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“—then cross the first over the middle, drop this strand down, pin it, and that is all it takes!”
“Fuck.” Chenle stares at her hand, and hisses again, “Fuck.” The second time around—or, to be precise, about the twenty-second time around—it comes out a little more defeated. “I fucked it up again.”
“It looks perfect!” Jisung protests. “You’re good at this—”
“Shut up,” she grumbles, undoing the plaits from Jisung’s hair.
“You know it’s okay, right?” Jisung lets out a soft laugh, leaning to the left so Chenle can reach over and rewind the YouTube video. Her bathroom is a tight space already, and with an assortment of clips, elastics, and makeup scattered all across her counter, Chenle’s phone is left to defy gravity on top of the wainscoting. Chenle herself sits in a stool pulled from the kitchen, with Jisung’s back pressed against her knees. “I appreciate your help so much, but I was kidding when I said I wanted to—”
“Shut the fuck up, princess.” Chenle picks out bobby pins from Jisung’s head and shoves them into her pocket. “I’m gonna get this dumbass bullshit right and you’re gonna be the prettiest girl out there in that club.”
It’s a stupid, stupid line, but it’s so utterly Chenle that Jisung raises a hand to cover her flushing face. Chenle swats her wrist away. “Careful. I spent way too long on your nails for you to smudge them this far in.”
“Sorry, sorry. I’ll be careful.”
The cheery tutorial intro replays, and Chenle combs through Jisung’s hair with her fingers, silk tresses falling out and brushing across her face. It’s the healthiest it’s ever been since she stopped setting it on fire with box hair dye, dark and smooth to the touch.
It’s also the longest it’s ever been, falling past her shoulders, at last long enough to tie back without it all tumbling apart from a slight breeze. Jisung had to buy a new pack of extra durable scrunchies after it became apparent she couldn’t dance with all of it in her face—and Chenle had to buy another two packs to replace all the ones Jisung lost and stole from her emergency stash.
Jisung can look in mirrors now, and be mostly ambivalent to the person that returns her gaze. She can fix her layers in public bathrooms and not be overwhelmed with a sudden bout of nausea.
Her hair is long enough to braid—at least, in theory.
For the past ten minutes, Chenle’s struggled to braid the two sides of Jisung’s head into waterfalls with no shortage of hissed curses and shedded strands.
She doesn’t think Donghyuck’s birthday party warrants this much effort, but the second Jisung voiced the thought of dressing up a little more, Chenle had sat her down inside her bathtub with their Spotify blend connected to her Bluetooth bathroom speakers and her brand of stubborn determination en garde.
They were both helpless with beauty products when they first met, Chenle maintaining that no one cared whether or not her wings were even while she was drenched in sweat on the court or hunched behind her gaming setup, Jisung too terrified of going to Sephora and having one of the employees ask who she was buying things for. It wasn’t until Jisung cried on her nineteenth birthday trying to use Chenle’s gift—a multipurpose eyes-lips-cheeks palette that saved the entirety of Jisung’s early transition—that Chenle found herself camping religiously on the makeup side of Douyin.
And, well, seasons changed, Chenle kissed Jisung on the New Years’ of their first year out of college, and since then, she hasn’t lifted a finger to apply anything more than mascara. If Jisung needs to, she can blend concealer and paint liquid lipstick inside the lines; all other times, like today, she puts her two left hands in her lap and lets Chenle work her magic.
Hair, though, seems to be beyond both of them.
“You’re doing amazing,” Jisung pipes.
Chenle grunts and picks apart strands at a tortoise’s pace, Jisung feeling the way she goes over under, over, drop; under, over, under, pick up. From Jisung’s peripheral, Chenle seems so intent—eyebrows furrowed, lips pursed, fingers stiff—it’s almost funny. She saves that expression for games of PUBG, or basketball live on the television.
The thought has Jisung’s eyes trailing down to look at her zip-up. It’s one of Chenle’s plethora of Golden State Warriors merchandise, plush blue fabric swallowing her entire frame.
“You should keep this one,” Chenle mumbles, crossing over three neat loops. “You wear it more than I do.”
Jisung stops tugging at the drawstrings with a sheepish smile. “It’s comfy. I like it.” There’s a small prickle of guilt over how much of Chenle’s clothes she’s stolen, dissuaded a second later upon remembering how much Chenle comes over to Jisung’s apartment to use her body soap because she refuses to buy her own.
