Chapter Text
“i fucking hate summer.”
megan isn’t even wearing a swimsuit, but she’s draped lazily at the edge of the pool, trailing a hand through the water. her cheek is pressed into the concrete. the only thing yoonchae can think about is how many feet have been right where megan’s face is.
well, maybe not that many feet. just lara’s, and rhea’s, and their parents, plus their dogs, and however many people have ever visited the rajagopalan’s backyard pool. still enough feet to be gross.
“it’s kind of nice,” she tries.
it earns her a derisive look. megan smacks her palm against the surface of the water. the splash arcs upwards, speckling yoonchae’s shirt.
“no, it’s not.”
she doesn’t elaborate on why it’s not. instead, she flicks her fingers. her nails—cheap, self-applicated press-ons—sparkle in the sun. yoonchae can feel little droplets of water landing on her skin and sliding down. she only has her legs in the pool up to the middle of her calves, but now everything up to her thighs is kind of damp. her shirt isn’t quite dry yet.
lara is somewhere inside her house. she was hanging out with the two of them until someone bypassed her dnd six times in a row. it’s been maybe an hour since she finally accepted the call and disappeared through the sliding glass door. yoonchae glances down at the watch she only started wearing because her phone keeps dying midway through the day.
it’s been twelve minutes since lara went inside. she looks down at megan, who’s staring at the water with the kind of look on her face that makes yoonchae want to pull her away from the edge.
she always liked summer growing up. summer in LA is different from a seoul summer, but that’s okay. not everywhere is like somewhere else. she’s getting better at thinking that way, except when it comes to megan.
with megan sprawled out over the concrete like this, yoonchae can’t help but think about what megan looks like sprawled out over her bed with less clothing on. not in any kind of way. just that it was hot that day and yoonchae’s window a/c unit wasn’t working. it was too hot to touch and megan still tried to put her head in yoonchae’s lap, nosing against the hemline of her shorts.
“i have no idea how you’re still wearing those. it’s like a million degrees in here.”
megan was still wearing her shorts too, but she’d rolled them at the waist so many times that she may as well have just taken them off. her shirt was tangled with yoonchae’s on the ground and she hadn’t decided to hate summer yet.
“we could go somewhere else with better a/c.”
“but i drove all the way here,” megan had whined, pushing herself up on one elbow. “and you have snacks.”
“we could go somewhere else.”
what she means is somewhere like back to australia, where it would be cooler and megan would be endlessly giggly again.
“i’m not just gonna ditch lara, yoonchae. that would be horrible.”
which isn’t what yoonchae meant at all, but megan splashes more water at her like she’s trying to apologize, so she just slumps backwards until she’s lying flat on the concrete with her face towards the sun. the ground burns the backs of her arms and she isn’t wearing any sunscreen. megan’s hand, cool from the water and still dripping, trails lazily up and down her calf.
rehearsal in the summer is, admittedly, not yoonchae’s favorite thing. she doesn’t do so well in the heat, and pants are just better for angles and all their new choreo that involves sliding around on the ground, so every day ends with her shirt soaked in sweat and sticking to her skin.
they’ve been running, like, fourteen hour days sometimes. they get lunch breaks and they’re allowed to be in the bathroom for fifteen minutes without anyone saying anything, but the warm breeze drifting in through the propped-open exit door makes it hard to focus.
lara keeps saying they should all go to the beach, but she never actually texts about it in their group chat, which means it’ll probably never happen. yoonchae isn’t sure which group chat the suggestion would go in anyway—the silent old one or the new one that’s only marginally more active. and besides, she can’t imagine a beach day while trying to dodge cameras the whole time would be any fun. they’d all have to choose between wearing boardshorts and getting backlash for bold choices or wearing their normal two-pieces and watching their feeds fill up with careless comments about their bodies.
they have a nutritionist on staff now. he’s supposed to ensure that they all get proper nutrition for their athletic lifestyles, but yoonchae’s pretty sure he’s only there to make sure they stay somewhere between concerningly frail and appropriately fit. like, there’s a color coded chart up in his office for visual cues of physical deterioration. sophia had scoffed when she’d seen it. missy has her on a tight leash lately, otherwise yoonchae’s pretty sure she would've said something snide about management hiring a man to monitor women’s bodies.
so, yeah; she kinda gets why megan hates summer, because so far, summer has just meant extra cardio and fewer carbs. but summer has also meant the two of them hanging out more. yoonchae’s lost count of how many times megan has pulled up to the curb outside her apartment building just to pick her up and drive around in the past month. that’s supposed to be a good thing. it feels like a good thing, and maybe not something that megan is lumping into her general hatred of the season, but it still stings a little to think about the spiteful curl in megan’s lip when she’d said it.
yoonchae tries to test megan’s feelings on hanging out with her specifically by asking her to go out for dinner in the middle of rehearsal on a hundred-degree day with everyone else watching. megan doesn’t like spontaneity when it comes to food, and she definitely doesn’t like being pestered while she’s hunched over her water bottle trying to catch her breath for long enough to take a sip without vomiting, but she wipes some sweat off her upper lip and smiles when yoonchae asks.
