Chapter Text
User No2dix (registered 5 years ago) logs onto the forum Sapphic-Circles. Comments on thread: ON THE CUSP.
No2dix: the comphet is winning, guys. pray 4 me
carolsbitch: nuuuuuu
Holyflannel: Fuck, we can’t lose another one! What happened, n2d? :/
No2dix: I have a beard I bring everywhere to ward off suspicion from my immediate circle and ofc unwanted advances from men in general
catradoraapologist: Does beard know he’s a fake bf? You know I have to ask!
No2dix: kind of? not exactly… I dunno
Girlkisser891: so… how have you been saying no to the dick? I NEED ADVICE!
No2dix: he says he can wait. on the odd occasion my need for affection is so intense, I can somewhat tolerate his touch… so we hold hands. I allow cheek kisses sometimes. we dont do more than that tho. hes a good friend, and listens, and does a lot of things for me >:D Ive really tried to like him that way. :( it just isnt happening for me >_>
catradoraapologist: Ohhhh so he’s a simp you’re just dragging along for the ride and exploiting. Nice nice. but yeah, you won’t truly know until you’ve tried being with a girl. You know, you could be ace.
No2dix: ace?
onlyslightlycodependent: Asexual
No2dix: ….I’m definitely not that
Holyflannel: You need allies irl, darl.
No2dix: I know. one day soon
*
The first thing Sana remembers about her new dormmate is that she smells her before she sees her.
It’s 4:00pm on a cool autumn afternoon, and Sana’s spent the past half hour in full scramble mode, darting around her dormroom trying to track down her notes, wrangling her belongings as she gets ready to leave for a late-day lecture. It’s a delicate balancing act in the end, as always: steaming coffee cup gripped in one hand, books and papers crammed under her other arm, her little backpack dangling precariously over a shoulder, half-eaten granola bar gripped between incisors, mind flitting anxiously to the clock every ten seconds.
Fourth and final year. She really should manage her time better. How is she still pulling the same last-minute, cartoonish undergrad mayhem she swore she’d outgrow by this time, this year?
She’s already running late. But for good reason, okay? She’d wanted to wait for her new dormmate to arrive as scheduled, greet her properly, do the whole ‘welcome, hope you’re not crazy’ routine before sprinting off to Professor Jung’s personal hell disguised as a lecture.
But the new dormmate is late, and all Sana hears is the clock in her mind ticking away the seconds, and she still has to bolt across campus.
She’s unplugging her aromatherapy diffuser that’s running on fumes (floral and minty, a mixed scent she carefully concocted to say ‘friendly but grounded, cool but nurturing’) when it hits her.
She slips into the room, slips into Sana’s life, without ceremony or fanfare, without so much as a knock.
It must be said, before all else, that Sana has always led with her nose.
Before memory, before reason, before words—there was scent. Most of Sana’s life is indexed not in dates or photos, but in smells. Her childhood exists as a catalogue of varying smells and fragrances: her mother’s rose petal hand cream, the eucalyptus oil dabbed onto tissues during flu season, the tang of sea salt and melting sunscreen on summer vacations, the waxy vanilla of birthday candles just blown out. She’s the first to detect a gas leak, the one who Mother trusted to throw out overripe pieces of fruit and expired food in the fridge. It’s the sense she trusts the most.
Unsurprisingly, she remembers people this way too. By the swirl of their shampoo, the detergent lingering on their sleeves, the faint bite of their perfume—or body odour. Not smelling good ranks high on her list of cardinal sins; her hypersensitive nose makes the rules, Sana’s just along for the ride.
So when her new dormmate enters her life, Sana’s attention is instantly hijacked. Before she can even register a face, a body, a voice, there’s just a striking scent that immediately fills the air and lodges in her lungs: cedarwood and white musk and traces of old journals and worn leather. Earthy, grounding. It’s a smell that’s lived-in and real. Not loud, but clean and intimate; verdant and woodsy yet subtly sensual.
She smells like a sunlit forest.
It’s a lot, and Sana’s more than a little dizzy, because it smells like someone, not something; less like the chemical zing of a mass-produced perfume and more like a tingling memory she hasn’t quite made yet. Like a secret only her nose knows. Like closeness, like the liminal space between people who are about to kiss.
And why—why is this girl already making her think about people kissing?
Well… she is a girl after all, and they tend to have that effect on Sana. But not all girls, most certainly not the revolving door of dormmates she’s had the past three years.
The last one, Miyeon, God bless her, was such a fun roomie to have—super hyper and bubbly and sweet, but she was much too similar to Sana that it left no room for that kind of softness between them. And then last month, she’d abruptly dropped out. Just like that. Said her side gigs—photography, styling, a YouTube channel that went viral without warning—were taking off, and she’d regret it if she didn’t step off the academic hamster wheel and at least try to pursue all that to the very bitter end.
All of which is beside the point. Because Sana doesn’t even know this new girl, not a thing about her. She’s got nothing but a scent.
Snapping out of her brief trance, Sana promptly spits out the granola bar so that she can talk. “Hi!” she chirps brightly, voice lifting easily into friendliness despite her rushed state. “Sorry I can’t stay and chat, I have a lecture in… well, now. But I’m Sana! Your new roomie.”
“Jihyo,” the girl responds. She glances up at Sana directly for a blink-long moment, only long enough for their eyes to meet. Just a flicker, no more than a heartbeat of contact, then she nods curtly with polite detachment before her head dips. Like she’s already figured Sana out in the span of two seconds and decided she’s unimportant. “Hi.” She moves along, ducking past Sana to dump her duffel on the unclaimed bed. She doesn’t look back, already sifting through her bag, a dark spill of hair covering most of her side profile. No big introduction, no fuss. With her other hand she fishes her phone out of her pocket and then is already glued to the screen.
