Work Text:
☠️ignore☠️ Choi Yeonjun
Are you coming out tonight?
Come out
It’s gonna be chill, just a group thing
Chan and Chaewon will be there
I promise I won’t make it weird
Yunjin rolls her eyes at her phone and sets it face-down next to her on the floor. It’s already weird that he has to say he won’t be weird, obviously. He’s so weird.
Yunjin has other people she can hang out with on a Friday night—even if Chaewon would have been her first call for that—and her own stuff to do, anyway. She strums a ringing, melodramatic D minor on the guitar in her lap. Maybe she’ll write a song. The only reason she hasn’t blocked Choi Yeonjun’s stupid contact is the hope he’ll annoy her enough to write a hit song about it.
Habit picks her phone up again before she remembers she was done with it.
Kim Chaewon~~~🩷
Are you not coming out tonight?
I __only__ told Lee Chan I’d go to that club because he said you were coming
Come over here
I’m gonna write a song
I am _____not______ going to sit in the dark and listen to you whine about Choi Yeonjun
He's just a __________boy__________
Come out with us
Give him a chance to act normal
He can’t do it
Then flirt with somebody else
You know he will
Yunjin groans and puts her phone face-down again.
This is solvable. She could go out with someone else, or tell Chaewon to ditch the boys and go somewhere else with her, or just stay home like she'd already decided to. She could do a lot of things.
But whenever she hangs out with Chaewon, lately, it feels like she’s picked the wrong place—everywhere is too quiet or too loud, there’s too big a crowd or not enough to do. She’s felt out of place in groups ever since she got serious with Yeonjun, like his presence is awkwardly huge in her mind and she can’t focus on the things she actually wants to. And now that it’s clear things with Yeonjun were never actually serious, she just feels a step behind. She’s been missing something important while she was focusing on the wrong thing.
And anyway, nothing else she could do tonight carries the thrill of going out with Chaewon and the boys. If she’s going to be picking at the Yeonjun thing like a scab either way, it’s more fun when Chaewon is there to scale the whole problem smaller. It balloons up in Yunjin's own head, gets bigger than it is. He's just a boy, like Chaewon said. Isn't she, like, supposed to spend this part of her life being silly about boys? There’s a petty sort of power in replying to Chaewon, not Yeonjun, to say she’ll meet them at the club.
It's like being in a movie, every part of it, from turning her head upside down and spraying dry shampoo in the roots of her hair, to riding the train in her polyester-blend satin dress, to finding Chaewon and the boys in the line outside the club.
Chaewon screams right out loud, both adorable and terrifying, and pulls Yunjin into a hug. Chan is next to her, chest already all puffed up to preen for the other girls in line, but when Yunjin pulls him in, he hugs her back sweetly.
Yeonjun is standing behind them, lurking a little, like he could hide even though he's a head taller than either of them.
Yunjin reaches deep for her greatest generosity of spirit and says, “Hey.”
Yeonjun nods backwards, tilting his chin quickly up. “Hey.”
“Hmm,” Chan says. “Should we see if we can cut the line now that we have two girls?”
“Ew.” Chaewon shoves his shoulder. “You don't have anything. Anyway, look, it's moving quick.”
Chaewon loops her arm through Yunjin’s and guides her a step ahead of the boys—she controls the motion in the mysterious way of ouija board, invisible but inexorable. She smells like fruity soju, sharp and sweet.
“Did you pregame?” Yunjin asks.
“At the bar by Chan’s place.” Chaewon sucks her teeth. “Because you left me alone with those losers.”
Yunjin laughs because that’s her line. Did he talk about me? she wants to ask. What did he say? Yeonjun is just behind them, that’s the only reason she doesn’t say it. In private, Chaewon would repeat anyone’s secrets to her.
Yeonjun takes over when they get to the door and then a hostess, making a big show of being charming—and maybe it works. They end up at a banquette overlooking the still slow-moving dance floor, Yeonjun and Yunjin at either end and Chan and Chaewon in the middle. Chan puts his arm around Chaewon’s shoulders, and she reaches behind her to push it up on top of the seat. Chan settles in there, unfazed.
“Are we getting drinks?” Chaewon asks. “Or do you just want to sit here long enough that other girls see you have friends who are girls before you go dance?”
Chan beams—his plan, definitely, is the latter—but Yeonjun hops right up. “Sure, I’ll get drinks.”
