastic shells anyway, feeling them grow warm beneath her fingers.
"Sometimes I like the idea of my things sitting on your dresser better than mine," Nayeon says, and Jeongyeon wonders briefly if Nayeon is conscious of when her words start to sound like flirting.
iv.
“Why don’t you ever call me pretty?” Nayeon asks out of the blue. Jeongyeon glances at her outfit quickly but instinctively replies:
“You're not now, so stop fishing for compliments.”
“What about when I am?” she demands.
“Then you already know, you narcissist.” Jeongyeon slaps her lightly on the head and looks out at the field as Nayeon rests that same head on her shoulders. It’s not true that Jeongyeon doesn’t call her pretty, but it’s usually in a context where that’s objective truth, and not just the ambiguous expression of her complicated feelings. Now she’s hyperaware of Nayeon’s looks and it sickens her.
This table fits three people, not two, so it doesn’t look balanced, Jeongyeon thinks. It’s round and stone and has got three arc shaped seats, and Nayeon is leaning unreasonably far across the gap between them to reach Jeongyeon and she’s going to fall onto the ground. Jeongyeon’s phone feels sticky in her hand. Jihyo is taking forever to reach the park and that’s not normal for her, so Jeongyeon gets even more antsy. Or that’s what she’ll blame it on.
Jihyo finally breaks radio silence with a group text. “She’ll be here in 10 minutes,” Jeongyeon relays to Nayeon, who is completely unfazed, just curls up on the table, far too comfortable.
After a while Nayeon stops tapping her foot and turns on the bench, shoes resting on the stone and arms tucked under her knees. Jeongyeon could say Nayeon is facing her now but she doesn’t know because she is ostensibly not looking.
“Why doesn’t anyone like me?” Nayeon asks. “Like, really like, or love me?”
“Nayeon,” Jeongyeon says abruptly, setting her bottle of water down on the table. It echoes with a dull sound. “How do you do it so easily?”
“What?” she scoffs. “Do what?”
“Ask serious questions in the middle of nowhere. This is like, a closed room, 3AM conversation topic. We’re in the middle of a park.”
“Well, I want to know,” Nayeon counters. “I don’t care who hears, I don’t know any of these people. Do you have an answer?”
Jeongyeon stares, bewildered, at Nayeon’s blind insistence. “I can’t just probe into the kind of person you are in broad daylight, Nayeon.”
She looks wounded. “Afraid I’ll get hurt? Am I really that horrible?”
Exasperated, Jeongyeon runs her fingers through her hair. “Nayeon. That’s not it. You know it’s not as easy for me to be honest as it is for you.”
“Honesty, Yoo Jeongyeon, is a human instinct. It’s just easier than lying.”
“Not if it leaves you vulnerable.”
“Hey, Jeongyeon.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you ever-”
“Oh, look, Jihyo’s here,” Jeongyeon interrupts, finger pointing and unsteady.
Nayeon brushes the hair out of her face slowly. Across the field Jihyo is waving and carrying the picnic basket with sandwiches in her new bob cut, which later she will explain is the reason for her utter lack of punctuality, and she’s incredibly sorry. Jeongyeon will say it’s fine because it looks beautiful. Nayeon will agree, but Jeongyeon is going to have to tell herself she is only imagining the dissatisfaction in her voice.
v.
Jeongyeon is horrible at ice skating. Nayeon knows this but she makes her come anyway.
“I have no traction,” she argues. “I don’t know how to do this!”
“Just glide,” Nayeon says uselessly, and she spins for effect. “It’s not that hard.”
After a few minutes of fiddling around on the ice Nayeon takes off to skate at her own speed across the rink. “Hold on, I’ll be right back,” she promises. Jeongyeon wants to protest but it seems futile. Jeongyeon is holding her back, she realizes, but is that really fair when Nayeon was the one that brought her along in the first place?
Jeongyeon struggles against the wall for a little while, watching little kids do impressive tricks at the center like they’re in the Olympics. It’s kind of humbling to remember that there are some things you’ll just never be good at. One of those is following after Nayeon. She skates around as fast as the watchful staff members, ponytail flying in the wind at her back, and Jeongyeon feels kind of lost.
In the time it takes Jeongyeon to cross from one end of the rink to the other Nayeon has lapped her six times. She stops to catch her breath at the entry door, almost blocking the door for an exiting family before Nayeon grabs her by the wrist and pulls her to the side.
“You can’t leave now, we’re just getting started!”
“My feet hurt,” Jeongyeon whines. “And what do you mean we when you left me to fend for myself!”
“That’s called character building,” she replies unsympathetically. “Now that you know what it’s like, you won’t take me for granted. Here, I’ll help you stay balanced.”
They’ll skate around the rink in slow loops, Nayeon says, filling Jeongyeon with indeterminate fear. Nayeon does the good thing and holds her hand for most of the hour, but it almost makes Jeongyeon so nervous she’d rather be left alone to struggle.
