Meet Me in the Afterglow (Purinz/Chaewon x Yunjin)

You Mean Everything to Me (M)

NOW.

Yunjin wakes up slowly, the world coming back to her in bits and pieces.

A door slamming, followed by muffled voices. The warm heat of the early-morning Busan sun streaming through the window, muted orange behind her eyelids. The soft sheets of the hotel bed on her bare skin. The lingering scent of fruity perfume and coconut shampoo.

Oh.

Chaewon.

Somehow, she knows without even moving her head from where it's smushed into the pillow that she's alone in the hotel room, but she still has to take a moment to steel herself before opening her eyes. When she does, Chaewon is nowhere to be seen. The bathroom door is slightly ajar, the light still on inside, and all of Chaewon's clothes, both her dress from the previous night and her other belongings, are gone too.

Yunjin rolls over and lays there, starfished out on the bed in a kind of fugue state, staring at the ceiling for a few long moments and thinking about how fucking stupid she is. This wasn't just sex with an ex , a dumb drunk mistake that anybody could fall victim to, this was sex with the ex, the one whose appearance and subsequent absence had bisected Yunjin's life into two parts: before Chaewon and after Chaewon. She can't even try to rationalize it as some kind of no strings attached thing. There were always strings. There are always going to be strings with Chaewon, a tangled messy knot of strings that were never fully severed like Yunjin almost convinced herself they were.

Yunjin wonders if she's just done the one thing that will ensure her already fragile heart will never, ever recover.

Another door slams out in the hallway and jolts her out of the beginning stages of a panic attack, and, presumably out of some kind of last ditch attempt to protect her heart a little longer, her body goes into autopilot.

She collects her clothes and hastily redresses enough to make her way five doors down the hall to her own untouched and unused room. She wipes the smudged remains of her makeup off, brushes her teeth, and then takes a scalding hot shower where she just stares at the steam clouding up the glass wall of the shower and resolutely does not look down at the little pink bite marks she knows are peppered across her chest and stomach. She towel dries her hair and puts it in a loose braid to finish air drying, and then plucks out a white t-shirt and gray sweatpants from her overnight bag to wear for the train journey back to Seoul.

She goes to breakfast. Loads her plate with eggs and rice and kimchi and a truly enormous almond croissant, and then joins the table that Minjeong, Jimin, Wonyoung and Yujin are already sitting at. Shuffles over to make room when Sakura and Kazuha eventually resurface to join them. Chuckles along with the others when Sakura promptly starts lecturing Minjeong about ducking out early the previous night. Blames her subdued silence on a mild champagne hangover when Wonyoung asks if she's alright.

There's a very conspicuous lack of Chaewon at the breakfast table, even when Ningning and Aeri — two notoriously late risers — eventually join them, and Yunjin stuffs half the almond croissant in her mouth so she doesn't do something moronic like ask where Chaewon is like some kind of pining ex girlfriend.

Which— well. If the shoe fits.

"Where's Chaewon-unnie?" Aeri asks for her, squinting around at the table.

"She got the earlier train back with Rei and Liz," Kazuha says, and it's only because Yunjin is already looking at her that she sees the way Sakura briefly glances at her.

"Oh," Aeri says, seemingly placated. "Is she alright?"

"She just said it was some kind of last minute work emergency thing," Kazuha says, and Yunjin is probably just panicking and reading into the glance way too much, but it almost sounds like Kazuha isn't telling the full truth. The almond croissant churns unpleasantly in her stomach.