Sana stands there for a second too long, blinking. A strange jolt of disappointment hits her, and her eyebrows knit together in confusion. But there’s no time to dwell. She needs to leave. Now. She’ll come back later to settle things with Jihyo.
Still, in that brief glance, Sana couldn’t help but notice—she’s pretty. Not just in a casual, passing way, but in that quietly arresting way that sneaks up on you like a sucker punch to the face and makes you forget your own name for a moment. Big, honey eyes, cherry lips, clear sun-kissed skin, that kind of natural beauty that doesn’t try for attention but has it anyway. She’s dressed sleek-comfort—black turtleneck tucked into relaxed-fit trousers and plain white sneakers. Slightly tomboyish and carefree, a style Sana’s never personally dabbled in, but all pulled together in a way that somehow doesn’t undercut how gorgeous she is.
Sana almost says something else. Your scent precedes you, she wants to say, wants to cheekily substitute ‘reputation’ with something infinitely more valuable. You smell good. Understatement of the millennium. You smell criminally good. Not enough. You smell so fucking good I’m nothing but a gay-ass-disaster-in-denial five seconds away from throwing my entire academic career and dignity out the window just to bury my face into the crook of your neck, and figure you out note by note. Accurate, but also highly inappropriate to say to someone she’s just met. There’s no time, she’s late, she’s flustered to all hell. So she swallows the thought, hoists her backpack higher on her shoulder and rushes out the door.
If Sana doesn’t leave now, she risks missing a solid chunk of the lecture. Catching up with Professor Jung’s classes is an absolute bitch, what with how he delivers, spits, his knowledge, paired with the almost-impossible-to-decipher slides cluttered with torturously detailed notes that do nothing to mediate the chaos. If Sana had known how much theory fashion involved, she might’ve snuffed out the Devil Wears Prada fangirl in her years ago and gone for something simpler, something more practical, like nursing or teaching. But alas. She had to be seduced by chiffon. Alas indeed.
She’s already mourning the dignity she’s about to forfeit when she bursts into the lecture hall mid-slide change, the thunderous creak of the door announcing her like some chronically-late tragic side character who just can’t get her shit together, drawing every pair of eyes toward her in sychronised disdain. Still, missing the lecture entirely isn’t an option. Not if she wants to survive next week’s quiz. Not if she wants to prove to herself and everybody around her that she can do this. Not if she wants to be more than just someone who likes clothes and has a good eye for colour palettes.
And so, she runs. Late, frazzled, caffeine-deprived, dream-fueled and wildly overdressed for the occasion; her stylish heeled boots clack obnoxiously across whatever unfortunate surface she happens to be pockmarking, because some things in life are simply non-negotiable.
Looking impeccably put-together while being a hot mess at life is one of those things.
Being a mess is fine. But being a mess without style? There are lines she refuses to cross.
Outside, the campus is golden, the kind of golden that only exists for a week in autumn, where the light hits just right and everything feels cinematic.
Sana doesn't have time to enjoy it.
*
Sana’s trusty beard, Jinyoung, walks beside her as they head back toward her dorm, unhurried footsteps carrying them along in the late evening’s ebbing, amber light. His shoulder bumps hers now and then, like it always does.
They’ve been doing this little charade for a year now. He’s kind, charming, harmless. Believable enough to keep nosy people at bay. Not close enough to suspect a thing.
“Hey, so… Friday night. Dinner? That new Viet place just opened. Thought we could check it out.”
“Hmm. I don’t know. I’ve got so much to catch up on. I haven’t even looked at last week’s readings. I’ve shown you Professor Jung’s notes before, right? Man wrote those in another dimension. He gives me academic panic like nobody else.”
Jinyoung exhales, a mix of amusement and exasperation colouring his expression. “You’re always studying when I ask you out.”
She chuckles. “That’s because I’m always behind.”
“I’m starting to take it personally.”
“Don’t. I just…” Sana shrugs, still smiling, but not meeting his eyes fully. “I take things slow.”
“C’mon, Sana. You’ve been taking things slow for almost a year.”
A familiar weight settles in her chest.
‘Dating’ Jinyoung is starting to get… complicated. It all started with asking him to pretend to be her boyfriend. Well, kind of. Not in those exact words. She told him she needed someone to help ‘take the pressure off’, that it would be nice to have a buffer from her family’s constant prodding and questioning, from the exhausting unsolicited male attention at school. And Jinyoung, ever the gentleman, accepted the offer, thinking he was stepping into the role of protector. That, in time, things might become real. To him, it was the prelude to a slow-burn romance of sweeping proportions, and Sana was just an honest tradwife-in-the-making (ha), the kind of girl who believed in long, deep conversations, family approval, and holding hands only after the sixth date.
And Sana let him think that. Because the reality of it is so much messier.
But she’s never promised him anything beyond what they are. She’s never kissed him. Never held his hand unless it was in front of others. It’s not malicious. It’s self-preservation, dressed up in feigned forgetfulness and polite let-downs. But she’s also never stopped him from hoping, making promises with her eyes that her mouth never dares speak, so it is misleading, undeniably, and there’s a searing blade of guilt that digs a little deeper each time she raises her shield to delay, deflect, deny.
“Come stress-eat pho with me.” Jinyoung offers her a crooked smile, the kind that’s both boyish and sincere.
