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They'd fallen asleep but they always do, already late enough in the night for a blanketing silence over the city before Sungah even gets home, starts talking to Chayoung as she climbs into bed instead of trying to go to sleep. They promise responsible hours to each other, won't stay awake too long on a weekday without a good reason. Sungah's mouth is the softest on Chayoung's neck, regardless. Above anything else. Her voice's the warmest after she goes out drinking and she murmurs about commute and having lunch with Sohee, about a barely busy afternoon at work and small details that feel important for how the alert lines of her body melt out as she says them. She's quiet when she's finally worn out of all of it: living it, processing it out loud. Exhausted on the persistence of her own need to have someone by her side through everything, though she never confesses to it. They're six floors up from the ground and it's a noiseless season, no wind or rain, just heat weighed down static. Sungah bites Chayoung's earlobe then seeks the corner of her mouth then kisses Chayoung into the pillow. It's ritualistic because Sungah is— the edge of her teeth before her tongue; keeping Chayoung's lips open on her own as she brings herself on top of her, between her limbs, suffocatingly; her spit and her shame as she tries to say what she wants and bears only half words, sweetly. Chayoung isn't practiced on finishing things she didn't begin herself. It's around midnight before and time crawls elastic into four twenty in the morning. Sungah starts tasting like she could've been dreaming and the sheets are gross right in the center, damp that's the wrong side of cold against the skin. Chayoung's numb to her fingertips, stops wanting to come after waking up for a second time, but she touches between Sungah's thighs again and Sungah sobs, letting her mouth hang open. So sensitive she's softer, all of her curling forward and inward, tighter around Chayoung's fist. From his room in the door in front of theirs, Sohee could hear them if he's awake, but at the breakfast table the next day he doesn't care, rarely talks while looking overslept and detached from the habit they've grown of setting a table and eating together. Deep down you don't care so much either, he'd told Chayoung once, a smile complicit, meaning he thought she'd do different if she wasn't in love with Sungah who carries them into these small obligations of companionship. He's Sungah's friend first, fell in love with her first, though out of sync like a misstep as he always would've been. Sungah knew better, half-brave and half-naive; he got to figure himself out by sticking to her side then like he'll do inconsequentially, boyish and annoying, too idolizing to admit it. In bed before morning light, Chayoung thinks he'll never really understand. There's an irreparable distance she wouldn't be able to explain, doesn't want to share. Sungah pins her own hair to the back of her neck with her palms and keeps it there, riding herself slowly on two of Chayoung's fingers, flinching, whimpering. She doesn't talk to kiss Chayoung without pause and Chayoung doesn't pull out without being asked to, the buoyant transit of emotions on her chest somehow more substantial than the speed of her heartbeat. Falling to Sungah's orbit was a graver vertigo, sinuous on gravity all hers— pulling them across rooms in a house party until she asked This is a date, right?, sat in a dark corner between a stripped bed and a low windowsill. Unreal, away from the stringed rows of blue neon that buried the depth of the place a direction reversed. It's too romantic for a party, I think. With the outside clarity mosaic on her cheekbones, hair loose on her clavicles, strands brushing her ribcage. We can fuck, if you feel like it right now. I want that too, but I'll want more than just that after. Chayoung liked the amount of time she had spent chasing Sungah around the city the previous couple of weeks. Cinema theaters, bars, public parks and sports courts. Swinging her leg over Sungah's thigh, Chayoung didn't mind no kissing or fucking, but she said she wanted anything Sungah wanted too. Would go anywhere to keep filling up her days with her. There'd been the righteousness of the feeling, inside Chayoung, for saying it out loud the best way she could. Doing it justice by being honest like at times she had failed to. Sungah had a black top with thin straps on and she rolled them down her shoulders first before bending forward to put her lips on Chayoung's shoulder, up her neck, on her earlobe, making her shiver. She wanted something nobody had ever wanted from Chayoung and Chayoung could fold into the routine of her seamlessly, free falling. Climbing on her lap, being the right person to stay eye-to-eye with her, Chayoung could drown. She sleeps when Sungah does: after changing the sheets, taking a shower together, having breakfast at the kitchen table with Sohee.