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It would be a picturesque poolside day if Jongho wasn’t forced to wear a parka.

It’s far too cold outside, and she doesn’t even own a swimsuit, but she wanted to have a pool day, so she’s gonna have a pool day, goddamnit. Never in a million years did Jongho think she was ever gonna live somewhere fancy enough to have a swimming pool, so she’s gonna enjoy every second of it even if she has to bundle up against the frigid March breeze.

Just a year ago, she was still writing songs for other artists and performing for dead crowds in dingy bars. Now, when she’s running errands, she’ll hear her own voice playing in the grocery store between intercom announcements about the produce sale of the week.

Sometimes, on the subway, she’ll even hear people mention her name. It catches her off guard, but at least it’s only her stage name, so it’s slightly less jarring.

But it doesn’t make her success feel any less like a hallucination than it already does. While the name Shinwoo may be famous, she’s still just Jongho once the stage lights turn off. Still Jongho, who nobody knows, and who still hasn’t broken the habit of eating ramyeon and spam for dinner to save up some spare cash. But even if her overnight success feels like a farfetched fantasy, she’s gonna enjoy every second of it before this dream slips away. She has a pool for fucks sake and she’s gonna enjoy it. Jongho thinks after everything she’s been through, she deserves her stupid pool day.

She leans back on the lounge chair and rubs her hands together for warmth. Perhaps she’s a little too stubborn for her own good. The sun sets and steals away any remaining heat with it, and when Jongho starts shivering, she figures it’s time to give up and go indoors.

She begrudgingly walks back inside, her footsteps against the marble floor echoing throughout the too big, too empty lobby. It feels even colder inside just from the vastness of the space, with the minimalist suede couches snaking around the room with nobody to sit on them. The only thing that fills the void aside from her presence is the ambience of the decorative waterfall that spans an entire wall. The droplets resonate in time with her footsteps, just loud enough to hide the sound of the other pair of footsteps pattering up ahead.

Jongho sees her neighbor, Yeosang, before she hears her steps, and she makes eye contact and smiles politely. Yeosang avoids her gaze as she looks to the ground, speeding up her walk. They pass by each other without exchanging a word.

Jongho isn’t offended by her avoidance, though, because having lived next door to each other for a good handful of months, she’s come to learn that Yeosang is far more skittish than she looks.

On the surface, Yeosang looks like she belongs on a DVD cover of the fairytale princess movies Jongho’s mom made her watch growing up, but she has a surprisingly athletic build beneath her frilly dresses. Jongho noticed it one day when she caught Yeosang doing bicep curls in the apartment’s gym. Every part of her has been sculpted to perfection, from her strong calves to her acrylic nails, like an artistic collaboration with the divine forces that created her. But unlike any other work of art, she doesn’t demand attention. She doesn’t like making eye contact, and really doesn’t like being acknowledged by strangers.

The two of them cross paths regularly, but Jongho’s never managed to talk to her before. She’s a little odd, even by Jongho’s standards.

While their apartment building is nice, it’s still an apartment, and the soundproofing leaves something to be desired. Jongho shares her bedroom wall with Yeosang’s unit, and as a result, she knows far more than she needs to about her odd neighbor’s personal life than she’d like to.

But Jongho can’t judge her too harshly, knowing she has her own quirks too. All the other more seasoned luxury apartment dwellers likely find her equally odd for staring at the fountain in the lobby, or riding the elevators to random floors all for the sake of enjoying every inch of square footage in the building that she barely believes she lives in.

Jongho feels a tickle in her nose and sneezes. It echoes through the lobby, and she hears Yeosang’s footsteps come to a halt. Jongho turns and sees the other woman giving her a worried look, but the second their eyes meet, Yeosang turns away, continuing off in the direction she was headed.

“Bless you,” Jongho mutters to herself.

Jongho sneezes so hard that she sees stars behind her eyelids and nearly topples out of her chair from the sheer force of it. When she opens her eyes again, she’s greeted by the stunned glances of everyone else in the studio.

One of the recording engineers breaks the silence with a quiet “bless you,” and Hongjoong bursts into the room moments later.

“What on earth was that?” she asks, bewildered. “I could hear it all the way down the hall. Either we need to improve our soundproofing or you need to see a doctor.”

“Sorry,” Jongho sniffles, desperately rummaging through the contents of her purse for a tissue and unfortunately coming up empty-handed. “My allergies have been getting worse and worse lately.”

Hongjoong places the back of her hand against Jongho’s forehead and frowns. “Are you sure you aren’t sick? Your face is burning.”

Hongjoong’s hand feels like ice sizzling against her hot skin, so yeah, maybe she is running a slight fever.

Jongho feels another tickle in her nose and whips her head away just in time not to sneeze directly into Hongjoong’s face, but with just enough momentum to send her stumbling into the wall. She’s lucky enough for the impact to be cushioned by a foam sound dampening panel, but her professionalism takes a hit as she’s left to awkwardly wipe her nose with the back of her wrist, no tissues in sight.

Hongjoong shakes her head at the sight and sighs. “I think you should take the rest of the day off.”

“But we need to finish the demo for—”

“I’m not letting you record anything if you’re just gonna sneeze all over my equipment.”

“Fair point.”

Hongjoong crosses her arms sternly, like a parent gearing up for a lengthy lecture. “I know recording the opening song for a big movie is a huge deal, but I really think you’ve been overworking yourself.”

“You’re one to talk,” Jongho snorts. “Ever since Where Our Hearts Touch went viral, you’ve been up all night in the studio too.”

“Well, you’re not gonna write another hit when you can barely stand straight. Now go get some rest,” Hongjoong instructs her, waving her out of the studio.

Jongho hobbles home, knowing it’s always best to listen to Hongjoong if she knows what’s good for her. Even if the ever creeping deadlines haunt her every thought, a disappointed Hongjoong is far more terrifying. When she arrives at the apartment, she’s relieved to see that no one else is home, so she collapses onto her bed for a well needed nap. When she wakes up, however, she somehow feels even worse.

So, she drags herself to the nearest clinic—one of those shiny new urgent care facilities that seem to be popping up everywhere, including in the formerly vacant building two streets over from her house. The name of the office, Lovesick Urgent Care, sounds a bit odd in hindsight, but Jongho, a beggar, isn’t in the position to be a chooser when she can barely crawl out of her apartment in her feverish state. After all, it’s not like she has the greatest health insurance at the moment.

At least the interior doesn’t give off any red flags. The clinic seems normal upon first impression, aside from splashes of offensively magenta branding here and there and the big heart-shaped logo hanging on the wall behind the front desk.

But when the doctor enters the exam room, it sets off every red flag in her book. He glides in with a mischievous look on his face that makes it obvious to her that he’s plotting something, which is of course exactly what she wants out of a medical professional.

“Took you long enough to get here,” he smirks. “My name is Dr. Wooyoung Jung.”

She does not like the mischievous glint in his catlike eyes as he takes a step back and does not like the way chuckles to himself as he looks her up and down either. Suddenly, in a puff of metallic pink confetti and velvety red rose petals, his lab coat and scrubs evaporate, and feathery white wings burst from his back in its place. An ornate golden bow and arrow materializes in his left hand, and he cocks his hip proudly as he poses with it.

“Oh god,” Jongho yelps, averting her eyes from the sight.

“First time seeing a heavenly being?” he asks rather pompously, fluttering his massive wings.

“More like my first time seeing some random guy’s dick. Can you put some pants on please?”

“You earthly creatures get so flustered over things like this,” he scoffs. “How prudish.”

“Not a prude, just gay,” Jongho clarifies.

“Ah! How gay,” he corrects himself.

“Those aren’t synonyms, sir.”

He furrows his eyebrows and shakes his head. “Humans are so confusing,” he frowns. He begrudgingly pulls a disposable gown out of the cabinet and ties it around his waist like a loincloth. “Is that better?”

“Sure.” Jongho would honestly prefer it if he wore it normally, but she’s never been the type to waste her breath on a man.

“Well then. It seems you’ve come down with a case of…” He pauses for dramatic effect in a way that grates on Jongho’s nerves. “…the Cupid Virus.”

Jongho blinks once, then twice in disbelief. “Can I see your medical license?”

“I don’t need a license to know you have the virus, because I’m the one who gave it to you.”

The look on the so-called-doctor’s face is almost convincingly genuine for once.

Jongho skeptically glances around the room. “Is this real?” she chuckles, wholly in denial. “You can cut the cameras if this is some sort of prank.”

“Why would you think this is a prank?” he asks.

Jongho prides herself on her ability to remain calm and composed.

Not because she’s naturally a very calm and composed person, but because it takes so much self control to hold back her monstrous temper once she’s been irked that it’s a feat in itself if she does manage to keep it under control for a few minutes. She lunges forward to pluck off a few of Dr. Jung’s feathers in retaliation.

“Now why the hell would you give me a virus?” she growls. “I have work to do. I have songs to record.”

Dr. Jung shrieks when Jongho swats at him. “Hey! I’m sorry, but I didn’t have much of a choice here. Now stop trying to pull my wings out and let me explain.”

He swats back at her with his bow and arrow until she gives up and sits down in defeat on the examination table again, crinkling the delicate paper beneath her.

“Fine,” she grumbles.

“So,” he explains. “I’m not exactly a doctor…”

“Obviously,” Jongho interjects, rolling her eyes.

“…I’m a cherub. Familiar with the name Cupid? I’m one of his most trusted and most valuable employees.” He excitedly points his heart shaped arrow at himself, but Jongho remains unamused.

Refusing to let her lack of enthusiasm dampen his theatrics, he continues on, dramatically gesturing to the bow and arrow in his hand. “Unfortunately my arrows haven’t exactly been working on one of my subjects. She shot down all of my most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, so I’m sort of running out of options here. That’s where you come in,” he announces as he points his arrow at Jongho.

“Why the hell am I involved now?” Jongho complains, rolling her eyes and swatting his arrow out of her face.

“Hey! Helping a cherub is a great honor, actually,” Dr. Jung argues, and Jongho doesn’t believe him one bit. “If you help me get this person to fall in love, you’ll be cured. Sounds easy enough, right?”

Jongho crosses her arms. “So you think giving me the flu is gonna work better than all your mystical arrows and your army of irresistible hot people?”

“I said I was running out of options. I didn’t say the options I had left were any good.”

“Sure, whatever.” Jongho’s patience for any more conversation is nonexistent, and as a general rule of thumb, the less she has to talk about romance, the better. “Now who am I playing matchmaker for?”

“I hear you’re quite familiar with her. A woman by the name of Kang Yeosang. ”

Oh, Jongho’s familiar alright, which is exactly why she instantly knows she’s screwed.

“So what you’re saying is that you’re trying to kill me.”

“I’m not giving you a death sentence. Just talk to her. See if you can set her up with one of your friends,” he suggests.

“I can’t do that, she’s Yeosang. She’ll break their hearts too and they’ll blame me for it.”

“Well, it’s worth a shot isn’t it?” the cherub shrugs. Jongho resists the urge to tackle him and pluck him bald like a raw grocery store chicken.

Yeosang’s love life is eventful, to say the least. Jongho moved next door to her about six months ago, and in those six months as an innocent bystander, she’d overheard Yeosang gleefully shatter the hopes and dreams of at least six absolute heartthrobs. The types of heartthrobs that would have people lined up to sell their souls just for a chance with them. People Jongho would’ve written heart-wrenching ballads about back when she gave a damn about falling in love.

Just a week ago, she’d ripped out the beating heart of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model of the Year, animal shelter volunteer, and all-around beautiful, benevolent angel, Choi San, after a screenplay-worthy confession that ended when Yeosang replied “I love you too, bestie. I hope we stay friends for a long time.” Jongho nearly died of secondhand embarrassment hearing that echo through the drywall, and she still winces at the memory every time she sees the dried up rose petals from the bouquet that got left behind on the floor by the garbage chute.