Sana winces internally at the soft turn in his voice, the sincerity that makes her feel like an emotional brute. “Rain check?”
He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “Do you realise how many IOUs I’m currently swimming in? I could cash in on like, thirty of them by now. I could probably trade them in for a real girlfriend at this rate.”
“Aren’t you rich,” Sana shoots back, arching a brow. “But it must be reiterated: I’m luxury-tier. A hundred IOUs and I become… mildly interested in sharing a dessert.”
He laughs, but it comes out a little hollow, and she hates herself just a little more for noticing.
“Two hundred, and you’ll put out?”
Sana stiffens. Something lurches in her gut, the dry burn of dread.
“Kidding! I’m kidding. It’s fine. One more IOU for the vault, then,” he says, hands stuffed deep into his coat pockets as they arrive at her building. “I’m saving up for you. There’s no other girl on the periphery. Just… keep that in mind, yeah? Good luck with the studying, and don’t let me catch you liking random Insta posts.” He laughs like it’s a joke. Sana’s stomach clenches anyway.
She forces a smile, blinks away, pretends he didn’t just drop something heavy and unfinished between them. She tightens the coat around her.
She’s done worse. Said worse. Left him hanging in all the same ways.
And she knows this can’t last forever. She just doesn’t know when she can reveal that to him directly—that whatever this is, it isn’t a slow burn. It’s a dead-end street with vapid, artificial scenery and a road leading to nowhere.
“I bet you were more fun as a fifteen-year-old,” Jinyoung says with an exaggerated pout. “Momo told me as much. Said you two were wild in highschool.”
“I’d rather you not think of fifteen-year-old me,” Sana mutters, eyes flicking toward the ground. “Sure, she was wild. A wild mess.”
What she doesn’t say: I was terrified. I was wired on fear and confusion and shame for so long. Still am.
Because at the same time that teenage Sana was desperately trying to figure things out, the trend for her mother was a downward plunge from dogged concern to barely contained dread. By the time she was fifteen, her mother had already lassoed a tight leash around Sana’s neck, peppering her daily life with the same stale, predictable rapid-fire of questions: who are you talking to, where are you going, when will you be home? Is it a boy? Is it? You stay away from boys until after highschool, alright, dear? You know they’re only after one thing at this age, don’t you?
Don’t you?
Thinly veiled control, masqueraded as well-meaning albeit ritualistic motherly concern, each question a sharp rope tug pulling her closer.
“No boys, mum,” Sana had insisted (for the three-hundred-and-eightieth time), voice coated in syrupy exasperation.
Wasn’t that a stone-cold fact. The irony? It was the truest thing she could possibly say. No boys indeed. No sweaty-palmed, hormone-addled teenage boy stammering compliments and fumbling stupidly in the dark to (unsuccessfully) unclasp a bra, as Momo would put it. The only penis-wielding humans her mother would conceivably find in Sana’s life existed as either a) her father or b) scuffed-up stickers of pixelated male idols plastered across the front cover of her school diary, a suspiciously conspicuous curation of glossy, airbrushed boyishly smiling faces that signalled to world around her: That’s right! Straight girl, right here~! Nothing more than a loud, winking case of performative heterosexuality, using safely two-dimensional male figures distant enough and unattainable enough that she would never find herself having to deal with aforementioned penii in reality.
“High standards, remember? It’s just with the girls, as usual. We’re having our monthly sleepover. I’ll take pictures and videos to show you. Is that alright?”
“Oh, my good girl, Sana.” Her mother positively beamed. “Keep being picky. And of course that’s okay! Send Mina and Momo my love.”
Poor, naive, Mrs Minatozaki. If only she knew. So far removed from the truth, she couldn’t even smell the smoke from the fire burning just beneath her daughter’s skin.
The truth had weight. It had a pulse. It had a heartbeat that thundered in Sana’s ears and hummed hotly beneath her skin, straight into the marrow of her bones.
The truth was that Sana wanted to give Mina and Momo more than just her mother’s love, she wanted to give them something far beyond girlhood rituals and platonic pleasantries.
She wanted to offer love that would have her own heart beat triple-time and make Mrs Minatozaki blush like a rose coaxed into early bloom.
She wanted to glide her fingers over smooth, porcelain skin, memorise every tremor in response. Wanted to steal kisses at the hush of midnight. Wanted to surrender herself to that blazing need, feel it seep into every single atom of her being. She wanted to lose herself in them, entangle their hair and limbs and everything else physically possible.
But none of that could ever happen, so she settled for the next best thing: breathing in every minty exhale that left Mina’s parted lips as she slept, and pressing herself back into the crook of Momo’s warm, strong body.
She wanted them.
She wanted them.
But that's all she could do. Want. And ache quietly. Ache so hard she could barely breathe through it sometimes.
Because the only kind of love that Sana felt capable of was the kind that didn’t fit neatly into her mother’s scripted expectations of boy-meets-girl, love that existed outside of normality and the millennia of tradition that’s come before her. It wasn’t in any of the stories her mother handed down to her.
It was a love that could only live in the secret thrill of whisper-light fingers brushing under blankets, that grew in the space between each breath when the rest of the world had dozed off. It would suffocate in broad daylight, Sana knew.
But that wasn’t a confession she could ever make. No, not to her mother. Not to the world that had already mapped out the road she was supposed to walk.
So Sana did what she was good at. She smiled. She nodded. And she swallowed it all down—the heat, the longing, the restlessness that pricked and pulsed under her skin.