As soon as he’s gone, Chan leans forward to catch Yunjin’s eye. “Yeonjun was talking about you at the bar.”
Chaewon pulls a shocked face, but probably only because she was planning to wait for both of the boys to leave before she brought it up. “Only a little.”
“All he would say is he’s a fool and he ruined it with you,” Chan reports.
They both level Yunjin with even, unblinking gazes. Short people are so untrustworthy. They could get up to anything down there and you’d never know.
“He’s a fool and he ruined it with me,” Yunjin says. “That’s about right.” That’s actually blissfully simple. If he’s ready to call himself the bad guy, maybe she can try that, too, and just let it go—even if in her heart she knows it’s more complicated than that.
“What does that mean?” Chaewon asks in a normal voice, and then, in a sudden, high-pitched whine, “Come onnn.”
Yunjin lifts her hands like she’s throwing it all away. It’s not too loud in the club to talk—they’re probably going to turn the volume up one more time when more of that line gets through the door and piles onto the dance floor—but she has to project this story she might rather whisper. It comes out huge, a tower of words she’s been building all week.
“He gave me this speech about how I’m wife material, he’s just not husband material yet. I think he expected me to argue with him or something. But I told him, fine, go do whatever you want. I’m not going to wait for you.”
“Good for you.” Chan slaps the table with his palm.
Chaewon doesn’t say anything, just smiles cutely to hold the space while she thinks about it. Somehow she does that, controlling conversations without ever saying too much. Her gaze cuts deep, a little hard to hold.
Yunjin turns to Chan instead. “You’re not a very loyal friend. Shouldn’t you be on his side?”
“I’m your friend, too,” Chan says. “And you both think he fucked this one, so.” He shrugs like the conclusion is obvious: Yeonjun loses, so Yunjin wins. Game over.
That’s what Yunjin said, isn’t it? So she nods. But she doesn’t feel like a winner. She feels like she’s standing idly on the empty court because she doesn’t know where to go next.
Yeonjun comes back with the drinks. He sets Yunjin’s glass down with an unnecessary delicacy, his hand too steady. Maybe he’s afraid that Yunjin will snap at him, or that he’ll look really stupid if he spills it on her.
She takes a sip, more soda than vodka.
“Are you still working on that song?” Yeonjun asks—politely, small talk.
“I’m having a hard time finding inspiration,” Yunjin says—also just small talk, and the truth, even if it feels unkind to look into his eyes and say it.
He smiles weakly. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
“That’s right!” Chaewon says, her voice rising on a vibrato trill. “Our Yunjin is a genius.”
“The choreographer from that company called me today about another project,” Chan says. “I can send him your demo anytime.”
Yunjin nods. She appreciates the offer, but they’ve talked about this—she needs a new song. Her portfolio is good, but she’s missing the one, the hook, the song she knows is just under her skin. The one that’s not going to be about Choi Yeonjun.
“What’s the new project?” Chaewon asks Chan.
Is Yunjin a bad friend if she doesn’t pay close attention to his answer? She has to concentrate to hear him over the music, and it’s awfully easy to just not do that. To, instead, sip her drink, to watch the dance floor fill and begin to move as one complicated, pulsing unit, to let the darkness and brightness inside the club fill her chest like her breath.
The beat and the volume kick up at once, and it grips Yunjin’s heart. She sits back, and catches sight of a group of girls at another table. There are a few on the end looking over, evaluating. This is why they always sit girl-girl, boy-boy, instead of in couples—so no one messes up Chan’s extremely cheesy, inexplicably effective game.
“Hey, Lee Chan,” she says. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
“Huh?” he asks.
She tilts her head subtly to the side. “Girls.”
Chan snaps his face into a perfect crescent smile as he turns around and makes eye contact. He shoves past Yeonjun in a hurry, almost knocking him out of the booth.
As Chan saunters off to make his move, Yeonjun hovers by the table, all slouching and weird, like he can’t figure out where to fit himself.
“Go and help him, before he makes a fool of himself!” Chaewon orders. She’s so good at stuff like that—aegyo-laced rages and charming commands, never showing her hand, always winning in the end.
Yeonjun jumps, and salutes quickly before he turns to follow Chan.
Chaewon rolls her eyes. “I don’t know what they do every day without us. Can you imagine him by himself in a grocery store?”
