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Haewon had always thought of herself as the moon.
Not because she had a habit of being cold or distant from others, no matter how much Jinsol liked teasing her for that fact. It wasn’t due to being this alluring, mysterious thing — that illusion would break the moment she’d laugh or do one of her many dumb impressions that left her friends hollering. No, rather, it was more to do with how the moon never made it's own light. It reflected whatever came near it, a constant thing that was content to hang back in the dark and watch. Haewon could match the energy she was given, but rarely did she walk into a room with the intention to bedazzle anyone.
But then there was Lily. Haewon supposed the cliche comparison would be to say that Lily was the sun — that she was the one who gave Haewon her light, let her stand out. But Haewon saw the sun as too far away, too blinding to look at directly. Lily was the earth — she was grounded, close, loud with life in every direction. She was always growing something, cultivating a new hobby or interest, always the most vibrant person in the room.
Much like the moon with the earth, Haewon had been pulled into her orbit before she'd had words for gravity, before she'd known she was gay, before she'd understood that the tightness in her chest whenever Lily laughed too hard at her own jokes had a name. She still didn't say the name for her feelings out loud, most days. But she'd written it down. Four pages of it, actually, folded into a square gone soft at the creases from being taken out of her desk drawer and put back so many times.
It was sitting on her desk right now, not two feet from where she sat on her bed, knees pulled up, phone in hand, half-listening to the sound of Lily rifling through her fridge in the next room like she lived there. Which, some weeks, she basically did.
“Haewon-ah,” Lily called, muffled by the fridge door. “Why do you have four types of yogurt and no actual food.”
“Yogurt is food,” she called back, and could hear Lily laugh.
“It is a condiment for actual food. I swear, you better not be turning into one of those gym bros who adds it to everything,” A pause. The fridge door shut. “I'm eating the mango one.”
“That's Kyujin's,” Haewon had said, and could envision the smaller girl’s frowning face.
Lily laughed, singing her words, “Kyujin isn't here~”
Haewon smiled down at her phone, which was doing absolutely nothing to earn the smile. She heard the couch cushions sigh under Lily's weight, heard the TV click on to something Lily wasn't going to watch, just background noise for talking over. This was the shape of most of their evenings, had been since they were eleven and twelve. Since Lily’s family moved in two doors down and the young girl had shown up at their doorstep with a smile so blinding and a plate full of cookies she insisted baking herself.
Half of them had been black on the bottom, the other half misshapen, and whilst their parents exchanged more grown-up gifts like wine or well-made cookies, Haewon stood there, heart beating faster than it had any right to. Lily had asked if she wanted to be best friends with a confidence that felt alien to Haewon, with Korean that sounded clunky and too loud. Yet, Haewon said yes, and twelve years later, it had been the only decision she didn’t regret.
Tonight was supposed to have gone differently for Lily, though. There was a boy — there was always, occasionally, a boy or a girl, Lily's type shifting like weather, though never landing anywhere long. He was from one of her creative writing seminars, and had asked her out to dinner, only to text forty minutes beforehand to cancel. He’d offered some half-baked excuse about a sick roommate, but even Lily, eternally willing to believe the best of everyone, hadn’t fully bought it.
Haewon had known within the hour, because Jiwoo had known within the hour, because Jiwoo made it her business to know things and then immediately share them with the group chat in a cascade of concerned emojis. lily got stood up T-T someone needs to do something.
Jinsol's reply had come fast. haewon. haewonnie. THIS is your moment.
Haewon had rolled her eyes at her phone and gotten her car keys anyway.
She hadn't called it a date, obviously. She'd shown up at Lily's door in her ordinary jacket with her ordinary face and said, “Get dressed, I'm taking you to that restaurant that does that gamja-tang you like. I’m not about to let you be sad about a guy who cancels over text,” and Lily had blinked at her with her makeup half-done for a night that had already fallen apart, and something in her face had gone soft and grateful in a way that made Haewon's ears go hot.
They’d gone and gotten the pork back-bone stew Lily adored, the place ran by an elderly ahjumma who’d shower Lily with compliments because she’d smiled at her bad jokes, and only gave Haewon a lingering stare because she hadn’t. Haewon planned to take her home after that, but then she watched Lily’s entire face brighten up from just a single bite, and something had loosened in Haewon’s chest. Lily’s day had been horrendous, and if she could make her smile, why stop now?