“Will do, Mum,” she said compliantly, voice light and betraying nothing, years of practice having honed her ability to slip on a mask, one behind which she could carry on spinning a web of half-truths. “I’ll tell them.”
She would allow her mother to continue to believe in that tidy portrait of best friends gathering for a harmless night of face masks and giggling over boys.
She would continue this, this forgery, this farce.
She’d stood in front of the mirror before she left, pulling her hair into a loose ponytail. She’d stood there for a long time after, just staring at her reflection and trying to see what her mother saw: a good daughter. A proper, well-behaved girl. Certainly not the type who thought about kissing her friends when the lights went out.
And just like that, she continued being her mother’s good girl. It was the only thing she was ever taught to be.
Besides, Momo and Mina didn’t deserve this. What she felt for them and thought about them had to be packed neatly away as nothing more than a guilty pleasure. It wasn’t love. It was all janky and wrong and Sana feared, more than anything, the horror in friends’ eyes if they realised how far her feelings for them ran. Momo and Mina would hate her if they had even an inkling as to how she truly felt about them. They would recoil from her in disgust, scramble to put distance between them. They would tell her she couldn’t sit with them anymore, that she was dirty and impure and her thoughts belonged in hell, along with that gay couple on Modern Family her mother would curse straight to the same fiery pits after making Sana change the channel every time she tried to watch it.
Over the years, she had trained herself to shut down those treacherous thoughts on command. Whenever they dared to surface, she’d conjure the stern, condemning glare on her mother’s face, using the image to douse the flames of her desires until they shriveled and wilted away.
And here she is now, years later. Still afraid. Still pretending. Still letting someone she doesn’t truly desire lean in close, pressing a kiss to her cheek.
His cologne, spiced and bitter, all pepper and stale tobacco, smacks the back of her throat.
She glances back at Jinyoung once more, a tight-lipped smile on her face, before stepping inside. He’s already turning away, humming something under his breath as he walks off into the evening.
The door clicks shut behind her. She exhales slowly.
And finally, finally, lets the guilt settle. Lead-heavy and sharp. Just like it always is.
*
A whole month unspools day by slow day, and the only words proffered and exchanged in Sana and Jihyo’s little dorm room:
Hi.
Thanks.
‘kay.
Sure.
Bye.
Monosyllables of obligation, nothing more.
Their interactions exist in the cold realm of necessity: they’re cursory, perfunctory, transactional. Flavourless. Like receipts handed over at checkout, or doors held open out of reflex rather than intent. Like a half-hearted how are you? that expects and desires no real answer.
It only took them a few days, really. To become locked in an orbit, tethered to two parallel lines governed by separate gravities. And in that orbit, they've precisely (and wordlessly) calculated the art of avoiding shared eye lines and pathways, of timing their exits and entrances so that they needn't cross paths.
No celestial bodies on course to collide any time soon.
Their eye contact, when it happens, feels like a glitch in the matrix. Quickly corrected, swiftly avoided.
They divvy up and stick to their own halves of the room, repelled by some invisible wall. The invisible wall comes in the form of a set of oversized, gunmetal headphones perpetually clamped over Jihyo’s ears, shutting out sound, shutting out Sana. It’s the cool, tempest grey of her gaze, thunderstorm eyes which scarcely meets Sana’s (it flits past, grazes over, hovers sometimes, but never quite lands), the tall, ever-growing stack of books on her desk that rises and looms between them like a fortress. It’s in the shape of their routines, the way they exist on opposing schedules: Jihyo spends an inordinate amount of her time out at night, and Sana spends most of hers away during the day. Private rituals designed to keep them well apart, all as real as any brick wall.
And then, half the time, Jihyo doesn’t sleep in the room anyway. At least, her bed often doesn’t look slept in, unwrinkled and smooth and neat in the morning light. And there’s also the very conspicuous lack of her in it.
Well. Whatever.
“It’s probably better this way,” Mina says over the phone, with her usual soft, unbothered cadence. “You don’t have to deal with another person all up in your space. Less drama.” Mina’s attempt at comfort. Would be easy for Mina to say; she’s hardwired for introversion and blissfully bunking with Momo (their third musketeer) right now, at another college that specialises in STEM. But Mina and Momo get to talk. Get to laugh. Get to exist together in the flesh, in close proximity where they can huggle-attack each other whenever (jokes, only Sana does that to either of them). Not. Fucking. Fair.
Still, maybe Mina’s right. It should make things easier. Sana and Jihyo don’t argue, they don’t bicker, they don’t impose on or trip over each other in the small space. No passive-aggressive post-its about dirty mugs or simmering tension over missing undergarments or borrowed usb cords. There’s peace here. She’s heard one too many a horror story floating around, about the hair-fall-inducing stress people have to endure as they figure out how to juggle study, work, a social life and on top of all that, their dormmate from hell, and Sana is very much attached to her long, beautiful hair, thank you very much.
But for a girl who thrives on easy chatter and connection, who fills silences like warm light in empty rooms, Sana finds the dormroom morphing into its own brand of solitary confinement—a twisted sort of exile encased behind thin walls. To be stuck with a dormmate who seems averse to offering more than just the barest acknowledgement of her existence. Who isn’t even there most of the time. Who cracks open the door, shuffles inside beside a blast of cold, night air and a sliver of dim hallway light slicing across the floor, and slips into bed, all the while Sana’s in the middle of a REM cycle. It’s not even discomfort that she feels—there’s just a kind of emptiness that hums beneath everything.
When Jihyo’s not there, her smell isn’t either.
