Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jihyo has a problem, a very big one; she’s run out of videos to watch.

Of all the horrible, awful things to have happened over the course of today — including having to teach a very hopped-up-on-sugar Dahyun how to do a vlookup, realizing that it was now almost seven and there was no way she would be able to complete all three health circles on the smartwatch from hell Nayeon had gifted her last birthday, and finding out Chaeyoung had made a thirty-five slide presentation in comic sans — it does seem a little strange, even to her, that this is what is finally making her want to frown and pout into her reflection in this fancy spoon. It’s just that she has a routine, and part of it is having a youtube video to watch while she has her meals for the day.

At this point in time, she doesn’t have a video planned out for breakfast tomorrow. What is she supposed to do, read the goddamn news like her fifty-six-year-old mother?

Her frown deepens at the thought of the fifth, pressing, horrible-awful thing that had occurred today, which is the reason she is currently sitting in a fancy restaurant, dressed in something that was making her itch in uncomfortable places and staring at the empty chair in front of her. The date Nayeon and Momo had set her up on.

The date who is, last she checked, two minutes and forty-seven seconds late.

Now if Nayeon had just listened to her (very valid, completely understandable) concerns against the concept of blind-dating, instead of brushing it all away with a Jihyo, babe, you’ve got to chill the fuck out, the evening could have gone a different way and Jihyo could have been crying over the fact that she had no video to watch as she had tteokbokki for dinner alone in her apartment. Which she would preferred over…. this. But no. Jihyo had chilled the fuck out, as instructed. And now here she is, waiting for someone she doesn’t even know the name of.

“—your table, ma’am,” someone says from behind her and oh, good. Speak of the devil.

She turns, and the minute she registers what her date looks like — sharp nose, pouty lips, long, wavy, blonde hair, a navy-blue dress with a slit up the thigh, long arms and even longer legs — she thanks god she hadn’t stood up because she would definitely have fallen back down. What the hell. Had Nayeon accidentally found an angel on the street and tricked her into this date as an act of charity?

Actually, on second thought, this was good. There was no way it was ever going to work out between them. Jihyo wouldn’t even have to get to the third awkward date or pull out her massive powerpoint presentation of her personal issues. This woman was gorgeous. Probably was going to be super cool as well.

Jihyo didn’t have a chance. Awesome.

“Am I late?”

“Four minutes and twenty seconds,” she finds herself replying, then freezes. What kind of a normal person…. never mind.

“Oh, good,” the angel says, in a voice that is so sweet it’s practically a songbird choir. “I was worried I’d turn up early.”

Wait. “What’s wrong with turning up early?”

“You’ve got to make them wait a little, don’t you?” The woman leans forward on her chair, rests her elbows on the table and peers at her with dark, beautiful eyes. “Hi, I’m Sana.”

“Are you also the kind of person who waits three days before texting a girl?” Jihyo asks her. “Oh, I’m Jihyo.”

“I know.” Sana pauses with her mouth open, like she hadn’t meant to say that. Wasn’t this supposed to be a blind date? Jihyo had thought neither of them had any idea who the other was. Huh. “And no. I don’t wait three days. At least five. That’s the sweet spot.”

“Aren’t you worried they’ll forget you in that long a time?”

“Jihyo ssi,” Sana says, tilting her head, lips stretching into a smirk, “I think you’ll find that I’m not the kind of girl you easily forget.”

Oh goody. Jihyo was on a date with the hottest — and the most annoying — woman ever. Joy.

*****

For the first half of the date, Jihyo keeps a mental tally of all the things she’s going to tell Nayeon the next day, as a punishment for setting her up with the one woman she should’ve know Jihyo had no business going on a date with:

• One, Sana seemed to have no life plans that extended beyond the weekend — Wait, no, she’d said, index finger in the air, an annoyingly charming smile on her face, I do have that Red Velvet concert I’m going to attend two months from now
• Two, Jihyo still had no idea what she did for a living. When she’d brought up her own job, Sana had waved her hand and passionately expounded on the horrors of a desk job and how she’d rather be caught dead than sit behind a desk all day. Then, she’d tilted her head, only to say: I mean, I suppose when I take over dad’s company I’d have to do that anyways, which is why I’m enjoying my freedom now
• She’d offered Jihyo the dessert she’d ordered, a slice of fruit cake that had been so sweet Jihyo had nearly choked on her own tongue trying to wash it down with her wine. Jihyo couldn’t have regular meals with this woman — she’d get diabetes through sheer proximity
• Fourth, and again, this was what she was going to emphasize to her friends on Monday morning, she was too goddamn beautiful. Jihyo couldn’t look her in the eye for more than a second, her gaze skittering away like that stupid ring freak in the Lord of the Rings movies Chaeyoung and Jeongyeon had made her watch one weekend.

The second half arrives as Sana waves over their waitress for the bill. “Did you not like the food?” she asks.

With a start, Jihyo realizes she’s been frowning at her reflection in silverware again and shakes her head. “No! Uh, no,” she says, lamely. “I’m just, um, distracted.”

“Mind telling me why?”

Sana’s face is curious. Polite but not pushing, so Jihyo opens her mouth to talk. “I don’t know, I’m worrying about what I’m going to watch tomorrow while I’m eating breakfast.” It comes tumbling out of her mouth. In her peripheral vision, a hand enters holding the bill; Sana smoothly hands over a card in return. “And this stupid watch has been telling me to move around every two hours and I’m still like a thousand steps away from completing my goals for the day. Also, I can’t stop thinking about an hour ago when I pointed out how late you were, down to the second, like some sort of idiot, and obviously it doesn’t matter because there probably won’t be a second date anyway because I’m not meant for dating and you’re too arrogant, although I kinda get that because if I looked like you did, hoo boy…..”

Sana’s mouth falls open.

“I’ve said too much, haven’t I?” It’s only mildly horrifying right now; it’s just going to grow in its intensity until it haunts her tonight so she can’t sleep. “You know what, let me cover dinner.”

“No need, you already have enough problems,” Sana says, not a hint of upset in the words. She sounds quite amused actually, which is. Well. Jihyo is glad at least one of them can find the humor in the situation. “Speaking of, I think I can help with at least one of them. Come on.”

Sana’s promise to drive her home after they’re done collecting her card is thrown into peril by the fact that she cannot locate her car. Didn’t places this fancy usually have valets to take care of cars? Jihyo would almost be concerned she was about to be killed if Sana didn’t trip over her own two feet, a trashcan, the hood of a random car, and walk right into a pole all in the span of fifteen minutes. The woman was unbelievably clumsy.

(It was kind of comforting in a way. Her supermodel levels of beauty seemed to have been cancelled out by her lack of balance and the annoyance she caused Jihyo whenever she opened her mouth)

“—how do you still not see it?” Jihyo pauses walking to lean against the nearest pole, breathing deeply. “How do you lose a whole car?”

“You joke, but it’s happened to me once,” Sana says, standing next to her. “Momo and I still wonder where it is. My dear, sweet, Mitsubishi. And I don’t need to find my car. I already know where it is.”

“What?” She raises her head, knowing full well her carefully done hair — Nayeon had insisted on doing it for her — was flying in different directions and that she was sweaty. Sana, to her extreme fury, is smiling widely. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean,” comes the answer, and Sana moves to hold her wrist. Gently turns it over, and through the slight panic that’s overcome Jihyo at the thought, the image of a woman this beautiful holding her hand, she realizes that her watch is being examined. “Is one, I’m sure my driver knows where it is, in the parking lot on the other side of the building and two, your six thousand steps are now complete. Hurray. You win against the machine.”

So she has.

Her watch face lights up with confetti and the pixelated image of three hearts completing themselves. There’s a beautiful woman holding her hand. She’s just had some really good food.

All reasons to celebrate. And yet, as Jihyo stares back and forth between her watch and Sana’s face, she has to actively suppress the urge to scream.

*****

I’m not reading any of that, Nayeon texts her back in response to her twenty ranting messages. Jihyo’s in bed, Bbuyo curled up next to her, trying to process the absolute disaster of an evening. But here. Sana sent me something, told me to pass it on to you.

Now what, she thinks, as she opens the chat to find a link. It opens up as a video essay on music theory in film scores.

Another forwarded message: Tell her it’s for breakfast tomorrow.

Huh. Had Sana actually been listening when she’d mentioned her interest in music? Strange.

And kind of nice. But mostly strange.

*****

Monday sees her in the elevator with Jeongyeon, Chaeyoung and Dahyun, telling them about the date for the second time. Only the second time.

“I’ve been hearing this for three days, unnie,” Dahyun says, presumably referring to Saturday morning when Jihyo had burst into her and Chaeyoung’s apartment to make sure they had groceries for lunch and ended up ranting about her date from hell for…. a while. She’s been half-asleep the whole morning, leaning against either her or Chaeyoung the whole journey here. “You saw a pretty girl and short-circuited. We’ve all been there. Not really a story worth stretching over three days.”

“Have you not been listening — that is not what happened!” she splutters, a hand automatically reaching out to whack a grinning Jeongyeon in the shoulder. “If you’d been there…”

The elevator stops, one floor below theirs. The doors open, and Jihyo pauses her story, so she can smile at Tzuyu, who has just entered.

“Speaking of short-circuiting,” Chaeyoung says, with a side-look at Dahyun, who has finally straightened up, a bright red flush spreading over her face.

“Are you also in for the founders’ meeting, Tzuyu?” Jihyo asks, for no other reason than so Tzuyu would turn in her — and thus a panicking Dahyun’s — direction.

Tzuyu nods politely at all of them; then she turns to Dahyun. “Hello, Dahyun ssi.”

The elevator doors opening distract them all from the painful sounds coming out of Dahyun’s mouth; Jihyo is pretty sure one of those was supposed to be a Good Morning when it started off and then somehow morphed into sheer nonsense after it exited.

Jeongyeon walks beside her. “Was it really that bad?” she asks. “Nayeon seemed pretty excited about setting the whole thing up.”

The answer is yes, but partly for reasons Jihyo would feel stupid articulating. What, is she supposed to tell her friends her date was too beautiful? Too charming?

“She thought she was hot shit.”

“Well, so does Nayeon and I love her anyway.”

“Lucky for me, I still have some time before I give up and settle for my worst nightmare.”

Jeongyeon’s worst nightmare is waiting for them, right in front of the conference room they’re supposed to enter in a couple minutes. Nayeon straight up ignores her Hey babe in favor of talking a mile a minute, right into Jihyo’s ear.

“Okay, so listen,” she says, rapidly, while they’re taking their seats, “in my defense I didn’t check either who exactly Momo was talking about and really, you’d have known yourself if you’d just asked for more information from your date instead of, I dunno, spending that whole time trying to find flaws in her—”

Dahyun and Tzuyu have somehow ended up sitting next to each other, resulting in the former’s face turning dangerously scarlet again.

“—and you know what, I don’t even see why I should be blamed for this. If anything, you should be hunting Momo down, because it’s all on her! She should’ve told me—”

The best chair in this conference room is the third one from the front; non-creaky and rotates like a dream. She and Jeongyeon scuffle over it for a minute before Chaeyoung slides in and claims it. They give up, sitting behind her.

“—Jihyo? Are you listening?”

Nayeon is anxiously wringing her hands, twisting them into each other. That’s suspicious. Nayeon is almost never nervous. Not when she’d told Jihyo she had feelings — dating feelings, mind you, she’d clarified over a tetra pack of banana milk, before Jihyo had plugged her fingers into her ears and run away, dating feelings, girlfriend feelings, kissing feelings, sex feelings — for Jeongyeon. Not even the day after that, when she’d proceeded to hijack their high school’s public announcement system to declare aforementioned feelings to a thoroughly exasperated Jeongyeon in the middle of maths class. Definitely not when the teachers finally broke into the AV room only to find her trying to adjust that one lock of hair to fall directly over her right eye — for ease of seduction purposes, as she later texted Jihyo, hands high in the air, cheeks glowing with a faint flush and the glossy mark of Jeongyeon’s lips on them.

Point is, the last time Nayeon had looked this nervous was when Jihyo had discovered that she and Jeongyeon had indulged in sexual activities on her brand-new couch and that alarms her. “Nayeon unnie,” she finally asks. “What did you do?”

“Um.” The fingers stop moving as there’s activity just outside the door. “I guess you can just find out on your own.”

She has long given up on any hope of deciphering Nayeon’s words when she’s talking about cryptic things, but if there’s anything she knows full well, it’s that she’s in for trouble regardless. She stays on edge all throughout the CEO’s speech, and even though it’s not like he’s saying anything important — at one point Jeongyeon gives up on the pretense of listening and straight up starts doodling a maze of dicks on her notepad — it pisses her off that she can’t concentrate even a little.

“Do you have any idea what Nayeon was on about earlier?” she asks, leaning closer to Jeongyeon’s chair.

“Here, solve this first.” She’s halfway through following through when she realizes that a, Jeongyeon’s just handed her a maze of dicks to solve, and b, that she’s almost to the end. It is not a complicated maze. “Also, no. The thing about dating Nayeon is that you’ve got to learn to tune out the nonsense or you’re stuck wondering why the woman at the food counter downstairs gives the janitor exactly two more dumplings than the rest of us.”

The CEO’s still droning on in the background as she finishes the maze. She leans back this time so she can whisper in Nayeon’s direction. “Tell me what you did.” Nayeon blinks. “Now.”

Nayeon subtly takes her head between both her hands and points it towards the glass door. “There,” she says, before removing her hands. “And please consider killing Momo first.”

Another man has started talking as Jihyo squints at the closed doors. There is nothing to see except the faint shadow of movement behind it. “And for those of you who probably don’t know her, my daughter’s also here in office today,” he says, waving a hand, and the doors open. “Please welcome her warmly.”

If Jihyo could later have made a list of the worst people to be on the other side of that door, it would probably have:

1. That one creepy dude from the boy band they managed last year who spent all of three months begging Jihyo for pictures of her feet
2. That cute girl from second year of university who Jihyo managed to throw up on, in the middle of making out, and then avoided all throughout the year by spending their shared classes ducked behind a desk
3. Her mother, with a basket full of peaches — For all your nice friends in office, Jihyo, why don’t you want me to meet them? — like she had three months ago, despite the fact that Jihyo had very deliberately not told her the address. Nayeon had spent the whole day talking up a storm with her and convinced her to send her some of her baby photos, just so she, Jeongyeon, Dahyun, Chaeyoung and Momo could set it as their screensavers. Assholes.
4. Sejeong. Sejeong.

And yet, who actually steps in through that door is way, way worse than any of them. Jihyo can only watch on, in abject horror, as Sana — Minatozaki Sana, heir apparent to Minatozaki enterprises, under which TDOONG Entertainment was established — glides in, smiling widely. Her eyes move over the whole room before coming to a halt at Jihyo, completely unsurprised, even amused to see her there.

Sana grins, throws her an excited wave and all Jihyo can do is stare, her jaw fallen open. Death would be too kind a treatment for Im Nayeon.

*****

“Jihyo, calm down.”

“Jeongyeon.” She’s calm. She’s very calm. “Put down your hands and let me kick your girlfriend’s ass all the way to Jeju. Please.”

Nayeon, ducking behind Jeongyeon’s chair, raises an indignant fist. “Why aren’t you going after Momo?” she asks, pointing to the girl in question, who is currently reclined on her chair, watching on while throwing chips into her mouth. Tzuyu is on the chair next to her, clearly invested in this but pretending to be occupied with her chocolate milk. “She hasn’t even apologized to you once!”

“To be fair, neither have you,” Chaeyoung says, from Jihyo’s right side. She and Dahyun flank her, presumably in an attempt to stop her if she tries to lunge, regardless.

She wouldn’t. It’d be fruitless. Jeongyeon was like double her height and unfortunately, very attached to Nayeon.

“I just thought you guys would look cute together,” Momo says.

“He’s my boss. You set me up with his daughter.”

“Technically, he’s your boss’ boss. No worries.”

“Exactly! He’s the final boss!” she hisses. “If this were a video game, I’d be fucked.”

“If this were a video game, she’d fall in love with you and then you could defeat him with the power of love or whatever,” Dahyun says, matter-of-factly. Jihyo cannot believe these people. Her life and her career were in peril and here they were, discussing it as calmly as though it were an article that took up a small corner of the last page of yesterday’s newspaper. “But while he’s trying to get one last hit in, he’d accidentally kill his own daughter and you spend the rest of your life as a sad alcoholic. So you do win, but at what cost?”

Jeongyeon breaks the silence that has fallen over the room first. “Wh….what?”

There’s a knock on the door, and they all turn to see one of their new interns, Jiwoo, poke her head in. “Um,” she says, bowing, clearly nervous at the sight of these many people. She still manages to shoot Jihyo a winning smile. “You’re being summoned. Ms. Minatozaki wants to see you.”

*****

Earlier, Jeongyeon had pressed her laptop into her arms; dazed from the worry that had built up in her, she’d taken it and was now walking to her death, her trusty ASUS in hand. She supposes the whole thing is an attempt to make her look more professional, although what the point of that would be if she were getting fired, she didn’t know. It wasn’t like Sana would take one look at that laptop in her hand, feel pity for her and renege on her decision to kick her out.

Alright fine. The chances of getting fired were very low. Probably.

Still, the sight of Sana swiveling in her chair does absolutely nothing to calm her nerves. “Hello,” she says, knocking. Sana jumps out of it while it’s still moving, stumbling in the process before turning to shoot her a dazzling smile. The next words were supposed to be an enquiry as to why she’d been called, but instead, what comes out is: “You knew, didn’t you?”

Sana’s smile turns sheepish. “When I saw you, yes,” she says. “But then you were talking about your job from hell and I couldn’t tell you I was indirectly affiliated with it—”

That’s one way of putting it, she guesses.

“—I thought it was kinda funny and I didn’t have your number to text you anything, anyway—”

Still managed to send me a video, she thinks, only half-annoyed. It had been a good video. Interesting and the youtuber’s voice didn’t grate on her ears like most dudes.

“—so I asked dad if I could tag along so I could see you again and explain, well, this and—”

“—are you going to fire me?”

“—ask if you wanted to go out with me again?” Sana finishes, a frown making its way onto her face by the end of it. “Wait, what? You thought I was going to fire you?”

Oh.

Hold on.

“You want me to go out with you again?”

“You think I was going to get you fired?”

“What the fuck,” she says, dragging over the nearest chair and sitting down on it, trying to process. Why would Sana want to go out with her again? “I spent almost half the evening whining about how much of a shithead my boss was. Doesn’t that reflect badly on your….” Is empire a good term? “Company?”

“I thought it was funny,” Sana answers, quietly, sitting down on a chair herself and rubbing the back of her neck. Like this, she cuts a small figure, nothing like one would imagine the heir to one of the biggest businesses in the country. Jihyo has to suppress a smile at the sight; it’s almost cute. Almost. “I wouldn’t fire you, you know. Even if I could, which I haven’t checked yet.”

“Not even if I refuse you that second date?”

Sana looks up at that, eyes animated again. “Why would you?” she asks. “I thought I was great on Friday.”

The woman truly was impossible.

“See, that’s why,” Jihyo says. “You’re… smarmy.”

“I don’t think there’s anything smarmy about knowing yourself well—”

“—and I get the impression you think you’re God’s gift to women worldwide—"

Sana leans back, points to her face, which, admittedly, does look glorious even under the drab office lighting. “I mean.”

“I just think that if I do have to date someone, I’d rather they be a person with actual goals and dreams, somebody responsible, somebody who can manage to make it through cooking a meal without setting off the alarm and getting the fire brigade called to their place on five separate and unrelated occasions.”

“Never should’ve told you about the great fires of 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2021,” Sana murmurs, pouting. “And I have goals and dreams! Just the other day, I tweeted about them!”

“Is it about how much you loved yogurt and how you were going to that artisanal café in Hongdae to have their custom-made mango-coconut blend?” she shoots, and Sana’s face falls comically. “Before you ask, you told me about that too!”

“Hey, that’s,” Sana pauses, head tilting to one side like she’s a puppy. Then she breaks out into the widest smile ever. “So you were listening to me!”

Uh oh.

“That’s beside the point.”

“Not really, you clearly enjoy my company on some level.”

“Look, I’d be a terrible person to date, okay?” Jihyo says, flipping her laptop open. “I usually wait until the third date to do this, but because you’re so determined, you now get to sit through fifty-six slides of why we wouldn’t work out. Spoiler alert for slide number seventeen, I once forgot my ex-girlfriend was allergic to lilies and had those sent to her office on our three-year anniversary!”

Sana chuckles. “How mad was she?”

“Wasn’t mad, just disappointed.”

If dead relationships had funerals and tombstones, that’s probably what would’ve been written on Jihyo and Sejeong’s four-year on-and-off thing: She wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Jihyo, driving them into dead ends and stray signboards; Sejeong, patching over dents and bumps with flimsy band aids. Clearly a match made in heaven.

She snaps herself out of it when she realizes she’s falling deep into an existential gloom. “Sorry,” she says, feeling awkward. “Got distracted. Anyway, my point was—”

“—tell me about slide thirty-one,” Sana cuts in, instead, waving it off, to her intense relief. “Also, can you give me a hand with the chairs?” Jihyo looks more closely to see around twenty chairs lying around the room. “I hate leaving a mess.”

She takes a moment to recall. Usually, her dates are fed up by slide fifteen, so she doesn’t have a lot of practice with the later numbers. “I could be wrong,” she says, cautiously, “but I think it has an image of the time I sent a scathing mail to the apartment complex dl about how the howling child in 3-C who peed in the communal plant pots on our floor was a cautionary tale against procreation.”

Sana laughs out loud at that, head thrown back, and Jihyo stops for a bit, taking her in. Light hair bouncing in the air, perfect teeth on display behind perfect lips — the woman was a vision to behold. What a shame about her….. everything else, though.

“Do you not like children?”

“Please, I’m unofficially raising like four already.” Despite Nayeon and Jeongyeon’s many protests. “And I do like children. Just not that — wait a second. This is a trick! You’re tricking me!”

The corner of Sana’s mouth twitches. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You do!” she pauses to point an accusing finger. “This is fourth date conversation, and I will not stand for it!”

“Tell me about slide ten.”

“Stop cutting me off!” But she answers anyway, pushing a chair towards the back. “Slide ten was about me being really busy with office.”

Sana’s already sat down in another one; pushing herself backward with her feet like a little kid, giggling the whole time. “Eleven?”

“Ten leads to eleven,” she replies, “I barely have any time. You know how I spend my weekends? Making sure Dahyun and Chaeyoung don’t die of starvation.”

“These are your neighbors, right?” Sana asks, wheeling herself around. “The ones you’ve known since college.”

First dates were so funny. Beneath all the awkwardness and formality lay a genuine want and hunger to listen to someone talk about all the seemingly mundane details that came together to form their life. Some times, you went to a movie with a woman who spent the whole two and half hours ranting about how the lead wasn’t fuckable enough for her, others, you happened to just sit across from somebody who stuffed their cheeks full of overpriced japchae and took note of the one time two people in your life had wrangled together an egg and expired kimchi for a meal because they were too lazy to go grocery shopping.

Then again, on at least one occasion in your lifetime, you could stumble upon a first date in a picnic underneath the stars that would eventually lead you to four years of I love yous and This isn’t working outs wrapped up in a pretty pink bow with the words What the fuck are you doing, Jihyo? written on it, in all caps, but. Not to digress.

Twenty to thirty-five. She eases through most of them, sliding all over the smooth floors, before looking around and realizing that all the chairs are done already, the rest put into place by Sana. Lined up against the walls, ready for another team to come in and listen to another mind-numbing HR presentation on how to behave in the workplace like they were dummies.

There’s still so many slides left. Just a couple more chairs and she could probably have shown Sana slides numbered forty-seven to fifty, which were just images of her dressed up in that atrocious unicorn onesie for Halloween two years ago. That would’ve made her laugh for sure.

Not that it mattered.

A nudge at her arm breaks her out of her reverie. Sana is peering up at her from a chair she’s been dragging all over the room for the past fifteen minutes.

“What?”

Fingers, soft and warm, curl around her wrist. By the time she’s registered the foreign yet not exactly unpleasant sensation, Sana has smoothly turned her wrist so she can read the face of her watch.

“That must have gotten you some steps, right?”

One. Two. Three.

The gall of this woman. Was that what all this chair-moving was for?

“Stop tricking me into getting my steps done!”

“I thought that was what you wanted!”

Sana’s answer comes along with her moving her hands up. Which would be fine, except for the tiny fact that she’s stil holding Jihyo’s wrist and thus what takes place, instead, is a complicated dance of multiple side-steps that ends up with Jihyo falling across Sana’s lap.

She doesn’t fall though. Not really. All things considered, Jihyo would’ve far preferred crashing to this…. closeness. This way, she’s firmly planted on Sana’s lap, their faces inches away, and if Sana was beautiful from six feet away, she’s absolutely breath-taking this close. That, and she smells like an intoxicating blend of fresh fruits, her perfume simmering on the edge of Jihyo’s senses, making it difficult to think of anything else.

“Jihyo ssi,” Sana whispers softly, her breath hitting Jihyo’s chin, bringing along with it the almost-tangible taste of mint. “Why is your heartrate so high?”

What is she talking about?

Wait. Her wrist. Her watch. That particular blight in her life.

“It’s clearly faulty!” she hisses, wrestling away her arm and raising it so she can point a finger right in Sana’s face. How funny. She was close enough to touch the curve of Sana’s nose. Should she….. no. That would be highly inappropriate. “And I’ll have you know—”

But before she can come up with something sufficiently scathing to rebuff Sana’s accusations, she hears the door click open, and steps barge in, before they pause.

“Oh!” Nayeon says — for of course, it’s Nayeon; when has the universe ever done Jihyo a favor? Jihyo can almost see her shit-eating grin firmly planted on her face, even without turning around. “Sorry! I didn’t know this room was….occupied.”

Ugh. Fuck.

*****

Sejeong had never really gotten around to liking Nayeon. While Jihyo kind of got it — the only reason she was still friends with Nayeon despite the laundry list of both criminally and morally reprehensible activities she was prone to indulge in on an almost daily basis was because they had been friends for so damn long — it was another reason she should have known that it would never work out with her. The rules of dating dictated that whoever she was sleeping with regularly needed to feel less-than-averse feelings towards one of her best friends. Technically, that applied to Jeongyeon as well, but people never had trouble liking her anyways, so Jeongyeon was a moot point. Nayeon was the cincher, Jihyo’s litmus test for filtering out people.

Sometimes, though — and especially tonight, not for the first time — Jihyo finds herself wondering if it was a lost cause. How could she ever expect a girl to like Nayeon when she herself wanted to strangle her so hard and so often?

“Why is it,” Jeongyeon asks, easily preventing Jihyo from lunging across the table to commit grievous harm to her girlfriend with a hand on the back of her neck, “that I keep finding myself stuck between the two of you while you squabble like rabid dogs?”

“She’s a rabid dog,” Nayeon sneers, taking a sip of her soju coffee demurely. “I’ve been minding my own business letting Tzuyu know what I walked in on today morning.”

“This is the sixth time you’re telling this story!” The first was right after Jihyo had scrambled off of Sana’s lap to run after her, when they’d both collided with Dahyun. Then Nayeon had tracked Momo down — completely unnecessary, seeing as Sana seemed to have already gotten to her, going by the sly grin she was sporting — to retell it. Jeongyeon. Chaeyoung. The woman manning the coffee counter on the ground floor. “Aren’t you sick of it yet?”

“Sick of sharing sordid details about how I found you in a close embrace with the future CEO of Minatozaki enterprises?”

She reminds herself it could be worse. Momo could be here — instead of whatever fancy restaurant she was in with her mysterious fiancee who none of them had ever met — to add to this ragging. When she was with Nayeon, their powers multiplied exponentially to induce the mother of all headaches in Jihyo.