“sure, yoonchae.” then she narrows her eyes. “but i get to pick.”
it’s a stipulation that yoonchae normally wouldn’t care about at all, but she’s running a test, so she tries to fight back.
“but i wanted kimchi jjigae.”
she even makes her voice all soft and pushes out her lower lip just to see what it’ll do. megan just laughs breathlessly. she looks a little pale from so much dancing, but she’s only ever passed out at rehearsal one time before.
“then take yourself out. i want taco bell.”
“can we also get kimchi jjiage?”
it’s just a shade too vulnerable. she realizes this as she’s saying it, that she’s letting genuine concern seep into her voice. megan’s playful expression softens around the edges and she tilts her head, eyes warm and wide. yoonchae kind of wants to reach down and muss her hair.
“sure, yoonchae. whatever you want.”
kimchi jjage really isn’t a summer food, but neither is taco bell, and it’ll all be eaten in megan’s car anyway, which starts to get hot the second she cuts the engine because the finish is a matte black that sucks up sunlight.
between the sun and the spice, yoonchae feels like she can’t breathe properly as she brings bite after bite up to her mouth. she won’t stop eating her own food until megan finishes hers, especially not now.
“megan,” she says, meaning to ask for the huge water bottle the other girl has cradled in her lap. what comes out is much, much worse. “i miss you.”
“what?”
megan’s smiling a little, brows drawn just slightly in her confusion. she’s got her crunch wrap mere inches from her mouth, and it just hovers there as she waits for yoonchae to repeat herself. she’s so pretty like this. her hair is still pinned back with clips from rehearsal. she looks the same as she always has, sort of, but her eyes are softer. her face looks less like a barely held-together mask than it did back when she was ginger and they were all living in one too-small house.
yoonchae has never understood the people online who want megan to go back to the ginger hair, to the pink bangs, to the plain black of dream. she loves how megan looks now. she’s so excited to see what megan will look like in the future. once, she’d tried to explain it.
“every day, you are prettier.”
she was, maybe, a little tipsy at someone’s birthday party. nothing crazy, but dani kept passing yoonchae her drink to sip on, and she hadn’t eaten enough that day. megan was deeper in than she was, and probably handling it better too.
“aw, thank you, yoonchae. you too!”
it was a little too bubbly to have come from the same place that yoonchae’s words had come from. she didn’t doubt for a second that megan meant them, but she’d known even then that megan hadn’t meant them in quite the same way.
“i mean, thank you,” she corrects. “for the food. you didn’t actually have to get it for me. i could have had taco bell.”
“but you wanted this,” megan says.
she passes her water bottle over the console and yoonchae wonders how she’d known. the thing is, sometimes megan does say and do these things that sound and feel like they mean something a little deeper. it’s always been like that, as far back as yoonchae can remember. she’s never examined too closely why she was comfortable with megan clinging to her during dream academy but stiffened up whenever adela or emily reached out to touch.
“sometimes our bodies know things that we don’t.”
sophia’s words, about dani’s psoas injury.
yoonchae’s body is covered in a thin layer of sweat and she drinks half of megan’s water bottle trying to cool it down.
not once in their relatively short careers have the members of katseye ever had separate dressing rooms for shows. they’re a unit, a package deal. except, there’s a little more space in their dressing rooms now than there used to be, and yoonchae feels it every show.
sophia leaves this big open gap between her stuff and megan’s, and no one ever says anything about it or tries to fill it in, not even missy. dani doesn’t really talk to them as much before shows anymore, either. after costume and makeup, she’s out the door and down the hall on the phone with jonas.
yoonchae can’t really blame her. she’s wished more than once that she had someone like that she could dial up privately and slip away to talk to for a while. sophia does it too, sometimes, but yoonchae is never 100% sure who’s on the other end of line when she does.
if sophia isn’t there, she watches lara and megan hype each other up. they play music and stretch and lip sync the lyrics at each other, and yoonchae warms up quietly nearby. they always try to include her, but three is a tricky number.