Choi San is literally famous for being perfect, and just seeing her in the apartment lobby on occasion was nearly enough to send Jongho into shock. If Jongho’s meant to find someone who meets the standards of someone who turns all that down, her illness might as well be terminal.

“And what if I kill you first?” Jongho threatens.

“You can’t kill a celestial being,” the cherub scoffs.

Jongho winds up for a punch. “Has anyone tried to?”

“…and that’s my cue to leave.”

Dr. Jung hurriedly shoves aside the heavy curtains blocking the window and pops the glass pane open.

“Thank you for your service, ma’am.” He salutes with a wink, and with a flap of his wings, he disappears into the evening sky.

“Bastard,” Jongho mutters to herself.

Jongho spends the rest of the evening attempting to formulate some kind of chemical concoction that might alleviate her current suffering. She didn’t want to believe the cherub, but the feathers and the glitter were convincing enough for her to think it wasn’t just some sleight of hand with a dash of classic magician trickery.

However, she is annoyed that her quack of a doctor never bothered to prescribe her anything in the meantime. Not that she would’ve trusted anything he would’ve given her anyway, but the effort would’ve been nice, though. Even a spare amount of sympathy would’ve sufficed.

Her pharmaceutical knowledge is limited to whatever she can dig up on Wikipedia, and her resources are limited to whenever she can dig out of her bathroom medicine cabinet, so she’s resorted to the hope-and-pray method to make sure she won’t give herself an adverse reaction with a forbidden combination of pills.

She wasn’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to have to talk to Yeosang, and this cough doesn’t make her any more excited to talk to her mysterious neighbor. In classic Jongho fashion, she puts it off until later. She isn’t that sick, she decides. She can worry about Yeosang whenever she decides the sickness gets unbearable.

The medicine she has in her cabinet does enough to quiet her cough enough for her to keep going through her schedule as normal. She goes to the studio, works on the demos for the movie soundtrack. She makes mediocre progress, but tells herself it's progress nonetheless. She goes through the motions for a couple of days, letting it all build up until she breaks into a coughing fit in front of her door as she fumbles for her keys, right in front of Yeosang.

Again, Yeosang doesn’t acknowledge her outside of a worried glance, and wordlessly walks past her and into her own apartment.

Jongho figures it’s time to start upping the dosage of whatever she’s been taking. The next morning, as she squints at the label on her bottle of acetaminophen, trying to calculate how much liver damage she’s willing to risk getting to make the rest of the day bearable, she hears rustling by her door, followed by what sounds like a faint knock.

She checks her peephole and sees no one, so she cautiously cracks open the door to check one more time. When it swings open, she hears a paperbag hanging from her doorknob brushing against her door. She unhooks it and brings it inside. Curiously, she opens it, and inside it’s full of herbal tea. Exactly what she needed to soothe her sore throat.

Immediately, only one person who comes to mind when she thinks of who would do this. She quickly dials a number on her phone.

“Hey Hongjoong,” she says after her producer picks up.

A groggy voice mumbles from the other end of the line. “Whaddyawant Jongho?” she slurs, lazily.

“Thanks for the tea.”

“What tea?”

“The tea you just dropped off.”

Jongho hears more confused grumbling and what sounds like the rustling of sheets.

“…What the hell are you talking about?” Hongjoong asks, thoroughly bewildered.

“So… it wasn’t you?”

“Not unless I’ve been sleepwalking. Now lemme sleep for 5 more minutes. I went to bed at 4 am making beats and my head still hurts.”

Hongjoong continues mumbling incoherently for a few seconds. Something about fixing a shitty bassline and how much she hates snare drums. She then hangs up shortly after.

Jongho tries to think of anyone else who knows both where she lives and that she’s been dealing with a cough that won’t go away. Only one other name comes to mind, but that would be completely absurd.

Impossible. But if it was true, it would be oddly convenient.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

She brews a cup of tea first, buying herself time to mentally prepare. It’s soothing, the peppermint clearing her sinuses enough for her to breathe clearly, and the warmth quelling the itchy cough in her throat. When she’s drained the whole mug, she feels genuinely better—far better than before.

Once she’s braced herself, she throws on a semi-presentable hoodie and takes two steps down the hall to the apartment door right next to her own.

She knocks on its smooth metal surface, and waits for a response, if any. After some sounds of shuffling on the other side of the door, it slowly swings. Yeosang stands half hidden behind the partially opened door, as if she’s ready to slam it into Jongho’s face any second.

Jongho figures it’s better to keep it brief.

“Were you the one who left me the tea?” she asks.

Yeosang meets her gaze for a brief moment, then her eyes dart off to the side again. She nods.

“Sorry. I was worried about your cough, that’s all. That tea always helped me so I figured you might like it.”

“Thank you,” Jongho says. She smiles reassuringly, so Yeosang relaxes, no longer tensed and ready to dart away. “I really appreciate it. I was worried I’d lose my voice, which would be awful because of all my deadlines at work, but this tea really helps.”

“Oh, what do you do for work if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m a singer. Songwriter too. Mostly a songwriter, actually.” Jongho stumbles over her words, not knowing how to describe herself. There’s no easy way she can explain that she’s Shinwoo in a handful of words.

Yeosang’s eyes light up, sparkling in the light of the chrome wall sconces lining the hallway. “Oh really? That’s so cool.” The door creaks open a bit wider, Yeosang no longer hiding behind it.

Jongho’s eyes dart to the ground. “Ehh, it’s not that cool.”

Yeosang’s eyes glitter, round and doll-like. “If you have a minute I’d love for you to me more. What songs do you write? Wait, would you like to come inside?”

Jongho really hadn’t expected Yeosang to be so talkative, but she seems like the curious type once she’s interested in something.

“Well, I am a little sick…”

Yeosang swings the door open fully. “I don’t mind. My job isn’t nearly as exciting as yours, so I wouldn’t mind having a sick day off,” she jokes.

Jongho does have an hour to kill and a cherub to appease, so she takes the chance and walks inside.

It’s a little uncanny entering another unit in the building. Yeosang’s apartment appears to be an exact mirror image of Jongho’s own one-bedroom. It’s disorienting, like she’s entered an alternate universe where her house has been flipped and redecorated, but the rest of Yeosang’s apartment from the furniture to the decor is quite welcoming.

The morning light trickles in through the blinds, casting the sun’s rays over the houseplants on the window sill, and across the pastel pink upholstery of her living room furniture. There are concert posters decorating her walls and records perched on the rails she’s mounted. Her bookshelves are stacked high with CDs next to a record player that’s playing music at a low volume—something ambient, sung in French.

A small white puppy runs up to greet her, putting her paws on Jongho’s knees as she tries to climb her like a tree.

“Down, Hetmongi,” Yeosang gently scolds, and Hetmongi listens, putting her paws back on the pristine white rug beneath them, but still darting between Jongho’s feet while she attempts to sit down on the armchair in the corner.

Jongho was not quite sure what Yeosang found so intriguing about her job as a songwriter, but she’s a music lover from the looks of it, which gives her the perfect opportunity to get some information out of her that could help her cure her sickness.

“So, what kind of music do you usually listen to?” Jongho asks to break the ice.

“Oh, I listen to a little bit of everything.”

“I’m the same way, usually. But since I’m writing a ballad right now, I’ve been listening to more of those lately. I haven’t been able to nail down the lyrics for it yet, though. Maybe you could help me think of some inspiration?

“A ballad? I love ballads. What’s the song about?”

Yeosang’s lips twitch, like she’s holding back a smile, excited as if Jongho’s about to spill a secret to her. Her angelic cheeks catch the light, and her bleach blond hair frames her like a halo. Even in the dim lighting, she exudes divinity in a way not even the actual heavenly body running the clinic down the street could.

Jongho tries not to look too hard so she doesn’t go blind. Pretty girls are a slippery slope that can only lead to shitty song lyrics she’ll scribble down through wet eyelashes in the aftermath of many bad choices.

“It’s about…” Jongho pauses, trying to think of a relevant topic. “It’s about when you get to know someone and start developing feelings for them. The giddiness and the confusion, you know?”

“I’m not very romantically experienced, so I don’t think I’d be much help,” she says shyly, looking off to the side.

“But you’ve been on dates before, right?” Jongho prods.

Yeosang shakes her head, chuckling as thou go Jongho’s made an outlandish statement. “Definitely not.”

Jongho’s sick but she knows she’s not sick enough to lose her grip on reality. But that denial definitely makes her feel like it’s slipping away.

“What about that girl I’ve seen you with before?” Jongho asks, sidestepping around the fact that she definitely knows more than she should about Yeosang’s love life. “I used to see her in the hallway a lot.”

“Oh, San? I haven’t talked to her in a while. She’s been weird ever since the last time she came over. She hasn’t responded to any of my texts, but I guess she’s just too busy lately.”

“Well, yeah, because you…”

Jongho at Yeosang’s face to see her brows furrowed in a sad sort of confusion. She wasn’t making a joke, and she certainly wasn’t playing dumb. And in that moment it dawns on Jongho that Yeosang has absolutely no idea that she’d completely obliterated poor San’s heart. She really truly meant that she wanted to be San’s friend forever, but suddenly she disappeared for a reason she doesn’t even know.

“We were planning on seeing the cherry blossoms together this year at the botanical garden,” Yeosang mutters. “I still have her ticket for this weekend when we made our plans.”

Jongho’s heart aches for her, knowing San isn’t calling her back any time soon.

“What a wasted opportunity,” Jongho says. “I’d love to see the blossoms before they’re gone.”

“If you’d like, you could come with me,” Yeosang suggests. “But only if you’re feeling better by then. I wouldn’t want you to spend the day entertaining me just to get more sick.”

Jongho’s momentarily taken aback at the offer. While Yeosang may be shy, she evidently warms up quickly.

“I’m down. I’m sure I’ll feel better by then,” Jongho lies. “It’s just a cold, anyway.”

Jongho forces herself to feel better in the name of reconnaissance, even though every cell in her body would much rather spend the day in bed.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” Yeosang asks her as they line up at the entrance to the botanical garden.

Jongho makes a very normal face as she holds back a sneeze and a cough simultaneously. She flashes her a thumbs up with a semi-confident, “Yep, never been better!” hoping that will suffice to assuage her worries.

Yeosang gets her ticket checked first, and once she’s just out of sight beyond the gate, Jongho lets it all out into the crook of her elbow. The worker checking her ticket gives her a concerned look.

“Allergies,” Jongho explains. “Typical spring, you know?”

He nods knowingly. “Hopefully our flowers don’t give you too much trouble.”

He lets her through the gate without more discussion.

“Great honor to help a cherub, my ass,” Jongho mumbles to herself, wiping her stuffy nose with a crumpled napkin she dug out from her pocket. She takes a deep breath, or at least tries to with her clogged sinuses, and jogs to catch up to Yeosang

Valentine’s Day has long since passed, but it seems its influence lingers here in the heart-shaped flowerbeds and the layer of cherry blossom petals covering everything in sight like confetti at a parade.

“So, Yeosang, your original plan was to come here with San as, like, a platonic friendship thing?”

“Of course, why else would we come here?”

Jongho at the very pink, very heart-shaped arbor above them and the couples around them walking hand in hand. “Yeah, I have no idea,” she deadpans.

She watches Yeosang walk beneath the trees, dressed head to toe in lace and pastels, the blossoms falling around her with each gust of wind like she’s meant to exist here in this garden to be dusted in delicate petals for all eternity. She reaches up to catch the petals midair, giggling when one lands perfectly in her palm. She spins around to show Jongho, cradling it in her hands.

