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Yoonji looks up when her sister raps her knuckles on the threshold of her bedroom. She tugs her headphones down off her head. “What? Are you going out?”
Suji tilts her head. “Is that your way of telling me I look nice?”
Yoonji rolls her eyes. “You look nice, unnie.”
“I am going out. And I know you heard the door buzzer.”
Yoonji shrugs. She looks down at her nails. “Thought it was your friend.”
Suji gives her a blank look.
Yoonji returns it. She won’t blush. She’d killed the thing inside of her that knew how to blush when she was thirteen and her parents had moved her and her sister up to Seoul. There had been a group of boys at her new school, who'd thought her Daegu satoori was funny.
Suji says, “I let her up.”
Yoonji says, “That’s fine.” She tilts her chin up.
When Yoonji had graduated college, her parents had moved back to Daegu. Yoonji had stayed.
Suji nods. “Well, call me, if you need to. We’re not going far, just to Apgujeong-dong.”
Yoonji swallows. “Why would I need to call you?”
Suji nods again. Then she swings her long hair over her shoulder and leaves.
Yoonji waits for the front door of their apartment to click closed before she pads out into the living room.
Jimin is there, on the couch, sitting with her head bent toward her knees. It makes her hair part and fall around her shoulders. She’s been wearing it long for a while now, even though she keeps saying she wants to cut it short. Maybe even buzz it all off.
Jimin is there, because Jimin is always there.
She looks up. “Hi unnie.”
Yoonji takes her in. She’s wearing a blue dress with tiny yellow flowers that doesn’t reach her knees and black, low-heeled boots. Yoonji wonders where her bag is.
Out loud, she says, “You hungry? Was just gonna make something, if you are.”
She pushes past the living room and into the kitchen, not waiting for Jimin’s answer.
There’s quiet for a minute and then Jimin says, “Unnie, I’m not hungry.”
Yoonji drops the pot she’d been excavating from their poorly organized cupboards onto the countertop. “Alright.”
“Unnie.”
Yoonji turns. Jimin is there, in the archway to the kitchen. There are, Yoonji can see, tear smudges under her eyes. Her bra strap is slipping down her shoulder, visible under the short cap sleeve of her dress. She must be freezing, walking around the streets of Seoul like that.
It’s late September and Jimin bitches when the air con hums through the night even in the longest, hottest days of July.
Well, used to bitch. Back when they were sleeping in each other’s beds, bitching about things like air con and whose turn it was to pick the restaurant for date night.
Now, Jimin sleeps in her boyfriend’s bed, and Yoonji sleeps alone, except on nights when she and Suji take the KTX down to Daegu and Holly takes up all the space in the center of the guest bed, leaving Yoonji with a triangle corner of the comforter, ass hanging off the edge of the mattress.
Which, actually, wasn't all that different from sharing a bed with Jimin, turned out.
“What?” Yoonji’s voice is flat.
Jimin’s eyes go wetter. “Unnie, please.”
“Don’t.”
Jimin bites her lip. “I’m not." She inhales, shuddering. "You know I’m not in love with him. Shit. Sometimes I can’t stand him.”
“Well,” Yoonji says. “Guess we do still have some things in common.”
Yoonji sits at her desk with her feet pulled up on the edge of her chair and listens to the sigh of the shower through the walls.
In the dark living room, Jimin had wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and said, “Can I at least just shower? I can’t – I can smell him on me, still.”
Yoonji held up her hand. “I can fucking promise you, Jiminah, that I don’t want to hear about how you smell like him.”
Jimin had slitted her eyes, and Yoonji had clenched her jaw, and then Jimin had said, “You know, unnie, you’re still my fucking friend, aren’t you? That’s what you had said, that’s what you’d prom –”
“You’re going to talk to me about promises? You’re going to sit here in my living room in your cute date night dress with your hair looking like that and ask me if you can scrub the stink of his cock off you in my fucking shower and talk to me about promises. Jiminah. You are one fine fucking thing.”
There was, Yoonji had always thought, a certain musicality to their fights.
Jimin had not even stopped for breath. “What the hell does that even matter right now when I’m fucking standing here asking for help? When you know I would do the same for you, no matter the circumstances? Fucking hell, unnie, there's blood on my thighs.”
Now, Yoonji looks at the chipped polish on her toes and tries not to think about how easy it would be to find his number, his address, show up at his house. She could make a stop at Jimin’s parents’ place while she’s at it, tell them about how Jimin used to laugh, real and loud and with all of her teeth showing, when Yoonji would kiss the inside of her elbow. How she doesn’t do that anymore – laugh that way.
How Yoonji wonders if they’ll notice on her wedding day, the way Jimin isn’t laughing. Not the real one, that goes all the way up to the curves of her eyes.