But Sana adjusts, as people do. She learns to live around the absence, makes peace with the fizzling quiet.
When she is around though, Jihyo is wordless, sealed tight in her own bubble. Still, Sana notices the little beats and rhythms: the soft, persistent tapping of Jihyo’s foot even when she isn’t listening to music, the weary sigh that accompanies her late night returns.
She wears a thick cloak of quiet—impenetrable on the surface, but there’s something there. Something quivering just beneath the stillness.
Who are you? Sana wonders.
And what happened to your voice?
*
Oh, but Jihyo definitely has a voice.
And what a voice it is. Low and rich and just a little rough at the edges. Honey and flint. Mind-melting, yes, but also maddening in the way it rarely, rarely, is ever directed at Sana.
Instead, on the rare night when Jihyo does occupy her side of the room, her voice is reserved for late-night phone calls, when she’s half-slouched over a spread of notes and an open laptop, looking to be cramming in some last-minute studying. One ear cup on, the other slipped halfway off, her voice comes alive on the phone to a friend named Jeongie, whose name gets stretched in a teasing lilt, a warm sigh that’s half-whine, half-laugh. They talk the most, and there’s no mistaking the ease, the closeness between them. Other times, it’s to a Nayeon-unnie, a name spoken with affection and exasperation in equal measure, like an older sibling you secretly, begrudgingly depend on. And then, occasionally, there are the clipped, quieter calls—ones Sana assumes are with her sisters. More rarely, her parents.
That’s when her tone shifts.
With her sisters, her voice cools off. Not into hostility, but it gets tight, flippant, a little distant in a way that says I’ve said this before a thousand times, and I won’t say it again. There is more hesitation, more silence, every word hushed and weighed in her palm before given away.
With her parents, it’s a whole other level of I’m done talking. She speaks plainly and there’s bite, a steely defensiveness that coils around every syllable. It almost feels like she’s speaking through a pane of glass, words tinged with exhaustion, muffled and not connecting, like she’s trying not to be misunderstood, but expects she will be anyway. The tension is palpable, thick enough for Sana to taste from the other side of the room.
Sana, from her own desk or bed or wherever she happens to be, listens in without meaning to. Not eavesdropping, exactly—more like catching raindrops through an open window.
The scraps that she’s pieced together: Jihyo is a music major (Sana wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was a vocalist). It seems to be the thing that’s causing friction with her family. Something ‘useless’, Sana thinks dolefully. Just like her own arts and fashion degree, another pretty, impractical pursuit doomed to be dismissed at every family gathering. At least they have that in common.
Not that they ever talk about it.
They don’t ever talk about anything.
And then, God—there’s Jihyo’s laugh.
The first time Sana hears it through the bathroom door, she stands rooted to the spot with toothpaste foam in her mouth, heart stuttering like she’d been caught sneaking in a designer bag full of contraband by the vice-chancellor. It was a laugh that started in her gut and bubbled up without asking for permission, full-bodied and unfiltered, resonant with joy.
It’s not a self-conscious laugh, the kind Sana’s guilty of routinely performing for people.
*
“So, progress updates with Jinyoung?” Momo asks.
Sana only shrugs in response, inhales the steamy aroma of the spoonful of shakshuka in front of her before spooning it into her mouth. The heat and spice distract her just long enough to avoid responding right away.
“Because if you’re not into him anymore, I might be.”
Mina smacks Momo’s arm.
“You can have him, honestly.” Sana scrunches her face up in delight. “Nothing beats the shakshuka here, I swear.”
The three musketeers are tucked into their usual corner booth, trying to escape the early autumn chill. Their drinks are half-finished, pastries long demolished, the dregs of conversation swirling lazily, like the scent of overpriced cinnamon lattes clinging to the air. At Sana’s behest (complete with overly dramatic caps-locked texts and sobbing gifs and emojis), they’d finally managed to carve out time from their tragically adult schedules for a rare brunch together.
“I’m more curious about your new dormie,” Mina says, arms folded across the table like she’s bracing for the tea. “You had so much to say about Miyeon and the others before her… but ever since the new one’s arrived? Crickets.”
“Funny you should say that,” Sana replies. “It’s been literal crickets. She’s not interested in being friends. Like, at all.”
They both look at her intently, expressions softening, all sympathetic eyes and pity-tilted heads. It’s a little annoying. Because they know her. They know what a people-person she is. They know how much she cried when Mimo decided to part ways with her to chase after their own higher education dreams at a different college. She still blames the split for at least three of her personality traits.
“It’s not a big deal, guys.” She waves it off with a too-bright smile. “I’ve been hanging out with my usual course peeps, and more recently some people from the photography club. You know, the one Miyeon dragged me into right before she abandoned me to fend for myself in Tumbleweed Town. Yep, it’s fine. I’ve just missed you two so damn much!” Sana sets down her spoon, lurches up, arms reaching across the table to pull the both of them into a three-way forehead-clink of friendship, replete with aggressive affection and a tide of verbal fuss. Mina sneaks in a cheek kiss and Momo pats her awkwardly. “Why’d my besties have to be born with science-y, mathy brains, ugh.”
“I just get maths. I don’t get people,” Momo says, still squished by Sana and trying, unsuccessfully, to extract herself. “Which makes me wonder. I’m literally repelled by most people, but you somehow suckered me on the second day of seventh grade and then every day since. There’s no escaping you. So how has the new dormie not fallen under your spell yet?”
Sana sits back down and doesn't look up. She taps her fingers along the side of her cup. “Don’t know. Don’t care,” she says flatly, too flat to be convincing. Then, without missing a beat, “Also, love the new scent, Momo-yah. Lily of the valley?”
