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Yoonchae discovers that pencils are quieter than feelings.
They don’t trip over their own feet or spill out of her mouth at the wrong pitch. They sit where she leaves them, obedient little soldiers in a ceramic cup, waiting for a hand to choose a softness (2B for shadows, HB for edges, 6B for the ridiculous depth of Megan’s ocean eyes when she’s laughing). Pencils don’t make a big deal about anything. They just let the line be a line.
Which is why her new favourite thing is to sit by the dorm window with the curtains half-open and draw her girlfriend like it’s the most normal act in the world.
It isn’t. It feels like a magic trick she’s only recently unlocked: capture light; keep it.
The dorm smells like toast and shampoo. Saturday sun lays itself across the floorboards, thin and warm. Somewhere, a playlist hums from somebody’s room—lazy bass, soft snaps. Megan moves through the light like it’s shy around her, wearing sleep shorts and one of Yoonchae’s oversized tees that has never looked better on its original owner.
“Good morning, menace,” she says, kissing the top of Yoonchae’s head as she passes. “Hydration or death?” She holds up a glass.
“Hydration,” Yoonchae says, but her “good morning” gets trapped behind the way Megan’s hair is trying to curl at the ends. She takes the juice, the kiss, and the small static spark of contact across her scalp like payment for breathing. “Don’t call me menace.”
Megan’s grin hooks to one side. “Okay, angel.” She leans her hip to the table, steals a triangle of toast off a plate that may or may not be hers, and notices the sketchbook before she notices the pencil dust across Yoonchae’s fingers. “Again?” she asks, fond. “How many of me do you have now?”
“Not enough,” Yoonchae says before thinking, and immediately drops her eyes to pretend the page demanded it. The page, for the record, is mostly Megan’s hands—knuckles, rings, the way her thumb curves when it taps a rhythm on her thigh; then a tilted jaw; then, in the corner, a study of smiling mouths that might be entirely coincidental.
Megan doesn’t call her out. Megan is a menace, but a considerate one. She sits on the kitchen bench like a cat, ankle over knee, and becomes very still in the way that is not stillness, just attention. “Do I hold the toast like this?” she asks lightly, raising it to her mouth and pausing.
Yoonchae feels her face go warm. “You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m posing,” Megan corrects. “For my favourite artist. Also, I am hungry. If your process involves me not taking a bite for twenty minutes, I’d like to file a complaint.”
“You can eat,” Yoonchae mutters, pencil lifting into the curve of a knuckle, the small dip where tendons meet. “If you mess up the line I’ll sue.”
“Artist threatens to sue muse,” Megan narrates to nobody, biting into toast with exaggerated delicacy. Crumbs scatter on her thigh. She brushes them away. Yoonchae’s pencil follows the gesture like it was choreographed for her.
Across the living room, Sophia appears with a hair towel and the face of a woman who has already been up for hours. She takes one look at Megan trying to freeze mid-chew and Yoonchae hunched over her book like a dragon guarding treasure, and sighs exasperately and happily all at once. “Domesticity looks disgustingly good on you two.”
“We are professionals,” Megan says, swallowing. “This is a professional sitting.”
“Please tell me you’re paying her,” Sophia says.
“She is paying me,” Megan answers, solemn. “In kisses.”
“That’s below industry rate,” Daniela calls from the hallway.
Yoonchae doesn’t look up. “It compounds,” she says, pretending she is not blushing. “Like interest.”
Megan slides off the bench, crosses to her chair, and bends to press a kiss to the corner of Yoonchae’s mouth—quick, the kind that knows it could be longer but chooses not to be because choosing is its own intimacy. “She’s a savvy investor,” she explains to Sophia.
“Mm. And a messy one.” Sophia points at Yoonchae’s cheek. “Graphite streak.”
Yoonchae swipes at her face with the heel of her hand and, of course, smears it worse. Megan’s thumb follows, careful and slow. “Hold still,” she murmurs. Her nail is painted a chipped wine red; her hand is warm. When she’s done, she doesn’t move away, and neither does Yoonchae.
The sketch on the page blurs at the edges until Yoonchae blinks. She clears her throat. “Stop hovering.”