So, the night went on. She’d taken her to that arcade, with a claw machine Lily seemed cosmically incapable of winning, to overlooking the river, sitting on the hood of Haewon’s car. Lily would point to someone jogging, or an elderly couple walking their dog, or two kids flying their kites, and narrate dramatic and emotional backstories for each one.
It hadn't been a date. Haewon had been careful with her wording, the whole night, to make sure it wasn't a date. Because if it was a date and Lily didn't know it was a date then it wasn't fair, and if it was a date and Lily did know then Haewon didn't think her heart could survive finding out in real time whether that idea delighted or horrified her.
But it had felt like one. It had felt like every single thing Haewon had, in secret, imagined a date with Lily to be. Her chest felt warm and fuzzy each time Lily tossed her had back in laughter, would feel her chest grow tight at the bright-eyed smile Lily gave. She’d be too busy grinning and howling with laughter each time she’d make fun of Lily, and the older girl would sigh and pout and hit her shoulder whining.
Then now, they sat in Haewon’s apartment, because Lily didn’t want to let their night of fun end just yet, because Lily’s home always seemed to be in Haewon’s heart and mind. There was a letter, sitting on Haewon’s desk almost mockingly, something she’d written four months ago and had never once gotten the nerve to give it to her.
She looked at it now. She thought about Jinsol's voice in her head, unbearably smug: You're just going to sit on that thing until it fossilizes, aren't you.
She thought about Yoona, of all people, her ex, who she still loved in the specific worn-in way you love someone you used to hold hands with and don't anymore, texting her last week.
yoona: im serious. tell her. im tired of watching you be sad on purpose.
Haewon picked up the letter. With a sigh and a nod of determination, she put it in her hoodie pocket before she could think better of it, and went to go sit with Lily.
Lily had claimed the couch in the way she always claimed it whenever she visited, with her legs slung over the armrest and whatever food she’d stolen balanced precariously on her stomach. Her head rested against the cushions, and when Haewon walked in, her face had lit up and she’d sat up, patting the space beside her. Haewon sighed, sitting down, and Lily readjusted, her back resting against Haewon’s shoulder, the scent of mango lingering in the air.
She hadn’t broken whatever monologue she’d gotten lost in at all, throughout the ordeal, and Haewon had lingered onto each word without really meaning to. It was something about her creative writing professor, who apparently had opinions about semicolons that Lily found both offensive and, begrudgingly, a little bit correct.
“You're not even listening,” Lily accused with a frown, not looking away from the TV.
“I'm listening, something about semicolons, and how Professor Kang is wrong but also sort of right,” she muttered, thinking back to the paper sitting in her hoodie pocket.
“See, this is why I like you better than everyone else.” Lily finally turned her head, grinning, leaning her head briefly against Haewon’s shoulder, “You pretend not to care and then you repeat back the whole thing anyway.”
“I don't pretend not to care,” she mumbled, feeling oddly defiant, and Lily laughed.
“You absolutely do. It's your whole personality.” Lily nudged her side with her elbow, shuffling as she rested her weight fully against the younger woman. “You’re like the moon, always floating above us, all judgy.”
Haewon huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, and tried to let the cool sensation of Lily’s body against hers wash over her, all in an attempt to ignore the letter pressing lightly against her ribs through the hoodie pocket, a small, stupid weight.
“Tonight was good,” Lily said, quieter now, some of the vibrancy draining out of her voice into something more tired and earnest. “Like, embarrassingly good. I was supposed to be having a crisis about that guy cancelling and instead I had a genuinely great night, and I keep thinking that says something bad about that guy.”
“It says something bad about that guy,” Haewon agreed all-too readily, and Lily chuckled. She shifted, sitting a little more upright, legs swinging round to brush against Haewon’s, and she sighed, holding onto the younger woman’s arm and pressing against her, cheek against her shoulder. Haewon felt her face flame, and mentally scolded herself. This wasn’t anything new, Lily lived her life always so close with others, so close with her, but all her brain could do was malfunction.
“Or,” she mumbled, yawning, “It says something good about you.”
Haewon swallowed, “That too, probably.”