“Why did you even invite me here when you know I suck,” Jeongyeon groans. “It’s not fun for me and it’s not fun for you, lugging me around.”
“It’s fun to spend time with you,” Nayeon says, pouting. “Is it not fun for you?”
“I like it because it’s with you and not because of all this,” she says, motioning to the ice littering her jeans and shoes, indicative of her many falls, only half of which Nayeon broke.
“You’re getting better at this,” Nayeon tells her encouragingly. It’s only for having watched Nayeon’s feet carefully, imitating one movement at a time, and stumbling whenever something doesn’t go as planned.
“I hate to admit it,” Jeongyeon says. She will inevitably end up nursing bruises and blisters on her feet from these awkwardly fitting rental skates, whereas Nayeon and the skates she’s owned since high school don’t have this problem. “Never a dull day with you.”
Nayeon skates around her in circles, just to have the last laugh.
vi.
>Missed call (1)
imnayeon: ya
imnayeon: jeongyeon
imnayeon: are you there
imnayeon: where are you
>Missed call (2)
imnayeon: I HAVE NEWS
imnayeon: PICK UP THE PHONEEEEEEEE
>Missed call (5)
“YOO JEONGYEON!”
“Nayeon, I’m in the middle of lecture! What’s wrong?”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to class.”
“You already pulled me out, now you have to spill.”
“Now you’re pissed at me and it’s not going to be fun.”
“Nayeon.”
“I got into the study abroad program. The USA one.”
“...”
“Well? Are you happy for me?”
“This is incredible, Nayeon. Congratulations! Seriously. Sorry, it took me a second to process that. I still have economics on the brain.”
(Nayeon lets out a breath of air.) “Yeesh, I thought you were going to act upset for a second. After all the times I’ve hyped you up before.”
“You know I would never do that. This is an incredible opportunity, your parents must be so proud. I’m really excited for you.” (Jeongyeon’s throat is a little dry.)
“I’m telling you first, you know.”
“...I kinda figured, actually.”
“Well, thanks, Jeongyeon. For everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“I mean it. Everything. I’m only here thanks to you, keeping my grades up and my head afloat, out of trouble. I just owe this to you.”
“Nayeon...”
“What?”
“I didn’t really do anything... it was mostly you. It was all you.”
“And what am I without you?” (Nayeon laughs.) “Not that much by my track record.”
“Yeah... wait, no, Nayeon-”
“I think you should go back to class, or else I’ll be responsible for your failures too. We still have plenty of time to talk before I go.”
“Wait, how long are you gone?”
“It’s a semester, and maybe the month after if I want to extend it.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.” (Nayeon sighs.) “Gonna be hard to wrap your head around that one, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll come over later.”
“Okay--”
>Voice call ended (2:22)
vii.
“I found this while packing,” Nayeon says with no further explanation. Jeongyeon looks up from her seat at the foot of Nayeon’s bed and watches the envelope drop neatly into her lap.
“What is it?”
“Just open it yourself,” Nayeon complains. “You’re so impatient.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Jeongyeon replies, but she finds a letter dated ten years ago in Nayeon’s huge, blocky handwriting. “It’s from the time machine assignment, huh.”
"Read it,” Nayeon says proudly. “My goal includes you."
"What?"
"My happy ending goal," she repeats. She grins with her teeth all showing, and her front teeth are still oversized and a little crooked like they were back then, something they could have fixed with some dental work, something Nayeon has still, not because she wants it but because she was too scared of the change. The nostalgia sweeps over her like a wave.
“To live happily with Jeongyeon.” What a turn of events - Jeongyeon doesn’t have any clue what she had written, but it definitely wasn’t something this idealistic.
"I still want a happy ending," Nayeon continues. "I want a happy ending with the person I love."
Jeongyeon has to deflect. "Don't we all want that?" Too late, she sees the way Nayeon’s face falls.
"Do you have to always make me feel like I'm just like everyone else?"
"How do I do that?”
"There are so many things a girl could want from her life, Jeongyeon. I could want a successful career and good health and, like, you know, whatever else. I don't really care about that."
"Maybe because you think you already have it going for you," Jeongyeon says, words out of her mouth before she can even process them. “You have amazing credentials, you’re so charismatic you’ll get hired right away-”
“It’s still true, Jeongyeon. I still want you in the end.”
“Stop.” She can’t stand how romantic this sounds without any of the accountability. “Please don’t be so dramatic.”
"I just can't stand the thought of you not in my life anymore, Jeongyeon."
"I'm still here, Nayeon. I'm not going anywhere."
"And how long will that last?" Nayeon challenges. She is so frustrating sometimes.
“Do you have to make this into an argument? You’re the one leaving first, you know.”
Nayeon stammers for the first time when she says, “I know. I still need you to tell me-”
“I really can’t have this conversation right now,” Jeongyeon says, out of pure self-preservation. So Nayeon turns up the volume on her flat-screen TV and watches late-night talk shows until she falls asleep.