“Make me,” Megan says, which is rude because it always works.
Yoonchae inhales, squares her shoulders, and raises her pencil like a sword. “Okay. Sit there. Turn your head a little to the left. No, my left. Tilt down. Eyes on me. No, on my nose. And don’t smile.”
Megan tries not to smile; fails immediately. “Tyrant.”
“Prettiest tyrant you’ve ever seen,” Sophia sings on her way to the laundry, and is rewarded with a tea towel thrown in her direction.
They fall into an hour like that: Megan in various mild contortions; Yoonchae chasing the way shadows gather under a lower lip. At some point, Lara emerges, swipes a strawberry from the bowl, and stands behind them with a commentary face that promises trouble.
“Oh, we’re objectifying Megan again,” she says.
Megan doesn’t look away from the invisible point on the wall where Yoonchae told her to look. “We’re honouring beauty,” she says.
“That’s what objectification says when it wants to be invited to dinner,” Lara mutters, but her eyes keep flicking to the page, and her mouth softens.
“Don’t hover behind me! I can feel your creepy presence,” Yoonchae says without turning.
“You’re both tyrants,” Lara says, amused. She leans on the counter and bites her strawberry loudly. “Does she know you draw her sleeping?”
The pencil hiccups. “No!” Yoonchae says too fast.
Megan’s eyebrows jump. She turns her head—ignoring Yoonchae’s scandalised “No head turning!”—and pins her with delight. “Do you?”
“I—” Yoonchae flails for dignity. It hides under the table. “Sometimes. If you’re already there.” She shrugs, small and hopeless. “You’re easy to draw when you’re quiet.”
“That’s a slur,” Lara says.
Megan laughs, tips forward to kiss the top of Yoonchae’s head again—different than before, deeper in its softness. “I want to see,” she says.
“Later,” Yoonchae says, an automatic protection. The sleeping sketches are the most sacred ones, drawn with the privacy of breath and bed sheet. “If you’re good.”
“I am never good,” Megan promises, and sits still for another twenty minutes anyway.
When the page fills, Yoonchae taps the pencil twice and exhales like someone has opened a window. She doesn’t say done; she doesn’t need to. Megan knows. She leans back against the table and looks, careful not to shadow the page.
“Is that my mouth?” she asks after a moment, delighted.
“It is a mouth,” Yoonchae says, defensive.
“It’s my mouth,” Megan says, smug, and then, like she can’t help it, presses that exact mouth to the side of Yoonchae’s jaw as proof of ownership. It lands precisely where the graphite is darkest.
“Now I have to fix that,” Yoonchae complains, not moving at all.
“Tragic,” Megan murmurs, and kisses her properly.
It’s slow, then quicker; familiar, then surprising anyway—how it always is, as if they haven’t mapped each other in dozens of morning kitchens and studio couches. Orange juice and toast crumbs and the slightest taste of toothpaste. Yoonchae’s free hand goes to the back of Megan’s neck; Megan’s thumbs finds the hinge of Yoonchae’s jaw like a homing device. The kiss unwinds and rewinds itself, laughter caught between their mouths because Lara is fake gagging behind them and Manon is clapping once like an enthusiastic stage manager.
“Break it up kids,” Daniela says, walking through with headphones, hips sashaying. “The toast is getting cold!”
By the time lunchtime becomes afternoon, the apartment thins out. People peel away to errands, naps, their own corners of quiet. Megan doesn’t. She makes coffee like she’s designing a perfume, then collapses on the living-room rug and drags Yoonchae down with her.
“Five minutes,” Megan says, which is code for until one of us gets hungry again. She sprawls flat, arms up, hair a dark halo on the woven jute. Yoonchae folds into the crook of her arm like she has always belonged there, which is either fate or good practice.
“Hey,” Megan says, nosing her temple. “Draw on me.”
“What?”
“On me,” she repeats, certainty like a smile. “Just a little. A secret tattoo. I won’t tell.”
“That’s permanent marker,” Yoonchae says, because the pen on the side table is indeed the wrong kind.
“Then I will be permanently yours,” Megan says, obscene and casual. “Unless the label raises a hygiene concern.”