Lily laughed, and it curled warm through the room the way it always did, and Haewon glanced down and let herself watch it happen — the way Lily's whole face got involved in laughing, nose scrunching, eyes near-shut, like joy was too big a thing to be housed in just a mouth. She thought, not for the first time, that she could map every phase of the moon onto the different ways Lily smiled — a small crescent for her smaller and more precious smiles, a gibbous for her larger, toothier laughing faces — and she would still run out of moon before she ran out of Lily.
The letter sat in her pocket like a stone, an asteroid she wasn’t ready to let sink into the moment. “Hey,” Lily said, softer, catching something in Haewon's face. “Where'd you go?”
“Nowhere,” Haewon looked down at her hands. “I have — okay. This is stupid.”
“You say that before every good thing you've ever told me, so, please continue.”
Haewon’s fingers drifted along the edge of the letter in her pocket, the paper crinkled near the edges, and Haewon was struck with the idea of it all seeming a bit much. Lily had just gotten stood up, and here Haewon was, sitting with a letter that had taken four months of drafts, four months of crossing out sentences that sounded too much like a confession. She’d rewrite them each time, trying to sound like something safer, only to circle back to being a confession anyway. Because there wasn’t a version of the truth about Lily that didn’t sound like one.
I wrote you a letter, she rehearsed, silently. I've had it for months. I don't know how to give it to you without it changing something, and I don't know if I want it to change something, and I do, and —
“It's nothing,” she said instead, and let go of the paper, and pulled her empty hand back out of her pocket, looking back toward the television. “I forgot what I was going to say.”
Lily gave her a look — the particular Lily look that meant she didn't believe a word of that, but had decided, out of twelve years of practiced patience, to let it go for now, though she did let go of her side, leaning back against the couch with her arms crossed. “Liar,” she said, without heat. “You're a terrible liar, you know that? You get this face.”
“I don't have a face,” Haewon rebutted with a frown, and Lily laughed.
“You have several faces, that’s the one you have whenever you try to play cool after lying,” Lily reached over and poked her cheek, and Haewon swatted her hand away, and for a while it dissolved into the kind of nonsense wrestling they'd been doing since they were fourteen, Lily shrieking with laughter as Haewon pinned her wrist with the mild, methodical calm of someone who had done this a hundred times and knew exactly how much force was needed to win without actually hurting anyone.
“Truce,” Lily gasped eventually, breathless, “truce, oh my god, you're so strong for someone who looks like she'd blow away in a stiff wind.”
“I’m deceptively strong,” she huffs, “Jihyo-unnie keeps dragging me to the gym.”
“You’re deceptively terrifying. I don't know why I like you.” Lily flopped back against the couch cushions, hair a mess, cheeks flushed from laughing, and Haewon's heart did the thing it always did, a sudden jump into her throat, and she thought, how she often did, that she was going to spend the rest of her life quietly loving this same girl and calling it friendship.
It got late without either of them really noticing, the city outside going from a loud, incessant buzz to a quieter whisper. Lily decided it was too late for her to go home, and would rather commandeer half of Haewon’s bed. Haewon had only rolled her eyes — it truly had always been this way, ever since they were kids, and Haewon had settled in beside her as Lily drew up the comforter. She was still talking, as she always did, a bright and endless stream of thoughts and ideas.
She ranted about her professor, this novel idea she couldn’t stop thinking about, the way she shipped her two main characters. She started talking about their friends, about how Kyujin wanted to start getting the group to join her on morning runs and to change their diets, and had been met with almost immediate rebellion, even from her girlfriend Yoona. Apparently, taking away her chocolate and gaming nights warranted sleeping on the couch.
Haewon had laid beside her in the dark, listening, the letter still folded in the pocket of the hoodie she hadn't bothered to take off, and thought about how she could listen to Lily talk about nothing for the rest of her life and never once get bored of the sound.
“Hey,” Lily said, quieter now, the momentum of the day finally slowing in her voice. “Can I say something kind of unhinged?”
“When has that ever stopped you?” Haewon muttered with a smile, and Lily had looked aghast.
“Rude,” Lily nudged her with an elbow, gentle, then went still, looking up at the ceiling instead of at Haewon, which was — Haewon noted, with the particular attentiveness she reserved only for Lily — not a normal Lily thing to do. Lily looked at people when she talked to them. Lily looked at people like they were the most interesting thing in any room, at least she had whenever she spoke to Haewon.