“I like you in it,” Chenle replies, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Jisung wants to curl into a ball and melt and die. “Tilt your head for me?”
Doing as told, Jisung focuses her attention on watching the street from her window. The afternoon is melting into the horizon, stained blue yellows a watercolour backdrop for the rush hour traffic. A police officer places a ticket under the wiper of Mr. Lee from across the hall’s smoothie green Kia Soul. Sungchan, the Jungs’ son, cleans the windows of their coin laundromat with a blue towel, chatting with someone sitting out of Jisung’s view. The ajumma from downstairs feeds birds while sitting at the bench under the big camellia tree.
It’s a beautiful view, one as familiar as the lines of her palm.
It’s a beautiful view, and it gets blocked by a large mass shadowing the glass.
“Bongshik!” gasps Jisung, reaching over in a rush to open her window and—
“Hey, hey,” Chenle chides, forcing her wrists down. “Nails.”
“But- but—” Jisung tilts her head back to look at Chenle upside-down with the widest eyes and the puffiest cheeks she can manage. “Please? Please? Chenle, Lele, unnie, jiejie—”
“Fine! …Fine.” Chenle sighs and puts a clip to hold the braids in place. “Fine. I’ll open the window for you.”
It’s already lifted an inch or so to let out the last of the alcohol fumes, and Chenle knows how to pull the lift up and to the right in order to slide the whole pan in one go. Bongshik, Jeno’s cat, tumbles into her laundry hamper with a yelp.
“Hello,” Jisung chirps, leaning over the side of her tub to get a better sight of her. “Wow, you’re such a cutie.”
Bongshik glances in her direction, and Jisung meows at her the way she does whenever she sees her, on her living room’s Juliette balcony in the mornings or lounging against Jeno’s window on her way home from the studio. She replies with her own meow, deep bellied and soft, and the two go back and forth for a minute before Jisung remembers Chenle is still in her bathroom.
She’s still in the bathroom, one hand paused inside her backpack as she stares at Jisung with a funny expression.
It makes Jisung’s face heat up. “What? Don’t judge! Jeno does it too.”
“No, I’m not- I wasn’t-” Chenle splutters, then shakes her head with a sigh.
From the depths of her bag, she pulls out a squeeze tube of chicken paste—Bongshik’s favourite cat treat—and sets it on her counter. “You ran out of them on Monday,” she answers to Jisung’s questioning gaze. “You need to go grocery shopping, by the way. You need more pork and laundry detergent.”
“Do you want to go this Tuesday? We’re both off in the afternoon and everything is better when you’re there.”
She hums in agreement and reaches for Jisung’s fingers. They dwarf Chenle’s, which once upon a time was one of her biggest insecurities. After so many days of Jaemin cooing over their size difference, Jisung’s learnt to love them a little more. Chenle’s hands are rough and calloused from her new hobby of violin. “They’re dry. You’re good to go.”
That has Jisung breaking into a grin, and she immediately scoops Bongshik up with one arm into her lap, tearing the cat treat with ease. As per usual, Bongshik attacks the treat, nibbling the tube with the kind of ferocity every house cat has deep inside them below the surface.
“Jisung-ah.”
“Hmm?” Jeno must’ve bathed Bongshik recently, because her fur is so soft, Jisung might cry. She’s seen videos of those people who grow catnip gardens to attract swathes of strays, and wonders if Chenle would set aside her blatant favouritism to help her plant cat weed. It couldn’t go any worse than all the lumpy dishes in her cabinets from their pottery date, or their wallpapering attempts sprawling across her bedroom ceiling.
“Jisung-ah, let go of my hand.”
Blinking, Jisung looks up at Chenle, who’s staring at her with that funny expression again, this time cheeks a bit tinted.
“Jisung, let go of my hand,” she repeats, cocking an eyebrow, “I can’t braid your hair if you’re holding my hand.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t realised that she’d laced their fingers together without another thought, her so-called monster hands engulfing Chenle’s. “Oh, sorry, sorry—”
Chenle holds a finger up to her lips to silence her. “Don’t apologise. C’mon, face forward.”
They fall back into a quiet lull, broken up by Dean crooning about needing blessings and the occasional car engine from beyond. Over the year of their relationship, it’s bittersweet how Jisung can count on one hand the lazy days they’ve spent together, letting the world slow in favour of being together in the same space with no other pressure. She wants more evenings like this, more mornings like this, more days like this, if the universe is willing.