other times, megan follows sophia around like a lost puppy. for all the edits yoonchae sees of her and sophia as a mother and daughter duo, she can’t help but think they should all be of megan and sophia instead. megan falls into sophia’s arms when she’s anxious before a show, and yoonchae gets it, she really does. sophia’s good like that. she’s warm and steady. the problem is, there’s something about her steadiness that makes yoonchae want to shake her. she’s got this weird urge to see sophia off guard. maybe it’s to prove to herself that sophia isn’t quite as untouchable as yoonchae feels like she is, or maybe she’s just a bad person who wants to see her loved ones cry for once. it’s probably not that one.
when megan cries around her, she tries to hide it. which, fair. yoonchae does the same thing. they all cry more now than they used to, though, and it’s getting harder to hide.
improbably, she’s alone in the dressing room before they’re supposed to film this crazy scene where they’re dancing in a field on fire for the new music video, and yoonchae looks at herself for a moment too long in the mirror. the tears come out of nowhere. she’s home, or close to it, and she’d gotten to have dinner with her parents one night, and they’re doing a collaboration that’s iconic, or whatever, and there’s really no reason for this to be happening.
the door creaks open while she’s got her palms pressed into her eyes, trying to stem the flow, and she freezes in place, trying to discern who it is without taking her hands off her face. she smells almonds and vanilla, which is how she knows.
megan doesn’t say anything. she walks up so close to yoonchae that she can hear her breathing, and then her arms go around her shoulders, and yoonchae wouldn’t be able to stop herself from leaning into the hug if she tried.
megan is wearing some kind of fluffy robe over her costume, and it’s thick enough that yoonchae thinks she’ll be able to get out of this without megan realizing she was crying, but then a breath catches in her throat and she has to inhale kind of shakily in that way that’s just not subtle at all. then she has to sniffle so she won’t get snot on megan’s robe, and megan still doesn’t say anything, but she slides a hand up the back of yoonchae’s neck and palms the back of her head gently. her thumb rubs back and forth behind yoonchae’s ear, and there must be some kind of anatomical button back there, because yoonchae feels her whole body relaxing without her explicit permission.
“there you go,” megan murmurs then, and she doesn’t sound even a little bit condescending. “we’re okay.”
she’s cried twice already today, and yoonchae had been there for both of them. they’re breaking down barriers or something. they’re growing their brand and chasing big opportunities. yoonchae doesn’t know how to describe their work to her parents anymore, which is maybe part of why she’s standing here crying into megan’s shoulder and part of why megan was crying into sophia’s shoulder earlier.
“fuck,” she muffles it into the robe.
megan laughs at her, just a little, but it’s not mean. her arms squeeze tighter.
“fuck is right,” she agrees. “that floor part is killing my back.”
“this is killing us.”
yoonchae pulls back, wiping at her eyes instead of dabbing. megan’s hands catch her wrists gently to stop her.
“we’re okay,” she assures, like she hasn’t gone a day without covering the bags under her eyes in months. like yoonchae hasn’t caught her trying to do sneaky math after group dinners and coffee runs. “but you need to go see soyun to get this fixed up.”
she’s not being pushy. it’s just that they have a schedule to stick to and none of their managers are here right now to remind them of that. yoonchae is honestly a little surprised megan was able to slip away from wherever she’d been.
“everyone’s kind of looking for you,” megan admits. “you missed the call time by like ten minutes.”
“what?”
yoonchae isn’t even wearing a watch, but she glances down at her wrist instinctively anyway. she must’ve been misremembering the call sheet, or more time had passed while she was staring into the mirror than she’d realized.
“it’s not a big deal, okay?” megan says. “but we probably shouldn’t make them wait too much longer.”
there are a million things yoonchae wants to ask her, but she swallows them all down. she lets megan twine their hands together, fingers interlocked, even though she knows hers are a little clammy. they’re careful with the press around not to hold hands like that. they all are, even lara and sophia.
she tries to breathe out slowly as megan guides her down a long white hallway, but it rushes out of her all at once, and yoonchae wishes so badly that she’d just remembered the call time correctly and not cried and then maybe everything wouldn’t feel so impossibly disordered.
“i love you, yoonchae.”
she only keeps the video in her camera roll because of the last few seconds. sophia had sent it to her, claiming that she didn’t think yoonchae had gotten enough pictures of the beach on her own. it’s a shitty video, truthfully, and yoonchae’s pretty sure that sophia had intended to pan the camera over to them before she’d gotten interrupted by a member of their staff. that’s how the video actually ends—benji who runs their socials asking sophia if she can come over here for a picture, but yoonchae had edited that part out.
megan tells her that she loves her all the time, and she usually tacks yoonchae’s name onto the end of the declaration, which makes it feel all the more intimate.
but megan tells everyone that she loves them, and probably doesn’t have any idea that yoonchae rarely tells anyone at all that she loves them.
she edited that part out too. the part at the very end, just barely loud enough to hear with the volume turned all the way up.
