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Chaewon is hit with the startling realization that she stares.
Staring is… fine, but only if a) you’re not caught, b) you don’t do it on purpose, and c) it’s not your best friend that you’re staring at.
In her case, it’s all of the above.
(It scares her that she doesn’t even know how long she’s been staring. When did she start staring at Hyejoo? Has she been doing this the whole time they’ve been friends? Should she stop staring? Can she even stop staring? Why does she even stare in the first place?
She doesn’t want to think about the implications of this.)
“Hey,” Hyejoo waves a hand in front of her face. “Are you listening to me?”
Chaewon blinks, attempting to remember the flow of the conversation but coming up short. “Uh.”
Hyejoo sighs. “Are you okay? Your face has been weird for the past—” she glances at the clock on Chaewon’s bedside table. “Ten minutes.” Hyejoo crosses her arms in front of her and leans back on Chaewon’s bed.
(Ten minutes. Staring. What the fuck.)
Chaewon pushes the bubbling feeling of panic down by rolling her eyes. “My face is fine, it’s actually very pretty, thanks.”
Hyejoo rolls her eyes, too. Chaewon sticks her tongue out. “Whatever,” Hyejoo says. A pause. “But seriously, are you okay?”
Chaewon huffs, fingers absentmindedly toying with the loose threads of her blanket. She looks anywhere but at Hyejoo. “Yeah, I’m fine. Tired. The usual.”
Hyejoo leans forward and reaches out to get Chaewon to stop picking on the blanket. (“You’re going to ruin that,” she mutters.) She threads their fingers together and Chaewon resists the urge to pull away. They’ve always held hands; they’ve done even more than hold hands and Chaewon was More Than Okay with it, but the whole I’ve-been-staring-at-my-best-friend thing makes holding hands (or any other kind of touching) Not Okay.
(Chaewon briefly wonders if this is what Yerim likes to call gay panic.)
Hyejoo is looking at her, lips pursed. Chaewon still isn’t looking at her. After a while, Hyejoo says, “You wanna be alone for a while?”
She’s thankful for her best friend’s ability to immediately sense what she needs, even if it almost hurts her. “Sure,” she says, and Hyejoo shoots her a small smile, squeezes her hand, then gets up to leave.
✩
Definitely gay panic.
And no, she’s not hiding from Hyejoo, no matter what Hyejoo’s 8 missed calls, 30 text messages, and 10 Messenger voice messages say.
Okay, so she is hiding.
But that shouldn’t be Hyejoo’s business.
(She sighs because it is, it’s always been Hyejoo’s business. It’s always been their business. They’re best friends. They’ve never left each other out in the cold like this.)
Her phone dings with a message (from Hyejoo, again) and someone turns around to shush her. She mouths a ‘sorry’ and sets her phone on vibrate.
She puffs her cheeks out and leans back in her seat. She’s in the library because she knows Hyejoo isn’t too fond of the place, saying it’s too quiet. (It’s no fun, she’d say. You can’t smuggle a drink in here. Not even water!) At least Hyejoo won’t bother looking for her here.
Her phone vibrates again, prolonged this time, which means Hyejoo is calling her. She hits decline but the guilt eats her up fast.
She worries at her bottom lip as she waits for a reply. Tucks her legs underneath her. Taps a rhythm on her thigh. Checks her phone; it’s been two minutes.
Hyejoo still hasn’t texted her back.
(Breathing is getting kinda hard.)
She opens her inbox and looks at her conversation with Hyejoo, reading and re-reading her message to make sure nothing sounds off. The three typing dots pop up for a few seconds then disappear. They pop up again, longer this time, but that disappears too. Chaewon feels like crying.
She almost flings her phone across the library’s tiled floor when Hyejoo’s message pops up.
She exhales, the pressure in her chest receding. She doesn’t know how she’ll survive an indefinite amount of time without Hyejoo, but maybe it’ll all make sense in the end…?
Then the gravity of the situation hits her, a sucker punch to the gut. They’ve never spent so much time apart. The longest was two weeks and that was because Hyejoo’s family went to Japan.
She leans her head back, pinching the bridge of her nose.
Ah, what have I done?
✩
Chaewon thinks.
(She hears Yerim’s exaggerated gasp in her head, saying “She’s thinking! Yeojin, are you recording this?”)
She grips one side of her comforter and rolls herself up into a human burrito.
Three things: one, she stares at Hyejoo, apparently; second, there are Hyejoo-related feelings in her heart space; third, Chaewon doesn’t want to lose her; and fourth… well, that’s just about it.
(Chaewon misses her already. She went through the 10 Messenger voice messages Hyejoo sent earlier, ranging from hey stop ignoring me I hate you to I’m so bored to PARK CHAEWON PICK UP THE PHONE to did I do something wrong? I’m sorry, please call me back or text me, that’s fine too—the last one made her chest ache.