“Pretty,” Jongho says.

Yeosang nods, holding her gaze. “Pretty,” she echoes softly. A faint smile reaches her lips, and she releases the petal so that it flutters to the grass below.

It’s easy for Jongho to imagine how San might’ve pictured this day when she planned it. It’s a classic tale of Conventionally Perfect Person A falling in love with Conventionally Perfect Person B—the marketable type of love her label loves to tell her to write songs about. She’d churn out a verse about how Yeosang is so pretty but too shy to know it, and a pre-chorus about what a privilege it is to lay eyes on her in this fleeting moment before the blooms are gone and whatever they have between them might end.

Yuck.

It’s cute enough to make her skin crawl.

They find a bench to rest on, facing outward towards the trees and the pond beyond the arbor. There are couples in swan boats pedaling through the water, slicing trails through the pink flower petals floating atop the surface.

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Yeosang asks as one of the boats floats towards them, skirting the edge of the water.

“I think that one’s a goose,” Jongho mutters. “It has weird eyes.”

Yeosang laughs as if Jongho’s the funniest person in the world, and Jongho reminds herself that she really isn’t in the position to fall for Yeosang’s charms. She’s just a fill-in for Yeosang’s ex-situationship, after all, and only here to gather intel on what the real love of her life might look like. But it’s just too easy to get lost in the moment with her.

“Cookie?” Yeosang offers, interrupting Jongho’s train of thought. She pulls a paper pouch from her tote bag and unwraps it to reveal a handful of chocolate chip cookies. “I got some at the bakery this morning.”

Without hesitating, she breaks off a piece of the cookie and feeds it to Jongho.

Jongho opens the mouth for it and she doesn’t know what it says about her that she went along with that without protest. Might be better not to think about it too hard. If Jongho didn’t know any better, she’d be convinced Yeosang was flirting with her. And if she was any more naive, she would’ve been happy to let Yeosang do so.

It’s all so painfully date-like and it’s obvious to Jongho now why many of Yeosang’s previous so-called friends got the wrong idea.

That makes this whole Cupid Virus thing a little less daunting in her book. She just needs to find out what kind of person Yeosang will fall for, and regardless of who they are they’re pretty much guaranteed to fall for her too. It should be easy enough to cure her flu then.

Yeosang hands the rest of the cookies to Jongho so she can wander off into the garden again. She catches another petal, and another, getting lost in the flurry every time the wind blows. The longer they spend in the garden, the more Jongho feels like she’s babysitting an easily distractible puppy on a leash.

Jongho notes down in her head that she’d do well with someone who also shares her excitement for the outdoors. If she comes across a hot botanist, they would make a stellar potential lover for her.

Yeosang weaves between the flowerbeds in a path with no rhyme or reason, inspecting every new flower and bee that catches her attention. Meanwhile, Jongho’s barely surviving, the veins in her neck straining and her eyes watering as she engages in the battle of a lifetime trying to not cough or sneeze in front of Yeosang.

She’s using everything she’s ever learned in her vocal lessons about breath control to keep her voice steady while her coughs threaten to erupt out of her mouth against her will, but periodically she still has to dip behind the bushes when a particularly powerful one fights its way through her defenses.

She’d rather die than make Yeosang blame herself for letting Jongho come out here on a day she’s not feeling well. But when Jongho ducks behind a tree to sneeze into her elbow again, she opens her eyes and sees that Yeosang has disappeared amongst the foliage.

“Ah, shit.”

She mentally notes that this hot botanist needs to be good at wrangling women who get lost easily. Better than she is at the very least. She quickly scans the area in hopes she’d just knelt down to take another picture of a flower and will pop back into view, but as the seconds turn into minutes, Jongho enters panic mode.

She searches high and low to try to find Yeosang, but she isn’t at any of the Instagram trap photo ops, or frolicking among the rose bushes. Jongho even asks the garden staff if they’ve spotted her, but Jongho realizes she isn’t very good at giving descriptions, especially when all she, for some reason, keeps stuttering when she’s asked what Yeosang looks like today.

Jongho briefly wonders if she’s fallen into the pond, but the swan boaters paddle by as though nothing’s out of the ordinary. Morbid, Jongho thinks, if she really is down there, but she’d suspect nothing better from someone in a goose boat with evil eyes.

And after running around the park without finding a trace of her, she starts to think it really might be true.

All the energy she has left drains from her body and she plops herself down onto the nearest seat, which just so happens to be a ladybug-shaped rocking horse in the playground area of the children’s garden.

In the distance, the park staff seem to be in the middle of some educational demonstration for a group of kids in the distance at the other end of the children’s garden. She spots a very tall child in the crowd and she briefly wonders what exactly a parent would have to feed her to grow to be roughly Jongho’s height at this age. The girl rolls up her sleeves and whoa, ok, whatever they’ve been feeding her must be pretty protein heavy by the development of those forearm muscles. Jongho feels a little ridiculous being jealous of a literal child, but the only other person she’s seen with that level of musculature is none other than her neighbor and… oh thank goodness.

Jongho feels a wave of relief wash over her once they’ve reunited, as well as a slight bit of confusion at seeing her fairy princess of a neighbor elbow deep in a bucket of compost surrounded by kids no more than half her age.

“Worm?” Yeosang asks casually, as if she hadn’t just sent Jongho spiraling.

“…worm?” Jongho repeats, half out of breath, grimacing as she tries not to cough as she steadies her breathing.

“Worm!” Yeosang enthusiastically holds out her hand and sure enough, there’s a fleshy pink earthworm wriggling atop her gloved hand.

Jongho takes a step away from the slimy creature. “… I think I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.”

The visual is a stark change from her appearance earlier in the day. It’s obvious now that Jongho doesn’t know a lot about Yeosang or about worms, but they all seem to be having a stellar time wiggling around together in the compost bin.

Jongho wonders how San would’ve reacted to this sight. Maybe she’d be a little grossed out, but perhaps she’d be in deep enough to find it endearing that she simply does whatever she wants without a care in the world. To Jongho, it’s refreshing to see her break the perfect-little-love-interest illusion so that she doesn’t have to continue white-knuckling her way through their pseudo-date trying not to let her heart flutter.

“There are some types of worms,” Yeosang explains as she watches them crawl between her fingers, “not earthworms like these, but other worms like flatworms or planarians, where if they get cut in half, each half grows into a new worm. Do you ever wonder what happens if those two worms fall in love?”

Jongho can’t stop herself from laughing at the absurdity of that question. “I don’t think that’s a thought that’s ever crossed my mind, Yeosang. Wouldn’t they be like worm twins or something?”

“You could say that, but I’d like to think of it like Aristophanes’ soulmate theory. They’re two halves of the same whole, and each half longs for its other half because only together will they be complete.”

It’s quite an odd notion, but she’s come to realize that Yeosang is quite an odd person in general. But if this is how Jongho can get Yeosang to talk about her perspective on love, she might as well entertain it.

“But when the worms get split, the head grows a new tail and the tail grows a new head, right?” Jongho asks. “So then they’d each become their own complete worms. By that argument, they’re not really two halves of the same whole anymore, so they wouldn’t be soulmates, would they?”

“I guess so, but only if you think healing fundamentally changes you. They may have changed shape, but I think there could still be a part of them that yearns for their other half.”

That strikes unexpectedly close to home, and Jongho suddenly feels like she’s being psychoanalyzed under the guise of a conversation about hypothetical worm biology. She needs to turn the conversation back around before they start treading into dangerous territory.

“What if one half of the worm splits again and again?” Jongho asks. “Would the other worm half have two soulmates now, or would they have none?”

Yeosang thinks for a moment, reaching into the compost to fish for another handful of worms, as if they’d help her think through her answer. “Maybe then that worm would be drawn to a totally different worm. If I was surrounded by identical worms, then that’d be pretty boring, right? But I’m not really a worm, so it’s hard to know what they’re thinking. I just hope they’re happy with whatever path they choose.”

When the sun starts setting, they exit the garden and head towards the train.

“I hope you find your other worm-half,” Yeosang says off-handedly as they pass through the gates. “I think your other worm would be a really nice worm.”

Jongho does everything she can to ignore the voice in her head that hopes that it looks a little bit like Yeosang.

When people ask Jongho about the lyrics to Where Our Hearts Touch, she doesn’t really have much to say.

Curious listeners will ask who she wrote the song about, but she doesn’t have a clear answer for that. Her record label simply told her to write some songs about love. Love sells, is what they said. Everyone can relate to a love song. Except for Jongho apparently. But she wasn’t going to squander this opportunity by admitting that she, at her big grown age of 26, has never had a real lover before.

Her track record for unrequited love is pretty impressive though—from a college classmate that shared her notes with her, to a manager who cared about her wellbeing because that was her literal job, to the girl at the deli who always remembered her name, and so so many of her straight friends. Anyone who smiled a little too wide, laughed a little too hard, or hugged her a little too tight.

Her songs were written with nobody in mind and everyone at the same time, and when Jongho listens to it now in retrospect, it sounds like the amalgamation of a lifetime’s worth of pathetic lesbian yearning. It’s embarrassing how easy it is for her to break her own heart, but it makes for decent song inspiration.

Decent enough for some random influencer to use a song from it in her honeymoon trip vlog, causing it to blow up randomly, months after it came out. And enough for that minor bout of fame to land her a contract writing the opening song to what she’s been told is the next new “rom-com dramedy blockbuster of the season.”

Love really does sell, apparently. But while Shinwoo may be a successful love song writer, Jongho herself is still totally averse to experiencing it in real life.

The day after the trip to the garden, she woke up to another little bag on her doorknob from Yeosang, this time full of medicine rather than tea. It seems she noticed Jongho had been struggling that day even though she thought she’d done a good job of hiding it. It pulls at her heartstrings, much to Jongho’s chagrin, seeing how Yeosang is far more attentive than she appears.

Jongho has to remind herself that Yeosang is just a kind neighbor, and any kind person would help their neighbor out if they were in need. She hasn’t seen Yeosang interact with any of their other neighbors, so she could be like this with everyone. And in that case, that wouldn’t make Jongho special at all. She can’t delude herself unless she wants to end up like San. Jongho could see herself falling in love with Yeosang, but not this time. She’s been down this path enough times, and knows exactly where it leads.

Falling in love is dumb, and Jongho’s pretty sick of thinking about it by the time she gets back to the studio.

When Jongho plays her latest demo for Hongjoong, Hongjoong stays quiet, chewing her bottom lip with a stoic expression. Jongho’s worked with the producer long enough to know that’s not a good sign, and that she’s not thinking about the song so much as she’s deciding how to word how much she doesn’t like it.

“This sounds like a re-hash of Where Our Hearts Touch,” Hongjoong manages, after a stomach churning, anxiety-inducing silence.

“But I thought the directors wanted a re-hash of Where Our Hearts Touch,” Jongho explains. She sniffles a bit, hoping Hongjoong will go easy on her on account of her illness.

Jongho knew the demo was lackluster, but she didn’t have much else up her sleeve. Writing a whole album about love was hard enough, and the ideas she has left are the insufferably corny ones she scrapped.

Hongjoong unfortunately never goes easy on anyone. “But we can’t give them that,” she says, crossing her arms. “You’re too good of an artist to be singing the same thing over and over again. Let’s show them something they’ve never heard before.”

Jongho knows she should trust Hongjoong’s instincts—she’s been a successful producer far longer than Jongho’s been in the industry—but she can’t help but feel skeptical. There’s only one song Jongho’s ever written that had any marketable success, so that’s what the public expects from her. That’s what the public wants, right?

