Chapter 6

Jihyo arrived just after seven with takeout she had no intention of letting anyone else pay for and the expression of someone who had already decided she was not leaving until she had assessed the damage for herself.

Minji, spotting her through the glass before she even came in, straightened at the front desk like a meerkat sensing weather.

“Oh good,” she said as the door opened. “Adult supervision.”

“I’m not here for you,” Jihyo said.

“That’s exactly what adult supervision would say.”

Jihyo set the paper bag on the front counter and gave her a flat look. “How are you still employed?”

“Charm.”

“Parasite behavior.”

Nayeon, from the office doorway, felt something in her chest loosen for the first time all afternoon.

Jihyo noticed immediately.

Of course she did.

Her gaze flicked once over Nayeon’s face, then past her toward the back room where Yunjin was still working through the final color corrections. Whatever conclusion she came to from that visual inventory, she kept it to herself for the moment.

“I brought food,” she announced. “Because I know what happens when people here are emotionally compromised.”

Minji raised a hand. “I would like it formally recorded that I ate a bagel.”

“Brave of you,” Jihyo said.

The studio had mostly emptied by then. Seungwan had left an hour ago after muttering something dark about shipping labels. The printer had gone quiet. Outside, evening had settled fully over the city, the windows reflecting more of the studio back at itself than they showed of the street.

Nayeon crossed to the counter. “You didn’t have to come.”

“I know.”

That was the problem with Jihyo, really. She weaponized care with alarming efficiency.

She unpacked containers one by one while Minji hovered like an opportunistic crow until Jihyo finally shoved a pair of chopsticks into her hand and told her to stop pretending she wasn’t planning to eat with them.

Yunjin appeared a minute later from the back room, rubbing one hand absently against the back of her neck. She paused when she saw Jihyo and then, almost despite herself, smiled.

“You actually came.”

“I said I would.”

Yunjin’s smile shifted, tired and grateful around the edges. “That’s usually how I know you mean it.”

Jihyo’s expression softened by a degree. “How tragic for you that I’m dependable.”

Yunjin took the offered container and leaned her hip lightly against the counter beside Nayeon. Not touching, not quite. Close enough that Nayeon could feel the presence of her there the way she felt studio light on the back of her hands after a long day.

For a while they ate standing up in the soft clutter of the front workspace, and because people were eating, conversation found easier paths.

Minji told a story about a client who had once requested to be made “more Parisian” in post-production despite having no articulable idea what that meant. Jihyo declared this a hate crime against both language and France. Yunjin laughed. Nayeon rolled her eyes. The world, for ten whole minutes, managed to resemble itself again.

It was only when Minji’s rideshare finally arrived and she left with a salute and half a dumpling wrapped in a napkin that the air changed.

Not sharply.

Just enough.

Jihyo glanced toward the front windows, then at the clock. “Are you closing soon?”

Nayeon understood the question for what it was and nodded. “Yeah.”

Yunjin did too.

“I can finish the rest tomorrow,” she said, meaning the color corrections, and maybe other things as well. “There’s not much left.”

Jihyo set her empty container down. “Good.”

There was a brief pause that could still have been ordinary if anyone had wanted it to be.

Then Jihyo looked at Yunjin. “You okay?”

The question landed gently.

Yunjin looked briefly surprised, not by the question itself but by the plainness of it. Then she gave a small shrug. “I’m here.”

Jihyo tilted her head. “That was not the question.”

Nayeon resisted, very deliberately, the urge to interfere.

Yunjin glanced down at the chopsticks still in her hand, then set them beside the empty container. “I’m fine.”

Jihyo gave her a look so dry it nearly crackled.

Yunjin laughed softly through her nose. “Sorry. That’s contagious in this place.”

“It really is,” Jihyo said. Her gaze warmed. “You don’t have to be fine just because she’s pretending to be functional.”

Nayeon made a face. “This feels targeted.”

“It is.”

Yunjin looked over at Nayeon then, and something in her expression changed. Not dramatically. Just enough that Nayeon had to look away first.

“I’m not falling apart,” Yunjin said quietly.

Jihyo nodded once. “I know.”

“It’s just…” Yunjin hesitated, searching for a version of the truth she could live with once it was spoken. “I think I forgot how much I already disliked her before this.”

Nayeon looked up.

Jihyo, to her credit, didn’t react with surprise. “Yeah,” she said simply.

Yunjin leaned one shoulder against the counter. “I used to hear things. When I was younger. From my mom, from Nayeon’s mom when she visited. Little pieces.” Her fingers worried once at the sleeve of her sweater. “And then I saw the rest.”

The studio went still in a different way than before.