“So move in with me.”
“What?” Jisung startles, jerking upright. She didn’t realise she said any of her musings aloud, and her face burns. At the sudden movement, Bongshik stops licking the tube to cast a questioning gaze.
“Move in with me, Park Jisung,” Chenle says, voice level. “I need to renew my lease soon, anyway. I have way more than enough space for all your things, the doorman knows you by name, and Daegal loves you. Move in with me, and I can give you all the evenings and mornings and days you want.”
It’s easy to imagine; Jisung already has her own two sections in Chenle’s walk-in closet, her own toothbrush and glass in her en suite, her own pair of slippers in the entryway room. She’d wake up in Chenle’s king to the smell of lavender room fragrance, push open the curtains to let a view of the entire downtown flood the bedroom with light, and shuffle into the kitchen, where Daegal would be eating from her automatic feeders and Chenle would be operating her six burner stove while preparing breakfast with her imported Japanese knives. Chenle would rub her back as she swallowed down her pills with water from the fridge dispenser.
It’s too easy to imagine. Jisung scratches behind Bongshik’s ear. Her yellow collar has a tag with three phone numbers on it. “That sounds great.”
Chenle’s hands go still in her hair and Jisung is quick to add, “I’d love to live with you! That would be a dream come true.”
“But?” questions Chenle. “There’s a but statement somewhere in there.”
Jisung’s eyes drift from her window, the trim faded and chipped on the edges framing laundry lines and planters, to her counter, holding up her mismatched mugs, to her storage cart, housing her prescription bottles in the sole organised space across her whole apartment.
Past her broken and glued back in place door handle lies the rest of her humble two-bedroom, every corner filled with all the trinkets she’s collected since her childhood, their individual names taking up too much space in her mind for her to let go. Her kitchen is home to a toaster oven that refuses to work unless Jisung speaks to it softly, her living room sports a single potted plant that Jaemin claims she can communicate with on another wavelength, and her studio space has a dent from when Donghyuck punched the wall covering Lucifer with a bit too much zeal. Every wall is covered with Renjun’s extra paintings and Jaemin’s Polaroids, every room sporting hamster shaped humidifiers.
Jisung rubs the faint stain on top of the counter, a battle scar from their fourth year in college, the time she’d dyed Chenle’s hair red. It ended up a garish shade of highlighter pink, and they’d laughed about it on their way to get boba from down the street. The barista asked Chenle in Mandarin if Jisung was her brother, and Chenle had snapped back that Jisung was her girlfriend—two words she only knew after she binged Find Yourself as an attempt to impress her.
She plays with Bongshik’s toe beans. If she puts her ear against the bathroom wall, she could hear Jeno moving around, humming or tripping on the edge of her carpet again. She might even hear Renjun singing along to some sad English song or Jaemin baby talking over the phone.
At that, Bongshik finishes the last of the chicken tube and gets up from Jisung’s lap to pad back out her window towards the fire escape she uses to traverse the space between their two apartments. None of Jisung’s whines and protests get her to turn around, and she’s left to deal with the clumps of fur clinging to the front of the jacket and her leggings in her wake, stark white against the black and blue.
“Is this—” Jisung hesitates, continuing only after Chenle nudges her back, “Is this what Daegal’s hair is gonna look like? Does it get everywhere too?”
“A little. Nothing a lint roller can’t solve.”
Jisung realises she’s been silent for longer than she should, and she rushes out, “It’s kind of sudden, I guess? I have to think about it.”
“Right,” Chenle intones, tying the two braids on the sides of her head together.
“And- and I don’t want the ghost to be lonely.”
“Ghost?”
“You know. The ghost in my apartment?”
Her eyes narrow, then widen, then narrow again. “Like, back when you first moved in? When you asked me to come over and spend the night because you thought the apartment was haunted?”
Jisung nods. Rent for the space was lower than every other place she’d looked at by a few hundred dollars, and without being able to deduce any noticeable reasons for why it came so cheap, she was certain it was because someone was murdered within. A couple years in now, and haunted or not, Jisung’s grown attached. “It’s definitely haunted, but the ghost is nice. It finds my keys and fills my bottle if I forget to drink water. You would like it.”
Another bout of silence falls between them, and as Jisung starts turning around in panic, Chenle puts her hands on her shoulders and holds her steady. “What’s your building’s pet policy?”