“love you too, megan.”
before yoonchae cries in the dressing room to megan, she cries in a hotel room to sophia about megan.
well, only sort of about megan. they’re frustrated tears more than anything else. megan has this green problem that yoonchae never knows how to deal with, and every time it flares up, she feels like they’re sixteen and seventeen again. ginger dye, lots of denim. touch, touch, etc.
eunchae accidentally catches yoonchae on the rear during the final take of their dance practice video, which is hilarious until yoonchae catches megan staring at them from a few paces away. it’s still funny after that, and she laughs with eunchae as they watch the playback of the video, but the step that megan takes away from her when she does feels, like, really intentional.
megan dodges her in the dressing room afterwards, and then gets in the van with missy and the press team instead of them. dani follows her, which means that sohey has to switch vans, which means that grant follows him, and yoonchae isn’t as good with change as everyone thinks that she is.
she manages to keep a straight face until they get back to the hotel, and even all the way up the elevator with megan right next to her, but she crumples the second she’s back in her own room. it takes a stupid amount of willpower not to flop face-first onto the bed for a personal pity party. she goes to the sink instead, thinking to wash her face or put on a ton of makeup and take some really good pictures to post or something, but there’s a knock at the door and it’s sophia on the other side.
“oh,” is all sophia says when yoonchae swings it open too aggressively. “i can—do you need a minute?”
yoonchae pushes the door open a little and turns, giving up on not dirtying the hotel sheets and falling onto the bed with a thump. she can tell sophia follows her in because the door clicks shut softly instead of slamming, and then there’s a dip in the mattress by her head. sophia’s hand lands on the covers next to her ear, and when yoonchae doesn’t move away, she starts carding it through yoonchae’s hair gently.
“megan’s being a bitch.”
she shocks herself by admitting this unprompted, because objectively, it’s not that deep. but she’s tired and she wants to go home, which is weird because they’re in south korea right now, and the outfit she’d chosen for the shoot started pissing her off within the first hour and then kept pissing her off.
“we’ve had a long couple of days,” sophia says quietly. she corrects herself almost immediately. “it’s been a long couple of months.”
yoonchae wishes she were the kind of person who could sit up right now and wrap her arms around sophia.
sophia insists she’s not really a hugger and she really only cuddles with them because they ask, but yoonchae isn’t really a hugger either and sometimes she wants nothing more than to be held, and there’s not a chance in hell sophia doesn’t feel like that sometimes too.
she’s eighteen. the world is large, and sophia is so patient.
“she’s mad at me again. i didn’t do anything,” she sniffles.
she feels pathetic. she sits up and sophia’s hand falls away from her head. her composure is harder to find around sophia than it is most of the time, but she gets it together pretty quickly regardless.
“you don’t have to do that, you know.” sophia looks really worried. yoonchae isn’t exactly sure why she’s here. “it’s okay to be upset over stuff like this.”
“it’s dumb,” she shoots back. “and it doesn’t matter. we’re tired. you said so.”
“i didn’t mean—”
“it’s not like we won’t be friends anymore. two days, back to normal.”
she waves a hand vaguely, pushes to her feet. then she just stands there aimlessly, staring at the weird patterning on the hotel carpet. she can feel sophia’s eyes on her back.
“have you and megan ever,” sophia pauses. her nails scratch over the bedspread and yoonchae shivers. “never mind.”
“what?”
“sometimes when you care about someone, you get kind of—” sophia stops again, and her clothes rustle, so she must be gesturing, but yoonchae doesn’t turn around to see it. “you know.”
yoonchae has seen more edits of her and megan than any other members, and she doesn’t really know whether that’s because there are actually more of them or because that’s just what gets served to her burner account’s feed. it’s strange seeing edits of half-moments. most of the clips editors use have sides to them that the cameras couldn’t possibly have gotten. people are, unfortunately, generally half-decent about putting pieces together.
“i’m not in love with megan,” she says, testing it.
“that wasn’t what i was asking,” sophia replies lightly. “i just meant, have you guys ever like, messed around?”
her cheeks get hot and suddenly, yoonchae’s glad to be facing away from the older girl. she wonders if the red in her ears is visible in the lamplight. she goes over to her suitcase to rummage around in it for a change of clothes.
“i don’t know mess around,” she lies.
sophia blows out a breath loudly. disbelievingly.
“you know, manon and i—”
she panics, just a little. “no!”
“manon and i were talking the other day,” sophia finishes. “she said megan told her you guys went on a date last week.”
“megan says things.” yoonchae stands up, clothes bundled against her chest. “she doesn’t mean a lot of them.”
