all my nights taste like gold / purinz

12

NOW.

The first thing Chaewon becomes aware of is how warm she is.

The second is that there's a car alarm going off somewhere outside that must have been what woke her up — she's always been cursed to be a light sleeper.

The third is that it's still dark, which means it's still early even for her, which means she can sleep for a little longer.

Chaewon snuggles further under the blanket, pushing her face into the soft pillow that smells like cherry blossoms and tries to let the sound of the rain pattering softly against the window lull her back to sleep.

And then someone — no, not someone; Yunjin — shifts behind her, and the warm, content feeling evaporates instantly, replaced instead with the sensation of being drenched with a bucket of ice cold water, chilling her to the bone.

She's in Yunjin's bed. Everything smells like cherry blossoms because she's in Yunjin's bed and because Yunjin washes her sheets with the same laundry detergent her mom uses because it made her feel less homesick when she first moved to Seoul. She's warmer than usual because she's in Yunjin's bed, under Yunjin's stupid thick blanket because she gets cold easily, and Yunjin's body heat has spread to Chaewon's side of the bed. She's in Yunjin's bed because Yunjin kissed her in the living room and then carried her through to her bedroom when Chaewon asked her to and she's in Yunjin's bed because Chaewon is the idiot who slept with her best friend.

The same panic that gripped her the morning after they first kissed takes hold of her again, only this time it's a thousand times worse, because this wasn't just a dumb kiss that, if necessary, they could've blamed on alcohol. This was a little more than that. This was Yunjin taking her to bed and begging Chaewon to touch her. This was Yunjin pressing her against the sheets and Chaewon telling her to do whatever she wanted. This was them kissing for ages and then falling asleep tangled up in each other.

At some point Chaewon must have rolled over, and now Yunjin is behind her, loosely spooning her. One of her arms is draped over Chaewon's waist, and her knees are touching the back of Chaewon's thighs.

Chaewon can't be here. She can't— she needs to leave. Last night she welcomed the heat of Yunjin's body against her own, but now it's too much. It burns, and not in a good way.

She slips out of bed and quickly starts gathering her clothes, hunting around in the dim early morning light. Yunjin mumbles something in her sleep, and Chaewon freezes midway through pulling her jeans on, holding her breath like the sound of her mild hyperventilating will be enough to wake Yunjin up.

All she does is roll over onto her back, the blanket slipping down as she moves.

Chaewon at least had the presence of mind not to leave any marks on Yunjin's neck, no matter how badly she wanted to, but she can't say the same for the rest of Yunjin's body. Her collarbones, her chest, the top of her stomach are all dotted with little red and pink crescent-shaped bruises.

Most of them are faint, and will probably have faded by tomorrow, but there's a few that will last a bit longer, and one at the very base of her throat that's darker than the rest. Chaewon wants to smack herself. Sooyoung has like, a radar for when people have been stupid and horny. If she catches sight of any of those very incriminating red splotches on Yunjin's skin, she's going to launch a full scale investigation, and Yunjin is not a spectacularly good liar.

Still asleep, one of Yunjin's hands reaches out, landing on the still-warm spot where Chaewon was a minute ago. Chaewon's heart constricts painfully. She needs to leave.

Chaewon scrambles into the rest of her clothes, finds her shoes in the hallway and her jacket draped over a chair in the living room. Jiwoo and Sooyoung are nowhere to be seen, so Chaewon escapes out of the apartment unnoticed, and quickly starts walking.