Hyejoo should be texting her by now, complaining about this group of boys in her World Literature class or ranting about how her Environmental Science teacher is practically reciting the textbook word for word. Then she’d be quiet for a while only to text again, asking Chaewon if she’s up to play PUBG.
Chaewon always says yes.)
She buries her face into her comforter, making a noise halfway through a groan and a sigh. She’s established that she has more-than-friendly feelings for Hyejoo; now what? What do people do when they’ve realized they like-like their best friend? She crosses confessing off her metaphorical to-do list because she just can’t, not right now at least. Not when her relationship with Hyejoo feels uncertain.
(She goes through her rom-com knowledge and decides that nope, she is not doing any of that cheesy shit, thank you very much. She doesn’t have the money nor connections to do any of those things. On top of that, Hyejoo would hate her.)
She turns to the ceiling and squints as if it could placate her worries. She tries to remember every interaction she’s had with Hyejoo (which is, well, a lot) to see how often she stares.
Unfortunately, she realizes she stares at Hyejoo all the time.
It’s pretty fucking creepy, now that she thinks about it. She wouldn’t hold it against Hyejoo if she decided to file some sort of restraining order. Chaewon would literally fight herself. She stares. A lot.
She pulls a face and snuggles into her comforter. She’s sure she doesn’t want to lose Hyejoo. They’ve been best friends for so long; losing her would arguably be worse than any kind of relationship break up she could think of.
And if Hyejoo likes her back, what if they don’t work out? What if they find out they’re better off as friends but the break up is so bad that they can’t go back to being friends anymore? Chaewon doesn’t want to lose her twice—as a girlfriend and a best friend.
(She also doesn’t want to acknowledge how her heart skipped a beat at the word girlfriend.
Hyejoo’s girlfriend, Chaewon.
Huh. Not too bad.)
She thinks about how maybe, she was bound to like Hyejoo. One way or another, she’d have to develop feelings she couldn’t get rid of. Who wouldn’t like Hyejoo, with her pretty hair and shy smile and half-scream half-laugh, with how she could eat grass and probably say it tastes good.
(Maybe she’s liked Hyejoo all this time.)
Chaewon concludes that liking Hyejoo is a precipice, and it’s about time she fell.
✩
It’s been two weeks since the Gay Panic Thought Train and Chaewon has accepted that Hyejoo practically lives in her mind rent-free.
(It’s free real estate. Or something. It scares her to know that she thinks about Hyejoo more often than is friendly and straight.)
They still aren’t talking.
“Are you and Hyejoo fighting?” Yerim asks, jabbing her chopsticks in Chaewon’s direction when they meet up for lunch.
“No,” Chaewon says. She swirls her noodles around her chopsticks. “We’re on a break.” She gracelessly shoves the food in her mouth.
“What? Did I miss something? Are you guys actually dating and none of you told us?”
Chaewon almost chokes. She makes a shrill noise around a mouthful of noodles. Yerim makes a face. “Ew. Chew your food.”
Chaewon resists the urge to roll her eyes and swallows. She wipes her mouth and sets her chopsticks down. “We’re not dating! We’re just not talking right now … it’s, you know,” she makes vague gestures with her hands, “complicated.”
Yerim is unfazed. “No, no I don’t know. Please explain complicated.” She pauses. Her eyes widen. “Wait, are you guys f—”
“No!” Chaewon shrieks. Some students in the canteen turn to look at them. “No,” she says again, voice lowered. “It’s not like that. Something just… happened.”
Yerim raises an eyebrow at her.
“It’s really not like that, I swear, I’d tell you if something like that happened between us—”
Yerim puts her hands up. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I won’t say anything anymore.”
“Thank you,” Chaewon says pointedly, picking her chopsticks up.
Yerim purses her lips.
“Okay, but can I tell Jiwoo about this?” she says, unlocking her phone. “I just think it’d be funny if—”
“NO!” Chaewon lunges across the table to grab Yerim’s phone. Jiwoo would get the wrong idea if she finds out through Yerim. And through text, too, the most unholy way to break the news to someone. “Choi Yerim I swear to god if you don’t stop—”
Yerim only laughs.
✩
Chaewon is in the library again, finals week a welcome distraction from what she likes to call the Hyejoo Problem. It doesn’t help that she misses Hyejoo more than anything.
(There’s a Hyejoo-shaped emptiness in her tiny, fragile heart.)
Samplexes from her Basic Calculus class are laid out on the library desk in front of her. She clicks her pen a few times and stares.