“oh, yoonchae.” sophia’s voice is too soft.
“i need to shower.”
she makes sure to click the lock pointedly, because she doesn’t want to go as far as slamming the door, but she is annoyed.
the hotel bathroom looks a lot like the one megan had asked her to play photographer in. yoonchae had wanted her to fix her hair, missed from yoonchae’s own fingers, before she took any photos. megan just smiled and said something about having a secret, winking like it was something playful and scandalous.
she thinks about flipping the lights off and showering in the dark, but that would definitely be overreacting, so she doesn’t.
yoonchae hasn’t worked her way up to full blown boxing just yet, but she’s been going to kickboxing classes at a gym near her apartment. she tries to take the really early classes to get it out of the way before rehearsals, which means that she shows up to those already flushed and sweaty.
it’s summer, though. she’d probably look like that just if she walked from her apartment to the studio, which she can do, and is what she’s been telling the girls she’s been doing on the mornings that she shows up looking like that.
she’s keeping a secret for herself. if she did tell them, they’d probably all titter supportively and move on, but she doesn’t really want anyone to know yet.
it’s kind of fun to imagine that one day, she and megan will be out walking late at night and someone will try to grab megan’s purse, and then yoonchae will punch them square in the nose to get them to back off.
megan has a car, and they do cardio all day every day, so they don’t really do that much late-night walking. which is fine. she’s only doing kickboxing for herself anyway. it feels good to feel strong.
the other people who go to the classes keep asking her where she’s from, and they don’t believe her when she says from here. they don’t even know her name is yoonchae. she goes by carly there, because she’d panicked when the guy on the phone had asked for her name, and now whenever she’s hanging out with karlee and someone says her name, she has to stop herself from looking over too.
it’s a whole mess, but still. no one has recognized her yet, and that’s the whole point.
they have to film all these tiktoks so that they have a backlog of stuff to post leading up to the wild release. the team tries to coordinate media days like that with their hair touch-ups, which means that they usually have to sit through a styling session and then immediately go learn a bunch of dances. it’s actually kind of fun sometimes, but it’s less fun in the summer. the dance studio’s a/c is even worse than the one in yoonchae’s apartment, and none of them are super keen on wearing shorts these days.
her and megan both show up wearing jeans, which makes megan say something excitedly about them matching, even though they, like, aren’t. her excitement is ridiculously contagious and yoonchae is grinning instantly, stupid and ear-to-ear.
megan has good days and bad days. they all do. yoonchae thinks she’s probably just needlessly attuned to megan.
her bad days are almost always the result of megan being furious with herself, anxious over messing up during a performance or getting stuck on a tricky choreo transition. yoonchae feels pretty helpless about those things, because megan doesn’t believe her anymore when she promises that the mistakes were basically imperceptible, because she thinks that yoonchae has a flawed opinion.
“you’re too nice to me. it doesn’t count when you say stuff like that.”
she, of course, hadn’t meant it to hurt, but it had. yoonchae isn’t sure why her thoughts should matter less because she thinks highly of megan.
megan isn’t having a bad day, per se, but she keeps fumbling a slowed down version of their iconic by mistake choreo and yoonchae can see how upset it’s making her. sophia is filming the thing, because benji is over with dani and lara shooting something else, and yoonchae is trying not to seem like she’s paying that much attention.
“just take a breather, megan,” sophia urges gently, but megan just shakes her head.
“run it again. i’ll get it this time.”
she doesn’t get it this time, and yoonchae feels her shoulders tense up in anticipation.
megan’s reaction to her mistake isn’t much more than a frustrated huff, but she still wants to go over and say something silly to make megan smile again.
recently, she’s become aware that they both do this thing where they try to pretend like they aren’t having a hard time with something when they’re around each other. some attempts work better than others. but megan is trying really hard to seem unbothered right now, because yoonchae can see her hands shaking, but she just tells sophia to start the recording again.
they’re, like, best friends. at the very least, they’re best friends. but lara and megan are best friends too, and yoonchae doesn’t see them pull shit like this. megan tells lara almost everything, and she never tries to pretend like she isn’t crying if it’s lara that finds her hunched over herself after a tough rehearsal. their friendship seems so easy by comparison, like sophia and dani’s.
“you know, manon and i—”
by comparison, her and megan have had it easier than sophia and manon have. they didn’t fight during dream academy, and then end up in a group together, and then, well.
she knows that sophia thinks about it all the time. about manon, how things are and how they were supposed to be.
she’d tried to comfort sophia after the hiatus announcement, opening her arms awkwardly and murmuring into sophia’s hair:
“i wish things were easier.”
sophia had shook her head, fisting the back of yoonchae’s shirt in her hands. she’d never done that before, and yoonchae doesn’t think she ever will again.