Yoonji could make a whole trip of it. Seoul to Busan, maybe stop to take out the fucker who had grabbed Jimin’s waist, once, when they were out in Jongno-gu. A stranger, and his palm on Jimin’s belly. Yoonji can’t forget, even now, the image of it: how Jimin had tipped her head, smiling back at him, flirting as she’d gently tugged his hand off. She’d done a twirl for him, even.
Yoonji knew about it, too, how smiling sometimes was the only way out. She’d killed that part of herself, though, along with the part that blushed. She'd watched it squirm under her knife and was viciously pleased. They could hurt her, she knew that, but she wouldn’t go down smiling.
When they’d turned out of the alley in Jongno-gu, Jimin had taken a stuttering, sharp inhale. “Shit, that scared the fuck outta me. Will you – can we just go home, unnie?”
Home, Yoonji had thought, and taken her back to her apartment. In bed that night, she’d lifted Jimin’s sleep shirt and brushed her mouth in slow, easy circles along Jimin’s belly. Erasing his touch.
Home.
Yoonji listens to the shower trickle off. She pulls her headphones up over her ears and clicks into Cubase.
It’s tipping past 2am when Yoonji knuckles the grit from her eyes and calls it a night.
When she turns around in her desk chair, Jimin is blinking awake sleepily.
Yoonji had thought, once, that she was done being angry with Jimin.
Six months after Jimin had said, “My parents – my parents want me to get married. Have babies. What do you want from me? Honestly, what did you expect?” Yoonji had been in a bar with Namjoo, watching a girl with platinum blonde hair flowing down her back order a round of shots for her table, and said, “You know what?”
“What’s that?” Namjoo was looking at her phone. She’d been talking to someone new lately that she’d met at a café. Yoonji always thought that if anyone deserved to meet the love of their life at a coffee shop where they stuck sun flowers in jam jars on the tables, it was Namjoo.
Yoonji had looked around the bar. Something synthy and electric was playing over the speakers. The girl with the platinum hair was laughing with all of her teeth showing. Yoonji had felt it then, and it had felt real. The forgiveness. “I’m being honest, I think I could even go to her wedding,” she’d said.
Namjoo had snorted, smiling. Her eyes had looked sad, though. Sad for Yoonji.
Yoonji nodded, tipping her beer bottle up to her mouth again. “Yeah, I’d bless her wedding, I really could.”
Now, she tugs her hair tie out of her hair and scrubs it back into a ponytail again. She looks at Jimin. Jimin, who is in her bed, hair still wet from where she showered the remnants of her boyfriend’s come off her, in Yoonji’s bathroom. “So.”
Jimin smiles. “You’re so pretty when you’re tired.”
“That is a fucked up compliment, Jiminah.”
Jimin shrugs. She’s wearing one of Yoonji’s t-shirts, the one with the hole under the arm. It had always been her favorite. Yoonji used to stick her fingers in the hole and stroke the side of her breast until Jimin would shiver and say, “Touch the whole thing, will you? Will you touch all of me, unnie?”
Now, Jimin says lightly, in her soft, pretty, tinkling voice, “It’s true. Don’t care if it’s fucked up or not.”
Yoonji snorts. She shakes her head. Bites the inside of her lip until the tang of it is in her mouth. Says, “How’s your cunt feel?”
Jimin blinks, slow and predatory. “Sore, unnie.” Her lashes are smoky shadows on the highest points of her cheekbones. She breathes out hard. “Unnie?”
“What.”
“Come and kiss it better.”
Forgiveness, Yoonji had thought. She had really thought that's what she'd felt that night, watching the girl with the bleached hair laugh so hard her eye teeth were visible under the curve of her lip.
Yoonji breathes out through her mouth and says, quietly, “I’m taking a fucking shower.”
In the shower, Yoonji scrubs shampoo through her hair and tries not to think. Tries hard not to think. Not to think about any of it, from start to finish. How Jimin had smelled like peaches and coffee the first night they’d met. How she used to pick her hair up and let it flow out of her fingers like water when she was thinking hard. How she would cradle Yoonji’s head in her lap and rub her thumbs over her temples until Yoonji was asleep, nose tucked to the crook of Jimin’s thigh.
She rinses her hair and tries not to think about the way Jimin had looked the first time Yoonji had pressed her fingers inside her, drawn this shuddering, white-knuckled orgasm out of her. How Jimin had pressed her lips together afterwards and said, “I didn’t know – it was supposed to be like that. Is it – is it always supposed to be like that?”
Yoonji had smirked, kissing the side of her throat, and said, “It is, when it’s with me, baby girl,” and Jimin had shrieked with laughter, promising never to stroke her ego that hard again.