Numbers help. Derivatives and theorems and x and all that math stuff she hates, but it’s better than letting herself think about Hyejoo again. It’s better than the impending headache and panic that she feels when she realizes she can’t run away from her best friend forever.
Best friend. She used to like that label a lot, made her feel special amidst all the girls in middle school that scrambled to get Hyejoo’s attention. Hyejoo would be nice and talk to them most times, but she always went to Chaewon first.
(Best friend.
It wouldn’t be entirely new for Chaewon to think that she wants more now.)
She shakes her head and clicks her pen again. She pulls a samplex towards her and begins to solve.
So. Solving ain’t shit.
Chaewon gets frustrated halfway through the second samplex she pulls from the pile. She hates math. It briefly crosses her mind that Hyejoo could help her because she took the class last semester. Chaewon leans forward to set her forehead on the cool wooden surface of the table and sighs. The exam is in two weeks and she feels like she’s only retained half of the concepts they learned the past few months. Since Hyejoo can’t help her, she might as well find someone from her class who can.
Chaewon stacks her samplexes on one side of the table and reaches inside her bag to get her laptop and turn it on. She has a History paper due in a few days; might as well start that instead of stressing over Calculus samplexes. That could wait another day. She opens a Word document, filling in the details of the title page and working through the prescribed outline.
“Please don’t tell me you’re writing self-insert fanfiction again.”
Chaewon freezes and looks up from her laptop. Jiwoo is by her table, arms crossed in front of her. Her bag is slung over her shoulder.
Chaewon rolls her eyes. “That was one time! I’m writing my History paper.” (In her defense, she had no idea that’s what it was called until Hyejoo read it out loud in front of Sooyoung, Jiwoo, and Yerim during a sleepover. No one said anything except Hyejoo, who ended the piece by saying, “I didn’t know you wrote self-insert fanfiction.”
Chaewon hasn’t written anything non-academic ever since.)
“O-kaaay,” Jiwoo says. She grins and puts her hand on the chair across Chaewon. “Can I sit with you?”
“Sure,” Chaewon says. Jiwoo sits and starts unpacking her stuff.
“Where’s Hyejoo?” Jiwoo asks, putting her binder on the table. Her pencil case follows.
“We’re not talking.”
Jiwoo stops mid-way through opening her binder. “What? What happened?”
Chaewon decides she can’t write like this—there was barely any writing happening to begin with—and closes her laptop. She puts both elbows on the desk and smushes her cheeks. “Things.”
Jiwoo flips through her notes. “Things like…?”
“I,” Chaewon begins, but the words don’t come out. She tries again. “I’ve been staring at her.”
Jiwoo snorts a little too loud. Chaewon opens her mouth, about to start whining, but Jiwoo puts a hand up. She purses her lips, attempting to fight a smile. “Sorry, sorry. I just—I don’t see why that’s a problem.”
“Well—” Chaewon brings her hands down to wring them together in front of her. “I realized. I realized.” No thoughts, just Hyejoo. Chaewon wants to curl up in a ball and cry.
“You realized…?” Jiwoo prompts, closing her binder, rendering all her attention on Chaewon’s almost-breakdown.
“I realized I like her.” Chaewon belatedly realizes that this is the first time she’s ever admitted it out loud to anybody. “I like her, which I think is the worst thing to happen because she’s my best friend, so I told her to stop talking to me first because I didn’t know what to do. So—so we haven’t talked in like, three weeks, and at this point I’m not sure if we ever will, y’know, ‘cause I’m not, like, sure if I’ll ever figure out what to do and I’ll just lose her forever or something.”
Jiwoo reaches across the table and offers her hand, palm up. Chaewon takes it.
“Wanna know what I think?” Jiwoo says, and her voice is so soft and gentle that Chaewon might actually cry.
“Okay,” Chaewon says. Jiwoo squeezes her hand.
“I think,” Jiwoo starts. “I think you should just accept your feelings for what they are first, you know? I mean, yeah, it’s scary and I get that, I get that completely. You know what I mean.”
(Chaewon does, remembering summer last year with the whole Jiwoo-and-Sooyoung debacle that made their group’s dynamic weird for weeks.)
“But,” Jiwoo continues. “it’s not the worst thing.” She pauses, thumb rubbing comforting circles into Chaewon’s hand. “Why are you scared, Chaewonnie?”
Chaewon sucks in a breath, exhaling after a few seconds. Why is she scared? “What if she thinks I’m weird? I mean, I like her. But we’re best friends. You don’t just fall for your best friend like that. I don’t think she’d want anything more than just being friends.”
“How are you so sure?” Jiwoo is gentle, but Chaewon feels her chest tighten at that question; she doesn’t wanna give herself false hope, not after all the time they spent apart. “Besides, I don’t think Hyejoo is the type to drop you and act as if you never mattered to her after finding out. You’ve been friends for years. I don’t think that friendship is gonna end anytime soon.