“Fine,” Jongho decides, settling on trusting Hongjoong’s experience over her own hesitations. “I’ll bring you some new stuff as soon as I can.” Jongho coughs for good measure, in futile hope that Hongjoong might spare her an ounce of sympathy.

Jongho sits back at her piano and goes back to punching the keys again like it’s a broken vending machine, that’ll dispense what she needs if she hits it hard enough. She knows it’ll go nowhere, but it’s better than leaving the studio now just to feel like she’s gotten nowhere.

In an act of rebellion, she mutes the vocals on the track she showed Hongjoong and ad-libs some new lyrics that could never go in a proper song. She rambles out whatever’s top mind, singing it out into the open to the tune of random piano notes. She belts out a line about a worm that gets cut in half, thinking back on their pseudo-date at the botanical garden, and it sticks with her, somehow. It’s funny enough to make her laugh, breaking her out of her frustrated headspace.

She sings it again and again, expanding it into a verse about worms that grow new tails and new heads, and wiggle around in the compost to find each other again. Love is just as weird and ugly as it is ubiquitous, and it’s a shame that a song that depicts that truth could never sell its way onto the mainstream airwaves.

She records her silly little verse and saves the sound bite on her hard drive. While technically she’s not any closer to finishing the actual song she should be working on, at least this makes her feel a little less useless as a songwriter.

Jongho can’t decide if Pool Day Attempt Number 2 is going better or worse than the first one.

On one hand, the weather is warmer, and the sun is out.

On the other hand, her weird body aches and sore throat she’d felt that morning almost cancelled her day altogether. Thanks to Yeosang’s cough syrup, she feels somewhat normal now, but she felt awful enough before taking it to feel like it was a sort of wake up call. While she hacked up a lung waiting for the medicine to kick in, she decided it’s time to take more drastic measures.

So, she invited Yeosang to join her by the pool that afternoon. Fortunately, she agreed, and even said she had an extra swimsuit Jongho could borrow for the day.

When they met by the pool, Yeosang’s lacy sundress shifted in the breeze as she walked up to greet her. She was breathtaking, and it was almost enough to distract her from the monstrosity of a spare swimsuit Yeosang was presenting to her.

What Yeosang hadn’t disclosed was that this “spare swimsuit” was actually a full body wetsuit she’d worn once on a scuba diving trip a few years ago. But Yeosang had already dug it out of her overstuffed closet and brought it all this way for her, and at that point, Jongho felt too bad to turn it down. So Jongho had no choice but to accept the suit, and her fate.

After tallying up the pros and cons in her head while laying spread eagle on the lounge chair in her ridiculous scuba gear, she concludes that this pool day so far is just as odd as the first one.

It takes a few minutes for her to get over herself, but eventually, the wetsuit starts to grow on her. It’s nice in the sense that she doesn’t have to worry about any wardrobe mishaps. Whoever decided that swimsuit tops needed to be two triangles held together with a shoestring is someone who obviously didn’t consult anyone in the Double D Club. It’s also quite practical, since she doesn’t have to worry about slathering her back with sunscreen. Maybe Yeosang is really onto something here.

The water’s a bit too cold still, so the girls opted to bask in the sun off to the side instead. Hetmongi doesn’t seem to mind the temperature, and dives into the water the second Yeosang takes off her leash. She splashes around in the shallow end while Jongho and Yeosang watch from afar.

“Should I adopt a puppy too?” Jongho muses.

“Maybe you could watch Hetmongi when I’m away on a business trip in a few weeks.”

“Sure, I’d be happy to.” Even if Jongho hadn’t wanted to pet-sit, Yeosang and Hetmongi are both too cute and too earnest for her to deny them. “I just hope she doesn’t mind me using her as a practice child.”

“I think she’d love to be your practice child, but only if you feed her enough treats,” Yeosang chuckles.

At the sound of that last word, Hetmongi jumps out of the pool, leaving a trail of little wet footprints behind her. She jumps into Yeosang’s lap and shakes off the water, and Yeosang squeals as the droplets spray her.

“I shouldn’t have said the forbidden word,” Yeosang laughs. “I didn’t think she’d hear me.”

Yeosang stands up to take off her soaked sundress, and as she pulls it over her head and while her arms are stretched upward, Jongho’s brain stops working.

Yeosang’s abs flex as she wriggles out of the dress, revealing the white bikini she’d been wearing beneath it. Her body is toned, the lines of her muscles visible on her pale skin, but she has a soft bit of fat around her hips where the bikini strings hug her tightly, leaving slight indents in her skin beneath the bows she’s tied.

“Hmm?” Yeosang asks, noticing Jongho’s lingering gaze.

“Uh, your hair looks really good in this lighting.”

“Oh really? I need to get my roots redone soon.”

Yeosang takes a second to tousle her hair, buying Jongho time to take in one last good look at her. Her bikini top is cute—frilly around the edges—and cups her modest chest in a way Jongho wishes she could stare at for a second longer. She tells herself it’s because she’s jealous of the practicalities of having a flatter chest, obviously. Not because she wants to run her fingers over it or anything. Jongho makes sure not to think about whether her boobs and hips are just as soft to touch as they look.

And then she stops wondering, because Yeosang is starting to look at her funny.

“Does my hair really look that good?” she asks.

Jongho gulps and nods, hoping the blonde won’t call her bluff.

Yeosang lays down on the lounge chair, casually but sensually, reminiscent of a catalogue model. “Could you take my picture then, please? We can’t let a good hair day go to waste.”

“Sure.” Jongho clumsily rummages in her bag for her phone.

Her sunglasses and sunscreen fall out onto the concrete in the shuffle, and she drops her phone as she leans down to pick everything up. When she reaches for her sunscreen, she bumps her sunglasses farther underneath the lounge chair. Defeated, crawls under the chair to gather her belongings. Jongho has never been psychologically equipped to deal with pretty girls, and bikini-clad Yeosang is a true limit test to her composure.

Once she’s gotten her shit together enough to take a photo, she stands up and signals for Yeosang to get into position. Looking at her through the buffer of her phone camera is somewhat less intense of an experience. She takes a second to frame the blonde in the lens, but she really doesn’t have to think much about it. As far as she can tell, Yeosang doesn’t have any bad angles. Her blonde hair flows behind her, glowing in the sunlight, like she’s been warmed from within until the light lit up her soul. Jongho is overcome with a feeling she’s never felt before, something just so light and airy. Her heart could drift away from her like a feather.

She snaps a few photos, thanking her phone’s camera stabilization for canceling out the wobble of her shaky hands, and when she reviews them on her camera roll, she’s quite proud of what she’s captured.

She hands her phone to Yeosang to see. “If you’re on any dating apps, you should totally update your profile with these.

“Oh,” Yeosang waves her hands in denial. “I don’t really do that kind of stuff.”

“Really? That’s surprising. Everyone’s on the apps now.”

A potentially stupid idea pops into Jongho’s head.

She holds out her hand, gesturing to Yeosang to hand over her phone. “Here, let me help make you an account.”

“But why?” Yeosang asks, clutching her phone closer to her chest.

“I think it could be fun.”

“Fun?”

“Yeah, think about it. You could meet a hot botanist that you could talk to about the wonders of compost and worm love.”

Yeosang pouts. “But I can just talk to you about those things.”

“Yeah, but it’s different when it’s with someone you’re into, you know?”

Yeosang gives her an unreadable look, her stare devoid of any emotion Jongho knows how to interpret.

“Are you on any dating apps?” Yeosang asks.

“No, but if I make you an account, I’ll let you make one for me.”

“Ok, deal,” Yeosang smirks. “But that means we need to do a little photoshoot for you too.”

Jongho scoffs at the idea. “How the heck am I supposed to look sexy in a wetsuit?”

“Don’t underestimate yourself.”

Jongho looks at her with a skeptical raised eyebrow.

Yeosang reaches over to adjust Jongho’s outfit. “Here, let me just…” She reaches for the zipper under Jongho’s chin, grazing Jongho’s neck with her fingertips, then slowly pulls it down. Jongho’s eyes follow her fingers as she drags it down her chest, the elastic material shrinking back to reveal her cleavage as the opening zipper relieves the tension in the fabric.

Jongho doesn’t know what to do or say, just watching Yeosang undress her until the zipper dips into dangerously low territory.

“Yeosang… Yeosang!” Jongho jumps back, covering her exposed chest with her hands.

“See?” Yeosang grins. “Sexy.”

Jongho pulls the zipper back up a few inches, still showing ample cleavage but not so much that she fears her tits will spill out if she moves. She has enough trouble keeping them contained under normal shirts already. Yeosang plays it cute most of the time, but she’s a total menace if she wants to be, Jongho’s beginning to learn.

Getting photographed is something Jongho feels she’ll never get used to. She’d felt horribly awkward getting her picture taken for her album cover, feeling like a tacky Christmas tree with her hair done up and draped in all sorts of accessories, thinking about all of the people who would see her like this and have opinions on everything from her fake eyelashes to her shoelaces.

She doesn’t know what to do with her arms and doesn’t know where to put her legs, and she doesn’t know what to do with her face either.

“Sorry, I’m not good at this.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s hard being in front of the camera.”

Yeosang repositions Jongho’s hands in a pose that feels more natural, moving her around like a ball-jointed doll until she’s satisfied with her positioning. Jongho doesn’t normally like being poked and prodded, but Yeosang’s touch is gentle and reassuring.

“You’re so pretty, Jongho,” she says. “No need to be nervous.”

Jongho, in a very Jongho-like manner, wants to call bullshit, but she can’t when Yeosang looks at her like she believes what she’s just said.

When Yeosang steps back and raises her phone camera, rather than looking at the lens, Jongho looks at Yeosang. She’s posing for her and her alone, and the camera feels less daunting.

The pictures turn out well enough for Jongho to feel safe putting them on the dating app profile she knows she’ll never use. She gives her approval and they swap phones to make each other's profiles. Jongho takes her time thinking through every aspect of Yeosang’s profile like her life depends on it, because it does, in a sense. While she’s in the middle of drafting out responses to the numerous prompts, Yeosang hands Jongho back her phone.

“Done already?” she asks.

Yeosang nods.

Jongho puts down Yeosang’s phone, taking a break to see what Yeosang had made for her. Under the question, “What am I looking for in a relationship?” Yeosang put "girl," which would be factually correct, but not exactly what the question was getting at. Jongho’s not an expert on these apps, but her gut tells her that her gender preference is something she should be updating in the app settings, and not on the Get to Know Me section of her profile. But that wasn’t the only weird answer Yeosang jotted down.

“My favorite food is… Mustard on Oreos?” Jongho reads, squinting to make sure that’s what that really says. “That’s a choice…”

Yeosang nods as if she thinks it’s a normal choice. “I think it’s a good conversation starter. Plus it’s an underrated combo. You should try it some time. It’s one of my favorites.”

“If you say so.”

It’s not like Jongho has any better conversation starters herself—they’re very much in a blind-leading-the-blind situation—so she keeps her mouth shut and continues to scrutinize the profile she should be working on instead. She’s quite proud of it when she finishes it, so she optimistically hopes that whoever sees it will be her key to curing her flu.

But her own profile lingers on her mind long after they’d finished making each other's accounts. Jongho had no intention of actually using the account, so its oddity shouldn’t have bothered her. But out of pure curiosity, she takes it for a test run to see what kind of reaction it would garner. It ends up being quite an ordeal, to say the least.

Since Yeosang messed up setting up her gender preferences, she's immediately jumpscared by the presence of men. But once she swipes them all away in disgust, the girls she does match with all have something to say about the mustard Oreos.