How Yoonji had thought. She presses her lips together in the shower, feels the water bead up on her skin. How she had even thought that if she didn’t get the producing job, it would be okay. It would be okay, because she had Jimin. Everything else had been secondary, at that point.
In the end, Yoonji had gotten the job.
She had not gotten Jimin.
In the bedroom, Jimin says, “You don’t have to pretend you don’t sleep in the nude just on my account.”
Yoonji pulls the t-shirt over her head. “You're really that desperate to get fucked tonight, huh?”
Jimin licks her bottom lip. “Unnie.”
Yoonji shakes her head.
Jimin says, “I came to you.”
“I can fucking see that.”
“He touches me, and I come to you.”
“Don’t.”
The bed feels cold and hard when Yoonji sits down on it.
Jimin licks her lips. “Erase his touch for me, unnie. It’s all – it’s all I want.”
Yoonji turns her head. She should’ve dried her hair, but she couldn’t be fucked. The trickle of water is cold down the back of her neck. Jimin blinks back at her. Yoonji always thought that was her whole predatory cat thing, that Jiminie soft but vicious vibe, but now she’s not so sure. Not so sure who is predator and who is prey.
Jimin licks her bottom lip, tilting her head. Yoonji wonders, suddenly and horribly, if she’s afraid. Like that night in the alley.
Yoonji says, “Show me your pussy.”
Jimin’s mouth parts. Her mouth parts with a slow clicking sound, and it is like a gun going off.
Yoonji says, “Show me where he fucked you.”
The bed covers seem to crush, shatter lines crashing like a building falling in on itself, when Jimin pushes the blankets down to her knees. For all her talk about sleeping nude, she’s wearing a pair of Yoonji’s boxers underneath her giant t-shirt.
Her thighs are still a little tanned from the summer sun, Yoonji notices.
She slips the boxer elastic under her ass and pulls them over her thighs.
Yoonji realizes her mouth is dry. Dry enough to click when she swallows.
Another gun shot, echoing around the room.
Yoonji’s mouth is parted, though, hanging open like a dog, while Jimin spreads her thighs in a vee and says, “Here, unnie.”
Yoonji thinks, suddenly, that Jimin has it all wrong. Jimin crooks her finger, and Yoonji is the one who comes running.
Jimin’s knees are bent, thighs pushed wide. She must be waxing again.
Yoonji watches as Jimin slides her palm down the inside of her thigh. When she gets to the hinge of her hip, she pauses with her fingers near the curve of her outer lips and tugs gently until the spread of her pussy splits wider.
Her cunt is dark pink and red at the center.
Yoonji twists onto the mattress. She brushes her hair out of her eyes. “There?”
Jimin nods. She extends her index finger forward and nudges at her folds. They look silky. Yoonji once had described Jimin’s pussy that way – silky – and Jimin had laughed, but it was the kind of laughing that was for crying. Laughing, so you didn’t cry. Later, she’d said she’d never had anyone talk about her like that. Like her pussy was pretty, and precious, too.
Now, Jimin says, “He just stuck it in, unnie,” and there’s a pout to her voice. Putting a pout on, so unnie will make it better.
Yoonji shifts her knee forward on the mattress. “No wonder it hurt. Fucker.”
Jimin laughs shakily. “Please, unnie.”
“Baby girl.”
“Yes,” Jimin hisses, and Yoonji watches her fingers tighten, pulling herself wider. For Yoonji. Giving herself up to Yoonji’s looking.
She’s wet, Yoonji realizes. She’s pulling herself wide enough that Yoonji can see the inside edges of her hole, how the skin has darkened with her wetness. Wet, just from Yoonji looking at her. Breathing on her.
Yoonji inches forward, the sheets snagging under her knees and wrists. “You want me to tongue you?”
Jimin’s breathing speeds up. Yoonji can see it in her pussy – the pulse of her. The way her heart is beating.
Yoonji breathes in through her mouth. She can almost taste her, too. Tinned peaches, that’s what she used to say, back when she was saying things about how Jimin’s pussy tasted in her mouth.
“You gotta,” Yoonji shuts her eyes, exhaling hard. “Gotta say what you want.” For once in your fucking life, Yoonji thinks, say what you want.
“Unnie.”
“Say it.”
Jimin makes a raw noise. “I am saying it. What I want. Unnie. I want unnie.”
Yoonji nudges forward and presses her lips right to the center of Jimin, over the circumference of her hole. “Let unnie make it better,” she says.
Jimin seems to heave and then recede, like all the breath has been punched out of her. Like it is a punch to the solar plexus, Yoonji’s mouth on her. This sore, tender part of her.
Yoonji presses her tongue forward, slides it along the ribbons of Jimin’s pussy lips, feeling the way they part and glide under the tip of her nudging tongue.
Above her, Jimin is trembling.