Momo slams the table weakly and points an accusing finger at Sana. “Does anything ever escape her nose?”
“No point trying to fool it,” Mina says, sipping serenely. “But what made the new dormie steal your will to live? ‘Don’t care’ is not something you’d ever say about anything, Satang.”
Sana flops back against the booth, eyes skyward, like she’s been mortally wounded. “Basically,” she starts, already sighing loudly. “She’s barely there. Like, ghost vibes, but quieter and really, really tidy. More tan than your typical ghost. Better skincare. It’s not like I want to be best friends or anything, I just thought we could be proper roomies. Friendly, emotional support buddies, you know? The occasional midnight ramen runs. Basic bonding rituals everybody has in college.”
“And so you feel stiffed you got the emotional equivalent of a do not disturb sign,” Mina offers dimly.
“Exactly,” Sana huffs. “The worst part is, I know she isn’t actually like that. I’ve heard her speak to her friends on the phone.” She’s warm and funny and lovely. “She’s nice.”
There’s a beat of silence. Momo slowly looks up from chewing the edge of her straw like she’s just remembered she has a mouth.
“She hot?”
Sana blinks. “What?”
“Your ghost. Is she hot?”
That earns her a sharp sideways glance. “Irrelevant,” Sana mutters.
“Oh, so yes,” Momo says breezily. “And not irrelevant. It’s better to have a sexy ghost than a not-so-sexy ghost. If I’m going to be haunted by someone, I’d at least like the trauma to be aesthetic.”
“Fine. Objectively, yes. She’s got symmetry. Painfully intense levels of unbothered hot girl energy. And she smells like my idea of heaven.” Sana pauses. Frowns. “Forget I said that last part.”
Momo continues to chew on her straw. “Too late. Already writing it in my diary.”
“Whatever.” Sana crosses her arms, a pout flaring on her lips. “She’s probably off being hot and mysterious and emotionally unavailable somewhere else right now.”
Mina reaches across the table and plucks a fry off the shared plate plate. “Maybe she’s going through something. Or maybe she’s just shy.”
Maybe. Maybe what Sana really needs to do is click-clack her heels all the way across campus, into their shared room, climb on top of Jihyo so she can’t escape, and prise off her headphones.
And then—
Talk.
Talk to her.
Well, get her to talk to Sana.
Maybe they could have a productive fight. An emotionally cathartic, mutually scarring argument where they finally lock eyes for longer than a second and exchange more than just sentences that’ve been pared down to the bone. Anything to disrupt the soul-sucking void of no eye contact and headphone barriers.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says again. “It’s cool if she doesn’t want to talk to me. Or look at me. Or acknowledge that I exist as a fellow human occupying the same shared living space.”
Mina tries not to laugh. “I dunno. That sounds... like a little bit of a big deal.”
Momo leans back, nudges Mina, and stage-whispers, “She’s so bothered.”
Sana kicks her under the table. “I am not!” she insists, now sitting up straight, hands flailing for emphasis. “I don’t need her friendship. I don’t care.” She clears her throat. “It is not a big deal."
Mina raises an eyebrow. Momo smirks. “You’ve said that three times now.”
“It’s my new mantra,” Sana says, crossing her arms with great finality. “It’s not a big deal because I have you guys. I have shakshuka. I have... inner peace.”
“Inner peace?” Mina echoes, brows still sky high.
“Inner turmoil. Same difference.”
“If you say so, hun.”
There’s an unbearably domestic moment where Mina refills her glass of water and automatically tops off Sana’s without asking. Where Sana rounds the table and squeezes herself into the already crowded side of the booth in search of corporeal comfort, practically sitting on top of Momo until the latter finally stops resisting and leans into her side, head momentarily resting on Sana’s shoulder before pulling back, muttering something under her breath about personal space and people who don’t know how to sit in chairs like normal humans. And they just sit there, the three of them. Warm and woven together like they used to be back in highschool.
And Sana thinks, God, I love them.
Not in the unhinged, obsessive late-night overanalysing way she used to. Years ago, what feels like an eternity ago, she’d crushed on both of them, was down bad. Mina with her ballerina elegance, clinically cool temperament and sneak-attack sass, Momo and her no-filter honesty, unintentional hilarity and lowkey biceps. The two of them and their excellent bone structure and eerie ability to read her, despite not being the most sociable people out there. And how much they cared. Especially how much they cared.
It had been a teenage fever dream; she’d lie awake at night, heart bruising itself against the inside of her chest, just thinking too hard about what a single text meant. If a smile held something more. If they knew.
And somehow, they’d all made it through. They grew up. Sana, by some miracle, managed to not fall apart, and her feelings evolved into something that didn’t burn quite so recklessly.
When she looks at them now, she knows that it’s not with hopeless longing—it’s with love. Real love. Chosen family kind of love. The kind that shows up with cold medicine and drags you out of a depressive funk with boba and your favourite meme folder. The kind that texts you good? at 1:15 a.m. because something just felt off.
It feels like a significant victory at this point, that she can look at the girls who used to make her heart do crazy gymnastics and not want to kiss them anymore. Not even a little. Well. Maybe a little. In her defense, they’ve somehow only gotten stupidly more good looking over the years.
Which makes her next thought feel especially traitorous.
So why does Jihyo get under my skin?