While she does agree adding a touch of dijon to a perfectly good chocolate sandwich cookie sounds abhorrent, she feels weirdly compelled to defend Yeosang’s favorite snack. After a week of arguing with random strangers about how the tanginess of mustard would actually compliment the chocolate in the cookies, Jongho wonders if her neighbor is faring any better with her much more normal profile.

“How’s the app been going? Any new matches?” Jongho asks her when they run into each other one afternoon. She’d seen Yeosang checking her phone from across the lobby, and figured she should catch up with her.

“Oh, it’s kind of… it’s been a little crazy.” She glances off to the side, like there’s more than she’s letting on.

“Crazy? In what way?” Jongho prods.

“It’s just been hard responding to everyone,” she explains. “See?”

Yeosang holds out her phone and Jongho’s eyes bulge out of her face when she sees the screen.

“A THOUSAND messages? How many matches have you been getting?”

Clearly a lot, because when Jongho takes her phone to get a closer look, it keeps pinging nonstop with more and more notifications showing messages from her latest matches.

Ding!

Ding!

Ding!

Crazy is an understatement.

“How does this even happen?” Jongho asks.

Yeosang is absolutely drop dead stunning, endlessly sweet, and impossibly endearing, but when Jongho does the math in her head to figure out how she could’ve gotten this many matches in a city this size after only a week, something isn’t adding up.

“Have you been swiping right on every single person on this app?”

Yeosang looks to the floor, guilty as charged.

Jongho gasps. “Yeosang…”

“It feels mean to swipe left!”

“How is it mean? It’s not like they’re gonna know.”

“But what if they’re a nice person but they just don’t have any good photos? Or they have a lovely personality but they’re not good at answering the prompts on their profile?”

Ding!

Ding!

“Yeosang, your DMs are filled with creeps.”

Ding!

“But what if they’re just bad at starting conversations?”

Ding!

Jongho frowns as she reads the fragment of the message shown on the push notification to herself.

“show me yuor bobbies…”

She puts the phone down and buries her head in her hands as she accepts her future of eternal sneezing, coughing, and a gradual painful death. Yeosang is willing to give everyone on the app a chance, but too dense to give San, and all of her other real life suitors one? Jongho gives herself a headache trying to wrap her head around that.

“Well,” she mumbles after letting out a long, pained sigh. “At least you’re not meeting any of these weirdos in person.”

Yeosang presses her lips together in a silent pause that Jongho finds deeply concerning.

“Yeosang…”

“I haven’t met anyone yet,” she claims defensively, “…but I do have four dates scheduled for Saturday.”

“FOUR? Like, at the same time?”

“Well, it’s hard to make plans with so many different people, so I figured…”

Jongho feels her brain fry into a crisp. All this with the added heat of her low fever cooks her neurons like they’re roasting in a double broiler.

“Yeosang, I think we should both delete this app.”

After a moment of confusion, Yeosang lets out a sigh of relief at the prospect of no longer having to reply to her endless incoming stream of messages. “Yeah, I think that’d be a good idea too.”

After a few quick taps on her phone, the dinging finally stops. Thank god.

Jongho taps away at her phone, following suit in getting rid of the godforsaken app, when Yeosang asks her, “Wait, why are you deleting it too?”

It’s an easy answer from Jongho. “I wasn’t looking for anyone to date. Plus, I’m sick of arguing with random strangers all day.”

“Is everyone on the app really that mean to you?” Yeosang gives her a sympathetic look.

“Nah, in all honesty I’m the one being an ass. Everyone has something to say about Mustard Oreos, and I had no choice but to defend myself.”

“But have you actually tried a Mustard Oreo yet?”

Jongho snorts. “No, why would I?”

“Well, you have to know what you’re defending,” Yeosang reasons.

And so Jongho suddenly finds herself in Yeosang’s kitchen, watching Yeosang scoop out the icing from an Oreo to replace it with a dollop of dijon mustard.

When she reassembles the sandwich and holds it out in Jongho’s direction, she instinctively opens her mouth, and Yeosang feeds it to her, enthused by Jongho’s eagerness to try it.

Jongho’s not quite sure what the giddy feeling that fills her stomach means, but those thoughts are quickly shoved aside when she takes a bite and the flavor reaches her tastebuds. She grimaces, trying not to gag, and Yeosang doubles over in a fit of giggles.

“I can’t believe you ate that for me,” she wheezes.

Jongho, against all odds, manages to swallow the portion she’d bitten off. “Why? Was this some sort of prank?”

“No, but I do know it is an objectively terrible tasting combo. I just happen to like objectively terrible foods. Nobody else has ever been willing to try it aside from you,” Yeosang explains, putting the rest of the cookie in her mouth.

“Well, yeah, because you offered it.”

If Jongho had been paying more attention, she would’ve noticed the mischievous glint in Yeosang’s honey brown eyes.

“So would you do anything if I offered it?”

“Yeah probably,” Jongho says, mindlessly.

Yeosang leans in close enough to let Jongho know she has now or never to take back her words.

“So, what if I asked if you’d let me do this?

Yeosang pulls Jongho in quickly, like the sun tugging on an asteroid’s orbit. Jongho closes her eyes and lets the flames wash over her. Right before the collision, Yeosang freezes, letting their lips hover in front of each other, not close enough to touch, but close enough to feel each other's warmth.

The gravity of what Jongho said sets in, but once she’s realized it, she still doesn’t feel like she needs to take it back. How could she, when it spilled from her lips so naturally?

Suddenly, Yeosang backs away, flustered. Only a second had passed by, but it felt like an eternity to Jongho, waiting for the tension to break.

“Come on, you have to tell me where the line is,” Yeosang prods.

Jongho realizes she doesn’t know where the line is either. She could’ve pushed Yeosang off at any moment, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, when she was being held like that. She’s always had a weak spot for pretty girls.

Kissing, in Jongho's experience, has always been a high stakes event. In her head, it’s on par with asking someone out, or professing your love for the first time. There’s an expectation that it’s a make or break moment, as if kissing the wrong way or approaching it oddly will ruin everything.

But Jongho’s tongue tastes like mustard and chocolate, and she knows Yeosang’s does too. So be it if their lips aren’t always moving in sync. If she kissed Yeosang, there would be no expectations. If they kissed, she wouldn’t back away. With Yeosang, she could be fearless. Only with Yeosang could she be.

She doesn’t hate the thought of kissing Yeosang, and she hates the fact that she doesn’t. It makes her chest ache, like her heart is seizing in on itself, and her lungs refuse to fill with air. She clutches her chest, trying to steady her breathing, concentrating as she inhales, then exhales again.

“We’ll find out one day,” Jongho says, knowing full well that Yeosang never will.

“Yo, Wooyoung,” Jongho shouts with her hoarse voice from across the exam room. She doesn’t even give him a moment to situate himself. When she heard the turn of the doorknob, she’d already been poised for her attack, so he’d be accosted the moment he stepped foot into the room.

He gasps, offended. “That’s Dr. Jung to you.”

Emergency clinic visits aren’t cheap, but Jongho’s running out of ideas. Bullying a cherub isn’t much of an idea, but it’s the only option she can think of. The strange pain in her chest she’d felt has been nagging her ever since Yeosang almost kissed her. It aches whenever she thinks about Yeosang and from Hongjoong’s firsthand experience, she’s very aware that leaving a cold untreated can turn into pneumonia.

Frankly she can't let that spoil her song on the movie soundtrack, or her reputation she’s worked so hard to establish. She couldn’t just sit around and do nothing, so here she is at the clinic, ready to pick a fight.

Jongho rolls her eyes. “We both know you’re not a real doctor. Now, just tell me what I need to do to cure my fucking fever.”

“But I thought you just said I wasn’t a doctor.”

“I’m in your damn clinic.”

“Okay fine, I get it.” The doctor sighs. “But really, was it that hard to set her up on a date or two?”

“You’re talking a lot for someone who couldn’t get her to fall in love either.”

Wooyong opens his mouth to protest, but slowly closes it, realizing she has a point.

“And it’s not like I didn’t try,” Jongho adds. “I tried to get her on a dating app and it was a whole fiasco.”

“Well, that’s because you were trying a dating app.”

Dr. Jung wrinkles his nose in disgust, crossing his arms over the lab coat he thankfully opted to wear this time around, and he mutters to himself. “These damn tech developers keep trying to steal my job.”

“If you actually did your job, we wouldn’t be downloading it in the first place.”

Jongho’s words appear to have hit a sore spot with the cherub, and he frowns, looking conflicted. By the look in his eyes, he definitely wants to fight more, but he holds his tongue for the time being.

“Our dear Yeosang is simply an anomaly that I haven’t been able to figure out yet,” he manages. He digs in the pockets of his lab coat and produces a small medicine vial. “Here, take this. It should help.”

The container looks suspicious—it’s unlabeled so the bright red liquid that sloshes around inside could be anything—but Jongho’s feverish and desperate enough to uncap the glass and immediately chug it without question. It’s bitter and burns as it goes down her throat, making her grimace, but at least it’s something.

“Thank god, was it really that hard to give me some medicine?” she complains.

She looks back to the cherub, who’s gone uncharacteristically quiet, and his eyes have gone worryingly wide.

“What?” she asks.

“…That wasn’t medicine.”

“But you just said it was?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said it was supposed to help?”

“Yeah, but not like that. I meant for you to give that to Yeosang, not throw it back like a freshman at a frat party.”

“If a doctor hands me a medicine bottle, I’m gonna assume it’s medicine.”

“I thought we just established that you didn’t think I’m a doctor.”

Wooyoung, doctor or not, is entirely infuriating. But her life is unfortunately in his underqualified hands, so she holds back from strangling him until she can figure out just what the hell she drank.

“So, what exactly was in the vial?”

“A… potion. Something I thought might help Yeosang fall in love.”

“Like… a love potion?”

“Potentially…”

“I just drank a love potion?”

“Technically it’s an infatuation potion. It’s way weaker than a true love potion. It’ll wear off quickly, I promise.”

“How quickly?”

“Um… it varies. At worst maybe… a few weeks?”

“A few weeks?”

“Don’t fret, it’s not even that strong,” he says dismissively. “At worst it’ll give you a little crush on someone.”

To keep herself from committing a felony, Jongho promptly discharges herself from the clinic. She hopes that Dr. Jung was just messing with her and prays that he’s just as useless of a pharmacist as he is a doctor and his potion isn’t potent enough to cause any problems. But the second she steps into the apartment, she realizes that, yeah, fuck, at least it was nice to have hope while it lasted.

Because when Yeosang smiles at her as she passes her in the hallway, she feels it pulsing from her chest up to the tips of her ears and down to her fingertips. Just one look at her, and Jongho’s aching throat closes up even more, choking her alive.

She comes to the immediate realization that three things are true.

One, Dr. Jung is a liar. She kind of knew that already, but still.

Two, that potion was a goddamn strong one.

And three, all the work she’s done to stifle her emotions has gone completely out the window, and now, all because of that useless quack of a doctor’s stupid little concoction, she has a big, stupid, fat, ridiculous crush on Yeosang.

Life goes on, against Jongho’s will.

She would’ve preferred it if the world ended right then and there when she’d realized she wanted to kiss Yeosang’s delicate cherry blossom-pink, doll-like lips, but nothing ever goes the way she wants it to. Not the song she’s struggling to write, and definitely not the recurring tragedy of her ridiculous love life.

Her face burns red whenever Yeosang looks at her in a way that’s impossible to hide. It was subtle enough to fly under the radar for some time, but as the two cross paths one day as Jongho’s leaving the gym, Yeosang points it out.

“It’s a new blush I’ve been trying,” Jongho lies.

It’s an obvious fib. Unlike Yeosang, she’s never been the type to wear makeup on a daily basis, and a better excuse would’ve been that her face was flushed from her workout, but when she’s on the spot in front of Yeosang, the circuits in her brain burn out like they’re overloaded with excess voltage. She doesn’t even like wearing blush, but she’s willing to start if it’ll substantiate this lie that’s singlehandedly upholding her dignity.