“I am begging you.”

“Sorry, no.”

There are almost twenty people in the bar right now. She wonders how many of them would turn if she’d pick her drink up and throw it in Nayeon’s face. And right on cue, Chaeyoung, who was until now sitting quietly next to her, grabs her wrist to pause her twitching fingers.

“I know it’s tempting,” she says, quietly, “but Dahyun’s within splash range. You can’t do that to her, not with Tzuyu sitting right there.”

She’s right. Squeezed into the seat across the table are Nayeon, Dahyun and Tzuyu, Dahyun trying valiantly to avoid brushing her hand against Tzuyu’s bare arm every time she takes another bite out of her chicken wing. Tzuyu’s definitely aware of it, seeing as she’s got a miniscule half-confused frown stuck on her forehead when she steals glances at the horrendously awkward woman sitting next to her.

There were the two women who desperately needed to date each other. A match made in office heaven, involving socially stunted idiots and stilted conversations in the break room. Why was everyone focusing on setting her up with a super hot woman who also happened to kinda be her boss when there was a much more feasible romance happening right under their noses?

“You know why that is,” Jeongyeon explains quietly later, as the evening crowd is slowly dying down. It’s not like there’s a danger of either Dahyun or Tzuyu hearing her, anyway; couple of drinks later, Dahyun’s lost her awkwardly-in-love flush and gained a much brighter, potent, drunk-on-both-confidence-and-wine flush on her face instead, leading her to currently be occupied with explaining some ridiculous concept to Tzuyu and Chaeyoung loudly. “We worry about you.”

“You’re more worried about a functional member of society than the woman who skateboarded down three flights of stairs last month?”

“She successfully skateboarded down three flights of stairs last month, of course we’re not worried,” Nayeon deadpans. “Dahyun’s fine. She’s great. You on the other hand have not talked to a woman since Jeongyeon’s awful hairstyle number 5.”

(Awful? The number of times Jihyo almost walked in on them because Nayeon couldn’t keep her hands off of Jeongyeon with that hairstyle was staggeringly high)

“Half convinced that’s the reason Sejeong broke up with you for the final time back then,” Jeongyeon says, grinning easy. “She just couldn’t stand to look me in the face and lie about how the mushroom hair suited me.”

“Maybe we should send her a current photo of you?” she suggests. “Might send her running right back into my arms, who knows.”

But when she keeps her beer down, she realizes her joke hasn’t been received well. They’re both staring at her with an odd mixture of concern and pity.

“What?”

“Is that why you don’t want to….”

“What? No!” Actually, on second thought, she should’ve let them believe her ex was the reason. Might have gotten them off her back, at least. “It’s been years.” Two years and three months. “Can I not have another reason for not wanting to go out with Sana other than being hung up on my ex?”

“But why?” Nayeon exclaims, startling the girls sitting in the booth behind theirs. “She’s beautiful! She’s funny! She could get us all pay hikes!”

“Oh, in that case, let me go seduce her right now.”

She receives an eager nod in response.

“Does it concern you even a little bit,” she says to Jeongyeon this time, because Nayeon’s eyes are turning into little ₩s by the second, “that your girlfriend’s like one gold-plated chain away from becoming a pimp?”

“It’s one of her many charms,” Jeongyeon answers, fondly regarding the girlfriend in question. She watches as Nayeon finishes up the last of the fries, then reaches across Jihyo to neatly dab at her mouth and get the remnants of the salt out. “Do you really not like her?”

“Nayeon unnie?”

Jeongyeon sticks out her tongue, brushing away her attempt to be funny. “Sana.”

She could, that’s the thing. She could like Sana. Could let herself get afflicted with the symptoms one more time, give in to the flushed cheeks and the warmth of a soft palm in hers. Of regular texts and dinners filled with laughter instead of her favorite youtuber’s voice in her ear. Could get used to seeing that perfect face in the mornings, could maybe even get her heartbeat to get used to Sana’s presence long enough for it to maintain an even pace instead of whatever jitterbug it keeps dancing to when she’s around. But.

But.

“I’m too,” she starts, then trails off, looking for the perfect word. Tired could get a rebuttal. Old, while wasn’t completely accurate, was figuratively true; she did feel too old for all of this effort. Then again, Jeongyeon would probably whack her over the head with a chicken bone if she called herself old so she pauses. “I’m just used to the way things are right now. Things are good right now. I’m good.”

“Things are good right now,” Jeongyeon parrots back, thoughtfully. On Jihyo’s other end, Nayeon rests her head on her shoulder, her first step in a long line of drunken activities that eventually lead to her being carried back home over Jeongyeon’s shoulder. “Don’t you want them to be better?”

“I think,” she replies, looking over to the other side of the table, where Chaeyoung has fallen asleep, her head resting precariously close to the edge, leaving Dahyun and Tzuyu to talk quietly, their heads close together. Young love. The image gives her an ache somewhere undefinable. “I think I mostly don’t want them to be worse.”

*****

Back when she’d hopped off of Sana’s lap to try and go shut Nayeon’s mouth, Sana had called out a cheerful See you tomorrow! at her back. She’d thought nothing of it later, because surely Sana meant See you later. Vague. Indefinite. Stretching anytime within the very next minute to hopefully seventy years later when Jihyo would hopefully be over her commitment issues and still hot enough to be mistaken for a spry fifty-year-old. See you later didn’t give her anxiety. See you later wasn’t a plan. Neither was it a date.

But apparently, Sana was one of those people who said See you tomorrow and actually meant to see her tomorrow — which was as unrealistic as it seemed — because the next day they all walk into the common room to find her already planted there, a massive lunchbox on the table in front of her. Momo is seated next to her, staring longingly at the lunchbox in question.

“Jihyo ssi!” she calls out, delighted. That’s another thing, by the way. The way Sana always greets her like she’s the eighth wonder of the world. It’s…. disconcerting. And completely undeserved. “Here. I made you lunch.”

Momo coughs.

“What,” Jihyo tries, “the hell are you doing here?”

“Surprise! I work here now!” Sana pauses, looks at her a little longer before her grin falls. “Well, I asked my dad to set aside an office for me so I could get my writing done here. Isn’t that great? We can spend more time together now!”

Jihyo can only stare at her. From her seat at the table, Momo looks at her, then at Sana. Then she coughs again.

Sana gives her a glare before opening the box and laying it out. A traditional bento box, it’s got rice and shrimp and vegetables and a smiley face laid out with some form of syrup. While both Nayeon and Dahyun immediately reach out their grubby hands to examine it, Jihyo sits down.

“You made this?” she asks.

Sana nods.

“Really.”

Sana looks right at her — almost like she can see the inside of her brain where Jihyo is currently thinking thoughts about the great kitchen fires Sana had gleefully described over their first date — and with not one ounce of shame, nods more vigorously.

“Why?”

“I just thought we could revisit our conversation about a second date now that I have proved myself to be an adequate adult.”

“You know, somehow I don’t,” she trails off, distracted by movement in her peripheral vision. Her friends have managed to start eating it all, led in earnest by Momo, who now has her mouth occupied with a massive fried shrimp, just the tail sticking out of it. “What the hell?”

“You were taking too long!” Chaeyoung complains, between chewing at her rice. “You can either flirt or you can eat. Not our problem.”

(Why that little….)

She does eat it, however, regardless of how dubious the food’s origins (or the intentions behind it) and how little of it she gets in the end; she has five friends and they are all hungry, hungry people. She even eats what Sana brings the next day (the best tteokbokki she’s ever had in her life) and the day after that (an assortment of bread of varied shapes and sizes). If Sana wants to blatantly lie about who made the food, that’s her business.

(If Sana’s hopeful, earnest face while she’s taking in the sight of Jihyo eating food that she’s brought isn’t exactly….. an unpleasant sight, that’s Jihyo’s business and she will make sure it stays that way)

Three days is how long it takes for Sana to break and she does it in the most dramatic fashion, standing up from her usual seat and proclaiming: “Jihyo ssi, please forgive me! I’ve been lying to you!”

Jihyo freezes, causing a chain reaction of people bumping into her back, five separate Ows, and one whimper that she presumes belongs to Dahyun, who had been walking right in front of Tzuyu.

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“I had my personal chef make your lunches the past three days!” Sana continues.

The rest of them go ahead and take their seats, Chaeyoung and Nayeon casting disappointed looks towards the bare table at the prospect of having to buy their own lunches again. Momo pats Sana on the back distractedly, one hand occupied with typing furiously on her phone.

“Yeah,” Jihyo repeats. “I know.”

Sana reaches back into her expensive Louis Vuitton bag and extracts another lunchbox, to Jihyo’s alarm. “To make it up to you, I’ve made today’s lunch myself,” she says, and the alarm turns into a full city-wide emergency call in Jihyo’s head, exacerbated when the lunchbox opens to what a very optimistic person might call omurice and fried rice. Jihyo herself would call it a miracle of mankind, and not in the good way. “Please help yourself.”

She directs the last bit to the others as well, and Jihyo suddenly sees them become busier than anyone’s ever seen them in office.

“You want to apologize by poisoning me?” she says, bravely poking at one rice grain that’s been burnt to a crisp.

“Come on,” Sana replies, pouting, both her hands joined beneath her chin. This way, she looks like a cartoon character, if cartoon characters were ethereally beautiful in a way that looked completely effortless. “You might like it.”

Jihyo pops a bite in. Tries to keep her wince contained, but fails, if Sana’s sheepish face is anything to go by.

“Is it bad?”

“Uh.” How was one supposed to critique food that tasted like the devil himself had put a chef’s hat on and cooked it down in hell’s kitchens in a polite manner? “Um.”

The sheepish expression turns distraught. “Wait, no,” Sana says, reaching out to grab the lunchbox. “You don’t have to eat this. I’ll order something for you.”

“No, it’s good!” She pulls the food away before Sana can get to it, taking another bite. This time, the flavor isn’t as bad. Probably her taste buds getting used to it. She shoves two more bites in, chewing vigorously, trying not to breathe in the meantime. “I can eat it. It’s completely fine.”

“You really don’t have to—”

“—Sana,” she says, then has to pause because she picked a rather chewy bit of egg to eat. Then she realizes she’s just called Sana’s name rather loudly in the room, and everyone’s turned to look at her. God. “I told you. I can eat it.”

Sana’s embarrassment fades away into something softer. Jihyo has to fight to tear her gaze away and focus on the ample amount of food still in front of her.

“Why?”

“I don’t like wasting food.” And maybe she can’t help thinking about Sana — horridly, inappropriately rich Sana, Sana who has grown up eating from needlessly expensive silverware at the hands of professional chefs — standing in her kitchen trying to figure out how to cook an egg. “The fried rice isn’t too bad.” Even if it is fried to a sharp crisp. “Plus I’m hungry. Stop asking questions.”

When she looks up again, her face has gone down to a normal temperature (and hopefully, color as well). Sana smiles at her.

Heat returns rapidly to her cheeks.

“And,” she manages, squirming under Nayeon and Momo’s all-too-knowing gazes she can make out even in her peripheral vision, “anyways, you’re gonna help me with finishing it, aren’t you?”

Sana’s smile drops.

*****

Life is an elastic band, prone to stretching to great extremes, not as adept at regaining its original shape afterwards. You meet someone, and it starts expanding with every piece of information, every childhood shenanigan and takeout order. Slowly, one cupboard turns into two, nightstands look more cluttered than usual, and there’s double the usual amount of hair stuck in a clump at the bottom of the bathroom drain.

It grows fast, moulds itself to include the existence of another human. That’s the easy part. What comes after — after your mattress has a dent in the shape of a missing person, after you discover an old shampoo bottle that smells like nostalgia and grief and something you can’t ever get back — that’s hard. That’s like asking molecules to forget, to shrink back, make themselves smaller so they can cover you like a blanket. Doesn’t work very well. Or at all.

“But I digress.” There’s a tower that has a blinking light set right in the heart of the city; every time Jeongyeon comes over to hang on her balcony, she’s mesmerized with it. Jihyo gets it. Sometimes, she thinks of it as her personal lighthouse. “You get what I mean, right?”

Jeongyeon looks back at her over her shoulder, her eyes wide and serious. “Kind of,” she says, gaze flitting back towards the glass doors that lead back inside to where Jihyo guesses Nayeon is, still helping Dahyun compose a reply to a text Tzuyu had sent her in the morning. “But I can only imagine what it’s like.”

That’s true. Nayeon and Jeongyeon found each other when they were six, got together when they were seventeen, and — excluding the five times they broke up because of some insane reason for the maximum of two days — have never had to go through an actual break up. But Jihyo considers them as honorary members of the club anyway, if simply for the reason that they were the ones who stayed up with her after all the times she and Sejeong would break up and get back together.

“Honestly,” Jeongyeon goes on, “tell me. It’s not because of her, is it?”

“No,” she answers, stretching out the one syllable. “I mean, sure, it’s about her in the sense that most of my issues in life come from the four-year recurring mess I was a part of at a real young age in life but like—”

“—how long can you beat that dead horse, right?”

“Yeah.”

The dead horse wasn’t just dead, though. The stupid thing was both a ghost and a zombie, following her places, popping out behind closets and half-closed doors.

“You ever eat at a restaurant alone?” she asks. Jeongyeon nods. “You think you’ll be fine in the beginning, right? It’s just a meal. So you’re sitting at your table, waiting for your food to come, and when you look around, everyone’s either with their friends, or with their partner, and you feel….. embarrassed. You bury your head in your phone but the whole time you feel eyes on you. Like everyone else is laughing at what a loser you are.”

The loneliness was what sucked the worst, back when she was fresh from the final breakup. She had gotten used to having someone to call — for a concert, for a meal. She hadn’t realized how much space Sejeong had taken up in her life until she went away and left this empty, breathing hole that stabbed her in the chest at the most inopportune of times.

Nothing like having a meal alone to tell you how alone you truly were.

She’d left the restaurant, walked home. Dahyun and Chaeyoung were out drinking, Nayeon and Jeongyeon had their date night, so she’d entered her house, cleaned the kitchen. The floors, the dust almost-perpetually lining the shelves. Picked up Sejeong’s old laptop charger and hovered over it for almost ten minutes before shoving it deep down in the storeroom. And then her father called.

He was already talking, even before she’d greeted him. It was a mildly irritating habit, catching half of a statement and then having to make up a potential story for it, but she’d heard him mumbling about how he’d seen the ripest of peaches in the market today and wanted to send them over, and she burst into tears. I don’t have any friends, she’d mumbled out, when he asked what was wrong.

It wasn’t true. Wasn’t even in the neighborhood of the truth. But she couldn’t tell him the whole thing: that she was sobbing like an idiot over a girl whose laughter once used to sound like windchimes, over a girl who had packed up the last of her stuff a month ago and left for another city.

I’m so alone. I don’t want to kill myself but sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind it if I stepped into the street at the wrong second and a truck ran me over. Sometimes I want to take myself out of existence for a minute, just a minute, just so this agony would pause its rampaging inside my head.

“Anyway,” she continues, “it sucked.”

Jeongyeon blinks at her. “You get used to it.”

Only through spite. Like pre-empting a firing by quitting. Solitude was rarely a natural state of being; Jihyo had punched what remained of her life like an uncomfortable pillow to fit into small boxes that suited a person, singular, and retreated within to live out the rest of her days in silence.

“I did,” she says, “so I don’t want to not get used to it.”

The cycle of life went thus: one fell in love, got used to waking up to a good morning text, fell out of love and got used to watching a video along with every meal. So on and so forth.

“Well, yeah, until you do it for the last time and never have to do it again.” Nayeon’s voice floats in from behind and Jihyo turns to see her walk out, arm in arm with Dahyun. “Jeongyeon and I, we are very proud to declare, have never broken up in our lives.”

“That is categorically untrue,” Jeongyeon retorts, one arm reaching out to pinch at Nayeon’s cheeks. “You once broke up with me for not being able to guess where you wanted to go for dinner. Said that you would, and I quote, rather die than touch me ever again.”

Dahyun giggles. “So what happened?”

“What happened is that I’ve been a necrophile ever since, apparently.”

They all groan out loud.

Her life is already too big and too empty. Why on earth would she want to make it bigger and emptier on purpose?

Chapter Text

Sana, though. Sana is too big a force to contain, to turn away, to keep tucked in a box far, far away from her big and empty life. She’s wild, impetuous, and larger than life, worming her way in with no regard to Jihyo’s sanity or wishes. The unstoppable force of her presence against the immovable object of Jihyo’s obstinacy.

“Yeah,” Nayeon says, flatly, “you’re losing. Bad.”

That is not true. Losing would mean Jihyo enjoys whatever this is and isn’t just putting up with the horrendous food because she’s determined to be nice and polite. Losing would mean her eyes automatically scan the breakroom until they fall upon Sana, sitting on a chair with the day’s awful lunch laid out in front of her. Losing would mean her heart does quicken in response to Sana’s voice as it comes closer and closer until the woman herself is planted right behind her, idly examining her laptop screen and making ridiculous conversation.

Losing would mean admitting that her world does feel brighter and shinier and louder and just more with each passing day that Sana wriggles another foot in, firmly, and if Jihyo can fight it she would, until her final dying breath.

“Do you know she cancelled all my meetings on Tuesday—”

(“What do you think, Jihyo ssi?” Sana asked, when Jihyo entered the conference room, a little dazed from getting the news that she had no meetings for the day. She was sitting just behind the projector with a tub of popcorn on the table near her. “I asked the interns to cancel your meetings so we can hang all day!”)

“—set up a claw machine in the office—”

(“Go on,” Nayeon urged Jeongyeon, from their vantage point in one of the couches in the lobby. “Help her out, please. I can’t bear to watch this anymore.”

“I tried,” Jeongyeon replied, miserably. “She refused. Wants to do it herself.”

“Don’t you have any work to do?” Jihyo asked them, because they’d been sitting out here with their laptops, the whole day, watching Sana make one attempt after another to win Jihyo a plushie from the claw machine she’d spent a whopping one point five million won on.

So far she had not succeeded once.

“Don’t you have any work to do?” Jeongyeon shot back, her eyes unmoving from where Momo was now guiding Sana on which reasonably loose toy to try extracting. The claw swooped, closed around air and rose up to the background music of their combined whines. “Why are you here?”

Because it was funny. Because she had to keep an eye on Dahyun and Chaeyoung, who were taking bets on how many more attempts it would take before a plushie came out. Because Momo and Sana’s ideas usually came together to cause abject destruction of property, both public and private and Jihyo wasn’t willing to deal with another injured person in office.

Because for the two seconds that the claw closed around a plushie, Sana’s eyes would go wide and light up with the joy and hope of a kid on Christmas morning and the one second the claw would rise, empty, would have her pouting at glass, so intensely Jihyo was surprised the machine wasn’t just handing her the toy over. Maybe, just maybe, Jihyo was awed at the former and unnecessarily moved by the latter.

Maybe she just thought it was unbearably cute.

“Move,” she said, after getting up and walking over to the machine. Sana blinked at her in surprise and shuffled over in reflex, nudging Momo as well. “Here, I’ll do it.”

It wasn’t easy, the damn things were so tightly wedged in there it had to be the work of Satan, and the only plushies she’d had experience winning were the ones where Jeongyeon had intervened by cheating, but she was determined and so, it only took four tries before she got one close enough to the edge so that one more move could just push it over.

And with that, with half the dinosaur’s head hanging over the edge, she walked away, slow enough so she could hear everyone’s sigh of relief when Sana tried once again and a plushie finally made its way to a human hand. If asked, she’d say she did it just so Chaeyoung — who had bet that Sana would only be able to get the damn thing done tomorrow — would lose, but she’d have to be lying if she didn’t admit (just to herself) that it was kind of (partly. Mostly.) because she knew it would make Sana smile, and that was something Jihyo might have had a personal investment in.)

“—and hasn’t let me work for the past three days—”

(“Have you seen the new movie that was released last Friday?” She liked to think she’d mostly gotten used to Sana sitting behind her and chiming in whenever she got bored with her own writing, but the voice sounded very close and there was the slightest whiff of berries when she breathed in, courtesy the chewing gum Sana was munching on. It made her feel warm all over. Then it made her angry. What business did a little bit of closeness have making her blush? The next words sounded like they were being spoken from even closer, and this time the warmth ignited into a roaring fireplace in a second: “I’ve heard it’s an office romance.”

Ants. There were ants on her neck.

“What am I supposed to do with that information?”

“You could watch it with me.”

“I have no—”

“—time, yes, I know,” Sana completed, sounding more amused than disappointed. “Which is why I went and saw it with Momo and Mina yesterday, leaving me free to tell you the whole plot today.”

Both Jeongyeon and Nayeon, who were sitting next to her, slowly craned their necks to stare at her. Jihyo let them stay in her peripheral vision, closed her eyes, and sighed.)

“—and are we forgetting that we still don’t know what it is she does for a living—”

“She doesn’t have to do anything to earn a living, isn’t that the whole point?” Dahyun says, then blushes furiously when the rest of them — Tzuyu included — turn towards her. “You’re so lucky; she’s hot and she’s loaded. The whole package.”

(Tzuyu goes back to her laptop, albeit with a tiny frown that looks a little like hurt making its way on her forehead. Interesting)

Technically, Dahyun’s last rebuttal isn’t completely true; Sana writes a regular blog for one of her father’s company’s online magazines. Some sort of commentary on Seoul’s queer scene but for the rich; Chaeyoung and Jeongyeon were apparently long-term readers of her pseudonym, one OneceBurntThriceShy. Jihyo had asked her about it once and had, predictably, gotten the most exasperating answer ever. I’m an expert on gay people and rich people, Sana said, smirking, so I thought, why not put that knowledge to use?

It exasperated her even more that her articles genuinely were hilarious, but Jihyo was never going to tell her that. Her already massive head might just swell to ridiculous proportions and burst.

“Also, are we ignoring the giant elephant in the room?”

Heads raise and turn to the elephant plushie sitting grandly on the floor between them, one of Sana’s very inappropriate presents for her. It’d be a welcome change from the humongous bouquets of flowers she’d been receiving for the past two weeks, except for the fact that it’s equally ostentatious. Jeongyeon reaches down and thumbs at the note sticking to its nose.

“To Jihyo chan,” she reads, in a tone of voice she reserves for a bit, and Dahyun awws. You’re Jihyo chan now? she asks, and Nayeon giggles. “Have an elephant-astic day.”

“Unnie,” Chaeyoung says, “I don’t think we could ignore it if we tried.”

“What date are you guys on currently?” Jeongyeon asks.

“If you ask Sana, our twenty sixth.” Then again, if one asked Sana anything, she usually could manage to come up with an answer that made about as much logical sense as a rat skateboarding over Han River. “I honestly don’t know what to do.”

“Have you ever actually told her no?” Tzuyu looks at her, fingers still somehow typing away at her laptop. “Like said the words Sana, I don’t want to go out with you?”

Well, that’s. Rather harsh, isn’t it?

“It’s implied.”

“Is it?” Tzuyu says, a challenging glint in her eyes. The rest of them have paused to look on. “You have all these complaints, unnie. If you’re so convinced it’s not going to work out, why not just say so? Tell her you’re not interested.”

Sana, I’m not interested in you. She imagines saying the words. Imagines Sana’s face falling into a pout, her eyes dimming until they’re devoid of their usual glow, her smile faltering in place until it’s completely gone and—

—shakes her head. The image disappears, like ripples on water. Leaves behind some semblance of hurt somewhere in her chest.

“Or is it,” Tzuyu continues, still regarding her carefully, “that you don’t want her to stop?”

“What? That’s,” she fumbles and pauses, trying to sound indignant rather than flustered. “That’s — you’re. Being ridiculous! Insane! Preposterous! Stop the slander! I could have you sued for this!”

“Okay then,” Tzuyu says. “Prove it.”

*****

No matter what ends up happening, she thinks it’s only fair for it to be noted that she means to do exactly that: to go to Sana at lunch and very gently let her down. In no uncertain terms. No See you laters that could be misconstrued into See you tomorrows. If only so she can get Tzuyu’s — and most importantly, Nayeon, Jeongyeon and Momo’s — judging eyes off of her.

So she does mean to do it, and that is what’s important, is what’s going through her head as she walks up to their breakroom, rehearsing potential breaking up monologues. All up until she enters the door and finds Sana sitting in a corner, flirting with one of the interns.

Later, Nayeon would ask her what exactly had her so convinced it was flirting she was witnessing and not just a very gripping conversation, but really, all she’d be able to remember is the sullenness that permeated her mind at the sight of Sana’s special smile (the one that made her eyes crease up, made exactly two and a half lines appear on both corners of her lips) directed at someone else, someone that wasn’t her. An ugly, twisting feeling in her stomach that made her feel a little sick, a lot disgruntled.

So much for date twenty-seven.

“—so you’ll text me the — Jihyo ssi!” Huh. Jihyo hadn’t realized she was already standing in front of Sana and her companion — who she now realizes is another one of the interns. Sooyoung or something, that’s what her name is. The ugly feeling festers, turns over her insides like clay. “Have you met Sooyoung? She was just telling me about—”

“—I have met her, actually,” she finds herself saying evenly. Sooyoung grows smaller under her gaze. “I work with her. Which is why I’m curious as to why she’s here instead of working on the data entry of the multiple users I’d assigned to her this morning.”

“Uh,” Sooyoung springs out of her chair, nearly stumbling into the wall behind her. She’s tall. Taller than Jihyo herself. Ugh. “Right. I’m going to… let me get right to it!”

She scrambles away, casting one last terrified look behind before disappearing from view. Sana does not watch her go, choosing, instead, to regard Jihyo quietly. As her eyes linger, the ugliness fizzles away into something closer to shame and regret. What was Jihyo on, acting like some sort of rabid dog, foaming at the mouth at the thought of Sana talking to someone else? Sana could talk to any damn person she pleased. Jihyo had no right to barge in and fend off random women in her periphery.

Wasn’t like she was her girlfriend or anything. They weren’t even dating.

Sana opens her mouth. “What was that about?”

“What was what about?” she shoots back, still feeling a ways about the whole thing. “And you! You want to poison the whole office by giving them your simultaneously over-and-undercooked food?”

“Why do you eat it every day, then?”

“And flirting with the interns?” People closest to them turn to look at them; she lowers her voice. “You’re the boss’ daughter; there’s a power dynamic here!”

“Please, the only power I have is the power of my nose scrunch, I’ve been told it’s pretty charming.”

She scrunches up her nose on cue, like a puppy showing off tricks for a treat, and Jihyo finds herself torn between strangling her and cooing at her.

“And I wasn’t flirting with her,” Sana continues, easily, pushing the lunchbox towards her and motioning for her to sit down on a spare stool. “She told me that she cooks, so I wanted her to send me her recipe for kimchi fried rice. You were talking about wanting to have some yesterday, weren’t you? I thought I could make it for you one of these days.”

Jihyo sits, the annoyance leaving her body, leaving behind sudden exhaustion. She feels tired. Too tired. Rests her cheek on a palm, looks back at Sana. “You don’t have to,” she says. It comes out softer than she meant to let on. So she sprinkles in a: “You’ll probably burn that too.”

Forgoes the rest of her speech. You don’t have to do any of this. The cooking me lunch and the telling me plots of random movies that get both Jeongyeon and Nayeon invested and the making sure I get my steps in. A girl as sweet and kind and pretty as you ought to be out there trying to meet and talk to girls equally as kind and pretty, girls with hearts not made of hardened Swiss cheese.

Please don’t do things that will make me want to hold your hand and kiss the arch of your nose even more than I already do, she thinks, and a part of her, the part that is malleable and hopeful, the part that still writes letters without putting in return addresses, immediately counters it. Please never stop.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sana drawls in response, flippant as ever. “That girl I was talking to, Sooyoung?” Jihyo nods. “I think she’s got a thing for one of the other interns here. Kept talking about some Chuu?”