“And,” Jiwoo says with a tone of finality, “I think you can take that chance to be more than friends. You’ll never know if you don’t try.”
Chaewon stares at their hands. She feels like she’s staring down the precipice, the bottom nowhere to be seen. The leap is terrifying.
Jiwoo squeezes her hand before letting go. “Take it. You’ll be fine.”
✩
Chaewon lets herself fall.
They’re all snuggled together underneath blankets—Sooyoung with Jiwoo, Chaewon with Hyejoo, and Yerim all by herself. They played one too many rounds of PUBG.
(Yerim took one look at the group and said, “Okay, I’m taking one blanket all for myself,” then took a blanket and flopped on the couch.
Jiwoo and Sooyoung sat on the floor. Chaewon and Hyejoo sat a few feet away from them, near the corner.)
This is the first time she’s voluntarily seen Hyejoo in almost a month. It feels awkward, to say the least, because 1) they have sleepovers like this all the time, especially after finals, and 2) Hyejoo is being too careful around her, as though she feels she’s going to hurt Chaewon somehow.
A movie Chaewon doesn’t know the name of is playing on Jiwoo’s TV. Hyejoo is scroll through her phone beside her. She pokes Hyejoo’s cheek.
“Hey,” Chaewon whispers.
Hyejoo looks at her, an unreadable expression on her face. She locks her phone and sets it aside. “Hey.”
“I’m sorry.”
Hyejoo’s eyebrows knit together. “What? Don’t be. I mean,” she lets out a small sigh. “I don’t know what happened, but I know you needed space. It’s okay.”
“Can I hold your hand?”
Hyejoo laces their fingers together in response.
Chaewon breathes in. Breathes out. “I realized something,” she says softly so the others don’t hear. The precipice is there.
“Hm?”
Chaewon looks at their hands. “I realized that I don’t want to lose you.” She squeezes Hyejoo’s hand. “I realized I didn’t want to lose you because you’re my best friend. But I also realized that I like you. Son Hyejoo, I like you. So much.”
She hears Hyejoo suck in a breath.
(Chaewon is falling.)
Hyejoo opens her mouth to speak. “Wait,” Chaewon says. She pushes forward. “I understand if you don’t like me back. That’s totally okay with me. I understand if you don’t want to be friends anymore, too.”
Hyejoo purses her lips but doesn’t say anything. Chaewon keeps going.
“But I hope you consider still being friends with me after all this, I mean, we’ve been friends for so long I just don’t want it to end this way. I really don’t want to lose you.” She lets out a breath. “That’s all.”
They’re quiet for a while. Chaewon’s heart feels like it’s going to crawl out of her throat. She peeks from behind the blanket to see that Yerim is asleep, and Sooyoung and Jiwoo are… somewhere. She doesn’t know when they left.
Hyejoo is still holding her hand.
“Remember that time last month, when that Starbucks employee thought we were dating?” Hyejoo asks.
Chaewon blinks. “Yeah…” What the hell is Hyejoo saying?
“And you said ‘no, we’re just friends’, then you turned to me and whispered ‘we would make a terrible couple.’”
Chaewon grimaces. She doesn’t want to remember that. “Is this your way of rejecting me, because like—”
Hyejoo squeezes her hand. “Hold on. I’m not yet done. So,” she continues, “so I thought, ‘okay, she would never like me that way’, and I just, accepted it, y’know?” Chaewon feels dizzy. Hyejoo sucks in a breath. “Because duh, why would you like me, of all people? I’m your best friend. Technically, I’m off limits. But now you’re here, and you said all that, and, well.” She reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind Chaewon’s ear. “What I’m saying is, Park Chaewon, I like you too. I like you, I have for a long time. I just didn’t think you felt the same.” Hyejoo inches closer. “But you do, and I’m happy.”
Chaewon purses her lips. She looks at Hyejoo, then down at their hands. “What if,” she says, “what if we break up?”
“We’ll cross the bridge when we get there.”
“I’m scared.”
Hyejoo lifts their hands to her lips, pressing kisses to Chaewon’s knuckles. “We’ll take it one step at a time, okay?” She lets go to stick her pinky out. “Promise me.”
“Hyejoo…”
“Promise me.”
Chaewon links her pinky with Hyejoo’s and presses their thumbs together. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Hyejoo kisses Chaewon’s forehead. “Okay. Now let’s sleep.”
(The next morning, Jiwoo shrieks when Hyejoo pecks Chaewon square on the lips. Yerim looks like she’s going to throw the both of them out. It’s not even her house. Sooyoung is the only one taking the news well, leaning against the kitchen counter with a smile on her face.)