“Taengoo,” Sunkyu calls from where she’s trying to reach something in a cabinet. “Want to pass me a chair?”

Taeyeon is about to reach for one, but she’s beaten to helping Sunkyu.

“Your poor baby.” Jessica walks over, rising to her tiptoes, and manages to grab the pack of cookies.

“Thanks, Sica!” Sunkyu beams, and Jessica just rolls her eyes and tells her that the best thanks would be to stop her “sickening aegyo” for a week. In response, Sunkyu pouts, and Jessica threatens to take her cookies back and put them on an even higher shelf.

“Geez, the ice princess is really making a comeback, huh?” Sunkyu grumbles, and then she takes her cookies and speeds away before Jessica can vaporize her with her glare.

Taeyeon laughs. “You really don’t like her aegyo.”

Jessica raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“I don’t mind it. Usually. And she’s my best friend, so…”

Jessica rinses off her cup and pours herself some juice. She takes it to the table and sits down, crossing a leg over the other one.

“I thought Tiffany was your best friend.”

“She is, but…” Taeyeon hesitates, unsure how to finish that sentence. All the endings are along the lines of she’s not just my best friend and she’s more than that, but how could she say that when all the feelings beyond mere friendship are on her side?

“They’re both my best friends,” she finally says, “in somewhat different ways.”

Jessica nods, seeming to accept the reply. She takes a gulp of juice, her bottom lip into .

“You don’t have that look in your eyes when it comes to Tiffany anymore,” she suddenly says.

“Huh?” Taeyeon asks, confused. “What look?”

Jessica’s eyes flicker away. “Never mind.”

Taeyeon takes a seat beside Jessica; their knees brush slightly and Jessica’s leg jerks back, too fast to be deliberate. Taeyeon’s face falls slightly at the sign that Jessica still isn’t comfortable around her. She can’t blame her for it, and really, she should have expected it, but she can’t help the flash of hurt inside her.

“I don’t like it when you look like that,” Jessica says quietly.

“You mean, the way I look at Tiffany?”

“No, not that. I mean—” Jessica leans forward, staring intently at Taeyeon, like she’s trying to see right into and through her. Taeyeon feels her face warm at the intensity of Jessica’s gaze, but she doesn’t – can’t – draw her eyes away. “How do you not know what you look like? It’s your face, Taeyeon, and your eyes.”

Taeyeon manages a weak smile. “I’ve been told that I have bad eyesight and I should get some glasses.”

Jessica chuckles quietly at that. “Sounds like some wise advice.”

“Yeah, the person who told me that can be wise.” Taeyeon waits a few beats before adding, “…sometimes.”

Jessica rolls her eyes, but pulls up at the corners, and she idly shifts her leg so that their knees press together. It’s a casual motion, one that can almost be dismissed as accidental, but somehow Taeyeon has a feeling that it’s not.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Taeyeon realizes.

“I didn’t?”

She knows that Jessica’s very good at evading things if she wants to – she has a gift for dancing around a question – but most of the times she doesn’t bother to. Jessica’s not really an evasive kind of person; she’s too blunt, too direct for that. She’ll either ignore you completely or she’ll tell you point-blank to back off.

But given how Jessica was the one who brought it up both times, Taeyeon thinks she deserves a proper explanation.

“What did you mean?” she presses. “About Tiffany? And about—the other thing?”

Jessica doesn’t meet Taeyeon’s eyes for a few seconds. Her head is bowed slightly, bangs covering her eyes, and her grip is almost white-knuckled on her mug. Taeyeon doesn’t know what she’s thinking at all, and she finds that she really, really wants to know, and she also wants Jessica to stop holding her cup so tightly and to hold her head up and to look at her.

“You usually look at Tiffany like—I can’t even describe it.” Jessica frowns, surprisingly deep lines etching in her forehead. “Like the rest of the world doesn’t exist and it’s just the two of you, or something. Like you only see her, and you wish she only saw you too. Sometimes you even look kind of like that when you’re just talking about her.”

Taeyeon can’t talk for a moment. Actually, make that a whole lot of moments. She doesn’t know how she looks at Tiffany; she doesn’t try to look at Tiffany a certain way, that’s for sure, but loving Tiffany has never required any effort. She doesn’t try to love Tiffany; she just does.

(She’s tried to stop, but she’s never gotten very far. Until now, that is. She realizes that Tiffany’s smile no longer makes her insides tie into knots, and fanservice with Tiffany doesn’t ache like it used to, like pressing down on a bruise that refuses to heal. It’s a strange, unexpected realization, one that settles down on her slowly but sharply.

