“In love with you?” Bomi kept repeating it out loud. “She’s in love with you. In love, she says. Wow.”

Bomi looked at Eunji carefully, her eyes half-closed in concentration.

“Are you in love with her?” She arched an eyebrow.

“No!” Eunji looked confused. “Yes? I don’t know. Why are you asking me this?”

Bomi looked at her friend, her eyes completely focused on Eunji’s expressions.

“I think you’re confused,” she said. “I think you feel something really deep for her but there’s something holding you back. I don’t think you’re ready to face it yet; first you need to find out what you feel on your own and then go after her when you’re ready. I think you feel pressured by her, maybe, and by other people around you and you’re going through a lot right now.”

As soon as she finished talking the door opened and Hayoung came in.

“Unnie! How are you?” The maknae expressed her concern towards Bomi, sitting next to her and across Eunji.

“I’m okay, Hayoungie,” Bomi answered. “How are you?”

“Good, good.” The maknae shrugged and suggested what she was here for. “Unnie, let’s go for a walk outside.”

Eunji opened her eyes in shock.

“Is she allowed to go out?” She asked. “What did the doctor say?”

“Chorong-unnie and I went to talk to him,” Hayoung said. “He said we can take her out, in a wheelchair since she’s not really able to walk comfortably.”

“But I don’t want to–”

“Bomi-unnie! It’s a wheelchair or nothing,” Hayoung raised her voice. “You’ve been stuck in this hospital bed for days, and you need to go out and get some fresh air. End of story.”

Bomi started laughing and sat up, shutting her eyes to contain the pain.

“Oh, Hayoung-ah... You’re such a grown up now.”

Hayoung looked at her, completely serious out of a sudden.

“Don’t do that.”

Bomi looked at her in confusion, and Eunji sighed loudly.

“What?”

“Don’t talk to me like you’re saying goodbye and you’re proud of me. Like you are glad that this is what you leave behind.” Both Eunji and Bomi looked surprised at Hayoung’s words.

“That’s not...,” Bomi hesitated. “I’m sorry, Hayoung. I am just proud of you no matter what’s going on.”

“It’s okay.” The maknae brushed its importance. “Let’s just go. I’ll take you. Eunji-unnie, are you coming with us?”

Eunji looked at Bomi carefully, trying to tell the other girl silently that they still hadn’t finished talking about her situation with Naeun.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “For a while at least.”

∼

“Chorong-unnie!”

The leader turned around when she heard Naeun’s voice. She had just walked Namjoo to the taxi, and the younger girl had left for the bungalow. She had wanted to grab some things of Bomi’s to take to the hospital, together with Chorong’s suitcase that the leader had prepared that morning in case she had to move.

“Naeun-ah,” Chorong said, “are you okay?”

Naeun looked at her unnie, hesitating. She was obviously having an internal fight, and she looked like she wanted to blurt her thoughts at any moment.

“Can I talk to you about something?” She sounded shy.

“Sure:” Chorong smiled, trying to comfort her friend. “Let’s go outside.”

The two girls walked outside through the empty aisle of the hospital. It was a nice summer day, and they’d been wasting the good weather lately with everything that had happened with Bomi. It would have been great to have their vacation as they had wanted to, it would have been perfect. But life had surprised them again, and not in a good way at all.

“I need advice,” Naeun said when they sat down in one of the benches scattered around the hospital’s gardens. Since many patients were able to walk around quite freely accompanied by nurses or family members, the gardens had been decorated and made comfortable for them all to take a walk when the weather was this great.

“It’s about Eunji-ah, isn’t it?” Chorong thought the younger girl was too see-through. It was too obvious when something was going through her mind.

Naeun nodded and blushed slightly. Somehow she had been doing that a lot in the past twenty-four hours, it was becoming a habit.

“I’ll go straight to the point.” There was still a part of her that reminded her of her own cold self, the one who wasn’t afraid of just blurting things out as they were without embellishing them. “I told her I love her.”

“You did what?” Chorong looked shocked for a couple of seconds.

“Yeah...” Naeun looked down. “I did it sort of jokingly at first but then realized I really did mean it... And Eunji-unnie... she looked so shocked. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.”

“Have you two spoken after that?”

“Oh, yes, we have,” Naeun answered. “We talked after I blurted it the first time, and then I ended up telling her again, saying I really did mean it.”

“Did she say anything? About how she felt?” Chorong grabbed Naeun’s hand and simply held it for a while, giving her friend all her support, both physical and psychical.

“She hasn’t,” Naeun said. “And I think I’m going to confront her about it later. She seems to be avoiding the topic.”

“Then why do you need my advice? You already know what you have decided to do,” Chorong stated, her mind going back to the time she first said those words and really meant them.

Naeun stayed quiet for a while, nodding in silence. Chorong’s mind went back in time, recalling those words and the situation when she first said them.

“When did you first tell Bomi-unnie that you loved her?” Naeun asked Chorong.

“Well, you see,” Chorong started. “It all started with a frog...”

∼

“Unnie, is this horror? Or is this terror?” Bomi was thinking out loud while watching the movie, sitting down on the couch while spending some quality time on her own. Chorong, who was taking care of her chores in the room next to her, was supposedly listening to her now girlfriend. But she was just immersed in her thoughts. She’d been officially dating Bomi for two weeks now, and even though their dongsaengs knew, they still hadn’t told their manager and the president of their agency. They were scared of the outcome of that talk.

Chorong had been making the beds and was now sweeping the floor. Bomi kept discussing whether the movie she was watching was horror or terror on her own, deeply focused on the issue that her mind was debating out loud. She seemed to be reaching a conclusion when a scream pierced the air and she froze in mid-thought.