“i just wish they were different.”
it’s all she can think about, sitting on the studio floor, sweating and watching megan get more and more upset with herself. she ends up excusing herself to no one before megan finishes. she stands in the middle of the bathroom and scrolls on tiktok for twelve minutes before she goes back. megan must’ve gotten it, finally, because she’s smiley when yoonchae walks back in and she practically pounces on her to ask if she wants to do a tiktok like the one they did back in the touch era. it’s something to do with the stairs again.
stupidly, yoonchae starts thinking about how stairs is only one letter off from stars, which means nothing on top of how she wishes so badly that things were just a little bit different.
she and lara go on this crazy depop shopping spree. it’s more money that she’s ever spent at one time—apartment and utilities excluded—and the day that the last package of the bunch arrives, lara comes over to see the haul in person.
she shows up wearing her own new clothes, but she doesn’t actually bring any of the others to change into, which makes yoonchae the reluctant center of attention.
first, they rip open all the packages and dump all the clothes into the laundry. most of them smell okay, but yoonchae isn’t super keen on putting any of them on until they’ve been through at least one spin cycle.
it leaves them with about two and a half hours to kill. yoonchae suggests they want a movie. lara wants to gossip.
“about what, even?” she asks warily.
“oh my god,” lara breathes, looking a little sick. “not, like, professional stuff. sorry. just, like, i don’t know, crushes or whatever.”
“I don’t have crush,” she says automatically.
she doesn’t know whether or not lara caught the end of her live with sophia where she fumbled her way through her reasoning as to why everyone has had a crush on their bestie at some point. because you just spend so much time with them.
“well, it doesn’t have to be your crush,” lara hums.
“it can’t be yours,” yoonchae replies.
orlando doesn’t really count as a crush anymore, she doesn’t think. so, they’re at a bit of a stalemate.
“we could talk about megan’s,” lara suggests after a beat of silence.
yoonchae is press trained, but she barely manages to keep a straight face at that one.
“i didn’t know megan had a crush.”
she feels silly, like she’s sitting at a secondary school lunch table, begging for information from the cooler girls. she turns away from lara, who’s seated at one of the stools by her counter, and starts rummaging aimlessly in her cupboards for something to put out as a snack.
“oh, yeah,” lara says.
she doesn't offer anything else, so yoonchae offers up some shrimp chips and they move on to talking about the new billboard by their studio that blocks their nice view of the skyline. a not-so-small part of her mind is stuck on megan’s supposed crush and what he looks like this time. whether she’ll meet him and feel a strange sense of deja vu, like she’s talking to someone she knows very well and not at all.
sophia had really hit the nail on her head with one of her analyses of megan’s crushes. or, at least, yoonchae hopes she’d really hit the nail on the head.
“he reminds me of you, yoonchae. it was kinda creepy, actually.”
she almost asks between outfit changes. lara keeps making her model walk in her new clothes down the hallway to loud edm music, which is actually kinda fun, but between all the giggles, she’s still kind of thinking about the crush thing.
what stops her: lara’s phone buzzes once, twice, five times, and when she picks it up, her pleased expression falls away. her brows knit together and she swallows once, hard.
“yoonchae, i gotta make a call. i’ll be in the hallway.”
she knows it’s megan on the other side of the line. she doesn’t really know how she knows. it was probably something about the contour of lara’s jaw as she’d read the texts. her face always softens for megan, even when she’s annoyed with her.
yoonchae checks her phone once, twice, five times as she waits for lara to come back. she does get one text, but it’s from her sister. karlee sends her two tiktoks. another one of her friends likes her most recent finsta post.
but no megan. she’s not sure exactly what she was expecting.
at least she still has megan around. she’s looking for things to be grateful for, and megan being around is one of them. plus, megan wanting her around in return.
megan asks her to sleep over on a gloomy thursday night that has yoonchae hoping that rehearsal tomorrow will be canceled and preemptively upset about how it definitely won’t be. she doesn’t really explain why over text, but yoonchae packs a little duffel and calls an uber without asking.
the door is unlocked when she gets there, so she lets herself in, calling out so that megan won’t think her apartment is being broken into.
megan doesn’t answer her, but yoonchae wasn’t expecting her to. she’s expecting to find megan curled up on her couch or in her bed, scrolling on tiktok. she does find megan in her bed, but she isn’t scrolling on tiktok. she isn’t scrolling on anything at all. her phone is facedown on the bedspread somewhere by her feet, and she’s staring out the sliding glass door that goes to nowhere in the middle of her bedroom wall.
her nightstand is dotted with a few half-finished drinks. mostly cups of water. one iced coffee. something that looks like it might’ve been tea.
yoonchae sits delicately on the very edge of the bed.