Who the hell is Chuu now? “Do you mean Jiwoo?” she asks back, and Sana’s face lights up in recognition, nodding. “Huh. How do you even know that?”

Jihyo’s a little ashamed to admit that the most she knows about the interns was that they were decent workers, and that most of them had recently graduated from the same college as her. Nothing about their personal lives whatsoever. But Sana’s just that kind of person. The kind to draw out conversations from strangers like they were lifelong friends.

Not for the first time, she thinks that Sana deserves to be somewhere else, with someone way, way….. nicer than her.

“I asked, Jihyo ssi,” Sana replies. It comes out condescending, so Jihyo makes a face at her. “So you don’t need to be jealous.”

Caught off guard, spoon in hand; Jihyo falters and drops it. It clatters against the surface of the table, sprinkling vegetables and sauce from today’s dish — jajangmyeon, or a very experimental version of it anyway — all over.

“What?” she gasps out, face burning from both embarrassment and scrutiny.

“I said that you don’t need to be jealous anymore,” Sana says, helpfully. “That’s why you were mean to the poor girl, weren’t you?”

“I was not jealous!”

“Uh huh.”

“I wasn’t—”

She gets cut off in the middle of her furious statement, by a spoon stuffed into her mouth. The perpetrator of this dastardly act gives her a cheeky smile.

Jihyo’s going to kill Sana. She really is.

“Eat.” Jihyo stops chewing at that, and Sana sighs. Then she places her hands under her face and blinks hopefully. “Is the food a little better today?”

It really isn’t. The noodles are so chewy that Jihyo’s jaw is starting to hurt. The sauce probably started off sour and sweet and got confused growing up. The vegetables had a metallic taste to them.

But the way Sana is looking at Jihyo makes her want to do stupid things, like promise her the moon and the stars and all the asteroids in the galaxy, both big and small. So Jihyo nods, and the smile she gets in response is a universe all its own.

*****

One afternoon, Jihyo — scrunched up between a loudly chattering Nayeon and Momo — realizes that, despite her best attempts to the contrary, she’s somehow started actively enjoying Sana’s company. The thought has her freezing in place, chopsticks midway to her mouth, long enough for both Jeongyeon and Chaeyoung to notice and steal some of her food.

The second time Jeongyeon tries, Jihyo whacks her on the back of her wrist with her chopsticks. “Stop abusing your power,” she says. “The money you earn…. you ought to be buying my lunch, not stealing it.”

“Oh, but that rule comes below another, more important rule that goes: Uh, you snooze, you lose.” Sometimes, Jihyo wonders why, in all their years of friendship, she hasn’t at least attempted to kill Jeongyeon once. Such a shame. “Where are you lost, anyways?”

If she admits the real reason she isn’t paying attention — Do you guys know where Sana is? — she is bound to have the satisfaction of watching Jeongyeon’s mouth drop open and then getting to stick a finger inside, just to watch her choke. Then again, she also happens to be stuck in between two of the loudest people in the universe and is not looking forward to blowing her eardrums out after the sonic boom their combined Oohs would cause. Cons won out.

But she is curious. Sana doesn’t takes holidays ever since she started camping here — I don’t get sick, she’d claimed once, when I feel a cold coming on, I swallow ice cubes to assert my dominance over it — so where is she? Or maybe she isn’t on a leave, and she just hasn’t come down to annoy Jihyo today, which.

Well, that’s a thought, isn’t it?

Has Sana finally given up? Have Nayeon and Momo finally stopped pushing them together? Does this mean Jihyo can go back to her regularly scheduled lunches of absolute solitude, accompanied only by a video on the internet?

The thought should make her happy.

It doesn’t.

Does take away her appetite, though, so she hands over the rest of her lunch — a thoroughly edible dish of jeongbol this time — to a flabbergasted Chaeyoung, and walks back to her desk.

Work provides little comfort. Turns out, trying to create presentations with something weighing heavy on her mind doesn’t, in fact, deliver the best results, but she only realizes that after she goes back to review the hundred words she’s managed to write in three hours and discovers gems such as Their latest album is a mixture of whimsy and bold, with an added side of where is she where is Sana and The title track is definitely an improvement from their last album where the bass is she mad at me. It’s so embarrassing she wipes out the whole thing and stares at the blank screen for all of fifteen minutes, wondering what is wrong with her.

It's just curiosity, she decides. Where was Nayeon’s insatiable need for gossip when one needed it? Did she have no relevant questions about a missing member of their lunch party?

She tries for an hour more, then finally gives up, the beginnings of a plan in mind. Dahyun works in Fashion, which is right next to where Sana’s fancy glass-walled office is. In theory, Jihyo could pop over there, ask how she was doing, and maybe find out what was up.

In theory, it was just a simple urge to find out what was going on. No one could fault Jihyo for wanting to solve a mystery.

When she finally goes, seeing Sana’s usual chair empty eases her mind somehow. She stares at it for a little while, relieved that Sana truly was missing and not mad at her like she’d been thinking this whole time. And then stares at it a little longer, because it doesn’t matter even if Sana is mad at her. Or tired of her. It shouldn’t. And yet, she’s just taken a walk through the entire office, something she hasn’t done in a whole year of being employed here, just to figure out the whereabouts of someone she’s deemed an inconvenience at best and a food-poisoning demon at worst.

“Unnie?” Dahyun’s voice breaks her out of her musings. It’s a relief, really. One or two more thoughts down the same lane would have been lethal for her health, her reputation, but most importantly, her ego. “What are you doing down here?”

“I came to see you, obviously,” she says. Drags over an empty chair and plonks herself down beside her. From here, she can keep an eye on the art section as well, where Momo’s chair sits, empty. “Can I not do that?”

Dahyun swivels in place to look at her. Jihyo notes she isn’t shedding tears of joy. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Why?”

Okay, that one was hard. “I, uh.” Momo’s entered her field of vision, talking on her phone. She looks over, waves at Dahyun, and then her eyebrows go up when she sees Jihyo. “I had a. Thing.”

Damn it. Momo is too far for Jihyo to figure out what, or who she was talking to. Farther yet for her to go over, make small talk and then steer the conversation around to Sana naturally enough so that it doesn’t set off alarm bells — or more accurately, wedding bells — in Momo’s head.

“What thing?” Dahyun asks, from beside her.

“I forgot,” she says, still preoccupied with the way that Momo’s trying (and failing) to steal inconspicuous glances her way, while still murmuring on her phone.

Dear lord. What if she was on the phone with Nayeon and telling her about this?

She half-gets up from her chair at the thought, before being pulled back in by a hand fisted in the back of her shirt. “Ow,” she says. “What the hell?”

“The only reason I’m doing this is because I know your stubborn ass wouldn’t come out and ask me,” Dahyun says, typing away furiously. The words on the screen are surprisingly coherent considering she’s multi-tasking right now. “Now, say I had a hypothetical girlfriend who wasn’t in office a day, I’d make a pretty accurate guess as to her being home with the flu—”

Sana’s sick?

Wait. Girlfriend?

“—and if I was worrying that much, it’d also be considerate on my part to visit her, get her something nice to eat. I’ve heard samgyetang is good for colds.”

“Okay, Dahyun!” The people sitting near them turn to look at them. She lowers her voice. “Clearly, you’ve got the wrong idea here.”

“Do I?” Dahyun shoots back, not once looking up from her laptop screen.

After a whole minute of typing, Jihyo sees — written in bold, and in a significantly larger font than the rest of her presentation about the best thrift stores in Seoul — the sentence Go see her if you miss her that much.

That has her jumping up again, successfully this time, only to lean over and press backspace until the words are gone.

Missing Sana. How preposterous.

*****

(Breaking up had been a lot of work.

Plus, it never stopped. Like an unwanted errand that went on and on and kept extending into the infinite unknown. Week one was clearing her shelves out and having to deposit all of Sejeong’s books at the nearest library. Week two, backing up all texts and photos onto her old, barely used laptop and deleting them off of her phone. Week three was a haircut Nayeon gave her that she regretted immediately, way into week four, five, six. Week seven was opening her once-barely-used laptop like a drug addict, looking for a fix, a hit. Proof that Sejeong had once kissed her on a park bench while the cherry blossoms fell all around them. Proof that she had once whispered that she loved Jihyo while they were in Burger King, making their way through those ridiculously thick fries.

Like every other, never-ending errand, Jihyo came home at the end of the day, believing that this was it, that she was done methodically scraping off every last remnant of Sejeong’s presence from her life. And every day, she was proved woefully wrong when she’d come upon another piece wedged tight between her bed and nightstand, the carpet and the floor. A life scattered, its owner a whole city away.

Some spots truly were stubborn. Jihyo guessed she finally could understand what Lady Macbeth’s deal was.

But of all the things that made this severance a task — that it was tedious, that it was especially difficult to do when her ex-girlfriend was now in a whole other different city, living her best life — the worst was the sheer agony and exhaustion that accompanied her everywhere. Jihyo got into the habit of watching herself shatter on the floor of her bedroom, wrapped in her blanket, and then having to get up with a crick on her neck and rebuild herself new. Of pressing herself up against the wall and thinking — I’m hurting right now. Where are you? Do you not care?

But no one was coming to pick her up. There were no longer arms meant to wrap around her and rock her to sleep, no longer lips to kiss away tears and make everything better.

Jihyo was well and truly alone.

And this hit her at times, yes, but never harder than the day she fell going downstairs and broke her wrist. Clutching at the stupid thing, she’d run back to her apartment, attempting a silent getaway, and then her plans were dashed when Chaeyoung sauntered down the staircase as well, caught sight of her cursing at the doorknob with a rapidly swelling arm, and gasped.

Jihyo hadn’t started crying until Dahyun walked in, an icepack in hand, handing it over to Chaeyoung and then sat down, fussing over her arm. That was when the dam burst, expelling all of her frustration and pain in one massive flood, surprising even her by its intensity. Even Chaeyoung jerked in place before she wrapped an arm around her, tight, her other hand holding the phone up to her ear. Through her sobs, Jihyo heard her frantically talk to someone — probably Jeongyeon or Nayeon — to get there as fast as they could.

Nayeon had stayed quiet the whole time, through the ride to the hospital, the x-ray and the fixing of the cast. Even later, when they were all back to the apartment, and Jihyo could hear Jeongyeon argue with Dahyun and Chaeyoung in the kitchen over what qualified as edible tteokbokki, all she did was sit on the bed next to her and hold her hand.

“I can’t do this again,” Jihyo broke the silence, “let alone for the rest of my life.”

“Broken arms are excruciating.”

“Nayeon unnie.”

“I know, I know.” Nayeon turned to her, brushed a hand over her forehead, pushing those stupid bangs she was responsible for in the first place back. “Just don’t know how appropriate it would be for me to tell you it gets better.”

“It doesn’t. It won’t.” Jihyo couldn’t ever imagine the empty spaces in her chest filling up again to form a whole person. What agony. Why did people do this to themselves, hand out pieces of their hearts to the first person who’d ask for it nicely, knowing there was a seventy-six point two chance of destruction ahead? Stupid breakable humans with their stupid breakable hearts and fragile bones. “I’m going to stay right here, and wither away, reminding myself that I will be unloved every day for the rest of my life.”

“For what it’s worth, Jihyo-yah.” Nayeon’s voice was pained, her eyes spilling over. What was she sad for, Jihyo found herself thinking, meanly. Wasn’t like she was the one walking around with the charred remains of her life. “We love you.”

“That’s not the same,” she replied, without thinking, overcome with the urge to lash out and make everyone feel as miserable as she was. “That doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter that I love you? Really?” The first angry tear dripped out of Nayeon’s right eye, and Jihyo immediately regretted everything. “Doesn’t matter that you can hear your friends outside trying to make your favorite food, because all the nearby take out places were closed?”

“Unnie…”

“What, you think I enjoy watching you starve yourself? That I like seeing the dark circles under your eyes every day at work? Dahyun told me the other day that you stayed inside the whole weekend, that they kept calling you to take you out to the mall but you were sitting inside, wallowing. And your arm. Tell me you’d have called us for help if Chaeyoung hadn’t accidentally seen you. Tell me.”

“I can deal with things on my own,” she replied. “I have to learn now, don’t I?”

“You’ve never dealt with things on your own, Park Jihyo,” Nayeon said. She sounded tired. “Back in junior year, Jeongyeon had to step in when that idiot Minho decided he wanted you to be his girlfriend and kept following you everywhere. Dahyun helped her mom make and pack your meals for a whole month when your mom fell sick, second year of college. Or Chaeyoung, back when you’d broken up with Sejeong for the first time, running all the way from her art history class up on the third floor to the other side of campus right before your lunch break, just to make sure you’d eat something? You really think any of us made it here on our own?”

That was when Jeongyeon had walked in, Dahyun and Chaeyoung following closely behind holding a tray and a bunch of plates. Then she’d stopped, looking between Jihyo and Nayeon.

“Are we interrupting something?”

Yes, Nayeon sniped, the same time that Jihyo shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We’re just hungry and grumping at each other. Get over here.”

They’d given up after half the tteokbokki, finally dialing the closest pizza place and ordering a couple of pizzas. Jeongyeon had fallen asleep first, an arm hanging over the bed. Dahyun and Chaeyoung had dragged over mattresses from their place and set it at the foot of the bed, complaining the whole time about the volume of Jeongyeon’s snores. And Nayeon stayed on Jihyo’s other side, a hand resting on her uninjured arm, a peace treaty of sorts. When Jihyo had woken up in the middle of the night, her arm throbbing with pain, it was Dahyun’s hand that switched on her phone’s flashlight and dug through her stash of prescribed painkillers to find one that fit, handing it to her, Jeongyeon’s hand that held out the glass of water on the nightstand.

Yeah, breaking up had been a lot of work. So maybe it was a good thing she didn’t have to go through it alone.)

*****

It is a miscalculation that leads Jihyo on the longer route to her apartment from the office, and it is another miscalculation that leads her to stop at a restaurant and then order way too much food for her to eat all in one go.

An unfortunate turn of events. Jihyo looks up at the waiter and asks if he can pack the almost intact bowl of samgyetang up for her to eat later. Then she walks out, looks up and down the street, and simply out of interest, fills in her GPS with the address Dahyun had pressed on her before leaving the office. Discovers that Sana’s apartment is on the way home.

How strange.

She stands at the door, a hand hovering over the doorbell for a while. It’s just a nice thing to do, isn’t it? Bringing food over for a girl she was totally not dating. There was no reason for her to feel awkward about it. All she had to do was ring the bell, hand over the food, make sure Sana wasn’t dead and then leave.

Four steps. Easy. She presses the doorbell.

The muted sound is accompanied by a sudden spike in anxiety. She rolls her neck a couple times, taps on the smooth surface of the door, hoping it doesn’t show on her face. The last thing anyone wants is Sana or Momo thinking she was nervous. She doesn’t even want to think of the misunderstandings that would cause.

She hears footsteps from inside, coming closer. The sound of someone talking; she guesses it’s Momo from the deep tone. And then the door opens.

Sana is standing on the other end, a bowl full of ice cream in hand, spoon sticking out of her mouth.

She’s got a shawl falling off one shoulder and her hair’s in complete disarray. Jihyo gets about two seconds to take it all in, before her eyes go wide in panic, and she closes the door. Right in Jihyo’s face.

Oh.

Maybe she shouldn’t have come here.

But the soup. No use in letting that go to waste. She goes to keep it on the ground and pauses when she hears whispering coming from inside.

“—why is Jihyo here?” Sana, if the clogged-up voice is anything to go by. “I look like a mess!”

“Really?” Momo this time. “You mean the ice cream isn’t magically making your cold better?”

“Shut up, Momo!”

“Um,” Jihyo says, and all sounds stop. “You do — you guys do know that I can hear you, right?”

There’s a whole minute of silence, before the door opens again. Momo grins at her, while Sana’s cowering in the back behind her, trying to hide her face.

“Why is she doing that?” Jihyo asks.

“Don’t see me like this!” Sana says, finally emerging. “I look awful.”

That is not true; the cold’s actually added a bit of color to her face, making her cheeks and her nose go red. She makes for an adorable figure, leaning against the wall, shawl now pulled up over her head. But no way Jihyo’s gonna tell her that, so she settles for: “You look okay.” Was that too harsh? She follows that up with, “You look…. not bad.”

“Wow, that was totally easy and not at all painful to watch,” Momo says, and Jihyo wants to strangle her. Then she asks something that increases the urge a hundred times more. “What brings you here?”

“I brought samgyetang,” she says. What was a correct answer anyway, something that won’t have Momo immediately calling Nayeon to gloat? Sana’s looking at her, her eyes big and round and soft, and it makes Jihyo’s skin itch underneath her jacket. “Nayeon unnie made me. Her idea.”

If telling them she was here because she was, in some (the tiniest. Miniscule) capacity worried about Sana was the stupidest thing she could’ve done, this — lying to Momo about Nayeon having pushed her to come when she knows for the fact that they’re both joined at the hip and Momo would know immediately that Nayeon had done nothing of that sort — comes a close second. But when the brave traveler is caught between a rock and a hard place, it is in their best interest to close their eyes, flatten themselves against the closest surface and hope for the best.

Momo’s eyes narrow. But she doesn’t say anything, instead, stepping aside to let her in.

(Maybe she won’t die today of strangulation, after all. Jihyo’s glad. The cleanup would’ve been a hassle and Jeongyeon would’ve nagged a lot.)

“Put down the ice cream,” she says, when Momo’s left them alone, chattering away on the phone about some upcoming wedding. Probably her own, going by the way she’s got a stupid smile on her face. Sana freezes in place on the couch. “Seriously, what is wrong with you?”

“If I have cold things, I can trick my body into thinking I’m not sick.”

Yes, because that’s exactly how it works. Jihyo resists the urge to facepalm. “Put that down and have the soup instead.”

“But it’s on the kitchen counter and I’m on the couch,” Sana whines. Then she puts her hands underneath her chin and fixes the most beseeching look upon Jihyo. “Can you get it for me? Please?”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” Jihyo says, but finds herself moving anyway. The woman was sick, after all. She wouldn’t be so cruel as to make her walk when she was clearly tired. She pours the soup out onto a bowl from the kitchen, and places it on the coffee table in front of the couch, coming around it to sit next to Sana, a safe distance away. “Here you go. Drink up.”

Sana groans, extracting the least amount of skin possible from under the shawl to grab the spoon and eat. “Oh, that feels good,” she says. “You know, I can see why sick people eat hot meals.”

Comfortable enough now that she’s seen that Sana’s not too sick to be annoying, Jihyo rolls her eyes. “Is this the first proper meal you’ve had all day?”

“Mina had dropped off some food for me in the fridge, but I was too lazy to heat it up. So I had it cold.”

Idiots. Jihyo is surrounded with them.

When Sana eventually drops a little soup onto her pajamas, Jihyo rolls her eyes, retrieving a handful of tissues from the bag. “I knew this was going to happen,” she says. “Did you not learn anything growing up?”

“Some of us don’t have mothers to teach us how to eat well,” Sana replies, and holy shit. Fuck. Fucking hell. Is she….. “I did, fortunately, but it never stuck.”

Jihyo blinks at her, stunned beyond belief. This woman.

“You should’ve seen your face, made my whole year!” Sana goes on, cackling. The sound is weak, reminding Jihyo that she still is technically sick and killing a sick woman wasn’t the proper thing to do. The laughing dies down as Sana examines the stack of tissues in her hand, puzzled. “Is this a whole pack of tissues?”

“No, I just asked them for extra because I know you tend to eat like a stoned rhino,” Jihyo shoots back. Sana turns to stare at her, sharply, an unreadable look in her eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Sana says. Then she waggles the spoon in Jihyo’s direction. “Do you want some? It’s not bad.”

The idea of putting her mouth where Sana’s has been makes her short-circuit for no reason. “Did you forget you’re sick and infectiously so?” she asks, when she recovers. “Do you want me out sick next?”

“I vow I’ll come over after work and get you something nice to eat,” Sana tells her, seriously.

She pushes the bowl away, and since a satisfactory amount of it is done, Jihyo gets up to cover it with the nearest lid and place it in the fridge. Then she hesitates, standing halfway between the couch and the kitchen counter. Technically, what she’d come here to do was done — Sana didn’t look like she was planning on dying any time soon. She could go now.

But. Here’s the darndest thing. She wants to stay.

It’s probably the fact that there’s not much to do at home tonight — yesterday, Chaeyoung and Dahyun had been talking about catching a superhero movie, and when they’d asked her to join in, Jihyo had spent five minutes pretending to throw up creatively — or that some part of her craves company. All of her friends are busy or dating or busy dating. She’s happy for them, but doesn’t quite enjoy being a perpetual third wheel. It is highly unlikely that all of them have date plans on the same day but calling someone up and asking makes her feel strange so she tries not to unless she’s convinced she’s going crazy alone in her room.

It is a little pathetic, she admits to herself, shuffling in place in yet another room she doesn’t belong in, that the biggest reason she wants to stay is none of the above, but simply the fact that Sana was here, and where Sana was, is where Jihyo also wants to be.

“I should go,” she says.

“No!” Sana says, then collapses in a fit of coughing. When she recovers, red in the face, she waves a reassuring hand at Jihyo. “I mean, I was planning on watching a movie. I’ll just be bored alone.”

“I mean, you can go, if you want to,” she continues, fingers twisting at the ends of her shawl, “but you can also stay. It’s up to you but I…. I’d like it if you stayed.”

And Jihyo’s feet move her to the couch, plant her on it before she can think twice.

Sana is, to her complete lack of surprise, an unsuitable — and that’s putting it lightly — person to watch movies with. She laughs out loud in places nobody has any business laughing out loud in, pauses for a whole minute whenever there’s an animal on screen to coo over it, and chucks popcorn in Jihyo’s direction every five minutes, because she apparently finds her brief annoyance amusing. Then, around the one-hundred-minute mark, somebody dies on screen and Jihyo turns around to see why there’s no accompanying giggle from her companion, only to find out that Sana’s fallen asleep, her head resting against the arm of the couch.

She’s half covered herself with the shawl, but one foot is still sticking out. Jihyo tries pulling down the ends of the shawl down, slowly, to cover it, but Sana unconsciously holds it up from the other end, making a snuffling sound in her sleep so she lets it be. Places a pillow over it instead.

She gets up, meaning to leave, but pauses there again, for some godforsaken reason. Sana’s clearly cold; it’s evident from the way her fingers are clutching the ends of the flimsy shawl, from the way she moves around like she can’t find a comfortable way to rest. So Jihyo takes her jacket off and kneels to place it over the shawl.

She almost gets away with it, but when she stretches her luck by tucking in the collar tight, the rustling wakes Sana up. “Sorry,” she whispers. “You looked cold.”

“I fell asleep?” Sana’s eyes were blinking up at her. From this angle she kind of looks like a cat caught napping. Which probably explains Jihyo’s next urge to take her cheeks between her palms and squeeze. “What happened in the movie? Did the cop die?”

Jihyo nods at her.

Sana whoops tiredly. “Can’t believe I missed that,” she mumbles, her eyes slipping shut for a second too long. Jihyo almost believes she’s fallen back asleep. But her eyes open again, brighter than before, and Jihyo finds herself smiling a little. “What? What are you thinking about?”

Sejeong had fallen sick maybe a total of five times the three years they were together; Jihyo was, embarrassingly enough, more susceptible to changes in weather than her. But she didn’t mind being sick, not that much, because besides the general annoyance of a stuffed nose, what she also would receive in bed was this: gentle lips on her forehead to check temperature, coughing herself awake only for Sejeong to reach for her in her sleep and shush her back to slumber, bowl upon bowl of near-inedible soup that she loved for no reason other than the fact that they were made by someone who cared about her, someone she herself cared for, very, very much.

“It’s difficult…. to go back to being sick alone after you’ve had someone nurse you through it in the past, isn’t it?” Sana stays silent, clearly waiting for her to continue. “I don’t know. I was just thinking about the time I broke my arm like two months after my last breakup.”

But that isn’t what she was thinking about, not really. Momo comes to mind, Momo who has apparently been in Sana’s apartment since after work, cleaning and taking care of her. Dahyun and Chaeyoung, who held her tight as she sobbed over a fresh breakup. Jeongyeon and Nayeon, who slept in the same bed as her whenever she’d get sick, getting up in the middle of the night to press water-soaked rags to her forehead.

Sometimes, she could be a bit of a drama queen. Why else would she convince herself it was her alone against the rest of the big bad world when the big bad world had her friends in it, always ready to make sure she was eating and sleeping well?

“I’d have loved to see fresh-off-a-breakup you,” Sana muses aloud. “Walking around writing sad poetry in bathroom stalls. You probably also gave yourself a pretty awful haircut, didn’t you?”

“Nayeon unnie did, actually,” she replies. “She gave me bangs.”

Sana lets out a gasp. “Photos.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Jihyo ssi.”

“Sana.”

“That’s unnie to you, you know?”

“Okay, that’s it,” Jihyo shakes her head, moving to get up, but Sana grabs her hand, places it between both of hers. “What?”

“Why is it easier?” Sana asks, her gaze serious, hands too warm. Jihyo remembers what they were talking about through her daze. “Being in a relationship while you’re laid up in bed, I mean?”

“Oh, you know.” She stalls for time, wondering what’s a better way to put It’s nice to be babied. “Somebody gets you nice food. Checks your temperature. Asks if you’ve had medicines. Takes — takes care of you.”

Sana blinks once, before raising their joined hands to place Jihyo’s against her cheek. “There, you just checked my temperature.” Sana’s skin is soft and unnaturally hot against the back of her hand, even as she flinches, probably because Jihyo’s hands are always freezing. Jihyo keeps her hand there, too surprised to move it. “And you came over after work to see if I was okay. Brought me food to eat. Asked if I’d had a pill. Does that make you my girlfriend?”

“You wish,” Jihyo says, when she can.

Sana is still looking up at her, her gaze unwavering. The hair that falls over her forehead is slightly parted, just the perfect amount for Jihyo to lean forward and kiss it. If she wanted to.

Thing is, she kind of does. Really, really bad.

“I’m not sure,” she says, before pausing. Sana blinks, curiously. “About your temperature, I mean. Still can’t tell if you’re really warm.”

“Be honest, you just want to torture me with your unnaturally cold hands once more, don’t you? Then again, if it’ll get you to touch me, I can — oh.” The words hang in mid-air. Jihyo moves forward to press her lips to the center of her forehead. Keeps her mouth there for as long as is appropriate for two people who are not-not-dating. Then one second more. “Oh-kay.”

Sana’s voice is squeaky and her cheeks pink, when Jihyo finally moves away.

“You’ll live.”

Sana takes in a deep breath. “Will I?”

So annoying, Jihyo thinks, and on the heels of that thought: So cute.

“Shut up.”

“Okay, I will,” Sana murmurs agreeably, eyes closing. Jihyo looks at her long lashes, her flushed cheeks, the bridge of her nose. “Thank you for taking care of me, Jihyo ssi.”

*****

“I have an idea for our thirty-fifth date,” Sana says into her ear while they’re in the elevator, after work one day.

With four other people, so the whole endeavor is futile anyways. Face burning, Jihyo watches Momo and Nayeon smirk at each other, Dahyun nudge Chaeyoung, and sighs.

One floor down, Tzuyu and Jeongyeon step in. “Why are we smiling?” Jeongyeon asks, while Tzuyu makes her way to stand next to Dahyun.

“We,” Momo says, pointedly, “are smiling because we are discussing Sana and Jihyo’s thirty-fifth date.”

“One, this is not a We situation.” It’s barely an I situation. “Two, we haven’t even been on a second date yet. And three, Jeongyeon, while you were down here Momo broke into your drawer and finished all of your corn snack thingies so maybe you guys should be discussing that instead.”