“It’s so cute on you,” Yeosang coos, none the wiser. “You should wear it more often.”

Lucky for Yeosang, it doesn’t seem like this flush is going to fade any time soon. Especially when Yeosang has decided to pinch her cheeks like that. Jongho has to hold her breath and tries not to perish the moment Yeosang’s manicured fingers come in contact with her skin.

Yeosang giggles at her reaction, brushing Jongho’s her short brown hair behind her ears to show more of her burning flush. Even if it’s unintentional, Jongho can’t help but feel like she’s being pushed around so Yeosang can find where she’ll draw the line.

“Is it really that funny to you?” Jongho asks, pouting.

“No,” she denies, but her smile doesn’t fade from her glossy lips.

Jongho shudders at her touch. “T-then why do you keep laughing?” she stutters.

“Because.” Yeosang giggles, amusement in her half-lidded eyes.

No matter how close they get, Jongho figures that Yeosang will always have some idiosyncrasies that she’ll never fully comprehend. But Jongho never liked pursuing things with clear cut answers and concrete truths. She likes Yeosang in the same way she likes music.

If the girl were a song, she’d be performed live again and again, familiar but with new twists and turns and quirks and mistakes and flourishes every time that Jongho gets hooked on with each listen. Never the same, but always the same, and never not intriguing.

Potion or not, she never really stood a chance. She pulls her cap down to hide her face, and hustles away as if she has somewhere to be.

It’s only when Jongho is alone in her apartment again, doubled over in a coughing fit, that the gravity of her situation sets in.

She’s getting sicker, her sore throat is getting worse, and she’s starting to lose her voice.

The calendar on her wall revealed to her the uncomfortable truth that she has only a few days left until she has to send these demos to the film directors, and all she has to show for it is a hard drive full of scrapped lyrics and half-written songs she’d given up on. The success of Where Our Hearts Touch was so sudden and immense that it felt impossible, and so temporary. She felt like anything could ruin this delicate fame she’s been gifted, so the release of her next song is bound to ruin it if it’s not up to par. She has only a few days to achieve perfection. No pressure at all.

And this whole potion fiasco is not a welcome distraction either. It really does feel like a test of sheer willpower—one so tough that it feels fitting that it was, in a roundabout way, heaven-sent. She needs the love potion to wear off, and she needs it to wear off quickly.

She looks out the window, letting in the evening light. It washes its orange warmth over the wooden dining table she’d picked so carefully and spent far too much money on. She’d justified the purchase by saying “it’s for my dream apartment,” which she continued to tell herself to justify every little detail she’d put into this space. Her records stacked in the corner. The curtains that just had to be velvet. The rug that isn’t quite soft enough, but just the perfect color so she was willing to overlook that.

There’s so many things that could go wrong—too many for Jongho to be able to sleep peacefully, or function with a clear head. Her next song could be a disappointment that sends her career back to square one. The directors might even cancel her contract for a more suitable artist instead. She might never cure her virus and lose her voice for good when it ravages her throat.

She could mess up with Yeosang and lose the friend she’s grown to care so much about. Potion or not, the space she’s carved into Jongho’s life is irreplaceable, and Yeosang deserves to find the love of her life, whether it’s Jongho or not.

If Jongho ever has to go back to her old life, she’d have to sell all this furniture and downsize. Call her materialistic, but it would tear a piece of her heart away every time she’d sell a fragment of this place. She doesn’t want to lose this home. She doesn’t want to lose any of this.

The only good thing about this entire fucked up situation is that at least she has something love-related to lament about lyrically as she’s piecing this song together.

She plays Hongjoong what she’d cobbled together in her fit of angst. She pours her heart and soul into the keyboard, singing with everything she’s been holding back for the past few weeks. She hits the pedal on her last note, letting it linger as it fades out, echoing through the empty studio. Her throat feels raw as she catches her breath during the final instrumental decrescendo.

“Are you ok?” Hongjoong asks, cutting the dramatic silence short.

“Not really,” Jongho answers honestly.

“I could tell,” Hongjoong says bluntly.

Jongho sighs, slumping over the piano. “What gave it away?”

“You rhymed ‘stupid’ with ‘cupid’ like four times in a row. Also you sounded like you were holding back a cough the entire time.”

Hongjoong places the back of her hand on Jongho’s forehead. Jongho is, admittedly, a little sweaty from her passionate performance, but her flushed face is enough to convince Hongjoong that she actually is fully sick. Jongho clears her throat to explain that she feels totally fine. She’d been taking Yeosang’s medicine consistently up until now and it had done a good job of keeping her virus at bay. But what comes out is indeed an intense coughing fit, and it dawns on Jongho that maybe some medicine isn’t enough anymore to keep this virus from overpowering her.

Hongjoong frowns when she removes her hand, not liking the excessive warmth she felt emanating from Jongho’s sweaty forehead. “I like the melody you wrote though. I think it’ll work if we rewrite those lyrics so they sound less like a fever dream, and then we’ll be all set for the meeting with the directors. You should go home and get some rest and I’ll keep working on it.”

“But—”

“No buts. You’ve been getting sick so often that I’m really getting worried about how much you’ve been overworking yourself.”

“I haven’t been overworking myself, It’s just…”

Jongho wants to explain that this is all a supernatural illness given to her by a mystical naked man who pretends to have a medical license, but she holds her tongue, realizing that wouldn’t help her in convincing Hongjoong that she’s physically and mentally capable of being productive right now. This whole thing is so absurd that she can do nothing but let out a long, pained sigh.

Hongjoong raises an eyebrow. “Just what?”

“Nothing. You know what? Maybe my fever really is cooking my brain.”

Hongjoong gives her a look that makes her start packing up to head home before she can say anything else.

Jongho gets a call from Hongjoong later, which is strange because Hongjoong hates phone calls.

She’d been napping off her virus-induced fatigue ever since Hongjoong sent her home, and it’d been only a few hours since they’d last spoken. She sits up and readjusts the strap of the old tank top she’d chosen to sleep in, then brushes her hair out of her eyes.

“Hey, what’s up?” Jongho asks when she answers.

Hongjoong sounds eerily calm. “So, you know how we were supposed to meet with the directors at the end of the week?”

“Yeah?”

“So apparently they had a last minute scheduling conflict and they decided to swing by the studio a few days early.”

Jongho’s stomach drops. “But the demos…”

“They asked me to play what we had. And unfortunately, they didn’t like any of them.”

Jongho feels an overwhelming urge to vomit.

“So,” Hongjoong continues, “I told them we had some more options they could hear. Remember the one I told you to scrap earlier? Do you still have it saved?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank god,” Hongjoong says, audibly relieved. “If you could send those over right now that would be great. They’re in the room next door waiting for me to play something new for them and from the looks of it they aren’t the most patient people.”

“I’m on it.”

Jongho trips over the rug in her rush to her laptop. Her shoulder collides with her coffee table, but her adrenaline masks the pain. She can’t dwell on it when one of her worst case scenario nightmares is currently on its way to becoming her unfortunate reality. She fumbles with her hard drive, still sprawled on the floor, messing up plugging in the USB a few times until it finally all connects. The file is in Hongjoong’s inbox at record speed.

There’s a knock on Jongho’s door before she can even exhale in relief. She hobbles over to answer it, and sees a panicked Yeosang on her doorstep.

“Are you ok? I heard this loud crash and oh my god Jongho, your shoulder is purple.”

Jongho looks at her shoulder and yeah, it’s a lovely bruised shade of violet.

“Yikes,” is all she can say.

It only starts hurting when her adrenaline subsides, and by then it’s swollen and throbbing. She winces when Yeosang grazes it with her fingers to inspect it. Seeing the damage up close makes Yeosang rush off to her kitchen and after a minute of rummaging around Jongho’s cabinets, she returns with a makeshift ice pack, fashioned out of a ziplock bag.

Yeosang places a dish rag over Jongho’s shoulder and places the ice pack on top. The ice is soothing, numbing her skin as Yeosang holds it against her, the dish rag insulating her from the direct chill of the ice.

“Thanks, Yeosang. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Yeosang turns her head away, shyly. If Jongho was any more delusional, she’d think Yeosang was blushing.

“You really should be more careful, Jjongie,” Yeosang mutters.

Avoiding Jongho’s gaze, she redirects her attention to chasing the drips of water escaping from the bag and running down her chest, dabbing them up with a napkin. The longer the bag stays on Jongho’s shoulder, the more condensation gathers on its surface, and the more the water starts to drip. Jongho watches as well in quiet amusement, like watching raindrops racing down her car window.

Her trance is broken when her phone starts buzzing in her pocket. It’s Hongjoong, again.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“So, Jongho, there’s good news and… weird news? I guess?”

“Well, as long as it’s not bad news.” Jongho reasons optimistically.

“Okay, so the good news is that they really liked the demo you sent. The weird news is that the one you sent wasn’t the demo I’d asked for.”

Uh oh.

And if that wasn’t enough to prove the extent of the complete and utter disrespect the universe has for her, a bead of water flows down into her cleavage. Yeosang, blissfully unaware of the seriousness of Jongho’s phone call, shoves her hand between Jongho’s boobs to wipe it up.

“What song was it?” Jongho asks. A random demo getting approved isn’t the worst thing in the world, as long as it’s not the one particular demo she’s thinking about.

“It was this weird song about, like, worms getting cut in half?”

Ha. Haha.

Jongho really really wishes she’d double checked which file she was sending.

“I’m so curious,” Hongjoong continues, “what inspired you to write it? The directors were raving about how it encapsulated the exact feeling of falling in love. You know, the way it’s vulnerable and primal, and even gross at times, but somehow perfect regardless? It’s so different from the stuff on your last album, Jongho. I have to know, like, who was this song even about?”

Jongho wants to do anything other than explain that the song was written about the girl whose hand is currently wedged between her tits right now.

Speaking of which…

Jongho puts her phone down and suffocates its mic against the side of her hip.

“Yeosang,” she whispers, “why is your hand still in there? The water’s already been wiped up.”

“Sorry, it got cold holding the bag.”

Jongho sighs and extends her hand toward Yeosang. Yeosang removes her icy fingers, placing them in Jongho’s palm so she can wrap her own fingers around them, warming her up in a much more practical way.

“I forgot this was an option,” Yeosang admits, lacing their fingers together.

Jongho chuckles, feeling a little less doomed work-wise, but a little more doomed love-wise as she puts the phone back to her ear.

“The song can be about whoever you want it to be,” she deadpans, hoping the fake, vague answer will suffice.

“If you say so.”

Jongho can’t see her, but she knows Hongjoong well enough to be able to hear when she’s rolling her eyes when she speaks.

“I’ll get that information out of you one day,” Hongjoong promises.

“I’m taking that as a threat.”

“As you should,” Hongjoong snickers. “But really, as crazy as the directors are, I do think they’re onto something here. This could be really good, and I think whoever you wrote it about would be honored.”

Jongho hangs up, convinced momentarily that she’s entered another dimension, but the ache in her shoulder as she lowers the phone is enough to let her know she’s not dreaming.

“Stressful work call?” she asks. She puts down the ice pack and it sloshes around, full of water now that the ice has melted, as she rests it on the floor on top of the dish rag.

“Yeah, I’ve been worming— working on a song,” Jongho says, stumbling through her Freudian slip, “but it’s not really going how I expected. Not in a bad way, though. Just different.”

“Well, whenever you release it you should send it to me! I’d love to hear it.”

“Yeah, I think you’d find it interesting at the very least.”