“No, don’t—”
“What is it?” she presses, firm. “What’s your building’s pet policy?”
“It’s—it’s one animal per tenant, not including fish.”
“Is your plant dog safe?”
“Y—yeah, it is.” She swallows. “Chenle, I—”
“You can do the dishes,” she starts, pinning the braids together with a barrette, “I fucking hate doing the dishes. You walk Daegal with me all the time, so you can take her out just fine if I’m at work late. I’ll drop the laundry off on my way to work and you can pick it up during your afternoon breaks. We can split everything else, or do it together. Kun and Doyoung have this organiser thing in their living room where they keep track of all their chores, and if you want, we could—”
“I’m so lucky,” Jisung breathes, “that you’re in my life.”
“That’s embarrassing.” Chenle fluffs Jisung’s hair one last time. “There. All done.”
Jisung squeaks and her face lights aflame as Chenle scoops her up into a bridal carry, setting her down on her windowsill to face the mirror head on. Jisung hasn’t known the faint touch of sanity since the moment Chenle started going to the gym with Jeno.
“Bon appetit,” Chenle declares, leaning against her window right beside her. “What do you think?”
A beat later, Chenle stammers, “Are—are you crying?”
“No!” Jisung’s voice cracks.
She’s not, she swears she isn’t, it’s just that the person looking back at her is kind of sort of really pretty. Her lids are dusted in soft pinks and browns that match her nails, and her face glows, round and delicate under the light. Whites from the pearls on her ears match the barrette and the stones pressed in the corner of her eyes. Her curtain bangs frame her face and the braids make her look like an elven queen, the way the locks spill out in perfect sections.
She’s really, really pretty.
“I’m—” Jisung lifts a hand up to ghost over her aegyo sal, the pad of her pointer catching onto stray glitter— “Everything is gorgeous. The hair and makeup is gorgeous.”
She looks over at Chenle, who rolls her eyes. “It’s not the hair or the makeup, princess, it’s you.”
Jisung exhales and okay, so she might be crying. A little bit. Not that much.
Regardless, Chenle’s eyes widen in panic and she wrenches out a fistful of tissues from the box to pat the corners of her eyes. Her other hand comes to rub her arm up and down. “No, stop, shit—don’t cry, don’t cry, you’re not supposed to cry, idiot, that wasn’t supposed to—Jisung-ah, stop crying, please—”
“Sorry,” she sniffles, lower lip trembling, “for always being such a mess. Thank you for—” For all the held hands on the way to the backstage dressing rooms as she teeters on the brink of a mental breakdown, for showering with her in the dark on days she needs to claw out of her body, for every single cooked meal and tip-toed kiss and all the stars in the nighttime sky. “For putting up with me, after all this time.”
Six years ago, they sat like this in the bathroom of some classmate long forgotten, Jisung instead crying over the shame wrapping her organs in a vice grip, contracting with every inhale, and Chenle awkwardly patting her on the back.
“It’s okay if you’re scared about being a girl,” Chenle said, her voice carrying that Chenle kind of insistence Jisung fell in love with—then or after, it’s still hard for her to tell. “Renjun’s scared of being a girl, too, ‘cause she thinks creeps are gonna jump her at night. Jeno’s scared ‘cause she’s worried she’s gonna accidentally rip display clothing with her bulging muscles. Being a girl is scary. Being is scary. Except to me, though. I’m not scared of anything.”
A galaxy’s worth of change stretches from then to now, but a few things remain consistent, at least in its essence: Jisung’s perpetual fear of everything everywhere, her abnormally large hands, and the space in her heart where Chenle’s made her place.
For Chenle, that same insistence cuts through as she uses the tip of her pinkie to tease Jisung’s lashes into place, murmuring, “You have nothing to thank me for.”
She’s pretty sure she has her entire existence to thank Chenle for. She opens her mouth to say as much, and Chenle closes the space separating them to kiss the words right out of her.
A year could’ve passed by in the slow seconds it takes for Chenle to pull away. Jisung’s lids flutter open, eyes darting to meet Chenle’s heady stare. “Shut up,” Chenle says, tongue darting out to lick her lips, “for real this time.”
“If I don’t, will you kiss me again?”
“No.” Chenle flicks Jisung’s forehead. “I spent way too long on your lip liner to mess it up half an hour before the party starts. C’mon now, let’s get you changed.”