Momo and Jeongyeon are still arguing over the definition of empty by the time the elevator leads them down, and Jihyo escapes them by ducking behind the nearest car she finds. Sana sticks with her.

“Driver not here yet?” she asks.

“I sent him home,” Sana replies, standing up and promptly banging her head on a side mirror. While they walk, Jihyo assists with injury recovery by rubbing at it and making appropriately commiserating noises, only because she gets the mother of all pouts directed towards her. “Thought we could have our thirty-fifth date today.”

“What, you telling me the whole plot of that insanely convoluted German show wasn’t date enough for you?”

“I’ll have to get you to watch it for real someday. I don’t think words can adequately express the insanity of finding out a girl is her own grandmother through time travel.” Sana opens the passenger door and is planted in Jihyo’s car even before the driver’s side opens, already making herself comfortable by familiarizing herself with the glove box. Jihyo pulls on her seat belt, then watches as Sana touches the little Jigglypuff hanging from the top, checks her own reflection in the mirror and fiddles with the stereo. It only makes her a little self-conscious. “Are you gonna keep staring or drive?”

“I wasn’t staring.” She had been. “And I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“The nearest grocery store.”

“The what?”

“The nearest grocery store,” Sana repeats, innocently. When Jihyo turns to look at her, incredulous, she sighs: “You were talking about shopping earlier, I thought I could accompany you.”

“To do what?”

“Spend time together?” Sana pulls her face up into what looks exactly like the pleading face emoji; it’s ridiculous how much she gets away with simply by virtue of those eyes. Jihyo can practically feel her insides melting into pure goo, willing to give Sana whatever she asks for, no matter how nuts the ask. The grocery store, really. “Alright fine. I realized recently that I’ve never been to a grocery store.”

What the. “How does that happen?”

“It happens when you have people cooking you food and getting you whatever you want from, oh, approximately your birth,” Sana explains. She’s a little red in the face, visible even through the limited lighting in the parking lot. “I go to stores, okay? Just never had to set aside grocery shopping as a separate task, and I think it would be a great character-building exercise.”

“And you want to do that on a date.”

“Yes.” Sana draws the word out into three separate syllables, before biting her lip. “Unless you really don’t want to, in which case, you can just drop me off at the corner and I’ll call a cab or something….”

Jihyo watches her fiddle with the hanging strap of the seat belt, head tucked into her chin, and feels the increasingly familiar urge again; the one that recently has her wanting her to pinch at Sana’s cheeks, squeeze at what looks like baby soft skin and squeal.

But she grits her teeth because despite what her head’s been telling her these days, she’s still fortunately a citizen of Sane and Reasonable Thought processes nation. Refrains.

“Put on your seatbelt.”

Sana’s head springs up. “What?”

“I said,” she says, nostalgic for the person she was two months ago, “put on your seatbelt. Let’s go.”

*****

Sana in a grocery store is excitable, flitting from spot to spot with added squeals for extra effect. So, in essence, Sana in a grocery store is exactly like Sana anywhere else, and Jihyo can barely restrain the perma-smile she can feel developing on her face when yet another perfectly normal thing is pointed out to her as though it is equivalent to a modern-day miracle, like snakes walking or tigers hula-hooping or Nayeon having a nose that wasn’t permanently buried in Jihyo’s business.

(“This is a whole shelf full of cereal,” Sana points out, an eager hand on Jihyo’s arm. It burns. “Can you believe it?”

“Uh huh,” she answers, grinning. Places a hand on Sana’s arm in turn and leads her over to another aisle. Now her hand burns. “You want to see something cooler? How about a whole shelf full of ramen in different flavors?”

Sana gasps, delighted)

Sana is all wide-eyed gazes, fluttering hands that slide through the items on a shelf and pouts when Jihyo pretends to refuse her request for more junk food. The woman’s got a sugar addiction for sure, almost half of their trolley filled with candies and sweet wafers, but Jihyo indulges her, if only so she can be at the receiving end of a bright grin and a squeeze to her arm.

(So she may be a little weak in the face of beautiful girls whose laughter sounded like the bells angels rung up in heaven. Sue her)

Part of the fun is discovering how inept Sana is when it comes to the usual things. The usual things, for example, being the act of taking a random guess at how much a one-liter carton of milk can cost.

(“Ten thousand won?” Jihyo is flabbergasted. “Seriously?”

Sana picks up one, turns it around, and lets out an embarrassed laugh.)

That said, her ineptitude is more adorable than anything. Mostly because Sana’s just so nice about the whole thing. She’s the kind of person who winks at the little kids in front of the freezer, helps them get the snacks at the higher end of the shelves. She says Thank you at least twice to every employee who helps direct them places, and despite herself, Jihyo is charmed.

She also tends to get too excited and walk away and get lost in another aisle, which is a little annoying when Jihyo finishes putting in a six-pack and then looks around to find she’s all alone. A couple of steps later, she finds Sana staring down an aisle, a calculating glint in her eye.

“What now?”

“This aisle,” Sana says. “I bet you can’t slide all the way to the other end.”

Jihyo is wise enough to recognize she’s being baited. “I’m in heels.”

“You have stockings on underneath them.”

That one is accompanied with a waggle of the eyebrows and an up-and-down look that Jihyo is convinced has her blushing furiously.

“Stop it,” she says. “You know I’m competitive.”

“Silly me,” A smirk. “And here I thought running up twenty flights of stairs just to prove a point to Nayeon unnie was normal people behavior.”

(When had Nayeon become Nayeon unnie to Sana?)

Jihyo rolls her eyes at her.

“Then again, it doesn’t matter,” Sana drawls, chin turned up. “Not like you could do it anyway, so….”

(So sure, fine. Jihyo is wise enough to recognize when she’s being baited but not zen enough to let something like that go, so she takes off her heels and promptly bumps into a trolley halfway through, sending it crashing into a poor father of two trying to get baking soda off a shelf)

About half an hour later, they’re finally at the billing counter — an endeavor Jihyo was trying her best to put off. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Choi — a perfectly nice ahjumma by all standards — except for the fact that she is always trying to lightly interfere in Jihyo’s life. The romance aspect of it. Or, as Dahyun and Chaeyoung put it, the lack-of-romance aspect of it.

Either way, it had been a little funny the first five times when she’d tried to set Jihyo up with eligible men, one of them being her barely-able-to-look-a-woman-in-the-eye-without-his-voice-cracking son. A nip less funny the sixth time when Dahyun and Chaeyoung opened their loud mouths in the middle of the store and told her Jihyo’s proclivities lay towards the fairer sex. Definitely not funny now that she’s moved on to showing her photos of women in her church who, as she usually puts in a hushed whisper, were Your kind of women, Jihyo-yah.

If Mrs. Choi tries to set her up with someone here, Sana is never going to let her live in peace. Ever again.

So she sends Sana off to get detergent right before her turn at the counter comes. Almost gets away with it, too — Mrs. Choi only half-heartedly tells her about this new lesbian she ran into at the market while she’s ringing up her items — until she saunters back, way too early.

“I couldn’t find that brand you were talking about,” Sana says. She’s not lying; the brand of detergent doesn’t exist. Then she raises her hands, pouting, and Jihyo sees a chocolate bar trapped between her fingers. “But I did see this.”

“I refuse to enable your sugar addiction.”

But that pout is borderline fatal, piercing at a part of her she usually pretends doesn’t exist, so she finds herself taking it from her and throwing it into the pile yet to be billed. Sana does a little happy dance in place beside her.

Mrs. Choi pauses to look at her, and that’s when Jihyo realizes she’s smiling. Her eyes move from Jihyo to a still bouncing Sana, then back to Jihyo, lighting up with a familiar glint.

Oh no.

“Jihyo, why didn’t you tell me?” Mrs. Choi is giving them her best, widest smile. Jihyo tries her best to avoid Sana’s curious gaze that she can just feel burning holes into her skin. “When did this happen?”

“Um.”

Sana’s head moves between her and Mrs Choi. She leans in closer to Jihyo, murmurs: “When did what—”

“—oh, you two look so sweet together!”

The pin drops in the third second after the words are done coming out; Sana’s head moves again, but only in her peripheral vision. Jihyo is way too chicken to look her in her (most definitely smug) face, so she hands over her card, and stares at the floor.

A hand loops through her arm before warm fingers intertwine with hers. “Really?” Sana asks, her voice quietly delighted. When Jihyo looks up at her, surprised, she’s smiling, almost shyly at Mrs. Choi. “Thank you.”

To her credit, she doesn’t gloat about it afterwards. Just grabs the bags, despite Jihyo’s insistence that she was fine, and struggles with them all the way to the car because of her noodle arms. Adjusts them in place, and slams the back door, before looking at her proudly, as if to say Look, I’m so strong!.

Jihyo looks at her and finds herself wondering what it would be like to hug her. To move forward and bury her face in the soft, expensive-looking fleece of her coat. To feel arms come up and lock themselves over her neck, her back. It’s been such a long time since she’s hugged anyone closely — her friends don’t count, all these years have desensitized her to their hugs — but this would be different. It would be different because this is a girl, a very pretty one at that. Someone who smells like a garden in full bloom, and who rambles on about the world like she’s amazed to be a part of it.

This is Sana — Sana who remembers movie plotlines down to the last detail, Sana who most definitely should go to rehab to deal with her sugar addiction, Sana who drops almost half of her food on the floor because of her clumsiness, Sana who is endearing despite what all of Jihyo’s chipped, jagged edges tell her — and to Jihyo, this makes all the difference, makes all of this new and unfamiliar and thrilling.

Was Sana the kind of person who’d cup the back of her head as she held Jihyo? Was she a squeezer? Would she stand straight and let Jihyo rest her face against the fabric of her dress over her collarbone or lean down and bury her head in Jihyo’s shoulder in turn?

The thought induces a full body shiver, and Sana steps forward, peering at her, worriedly. “Jihyo ssi?” she asks, and Jihyo can feel her face grow hot in response, because dear god, it’s been a long time since anyone’s said her name with this much care. And no one’s ever said her name like Sana does. Like the syllables are dancing an eternal waltz in her mouth. “Are you cold?”

“No, I’m fine,” she answers, but Sana is already moving to remove her coat, despite Jihyo shaking her head. She steps forward to place it over Jihyo’s shoulders, and Jihyo can’t suppress the second shiver that passes through her, at being engulfed by sudden warmth and the scent of familiar, light perfume. “Sana. I’m fine.”

“Damn right you are.”

Usually she would roll her eyes at something like that, if only to dissipate the blush from her cheeks, but in the process of putting the coat over her, Sana had stepped closer, and her breath falters in the middle of her retort.

As if in response, Sana sucks in a breath as well, her eyes falling down, approximately to Jihyo’s nose. Or her chin. Or maybe somewhere in between. Jihyo sees the faint wisps of her breath on the cool air, her lips hanging open a little and wonders….

Wonders what it would be like to kiss her mouth.

Her heartbeat spikes crazily, like a car revving up. Heat crawls down her spine, followed by a chill. Followed by heat again.

Then somebody’s car honks, and she recoils, dropping her keys on the ground. She leans down, fiddles with it and only gets up when Sana has stepped away, rubbing the back of her neck awkwardly.

The spell is broken, and for good measure too, because what in the world were they about to do a second ago?

She doesn’t stop thinking about it, though. Not when she drives them out of the parking lot, onto the streets and through them until the entrance of Sana’s luxury apartment complex. Doesn’t, can’t stop thinking about parted, moist lips under the shitty lighting of the passing streetlights, about the way Sana’s fingers trembled when Jihyo removed her coat, handed it over and their hands brushed. And if the pale, pink flush on Sana’s cheeks and the almost constant pressure of teeth on soft-looking lips were any indication, Jihyo thinks Sana can’t stop thinking about it either.

*****

“So you almost kissed.” The way Jeongyeon says it, she might as well be reading off of a random pamphlet handed out at a bus stop and not the headlines of Jihyo’s daily, no, weekly, no, yearly newsletter instead. “Big deal. Do it for real next time and we’ll talk.”

“This isn’t a joke.” It really isn’t. She’d taken the longer route home so she could empty her mind completely. It hadn’t worked, so once she’d come back, she’d cleaned the whole house, dusting the shelves, arranging and rearranging her books, her collection of vinyls over and over just so she wouldn’t have a lot of time or energy to think about the evening. And yet, here she was, absentmindedly petting her cat with one hand and calling Jeongyeon with the other because her brain just. Wouldn’t. Shut. Off. “I’m not kidding, okay? I’m freaking out!”

“Jihyo, I,” Jeongyeon starts, then pauses. In the background, Nayeon’s voice comes floating in: Babe, come back to bed. She hums in response, then continues in a significantly lower volume. “Talk to me.”

And just as it tends to do when asked to explain itself, her mind blanks, leaving nothing but the wordless echo of an incoherent scream behind. “I don’t know,” she says, feeling her own heartbeat pound away in her ears. The nagging, anxious feeling’s been there for a while now, rendering her unable to make sense of anything. She sighs. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Jeongyeon, you should go sleep. I don’t wanna keep you up.”

“It’s only eleven. Nayeon’s just whining because she gets cold easy. She’ll manage.” Jeongyeon speaks slowly, deliberately. “Are you really upset?”

“I don’t know what I am,” Jihyo tells her. “I can’t do this.”

“Can’t do what?”

“Just. This. Everything.” The tiny crevices of her life Sana’s been pouring herself into, in bite sized quantities. The faint tremble of her heart, like the precursor to a coming earthquake. The thawing of doors slammed, frozen shut a long time ago. “I know what’s coming and I’m not sure I’m okay with it.”

Jeongyeon’s voice, patient as always. “Tell me what’s coming.”

“Good morning texts? Regular meals without having to fill my head by watching a video? Clearing out a space in my closet? Buying a new blanket because the one I have is probably going to make her feel itchy all over?”

Getting mad because she was talking to her ex? Getting mad because she got mad that you were talking to your ex? One day of space. Flower arrangement. Two days of space. Another flower arrangement. A whole week of space, and the sinking realization that it felt better and more peaceful than the last three months of co-existence.

Another flower arrangement.

“It’s nice though, isn’t it?” Jeongyeon asks, softly.

“It ends.” In fire and flame. Or some way quieter, a little less ostentatious. “It ends and there’s almost nothing to show for it except dust and rubble.”

“And love.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, pressing a hand to her chest. Beneath it, her heartbeat pounds along in an anxious and unsteady rhythm. “That goes away.”

“Jihyo,” Jeongyeon asks, seriously, “do you want me to come over?”

Her heartbeat flares up, even faster than it already was, at the thought of having to talk about it face-to-face, where it could all show on her face. The panic, the uncertainty.

The resignation that she was already way past the starting line of whatever this was.

“No,” she answers, shaking her head hard. “No, it’s okay.”

“Jihyo.”

“I’m okay. I mean it, Jeongyeon, please don’t come over, I just, I need some…. space.” From people, but mostly from Sana and her beautiful lips and her scrunched up nose and her huggable arms that smelt like exotic fruit. “I think. I think I’ll work from home the next two days.”

There’s a low whistle on the other end. “You serious?”

“Yeah.” It’s Wednesday. She can work from home the next two days, giving her four days in total to get her head screwed on straight. Just as long as it took to get the stupid thing in her chest to calm down, and it wasn’t going to happen around Sana. “Yeah, I am.”

“Suit yourself,” Jeongyeon says, after a whole minute. “But you’re an idiot if you think Sana isn’t gonna ask where you are.”

*****

On Saturday, Dahyun has a party.

And even though her idea of a party is inviting, like, four people, ordering pizza, screaming Party people!!!! and calling it a day, on the rare occasion that she does decide to throw a serious one, it snowballs until they’re getting noise complaints from the rest of the residents of their apartment building. So, when she’d offered to do one so they all (read: Jihyo) could get their mind off of things (read: Sana and the incredible problem she posed to Jihyo’s life of preferred solitude), Jihyo had listed out every problem they could face.

“If the neighbors complain, we’ll invite them too, unnie,” Chaeyoung had answered, lounging over Jihyo’s couch, Bbuyo curled up on her chest. Then she started ticking off on her fingers. “If Nayeon unnie gets too drunk and starts door-dashing along the hallway, we’ll send her to your apartment and put her to sleep. And if Tzuyu comes, I’ll take out my camera and keep it trained on Dahyun’s face the whole time.”

“Yah!” Dahyun had protested, before jumping on her and creating a mess of two women and one yowling cat on Jihyo’s previously pristine couch.

Either way, Dahyun has a party, and the invite list starts off with their co-workers and some college friends who still lived in the area and then grows out of control about an hour in. They do order pizza, but as more and more people walk in and their apartment starts resembling a rave more fitting of the people they were approximately four to five years ago in college, the food deliveries start branching out as well. And so do the alcohol runs. Jihyo and Nayeon go twice, Chaeyoung once, before they figure out they could just call a guy and have it delivered.

It’s fun in an mind-numbing way, as most parties go. But also as most parties go, the numbness starts grating after a while. Jihyo drinks and eats and dances with Jeongyeon while Nayeon gets progressively drunker and hoots at them from her spot on Chaeyoung’s favorite beanbag. Meets old friends, fields questions about where Sejeong is from people who had no idea they’d long broken up.

“You okay, unnie?” Chaeyoung speaks directly into her ear. She’s nursing some weird cocktail that Dahyun — before she disappeared with Tzuyu — had wrangled together for her and swaying in place. Her eyes are glaring at the back of a retreating Jeonghan-from-Economics’ head. “What’s up with all these people butting into your private life?”

“You once made a chart of all the times I wore heels versus all the times I got laid,” she replies. “I don’t think you get to talk.”

“I can do that; some rando from way back in college doesn’t get to.”

Chaeyoung’s face is mutinous. Jihyo appreciates her loyalty, even if it is a little misplaced. Doesn’t point out that Chaeyoung herself had once been a rando from college, before she’d graduated to what Jihyo usually — with the exception of the times she’d come out of bar graphs and charts trying to correlate something as banal as the length of Jihyo’s bangs to her non-existent sex life — hopes would be a permanent place in her life.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“Are you?”

“I’m fine,” she repeats.

Which is true. It was a party. Everything was fine under strobe lights and shitty music and the suffocating smell of sweat and Axe body spray. Nothing like alcohol to make one realize what really mattered, and what mattered to Jihyo right now was sitting out in the balcony with a can of Heineken and watching the blinking light over the city.

That was it. That was all.

Except.

Except that there’s this nagging feeling poking somewhere around her sternum, and it isn’t the beer she’d chugged down earlier. Something feels off, almost, like she’s forgotten some critical piece of the puzzle. Like switching off the gas, or turning off the water heater. Almost urgent, the feeling niggles away at her until she’s frowning while she stares blankly at the ceiling. Something’s missing.

No, that wasn’t correct. It’s a little more like ordering pizza and then discovering she’s run out of beer and now would have to eat pizza dry, like some sort of ignorant pizza-hating heathen. More like falling asleep on the couch and blearily opening her eyes to realize the warm, comfortable throw was lying on the floor five steps away instead of on top of her. Like traveling someplace with only half of your friend group there and spending the whole time wondering how nice it would be if all of them were together and if the rest of your friends were thinking about you at the moment and if they were missing you and wanting you with them as much as…..

Oh. Fuck. It’s not something she’s missing; it’s someone.

She’s already opened her phone to the chat she’s got going on with Sana — their last conversation being Sana’s multiple, insistent offers to have soup sent over to her place when Jihyo had mentioned that she was taking the days off because she was sick — before she realizes she’s doing and shuts it down again. Wanders out to the balcony, and stares at the blinking tower for exactly seven blinks. Closes her eyes. Opens them again.

Does she….. miss Sana?

The niggling feeling in her chest — one that she’s since recognized as emptiness — replies in the affirmative.

(Also. How could something that was already empty get emptier? Could one dig a bottomless hole? How would one start, with a shovel made of dark matter? This was ridiculous. She was going to draft an email to her alma mater’s philosophy department tomorrow to get clarification on the matter.)

No, she whispers to herself, horrified, then to the blinking light. No.

The blinking light blinks on, as it always does. It probably has no girls to text. Lucky.

She could just text Sana, once. Maybe ask her how the rich people’s party that both she and Momo had had to attend tonight — rendering them unavailable for this one — was going. It wasn’t weird, was it?

Drunk Jihyo, who she’s consulted for this particular query, says no, so she opens up the chat, types in a Hi.

Before backspacing twice, and then three more times good measure. On second thought, why couldn’t she just call Sana and be done with it? At least this way, there would be no chance of being left on read and having that memorialized in history forever.

Sana picks up after three rings, which seems about four rings too far for Jihyo, who was anxiously biting at her lip throughout. “Jihyo ssi?” she says, softly. In the background, there’s the usual sounds of people mingling, random conversation snippets that make no sense. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” Jihyo starts, releasing her lip, which is now bleeding. Then she shakes her head. Then she realizes it probably won’t be visible to Sana unless she were omniscient. “Sorry, I mean. Are you busy?”

“—uh, not—”

“—sorry, stupid question, you probably are. Nayeon told me you were at a party and—”

“—I am, but—”

“—know what, I’m just going to hang up now, this was stupid—”

“—Jihyo!” Sana says, voice still the same volume but somehow firmer. No honorific, no formality. Jihyo feels a strange thrill go through her at the memory, her own name in Sana’s voice replaying in her head. “One, I’m not busy, Mina’s father announced her engagement, yet again, and so everyone’s been hounding her and Momo all evening, leaving me, uh….mostly free. Two, I am at a party, but I’m bored out of my mind and three.”

When there’s a pause, Jihyo speaks. “Three?”

“Three,” Sana repeats. Or sighs. “Don’t hang up. I’m glad you called.”

*****

The relief that hits her when Sana says she’s on her way over makes way for panic almost instantly. Jihyo has to keep her eyes steady on the blinking light for her heart to calm down. When that doesn’t quite work, she grabs two more beers and dunks them in quick succession.

So, by the time Sana’s voice rings out from behind her, teasing and affectionate at the same time, she’s already been lulled into a state of false calm. “Feeling introspective, are we?” Jihyo turns, sees Sana’s silhouette in the doorway. She’s dressed in something that looks like it cost as much as Jihyo’s annual salary — a very sexy something, with a slit running up the thigh, her mind informs her helpfully — and holding a pair of heels in her hand, a handbag hooked over her wrist. When her eyes move over Jihyo, she tuts. “Gosh, you must be freezing.”

Before Jihyo can protest the statement, tell her the beer’s been keeping her warm, she’s already disappearing back into the house. She comes back five whole minutes later, with a blanket in hand. Drapes it carefully over Jihyo’s shoulders, making sure to cover every part of her bare arms, topping off the whole thing by patting the top of her head.

It's so fucking sweet that it makes Jihyo’s head swim. Not the alcohol, not the music blaring from the inside. Sana does it to her.

“Also, you’ll be interested to know,” Sana says, as she plonks herself down beside her, “in my search for something warm, I may or may not have stumbled into a room and seen Dahyun and that other co-worker of yours who always looks like she hates me…..occupied.”

“Tzuyu doesn’t really hate you, she just.” Wait. Hold on. Hold the damn parade. Jihyo stops, processes Sana’s words from a second ago. “Dahyun and Tzuyu?”

Sana’s grin widens. “Yeah.”

“Dahyun and Tzuyu?”

“I just said—”

“—I know, but,” Jihyo pauses, “wow. Wow.”

“Good for them, huh?”

Sana shivers as she says it, and now it’s Jihyo’s turn to frown. “You’re cold too, aren’t you?”

Another shiver. “No,” Sana replies, turning her nose up.

For god’s sake. Jihyo unwraps the blanket from one side, throws it around Sana’s shoulders too. It’s stretching. “Can you move closer?” she asks, hoping the dark masks her blush. “This blanket isn’t big enough.”

Not that she’s looking — because looking would mean blushing and swooning and all sorts of undignified actions she’s better off believing she’s above — but she can sense Sana staring at her for a second, before she gingerly slides closer. Then a little more, until their shoulders brush and their thighs are inches apart.

Shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe. Jihyo likes it.

Drunk Jihyo wishes they were even closer.

There’s an internal struggle, something resembling a bar fight inside her head; Drunk Jihyo wins, so she finds herself closing her eyes, and blindly tilting her head until it hits a soft shoulder. Feels, more than sees, an answering, barely-there tremble that goes through Sana’s body.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, because she’s polite like that. “Do you want me to—”

“—no,” Sana says, quickly. “Don’t.”

Eyes still closed, Jihyo moves her hand, and makes what seems to her like the most momentous decision of the twentieth century; she finds Sana’s arm and moves it around her own shoulder so she’s now leaning half against Sana’s neck. Holds her breath and counts to ten.

“How about now?”

“Still no.” Sana’s voice is hoarse; Jihyo shivers at it. Her other hand rises to hold Jihyo in an awkward, loose hug. “Please don’t.”

They sit in silence for a while. Jihyo stares at the lights over the city, at the small potted plants Dahyun had set in the corner of the balcony. Then she stares at Sana’s fidgeting hands, joined over her right shoulder. Her slender, graceful fingers, the one glittering bracelet dangling off a wrist.

“You shouldn’t have ditched your party for this,” she says, finally. “I told you I was fine.”

“And miss the thirty-second piggyback ride Nayeon unnie gave me on my way in? I think not.” Sana’s voice is light, teasing. “Do you want me to go back?”

Words have never been Jihyo’s thing. Her breath falters instead at the thought of having to say goodbye, at having to go back to leaning against the cold hard wall instead of the gentle arms of the loveliest woman in the whole wide world, so she raises a hand and holds Sana’s wrist lightly.

I want to do this a lot more, she thinks. Thinks I missed you, and maybe it’s a testament to how drunk she is that her mind doesn’t immediately come up with a rebuttal or an explanation as to why that is. It doesn’t even have to be while she’s drunk. Three days of not seeing Sana probably didn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things but since when did the grand scheme of things light up Jihyo’s days like a Christmas tree, buzzing with life and heart? The grand scheme was poor consolation for all those nights she couldn’t sleep, buzzing with anxiety and latent grief over solitude she was supposed to have gotten used to ages ago; now, there weren’t enough minutes in the day to celebrate the happy seconds.

Maybe it was a little strange, having to build herself a coffin, shovel up dirt and climb inside it, only to remember afterwards that she was still alive, that her heart was still capable of and willing to beat steadily, but this kind of strange Jihyo could take.

“It would take a long time,” she says, slowly, not sure what she’s referring to exactly, “to go back.”

“Yeah, it would.” Sana moves forward so her chin is resting over Jihyo’s shoulder. When she speaks, the vibrations both soothe and excite Jihyo. “Plus, I don’t want to.”

Jihyo doesn’t want her to either, so she closes her eyes, and breathes in her presence, feeling content.

“Someone had to come keep you warm, anyways.”

“I wasn’t cold.”

“Nice try,” Sana drawls. “You were wringing your hands when I saw you. You do that when you’re cold.”

Jihyo absolutely does not do that, no way.

“I see that you don’t believe me, so ask Nayeon unnie when she can think tomorrow.” Sana speaks with such conviction; Jihyo is a little curious. “Want to know your other tells?”

“No.” Yes.

Sana talks, regardless. “You rub the back of your neck when you’re feeling awkward. Poke at the mole on your nose when you’re thinking. Tilt your head slightly to the left when you’re listening, but don’t want me to know. Rub at your eyes when—”

“—okay, Sana,” she says, a little desperately. Like someone had drawn the curtains from the outside and seen her dancing in her bedroom with a hairbrush for a mic; Jihyo is all forms of embarrassed.

“Either way,” Sana goes on, a little quieter, “that’s how I know you were cold.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have a problem with that if that someone would return my jacket they stole a month ago.”

Sana gasps, dramatically. “You gave it to me.”