===
ix.
“I missed you like hell, you know.”
Nayeon clings uncomfortably to her back and Jeongyeon wishes more than anything that there was someone else in the house.
“I missed you tons,” Jeongyeon responds. “It wasn’t the same without you.”
“It’s not the same with you either, I’m afraid,” Nayeon says, and she breaks away from the proximity to Jeongyeon and just looks at her wistfully. “I feel like you moved on without me around.”
“Who could ever move on from you?” Jeongyeon says, leaning against the back of the futon. She didn’t mean it to sound so vaguely full of longing, but at this point she’s too tired to disguise it with anything else.
“I mean it. I’m sure you found other people to spend time with and even to tell secrets to. We used to tell each other everything, right?”
Jeongyeon doesn’t think that stopped when Nayeon left - that probably ended years ago, when she was first questioning her own feelings. But that’s beside the point. “You did the same thing, I’m sure, and I didn’t want to hold you back, making you tell me everything, instead of letting you explore a new place for the first time on your own. We’ve never been apart this long, after all.”
“I wanted to share with you,” Nayeon says quietly.
“It’s good to know we were both holding back from saying things,” Jeongyeon says, looking down at her hands.
“I guess that’s just what happens when you’re apart,” Nayeon concludes. “That’s what I was scared of.”
Jeongyeon reaches over to hug her against her own wishes, like some kind of false intimacy she doesn’t deserve. “We can make up for it now.”
Nayeon won’t let her go. “Great. I’ve been lonely,” she says. “I need to fill the gap with you again.”
“Did you date any of those American boys? What were they like?” Jeongyeon presses, though she feels like she doesn’t want to know the answers.
“Nothing serious.” Nayeon laughs it off, pulls away. “Not my style.”
“Are you interested in anyone, these days?” Jeongyeon asks, something she’s never, ever asked Nayeon before. How do you not ever ask your best friend if she’s crushing on anyone? There’s only one reason.
“It’s been a while since there’s been anyone new,” Nayeon says. “You know? When you keep meeting new people and thinking there’s something, but it’s just you, desperately hoping to find your soulmate. Even if you’re terrified you already have.”
“It sounds like you know that feeling very well,” Jeongyeon says, feet cold, stomach churning. It’s the leftovers she ate for dinner. That has to be it-
“I have to know,” Nayeon continues, finally meeting her eyes. “I just have to know.”
It takes every ounce of Jeongyeon’s courage to ask what it is.
“You like me, right?” Nayeon asks, as if resigned to the fact. The tension hangs in the air. Jeongyeon feels all of her strength drain away.
“Only if you like me back,” she answers. It doesn’t feel like a relief at all.
x.
Tzuyu invites both of them out for dinner in a neighborhood across the city, so Nayeon offers to drive them. “It’s for the environment,” she says. “We have to carpool.”
Jeongyeon has spent the last few nights replaying their conversation, trying to see where things went wrong, where her barriers broke down, where she still has room to salvage things. Nayeon honks the horn in front of her house twice before she can come up with any solutions.
“So, great weather out there, huh?” Nayeon says after a few minutes of driving in dead silence.
“I’m sorry,” Jeongyeon says, and she’s about to add “for”, but she can’t think of what to say next.
“I don’t see why you would be sorry,” Nayeon says, watching the road, “when I’m the one who stirred things up.”
“I can’t say I did anything right, either.”
“I guess that’s true,” Nayeon agrees, in her infuriating Nayeon way.
Jeongyeon doesn’t know what she wants anymore. The paradox of wanting her to feel that way and yet not wanting her to do anything about it has finally reached its climax and none of it is in her control.
The car slows down in the congestion of rush hour traffic. “Sometimes I feel like you've already broken up with me before even giving me a chance,” Nayeon says.
Nayeon doesn’t know how many times Jeongyeon has imagined the possibilities. “I don’t want either of us to get hurt.”
“I have the capacity to love you even more,” Nayeon says. “If I told you the whole truth, I don't know that you would have believed me. This way you can trust I was honest in my silence.”
It feels silly, having driven around for hours together only to arrive at the same conclusion. Jeongyeon has tried for so long to fight this - Nayeon will never know - and in the end it wasn’t enough - it wasn’t enough, because of everything that Nayeon is.
“You know,” Jeongyeon says, “the two of us, we believe in different reasons why we would never work out. And there are two different ways we think we need to deal with this.”
One is to live in the moment, to love and break up, if it comes to that. And the other is to never try at all.
“Which one are you really, Jeongyeon?”
The cars far ahead start moving again, red tail lights streaming slowly across the horizon.
“Do you truly believe that it’s not worth it to try?”
“I don’t want to lose my best friend,” Jeongyeon says, voice breaking.
“You never will,” Nayeon promises.
Jeongyeon closes her eyes, shoulder inches from Nayeon’s, and takes her hand.