“Nope,” Yunjin says. “He really isn’t husband material, I guess.”
Chaewon slides across the banquette seat, close enough to wrap her arm around Yunjin’s waist and put her chin on Yunjin’s shoulder. “You think he wanted you to tell him he is, actually?”
“I think he wanted me to turn him into a boyfriend, somehow,” Yunjin says. “Make a plan, boss him into it, fix everything for both of us. Just make everything work, the way you always do.”
Chaewon sits up, eyes wide. “Me?”
“You are wife material,” Yunjin says. “For real.”
“So are you.” Chaewon cuddles back in, tucking her chin on Yunjin’s shoulder where it always fits so neatly. “Just because it wasn’t right with him doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”
“I guess.” Yunjin sits back a little with the sigh. The music changes to something deeper, thicker, the shape of it changing Yunjin’s pulse again. That song she can’t write is so close to her tonight, dissolving the boundaries between her body and every soundwave. Finally, a week later, she manages to articulate the thing that’s been nagging her since her talk with Yeonjun, finding it in her own head at the same moment she says it out loud. “What if I don’t want to be wife material?”
The music gets louder as a new beat drops. It comes in like a crash, the lights dropping and Chaewon pulling away as she sits up straighter, and for a moment, it feels like the whole world has shifted.
And then it’s just loud, staying loud as a screechy synth line starts whining over the heavy bass. Yunjin shrugs. “Like, can you imagine?” she yells. She puts her hand under her chin and bats her eyelashes, saying in English, “Mrs. Choi!”
“That’s not how it works,” Chaewon yells back. “You could be with someone and still be the same Huh Yunjin.”
Could she? Chaewon is right, of course, but there's something unlikely about it.
Chaewon moves closer so she can speak into Yunjin’s ear, murmuring warmly instead of having to shout. “He was just the wrong person. You thought you were together, but you were moving past each other. Maybe it wouldn’t be like that with someone else.”
The quietness of it is fierce, cutting against all the empty loudness. On the surface, that’s just a thing people say about breakups, but something in Chaewon’s arm around Yunjin’s waist is urgent, holding tight.
Yunjin swallows the strange feeling down and speaks softly into Chaewon’s ear, too. “Sorry. You ended up sitting in the dark listening to me talk about Yeonjun after all.”
“Is that what we’re talking about?” Chaewon takes a coy sip of her drink, big eyes communicating the drama behind her enigmatic line, but she slurps the last dregs out of the ice and then cracks into a laugh. A red strobe light finds her smile in the dark.
Yunjin finishes the last watery mouthful of her own drink. “We should go dance,” she yells. “That’s what we came here for, right?”
Chaewon shrugs. “I told you. I came to hang out with you. What do you want to do?”
The question hits Yunjin hard, maybe harder than Chaewon meant it to. What did she come out here to do? She feels all disoriented—like they’re at a party and she’s got a blindfold on, spinning circles in Chaewon’s hands. Chaewon is always in control, but it doesn’t usually feel like this. “Something new,” Yunjin says. “But I don’t know what that is, so let’s just dance.”
She’s already scooting out of the booth, and Chaewon follows without asking any more questions.
There’s no way to know whether Chaewon the dancer or Chaewon the dork will have come out on any given night. Tonight, she throws her arms up in the air and screams loud enough to startle the people around them, even over the music, and Yunjin is laughing before she decides to.
Even moving like a wild girl, guiding Yunjin to be stupid along with her, Chaewon gets a lot of attention from men. She’s better at brushing it off, at letting it glide off her, than Yunjin is. Yunjin always feels it—hands, bodies, gazes, the weight of all those conscious minds and judgemental thoughts surrounding her. To see Chaewon move through the crowd, you’d think she didn’t notice at all. But that can’t be right—she must be better at holding it all somewhere.
Yunjin winces at the heavy drop of an arm around her shoulders—but it’s just Chan, sweaty and smiling. Yeonjun is lurking behind him again, dragging his shirt up to wipe his forehead with the collar.
“Strike out?” Yunjin asks.
Chan shrugs, unbothered. He loses his game a lot, but he also wins a lot, because he puts himself out there a lot to play. Yunjin gets it in theory, but she couldn’t live like that.
Yeonjun isn't like that, either. She thought it meant something when he started flirting with her. Maybe she thought it meant he would do all the work, just as he turned it around and asked her to do all the work. She called him the fool, but those are both bad ideas.