“I lent it to you.”

“Then I’m still borrowing it.” The answer is cheeky, and Jihyo has a hard time keeping her smile contained, so she doesn’t. A moment of silence. “Are you feeling better now?”

It takes her a minute to understand what Sana’s referring to. “Yeah, I,” she starts, then pauses. She doesn’t want to lie anymore. “I wasn’t actually sick, Sana.”

Sana’s cheek nudges against hers, stays; Jihyo realizes it’s because she’s smiling too. “I know.” Jihyo turns to look at her, surprised. “If I thought you really were sick, I’d have sent you soup every day.”

“I was promised a home visit—”

“—yeah, yeah,” Sana answers. “Wanna tell me what that was about?”

“I don’t mean to be difficult, you know,” Jihyo tells her, struggling to put one word after another. Every phrase a landmine; one wrong intonation and she runs the risk of giving Sana the wrong idea. Which is funny, because she’s been trying to do that deliberately this whole time. “It’s just — I’m not used to. Change.”

“I know,” Sana says, with an earnestness that twinges at rusty parts of her that have been coming back to life more recently.

“I have a bed for two, but I let my cat sleep on the other side. All my closets are full. My medicine cabinet is cluttered, and I still have empty bottles from 2014 because I hate throwing things out, even if they’re long past the point of usefulness. I whine about needing a video to watch every time I eat, but really, most of it is just so I won’t look like a lonely loser eating alone. I’m very particular about mealtimes. And my daily routines.”

“Okay.”

“And that’s not even to speak of the laundry list of problems I have. I get irrationally mad when somebody wakes me up from my afternoon nap on weekends—”

“—okay—”

“—and I’m a hypochondriac, whose paranoia extends to her friends’ lives so I’m always scheduling them bi-annual check-ups at the doctor’s—”

“—okay—”

“—and dating! I haven’t even held a hand since like three years ago—”

“—okay—”

“—or even slept with anyone since then—”

“—okay,” Sana repeats, like she has been, for the past minute, before blinking. “What?”

“That’s what you get hung up on?”

“Almost three years?”

“Shut up.” Jihyo bet if she tried hard enough, she could physically will the blood she was feeling rush to her cheeks, away. So far she was still trying. “I was busy. Had things to do.”

Sana opens her mouth again, presumably to say something as inane as Almost three years again, but before she can, Jihyo extracts an arm out of the tangle and presses an index finger over her lips. “No more,” she demands, registering, faintly, how soft Sana’s lips seem to be underneath her skin.

Soft and pliant. They’d sink into hers if Jihyo leaned forward, wouldn’t they?

Jihyo isn’t drunk enough to try that, though, so she just stares. And wonders.

Sana presses a kiss to the middle of her finger.

“Why did you.” Her voice is garbled when she wrenches her hand away, and shakes it, for some reason. Like that would help with the burn. Like a tattoo could be shaken off that easily. Then she just gives up and covers her face with the hand, hiding her eyes. “Do that.”

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”

“Kiss my index finger?”

“For starters, yes.” A hand touches her fingers, pulls them down so she and Sana are looking at each other again. “I like it very much. It’s short and cute. Just like you.”

Jihyo can’t be sure, but she thinks she short-circuits for a whole five minutes. When she finds her way back, they’re squeezed together again, with Sana’s chin resting on top of her shoulder, their cheeks millimeters apart.

“I once had this…. argument with my ex-girlfriend,” she starts. Sana hums in response, encouraging her to go on. “No idea how it started, no idea how it finally ended, but I do remember her saying to me: I thought love meant you were willing to change. And I—”

She trails off, going back to a rumpled bed, the remnants of breakfast on the nightstand beside them. The television going on in the background. I thought love meant I wouldn’t have to change, she’d answered, after a minute, and watched Sejeong’s face fall in slow motion. That you’d love me just like this.

“I say this so you know that I’m not very capable of consideration, Sana. Or accommodation. Not the way you deserve, anyway.” Because Sana deserves it all: someone able to open their universe up, build for her a home, hell, a whole planet inside it. Deserves a heart that is intact and whole, not spider-webbed with tiny cracks left inside it over the years. A hand to hold that isn’t still haunted by phantom touches of all those it has held and then dropped over the years. “I don’t want you to… be disappointed when you find out what I’m really like. Because I snap when I’m anxious and I worry too much about whether I’d be able to complete all the rings on my stupid watch and I thought I was going to be alone forever, so I’ve built my whole life that way and sometimes I think love just wasn’t made for me the same way cream tops wash Dahyun out and Whamisa makes Nayeon’s hair frizzy as hell.”

There’s silence after she’s done, the only thing remaining faint music still blaring from the inside, and the sound of Sana’s even breaths, next to her.

Then there’s a sigh.

“Your ex-girlfriend was right,” Sana says, staring out into the distance.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You were wrong. Love does mean having to change. But Jihyo chan,” Sana pauses, and Jihyo is grateful for it, because it gives her a chance to savor the Jihyo chan, tuck it away behind her ear like a flower, for it to replay in her head whenever she feels sad. Jihyo chan. “You started carrying extra tissues in your bag because you figured out I was a messy eater. You gave me your jacket when I was sick, even when you tend to get cold easier. You set me up to win the plushie, even though you’re, quite frankly, disturbingly competitive. You ate the awful food I made, every day, without complaint, because you didn’t want to make me sad—”

“—it was only because I hate wasting food.”

Sana turns, looks at her so fondly Jihyo has to fight the urge to turn away and hide. “You’ve already been accommodating me in a million different ways. Even if you don’t know it.”

“Sana.”

“Yes?”

“You’re sure about this?” A final plea. Maybe Jihyo could break out her powerpoint of a 101 problems with Park Jihyo again, if Sana refused to acknowledge the severity of her inadequacy. “You want to spend time with a chronic worrywart and semi-permanent recluse?”

“Stop fighting me on this, already,” Sana whines, adorably. “You can keep worrying, that’s alright. But stop fighting me when I tell you I want this. Grumpy afternoon naps, hypochondria, and all.”

It is not time to ask Why, even though Jihyo itches to; it isn’t usually in her nature to let things go without doing adequate research. But Sana sounds sure, looks sure when she gazes steadily on at her, and so Jihyo thinks she can let it go, just this once. No more notes on her phone, no more powerpoint presentations full of correlations and causations, no more asking the sun why it wanted to court the moon — drab and devoid of light and full of freckles — of all celestial objects.

Maybe the sun was a besotted idiot. Jihyo could relate.

“I want this too,” she says. Hears Sana suck in a breath, sharply, and bury her head in Jihyo’s shoulder. Goes on, regardless, before fizzling out: “You. This. And the. Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Sana’s voice is adorably muffled; the vibrations of her words cause goosebumps along Jihyo’s arm. “Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah, it’s good.” A thorough head-shaking into her skin; Jihyo looks on, both amused and shy, as Sana finally raises her head, having mostly recovered save the bright crimson all over her face. “Okay, I can be cool now. Park Jihyo just wants to date me. Totally cool.”

Ugh, why is so so.

Beautiful. Adorable. Lovable.

“I thought we were already dating.”

“But you refused to acknowledge it,” Sana argues. Then she blinks, as though something’s just occurred to her. “Hey! You’re drunk right now.”

“What does that have to—”

“—what if you don’t remember this in the morning?”

Sana looks so distressed at that, Jihyo reaches forward to pat her on the head. Kind of freezes a second later, but powers through, regardless. She’s got to get used to this. To doing things she wants to do.

If Sana’s quiet smile at that is any indication, she likes it too.

“Just remind me, then.” Remind me that an immovable object swayed to a lost song, and that an unstoppable object somehow paused enough to just gently nudge at it. “Remind me, and I will know.”

“I will, but.” Sana digs around in her handbag until she’s dug out a pen from within its confines. She brandishes it triumphantly in the air before uncapping it. “May I?”

“May I what?”

A hand wraps itself around Jihyo’s wrist, aligns it so her pen hovers over the inside of her forearm. Sana taps at her smartwatch, presses a couple of buttons to check out her heartbeat. Finds it adequately elevated, and grins. “May I?”

At Jihyo’s nod, she starts scribbling, diligently. Jihyo allows herself to look, at Sana’s hair falling over in waves, the two and a half lines on her forehead, at the slight pout that seems to make an experience whenever an action requiring extreme concentration is in progress. Tells herself it’s okay to be feeling the hitch in her breath, the unsteady gait of her heartbeat, the longing in the tips of her fingers asking her to reach out and touch, touch, touch.

But telling herself that isn’t good enough as actually doing it, so she finds herself brushing some of the hair back from Sana’s forehead. Lingers over the skin there. Smooths out the lines. Presses a thumb to a divot.

“Have you been holding back this whole time, Park Jihyo ssi?” Sana murmurs, her eyes glinting bright. Her pen pauses for a bit.

Jihyo leans forward, kisses the spot her thumb was touching. “You have no idea, Sana-yah.”

Sana’s smile melts into something infinitely softer.

*****

So her right arm says Dating Minatozaki Sana (for real this time), and Jihyo spends only five minutes swooning at it, before she steals the pen and scribbles Dating Park Jihyo (since forever) on Sana’s arm in return.

Sana swoons for even longer. It’s probably the cutest thing Jihyo has ever seen. Maybe rivalled only by Sana in front of the claw machine or Sana taking a bite of her own food, or Sana—

—well, doing anything, really. Now that Jihyo is letting herself be, she’s discovered she may be a bit of a loser.

“No!” Sana looks indignant. “You’re not a loser!”

“You might be a little biased, Sana.”

“I am, but,” Sana pauses, looking like she’s searching for words internally, “you are the most wonderful woman in the world. And I am the happiest woman in the world.”

“Here,” she says, because now Sana’s eyes on her are starting to burn in an unbearably nice way. Pulls Sana’s arm again, trails the back of the pen over the letters until she gets to the very end. Then she flips it around and etches a tiny heart there, right after the closing parenthesis.

Sana makes an unintelligible noise in her throat.

Jihyo pulls the arm, presses a kiss to the crook of Sana’s elbow, right over the tiny heart she’s just drawn.

Sana turns bright red, throws her free arm over her eyes, and screams.

And even with all of that, it’s possible she’s only the second happiest woman in the world tonight. Jihyo’s gonna fight her for it. She’s been told she’s disturbingly competitive, after all.

Chapter Text

Sana once had three problems, three very big and pressing problems: one, the vending machine wouldn’t yield its glorious bounty to the likes of her, apparently, two, there was a ring weighing heavy inside her brand-new Hermes bag, and three, she was halfway in love with a strange woman she was yet to see the face of.

“Don’t worry, I have a machine just like this in my office,” the woman said, massive black sunglasses with pineapples on them, perched on her face. In broad nightlight. During a Christmas party. Its charms were only accentuated by the red-colored top hat she was donning. What an intriguing weirdo. Sana had never wanted to get to know someone more. “You need to hit it just right and.” She nearly stumbled; Sana lunged forward to steady her. “Sorry, can you point me towards the — yes, thank you.”

She knocked her shoulder against the glass and suddenly the packet of wafers Sana had paid for fell out of the slot. One problem down.

Two more to go.

It wasn’t like Sana was the kind of idiot to fall in love at first sight. It wasn’t like love at first sight even existed. It definitely wasn’t like Momo’s plan to propose to Mina today of all days was spurring on her romantic side to finally settle down. It was just—

—just that Sana saw possibilities. A flower in a bud. A butterfly in the wrinkled body of a caterpillar. A rainbow in a storm. And what was love if not the culmination of every beautiful possibility in the world?

Just that when a stranger had collided with her, Sana had heard her sweet, worried voice babbling on about These stupid glasses, smelt a strangely intoxicating mixture of champagne and lavender and thought Oh. Now where did you come from?

So no, Sana wasn’t in love in the way where she was ready to climb up the Lotte World Tower and set fireworks off for a woman she didn’t even know the name of. But maybe she could see the building blocks already, could feel the stone of the two thousand and seventeen steps underneath her feet.

A lego tower constructed out of the flimsy strings of fate. Maybe she wanted to see this one through.

“Every year for the past three years in the same building for the same lame Christmas party,” the woman continued. “I know everything about this place.”

“Thank you,” Sana answered, and then, even if it hurt her to let this strangely intriguing sun-glassed, top-hatted woman go without getting her name or her number, she offered: “Um, do you need me to guide you somewhere or…”

“Oh, no I can see!” The woman craned her neck back, almost like she was looking at Sana at an angle. The hat almost fell off, saved only by the quick hand she shot out to balance it. “Well, sort of. Kind of. Maybe from the bottom half…. thing is, my friend bet me I couldn’t make it through a work party wearing these ugly things, and I do not take bets lying down.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Why does Nayeon unnie do anything? To make my life more difficult.” That one was said in a mumble. She stretched out her arm until she found the nearest wall, and leaned against it. Sana followed, stood next to her. “Ah. I think it’s mostly because she knew I was planning on texting my ex-girlfriend.” She pointed at the phone in her hand. “And knew the only way to stop me was to distract me. That’s what’s at stake, by the way. Jihyo, if you can make it one hour without injuring yourself, I’ll know you’re not doing this because you’re inebriated. Joke’s on her, I’m very inebriated. And I’m gonna win when time’s up in the next five minutes anyway.”

The lego tower came crashing down.

“You could always cheat and text her.” Saying the words came very close to killing her, and no, Sana was not exaggerating.

The woman — Jihyo, her name was — shrugged.

Something occurred to Sana, then. “Do you want to win?”

“I don’t know,” Jihyo spoke, in a rush. From what Sana could see of her face — which wasn’t a lot — she seemed anxious, the corners of her lips downturned. “It was my idea like an hour ago, but now — I don’t know. What if — what if she’s already dating someone else? I just look like an idiot that way, don’t I?”

“How long has it—”

“—a year. And eight months. Fifteen days.” The last part came out in an embarrassed-sounding whisper; Sana wanted to laugh but she wouldn’t dare. Not in the face of this sad, pretty woman. “I’m over her, though! It’s not like I’m pining away or something! I’m just — I’m just a little drunk and I’d like to know how. How she’s doing. Or whatever.”

There was a pause; Sana tried to process, opening the packet in her hands and biting into one wafer.

“I’m sorry,” Jihyo said, facepalming, then winced when her glasses hit her nose. “I’m being so rude. Are — do you work at TDOONG ent?”

“Um.”

“G mag? D.O consultancy?”

There was no good way to say what she really was, which is the daughter of the owner of all of these firms having a Christmas party here, so she tried buying time by chewing on another wafer vigorously. My father, she started in her head, then crossed it out, automatically. I broke into the place to commit a murder would honestly go over way better than I’m the rich brat who’s going to take over the company you work at in a couple of years.

She finally decided on: “I’m here because my best friend wanted to propose to her girlfriend tonight. Look, here’s the ring.” Then she realized that Jihyo was temporarily visually challenged so she shoved the expensive ring that Momo had blown nine months of savings on, back into her bag. “She was worried she’d jump the gun and hand it over to Mina before time, so she gave it to me, instead. I’m just waiting for her text.”

“Aw,” Jihyo gushed, before: “Oh my god. There are people proposing to their girlfriends at this party. What am I doing with my life?”

“Wearing fun glasses and talking to a beautiful stranger?”

“I can’t even see you. Not that you can’t be beautiful, obviously,” Jihyo stammered, hands fluttering adorably in the air like she was actually worried Sana would be offended. “Like, even your voice sounds like it’s way, way out of my league.”

That is absolutely not true, but Sana let it pass. “If you say so.”

“Oh, well.” Jihyo pursed her lips. Hummed. “I’m happy for your friend, though. Good for her.”

From roping Sana into helping her climb up a dorm room balcony to serenade a pretty girl to asking the pretty girl to marry her. Sana was happy for Momo, herself.

“But it’s given you an existential crisis now.”

“Well, doesn’t it give you an existential crisis when you think about it?” came the reply, instantly. “It’s not just…. you know, your friend. It’s everyone in the world who’s settling down or getting somewhere while the highlight of your week is going grocery shopping because you heard they have a new brand of fabric softener available now. Or, you know, having a nice long cry as soon as the clock strikes midnight and it’s your birthday because suddenly you’re twenty seven and wasn’t this the year your girlfriend of five years or something was supposed to propose to you with a slideshow of your everyday-romantic moments together while your friends looked on and cheered? Don’t you sometimes, I don’t know, feel like—”

“—time’s running out?”

Jihyo sighed. “Yeah. That.”

“I used to think I was wasting it,” Sana told her and found herself glad Jihyo couldn’t see her because this was embarrassing to admit already. “Time, I mean. Like every minute I was not trying to find the great big love of my life was a minute wasted and an activity down the drain and — yeah.”

“So what do you do?”

“You stop thinking that. Just because the sunset is pretty doesn’t mean all those hours the sun’s right above our heads doesn’t matter.” Her cell vibrated; she continued, ignoring it. “I like what I’m doing most days, even if it’s just lazing around and watching Mina butcher demons in a nerd game or having to come up with an endorsement for the worst gay club in the history of Itaewon. I like where I am right now, too, you know? Holding a pack of wafers and talking to a beautiful stranger. I don’t think any of this is a waste of time.”

Jihyo ducked her head. “Do you — are you trying to flirt with me?”

“Would it make you feel better if I said yes?”

“I just…. feel the need to remind you that we met while I was in the process of texting my ex-girlfriend,” Jihyo said, sounding more guilty than anything.

Sana’s phone was vibrating again. “Well, then, why don’t you? Time’s up, isn’t it? Been an hour,” she said, taking out her phone to throw it into oblivion, or silence it. Silence it, probably; she was rich, not stupid — before she saw the screen light up with fifty new messages. One quick scroll told her it was all Momo, with texts increasing in urgency until the last one just read ABOUT TO ASK WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU. “Oh. Fuck. Fuck fuck fucking hell.”

“Your friend?”

“She’s about to propose and I have to run or she’ll kill me.” Momo truly was going to kill her. Then bury her. Then dance over her grave. She prepared to sprint up the nearest staircase, before: “Before I go, are you going to text her? Your ex?”

“I don’t know,” Jihyo asked, raising her hand and covering her face with it. Her glasses jostled comically. “Should I?”

“I’d answer that if I didn’t have a personal investment in this. What if you end up being the love of my life?”

She was already running by the time Jihyo spoke again. “Love of your life?” she called out, sounding amused. “You won’t even remember me tomorrow!”

And Sana almost wanted to turn back, hand over her number, her heart, tell this strange, anxious, beautiful woman she could do whatever she wanted with either of those things, wanted to let her gut feeling take over and spend the night talking away with her, but her best friend was probably waiting on a balcony somewhere, kneeling and some things truly did take precedence. So—

“I disagree, Jihyo ssi,” she called back, “I don’t think you’re the kind of girl I’d easily forget!”

*****

Just over a year later, Sana remembers that night almost as though someone took the time and effort to scribble a footnote in the book of her, chapter number Twenty-Eight titled This is where your life changes forever. Eyes closed, she can almost feel the smoothness of the oak banister as she ran up the stairs to the balcony Momo had had everything set up. There’s the continuous vibration of her phone in her dangling, swaying Hermes bag, the vigorous thumping in her chest not entirely attributed to the fact that she was sprinting. Heads turning, doors thrown open, until she finally came upon the balcony, saw customized fireworks going off in the distance, and Momo — who she’d later come to find was desperately stalling and fumbling for conversation topics in the face of a fondly amused Mina — kneeling on the ground. I met a girl, Sana had told them, breathlessly, and then Momo had turned to her, glaring. For fuck’s sake, Sana, I’m trying to propose here. And then Mina had laughed out loud.

“You’re never going to tell her,” Momo declares, easily, while they’re taking a walk through the lawns on the resort. People mill about, setting up the tent and tables for the wedding, but thankfully do not notice one of the brides, clad in an oversized hat and a mask, walking along with a woman holding a hyperactive dog in her arms. “This is gonna become one of those secrets that destroy a family, mind you. You and Jihyo will end up getting married and adopt like five children and then one fine day when you’re in your fifties, she’ll find out you went on like seven blind dates with every single Jihyo working under Minatozaki Enterprises until you finally found the one you’d met at a Christmas party ages ago and she’ll kick up a fuss because she’s Jihyo and no matter how much she pretends to be tranquil about irrelevant shit, she’s secretly the most dramatic out of all of us—”

“—Nayeon unnie included?”

“Nayeon unnie included,” Momo says, solemnly. She pats a wriggling Boo on his little head and he thankfully calms down in Sana’s arms. “I suggest you lawyer up in advance so you can keep at least two of your kids.”

“Can I just point out that none of this would be happening if it had only occurred to you that you yourself had a friend called Jihyo—”

“—and can I just point out to you that I’d have thought of Jihyo earlier if you’d described her as anything other than the woman who had stolen your heart forever, which, as sweet as it sounds, wasn’t exactly descriptive—”

“—oh, fuck you,” Sana protests, panting. One second later, she realizes it’s because Momo’s sped up, her steps now wide and eager. Another second after that, the reason comes into view: the top of Mina’s head, from over the tall hedges of the garden. She seems to be talking to someone. “Who’s Mina talking to?”

Momo turns to give her a look. “Uh,” she snorts, walking backwards. “Your girlfriend?”

Well, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Because Sana’s almost at the point where she can see the top of another head and last time she’d checked, Jihyo’s head was a gorgeous shade of brown, definitely not bright red—

“—oh my god,” she murmurs when they finally round the corner, because yes, that is indeed her girlfriend, and she does indeed have hair a shade of crimson now. “You — your….”

Somewhere in her periphery, Momo and Mina are reuniting like they haven’t spent most of their adult life — including last night while Sana had to cover for them — together, and Boo has jumped out of her arms to frolic around them, but none of that matters right now, not when Jihyo stands in front of her, eyes squinting in the sunlight, one hand playing with the ends of her hair. It’s been a whole week since they’ve had time to meet — Sana had flown down here early with Momo and Mina because there were a horrendous number of things to prepare for when a wedding was involved — and that means her eyes have had time to go back to a state of pre-Jihyo, go back to a world where mundane things like sunrises and sunsets were widely believed to be the be all and end all of beauty.

As if. Show her a sunset that came close to the graceful curve of Jihyo’s chin, the mild arch of her eyebrows, the calm ocean of her light brown eyes.

Somebody clears their throat. Sana drags her eyes away. The haze clears.

Mina’s looking at her, amused. “I was just in the middle of telling Jihyo here about the time you upturned a cake in the face of—”

“—why must you do this to me?” she begs, embarrassed. “I brought your fiancée to you and had to listen to her whine the whole way. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

“Not nearly,” Mina shoots back, smirking, as Momo flips Sana off. “But Jihyo can tell you all about that later.”

Sana gets halfway through her question as they’re walking away, before she turns back and the fresh sight of Jihyo has the other half evaporating in her throat. “Hi,” she says, awestruck again, unable to tear her gaze away from Jihyo’s hair. “Your hair looks….” Like angels spun clouds into threads, sprinkled them with color personally, and deposited them on top of your head. “Nice.”

“Thank you,” Jihyo murmurs back. She looks like she’s struggling a little, her hands clenching and relaxing, before she pitches forward and wraps her arms around Sana. “Hi.”

And even though she knew this was coming — Jihyo had her tells, whether it came to her narrowed eyes when she was feeling rather competitive, or her fidgeting arms when she wanted to indulge in physical affection and wasn’t sure how to ask — it still knocks the breath out of her. Palms stretched out over the small of her back, a forehead against her hair, slightly uneven breaths in the crook of her neck. Funny how it’s taken her twenty-nine years to figure out that this was the secret to happiness. To hold the girl you love, to keep saying Hi back and forth until one of you gives in and finally replaces it with I missed you instead.

Or maybe the secret to happiness was simply Park Jihyo. If Sana had more of a scientific mind, she’d try to figure it out. For now, this is enough.

Since Jihyo has already made the first move, Sana has no qualms about making the rest easier on her. “I missed you,” she says, breathing in deeply, feeling Jihyo’s body move along with hers like in a well-practiced dance. “Jihyo yah.” And she knows, just knows that Jihyo is smiling at that. Call it a gut feeling. “I missed you so much. I thought I was going to die.”

“So dramatic,” Jihyo answers, into her hair, but her hold on Sana tightens to the point of hurt. It’s the good kind. “I missed you too. So, so much. I made Nayeon come down with me to your section of the office all the time, just so I could get to the perfume bottle in your drawer and take a sniff.”

The image is so funny that Sana has to laugh.

“I’m not kidding!” Jihyo whines, embarrassed. “Like I’m addicted. It’s highly annoying. You need to do something about that.”

“Stop storing backup perfume at the office?”

“Where will I get my hit, then?”

“Change perfume brands?”

“I’ll just get addicted to that one,” Jihyo replies, sighing. “No point.”

“How about we never take this long a break between seeing each other again?” Sana suggests, for completely altruistic reasons.

Jihyo nods.

“Did Mina bother you too much?”

“No, I like her. She’s nice.” The tiny anxious knot lodged in Sana’s stomach dissolves. Her best friends were complete pains but they were also, very unfortunately, important to her and it was necessary that Jihyo not hate them. Or vice-versa but that was impossible anyway. Jihyo was impossible not to love. “I’m just worried she might not like me. I quite literally knocked her down because I couldn’t see her hiding behind the hedges. And then I started nervous rambling. You know how I get.”

She does know how Jihyo gets. It’s adorable.

“I’m sure that was her fault and not yours.” Serves them right for all the hiding and sneaking off to meet each other. Like Mina would disintegrate into dust if she went without exchanging saliva with Momo for more than five hours. “For what it’s worth, I think she does. Like you, I mean. She was talking to you, that’s always a good sign. She usually clams up around strangers.”

Jihyo hums, taking in a couple of deep breaths. Then something else occurs to Sana.

“Oh, also. What was Mina talking about earlier? About extending my suffering or something?”

“Yes. That.” Jihyo finally disengages from her to stare at somewhere close to Sana’s neck, pink in the face. “So I found out that couples are supposed to share rooms.”

“Okay?” Why should that be an issue? “Are you worried about the singles? Or Dahyun and Tzuyu? Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they’ve put them far, far away from each—”

“—Dahyun and Tzuyu are not the issue,” Jihyo says, the color on her cheeks deepening. Then she shakes her head. “Well, I mean. Other than the fact that they didn’t look at each other the whole way here, that is. But, um, that’s not the. Thing.”

“So what is?”

“Sana,” Jihyo says, very seriously, finally looking her right in the eye. “Couples are supposed to share rooms. They, um. Had me put my stuff in yours.”

That’s when it hits her. “Motherfuc—”

*****

Of course they’ve kissed. Everyone knows that. Everyone ought to know that — Jihyo had, after all, spent the whole next day bright red in the face and stammering every time they were within five meters of each other. The only reason Sana hadn’t teased her about it was because she herself had spent most of the day in a daze as well, replaying the moment over and over in her head: Jihyo’s face, cast in half-shadow through the streetlight, her lips, unbearably warm and pliant when they moved over hers, her soft whimper when Sana had nipped at her bottom lip. Sana’s stomach swooping every time she felt Jihyo’s grip tighten on her waist.

Either way, they have kissed. Done other stuff too, like make out on Jihyo’s couch while her stupid cat Bbuyo glared at Sana from his vantage point near the window, make out on Jihyo’s kitchen counter while her stupid cat Bbuyo glared at Sana from his favorite seat on the edge of the couch, make out against the door with Jihyo’s hands trailing dangerously close to Sana’s chest while her stupid cat Bbuyo….

Bbuyo truly was a stupid cat. Sana could not stress that enough.

“I asked you one question and all you’ve done is criticize that adorable boy,” Nayeon says, an unimpressed look on her face as she reclines against one of the pool lounge chairs. She’s sipping at a drink out of a coconut; if Chaeyoung is to be believed, this is her fifth and it hasn’t even been three hours since they all arrived. “Why have you not had sex yet?”