Not tense.
Just honest.

Jihyo’s face softened fully now. “You saw way too much for someone who should have just been having cake at birthday parties.”

Yunjin smiled faintly, but there was no humor in it. “I think that’s why this bothers me.”

Nayeon stood very still.

Something sharp and difficult moved in her chest. Not pain exactly. Or not only pain. The shape of being seen from angles she had never asked anyone to keep.

Jihyo glanced toward her then, and for once there was no edge in it at all.

“She’s not saying you did anything wrong by taking the project,” Jihyo said.

Yunjin nodded. “I know.”

“She’s saying Mina makes her want to commit crimes,” Nayeon muttered.

That got a brief laugh out of both of them, to Nayeon’s immense relief.

Jihyo folded her arms loosely. “For the record, I support this instinct spiritually.”

Yunjin shook her head.

The moment eased.

Then Jihyo looked between them, and whatever she saw in that small gap of shared tiredness seemed to satisfy her enough that she did not push further. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve done my part. I’ve brought food, emotional surveillance, and superior judgment.”

“You forgot humility,” Nayeon said.

“I leave that to the weak.”

When she finally headed out, she squeezed Yunjin’s shoulder once on her way past and nudged Nayeon’s arm with two fingers.

“Don’t work any later,” she said.

“I own the place.”

“And yet I’m still more in charge somehow.”

That, annoyingly, was true.

After she left, the studio felt emptier than it had before.

Not lonely. Just quieter in a way that made every remaining sound more distinct. The snap of a storage drawer. The click of Yunjin closing her laptop. The hum of the lights overhead.

Nayeon locked the front door while Yunjin gathered the last of her things. Neither of them hurried. Closing routines had their own pace, one built over repetition and familiar division of labor. Yunjin checked the backup drives. Nayeon powered down the editing stations. Yunjin made sure the print orders for tomorrow were stacked in the right tray. Nayeon turned off the display lighting in the front.

By the time they stepped outside, the air had cooled enough to raise goosebumps along Nayeon’s arms.

The drive home was quieter than usual, but no longer strained in the same jagged way as the night before. More tired than tense. Yunjin leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes at one red light, only opening them when Nayeon reached over and tapped once at her wrist.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Nayeon said.

Yunjin blinked at her. “Are you jealous of unconsciousness now?”

“Only when it gets your attention before I do.”

The sentence came out before Nayeon could censor it.

Silence followed.

Nayeon kept her eyes very firmly on the traffic light.

Beside her, Yunjin turned her head. “That was interesting.”

Nayeon groaned softly. “I hate speaking.”

“Clearly.”

But there was laughter tucked under the words now, and when the light changed, something in the car felt warmer.

At home, they changed into softer clothes and drifted naturally toward the kitchen without deciding it aloud.

Yunjin found rice.
Nayeon pulled vegetables from the drawer.
A pan came out. Then another.
Music, low and half-random, came from somebody’s phone set near the sink.

Cooking together had always made more sense to Nayeon than trying to speak about emotions directly. It gave hands jobs and mouths excuses and let intimacy happen sideways where nobody had to be brave enough to call it by name.

Tonight it came easily.

Not perfect, not untouched by the last few days, but easy enough to feel like reprieve.

Nayeon sliced mushrooms while Yunjin measured sauce into a bowl and complained about Olivia using the phrase “post-structural color grief” during seminar critique with a straight face.

“That sounds fake,” Nayeon said.

“It was devastatingly real.”

“Are you sure Olivia isn’t terrible?”

Yunjin looked over, one eyebrow lifting.

Nayeon kept cutting mushrooms with exaggerated innocence.

A smile tugged at Yunjin’s mouth. “You’re still doing that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re acting like she’s a threat to your peace because she borrowed my notes once.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“What is it, then?”

Nayeon tipped the mushrooms into the pan harder than necessary. “I haven’t decided.”

Yunjin laughed softly and turned back to the sauce.

The sound moved through Nayeon in a way she chose, once again, not to examine too closely.

By the time dinner was finished, the kitchen smelled warm and savory and lived-in. They ate on the couch instead of at the table, plates balanced on their knees, the TV idling through the menus of three different streaming apps before either of them could commit to something.

“You always do this,” Yunjin said.

“I’m curating an experience.”

“You’re scrolling.”

“Artfully.”

In the end they settled on an old movie they had both seen before, something familiar enough that not paying complete attention did not count as failure.

Halfway through, Nayeon realized the apartment had gone very still around them.

The city outside was a muted shimmer behind the windows. The dishes had been abandoned in the sink. The lamp near the couch threw soft gold across the room, catching in Yunjin’s hair where it had nearly dried.