All Yunjin can think of is ways she can’t imagine living her life. She looks away from Yeonjun and into the spinning lights and shadows on the ceiling. It’s too loud in here to think. She needs to figure out what she actually wants.
She wants to write that fucking song. She wants to want to write the song, to feel it under her skin like this DJ’s beat has crept in. But that’s skipping to the end, isn’t it? She’s already tried and failed to drag that inspiration from the same old wells, all dried up.
“We want to move!” Chaewon yells. “Next place!”
She puts herself close, waist in Yunjin's arm, and Yunjin nods smartly. It sounds like a good idea now that Chaewon says it.
“Where would you like to go?” Chan asks grandly, like he’s their guide or guru.
“Take us to the kind of place you usually go after we go home,” Chaewon says.
Chan’s face freezes, and he and Yeonjun share a quick, wary glance. Yunjin doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but whatever is behind that cautious look is definitely something she wants.
Chaewon opens her jaw like a snake and Yunjin, who knows her well enough to be used to this by now, ducks her head as far to the side as she can get without letting go of Chaewon’s waist, right before Chaewon screams.
Chan lifts his hands in defeat and grins in delight. “Whatever the lady desires, of course,” he says with that old-fashioned grandeur.
Chaewon sighs at his nonsense, moving her shoulders enough that they can all see it since they can’t hear it, but she takes Yunjin’s hand and follows his lead off the dance floor and out to the street.
The street is too full of people for Yeonjun to lurk in the back like a weirdo. He keeps Chaewon between them, but he walks along casually at her other side and hits Yunjin with a smile over her head.
He’s sweaty from dancing, his hair a little stringy across his forehead. He looks as good as he ever does, which is awfully good. And still…
“Friends?” she mouths.
Yeonjun grins, and all Yunjin feels is relief. He does something jaunty and obnoxious with his chin, and she rolls her eyes. These boys can be so cocky. They basically annoy her all the time. She’s glad she decided to come out with them.
Chan strides around a corner to a narrower side street and a staircase that leads down to a half-basement. Yunjin understands what’s about to happen a moment before it does—they walk into a dim, low-ceilinged room, the music as loud as the bigger club but muddier because of the close space. Almost everyone in the room she would read as men, but she can tell instantly she shouldn’t be assuming genders. Most are dressed very differently than the guys in the other club—there’s a skinny boy on the dance floor in a green Uniqlo crop top Yunjin also owns.
Instantly, Chan finds someone to shoot a crescent-shaped smile at, and he gives Chaewon a quick salute before he dissolves into the crowd.
“I’ll go get drinks,” Yeonjun says. “They won’t be as watered down here, be careful.”
Chaewon props a hand under her chin and rides the line between mean and sweet precisely as she says, “Thank you for taking care of us so well, oppa.”
Yeonjun shakes his head, but he still looks pleased with himself as he pushes back to a bar. Hand still in Yunjin’s, Chaewon just pulls them a little closer to the wall, away from the door.
Chan is already dancing in a circle of men, rolling his body like he’s the one to be looked at, not the one to do the looking. Yunjin stares. “This is what they do after we go home?” she asks. “Every time?”
Chaewon shrugs. “Often enough that Lee Chan brags about it at brunch. He brags about everything, though.”
“Are they both bisexual?” Yunjin turns to Chaewon and tries to wipe the stupidly astounded look off her face. “Is everyone bisexual?”
“Everyone?” Chaewon repeats, again turning the conversation around instead of saying anything. “I think that depends on you.”
Well—Yunjin has always taken the stance that gender doesn’t matter, in a sort of political, social-moral sense. But she’s never kissed a girl. Assuming one dismal, badly aimed fumble at a high school dance doesn’t count, the only person she’s ever kissed is Yeonjun. That seems too depressing to admit, though, and before she can think of another answer, Yeonjun has appeared with four acidly pink drinks balanced in his hands.
The first sip scalds all the way down Yunjin’s chest. “Oh my god.”
“Nice,” Chaewon says.
Yeonjun smirks at her. “Are you two all right? I’ll go give this to Chan.”
Chaewon nods. Yeonjun disappears somewhere in the crowd on the dance floor—Chan’s circle has spun out of sight.
“Do you want to finish these and then dance?” Yunjin asks.