“My rose,” Jeongyeon interjects, a pained look on her face. Sana takes this chance to fan at herself. “Remember what we discussed earlier? You cannot ask people why they haven’t had sex because it’s none of our business.”

“Jihyo’s business is my business, and by extension, yours as well,” Nayeon informs her, primly. Then: “Can I ask why we haven’t had sex—”

“—dear god, it’s been like two days.”

Sana waits patiently for them to stop bickering, takes the time to rearrange her thoughts. When Nayeon finally remembers her existence, she’s ready.

“We’re taking our time.”

“You’re taking your time, you mean,” Nayeon says, finishing up her drink. Jeongyeon, ever-patient, ever-besotted, gets up to get her another one. “Because Jihyo’s ready, bud.”

What. “Did — did she say anything?”

“Unfortunately, the best friend code prevents me from—”

“—you’ve been discussing Jihyo unnie’s personal life for about an hour now,” Chaeyoung, who’s just slid into Jeongyeon’s chair, drawls. “Give her a break.”

“And what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping Dahyun and Tzuyu apart?”

“Ugh, I’m sick of them,” Chaeyoung replies, and Sana follows Nayeon’s gaze to the other end of the pool, where Dahyun and Tzuyu are sitting with one pool chair between them, each one taking it in turns to look at each other. “You listen to Dahyun and it’s all She was the one who left the next morning before I woke up and then you go to Tzuyu and she’s all I don’t think Dahyun likes me like that, look at all the girls hovering around her and you know what, it’s been months I have a life of my own!”

Dahyun and Tzuyu are such an interesting case. Maybe it’s because Sana is relatively new to the dynamic between them, but she loves watching them around each other. It’s always been so cute, like two teenagers flirt across benches on diagonally opposite ends of a classroom, through crumpled up notes, misfired and never read. A little funny how they were two of the most private people in the group — as opposed to Nayeon and Chaeyoung who couldn’t keep a secret for more than, oh, approximately five seconds after hearing it — and yet were almost completely transparent when it came to their affection towards each other. Like they were lab rats under her study, Sana sometimes spent her spare time making little mental notes about their behavior and passing it all on to Jihyo for her input.

She’s idly doing the same now, filing away the sheer awkwardness as something she’s going to gleefully tell Jihyo about later, when there’s movement out of the corner of her eye and she turns to her right, only to nearly fall out of her chair.

Her girlfriend’s emerging from the lobby doors, clad in a skimpy swimsuit, in slow motion.

Or maybe she was moving fine and it’s just Sana’s inability to process all of that…. skin all at once. All the symptoms of being drunk hit her in the span of a second — the dizziness, the pounding heartbeat, the urge to slump over and lie down on the floor.

When there’s a massive splash, she realizes her brain’s finally caught up. Registers the sight of Jihyo swimming over, and looking up at them. Water dripping from her glistening shoulders, golden skin. Hair slicked back, golden, touchable skin. Bright, beautiful eyes, golden, touchable and kissable skin—

What the fuck, she thinks, feeling unreasonably hot around the face. How the fuck was she supposed to survive three nights with that?

“They’re taking their time,” Nayeon helpfully informs someone — probably Chaeyoung — just as Jihyo waves and swims away again.

“This is my life on the line, okay?” Sana whines, when she can stop gawking. “It’s not funny.”

Chaeyoung high-fives Nayeon. “I dunno, man, we think it’s extremely funny.”

And if they weren’t the closest friends of the woman she’s planning to one day marry, Sana would flip them off. Instead, she covers her eyes with her hands — resists the temptation of Aphrodite Incarnate in the water — and grumbles away.

*****

Though Jihyo is usually the one who keeps track of the big moments and their dates — she’s got an excel sheet, color coded — Sana’s got a whole separate list in her head as well. The night after their first date, when she’d immediately gone over to Mina’s place afterwards and bugged her into finding an adequate video so she could send it to Jihyo. The first time Jihyo had managed to finish all the food Sana had made her, burnt vegetables and all. The evening they almost kissed and Sana had spent the whole night tracing patterns on the ceiling with her eyes, unable to get a wink of sleep. The evening they actually kissed and Sana had spent the whole night with the image of Jihyo’s face plastered on the back of her eyelids, unable to get a wink of sleep.

This night goes on the list too, Sana decides, while she’s in the middle of removing her makeup. Her vacant gaze leads her to Jihyo, sitting on the bed and looking back at her through the mirror.

“What?” she asks.

Jihyo’s smile widens, her eyes shimmering with affection. “Nothing,” she says, easily applying lotion onto her arms and legs. “You’re pretty.”

Pretty with makeup, pretty without it. Pretty through the mirror in a hotel room with dim lighting. Sana believes her.

There are so many things to discover about a person: what brand of hand cream they preferred, the scent of their moisturizer, whether or not they preferred their phone to stay right-side up while it charged. Jihyo places her glasses on the nightstand, as opposed to Sana, who just throws them onto her bed when she’s feeling too lazy. She likes pulling her hair up while in bed and her favorite hair clutcher is navy blue in color. The pajamas she’s wearing are a little too long for her, brushing the tops of her ankles, swishing around when she walks.

It’s funny how they call it going through the motions, when everything Jihyo does, seems to Sana like this wondrous discovery, something akin to man’s first exploration of the moon. Regardless, Sana takes note of every little detail, her eyes following Jihyo’s movements like a little puppy, a smitten smile fixed on her face.

Jihyo’s own smile stays on all throughout the evening, right up until there’s a knock on the door and Sana directs the resort workers to place a brand-new mattress next to the bed.

“Can I ask—”

“—it’s for me,” Sana tells her, hoping for no more follow-up questions.

Unfortunately, life’s not that easy. “What do you mean it’s for you.”

“Look,” she starts, making her way over to it and squeezing herself under the blankets. Jihyo sighs. “I’m just trying to do the decent thing, okay?”

The decent thing being keeping Jihyo away from her snoring. And her morning breath. That, as well as her vibrating alarm that’s supposed to wake her up at 5 am so she can have time to go fix her bedhead, wash her face and curl up back in angelically, the way models in mattress advertisements did.

“But don’t you want to sleep with me?” Jihyo asks, cutely, and then immediately turns red.

Even though she knows what Jihyo meant, Sana’s memories are already taking her back to the weight and feel of Jihyo in her lap less than two weeks ago, whining and groaning into her mouth, to the sight of her bare, glistening shoulders as she rose up from the water this morning. She’s blushing too now; she’s sure of it. She immediately pulls the covers up over her face. Too much, she answers in her own head, feeling hunger pulsing at her.

Five minutes is what it takes for her to recover and when she emerges, Jihyo’s head is half-hanging off the edge of the bed, looking down at her with the covers turned up to the chin.

“I do,” she says. “I just….”

All that time spent convincing Jihyo that she wanted her as she was, frills and untamed edges included, while she herself had a deathly fear of Jihyo finding out that her favorite hoodie had a hole in the back. Sana was a fucking hypocrite.

A hand drops to the floor, directly in her line of sight. “Can we at least hold hands, then?” Jihyo asks, understanding written all over her face. Her fingers wriggle, as if to entice Sana. “What if I miss you in my sleep?”

Sana throws one hand out of the blanket, places it in Jihyo’s. Then pulls it towards her to give the knuckles a little kiss.

“Goodnight, Jihyo,” she whispers, as Jihyo turns off the light. The night Sana and Jihyo went to sleep holding hands, she thinks, and notes down the date in her head.

Jihyo takes their joined hands and places them against Sana’s forehead, brushing back the hair there, before resting them on the floor again. “Goodnight, Sana,” she whispers back and that’s how Sana falls asleep.

*****

This is how Sana wakes up: there’s a recurrent vibration underneath her right arm, and the itch of the carpet on the back of her hand. When she manages to open her eyes the slightest bit — just enough for her to get her bearings, not enough for her to lose residual sleep — it’s still dark out, which irritates her for some reason. Why the hell was her alarm going off—

“—baby,” Jihyo mumbles, from above, and that’s when Sana remembers. “Shut that off, please.”

Her heartbeat speeds up, nudging her firmly out of sleep. Baby. Had she heard that right? Could Jihyo have said Maybe, perhaps? Or AB? Maybe she was the kind to start reciting the alphabet early in the morning.

“Baby,” Jihyo says again, and that startles Sana enough to reach for her phone and shut it off. Her hand is still resting on the floor, inches away from Sana’s own. Somewhere deep inside, that makes Sana sad, so she reaches out and holds it again. “What time is it?”

Fingers thread through her own. Sana lets the comfort wash over her, then thinks: Didn’t I have a plan? Brush her teeth and wash her face and comb out her head and make sure Jihyo never found out about that one lock of hair that tends to stick straight up in the morning for some goddamn reason. But Jihyo’s warm eyes are blinking down at her, sleepily, and that holds her in place like she’s nothing more than sloshing soup, bound by the edges of a beloved ceramic bowl.

“It’s five.”

“So early,” Jihyo whines, and Sana grins, overcome by adoration. “Just go back to sleep.”

But her eyes keep opening and closing, until they finally open enough to stare down at Sana properly. “Good morning, Sana,” she says, and oh, it’s way too early for a heart attack. “Do you know you snore while you sleep?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be, it’s cute. Kind of soothing once you get used to it.”

“It helps if I,” Sana pauses, thinks back to all the articles she’s had bookmarked on her phone for a while, “sleep on my side or something so if it’s too bad I can always do….. that.”

She trails off when Jihyo raises their joined hands to her level, then nuzzles into her knuckles. “Don’t,” she says, quietly, her gaze sure. “I’ll get used to it.”

“Okay,” Sana breathes out. Suddenly, The morning Sana and Jihyo woke up next to each other doesn’t seem like a very big deal, not when Sana is sure they’re going to do a lot more of that from now onwards. “Good morning, Jihyo.”

*****

Nayeon makes a big deal of not wanting to miss out on Jeju sights — the food, you mean, you bottomless pit, Jihyo sneers, before they start bickering — so Sana convinces the bridal parental unit to let Mina and Momo out for the day, so they can join them. They rent out a couple of scooters and, armed in their very best beach wear — which, for most of them, consists of the ugliest Hawaiian patterned shirts Sana has ever seen in her life — wander around, making stops at beaches restaurants, signboards and the occasional gas station when one of them needs to pee.

It’s a good day. Mina and Momo certainly look relaxed, which means Sana’s plan did, in fact, work; she’d hate for them to go into their bachelorette parties and the wedding looking stressed. The food is good, and there are a lot of photos, with some very careful implicit arrangements: no Dahyun and Tzuyu next to each other because it’d be awkward, no Nayeon and Momo next to each other because they always, always teamed up to throw obscene gestures behind some poor, unsuspecting soul’s (Sana, the one time, before Jihyo jumped in to save her) head, and last, no letting Chaeyoung take off her jacket, because it always got way too much attention from random girls in the vicinity, all wanting to touch her tattoos and coo over how cool she was.

“You’re all haters,” Chaeyoung grumbles, now clad in Jeongyeon’s leather jacket. Momo had offered her own sweatshirt, but the one time her abs had been on display this morning people had ogled and Mina got so jealous she’d started making out with her on the beach, scandalizing a couple of nice old ladies sunbathing on the sand. “Just because you’re all happily taken, I’m not allowed to find love?”

“I’m single,” Dahyun says, staring down at the ground.

And Tzuyu chimes in, immediately. “Me too,” she says.

So it’s mostly a good day. Jihyo seems happy, at least, which is what’s most important to Sana. When they’d started off, she’d affixed an absolutely adorable pink helmet on top of Sana’s head, before pulling her down to kiss her forehead and then her cheeks, and that had made the subsequent helmet-hair worth it. Her own helmet, a purple one, had dashed Sana’s dreams of having her hair whip in her face while they drove, but it was still pretty satisfying to lean forward and rest her chin on Jihyo’s shoulder as she drove them. All day, she’d alternated eating with feeding Sana, even taking care to make sure the remnants of her drinks were gone from the corners of Sana’s lips, never mind the fact that she mostly did that by kissing her thoroughly until either Jeongyeon or Dahyun started to protest.

Now, Sana takes a not-so-discreet photo of her as she stands by the lake, skipping pebbles over it with Nayeon and Mina. There’s yet another bet involved — going by the fact that Dahyun is watching them from the corner and chiming in when the shouting gets too intense — not that Sana cares. Not as long as it gets her a photo of Jihyo’s back, staring out at the sunset over the water.

If nothing else, Sana has at least gotten a new lock screen out of today. It would go well with her home screen, which was a photo that Chaeyoung had once taken of her and Jihyo at lunch, Jihyo stuffing a whole egg into Sana’s mouth with glee.

Tzuyu wanders over to the blanket they’d set down underneath a massive tree and sits down. “Please,” she says, as soon as Sana opens her mouth in greeting. “Don’t feel pressured to make conversation.”

“I never feel pressured to make conversation, Tzuyu yah, it just flows out of me.” It’s so much fun to annoy Tzuyu. She’s the only one of them who hasn’t yet figured out that the best way to make Sana stop is to simply ignore her. “Then again, I’d hate to distract you from your very important task of pretending you’re not staring at Dahyun every five seconds.”

“How is it that Jihyo unnie can stand to date you?”

“I can’t believe it either.” Even though Sana is still joking, the thought fills her with a familiar sense of awe, one she feels every time Jihyo tucks her face into Sana’s neck, or warm fingers brush over her forehead when she’s trying to take a nap in office. The fact that Park Jihyo wants to be with her will always be her greatest achievement. “Sorry, I….forgot what we were talking about.”

Tzuyu sighs, tiredly, but she also keeps glancing over in Sana’s direction, like she wants to ask something.

Sana decides to help her out. “Something you need?”

“No,” Tzuyu shoots back. It is now Sana’s turn to sigh, and look at her, patiently, until she gives in. “How — why do you…. like how do you — know you….”

She trails off, red in the face. Sana helps her out again. “How did you know you liked Dahyun?”

“I asked first.”

What a question, though. Sana wonders if there’s ever been a single moment a ukulele’s played in the background, or rose petals fell down from the sky, or the universe held up a massive signboard with the words You love Park Jihyo written on them in fancy cursive. Mina thinks Sana and Momo are pretty much the same when it comes to things like these — Momo had seen a beautiful girl in her accounts class and decided that was it for her, and now they were getting married — and Sana doesn’t completely disagree, even if she thinks it usually takes her a little more than one glance through the corner of her eye. Love is a work of art always in progress; no matter how many times one pauses and has the breath knocked out of them, there’s always one more moment, one more minute to think Oh, you’re wonderful. I can’t believe you’re mine. Always more color to fill in, more brushstrokes to smooth over canvas.

“On our first date, she played with her rice a little,” she starts, looking over at the lake again. Jihyo’s jumping around happily; it’s a little hard to reconcile this image with the three-quarters-cynical, one-quarter-hopeful woman she’d once gone on a blind date with, but Sana tries anyway. “Traced triangles and squares and other shapes of the like with it. When I off-handedly mentioned I like breadsticks, she asked the waiter if we could get some more for our table, even if she wasn’t very impressed with me; I could tell. Near the end, she said she didn’t have a video to watch while eating her next meal, and I had the strangest thought, that I didn’t want her to have to watch a video while she ate, ever again. That if she let me, I’d like to have breakfasts and lunches and dinners with her from there on, so she doesn’t have to do those alone. That was — yeah, that was pretty much it.”

All her years of loving and leaving and being left have left her with some wisdom, at least. No matter how you tend to put it, there was never any concrete reason people liked each other. Wasn’t in the face, wasn’t in the body, wasn’t in the jokes, memorized and delivered perfectly. Sometimes it was just as simple as having a simple conversation with someone, and thinking You. I’d like to get to know you better. Will you give me a chance?

Tzuyu hums.

“Isn’t it your turn, now?” Sana tells her, when there’s nothing else forthcoming.

Sue her, she’s a little curious. Tzuyu doesn’t seem the kind to open up easily.

Tzuyu turns to narrow her eyes at her.

“That doesn’t scare me.” It does. “I’m literally dating Jihyo.”

Then again, Jihyo narrowing her eyes turns Sana on more than it scares her but Tzuyu doesn’t have to know that.

“My first day at TDOONG.” Tzuyu speaks as though fighting an internal battle. Grudgingly, she continues, eyes staring off into the distance. “I was late because there was an accident two blocks from the office, I knocked my toe in the revolving doors, and then somebody spilled coffee on me, right down the front of my shirt. I was fine — right up until someone stepped into the elevator and asked me if I was okay. That’s when I started bawling.”

It's an easy enough scene to imagine, Sana thinks, feeling an acute wave of sympathy go through her.

“I didn’t even have to tell her it was my first day.” Of course it was Dahyun. Sana hasn’t even known them all that long, but Dahyun certainly seems sweet enough to ask a stranger how their day was going. “She guessed. Ripped off her scarf, and wrangled it into some sort of tie, so that the stain wasn’t so…. visible anymore. Barged into my supervisor’s office, and apologized to him for making me late; that she’d needed some help in the copy room and I was the only person available. I — she didn’t even know me. She was nice to me, anyways.”

“Why don’t you tell her this?”

“What did I just say?” Tzuyu asks, wearily. “Dahyun’s nice. Nice to everyone. I’m not special.”

Dahyun is nice to everyone, but she is considerate when it comes to Tzuyu. Not that Sana’s going to say it. She knows her limits. Is becoming increasingly familiar with Tzuyu’s too, which is why she’s not risking being drowned in this gorgeous lake with her girlfriend and her friends watching.

Which. Speaking of.

“Look what I scored from that stall over there,” Jihyo crows, walking towards them. She changes direction to meet Tzuyu first, handing her a lightly roasted corn on the cob. Pats her on the cheek, before she finally plops down next to Sana, her head immediately finding its way onto Sana’s shoulder. “You hungry?”

*****

“How nervous is she?”

Sana hums, running a hand through Mina’s hair on her lap. “Like a nine. On a scale of one to five, mind you.” Jihyo had spent the last hour chewing at her nails, as Nayeon, Chaeyoung and Dahyun barged into their room and started picking out dresses she could wear. Sana had kicked herself out half an hour back to give her time to get ready. “I keep telling her she’s got no reason to be.”

“I mean, the first time my father met Momo was when he walked in on us going at it in my office.” And the memory of Mina telling her about it over soju the same evening, as Momo had her embarrassed little head buried in her plate of jokbal is something Sana deeply cherishes. Mina seems to have gotten over it now, going by the cheeky half-smile she’s sporting. “Nothing can ever be as awful as that.”

Really, it’s cute that Jihyo cares so much. She’s even gotten Sana’s parents a little trinket from Gyeonggi, texting her photos and anxiously asking if they’d like it. And now, she’s been holed up in their room getting ready for the past two hours, ever since they got back from their tour, and Sana doesn’t have the heart to tell her that her parents will probably be clad in sweatpants, so a lot of this fuss might just be….. unnecessary. Not that it would make a difference to Jihyo.

Sana’s dressed up too, if only so Jihyo doesn’t feel overdressed. And so she can see the look on her face when she turns up in her little wrap dress — if what Nayeon had told her at a club when she was completely wasted, a while ago, is true, Jihyo happens to be a fan.

“Also, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Sana asks, playing with the ends of Mina’s hair. “What did you think of…..”

Mina bites at the corner of her lip. “Your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“She cares about you.”

When the silence after that stretches on, Sana talks. “What, that’s it?”

“You need something else?” Mina asks, an eyebrow arched.

“Mina.”

“She cares about you; I like her.” Mina reaches up to poke at her cheeks, smiling when Sana puffs them up in response. “You should see her face every time she looks at you, it’s like she’s finally found her life’s purpose and it’s to stare into your eyes—”

“—that is not true,” Sana cuts in, blushing, but Mina seems to be on a roll.

“Like a lost spaceship finally within sight of a friendly planet—”

“—not funny—”

“—or a moonbeam hitting the highest wave at midnight—"

“—are you done?”

“Not even a little,” Mina says, but she sighs in a way that lets Sana know she’s tired of her bit now. Turns to bury her face in Sana’s stomach and give her a half-hug. “I like her, Satang. Anybody who cares for you the way she seems to…… I love her, in fact.”

Sometimes, it hits her like a sledgehammer, how much she loves her best friends. “Gonna tell me not to fuck it up?”

“I trust you. You can take care of yourself. If not, you can always move in with us and we’ll take care of you. We keep talking about that threesome anyway.”

“You keep talking about that threesome, you mean,” Sana tells her, and hey, what timing. Momo’s just entered the room, middle finger aloft. “Keep it up and I’ll start thinking it’s me you’ve wanted this whole time.”

“You’re right,” Mina deadpans, her face lighting up when Momo sits on the bed too. She immediately rises and then flops over into Momo’s lap, instead. “Sweetheart, I’m running away with Sana day after.”

“Okay, my love,” Momo answers, adoringly. Then she turns to Sana, all of the love wiped off of her face. “And you. Jihyo asked me to tell you she’s ready. Go.”

*****

(Her parents love Jihyo, not that Sana had ever doubted it. Her dad is so impressed that he later asks Sana, in an aside, if Jihyo would like to be the VP of one of the departments of TDOONG Ent., before her mother smacks him on the arm and tells her to hand over the whole company, at the very least. Sana later thinks that her propensity to go above and expensively beyond for the people she likes might be hereditary, after all.)

*****

(They’ve fought once, so far.

Sana and Jihyo’s first fight, Sana would’ve titled it in her head, maybe written it down in a journal or something, except that the two days she didn’t talk to Jihyo, she wasn’t exactly in a writing mood. Or a noting-down-things mood. Or a doing-anything-except-mope-around-the-house-alone mode, really.

Which is why it had been a surprise when her doorbell rang and she’d opened it to find Nayeon on the other side.

“You should be with Jihyo,” she said, dumbly.

“Jeongyeon, Dahyun and Chaeyoung are with her, she sent me to look after you,” Nayeon replied. She gave Sana a once-over, frowning. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah, well.” As long as Jihyo didn’t see her like this, it was fine. “Do you want to drink?”

“Of course,” Nayeon answered, brightening up. “What’s the point of being there for a hundred millionaire if there’s no expensive alcohol to be had?”

Nayeon was the worst. She had also been joking, some way to make Sana laugh through her warped sense of humor. She’d taken charge easily, pouring out drinks, staying silent and letting Sana ramble on about the weather, her articles, everything except for the one person she’d wanted to talk about, and left late at night, only after Sana had fallen asleep. Sana appreciated her company; usually her go-to would’ve been Mina and Momo, but they were so busy with wedding preparations that she hadn’t told them all of this was going on.

(They would later find out and then she’d have to take them out to three very expensive breakfasts before they’d forgive her for not telling them when she was upset, but that, at that point, had been future-Sana’s problem, and honestly, fuck her. She could deal with that.)

Sana hadn’t needed to tell her what had happened, of course. She presumed Jihyo would’ve gone over it already, and Nayeon was her friend — Sana felt like she had no business trying to explain her point of view. What could she have said, anyway? The She said and I said of it, all the Why didn’t you just tell me you were sick-s and I don’t want to get used to this because when we break up-s and the—

—What do you mean when? Do you have an expiry date on this? Another couple of slides to add to your big bad presentation?

“Can I tell you something?” Nayeon had said, two bottles of wine in. Sana hummed her assent from where she was upside down on the couch. “You know why Jihyo has that smartwatch?”

“You gave it to her, yeah?”

“I did!” Nayeon took another sip. “There was a whole…. Uh. About a month or some after her breakup — she broke her arm, was a mess, the works — that she locked herself up in her room and didn’t come out. Requested to work from home the whole time, and the only time any of us would see her was if Dahyun and Chaeyoung saw her receiving her groceries through home delivery. It wasn’t the best…. yeah. Wasn’t the best time.”

There was always a strange feeling attached to being in a relationship. One had to contend with the knowledge that there were all those stories, all those experiences another person had gone through that they weren’t a part of. That there had been times when Jihyo had been happy, or cried herself out and there was no power in the world that could turn back time and take Sana to back then, just so she could hold all her scratches and sing them a lullaby, hold Jihyo’s hand and tell her there were so many better things in store for her.

“I wish,” she started, and then trailed off for a bit, Nayeon’s eyes fixed on her. “I wish her life. Had been a little easier.”

“Me too,” Nayeon hummed. Then: “Want me to go on?”

“Yeah.”

“The watch, I ordered it on a whim,” she said. “I saw this ad where these two dudes had a bet and then raced each other through a city, and they were so stupidly competitive, I thought: Now where have I seen this before? And then Jeongyeon said—”

She paused when Sana giggled.

“—yeah. That’s what she said. And I figured there was nothing that would get Jihyo out of bed, not a typhoon, not an earthquake, not even her goddamn mother. Nothing, really, except the promise of beating some smug machine that would get all up in her face about the number of steps she was taking or the amount of time she was up and about all day.”

“It worked.”

“It did, which is why,” Nayeon paused, and placed a hesitant hand over Sana’s shoulder. “I know that it takes a bit of a push for her to come around. And that you’re not wrong. Or asking for too much. I know you think the sun sets in her eyes or whatever but don’t just roll over and give in. Don’t let her get off that easy.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on her side?” she asked, feeling absurdly emotional.

“I am,” Nayeon said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. Just….. give her some time. And patience.”

(Sana was prepared to gather all the water from the oceans by the handful and pour it into a jar for Jihyo. Time? She could do time.)

The next time Nayeon had talked to her, it was seven am in the morning. “I’m giving you five minutes,” she’d said, without preamble. Sana blinked, almost went back to sleep. “Driving Jihyo to yours.”

Five minutes.

By the time there was a knock on the door, she was good and ready. She opened it to Nayeon already talking to her. “Here we a — is that mascara?”

(It was. There was lipstick, too.)

“Okay, that’s enough.” And what that voice did to Sana’s insides would stay between her and whatever higher power was up there. Jihyo lightly pushed at Nayeon’s shoulder. “I will see you later.”

Then it was just the two of them, staring at each other from either side of the doorway. Sana — unwilling to blink, unwilling to tear her eyes away from Jihyo for fear that she might disappear like the past two days — raked her eyes over Jihyo’s features, hungrily. There she was, same curl of hair over her forehead, the same perfect nose, same miraculous light glinting in her eye as she stared back. Two days was too damn long to stay away; she’d thought she was going to go insane from the number of times she’d picked up her phone, only to remember that they were technically fighting and that she couldn’t just text Jihyo how much she wanted to see her.

And while two days weren’t enough to have caused any major changes, there were still some things that Sana noticed, like the tight grip Jihyo had on the hinges, like that was what was keeping her upright, the deep bags underneath her eyes, probably a product of the stupid fever that had been….

The fever. Sana ushered her in, practically pushing her onto the couch and wrapping her up in her warmest throw. Then she realized what she’d just done.

“Sorry,” she said, bent over so her face was level with Jihyo’s. “This was probably what you were trying to avoid this whole time, huh?”

Momentary pain flashed across those beautiful eyes. “Sana, no,” Jihyo murmured, and held out her hand. Sana grasped onto it, relief surging through her at the sensation. Sat down right in front of Jihyo, cross-legged, still holding on. Jihyo blinked and patted the couch next to her. “Just sit up here, please.”

“I’d rather look at you, though.”

To Sana’s deep alarm, Jihyo blinked and her eyes turned watery. “Why do you,” she started, voice choked off, “how is it so damn easy for you to say these things?”

“Are — are you worried about not being romantic enough for me?” Sana asked her, thoroughly bewildered.

“No, I’m worried about not being enough for you, period.” While Sana tried to wrap her head around the concept of anything Jihyo not being enough for her, a ridiculous concept if Sana had ever heard one, Jihyo spoke again. “I’m not fair to you, am I?”