Nayeon had stopped following the plot fifteen minutes ago.

Part of that was because she was tired.
The other part was because Yunjin was sitting beside her in that loose, quiet way that always made the couch feel smaller than it was. One leg folded under herself, one arm along the back cushion, body warm and familiar at the edge of Nayeon’s space without ever crowding it.

At some point, without discussion, Nayeon leaned sideways.

Just a little.
Just enough that her shoulder met Yunjin’s upper arm.

Yunjin did not react at first. Not outwardly. She just shifted the tiniest bit to make the angle easier, as if Nayeon doing this belonged so naturally in the evening that it would have been stranger not to account for it.

That tiny accommodation nearly undid her.

Nayeon let herself settle more fully.

The movie kept going. Somebody onscreen was saying something emotional in a rainstorm. Nayeon did not care. She was aware instead of Yunjin’s warmth, the clean trace of her shampoo, the slow steady rise and fall of her breathing. The kind of nearness that should have felt dangerous and instead felt, infuriatingly, like home.

She was asleep before she meant to be.

The movie had long since reached credits by the time Yunjin looked down and realized Nayeon had gone entirely limp against her.

For a moment she stayed still.

Nayeon rarely fell asleep on her unless she was truly exhausted. Even then, she usually woke half a second later with some muttered complaint about being fine and not asleep at all, as though unconsciousness were an accusation she needed to defend herself against.

Not tonight.

Tonight her cheek was warm through the cotton of Yunjin’s shirt, one hand gone slack against the blanket pooled over both their knees. Her breathing had settled into the deep, even rhythm of someone who had outrun herself for a whole day and finally, accidentally, lost.

Yunjin turned her head just enough to study her properly.

Asleep, Nayeon looked younger around the edges. Not childish. Just unguarded in a way waking never allowed her to be for long. The small line that had lived between her brows all week was gone. Her mouth had softened. A strand of hair had slipped across her forehead and stayed there.

Yunjin lifted a hand, hesitated only once, then brushed it back.

Nayeon didn’t wake.

Something in Yunjin’s chest tightened so gently it almost passed for ache.

“Come on,” she murmured, though it was really for herself.

She shifted carefully, one arm sliding behind Nayeon’s back, the other under her knees. Nayeon made a quiet, sleepy sound of protest as she was lifted, then immediately burrowed closer instead of resisting.

Yunjin nearly laughed.

The apartment was dim and quiet as she carried her down the hall. Nayeon was not exactly light, but Yunjin had done this once before after a double shift and a gallery opening had left Nayeon dead on her feet and incapable of walking a straight line without indignation. This time she moved more slowly, less because of the weight and more because the moment felt too fragile to jostle.

At the bedroom, she nudged the door wider with her shoulder and crossed to the bed.

“Hey,” she said softly as she lowered Nayeon onto the mattress. “Wake up a little.”

Nayeon’s eyes opened the smallest amount. Not enough to focus properly. Just enough to look at Yunjin through sleep-heavy lashes and make a face like being conscious was a personal insult.

“You kidnapped me.”

Yunjin stared at her.

Then, because she was only human, laughed outright.

“I carried you to bed.”

“That’s worse.”

“You were asleep.”

“I was resting.”

“You were drooling on my shoulder.”

Nayeon’s eyes opened a fraction more. “Lies.”

“Tragic but true.”

Nayeon squinted at her, then seemed to give up on dignity altogether and let her head fall back against the pillow. “You’re rude.”

“And yet,” Yunjin said softly, pulling the blanket over her, “you keep me around.”

Nayeon made a vague sound that could have meant anything.

Or maybe not.

Because after a second, without opening her eyes again, she mumbled, “You always stay.”

The room went still.

Yunjin’s hand paused where she had been smoothing the blanket near Nayeon’s shoulder.

Nayeon, apparently unaware she had just said something capable of changing the molecular structure of the air, was already drifting again.

Yunjin stood there for a long moment looking down at her.

Then she sat carefully on the edge of the bed and let herself do one reckless, quiet thing. She touched the back of her fingers to Nayeon’s temple, just once, brushing loose hair away from her face.

“Yeah,” she whispered, though Nayeon would not hear it. “I do.”

When she finally changed for bed and slipped in beside her later, Nayeon moved toward her in sleep without hesitation, finding warmth the way people found home in the dark.

Yunjin lay awake longer than she meant to.

Not unhappy.
Not exactly.

Just aware, in that deep and terrible way love sometimes made possible, that tenderness could coexist with fear for a very long time before either one admitted what it was becoming.

Beside her, Nayeon slept on.