“we could blow up the studio so we don’t have to go to practice tomorrow.”
megan snorts, a shocked little sound, and she tears her gaze off the door to look at yoonchae.
“jesus, yoonchae.” her voice is hoarse, like she hasn’t been using it.
yoonchae brought her bag into the bedroom with her. she passes her water bottle across the bed for megan to sip at. she looks sheepish as she does it, sitting up a little straighter and smoothing down some flyaways.
“i was just taking a nap,” she says. it’s not particularly convincing, but yoonchae lets it slide. “you woke me up.”
“if you nap too long, you won’t be tired tonight.”
if she were sophia, megan would roll her eyes and say, okay, mommy.
since she’s not sophia, megan just shrugs.
“i could sleep through a hurricane and then some right now. but my brain keeps running the new choreo every time i close my eyes.”
this is true. it happens to yoonchae too. she’ll jerk awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because her dream-self has screwed up the same move twelve times in a row. the whole time they were filming for iconic in korea, she had these stress dreams about stepping on the bottom of her pants during the dance and falling into someone else, dominoing everyone to the ground in one huge heap.
she’d chosen to wear shorts the day of filming and was annoyed with herself the entire time, but at least she didn’t trip over them.
“we should put a movie on,” yoonchae decides.
megan has a tv mounted across from her bed. well, it’s not mounted. it’s resting on a thin table that runs most of the length of that wall in her room that also holds no less than six tops and two pairs of pants at any given time. and, usually, a few containers of makeup as well. it’s not that megan is messy, exactly, but yoonchae wouldn’t call her organized. she can’t blame her, though. if she had megan’s brain, she doesn’t think she’d be able to keep her room all that orderly either. megan runs on either 2 or 200% energy all the time, and a day rarely goes by where she doesn’t gnaw her bottom lip or her thumbnail raw with worry.
they all have their things. sophia is always being reminded by dani or lara or sohey to focus during film review at practice. she’s locked in until it’s time to stop moving. lara gets worked up over online discourse. dani can’t leave a choreo run unfinished and imperfect. they’re just people, and people are weird. manon took—takes—two sips of water for every one bite of a mid-practice snack.
“i want to watch something animated,” megan says.
yoonchae just hums and looks around for the remote. she doesn’t really care what they watch. she wants to curl up next to megan and doze until they have to get up stupidly early to force down protein bars and coffee before practice.
megan cuddles in close once yoonchae locates the remote and settles more fully onto the bed. she keeps butting her nose against yoonchae’s shoulder, which yoonchae ignores for as long as she can before she sinks a hand into megan’s hair. she doesn’t want to admit that she was reaching out to do that before megan even got close.
she picks out something neither of them has seen before and puts on the korean captions before thinking better of it and switching to the english ones. her left hand is clumsy over the remote.
“no, no,” megan protests softly. “go back to the other ones. i’m learning.”
hangul is hard for her, but she knows more words by ear than any other member. yoonchae’s starting to have to be careful with what she says in korean around her, because she’s pretty sure megan will get at least 30% of it at any given time.
when she doesn’t immediately switch back, megan lies out dramatically across her lap to grab the remote. she doesn’t really move after she’s gotten ahold of it. yoonchae tells herself she is just used to this as she wraps her arms around megan’s waist and holds.
she must fall asleep before megan, because she wakes up laying most of the way flat with the blanket tucked around her. the other side of the bed is empty and she’s still in her sweatpants from earlier. she’s a little too warm and too groggy to move.
“mei?”
it comes out as a pathetic little mewl, but it works, and megan pops her head out of the en-suite with a toothbrush between her lips. they never ate dinner, which their nutritionist would be annoyed about, but yoonchae can’t fathom the idea of getting up right now. the early morning kickboxing classes might be beating her down a little.
“i’m here,” megan whisper-shouts.
yoonchae hums, mostly to herself, and rolls onto her side. her eyes slide shut again. she listens to megan clanking around in the bathroom for a while and it makes her stomach hurt badly with want.
this is so domestic, she thinks lara would say if she knew about this. the other side of the bed dips and it takes every ounce of willpower in her body not to roll over and face megan.
megan finds her anyway. she is, as sophia would say fondly, a snugglebug.
yoonchae lets it happen. of course she does.
there’s a boy in her kickboxing class. his name is angelo, and so far, he’s lived up to his name. sometimes they get paired up for partner drills, and he hits her as hard as he would hit anyone else. yoonchae likes that. when they spar, he knocks her to the ground, and then apologizes and helps her to her feet with hands that don’t linger.
the tips of his brown hair have been (poorly) bleached, but it’s an oddly good look for him. he’s short; shorter than her. just by a half-inch or so, but he has to turn his face up to smile at her properly and when he does, the tops of his cheeks dimple inwards.