“I keep thinking,” Lily started, “about how easy tonight was. Like — I don't mean easy like boring, I mean — everyone else, dating, it's this whole performance, you know?” She mumbled, “You have to think about what to say and whether you're being too much and whether you're being enough, and with you I don't think about any of that, I just… am. I'm just here, being a disaster, eating your roommate's yogurt, and you don't need me to be anything else.” She exhaled.
“Yeah?” Haewon answered back, not trusting her voice any further, and Lily nodded.
“Yeah, it just… it got me thinking, you know?” She sighed, “Dating you would be so easy. Not because you're low-maintenance, god, you're the most high-maintenance person I know about certain things,” Haewon snorted at that, “but because loving you is easy. Liking you is easy. It's the easiest thing I do.”
The room went very quiet.
Haewon lay still, staring up at the same ceiling, her heart going off like something breaking loose from its moorings. She was aware, distantly, of the letter in her pocket, of four months of crossed-out drafts, of Jinsol's voice and Yoona's texts and twelve years of careful, deliberate silence, all of it rising up in her throat at once.
“Lily,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was, she thought, either the greatest or the most foolish thing about her. “Could you actually see yourself dating me?”
Lily didn't answer right away. She turned onto her side to look at Haewon properly, and in the dim light from the window Haewon could see her expression working through something complicated, something that wasn't a no, wasn't quite a yes either.
“Have you heard of alterous attraction?” Lily asked.
Haewon blinked. “That's not an answer.”
“It kind of is, hang on.” Lily propped her head on her hand, and even now, even in the middle of what felt to Haewon like the most important conversation of her life, there was something endearing about the way Lily's brain worked, always reaching for the exact right word even when a simpler one would do.
“It's this idea — I read about it for a character I'm writing, actually — it's for when you want closeness with someone,” she started, “Not something romantic or platonic, you know, but this sort of in-between. It’s not about dating this person or being friends, that doesn’t really matter, it’s more about wanting this deep emotional bond with them. People seem to define it differently, but it’s… it’s this idea that whether you date someone or not, you just want them in your life.”
A stone sat lodged in Haewon’s throat. “And that's…. what you feel about me?”
“I think so,” Lily's voice had gone smaller, more careful than Haewon had ever heard it, all her usual bright certainty dialled down to something quieter, as though she was searching again for what to say. “I've thought about it, you know. About us, more than I've told you. But I don't want to…” She stopped, started again. “I don't want to say something and have it wreck what we already have, because what we already have is the best thing in my life, Haewon,” she whispered, her voice breaking slightly, “and I would rather have you like this, forever, than risk turning you into something I lost because I got greedy.”
Haewon stared.
“You wouldn't lose me.”
Lily chuckled, “You don't know that.”
“I do, actually.” Haewon turned onto her side too, so they were facing each other properly, close enough that she could see the exact worried crease between Lily's eyebrows, close enough that this felt, finally, unbearably, like the moment. “Lily. What if I want you to ruin it?”
Lily froze.
“When we first met,” Haewon started, voice trembling slightly, “I didn’t know what to call it. You’d waltz into the room with your smile, and I felt like something inside of me had been turned on and I couldn’t turn it back off again,” she inhaled, as though the confession was spilling itself out, stealing every breath from her, “I… I had this thought, one day, after I’d broken up with Yoona. I felt horrible, but… but something always felt missing, and she said something to me. About how the reason I couldn’t love her was because she wasn’t…” She inhaled, voice cracking, “Because she wasn’t you.”
Lily’s lips parted, slightly, and Haewon pushed on, “The worst part was… I knew she was right, it’s why we broke up. A-And even despite all of that, when I felt like I had a hole in my heart and felt horrible for hurting someone so important to me, who was it that showed up and helped me? Who was it that made it all okay again?” She shuddered, eyes stinging, “It’s you, it’s always been you, unnie.”
Lily hadn’t said a word, and Haewon, scared of the silence, desperate to let it all out, kept going, “People say… the love of your life is the sun, someone bright and warm. But the sun is too far away, too bright to love forever… you’re like… the Earth to me, unnie. You’re so… lively, so colorful and amazing that I can’t help but be pulled into your orbit…” She whispered, “I love you, Lily. I always have.”