She didn’t try to fall in love with Tiffany – she just did. And she didn’t try to fall out of love with Tiffany – she just did. Love isn’t a very voluntary thing.)

“Wow, that makes me sound like a pathetic loser,” Taeyeon says, not exactly joking, accompanied by a weak chuckle.

Jessica brushes her hair out of her eyes, giving a small smile that’s tired and worn down around the edges. A smile that’s beautiful in a sad, painful kind of way.

“Love makes people into pathetic losers.”

After that blunt statement, Jessica takes a big swallow of juice, like she’s toasting to her words or something. Taeyeon wryly thinks that if she had something to drink, she would join Jessica in that toast.

“Is that what all those books you read have taught you?” she asks, light-hearted, teasing, because the atmosphere between them is getting dangerously gloomy, and really, she’s had more than enough gloom lately.

Jessica’s mouth quirks up in a shadow of a smile. “No, I’ve just been reading chick lit lately and those books always make love sound prettier and easier than it actually is.”

Taeyeon smiles a little, partly out of amusement, mostly out of agreement. “Then why do you keep reading them?”

Jessica shrugs. “Sometimes it’s nice to think about something pretty and easy.”

Taeyeon can’t argue with that. In their lives, a lot of things are pretty, from other idols they interact with to costumes that are laid out for them, but not a lot of things are truly beautiful. And as for easy – she doesn’t let herself think about that word very often. It’s better that way.

“And I didn’t mean that you’re a pathetic loser,” Jessica adds. “I don’t think you are. Tiffany’s not—hard to love.”

Taeyeon feels like Jessica was about to say something other than hard to love, but she doesn’t really know why she thought that, so she pushes the thought to the back of her mind.

“But she’ll never love me back,” she says quietly. “Well, she does love me, but not in the way I want.” She blinks a few times, forehead furrowing and corrects in an even quieter voice, “Wanted.”

“You’re not in love with her anymore?” Jessica’s talking in a very low voice too. Taeyeon doesn’t know why they’re whispering, but it seems right somehow, for this personal moment between the two of them, tucked away in the place where they spoke like strangers not so long ago and then made up amidst tears and laughter and confessions that Taeyeon had only spoken before in her mind and her dreams.

“You said I don’t look at her like that anymore.”

“I could be wrong.” Jessica looks away from Taeyeon, into the distance, her eyes oddly glassy. “I’m not good with feelings.”

“It’s okay,” Taeyeon says. “Neither am I.”

Jessica glances at her and then looks down at her cup like it’s tea and she’s trying to tell her future in the leaves.

“Good thing we’re in charge of vocals and not sentiments, then.”

It’s pretty funny but not exactly hilarious, and yet Taeyeon can’t stop laughing anyway. Jessica watches her laugh for a moment, eyes soft and warm, and then she joins in, her laughter so different from Taeyeon’s – high and sweet and hovering between delicate and shrill and just so feminine and so Jessica.

Their laughs don’t clash though, as different as they are. Actually they sound quite nice together. And then Taeyeon wonders what she’s doing thinking about how their laughs sound together, but she decides that this whole sitting at the kitchen table talking to Jessica thing is weird enough, but it’s not the bad kind of weird, not at all, and she won’t question it.

“You said…” Taeyeon hesitates, her lips. “You said you don’t like it when I look like—what I looked like when you said that. What did I look like?”

Jessica tilts her head to the side, her eyes dark and thoughtful, full of things that Taeyeon is yet to know.

“Sad,” she says, just as Taeyeon has almost given up on getting an answer. “You looked sad.”

Taeyeon swallows, wants to see if she’ll understand all the things in Jessica’s eyes a little better, but for some reason she can’t bring herself to meet her gaze.

“You don’t like it when I look sad?”

“I don’t like it when you are sad.” Jessica bites her lip, gnaws on the bottom one hard enough to leave the imprint of her teeth behind. “You don’t cry much, but you don’t laugh a lot either. I wish you would laugh more.”

“I don’t really like my laugh,” Taeyeon says self-consciously. “I sound like such an ahjumma.”

Jessica laughs at that: her bell-like, girlish laugh. “There’s nothing wrong with JumTaeng showing up once in a while.”

Taeyeon sighs, putting a hand over her forehead, and Jessica laughs again. That’s how Sunkyu finds them, empty cookie packet in hand, with Taeyeon looking like she’s trying to disappear behind her hand and Jessica laughing away in that way of hers.

“I need to get some new friends,” Sunkyu mutters, setting Taeyeon off, and Sunkyu walks away shaking her head as Taeyeon and Jessica double over in mirth and half-fall into each other with aching sides and light hearts.