Jongho feels that odd ache in her chest again and prays it isn’t a sign that her lungs are giving out.

As much as Jongho, her bank account, and probably even her health insurance don't want her to return to Lovesick Urgent Care, she drags herself into the office and slouches into the seat underneath the nauseatingly pink logo on the wall. This love potion, and all this other cupid nonsense has done enough damage, so she once again takes matters into her own hands, showing up to the clinic with the full intention to beat a cherub into a pulp once and for all.

The nurses check her vitals again—they’re as normal as they can be for someone who’s been half dead for this long—and after a few minutes of waiting in the exam room, an unfamiliar face enters the room.

“My name is Dr. Park,” he says. “Dr. Jung is out of the office today.”

He looks more trustworthy than the other doctor, but that’s a low threshold to pass. He’s taller, with a refined air about him, and a reassuring smile on his lips as he enters the room. He spreads his wings a tiny bit, giving his feathers a slight ruffle, revealing that like Dr. Jung, he’s also a cherub. But unlike the other cherub, he’d taken the proper care to cut slits into the back of his white coat to free his wings. Maybe some cherubs really are doctors, Jongho thinks, because this one does have the demeanor of someone who’d passed his board exams.

“What brings you in today, Miss Choi?” he asks, walking over to the computer positioned across from her.

What she wants to say is that this love potion is giving her life-ruining desires. She longs for Yeosang’s undivided attention and touch. Ever since she took the potion, she’s been teetering on the edge of ruining it all, destroying what they already have for what could never be. It’s been gripping her lungs when she tries to breathe, and tightening up her already closing throat. It’s a fight for air every time they’re together and only a matter of time until her heart gets strangled alive. But what comes out is far less eloquent.

“I wanna fuck my neighbor.”

He looks at her sympathetically. “Sexual urges are natural and nothing to be ashamed of…”

“No,” she interrupts, flustered and stumbling over her words, “what I mean is Wooyoung, I mean, Dr. Jung gave me a love potion and it’s not wearing off. I feel crazy whenever I’m around Yeosang, my neighbor, I mean.”

“Ah, perhaps I can prescribe you an antidote,” he mutters, fingers quickly flicking across the keyboard. “I’d assume that potion was given to you during your last visit here? Which was about two weeks ago according to your chart.”

“Yes,” Jongho nods.

“Hmm… And I also see here that you’ve been diagnosed with the Cupid Virus as well.” He quickly glances at Jongho's haggard state. “That hasn’t gone away yet, has it?”

“No.” Jongho looks down at the linoleum floor, dejected. “It’s practically impossible to get Yeosang to fall in love with other people.”

“Yeah, I would hope so,” the doctor says plainly, continuing to type without pause. “That sure would make it harder to cure you.”

“…Wait what?”

That doesn’t quite track with anything Jongho’s been told about the virus.

Dr. Park steps away from his screen, taken aback by her confusion. “Dr. Jung told you how to cure the virus, right?”

“All he said was that to get better, I need to get Yeosang to fall in love with someone.”

The doctor gives her a puzzled look, but after a moment of thought, his eyes suddenly widen. “Ah, I see what Wooyoung is doing here.” He chuckles to himself, grinning mischievously. “He’s always up to something.”

Jongho absolutely hates the sound of that.

“And in that case,” he continues, holding back his laughter, “I can’t prescribe you an antidote to the love potion.”

“What? Why not?”

“Well, I’m not really in the position to mess up any of his schemes, I mean, treatment plans. And it’s not like I’d even know which antidote to give you anyway. I’m not quite sure what love potion Wooyoung, I mean, Dr. Jung even gave you.”

“It was red and tasted like vodka,” Jongho describes, fully in denial that she can’t be helped in the slightest. “And it came in a little medicine bottle?”

“Well, unfortunately, there are many potions that are red and taste like vodka.”

Jongho crumples the thin paper covering the exam table beneath her with her hands in annoyance.

“Dr. Jung should be back in a few days if you’d like to give him an earful,” the doctor says, giggling to himself as he exits the room, leaving behind a puff of glitter as the only proof that he was ever there.

These goddamn cherubs.

Jongho forgot she offered to walk Hetmongi until Yeosang said she didn’t have to.

“You’ve been feeling under the weather, so I’ll just call up my old dog sitter,” she’d said.

But Jongho, an insufferably stubborn woman, shook her head. “I can still watch her, I’m honestly feeling fine.”

Something deep inside her heart makes her want to do things for Yeosang. She’d pick the blonde up and carry her bridal style anywhere in the city if she asked. But that’s probably still the potion talking, she thinks.

She unlocks Yeosang’s door with the spare key she was given, and Hetmongi bounds across the room to greet her, looking small and fluffy as ever.

According to Yeosang, the shelter told her that the puppy was a doberman-maltese mix despite not looking at all like a doberman. Yeosang had also told the shelter she’d been looking for a doberman to adopt, so Jongho suspects that they must’ve fabricated that bit about Hetmongi’s heritage to get the little gremlin adopted quicker.

Sometimes Jongho thinks she can see a bit of doberman in her. She stands her ground and guards Jongho against threats, even if it’s just a stray squirrel or a sparrow that’s chirped too loud. She’s surprisingly reliable despite her airheaded appearance, much like a mini Yeosang.

Saying she’d be fine walking her might’ve been a stretch, but Jongho never goes back on her word. Her legs hurt as her fatigue transforms to full on muscle cramps, but at this point, Jongho’s resigned herself to just accepting her current predicament. She’ll wait out the love potion and go back to finding her a lover once her feelings subside. It’ll be easier to cure herself once she won’t have to cradle her own bruised heart so delicately.

She enters Yeosang’s room to grab Hetmongi’s leash, and Hetmongi follows, excited for her walk. The puppy darts between Jongho’s feet and while she’s usually coordinated enough to catch herself, she stumbles on her wobbly legs. She catches herself against Yeosang’s bookshelf, knocking over a few CDs she had on display.

“Shit,” she swears to herself, giving a few head comforting rubs to Hetmongi, who’d jumped at the sudden crash. “Sorry, girl.”

After a long, pained sigh, she starts to stack the jewel cases back up in their proper place. She’d never spent much time here before, only ever passing through on the other occasions she’d needed to grab Hetmongi’s leash. She hadn’t even noticed that Yeosang had a CD collection, so out of curiosity she looks at each album as she props them back up. There’s a variety of music—a couple pop albums, some EDM, an old rock album or two.

But the one that stands out to Jongho is the one with the name “Shinwoo” written on the cover.

The thin plastic has been removed from the outside, so it’s been opened at least once. But the walls are thin enough for Jongho to know it likely hadn’t been played before.

It’s been a while since she’s taken a good look at the album cover art. She’d chosen a photo where her face was hidden, her features distorted in the grain of the vintage film that the photographer had chosen to shoot with. The rest of her outfit was decorated so that even her silhouette was completely unrecognizable.

It was all directed to be very much not Jongho-like, because the songs themselves weren’t very Jongho-like. Everything that read as Choi Jongho was obscured because this album wasn’t about her, or her views on love. They were all strictly fictional accounts, so it only felt fitting for them to be sung by a fictional version of herself.

That’s why she feels so uneasy about the worm song. Aside from how it’s a pop ballad about worms, of course. But that song, as ridiculous as it is, was about something real.

She won’t be able to shield herself behind the persona she’s curated. Her most anticipated and most scrutinized release will be the one that will leave her feeling the most vulnerable.

Which is a really chill thought that definitely doesn’t make her stomach hurt or her chest ache even more than it already does.

She turns the album face down on Yeosang’s shelf.

“Come on, Hetmongi,” she says. “And come on, Jongho,” she whispers to herself.

The last thing she needs is to overthink herself sick. She clips Hetmongi’s leash onto her little pink harness, and ushers the puppy out the door.

When Yeosang gets back from her trip, Jongho swings by to drop off the spare key she’d borrowed. She plans on stopping by quickly just before she’s due to head back to the studio, but Yeosang beckons her in to chat, having missed her the past few days. Jongho doesn’t stop herself from getting distracted, despite knowing that Hongjoong will lecture her for running behind schedule.

She’s supposed to be recording the final vocals for the worm song, and she’d rather be doing anything but that. She still can’t wrap her head around how it even got approved, and how it’s even made it this far into the production with anyone else being nearly as doubtful.

“You can put the key in the dish on the bookshelf,” Yeosang says.

Jongho drops the key in and takes one more look at the Shinwoo album, still face down and out of place from when she knocked it over.

“I didn’t know you were a Shinwoo fan,” Jongho says, propping it back up how she recalls it was originally.

“Of course I am,” she chuckles. “She’s like my good luck charm.”

“Good luck charm? How does that work?”

“Yes, I feel like good things happen the more I listen to her music. Like, when Sannie and I went on a girl’s trip together, I posted the videos we took during the trip to Where Our Hearts Touch. And then people started sending me these huge boxes of skincare stuff. And so I posted another video to the song like ‘Oh wow, thank you!’ and then they kept sending me even more stuff. Like, every time I hear the song people give me gifts.”

“Oh, that’s cool, I’ve always wanted to get a PR package.”

Yeosang’s eyes widen. “Is that what they’re called? I don’t really spend a lot of time on the internet so I didn’t know this was a thing.”

“Yeah, so like, brands will send influencers stuff to try on camera…”

“I’m an influencer?”

“Uh, I’d assume so? Wait, let me see your page.”

Yeosang types her Instagram handle onto Jongho’s phone and sure enough, all the hallmarks of an influencer are there. Thousands of followers, brand deals, and a curated feed, but somehow it was all unintentional? Hot people can win just by doing whatever they want, apparently.

The thing that’s more striking to her though is that Jongho has definitely seen this account before. She recognizes the profile picture, showing the back of a blonde girl’s head. It looks just like the profile picture of the influencer who’d been supporting her music from the beginning, who’d posted her song as the soundtrack to that viral honeymoon vlog that kickstarted everything. Exactly like it, pixel for pixel, and too close to be a coincidence if Jongho’s memory serves her right.

It then dawns on Jongho that the honeymoon vlog that went viral and made her famous in the first place was Yeosang’s video about her and San’s supposed girl’s trip.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but Jongho dwells primarily on the fact that she didn’t realize until now, but she owes her entire career to Yeosang’s dedication as a fan.

“You really like Shinwoo, huh,” Jongho sputters, reality weighing a little too heavy in the air around her.

“She’s my favorite singer right now,” Yeosang nods. “I heard she’s even getting featured on the soundtrack for that romcom that’s coming out later this year. I’m glad though she’s finally getting her flowers.”

Jongho’s gut churns nervously, knowing that the girl in front of her might be one of the many people who will be disappointed in her next release. “I wonder if whatever she releases is gonna live up to the hype. It’ll be hard to surpass the random success of Where Our Hearts Touch, don’t you think?”

Yeosang shakes her head. “Where Our Hearts Touch didn’t come out of nowhere. I think there’s so much more to her as an artist than just that song. That’s why the directors wanted to work with her in the first place. Even if it’s nothing like that song, I think it’ll be good as long as she puts her heart into it.”

The thing about Yeosang is that she’s so authentically Yeosang. She pays no mind to the things that don’t matter to her, but loves the things she does wholly and entirely. She doesn’t lie, and she’s honest in everything she says and does. Jongho wants to doubt her, but she can’t, even if her head tells her she should.

There’s something awe inspiring about Yeosang’s honest approach to all things. If Yeosang can be so Yeosang, maybe there’s nothing wrong with Jongho being a little more Jongho.

She reminds herself of that later when she’s in the recording booth, singing the vocals to that ridiculous worm song. And this time, she doesn’t hold back. For the first time in a long time, she leaves the studio confident that she nailed the song the way she needed to.