“The label can mind its business,” Yoonchae says, and thinks for a second, then chooses the mechanical pencil instead. She pushes Megan’s sleeve up, finds the inside of her forearm, the tender pale there. “Hold still.”
“I am a statue.”
“You’re vibrating.”
“Artist effect,” Megan says, obediently stilling.
Yoonchae draws a tiny star where she knows Megan’s pulse sits. Then she adds a second, just beside it, smaller. Then—impulsively, because the morning is gentle and the light is kind—she draws a little orbit between them, barely a curve, more suggestion than line.
Megan watches her face instead of the drawing. “What’s that?” she asks, soft.
“Us,” Yoonchae says, softer.
Megan makes a sound that belongs in a different room, a different hour. She flips their hands, presses her mouth to the ghost of graphite. “Frame it,” she whispers.
“You’re not skin I can hang on a wall,” Yoonchae says, smiling. She ponders for a while. “You’re a... wall I can lean on?”
Yoonchae's been earnestly trying to improve her English. It's not perfect yet—she can't find the perfect adjectives sometimes, but she tries to replace them with descriptive words that match the gist of what she's trying to convey. And all that, unintentionally comes across as so poetic.
“That was a crazy good line,” Megan says, impressed. “How are you this accidentally romantic all the time? I’m stealing it for lyrics.”
“It's your effect perhaps,” Yoonchae replies, now smirking. "Pay me."
“In kisses?”
“In snacks,” she corrects, but accepts the kiss anyway. Very eagerly in fact.
The studio after midnight could be a church.
Not for silence—there’s always something humming; the air conditioner, the sleep-drunk laptop, Megan’s foot restlessly tapping a double-time. It’s the reverence. The way lights feel lower, even when they’re not. The way sound behaves like a secret offered up and held carefully by the room.
Megan is in the control chair, hair now braided, hoodie exchanged for a soft black knit that keeps slipping off her shoulder. She’s mixing something bright and cruel, a little wicked on the snare. Her face is all angles until she relaxes, and then it’s nothing but curve.
Yoonchae sits on the floor to the left of the chair because that is her spot—close enough to hear, far enough to watch. She has a second sketchbook for the studio, as if drawings made here are different species that must be kept from cross-breeding. The first page is dated with a shaky hand: first time I drew her while she worked. The subsequent pages have ceased counting.
It starts with hands again—faders and knobs and the small unconscious turn of her wrist. Then a jaw. Then the stubborn line of a mouth that is trying not to smile at a particularly good take she just cut from three messy ones.
“Thoughts?” Megan asks, not looking. She always knows when the song has hit a point where it needs outside ears.
“I like the way the bass tucks under the vocal? Like a... blanket,” Yoonchae says, and Megan makes the pleased noise that means correct answer. “But the fourth bar of the bridge feels like it’s... arguing with itself. If you get what I mean.”
Megan finally looks, delighted. “That matches what I wrote! ‘Bar four chooses violence.’” She leans back, pushes the chair away on its rollers, and nudges Yoonchae’s knee with her toe. “You’re good at this,” she says, honest, no teasing.
“I have ears,” Yoonchae says, peering down at her paper as if the page will explain why compliments feel like stolen fruit. "And Lara's been actually pretty good at helping me get down with all these music production thingies."
“You have taste,” Megan says. “And you always have me too, don't forget!” She says it without weight. It settles heavy anyway, the good kind.
Yoonchae draws until the song eases into itself and the air settles in her chest. She’s just begun shading Megan’s lashes when she realises she’s blended two thumbs instead of one. She tilts her head, amused at herself. “I gave you extra hands.”
“Useful,” Megan says. She drags herself off the chair and collapses onto the floor beside Yoonchae, shoulder to shoulder, the way they do when the room is safe enough to let the day fall off. “Show me?”
The page is a patchwork of Megan’s fragments: lashes, mouth, the tilt of her head when she’s listening hard; the neck of the microphone; a scrap of a lyric she caught her humming earlier and wrote in the margin: sugar on my tongue, gravity undone. Megan reads it and makes that face again, the one that says I’ve been seen and it doesn’t scare me.
“I want to be inside your head,” she says, a little helpless. “It’s all maps.”