“Why do you think that?”

“All of these stupid rules I have put in place,” Jihyo answered. “Insisting on eating at least one meal alone every day so I can watch a video, still, not telling you when I’m sick so you can’t come over to take care of me, emphasizing the fact that I believe this — this whole thing — is going to end, at every given opportunity…. it’s not — I’m not. Nice.”

“The last one kind of hurts,” Sana said, immediately regretting it afterwards.

“Sana.”

“Okay, fine, it really hurts. When you say it like that. I like to think the idea of us breaking up should be an if thing, not a when thing.”

Jihyo squeezed at her hand. “You’re right.”

“And it’s not like I don’t know it’s a possibility, you know? Or why you do it.” She truly hated it when Jihyo cried; it made her want to curl up into a ball and sob herself. She reached up with her free hand and brushed away one tear making its way down her cheek, stayed there when Jihyo leaned into her touch. “I like to think I’m an expert on your nutty way of thinking by now. I know you’re just trying to protect yourself—”

“—not from you, never from you,” Jihyo emphasized, and her eyes were alight with absolute certainty.

“Okay.”

“In my head, it’s just like — like if I keep telling myself it will end, at least it won’t come as a surprise to me. That if I don’t get used to this, it won’t hurt as much when it goes away.”

“But that’s no way to go about this, is it?”

“No. No, it’s not.” Jihyo pulled up their joined hands, pressed it against her chest. “And also because it’s already going to hurt like a bitch. Doesn’t matter what I call it; you’re already in my head. And in my closet. And on my dresser drawer. And in here.”

“On your boob?” Sana asked, because if she had to go one more minute without seeing Jihyo smile, she would absolutely lose it.

A half-sob, half-laugh escaped. “Yes, there too,” Jihyo said, pulling her up. Sana sat on her lap, tilted her head down so they were forehead to forehead. Jihyo’s other hand, warm, trembling, cupped her cheek, thumb tracing a path from her temple, down her cheek, to her jaw, pausing there. And again. And again. “Can I kiss you?”

The almost unbearable warmth of Jihyo’s mouth, the fullness of her lips — Sana found herself re-discovering, memorizing all of it as they kissed. Found herself wondering if this was new in the two days they’d been apart as well. God, she thought, feeling tears prickle at her eyes, feeling the urge to touch and caress and love, the urge to give Jihyo a knife and point it right at her heart so she could do with it anything she pleased, I don’t know what to do with myself. And then another sentiment came upon her, something akin to Archimedes in that bathtub, or Newton in that garden, slowly trying to trample a path from point a to point b in their heads, that this couldn’t just be simple affection.

I like you, she thought, but no, that wasn’t the right phrase. I would let myself be run over by a thousand trucks if only it’d mean that I could cross the road to you. Would get skewered on a billion swords if you wanted someone to test the strength of a forge.

Too dramatic. Besides, Jihyo usually didn’t make Sana want to end her own life in a blaze of glory in any sense other than the metaphorical. She was warm, beautiful and when she smiled, she made Sana want to be a poet or an artist, just so she could immortalize her joy onto paper. Jihyo was…..

Sana loved her.

There it was. The shape of the words fit into Sana’s head as perfectly as a jigsaw piece slotting into place. She knew they’d fit on her tongue easy too.

I love you.

But it was way too early, and Jihyo’s cheeks were still sticky with the remnants of her tears. They had so much to talk about. Sana would get around to it when she was sure Jihyo was ready.

They had time. Quite a lot of it, she knew.)

*****

Momo holds her bachelorette party in a bar; Mina holds hers in an arcade.

It would have been infinitely simpler, of course, if they could just have done it together and gotten it over with — and they very much wanted to as well — but in the interest of tradition (and an attempt to keep their parents’ blood pressure down to acceptable levels) Sana sucks it up and sets up two parties. There are cars available to take people from one to the other, in case they get bored, and Sana herself arranges her schedule so she’d be able to attend the important bits of both. Not that there should be many — Momo’s plan is to get drunk and dance; Mina’s includes destroying every single one of her friends in every game there is.

“It’s a confidence thing,” she’d explained to Sana, when asked. “How can I be expected to provide for my sweetheart if I’m not capable of winning in a shoot-out? They do say In good times and zombie apocalypses for a reason, you know?”

“Please tell me that’s not actually part of your vows,” Sana had pleaded.

Mina simply winked.

It’s a little unusual but it works. At least in the beginning. As coordinator, Sana is an unwilling witness when Nayeon climbs up on the bar, takes off her shirt and dances to a very sexy number about women’s chests, their thighs, and to nobody’s great surprise, their butts as well. And when she inevitably falls off of it into Hana’s arms. Jihyo and Jeongyeon get up onto the stage to sing a highly romantic number…. to each other, while Dahyun watches on from the corner and mimes marrying them off to each other. At the other party, Chaeyoung and Tzuyu get into an intense dance battle, both losing when Yeri drunkenly walks into a tangle of wires and causes the whole arcade to lose power momentarily.

Everyone seems to be having a good time.

As most bachelorette parties go, it gets really wild right around the one am mark. That’s when she discovers, aided by Tzuyu, who was barely keeping it together after five straight shots, that Mina’s been chugging drinks every time she’s defeated someone at a game and is now sloshed in the restroom, crying over Momo for some goddamn reason.

“I lost!” Mina wails, eyes red and angry, when Sana manages to get the door to open and sees her sitting on the floor. “I lost to fucking Hyeju! How am I supposed to protect my wife? I’m a failure!”

Sana sighs and manages to get her to sit on the toilet seat. Gives her a bottle of water, and while she’s battling the straw within, calls Momo.

“Your fiancée is a drunken mess,” she says, the minute her call goes through.

“What a surprise,” Momo snipes back. “So is your girlfriend.”

Correction: Jihyo is an adorable mess. Also a drunken one. When she finally arrives, her head’s sticking out of the car, and she whoops in joy when she sees Sana. Tries to get out that way too, before Momo wrestles her torso back in and opens the door so she can fling herself in Sana’s arms.

(Dear god. Icarus and the sun, Orpheus and Eurydice, could all go suck it. This was the greatest love story ever told. Sana would tunnel her way through mountains with her bare hands just to feel the pleasure of Jihyo’s embrace, once.)

“Baby!” Mina is crying again, kneeling on the ground now. Why. “I have failed you! I can’t save you from the zombies! Hyeju got more points than me!”

“Is that so?” Momo murmurs, picking her up and wrangling her into a bridal carry with ease. “I think I ought to have a strongly worded discussion with Hyeju, in that case. How dare she make my fiancée cry, and that too on the eve of our wedding?”

After they’re gone, Jihyo looks up at her, eyes entirely too alert for someone who — by Momo’s fondly disgruntled admission — has just spent a whole car ride over with her lips firmly attached to a wine bottle. “Baby,” she says, once, and Sana’s heart stutters in her chest like a lovestruck teenager at prom. “Baby baby ba — by. Baby. Bay. Bay. Baby…..”

“Yes, Jihyo chan?”

“I was thinking about you.”

“You were?”

“I was missing you.”

The lovestruck teenager shakily pricks herself with a corsage. “Really?”

Jihyo nods, earnestly. “And now I’m not,” she says, seriously, “because you’re here and the world is good again! Hurrah!”

Sana’s heart is both the balloon flying above and beyond, and the string that grounds it, both the mentos falling into a bottle of coke and the explosion that follows soon after. It swells and soars and trips over itself, and all Sana can think is: Oh, you’re wonderful. I can’t believe you’re mine.

*****

It takes three people to hold Jihyo back from punching her way into a claw machine.

Drunk Jihyo is a delight. She’s also, quite frankly, one of the most impulsive people Sana has ever had the pleasure of meeting. The dazzling lights in the arcade don’t help one bit, enticing her every way, every second, leaving Sana to keep chasing her like she’s a hyperactive toddler at a….well, an arcade.

The problem is that while Jihyo — regular Jihyo, sober Jihyo, never-once-threatened-to-stab-Chaeyoung-in-the-neck-just-so-she-could-get-a-sample-of-her-blood-and-have-the-nearest-lab-check-if-she-had-traces-of-incurable-stupid-running-in-her-veins Jihyo — has an adequate sense of balance to back her up, the drunk version of her is awful at walking in a straight line, and subsequently awful at winning things. She presses all the wrong buttons, nearly gets into a fistfight with a Pokemon mascot just going about his business and flips off a 10-year-old in front of his mother. Sana isn’t too pressed about the last one; one, the kid had no business being here since this was restricted to bachelorette-party adults, and two, he had called Sana a loser when she’d tried to usher him out before he could witness Soonyoung hurling every profanity in the world in Seungkwan’s direction.

Fine, she’d nearly swooned when Jihyo had stepped up in her defense. Her girlfriend was fucking awesome, even when she was trash-talking children.

“Okay,” she pants out, after wrestling Jihyo into the restroom and into a stall, so she could wipe down her sweaty face in peace. “You’re going to sit here and close your eyes so I can do this.”

Jihyo’s eyes fly open on cue, her pupils blown in awe. “You’re so hot,” she says. “Seriously, you’re so, so, so fucking hot, Sana. I’d close my eyes and let you do anything to me, any day.”

A flash of heat shoots straight south, blazing warmth settling in the pit of her stomach. While it is not exactly an uncomfortable feeling, this is not the time for it.

Jihyo babbles on while Sana runs the tissue over her face. Drunk Jihyo happens to be an over-sharer, apparently — she tells Sana all about the time she and Chaeyoung had internet-stalked one of Dahyun’s college crushes, or when she walked in on the middle of Jeongyeon practically fucking Nayeon on her brand-new couch and yelled so loud Chaeyoung and Dahyun had also come running in after her. She’s also a bit of a sweetheart, ooh-ing and aah-ing over how pretty Sana is this close up, and was she sure that she didn’t have lenses on because her eyes were so damn pretty?

She’s still going on about Sana’s nose, wondering if their children will inherit it — which totally does not give Sana a heart attack — when the door opens, and Dahyun’s voice comes floating in. “Tzuyu ssi, please slow down, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Uh, what the fuck.

She immediately presses a hand over Jihyo’s mouth to stop her from giving them away, then veers to one side to peek out the small gap between the door.

Tzuyu’s leaning against the wall, pretty out of it, while Dahyun stares at her from the other corner.

“I’m fine,” Tzuyu says. Her voice is slow, slower than the measured tone she uses when she’s sober. “Tzuyu ssi?”

“How else am I supposed to refer to you?”

“Shouldn’t you know that?” Tzuyu shoots back. “Because that is not what you were calling me when you were knuckles deep inside me couple months ago.”

Dear god. Sana considers covering her own ears for a bit, to give them some semblance of privacy, but Jihyo’s curious, eager face, and her own insatiable need to find out what was going on wins in the end.

“You’re drunk.”

“Like I said, I’m fine.” No, Tzuyu isn’t. Her eyes are squinting continuously in an attempt to focus, and all of her body seems to be upright only through the iron-grip she has on the sink counter. “So you can leave now.”

“No, that’s what you do, remember?”

Dahyun’s out of the limited view Sana has, so she can only imagine what she looks like right now. Resigned, maybe? Pissed?

Tzuyu blinks slowly. “You can go,” she says. “No, I’m not…. not saying it to — you can go, okay? You don’t have to—”

“—yes, I do—”

“—worry about me or—”

“—I do that, too, unfortunately,” Dahyun says, with a finality that rings out in the small space of the restroom. “Worry about you, I mean.”

“Kim Dahyun ssi,” Tzuyu says, her eyes closed now, a small, bitter smile playing around her lips. “Always so nice to everyone. No wonder everyone likes you.”

“What are you even — I,” Dahyun starts, sounding exasperated, and then lunges forward in Sana’s field of vision when Tzuyu tries to take a step and stumbles, the back of her head the hitting the wall. “Okay, that’s it. Pause. Sit up on the counter.”

Tzuyu’s glare softens as Dahyun reaches up to rub at her hair, right over the hurt. “Don’t tell me you don’t know about your little fan club of interns in office.”

“I have a fan club? What do they call themselves?” Dahyun asks, and while her back is to the stalls, Sana can still make out the mild amusement in her voice. “Who’s the president?”

“Why, you want to date her?”

“No.”

“I could set something up, maybe—”

“—would you, really?” Dahyun asks, quietly.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Tzuyu says, equally quiet. There’s a loaded pause, before she speaks again. “Go woo them on your own time.”

“The girl I like isn’t exactly a fan,” Dahyun says.

The room falls silent. Sana holds her breath. Hell, even Jihyo, whose mouth is pressed up against the palm of Sana’s left hand, stops moving.

Then. Then, Tzuyu opens her mouth and says something that has Sana wrenching her hand away from Jihyo’s mouth so she can smack herself across the face in utter despair.

“So this is what you do, huh?” Tzuyu says, and although the words are meant to be biting, them come out more glum than anything else. “Just because the girl you like won’t look at you, you sleep with me?”

There’s a whole minute of silence. Sana counts this time.

“What?” Dahyun gasps, in utter disbelief. “What the fuck are you on about?”

Tzuyu raises a hand, points it — or so Sana presumes, not that she can see much with Dahyun’s back covering most of her — at Dahyun’s chest. “You slept with me because—”

“—you’re the girl, you idiot!” Dahyun says, and wow, Sana has never heard her talk this loud at Tzuyu. Or this angrily. It was true; love truly did change people. “You — you. Complete. Fucking. Idiot! Dumbass! Imbecile!”

“What — I.” Tzuyu shakes her head once, twice, fumbles for words. “What — you — you like me?”

Dahyun steps away from her, slowly. “Yeah.”

“You like me?”

“Yeah.”

“You like—”

“—Tzuyu ssi.”

“Oh.” Tzuyu sounds surprised. “Oh.” The second Oh is a little drawn out, like she’s slowly thinking it over. “Oh.” The third one is the longest yet, the long Oh of realization.

“Oh?”

“That…. makes sense.”

Dahyun crosses her arms. Wraps them, really, around herself. When she speaks next, her voice is shaky. “Is that all you have to say?”

“No, I have more, I’m just. Processing,” Tzuyu says, her voice still disbelieving. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why were you gone the next morning?”

“I thought…. oh, you’re right, I’ve been an idiot.” Tzuyu hops off the counter, and then sways in place when she lands, groaning. Like she’d forgotten she was still very drunk. “I didn’t — didn’t want you to be nice about it if you woke up and realized you weren’t interested. Like — I woke up that morning and you were still sleeping and your face was so, so pretty and your shoulders so beautiful, and I.”

Dahyun’s slowly turning pinker by the second.

“Forgot what I was saying.”

Pink turns to scarlet. Jihyo slaps Sana on the arm, excitedly.

“What if you didn’t want me that way? Later?”

“I think that night established I wanted you in most ways a person could want another,” Dahyun replies, primly. Sana can personally think of at least five jokes she could’ve cracked there; really, both Dahyun and Tzuyu deserve more credit for keeping it pg rated.

“I thought I’d give you time. To process it, without me messing all of it up by hanging in your space. But then, you came to office and you didn’t look in my direction and then that whole gaggle of interns were hanging around you all day and it made me so mad—”

“—most of my workplace is women, what do you expect me to do, not talk to them?”

“Yes. No! I don’t know!” Tzuyu steps forward, right into Dahyun’s personal space. “I have feelings for you.”

Dahyun looks away. “You’re drunk.”

“That just makes me more honest,” Tzuyu says, simply. Another step forward. She gently untangles Dahyun’s arms from around her, holds her hands. “Kim Dahyun ssi, I have feelings for you.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Tzuyu says, simply. Raises Dahyun’s hands to face-level, kisses both of them. “I like you. I want to date you. I’m the biggest idiot in the universe. Please forgive me.”

There’s a sniffle.

Sana realizes exactly a second later that the source of the tiny sound they’ve all heard isn’t Dahyun or Tzuyu. Except by the time she realizes it, Jihyo has already burst into sobs and Dahyun’s walked towards their stall to wrench the door open.

“We can explain,” Sana says, and Dahyun sighs, still red in the face.

*****

It’s four am by the time they finally escape the arcade — Dahyun and Sana flanking Tzuyu and Jihyo, who were holding onto each other for balance. Sana sits up in the front with the driver, figuring out her timetable for tomorrow, while Dahyun sits in the back, Tzuyu and Jihyo snoozing on her shoulders. By the time she and Jihyo — who was grumpy from having to wake up so she could walk back to their room — wave goodbye to Dahyun and Tzuyu, Sana’s all tuckered out and just looking forward to crash on her very comfortable mattress.

Jihyo — who has spent the last half hour alternating between cooing over Tzuyu and Dahyun and sleeping — apparently does not share the same desire.

“I’m almost done with my stuff, sweetheart,” Sana calls out from the bathroom, wiping down her face with a towel, and stepping out. “Please don’t fall asleep, I’ve got to remove your—”

Jihyo’s lounging on the bed, wide awake.

“—makeup.”

“Oh good, you’re back,” Jihyo says, slowly getting up and sauntering towards her. Sana blinks, because the world’s gone back to slow motion again — what with Jihyo’s voice turning an octave lower and her hips swaying from side to side as she walks right up to…. grab Sana by the shoulders. “I’ve decided I don’t want to sleep anymore.”

“I — I’m sure a podcast might help—”

They’re turned around now; Jihyo gently leads them backwards until the back of Sana’s knees hit the bed and she sits down.

“—or, um, music? I could sing you a—”

Jihyo looks her right in the eye, with her wide-blown pupils and unzips her dress so it pools on the ground at her feet.

“—oh my god.”

A podcast? Music? Fucking Morpheus himself could not get her to calm her racing heartbeat enough to fall asleep now. Sana takes one last look, thinks Calves, thighs, stomach, dear god, before she furiously slams her eyes shut and presses her palms against her face for good measure.

“Baby,” Jihyo purrs, before the worst thing to ever happen in history — including the time she and Momo had nearly ended up in a jail cell — happens to Sana; a weight settles on her lap, warm and soft and unless there’s been a home invasion in the three seconds that Sana’s eyes were closed, it’s probably Jihyo. “You can look.”

You can look. You can look? Does she not know that Sana’s actively trying not to, is actively trying to keep the warmth in the pit of her belly contained, the clenching between her legs to a minimum, the hunger smoldering inside her tamped down. Sana’s hands, wild horses, tied back with fraying ropes, her lips—

—taming a sharply roaring flame, pressed against Jihyo’s. Sana removes her hands from her face at the first touch, immediately placing them against Jihyo’s hips when a tongue licks over her bottom lip, hot and insistent.

“Jihyo,” she gasps out, eyes still shut tight, when lips trail over her jaw and then lower, latching onto that one goddamn spot that always make her knees go weak and her gut drop. Jihyo rolls her hips once, whining shockingly loud in the dark, and a wave of want nearly overcomes Sana then. “Don’t you think we should—”

It’s a miracle how Jihyo even responds, seeing as she’s currently occupied with Sana’s neck. “Hmm?”

A sudden whiff of all the shots Jihyo has consumed over the evening brings Sana crashing back to reality. Her girlfriend, no matter how limber she seemed to be, was still completely plastered.

“—I don’t know, stop?” It’s easy enough to flip them over so Jihyo’s the one with her back on the bed. Sana pulls the covers up, fits them until her stomach. “It’s really late.”

(Or early really, considering there’s about an hour or two to sunrise, and — oh god — three hours or four to Sana’s alarm for waking up both Momo and Mina for hair and makeup.)

Jihyo stays still while Sana busies herself with the bedding, her eyes flitting over the ceiling. Too still.

On an impulse, Sana pauses. “Baby?” she asks. “You okay?”

Jihyo doesn’t answer right away, her eyes still roving over the air conditioner at the far edge of the ceiling. “Do you,” she asks, in a voice so small Sana has to lean forward to hear her better, “do you not want me?”

The question completely stumps Sana, so much so that she’s left gaping. “What?”

“I — never mind,” Jihyo answers, and then turns onto her side, facing away from Sana.

“No, wait.” Sana stretches out too, gets on her side and places her hand on Jihyo’s arm. “Do you really think that?”

“Sometimes,” Jihyo says, her voice still heartbreakingly small. Sana moves so they’re pressed together, chest to back. “I don’t know what to think. It always seems so…. easy for you to stop.”

“It’s because my self-control is out of the world,” she jokes. Jihyo stays stiff in her arms, and Sana curses at herself. So fucking stupid. How was she any better than fucking Tzuyu? “Baby, you have no idea. I feel like…. oh, I dunno. Tantalus, was that his name?”

“Who’s that?”

“Guy from Greek mythology cursed to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Except every time he reached for the fruit it skittered away. Same with the water. It’s where the English word tantalize comes from, I think.”

Jihyo sighs, relaxes a little. “Have you always been a nerd or is this a recent development?”

Sana kisses her shoulder. “So many things you still don’t know about me,” she says. “Baby, I’m a fucking livewire every time you so much as put your hand on my thigh, okay? I want you so much that I.” Am really fucking uncomfortable right now, she completes in her head, shifting. If there ever was a time she needed a cold shower more…. “I do, I do want you.”

Jihyo turns around to face her, her eyes entirely too serious considering the amount of alcohol she’s consumed today. “Then?”

“Well, for starters,” Sana tells her, kissing the mole on her nose. How cute. “You are drunk right now.”

Jihyo’s gaze does not waver, even though the corner of her mouth twitches, just the slightest bit. “And?”

“And.” Sana consoles herself by reasoning that this was a long time coming, even if now isn’t exactly the best time to talk about it. “And, you haven’t slept with anyone in three years.”

“You’re gonna end up making it four, at this rate.”

Sana has to laugh at that. Her sweet, drunken sweetheart, with zero filter. “I might be a little…..nervous.” Hah. Nervous was reserved for back in the day Sana, who had done nothing more than hold Jihyo’s hand with her own, sweaty one. Every time Jihyo climbs into her lap, that ridiculous thing in her chest threatens to give out. “I want it to be good for you.”

“If I’m with you, it will be.”

“But what if it isn’t?”

“Then we’ll work on it the same way we’ve been working on your cooking,” Jihyo says, then yawns. “I’m sure you’ve seen that I’m excellent at giving orders.”

(Sana’s insides erupt into flames again)

“O-oh.”

Jihyo raises a hand, runs the back of it against her cheek. “You’ve got it wrong, by the way,” she murmurs, softly. “Your Greek story, I mean. I am the guy with the complicated name. You’re the fruit that keeps running away.”

Sana laughs again, and Jihyo blinks at her, slowly. Her eyes stay shut longer than they are opened. Turns out all it took for all the shenanigans to tire her out was just lying down in a comfortable bed.

“Sleep,” she says, kissing Jihyo’s forehead and trying to extract herself. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, when you’re not so drunk. I promise.”

One hand clenches around her shirt, drags her back in. “You sleep,” Jihyo grumbles, throwing a leg over Sana’s thigh and burying her face in her neck. “No more mattress. It’s idiotic and I know it makes your back hurt; don’t think I don’t see you rubbing at the back of your neck every five minutes. The world’s not gonna end if we share a bed.”

“My snoring’s worse in close quarters,” Sana tells her, half-heartedly, already unbearably comfortable like this, all wrapped up in everything Jihyo.

“I told you it’s okay,” Jihyo says, slowly, like she’s falling asleep in the process. Sana feels her heartbeat slow down to match the cadence of her breathing, the space from one beat to another spelling out I love you, I love you, I love you, at the sight of soft lips curled up in a slight pout, of eyelids shut as gently as window panes in a sleeping baby’s room. “You can….. snore away into a megaphone for all I care, baby. Or skitter away every time you get a little spooked. Doesn’t matter. I’ll….. I’ll follow you anywhere you go. I just want to be where you are.”

*****

Wedding days are supposed to be stressful, but by god, Sana feels like she’s being split five ways.

These are the hours she’s supposed to be spending gracefully crying into a white handkerchief as she comes to terms with two of her best friends getting married to each other and leaving her alone (Both Momo and Mina would smack her for saying the last part. And they have, multiple times.), and yet, there’s no time. There’s comparing notes with Momo’s sister, Hana, on their maid of honor responsibilities. Making sure the brides’ parents are dressed on time, and in the correct clothes; Momo’s father tended to have adventurous tastes in suits, and it was her job to make sure he didn’t accidentally turn up in a plaid one or something. Both Mina and Momo would be fine with it, but they weren’t sure Mina’s mother could take the sight. She even makes a round through the rooms of close friends, making sure they were all up and getting ready: Nayeon flips her off, a tangled heap in the bed the minute Jeongyeon opens the door to let her in and Chaeyoung is saying goodbye to a very pantsless woman doing the walk of shame back to her own room, only winking at Sana when she raises her eyebrows. Both Dahyun and Tzuyu are up and about in their own rooms, but completely useless, they keep zoning out and smiling to themselves even when Sana’s telling them about something as unglamorous as the wedding pianist having come down with a bad case of the drank-too-much-and-is-currently-puking-their-intestines-down-the-toilet affliction.

(Jihyo would make the list too, except dealing with her doesn’t seem like a task, never seems like a task, and when Sana was basking in her presence in the morning, reveling in the weight of her head on her shoulder, she hadn’t thought about the massive list of things awaiting her, or the fact that Mina would most definitely need sedation in a few hours when she’d inevitably process the reality of walking down the aisle in front of, like, a million people. She’d thought, instead, about the mole right on the tip of Jihyo’s nose, and how perfectly it had been placed there, like carefully sprinkled garnish on top of a bowl of rice, like the dot on top of an i.

“Sana,” Jihyo had murmured, and when was Sana going to stop being surprised at the thrill of the sound of her own name on Jihyo’s lips? “Baby, please stop squirming and go back to sleep. My head is killing me.”

“I need to go,” Sana had whispered back, depositing a quick kiss right on top of the mole. Jihyo wrinkled her nose adorably. “Wedding duties. Just the afternoon, and then I’m all yours.”

A still drowsy Jihyo had let her go then, grumbling incoherently as she touched the surface of the bed where Sana had been sleeping. Sana took a couple steps towards the bathroom, then looked back to see her muttering to herself about something she couldn’t make out, properly, her eyebrows drawn in a frown, her nose scrunched up and her lips….

….those damn lips, twisted in a sleepy pout. Ugh.

The grumbling melted into a surprised squeal when Sana walked back and crashed onto the bed, into Jihyo again. “You’re so,” Sana told her, irrationally pleased about Jihyo’s blinding smile and the tightening of arms around her. “Stop looking this cute. I’m never going to get anything done.”

“I’d say it’s only a few hours,” Jihyo said, eyes still closed. Sana stopped jostling her when she winced a bit, probably the remains of the alcohol from last night taking effect now. “But I don’t want you to go either.”

For the first time in her life, Sana wondered if she truly was too old to be feeling this way. Wasn’t this sort of thing — the trembling in her hands, the skip in her heartbeat, the craving in her lips to kiss, kiss, kiss — supposed to be reserved solely for teenagers tumbling headfirst into a first love? Here she was, almost thirty, near-swooning over a hungover dork with clingy hands and incoherent words on her lips.

I love you so much, Park Jihyo, she thought, pressing the words as a stamp onto her frowning forehead in the form of a kiss. “Afternoon,” she promised. “I’ll look for the prettiest woman in the audience.”

“You’ll be looking for a mirror, then,” Jihyo replied, instantly, and surely both Momo and Mina would understand her delay later. There were simply more important things to do, like kiss the absolute breath out of her girlfriend’s lungs in the gentle morning light.)

Solving little fires here and there, though, Sana grows complacent after a point and that might be her big mistake. She only realizes she hasn’t checked in on either Mina or Momo since she’d left them in the hands of the makeup folks, around two hours ago, when both Hana and Kai come running to track her down at the catering section.

“What?” she asks, and both of them point to different directions.