Sana shakes it off, swats the thought away like it’s a pesky fly. Nope. Not going there. Not today. Jihyo doesn’t even like her. She’s indifferent. And worse, probably straight. Sana is definitely not about to spiral over a straight girl with a sexy voice who’s developed some weird form of emotional constipation that’s only brought on when Sana’s in the room.
Those days of pitiful pining are over. O-V-E-R, over! Behind her. BENEATH HER.
She stabs a bit of toast like it’s responsible for her feelings.
Next to them, Mina is scrolling through her camera roll, gently narrating some new showcase snaps for Sana of LEGO sets she’s completed recently, pristine little cities all now living in a paid storage room because Mimo’s dorm shelves are already at capacity. Next to her, Momo is gazing out the window with the serenity of someone who’s slipped into a kind of astro-projected midday meditation, eyes unfocused, face blissfully blank, as though working to recoup some of the life energy that she’s lost to Sana.
It’s all so normal, so soft, so them.
Sana lets herself soak in it a little longer.
*
Sana was nine years old and a serial girl chaser, an errant, pint-sized menace on the playgrounds. She chased after girls with wild glee, to tag, tickle, tackle, and held their hands after under the shoddy pretence of consolation. Little Sana, all scraped knees and bouncy pigtails, was powered by a single-minded determination to catch girl cooties, yet somehow not even slightly aware that by merit of being a girl, she already had it.
She was ten years old and desperately trying to scrub ‘girls kissing’ from her search history.
She was twelve years old sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tray of grilled fish, miso soup and steaming rice in front of her, watching a random episode of a foreign sitcom on TV called Modern Family. It was light, funny, fast-paced, and half the jokes flew right over her head, but it didn’t matter. It was fascinating to watch the dynamics of this chaotic American family. It felt strange and electric, foreign in a way that wasn’t just about the language. Then Cameron and Mitchell appeared onscreen. Two men, affectionate, ordinary, fussing over something silly in their sunny kitchen. Watching them made Sana’s heart beat so hard it almost cracked through her ribcage; she buzzed with something unnameable, something tender. Some sort of awe. A spark of kinship, maybe, though she didn’t have the words for it yet. Her parents were behind her on the couch, murmuring between bites, quietly enjoying the show. They were good people. Soft-spoken. Thoughtful. Gentle about most things. Until they weren’t. Change the channel, Mr Minatozaki barked mid-scene. Just American culture for you—perverse, shameless, Mrs Minatozaki added. Sana was twelve when her hands froze around her chopsticks, her excitement curdling instantly. Her insides scorched with a particular kind of humiliation that only her parents could inspire in her, because their opinion meant everything. Something inside her curled into itself, and died, right there and then.
She was thirteen, and slumber parties with female friends had become literal battlegrounds, quiet, little private wars only she ever seemed to be fighting. A smoky minefield of pillows, pizza crusts and danger. The danger of too much. Too much closeness. Too much softness. Too much of someone’s fingers playing idly with her hair, or playing what felt like a game of footsies with her under the blanket. The slow, fluttery panic of a friend curling up beside her, head on her shoulder like it was nothing. She’d feel a tightening just beneath her ribs, sharp and sweet, a peculiar ache that made her want to shift away and inch closer all at once. She’d lie there for hours trying to fall asleep, repeating to herself, firmly, like a spell she was trying to cast: It’s just friendly affection. That’s all it is. That’s all it is ever going to be.
She was fourteen and it hurt. It hurt to think, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to be.
She was fifteen and stopped crying about it. She stopped feeling much at all, except for the way her lungs burned raw as she screamed her love for Yamashita Tomohisa at the top of her lungs, as though the sheer force of her voice could imprint the feeling onto every cell of her body, overwriting its truth. She screamed his name because every other girl was doing the same, and it was instinct to blend in; he was the hottest star, and she thought he was cute enough that she could do this convincingly and pass inspection. But as always, Sana’s gaze slid sideways. On the inside cover of her school diary, she stuck stickers and printed cut-outs of Nagasawa Masami, Kitagawa Keiko, Horikita Maki—all his female co-stars. With correction pen fluid, she dotted tiny hearts next to them, wrote their names out in careful, secret, looping cursive.
She was sixteen and cranked up her femininity to 110. The skirts got shorter, the makeup sharper, her laughter sweeter. The boys noticed, of course they did; no surprise that she quickly began to drown in male attention, despite being in a constant state of panic trying to manufacture distance between said males and herself. When Momo or Mina raised their brows at her antics, her constant deflections, she shrugged it off with the excuse she’d refined into muscle memory—I’m just picky. Too fussy. Nobody could ever live up to her dream man, her husband, Yamashita Tomohisa (Yamapi—or Yummypi, as she liked to joke), and that, thankfully, curbed the curiosity flecked in her best friends’ eyes for a while.
She was seventeen when Momo started seeing a guy too many years her senior, and Sana’s first response wasn’t Oh, nice, or How did you meet him? It was a nauseous Him? Followed by a tight-lipped smile. Followed by an apology. Then another one, because apparently Momo had complained to Mina that Sana was treating her boyfriend like a criminal and was being weirdly territorial. Which, in hindsight, was fair. Sana apologised profusely, claiming she was just being protective because she didn't trust a guy his age looking at, let alone picking up a girl their age. She didn’t say: I hate the idea of anyone touching you like that. Everyone always predicted she’d be the first one of the trio to land a boyfriend—she had all the right ingredients. Pretty, sociable, kind, super femme. Ideal girlfriend material.