“gotta be slower,” he says as he tugs her up from the mat. “you fall because you turn your shoulders too early.”
“show me, then,” she hears herself reply, a little surprised at the playful lilt in her voice.
angelo puts his hands on her shoulders to demonstrate what he means, and yoonchae doesn’t really feel the urge to pull away.
lara goes on this whole tirade about pride month. yoonchae actually doesn’t mind it—she’s still a bit uncertain about what it all entails.
“basically, it’s to celebrate,” lara explains.
yoonchae narrows her eyes, scrunching up her face annoyedly.
“i know that,” she says, realizes how it must sound. “celebrating is good.”
lara flops onto the ground. they’re waiting around for their turns in meetings with management. supposedly, they’re just going over schedules, but yoonchae has a nervous knot in her stomach anyway. the last time they were supposedly going over schedules, something else happened.
“are you going to celebrate?” lara asks her.
from across the room, dani looks up from her phone and snorts. she has her hair tied up in a bun, glasses perched on her nose. she looks pretty like that. yoonchae doesn’t think she could pull off a bun in the same way.
“don’t tease her like that,” dani tells lara, like yoonchae’s still sixteen and oblivious.
“i’m not! i was asking!” lara defends. she tilts her head to face yoonchae. “i was just asking.”
“it’s okay. i want to celebrate,” she says to herself in the mirror. she watches mirror-lara sit up a little. “to be an ally.”
lara and megan taught her the word ally together, giggling the whole time. it hadn’t felt mean-spirited at the time, but now, looking back, she kind of wonders whether it was maybe a little bit teasing.
the door swings open and sophia steps through. she’d been in the bathroom, according to her excuse before she left, but she has her phone clenched in one hand and yoonchae just barely make out a column of outgoing calls displayed on the screen.
“we’re being allies?” she asks, falsely cheerful. the corners of her eyes don’t crinkle as she smiles.
“yep!” lara chirps. she puts her arms out, beckoning sophia closer. “i’m taking yoonchae to a pride parade.”
“i’ve never been to one,” sophia hums, sinking to the floor next to lara. she lets herself be enveloped in a hug, eyes fluttering shut.
lara presses her cheek to the top of sophia’s head. she doesn’t look at all curious about where sophia had been, which makes yoonchae think she must already know.
“well, you can come too,” she says. “we’ll all go.”
“we’ll all go where?”
megan’s there, suddenly, and she laughs loudly when lara tells her where. yoonchae feels a wave of relief crash over her at the sound. megan’s meeting with management must have really just been about scheduling.
she reaches out as megan lowers herself gingerly to the ground beside her. her back’s been off lately. yoonchae has a feeling it’s from sleeping all curled up in a ball the way that she does. megan accepts her hand in her own.
her fingers almost wrap the whole way around yoonchae’s hand. her thumb traces pathways back and forth across yoonchae’s knuckles.
“good,” she says, and yoonchae sits up a little straighter. “that’s good press right there.”
it's like letting like air out of a tire.
yoonchae huffs and lies fully back like lara. her hair fans out across the scuffmarked ground.
“miss attitude over here,” megan teases, poking yoonchae in the side with their entwined hands. “what, you don’t want to go to the big scary pride parade?”
normally, the jokes don’t sting so badly, because yoonchae knows none of them actually think she’s, like, at all homophobic.
she squeezes megan’s hand once, twice, three times.
“i do want to go!” it comes out kind of as a petulant whine, like a kid begging to go to the candy store, and she flushes red almost immediately. over sophia and lara’s laughter—she doesn’t know how lara always manages to cheer sophia up like that—she repeats herself softer, trying to make eye contact with megan. “i do want to.”
megan catches herself mid-giggle. for a brief moment, uncertainty wins out over everything else on her face, but she manages a smile that looks real.
“we can, you know,” she says quietly. dani, lara, and sophia have moved on. sohey is trying to get yoonchae’s attention. “if you really want to.”
“yoonchae! hey!” sohey waves his arms over his head. “c’mon, you’re up.”
she leaves without saying anything else, because she’s honestly not sure whether megan was talking about the pride parade or something deeper. stairs and stars. as enters the room where all her bosses are gathered around a table, faces serious and stern, she tries to remind herself: it’s not that deep. even when it feels that way, it isn't. megan doesn't choose her. she just happens to be in the right places at the right times and, well, whatever. it's summer. the heat makes things wavy.