“Let’s just go for it,” Chaewon says. “You know I hate to admit when he’s right, but we shouldn’t drink these too fast.”
Yunjin still drinks hers too fast, making one dark corner of the dance floor into her own small world with Chaewon. They still move with the club, opening their unit of two into larger circles that shift and dissolve, but it feels smoother now. She’s less aware of every set of eyes around her—she just keeps finding Chaewon’s, big like lanterns in the dark.
Chaewon sets their empty glasses on a shelf to the side, and when the rotations of the dance floor spill Yeonjun in front of them again, Yunjin brushes off his offer to get them more. She feels perfect like this—a little hotter than ought to be comfortable, just pink enough to glow in the dark.
Yeonjun moves away to keep dancing—with a stranger, not Chan, because he’s a little farther, sandwiched in between two men. His hips are controlling their movements like they’re leashed dogs. The whole room feels impossible, but also obvious. Like if it had ever occurred to her to think about it, of course she’d have known he could do that.
Her hair is getting sweaty as she moves. Chaewon’s is still perfect, of course—she gets all her trims on time, always blows her hair out with the right products. Yunjin’s is just flopping around. She piles it on top of her head and tries to get the scrunchie on her wrist around it, but it feels complicated, trying to get all the pieces together and keep moving her hips. The music is too muddy to pick out melodies—it’s all one driving beat.
Chaewon steps closer and takes over, drawing her palms up Yunjin’s head to gather her hair, tucking each piece into Yunjin’s own still, obedient hands. She pulls the scrunchie down Yunjin’s fingers, a slide of silk that feels loud even though it’s the most silent thing in a booming room. Chaewon twists Yunjin’s bun deftly into place and beams.
Yunjin smiles back and keeps Chaewon close. The curve of her waist to her hip fits perfectly under Yunjin’s forearm. The logic of it—Chaewon’s softness, her fluid movement, the sweet and sharp scent of her—makes so much more sense to Yunjin from this angle than it ever has.
Chaewon puts her arms around Yunjin’s neck and moves her hips slowly, like the thick beat takes effort to roll through.
There’s a shift to the music—slower, lower, heavier—that matches the way the volume rose to signal a change of pace in the other club. Yunjin can guess what this one means.
If this were anyone else, Yunjin would know exactly what they were asking for. But this doesn’t feel sure—less because she has a girl in her arms than because that girl is Chaewon.
They’re friends. If Chaewon wanted something different, wouldn’t she have said something before? Unless she’s been looking for a crack in the heavy wall of Yunjin’s recent dramas. Tonight might be the first night in a while Yunjin’s been looking for something new—certainly the first time she’s said it.
Maybe they’re just dancing.
Yunjin slips her hand inside Chaewon’s and spins her out, gallant like a gentleman, and back again, clutching a tight arm around her waist. Chaewon’s hands land on Yunjin’s back, and she runs one down, deliberate and tactile, like she’s testing the softness of the satin dress or Yunjin’s waist.
“Are we just dancing?” Yunjin asks, close to Chaewon’s ear so she doesn’t have to shout.
“If you want,” Chaewon says, her expression still so smooth.
“What do you want?” Yunjin asks.
Chaewon finally wobbles, a smile breaking slow and sheepish. “I feel like I’m being so obvious.”
“You’re really not,” Yunjin says.
Chaewon shrugs. She says something, too quiet to hear. Yunjin moves closer, ear by Chaewon's lips. “You were, like, busy,” Chaewon says. “You weren't paying attention.”
“I'm paying attention now.” Yunjin turns her face closer to Chaewon can hear her. She feels very close.
Chaewon’s hand cups the back of Yunjin’s head and she starts to pull them even closer. The angle, leaning in to hover over Chaewon, sends a tender thrill sparking up Yunjin’s spine even before Chaewon’s lips press and part against her own.
Yunjin knows what this means.
When Chaewon lets go, Yunjin lifts her head and nods a little.
Chaewon’s smile returns to its perfect smoothness, inscrutable for someone who doesn’t know where to look. But she’s obviously thrilling inside—Yunjin can’t see in the dark, but she knows for sure Chaewon is blushing pink.
“Do you want to dance some more?” Chaewon asks.
“Yeah.” The beat is there under Yunjin’s skin, vibrating from the floor underneath her feet all the way to her chest. She lets it fill her there, whatever flow the music will take, as she turns Chaewon into another dizzy spin.