Mina’s problem is that she needs Sana to do a grammar check on her wedding vows. Momo’s problem is that she’s the bane of Sana’s existence and after today, Sana can’t wait for her to completely become Mina’s problem to handle.

“Don’t you dare do it!” Sana calls out, not even completely through the door. “You are not dyeing your hair five hours before the wedding!”

“Too late,” Momo answers, looking at her defiantly through the mirror. It’s all done, already, Sana sees, her hair wrapped in foil, waiting to uncover something that’ll probably send Mina into cardiac arrest when she sees it through the aisle. “It’s already done.”

The woman working on it looks mildly apologetic. Sana sighs, slides into the free chair next to Momo. Is talking to their reflections when she raises an eyebrow.

“Wouldn’t you prefer this to me chopping most of it off?” Momo says, conversationally. Lot of good that’s doing when Sana can clearly make out her fingers, tapping restlessly on her thighs. Her hands, pressing and squeezing against the surface to get rid of sweat. Mina used to say, back in college when they’d just met her, that she thought Sana and Momo had a language all their own — something that even she, as Momo’s girlfriend, had a hard time deciphering. It certainly seems that way sometimes, what with Momo’s entire history, present and future etched into her body language. “At least this way the photos come out semi-decent.”

“Do I at least get to ask what color it is?”

“Don’t you want to be surprised?” Momo snarks, then grins when Sana sighs again. “Blue.”

Sana looks over at her; at her hair done up in curls and wrapped in foil, at her face with most of the makeup done already. Thinks of every time she’s seen that face, nearly every day that she can remember from ages three through twenty-nine, of all the conversations and all the stories that have written down the lines on Momo’s forehead, at the corners of her mouth when she laughs. Feels a sudden prickle of tears at the thought — a recurring one, these days — that everything was going to change now.

“The photos are going to come out more than semi-decent because you’re going to look beautiful,” she says, relieved when her voice doesn’t crack. Momo shoots her a tremulous smile. “Are you scared?”

“Nah. Well. I don’t know, yes?” The words come out in a staccato, punctuated by quick taps of her fingers against her thigh. “I know divorce isn’t exactly high on the list of possibilities but like, it’s still there, right? And what when we have a kid and Mina’s mother insists on the poor thing having to learn French and German and Mandarin all at once and have we forgotten she still thinks I’m some sort of pleb just because my dad doesn’t get tea served to him on a silver platter the minute he wakes up in the morning….”

Sana grabs a hold of her hand to pause her rambling. “Momo,” she says, and the very next second, registers sticky moisture on her palm. “Ew! Can you stop sweating?”

“It’s my fucking wedding!”

“Ugh! Fine!” It’s fine. It’s just a little sweat and either way, aren’t Momo’s sweaty hands supposed to be Mina’s to have and to hold from today onwards? Sana could suck it up for another hour. “Do you really think Mina’s going to let her mother walk all over your future kid?”

She wonders if Momo’s thinking about a pre-nuptial agreement lying in tatters on an exotic hardwood floor, and Mina’s blazing, furious eyes as she’d stared down her mother, when she answers with a tiny No.

“And do you really think she has, or she will, ever let her mother be an ass to your dad? Or to you?”

The first year of their relationship, Sana remembers seeing photos of Mina and Momo’s dad out fishing in the lake, both of them clad in neon lifejackets, grinning ear to ear over a massive shrimp they’d managed to catch.

Momo shakes her head.

“And do you really, really, think divorce is ever going to be an option for you guys?”

Momo and Mina had broken up once. Something about Mina’s mom insisting on Mina interning at the American branch of Myoui enterprises, her senior year of college, and a miserable Momo, in turn, insisting that she didn’t want to hold her back. Seven months of acute secondhand agony of watching Momo wither away in her room, get drunk daily and punch walls, deep in self-loathing, had finally come to an end when she broke her ankle dancing and got confined to her bed two whole months. One day after the injury, Mina had flown back, yelled at both Sana and Momo for letting this happen, and then collapsed into Momo’s arms in a mess of tears when jetlag inevitably hit.

I’m not leaving, Mina had said later, puttering around the kitchen, a look of intense focus on her face while she measured ingredients for an old Japanese herb soup that was supposed to strengthen ailing bones. If I can’t do it from Seoul or Tokyo, I don’t give a fuck. She can find somebody else to take over. I’m not leaving Momo again.

Momo looks at her through the mirror. Shakes her head again.

“Well then,” Sana says, and now her voice does crack. “In a couple of hours you’re going to go out there and she’s going to go out there and you’ll both do that cheesy thing where you burst into tears when you see each other — you will too, mind you, I’ve seen your wife already and she looks drop-dead gorgeous. And then the rest of us are going to cry — even Tzuyu, now that she’s all happy and in love — but Nayeon would still get up and pull some shit when they ask if anyone has any objections. And maybe Mina’s going to read her nerd vows about zombies apocalypses and npcs and kill stats or whatever it is that she does all day when she’s not staring into your face like she’d lay down her life for your smile and in the end, if neither of you have passed out yet, you’ll make out. Lucky for your parents, I’ll be there to stop it from turning obscene, because I have so much experience with that already. And then you’ll dance, because nothing will have changed, except that maybe, some last names would get switched around and your wife will no longer be able to flirt with me.”

“I think she’ll flirt with you anyway,” Momo says, her voice wet. She squeezes Sana’s hand once. “Will we get to dance with you?”

“You don’t have to ask,” Sana says, and now she’s thinking back to all the times she heard a Satang, do you wanna come see a movie with us? and We ordered in way too much pizza, come stuff your face. All those nights she’d crash in the middle of movie night and wake up in a comfortable bed, with Momo’s leg slung over her own, and Mina’s hair in her mouth. Innumerable cups of coffee, unasked for, meals delivered at her room on the eve of exam days. Through good days and awful ones. “Momoring. Nothing’s going to change.”

“No, Satang,” Momo says, tapping at the back of her hand with her index finger, “everything’s going to change. I’m just glad you’ll be with us the whole way.”

*****

There’s a moment, right after Mina’s just reached the stage and whispered an awed My god, how do you look so gorgeous to Momo that has the latter bursting into giggles through her tears, that Sana suddenly feels small. Could just be because they’re all so on display — she and Hana and Kai behind the brides and the officiant — and all she can see is expectant faces staring up in their direction. It’s a mixture of the exhaustion of the day, the joy, and just the slightest bit of panic that is induced at the thought of being left alone, somehow.

What better timing for an existential crisis to hit than in the middle of her best friends’ wedding, right?

So there she is, heart pounding way too fast, strange sort of sorrow seeping into her bones, when her eyes move over the audience, look more closely. There’s Jeongyeon, already starting to brush away tears, hiding her face in Nayeon’s shoulder, who, herself, is openly sobbing. Dahyun, her head leaning on Tzuyu’s shoulder, the latter’s arm thrown over her shoulders. Chaeyoung, who is staring wide-eyed, between both of them, as if trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. And next to her—

—Jihyo, her sweet, wonderful, beautiful Jihyo, dressed in a bright yellow dress that Sana can’t wait to see in its entirety, sitting up straight, her eyes only on Sana. When they make eye-contact, she smiles. Raises her hand to her face, holds the first two fingers against her lips for a moment before pushing it out in Sana’s direction.

(The world resumes its course, slow and steady. Her heartbeat goes back to its earlier pace. And that’s how she goes back to paying attention to the actual wedding, with Jihyo’s reassuring gaze set on her.)

There’s a lot of dancing, afterwards. After Mina and Momo are done with their first dance — something way too elaborate for a wedding, the nerds — and then dancing with their parents, Nayeon pulls Momo away while Sana grabs onto Mina and does her best to shield her blotchy eyes from the cameras.

“You sure you’re okay?” Sana asks her, once, when her eyes still look glossy.

Mina smiles, her eyes darting, as they have been the whole evening, to Momo, who is currently sandwiched in between Nayeon and Jeongyeon. “Never better," she promises. “This is the second happiest day of my life.”

Huh. “Second happiest? What’s the first?”

“That depends,” Mina answers, then bites at her lip. “When will you agree to that threesome?”

“Momo!”

Every single one of them stares, agape, when Tzuyu twirls Dahyun onto the dance floor, and right in the middle of it, dips her into a kiss. Even Jihyo, who had no business being surprised at something she was witness to.

“I suppose I owe you one,” Dahyun says, right after, when Chaeyoung, Momo and Nayeon drag Tzuyu away to interrogate her, and Sana comes into her orbit. “For not telling them any of this. Their faces were hilarious.”

Sana cannot take any credit for that — as interesting as this news was, this busy morning had given her zero opportunity to talk about it — but she shrugs anyway. “Are you sure you should be dancing with me?” she asks, winking at Jihyo, who is now dancing with Mina. “I’ve heard your girlfriend is the jealous kind.”

“Not my girlfriend,” Dahyun says, but she’s blushing prettily, and Sana thinks she isn’t going to be saying that for much longer. “And I’ve heard yours is worse.”

Jihyo isn’t jealous, but she is grumpy about the fact that they haven’t gotten to dance together, yet. She comes over right after Nayeon is done whacking Sana for not having told her anything about Dahyun and Tzuyu, and drags her to the dance floor by the arm, wordlessly.

Some song about stars and love is playing in the background; like every other song that is about stars and love, Sana thinks that this, too, must be about Jihyo. “I may be your girlfriend,” she says, amused, “but I still believe it’s customary to ask.”

Jihyo’s eyes glitter like fireworks over a lake. “Would you have said no?”

Oh, the minx. “I must be the first woman in my family to give in this easily,” she answers. “My mother made my father court her for a whole year before she finally agreed to marry him.”

“Then I guess you’re more like your father than you choose to believe.” Jihyo frowns a little; before Sana can ask her why she’s already untangling her arms from around her shoulders and cupping at her face, examining it up close. “You look tired.”

“I do?”

“Mm-hmm.” Warm fingers press against her cheeks lightly, tenderly, and yeah, Sana was tired, but she suddenly feels exhausted now. Jihyo holds her up as she sags a little. “All that schmoozing got you tuckered out, huh?”

“What can you do, huh?” Jihyo is frowning again, but this time not in her direction. When Sana turns them around, she catches Jeongyeon making cryptic but urgent gestures. “Turns out the rich have a set of problems all their own.”

Jihyo seems to snap out of whatever’s going on with her friends, and goes back to focusing on Sana. “I’ll say.” It’s only a little sarcastic. “Mina told me she had a private tutor growing up, whose only job was to teach her how to behave in company.”

“We all did, sweetheart.” Hikaru sensei. Used to lightly whack Sana across her fingers when she didn’t pick up chopsticks properly. Sana has very fond memories of Momo unscrewing the nuts in her chair, back when they were eleven. “My parents paid mine an insane amount of money to make me a functional member of society.”

“Your parents should’ve gotten a refund.”

That makes her laugh. Jihyo lets her finish, then leans forward to kiss her cheek.

“Taught me everything except for how to woo a beautiful woman.”

“You seem to have done well enough learning that on your own,” Jihyo says, an eyebrow arched. “Mina told me all about that one girl who you nearly put in the hospital from your almond covered chocolates—”

“I didn’t know she had an allergy!”

“—or the girl you knocked over with your bike on campus because you were trying to serenade her—”

“She was jay-walking!” Sana protests, again, flipping Mina off behind Jihyo’s back. Fat lot of good it does her, considering her best friend is embroiled in a heated discussion of some kind with Nayeon. Huh. “I’m going to make Momo a widow tonight.”

“You will do no such thing,” Jihyo says, and it’s a little pathetic how easily Sana gives in. “Honestly, it was kind of sweet. I think she was just trying to make sure—”

“—please tell me she didn’t give you a shovel talk—”

“—you don’t get hurt,” Jihyo completes, and then frowns. “Is she capable of hurting me?”

“You have not seen her eviscerate men over the internet if they’re not playing well,” Sana tells her, shuddering. The colorful language employed….. all that class taught at finishing school down the drain. “Sometimes, she and Momo can be…. a little over-protective.”

“You bring that out in a lot of people. I’m glad,” Jihyo says, her eyes impossibly warm. Cups her face with one hand, runs a thumb over her temple. Then she clears her throat, a little pink in the face. “You need it, anyways, crashing into everything like the klutz that you are.”

“You’re right,” Sana agrees. “You should always walk next to me, pushing things out of the way so I don’t get bruised.”

“Don’t give me ideas.” Another circle. Another twirl. “Who knows, if I’d known you back in college I’d have been able to save both you and that poor girl you were trying to serenade from your little collision.”

“My darling, if you’d known me back in college, you would have been the one in the collision,” Sana tells her, and she’s never been more certain of anything else in her life. She likes to think that Sana-at-whatever-age — as stupid as she’s been — should be able to recognize the girl of her dreams at any point.

But that little quip doesn’t get her the reaction she’s expecting. Jihyo, instead of swooning, has her eyes set far away into the distance. When she speaks, her tone is wistful, mournful almost.

“Sometimes,” she says, eyes still looking over Sana’s shoulder, “sometimes I wish I’d known you earlier.”

Sana clears her throat, because God. Same. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Jihyo seems to be thinking it over. “I wonder what twenty-seven-year-old you was like. Twenty-three. Eighteen. Ten. If you ever fought with Momo. The day you met Mina. If you ever fell asleep in the library, or in front of the tv while it was still on. Were you ever carried to bed, did you get grumpy when you were sleepy. If you dreamt of getting married, having a big family. And I wonder,” and here she pauses, looking right at Sana with a tiny, adoring smile playing on her lips, “I wonder if you thought about all the people you were going to fall in love with.”

It’s true, isn’t it? That Sana has thought about Jihyo for a long, long time, long before they even met. Has longed for her, yearned for a phantom voice she didn’t even know existed. Has looked for her in places like filled-up classrooms and quiet cafes, in gyms and boutiques, while she was in the middle of deciding if her date for the evening would like grey or purple better. Has looked for her every day, since a chance fifteen-minute meeting at a Christmas party had turned her life upside-down in a way she couldn’t articulate to anyone, not even Momo and Mina, who were used to unearthing bits and pieces of information out of non-sequiturs and rambling stories.

“It makes me a little jealous,” Jihyo continues, “to think of all the people who have known you all this time. Like they hold pieces of you I can’t…. get to.”

I looked for you, she thinks, looking at the woman she’s grown to love so, so fiercely. I looked for you and I found you, and someday I’ll tell you how relieved I was to see you sitting there at the table, when I talked to you and discovered I hadn’t been wrong about feeling that a chance encounter with a drunk stranger had already changed my life somehow.

“You can have all my pieces,” she says, hoarsely. “If you ask. I’ll give you anything you want.”

Jihyo looks away, a little bashful. “Really?”

“Really.” Then something occurs to her. “I, I also. Um. There was something I’ve been meaning to tell you. About the night we first met.”

Jihyo frowns, and before Sana can rush to assure her it isn’t anything bad, she realizes it isn’t her the frown is directed at. They stop dancing, and when Sana turns, there are a lot of people approaching them, Nayeon at the head.

Before she can open her mouth, Nayeon is already talking. “We didn’t know, I promise,” she says, rapid-fire. “Neither did Mina, because obviously—”

“—she didn’t know any of you guys,” Momo continues. “Honestly, we didn’t even look at the rsvps, since her parents were inviting so many people it was a headache, and somehow this slipped through the cracks—”

“—okay, stop.” Jihyo holds up a hand, and the clamoring stops all at once. Sana’s impressed, honestly, even through her confusion. “I still have zero idea what you’re talking about.”

“Unnie,” Chaeyoung says. “We just wanted to give you a heads up. There’s, uh — she’s, she’s here.”

It takes Sana one minute to figure it out. By then, Jihyo’s eyes have slipped into a distant, inaccessible haze, her mouth drawn in a flat, neutral line.

“Oh,” she says, quietly, and while Sana thinks, furiously, What was her name, they’ve all found their target, sitting at the bar, sipping at some cocktail with her face turned away. “Sejeong.”

*****

She’s pretty.

Oh, Sana would’ve loved for that to be another one of Nayeon’s exaggerations, would’ve loved it if the woman who her girlfriend has spent a significant part of her young adulthood with, turned out to be quite plain, if only so she can feel better about this whole thing, but the woman is a knock-out. Sana can imagine Jihyo staring into those pretty brown eyes, can imagine her brushing back soft-looking bangs away from that forehead.

Sejeong. Even her name is pretty. What the fuck.

Complicated stories. Complicated emotions. Sana kicks her feet in the water, watches the lights ripple over the swimming pool and tries to reason with herself. Which shouldn’t be this difficult. For fuck’s sake, she’d told Jihyo to go talk to Sejeong if she wanted to, had practically showered her blessings onto this little reunion, before making some stupid excuse to the rest of their friends and escaping.

Jihyo’s her girlfriend. Does Sana now think she’s suddenly going to fall back in love with a woman she hasn’t seen in ages?

The answer is no.

Mostly.

They have history. A whole sweet story — Jihyo had told her once, on a picnic date, head resting heavy on Sana’s lap — involving two women colliding in college, and falling in love slowly, organically over ramyeon dates and economics notes. Four years of love under the belt.

How is Sana, with her one blind date and persistent attempts at poisoning Jihyo supposed to compete with that?

She’s already texted Momo that she’s safe, she’s okay and yet there are about ten texts from both her and Mina clogging up her phone right now, making the guilt worse. It was their wedding, damn it. They shouldn’t be worrying about their stupid best friend metaphorically drowning her sorrows at a swimming pool because she is, of all things, jealous.

Time. Just a little bit of it. That’s all she needs to get her malfunctioning head in order, and Jihyo never has to find out—

“—why are you out here sulking?”

(Damn it)

“Who says I’m sulking?” she says. “I’m not sulking.”

“Shoulders down, hunched over, and if I were to guess, a massive pout on your face,” Jihyo says, her voice coming closer until she sits down next to her, pulls up the hem of her dress and little and dips her feet in the water too. “You do that when you sulk.”

“I do not.”

“Not to be mistaken with when you’re shoulders down, hunched over, but your lips are flat, because that means you’re just sad. And yes, you do.” Jihyo pokes at Sana’s cheek, repeatedly, until she smiles. “What, you think you’re the only one who can know someone?”

“Jihyo….”

“Sana.” A hand finds hers; Sana threads her fingers through Jihyo’s, holds on tightly. “What were you telling me, before?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I still wanna know.”

“Eh.” Sana tries waving it off. “How are you? How was…. all that?”

Jihyo turns to stare at her for an inordinately long time; Sana keeps her own eyes fixed ahead and imagines her wondering if she wants to let this one go. Then, finally:

“You know, sometimes you build things up in your head to such a level that you,” she trails off, her free hand held aloft in the middle of a gesture. Then she shakes her head. “For a long time, I imagined our first meeting, practicing, over and over, what I was going to say to her so she’d know I didn’t give a fuck anymore, or that I wasn’t lonely, and that I had a good life, and yet. Right now, I’m thinking, what even was that. Like. She said hi, and I said hi, I hope you’ve been well, and I meant it? I just — I dunno. Looked at that face, and thought I used to think you were the most beautiful woman in the world and I don’t, now, thought I used to be madly in love with you, and it’s so weird that I haven’t been for a while.”

Sana thinks she knows the feeling. The last time she’d felt it, three years ago, Miyeon was staring at her from across a room, in the arms of another woman, and all Sana had done — after she’d broken out of the trance that getting hit in the face with her own past had put her in — was raise her flute of champagne in greeting. Then, she’d wondered about how pleasant it was that the wound she’d thought was still bleeding, would keep bleeding forever, had finally scabbed over, nothing but a scar left as a reminder of a love loved long ago.

“She is beautiful.”

“Funny, she said the same thing about you.” There’s a pause. “Are you upset?”

“No.”                          

“Are you jealous?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

Sana waits a beat before answering. “No.”

A beat too long, apparently.

“You know, Sejeong is beautiful,” Jihyo tells her. “But she’s not the most beautiful woman in the world to me, anymore.”

And this. This is what Sana had been trying to avoid, this whole time. No matter how one put it, how Jihyo put it, the words were now being filtered through to Sana’s brain with a faint tinge of consolation to them. Anger she could stand. Even irritation was welcome. Some warped form of pity? That, she couldn’t bear.

She opens her mouth.

“No, don’t talk just yet,” Jihyo says, her free hand now over Sana’s lips. “I know you’re going to say something stupid.”

Well, that’s really unfair.

“Ah raffl waf—”

“—shush.”

Left with no choice, Sana kisses Jihyo’s palm. Can’t help feeling smug when she drops her hand in shock.

“I don’t like you.”

I love you, Sana thinks. “I don’t like you either,” she says, aloud.

“Too bad, then,” Jihyo answers, cheekily, “because you’re stuck with me, anyway.”

I love you, Sana thinks, again. Then: I’m an idiot.

Jihyo paddles her legs, moves them closer so her toes touch Sana’s underwater. Wriggles them, like she’s saying Hello.

“It’s an ugly emotion.”

“Mm hmm.”

“And it’s irrational.”

“Mm hmm.””

“Like, it’s not that I genuinely think you’re going to look at her once and dump me—”

“Mm hmm.”

“—or what, have I actually, for even one second, thought that there’s no way I could ever compare with the great love of your early twenties? Come on.”

“Okay.” Jihyo hums again. “Have you?”

“Sometimes,” Sana says, too ashamed to meet Jihyo’s eye. She focuses on her hand, instead, on her thumb rubbing gentle, soothing circles into the back of her own hand. “Sometimes I think I badgered you into dating me.”

Jihyo leans her head on her shoulder. Hums to let her continue.

“Sort of like you….gave in, eventually. Settled for me, or whatever. Because I was there, and I was persistent. And one day you’ll realize that and wonder What am I doing with her? And then that would be the end of…. this.”

Jihyo hums again. “Tell me,” she says, after a whole minute, “if I’d once straight up told you that I wasn’t interested, or that I didn’t want to date you — like a clear No — would you still have pursued me?”

“Well, no, but,” Sana pauses when Jihyo clears her throat, very deliberately, “that doesn’t mean anything.”

“No?” A beat passes. “How many first dates do you think I went on after Sejeong and I broke up?”

“I….”

“Fifteen,” Jihyo completes, easily. “Four men, eleven women. You don’t think I’m desirable enough at least a few of them asked me out on a second one?”

“This feels like a trick question.”

“It’s not, and they did. So if I did have to settle, why not them? Not like they weren’t nice people. Not like they didn’t want me.”

“So what you’re telling me is that I’m competing with fifteen more people now?” Sana says, only because she knows that one’s going to get a laugh out of Jihyo.

It does. “Yes,” Jihyo answers. “How good are your dueling skills?”

“Almost as good as my cooking.”

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

“No, we’re not.”

“No, we’re not,” Jihyo repeats back to her, then turns her head to kiss her shoulder, quickly. “Because I picked you. And I’ll pick you. Will keep picking you for a very long time, if you let me. Ugly, irrational emotions, loud snoring and all.”

When Sana finally turns to look at Jihyo, she finds her gazing back at her, steadily. No hint of uncertainty in her eye. Or in the gentle grip they have on each other’s hands. I picked you. What an easy thing to say to someone. I’ll keep picking you. What an incredibly wondrous, difficult, beautiful thing to say to someone.

“So much for badgering,” Jihyo tells her, fondly. “You think you badgered me into eating your horrendous cooking—”

“Well, there was some amount of emotional manipulation involved, I’ve heard my puppy eyes are deadly.”

“—or listening to your re-telling of shit movies—”

“They were classics!”

“—or missing you when you’re not around, and thinking about what you’re doing, constantly, or wanting to hold your hand, and kiss you, and touch you and,” Jihyo pauses, out of breath. “Do you think you’ve successfully badgered me enough into falling in love with you? Because that’s where we are right now, and that would also mean you’re a world class badgerer.”

“Is badgerer even a word?”

“I don’t know. That’s your primary concern?”

Falling in love? Falling in love?

Did Jihyo really say that?

Maybe she didn’t. Or she did, but in the same way Sana had said I love you to her first girlfriend, exactly five seconds after they were done making out for the first time, because she’d gotten her endorphins mixed up. Or maybe Jihyo thought she meant it, but only because it was a wedding and they’d just seen two people revoltingly in love get married to each other and now she was getting her endorphins mixed up. Or. Alternatively. It was less about what Jihyo may or may not have meant and more about—

“—I love you.”

“Why?” Sana whines, stupidly, her cheeks suddenly blazing hot. “Now I’ve lost my train of thought!”

“What do you mean why?” Jihyo shoots back, indignantly. “I’m so sorry I didn’t let you have your court-mandated freak out for enough minutes before interrupting it with a declaration of love!”

Sana stares. Then stares some more. Keeps staring until Jihyo cracks, bursting into giggles, her shoulders shaking with the effort to keep herself quiet.

Sana wants to tell her to not do that. Jihyo’s laughter makes the list of top five sounds in Sana’s world, topped only by the way she calls out Sana’s name.

“This is ridiculous,” Jihyo says, finally, when the laughter is mostly gone, and there’s silence again.

“We are ridiculous,” Sana says. Thinks of sharing burnt rice in lunch rooms, of hooking her chin over the back of Jihyo’s chair and watching her type away, diligently, on her laptop, the back of her neck flushed red. Every day better than the last, every meal happier than the one that came before it. Funny how things turned out. One day you were crashing into a frazzled, anxious woman at a party, and more than a year on, her warmth has lit up every corner of your life. “I love you.”

For the first time this whole evening, Jihyo falters. “You,” she says, “you don’t have to—”

“—I know that.” A silly, silly woman, Park Jihyo. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

“You told me I looked good in that top Nayeon personally described as giving unicorn puke.”

“That’s because you did,” Sana answers, stoutly. Jihyo looks good in everything, anyway.

“And that time on facetime with my mom, you lied when she asked you why you looked all red and your shoulders were all bruised up.”

“Did you want me to tell her the real reason I looked all red and my shoulders were all bruised up?”

Jihyo averts her eye, biting at her lip. Nice. That was exactly what she’d looked like that day, right before Sana had leaned in to kiss her. It had been…. a really good day.

“Now you are badgering me.”

“Too bad, you love me. You do, don’t you?” When Jihyo bites at her lip again, Sana can’t take it anymore. She leans over, kisses her. Feels a startled squeak against her lips before there’s a laugh. “And I love you so you have to put up with it.”

One kiss. Two kisses. Three. Sana nearly topples over, her awkwardly angled legs splashing in the water, before Jihyo steadies her, giggling against her lips between kisses.

“Now,” Jihyo says, then pushes at her chest when Sana tries to bite her lip. “Ah! Stop distracting me! Do I now get to find out what you were saying before we were so rudely interrupted?”

Oh. That.

Jihyo frowns. “What’s that face?”

“You mean this face that you love?”

“No, I mean that face that reminds me of the one you made right before telling me you and Momo had broken my work laptop playing catch with it in the office.”

Sana remembers that day very well. There had been a lot of screaming. Not the good kind.

“Oh. Well. You see,” she starts, her mind already ten steps ahead planning rebuttals. But baby you can’t break up with me now, you literally just told me you love me. But baby, this is all Momo’s fault. But baby… “There was this…. a couple months before our first date, we….”

*****

(“What do you mean you first saw me in those ugly glasses?”

“They weren’t that ugly!” A whack to the arm. “Wait! I mean, I didn’t even know it was you in them!”

“Also, what do you mean you dated seven Jihyos—”

“—it was one date, baby. And—”

“—and?”

“And…. they weren’t who I wanted, okay? It doesn’t matter that they were beautiful and nice and sweet, you were who I was looking for the whole time. I only ever wanted to see you and to talk to you again. I couldn’t — couldn’t get you out of my head. Still can’t, really.”

Silence.

“So they were beautiful and nice and kind?”

“Park Jihyo ssi.”)