“It’s a junk drawer,” Yoonchae says, but she lets Megan keep staring because Megan stares like prayer: not to take, just to praise.
“Draw me again,” Megan says suddenly. “But—” She stops, like she has to ask permission for wanting more. Then she doesn’t ask. “Draw my mouth.”
“I have,” Yoonchae says, dumb.
“Right now,” Megan says, lower. She tips her head, and Yoonchae understands: not a study; a witnessing.
The pencil trembles. Yoonchae steadies it with her other hand. She looks up at Megan’s mouth, at the corners that have kissed toast crumbs off her fingers and laughter out of her throat, at the softness that has been kind to her on ugly days and silly on good ones. She looks, and then she draws, and the line does what it’s supposed to: it keeps what it touches.
Megan doesn’t speak. She just watches Yoonchae’s face move from concentration to something like awe. When the line closes, when the shading gives the lower lip its weight and the top lip its bow, when the little shine is suggested with a breath of empty paper—Megan says, “Come here,” and Yoonchae goes.
The kiss is slower than the morning’s, and longer, wrapped in the warmth a studio somehow invents after midnight. It starts with a press and opens like a door. Megan’s hand cups the back of Yoonchae’s head, careful of the clip; Yoonchae’s hand lands on Megan’s knee and slides, anchoring. The room hums. A neon LED strip somewhere blinks like a sleepy heartbeat. The laptop fan sighs.
“Mm,” Megan says against her mouth, something like approval, and nudges her backward a little so they topple into the unmade nest of blankets that has appeared over weeks of late-night working. They don’t lie down all the way. They tip and catch, foreheads tipped together between kisses that find their own pace: a slow, silly peck; a deeper line; a break where they grin like thieves.
“Interest?” Megan murmurs, and Yoonchae laughs into her mouth.
“Compounding,” she says.
“Art benefits, too,” Megan says, untangling enough to glance at the page. “You just drew me better after that.”
“That’s because you sat still,” Yoonchae says, and kisses her again.
At some point, the song on the speakers loops back to the start and neither of them gets up to stop it. At some point, Yoonchae draws a tiny version of that orbit again on the inside of Megan’s wrist—this time with permanent marker.
They live in that little, ordinary forever until the clock says 2:14 and the body says bed. Megan stands and stretches, groaning like someone twice her age, then holds a hand out. Yoonchae takes it. Their fingers fit the way well-used pencil grooves fit fingertips; there’s proof in use.
“Bring it,” Megan says, chin toward the sketchbook. “I want it near us.”
“You want to sleep with a drawing of your own mouth beside you,” Yoonchae says, amused.
“I want to sleep with my artist beside me,” Megan says, solemn for once. “The drawing is a bonus.”
They commute the few steps to the small couch in the side room and call it a bed. The blanket has studio dust and the faint ghost of last week’s coffee; it is home anyway. Yoonchae rests the sketchbook open on the low table where the latest mouth can look up and be smug. She curls into Megan’s chest and realises, distantly, that she has graphite on her cheek again.
Megan’s thumb finds it in the dark and rubs it away. “There,” she whispers. “Clean lines.”
“Messy hearts,” Yoonchae whispers back.
“Best kind,” Megan says, and kisses her once, twice, the kind of kiss that isn’t about heat so much as the decision to be here again tomorrow.
The studio hums along, a faithful machine. The drawing dries. The night parks itself on the other side of the window and minds its quiet business. The girls sleep in a tangle that makes sense only to them.
In the morning, sun will pool on the floor like yesterday’s, and Yoonchae will make coffee for once and get the sugar wrong and Megan will make a face and drink it anyway. There will be new pages. There will be the old hoodie. There will be hands and mouths and laughter. The interest rate will continue to do whatever interest does when two people decide they are tired of saving and ready to spend.
For now: Yoonchae knows she has a new favourite thing to draw. Not just Megan’s face, or her hands, or her sleeping profile. It’s all of it. It’s the way Megan lives in the world. It’s the line from light to body and back again.
She presses a last kiss to Megan’s collarbone, tastes graphite and skin, and promises the page the same thing she’s already promised the girl.
I’ll keep you.