She is, also, still holding herself open, both hands on the sides of her pussy, fingers tugging her lips wide, and Yoonji’s face fits perfectly between them. Fits perfectly between the palms of her hands, between the clutch of her thighs.
Yoonji flattens her tongue and laps at Jimin from her asshole to the top of her mound, leaving a glossy smear of saliva behind.
Jimin’s thighs squeeze and tremble. “Don’t close,” Yoonji tells her and Jimin makes a noise, hard and hot, and pushes her cunt against Yoonji’s mouth.
“Lick it,” she moans. “Unnie’s the only one who. Please, make me – make it wet. It’s yours, it’s your cunt.”
Yoonji bites the inside of her thigh. “Did you come tonight?”
“What?” Jimin sounds breathless. She is breathless. Chest heaving.
“Did you come.” There are rocks in Yoonji’s throat. Gasoline behind her eyes. She feels like a lit match put out on the pavement. She says, “On his cock.” She sticks her tongue inside of Jimin’s hole, as far as it will go, and mumbles, “When he had his cock here, Jiminah, did you come on it?”
Jimin is shaking her head, though, arching her back and trying to rub her cunt across Yoonji’s face. Yoonji holds her down by the hips, sets the edge of her teeth on the crease of smooth skin between her cunt and her thigh.
“Tell me.”
“With my fingers.”
Yoongi laps at her, a long sweep of her tongue horizontally across the shape of her hooded little clit. It bobs and clicks under Yoonji’s swipe, so Yoonji does it again, making Jimin cry out. “You got yourself off?”
“Yeah.”
“Good job, baby.”
Jimin laughs, breathless and sweet. “Please don’t stop.”
“Have I stopped?” Yoonji buries her face between Jimin’s thighs, kissing open mouthed and sloppy. “Have I stopped once? Fucking talking into your pussy, that’s how much I can’t stop tonguing you, baby girl. Can’t stop to fucking breathe, ‘cause I gotta lick you out.”
Jimin’s fingers slide into Yoonji’s hair. “Is this okay?”
No, Yoonji thinks. What about this is okay? Instead, she nudges lower and circles her tongue along the pinched shape of Jimin’s asshole. “You want unnie’s mouth on both holes?”
Jimin’s fingernails scrape along her scalp. “Whatever you like, unnie,” she says, like she’s being sweet, but she pushes her hips up higher and Yoonji takes the access, lets her tongue circle the tighter clench of her asshole and then push inside, the tip of it, until the rim relaxes around Yoonji’s tongue, letting her pulse forward, slipping inside of her.
Jimin’s moans have always been high pitched, when she is close to coming.
Yoonji eats her out slow, and then fast. There is slick down her chin, then down the length of her throat.
Afterwards, she kisses Jimin on the mouth. Thinks, Don’t forget about us. How we erased everything else. How we painted over all of it.
She doesn’t say that part out loud, though. Not anymore.
The last of the moonlight slices in through the shards of Yoonji’s shades. Neither of them have bothered to pull their shirts back on. Jimin’s fingers are tracing circles on Yoonji’s clavicle.
“In the morning,” she says.
Yoonji cuts her off. “Don’t. Don’t say that shit. You won’t be here in the morning. We both know it.” She pauses, pulling in a lick of breath through her lips. Jimin is quiet. Yoonji glances at her. “Shit. Really? That’s what makes you look ashamed tonight, of all things?”
Jimin’s eyes go wet. She says, “Of course it is, unnie. Don’t you get it?”
Yoonji looks at her. “I don’t get any of this. Not even one fucking bit of it.”
Jimin nods. Her voice is small. “Why do you. Why don’t you just kick me out. You could. I know you could. Why do you let me.”
Yoonji shrugs. She is looking up at the ceiling. She can hardly breathe. She says, “I make good music, when I’m heartbroken.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Jimin says, like she’s really annoyed, like she’s gearing up for it again, that back and forth kicking off, ‘cause it’s good when it’s like that at least, isn’t it? Gives them both something to do, when they’re tearing at each other’s throats and licking the blood clean afterwards. Something to do other than weep.
But then the air seems to deflate out of Jimin all over again. “You’re so…” she says.
Yoonji nods. “I know.”
“So, so fucking…Unnie. You’re so. You’re – you’re so.”
Outside, a siren is going. Wailing, really.
Yoonji says, “Alright. Alright, sweetheart,” and then, lower, longer, when Jimin’s shoulders start to shake. “It’s alright, sweetheart. Alright. It’s gonna be alright, sweetheart.”
Hushing her. The siren, and Yoonji’s soft noises.
Hushing.
The hushing of it erasing everything else, except the two of them, and the sounds of their close bodies moving together as the sun reaches its fingers forward and sweeps the moonlight out of the night’s soft crevices, inching toward morning.