Beneath Lily’s stare, Haewon looked away, a sudden spike of dread prickling up her spin and darting along her throat. She’d done it, she’d unleashed everything she’d kept within herself, and now, it was going to undo everything she’d worked to maintain. They were stuck, in a bed too warm, and a room too dark to escape from, and Haewon had washed twelve years down the drain. She opens her mouth, ready to take it all back, and then, it happened.
Lily laughed.
It wasn’t a polite laugh she’d give when she didn’t fully understand someone’s joke, and it wasn’t one of her bright, booming laughs because Jinsol had said something utterly ridiculous. It was cracked, disbelieving, her eyes crinkled into crescents yet shimmering with something else.
“You've… You’ve been in love with me since we were twelve and you're telling me now,” she asks between laughs, “while I'm wearing your roommate's yogurt on my sleeve?”
Haewon feels the corner of her lip quirk, a grin threatening to overtake her expression, “In my defense, I didn't plan the yogurt.”
“Haewon-ah.” Lily's hand found hers under the blanket, fingers threading through carefully, like she was checking it was real. She rubbed her thumb over the back of the hand, sending shivers down Haewon’s skin. “I've been in love with you for a long time too…. I guess I also didn’t just didn't have a tidy word for it, so I kept calling it something else,” she sighed, “Because… Because there isn’t a word for us, Haewon. Best friend, soulmate, all of that… you mean so much more to me than just… a girl I like. You’re everything, you…” she laughs, “You go beyond all that. There isn’t one word for you, Oh Haewon.”
There’s something adoring in Lily’s eyes, and Haewon thinks she’s about to make an inhuman noise born from nothing else but the mushy love in her chest. Instead, she shifts closer, hand still interlocked with Lily’s.
“You don't have to pick just one word, unnie,” Haewon said, smiling. “Maybe we weren’t meant to be simplified like that, we can just be…. whatever this turns into.”
“Whatever it turns into,” Lily echoed, and there was something wondering in her voice, like she was trying the shape of a future on for size and finding, to her evident delight, that it fit.
They didn’t move, they couldn’t, simply too absorbed in the other’s eyes, hands still tangled beneath the blanket, Lily cold against Haewon’s skin as she always was. Haewon didn’t mind, she never did — she ran too hot anyway, needed someone out there to balance her out. Twelve years seemed to collapse down into that moment, and whilst neither would later be able to say who leaned in first, someone did. It’d become a small, sweet, comfortable argument they’d have for years after that moment.
Their lips met, and Haewon felt less like the moon, and more akin to a distant star that had detonated, exploding out into a colorful supernova. It wasn’t rushed or hurried, Lily’s arm gently looping around Haewon’s shoulder and neck, attempting to pull her in even closer, pressed flush up against her body. Haewon felt something warm slide down her cheek, and it was then she realised she’d been crying, because of course she had.
There was the faint taste of mango on Lily’s breath, and it only made Haewon feel that much warmer in her chest. Because Lily had never been some distant scent she’d wanted for herself, she was a familiarity that had stayed in Haewon’s life when nothing else ever had.
When they finally pulled apart, Lily was grinning, wide and unguarded, the particular smile Haewon had spent twelve years quietly cataloguing as her favorite. They stared at each other for a moment longer, but Haewon didn’t find herself rushing to fill the silence this time. Still, she spoke up eventually, sighing to herself.
“Jinsol is going to lose her mind,” Haewon said. “Jiwoo's going to cry actual tears. She has this whole gallery of pictures where it’s just us looking at each other. She kept trying to convince me to confess sooner.”
Lily hummed, “You should’ve listened.”
“Kyujin's going to make us go on a couples run,” Haewon groaned, and Lily giggled, “Yoona's going to say 'finally' and go back to her games without looking up. She probably made a bet with Jinsol about it.”
“That’s pretty accurate,” Lily laughed, and Haewon could only stare, smiling. Lily settled back down against her shoulder like she'd always belonged there, and to some extent, she always did.
The letter was still folded in Haewon's hoodie pocket, forgotten on the floor where the hoodie had ended up sometime in the last hour. Four months of careful, unsent sentences that had turned out, in the end, not to be necessary at all. She thought about it once, as Lily's breathing evened out against her collarbone, already half-asleep the way she always was, all that bright noise finally gone quiet and content.
She'd give it to her some other time, Haewon decided. There'd be time now. There'd be so much time.
For tonight, this was enough.