Love is gross and a little weird, and never turns out the way she wants it to. But that’s Jongho, that’s this song, and that’s exactly what she needed to sing.

With Hongjoong fine tuning the production of the still untitled worm song, Jongho feels the pain in her chest subside slightly from the relief. But still, the potion’s effects miraculously grow stronger with each passing day. It makes her feel a little more wary of the inevitable confrontation she’ll have to endure if these feelings grow any stronger. She almost lets it slip out when they leave for work at the same time one morning.

“Have a good day at work, Yeosang,” she says, followed by a disgusting, hacking cough that was a result of her choking back a casual “Love you!” to her platonic friend slash neighbor.

Yeosang in turn gives her a worried look before responding with an equally cordial “Have a good day too, Jongho,” sans the coughing.

Good thing Jongho kept that situation under control, because the results of that could’ve been disastrous. It’s on the tip of her tongue at all times, though, and she feels like she’s on the precipice of ruining everything they have at any moment. If her fever gets worse and her mind gets even more hazy, she could lose control of her tongue and it could all come crashing down.

It all feels too dangerous, and in spite of her best judgement, she remembers what Dr. Park said about giving her favorite cherub an earful, and makes her way back to her favorite place in the world to see her favorite celestial entity in the universe.

“Please give me an antidote,” she begs reluctantly, lying flat on her back on the exam table, too achy to sit up and face him.

“Antidote? What antidote?” Dr. Jung has the audacity to ask.

“The one for the infatuation potion you gave me. You said it would wear off by now but it’s getting stronger.”

Before Jongho can muster up the strength to roll over and glare at him, the cherub starts laughing.

“I checked my potion bottles after you left the office and you know what’s funny?”

Nothing about this could ever be funny, and Dr. Jung is lucky that Jongho is currently to incapacitated to shoot him a nasty glare.

“I’d gotten my potions mixed up with my cocktails as I was bottling them. So instead of a love potion, you actually drank my special vodka cran recipe.”

“That shit didn’t taste like cranberry at all,” Jongho deadpans, ready to call bullshit.

The cherub blinks in confusion. “Vodka cran is supposed to taste like cranberry?”

“Yeah, where do you think the cran came from?”

“Oh, I thought it was like how a red velvet cake doesn’t use any velvet in it. Like it was just part of the name. Huh, the more you know.” He scratches his head and Jongho rolls her eyes. “Human recipes are so confusing.”

“If you didn’t think there was any cranberry in a vodka cran, then what were you even putting in there?” Jongho asks out of morbid curiosity.

“Vodka and red food coloring.”

Jongho wants to gag, but in hindsight, at least those ingredients are safe for human consumption. There’s no telling what he would’ve put in an actual love potion.

There’s still one question she has though, knowing that neither of those ingredients are exactly powerful, long-acting aphrodisiacs.

“Why did that cocktail make me feel that way around Yeosang?”

Jongho doesn’t need to look at him to know Wooyoung is grinning when he speaks.

“There’s a very simple explanation for that.”

Jongho starts connecting dots she would rather not connect. Deep down, she knew what she was feeling was more than just a potion-induced chemical imbalance in her brain, or even just a simple infatuation. What she felt for Yeosang was more than any other unrequited love she’d written about before.

“So, I’m actually…”

“Yep,” he says, with an annoying amount of enthusiasm in his voice. “You’re genuinely and unironically in love with Kang Yeosang.”

Cool.

Jongho thought it was about time for her to start writing her will anyway.

Jongho drags herself home from the clinic, but for some reason, her key won’t unlock her door. She struggles to fit it into the key hole with her blurry vision and shaky hands, and it stays firmly in place when she tries to turn it. Her head spins, but the key doesn’t, and she grits her teeth in frustration. Miraculously, as she’s rattling the knob and fiddling with the lock, Yeosang opens the door from the other side.

“Are you ok?” Yeosang gasps, catching Jongho before she trips over the doormat. “Why are you…”

“This evil twink gave me a disease where I’ll fucking die unless you start making out with someone,” she rambles. She sniffles and looks up at Yeosang with hazy eyes.

“Oh… ok. Let’s get you to bed.”

Yeosang doesn’t quite understand Jongho’s delirious babbling, but still takes the time to carry her bridal-style into her room and lay her down on the bed. Jongho’s so dizzy that everything in the apartment looks like it’s been flipped and mirrored the other way, so she closes her eyes as Yeosang lays her on the bed.

She brushes Jongho’s sweaty bangs away from her face. “Get some rest, okay?”

Jongho doesn’t think she can rest anymore knowing how Yeosang’s strong arms feel lifting her weak body at all. She doesn’t want to find Yeosang a partner anymore, she decides as she lays atop the mattress like a beached whale. If being sick is the price she’ll pay to not fracture her heart any further, that’s what she’ll have to live with.

Jongho had always known the Cupid Virus was a perfect recipe for disaster. Jongho falls quickly, but Yeosang never does. But now that its inevitable worst case scenario is moments from playing out in front of her, she decides that she’ll just die like this with her mouth shut so at least she won’t have to die heartbroken.

She resigns herself to a fate not unlike the crunchy, shriveled up rose petals she’d seen by the garbage chute out all those months ago. When she’s on her death bed, perhaps she can call up San one last time just for the solidarity before she crosses the rainbow bridge.

She lays there motionless, too sore to move. She can barely pick up the scent, but it does smell overwhelmingly like Yeosang. She basks in it, eyes closed, in pain but at peace with it.

Yeosang places her hand on Jongho’s, worriedly. “Jongho, do you need me to call someone? Should we go to the hospital?”

“No… Just… Stay with me.”

With the warmth of Yeosang’s hand, she feels like she could die like this. She’d be happy to, with Yeosang by her side. She feels her body grow weak and her consciousness starts to fade away.

It feels cowardly, though, to go like this, with the truth locked away behind closed lips. After everything Yeosang has done for her, she of all people deserves to know. Jongho doesn’t even need an answer. She’s made peace with the truth that she’ll forever be someone who doesn’t know a thing about love. So, with the energy she has left, she takes a shallow breath and whispers.

“I think I’m in love with you.”

And her mind fades to black.

Jongho wakes up to the feeling of warm soft, feminine lips pressed against her own.

Her first thought is that she never thought she’d make it to heaven, and her second thought is that she hadn’t ever considered that heaven would be so homoerotic. Her third thought is that anyone who believed heaven and homoeroticism to be at odds with each other would be proven wrong and hilariously appalled by the pleasures of Gay Heaven.

Jongho enjoys Gay Heaven. Gay Heaven is everything she’d ever dreamed of.

She embraces its warm and loving embrace until she opens her eyes and the sapphic angel beckoning her into its pearly gates looks a little too much like Yeosang, and a little too lustful to be guiding her to the holy realm. It clicks when she notices that Gay Heaven looks exactly like Yeosang’s bedroom.

Jongho pulls away and gasps for air. That in itself is remarkable, because she hasn’t been able to take a deep breath in weeks without hacking up a lung. But that only adds to her confusion.

Her panic sends this very real Yeosang into a spiral.

“Sorry, you told me you loved me so I kinda just…”

Jongho puts a hand on Yeosang’s shoulder, steadying her.

“How long was I out?” Jongho asks.

“Um… maybe thirty seconds?”

Odd, because feels like she’s slept for a century. The deep ache of fatigue has left her bones and her sinuses are clear. Her throat didn’t hurt when she spoke either, which is a completely foreign sensation. She feels good for once. She feels well. Which can only mean one thing.

“You’re in love with me?”

Yeosang turns away, but Jongho can see the tips of her ears turning pink from the outer glow of her bright red flush. “Yeah, I have been for a while.”

Jongho blinks in confusion. “Since when?”

“I think… ever since we met. Those first few months we were neighbors, I was so awkward because you were just so hot and cool and stuff, but then after the cherry blossoms it was kind of over for me.”

That’s impossible. Unless…

“Goddamnit, Wooyoung,” she mutters under her breath.

“What was that?” Yeosang asks.

“Nothing.”

Maybe it was a tad dramatic of her to, upon realizing she was in love, immediately lie down and decide to die. And perhaps even more dramatic to assume that Yeosang could never love her back.

She laughs at her foolishness as she wraps her arms around Yeosang’s neck and pulls her down to kiss her again.

Kissing Yeosang is just as easy as she’d imagined it. Jongho’s tendency toward crippling trepidation evaporates when Yeosang kisses her back, and with her subsequent bravery, she parts her lips to let her know she isn’t going to back away again. Yeosang smiles when she feels Jongho pulling her down further, pressing their bodies together. Her lips curl against Jongho’s and she kisses Jongho between her giggles and airy breaths. It’s contagious enough for Jongho to start giggling too.

Yeosang takes that moment to climb onto the bed, straddling her.

“Yay,” she says, staring down at her lovingly.

“Yay?” Jongho snorts.

“I’m excited,” Yeosang pouts. “I’ve been waiting so long for this.”

Jongho chuckles, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind Yeosang’s ear.

“Yay,” she whispers, placing one more peck on her lips before they’re both tangled up in the sheets.

Jongho visits the clinic one more time to demand an explanation from her favorite cherub about why her sickness wouldn’t go away when Yeosang had been in love with her the whole time.

“The anomaly was actually you, Jongho,” Wooyoung explains. “I figured a little lie and some sniffles to get you to hang out with Yeosang would be quite effective. And it was, because I’m a genius. But Yeosang’s always been the one for you, which is why whenever anyone else flirted with her it totally went over her head. You just needed a push in the right direction, because if I’d told you to just talk to Yeosang, your stubborn self wouldn’t have done a damn thing.”

Fair.

She lets it slide this time, because she has a movie premiere tonight, and a girlfriend to get ready with.

Yeosang was endlessly giddy ever since Jongho invited her as her plus one, and Jongho needs that excited puppy-like energy to calm her nerves.

“I can’t believe you got tickets to this. We get to be the first people to listen to that Shinwoo song,” Yeosang says, clapping excitedly as their driver pulls into the venue’s parking lot.

“I guess they spared me a ticket because I worked on the track,” Jongho says.

“Really?” Yeosang gasps. “What part? Did you write the lyrics?”

“You’ll see.”

The event goes by in a chaotic blur that Jongho still hasn’t gotten used to. She’s pulled in every direction for photos, but with Yeosang by her side to reassure her, she feels confident enough to pose for the cameras the way she did that day they took photos by the pool.

The movie is sweet, funny, and a little odd. It’s messy at times, but heartwarming nonetheless, and when the couple finally gets together, Jongho sees why they’d wanted the worm song to play at the very end.

Her song starts playing on cue, just as the actors’ lips meet on screen, and Jongho leans over to whisper in Yeosang’s ear, “I wrote this song for you.”

In the dark, she can’t see the blonde’s reaction, so she waits nervously to see what she thinks. For the final version, the more graphic imagery she’d rambled about was turned down a notch, but the sentiment still stood, and she sang it from the heart. She sang it as if only Yeosang would hear it.

She turns to Yeosang once the lights come on. The blonde’s normally sparkly eyes are glossy and red. She’s sniffling, so Jongho hands her a tissue from the pack she’d come so accustomed to carrying around for herself. Yeosang takes the tissue, holding it between her fingers as she tries to speak through her uneven breaths.

“You’d really still love me if I was a worm?”

Jongho laughs. “Of course I would.”

“And you’re Shinwoo? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because that would’ve ruined the surprise, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh god,” she says, dabbing her tears away, “just when I thought I couldn’t get any more obsessed with you. I thought it was just a coincidence that you sounded like her.”

Jongho laughs and kisses her on the cheek. “Nope, it’s not a coincidence. You’re just that lucky.”