SUGAR KISS [YEONBIN] ✓

five

I have elected to eat in my room, because it’s pizza, and that’s a total eat-it-in-your-dorm kind of thing.

We both change into pajamas, and Taehyun says, “Cool if a couple of boys come over? Not to like stay up and throw a rager or whatever, just yeah. Hanging out.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Is everyone here came from your place?”

He laughs. “No. Only one I know from before is Beomgyy.”

“So you’ve made friends here already? Good lord, what is your life?”

He laughs again and shrugs, this dainty little maneuver on him somehow, and I settle onto my bed.

I will remain in my natural habitat: this bed surrounded by shitty dorm room pillows, as the lord intended.

“What do you want to do?” asks Taehyun, and I furrow my brow, then glance over at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Like with food. You graduate, what do you do?”

I sigh, and it comes out embarrassingly dreamy. “It’s not realistic,” I say. Like I need the qualifier. But it’s . . . I mean, it’s not. You have to be Someone Big to do what I want to do and I am Someone Perfectly Medium. “I want to go somewhere really cool. Paris or Rome or Tokyo, somewhere with amazing food. Learn a few things, a couple specialty courses? Then come back here.”

Taehyun whistles. “See the world and own your own place. You are in for some sleepless nights, my friend.”

I shrug. I don’t tell him that the last vacation I was on was to a lake forty minutes away and we slept in a little tent, and that apart from this one time I visited my grandparents. I don’t remember ever leaving my grandparents. Because my childhood was good—it’s been good and it still is—but we barely have money for rent, and sometimes we don’t even have that. I can never remember having money for an actual vacation. I don’t say I want to see the world because I haven’t even seen my own country and, by now, my own country has kind of lost its mystique. I don’t say that I know that’s out of the realm of reasonable. I just smile and say, “I don’t mind giving up sleep. What about you?”

“I want to work at a top bakery. Maybe go see the world, maybe stay, I don’t know. But I’m a science kind of girl; I love the precision of baking. This much flour and this much baking soda creates this reaction and at this altitude the air reacts with the dough just this way.”

“Sounds like you want to be a chemist.”

He says, “Same thing.”

I smile. I love cooking because of the messiness. Grease is going to pop and burn you and sometimes stuff will turn out and sometimes it won’t. And you just throw it all in the skillet and kind of see what comes together. I love the uncertainty of it all. You have to master it for food to turn out for you.

“My grandpa cooked,” I say. “Both of my parents are kind of terrible at it, and when Grandpa died, Mom had a really hard time with it. So I kind of just slid into that opportunity to start making dinner for everyone because I’d done it with Grandpa since I was super little. And seriously, to call what either of my parents ever made from scratch ‘edible’ would be, like, high praise.” He giggles. “So I’d been in love with the whole experience since I was five and got my first wrist burn from a sizzling pan, and when I had the excuse to take care of everyone, this is what I picked. It’s like . . . part of me, or something? Which sounds so cheesy. I just heard it.”

“Not cheesy. Baking is kind of an anti-anxiety thing for me, I think. Always calmed me down when I was freaking out over a test or one of my friends being a bitch. Not if I combined the ingredients just so. It’s been me and my Easy-Bake Oven since I could walk.”

“Easy-Bake Oven, oh man,” I say.

“The most mythical lightbulb ever created to cook food.”

I’m grinning just thinking about it. I swear, sometimes my thoughts surrounding food and the utensils with which one makes it are more romantic than anything else. And here it’s like, so are everyone else’s. They all love this so much, want it bad enough to give up a whole summer here. And I guarantee, no one here views it as giving anything up. I bet they all write sonnets to butter and caramelized onions in their sleep. They all get heart eyes for macarons and flutters in their stomachs for a perfectly braised lamb shank. These are my people.

My people, who I will have to try to brutally destroy in every round of competition from here on out.

Someone knocks on our door and Taehyun says, “Come in!” And I shit you not, three different boys walk in and Taehyun hugs all of them like he knows them. Three boys. In like twenty-four hours. How is that even possible?

They say hi to me, but I refuse to move from my blanket cocoon, so pretty quickly, all three of them head over to Taehyun’s bed.

Jungwon snuck in a little alcohol somehow, and normally I would be interested but tonight I’m exhausted. Partially because it’s just been . . . a lot. And thinking about Grandpa’s cooking, and then Mom and Dad back home, well. It has me suddenly missing everyone, bad enough it almost hurts. Like I’m some little kid who can’t handle a sleepover.

I shoot both my parents a quick, nonchalant, Miss you love you text, and Mom hits me back with three lines of emojis, which both eases the kiddish pang in my chest and sharpens it.

The other complication, the other thing making me want to shut out all these nice boys invading my room, is that even though I shouldn’t, I feel bad about Yeonjun. And I can’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he just sighed and walked past me in the quad.

So they laugh and drink and whatever, and it’s fine. But I pass out to a lovely chorus of guilt in my head. Yeonjun scowls me into sleep.