So when Sana was eighteen, she decided it was time to try. She was eighteen and finally had her first kiss. With a boy. No matter what distance she put between them and herself, she was done being envious and possessive whenever her female friends got involved with the opposite sex. So her first kiss came like that, with a guy who seemed sweet, was cute and liked her a lot. And when he leaned in, she let him. But there was too much tongue and cold slop, like he was chasing something inside her she wasn’t quite willing to give. It wasn’t bad, just… not anything. No spark or flutter. No rush of blood or dizzy thrill. Just a wet, vaguely awkward pressing together of two faces, without rhythm, without meaning. Maybe next time, it would feel like something. So she tried harder. Dated more, said yes more often. Became overly invested in the idea of it—because what if she just needed practice? Maybe next time, this hollowness could be smoothed and patched over with enough kisses, enough boys, enough effort. Maybe next time.
She was twenty-one and found a ‘boyfriend’ in Jinyoung, one she could post about and hold hands with in public. One her parents approved of. And it helped, a little; the shame quieted and the pressure loosened. So she kept playing the part, kept smiling, kept pretending, hoping one day she’d wake up and feel what she was supposed to feel.
*
Sana is twenty-two and makes the catastrophic error of locking eyes with her new dormmate one night during a rare string of nights where she actually does spend it in the dorm, and it’s then. It’s then that Sana realises Park Jihyo might be the most beautiful girl she’s ever laid eyes on.
There’s no grand trigger.
It’s during one of those late-night calls that it happens. Jihyo’s sprawled across her bed, phone to her ear, her murmuring voice lingering at the edge of a laugh. Her voice curls around her words, alive in a way that’s intensely disarming. And then, she laughs.
Sana looks up from her laptop, distracted mid-scroll, rendered momentarily stupid, like someone flipped the lights off inside her brain.
Her head turns and her eyes flick over before she can stop them.
Jihyo looks up at the same moment—catches her.
Phone still pressed to her ear, lips parted mid-smile, she locks eyes with Sana across the room. She seems neither startled nor cold. Just… aware.
Sana freezes. Blinks. One second. Two seconds. Three. Looks away a second too late.
Jihyo just turns back to her call with the faintest tilt to her head, as if she’s taken note of something and quietly shelved it away.
It’s taken two months of quietly sharing a living space for the epiphany to crash into Sana’s frontal lobe like a delayed detonation—the kind where the fuse was lit ages ago, burning innocuously in the background, almost unnoticed, until the blast predictably hits and the ensuing concussive shockwave knocks everything off axis. The world tilts, shifts, rearranges around a single startling thought:
Paralysing.
There’s something utterly, hopelessly paralysing about her.
Jihyo is hoop earrings and polished combat boots. She’s a no-nonsense blazer layered over mesh crop tops, baggy cargo pants or wide-legged slacks. She’s a white ribbed tank, bob hair and a chain necklace that accentuate her sculpted shoulders and collarbones.
It’s the damn way she sits sometimes. With her leather jacket sliding off one shoulder, reclined back into her pillows and one knee propped up over which an arm lazily rests, headphones snug over her ears, raspberry-tinted lips mouthing silently to lyrics Sana can never make out. The next moment she downs half a beer can in one gulp without blinking.
She’s a certain squared-off confidence, stony self-assurance, but inexplicably pretty and soft all the same. The improbable amalgamation of Sana’s childhood repression and every half-buried, half-understood clandestine fantasy she’s ever had, all wrapped up in one neat little package. Devastatingly choreographed by the universe to drop a torpedo into Sana’s life.
Because Jihyo wears and owns both sides of the spectrum in equal measure, in perfect balance, neither overtly feminine nor aggressively masculine. She straddles the line, and god, Sana wishes she’d straddle her.
Sana tells herself she just admires Jihyo’s style. Her energy. The femme-to-futch-to-butch-and-back pipeline. That’s all it is. It’s easier to explain it away as such. Easier to say cool than beautiful. Easier to say style goals than God, please touch me.
And then, of course, the universe delivers the final blow.
It gifts her an image she’ll never forget. One early, chilly evening, when Sana’s working on her sketch portfolio, pencil scratching faintly across paper. After a period of comfortably routine silence, she hears movement—a drawer opening, fabric rustling, a zipper tugged.
She turns her head, glances over. Just a harmless flick of the eyes. She knows by now that she really shouldn’t. She knows. But some terrible, ungovernable part of her risks it anyway.
On the other side of the dormroom, Jihyo stands in front of their full-length mirror with her back to Sana, mid-motion and halfway into a pair of sinfully tight jeans, the need for any curtain of modesty be damned.
Sana forgets how to breathe. And she should look away. Really, she means to.
But then Jihyo shifts her hips, allowing her weight to settle to one side, thumbs hooking into her pockets like a model straight out of a Levi’s ad, and Sana’s throat goes dry in that shamefully visceral way that feels a little like choking on air. The denim hugs her in all the right places, her hips, her thighs. Jihyo tilts her head, assessing her reflection with a casual sort of disinterest, and on the other side of the room Sana is ruined.
Watching her put on jeans is a near religious experience. That, or a federal crime. Possibly both. Somewhere between spiritual awakening and softcore pornography.
And the worst part isn’t even the jeans or how she looks in them.
It’s her. It’s the way she exists, the way she takes up space unapologetically. The way she doesn’t hide.
Sana’s vision spins and smears and so does the paper in front of her. Her pencil drops and clatters across the table.
She tells herself she can look. She can feel. It’s okay. She can just be. And it’s okay. It’s okayit’sokayit’sokayit’sokay.
Fuck.
It’s not okay.
She’s gay.
And fucking Park Jihyo is her dormmate.