Clink. Taeyeon taps her spoon absently against the edge of her bowl. Clink. Clink. The soup is really good – delicious, actually, but she doesn’t have much of an appetite. Clink. Clink. Clink.

“Can you stop that? You’re driving me insane.”

Half-startled, she looks over and sees Sunkyu, whose expression is one of utter, frustrated exasperation.

“Oh.” Taeyeon puts down her spoon. “Sorry.”

“Taeyeon,” Sunkyu sighs. “You’re driving me insane.”

“I’ll stop the spoon thing—”

“This isn’t about the spoon thing!”

Taeyeon gives her a blank look. “I’m not even doing anything besides that.”

“Exactly,” Sunkyu says through gritted teeth. “Why aren’t you? What happened with Jessica? You’ve been all—weird since you came back from her house.”

“I think I’m pretty weird most of the time.”

“You are, but not this type of weird.”

Taeyeon picks up the spoon again and takes a sip of soup; it’s almost cold. “I’m trying out something new.”

“Taeyeon—”

“Do you want some soup?”

“No, I don’t want any soup.” Sunkyu looks like she might knock the bowl out of Taeyeon’s hand. “This isn’t about the soup, and it’s not about the spoon!”

Taeyeon stares at Sunkyu with wide eyes. She can’t remember the last time she saw Sunkyu angry, much less at her. They’re best friends, after all, and neither of them is the type to shout it out in an argument. That’s more Tiffany’s style.

Sunkyu takes a deep breath, and she seems to calm down. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just—I’m so done with this whole mess between you two. It never should have gotten so far.”

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Taeyeon starts to say, but she swallows the words before they’re out of . Sunkyu’s her best friend, and she’s just looking out for her, and it’s not fair for her to constantly deflect and deny. Even she’s tired of it, and if she is, no wonder Sunkyu is so exasperated.

“I don’t know what to do,” she admits. “I feel like I messed everything up.”

“What happened?” Sunkyu asks, her voice gentler now.

“Jessica—” Taeyeon’s mouth feels as dry as a bone. She her lips and swallows, but it doesn’t help. “—kissed me.”

“What? Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

At first, she almost thinks Sunkyu is being difficult, but then she realizes she actually spoke too quietly to be heard. She clears and speaks louder.

“Jessica kissed me.”

Sunkyu just gives her a blank, uncomprehending look. “She did what?”

“She kissed me, okay? She. Kissed. Me.”

Sunkyu’s mouth falls open. “Oh my God,” she breathes. She looks like she wants to say something else, but just stops there.

“I know,” Taeyeon says heavily. “That’s what I thought too.”

“Well, did you kiss her back?”

“That’s all you’re going to say? What about ‘why did she do that’?”

Sunkyu gives her a look like she’s stupid. “Why do you think she did it? Why do people usually kiss other people?”

“But Jessica can’t possibly like me,” Taeyeon says in a small voice. “How could she? Why would she?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I’ve messed everything up,” Taeyeon says hollowly. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Taeyeon,” Sunkyu says in a slow, measured voice. “I know you can be—thicker than a block of wood, but please tell me you aren’t this dumb.”

“Okay, so she kissed me, you think that means she has feelings for me, right? Well, she told me I don’t understand, and I don’t. I don’t understand. Why would Jessica have feelings for me?”

“Because.” Sunkyu’s voice is suddenly so gentle Taeyeon feels like she can’t handle it. “Unlike what you may think, Taeyeon, you’re not hard to love.”

“This is after I treated her like…after all those months.” Taeyeon puts her face in her hands. “How could she even stand to be around me? How could she—” She looks up at Sunkyu, and she thinks that there must be desperation written over her face, because the concern in Sunkyu’s eyes goes up a notch to worry. “I was so terrible to her, Sunkyu, I said such—awful, horrible things. How could she possibly—”

“—love you?” Sunkyu finishes. “The heart works in strange ways, Taeyeon.”

“Love me,” Taeyeon repeats in a flat voice. “Love. Me.”

“Well, you know that she loves you, don’t you?” Sunkyu says in a reasonable voice. “After all, you love her too. You love all of us, even if it’s hard for you to say it out loud.”

“I love you, like a sister. All of you. Except…except Tiffany, and.”

“And?”

“I’m not in love with Jessica, Sunkyu. I think I would know if I was.”

“Would you?” Sunkyu muses. “I never said you were in love with her. But you said just now that you don’t feel the same way about her as you do the rest of us.”

“Well, I don’t want to kiss you guys,” Taeyeon says wryly, “and I wouldn’t want to kiss Hayeon.”

“So you wanted to kiss her?”

“I don’t know what I want, okay?” Taeyeon takes a deep breath, suddenly realizing that her hands are clenched into fists. She unfurls her fingers, feeling the blood return to them in throbbing little pinpricks. She didn’t know her grip was so tight. “No,” she says quietly with a sigh. “I guess that’s not true. I do know a little.”

She knows that she wants Jessica. But…in what way? Does she want to date Jessica? Does she want to love her? Her head feels like it’s spinning with questions, like there are flocks of dismayed birds fluttering inside her skull, and she feels dizzy with the force of her confusion.

“Taeyeon,” Sunkyu says gently, putting a hand on her arm. “It’s normal to be confused. Not everyone knows exactly how they feel about…the person they feel something else for.”

“Something else,” Taeyeon repeats, and she thinks that those two words not only describe how she feels about Jessica, but also Jessica as a whole, very well. “Why is it that other people seem to know what I want and how I feel better than I do?”

“What other people?” Sunkyu asks mildly. “I’m not ‘other people’.”

Taeyeon smiles a little at that. “No,” she agrees. “You’re not.”

“It’s different to be on the outside. You can’t see yourself clearly because you see yourself through your own eyes. And I have a feeling that you don’t see the same person we do.”

“And who do you see?”

“I see you,” Sunkyu says simply. “I just see you, our Taengoo, who always does her best and never thinks it’s good enough. Who cares about us so much, who fights for us, and doesn’t realizes how much she does because she always expects better from herself.”

“Sunkyu—”

“I think that’s who Jessica sees too.” Sunkyu smiles, her eyes tired but warm. “And maybe you don’t see the way she looks at you, but I have, Taeyeon. Not a lot of people get looked at that way, you know.”

Taeyeon feels like her heart has climbed into , and if she’s not careful, she’ll choke on it. “And how do you think I look at her?”

Sunkyu lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Really now, Taeyeon, I can’t give you all the answers. You’re going to have to do some work yourself.”

Taeyeon’s mouth ghosts up, halfway to a smile. “You’re right. I have to do some work for myself.”

“You know, you never answered my question before.”

“You asked a lot of questions. Which one are you talking about?”

Sunkyu’s gaze is even, steady. “Did you kiss her back?”

Taeyeon’s mind flashes back to the past, to the bed and Jessica beneath her, all long hair and soft skin and that voice, low and raspy, gasping her name and please don’t tell me to stop.

“I did.” She swallows. “And I think I hurt her by doing that.”

“Well, you probably would have hurt her more if you didn’t, right?”

Maybe, but maybe what she’s doing now would just hurt Jessica more in the long run. Maybe cruelty can be kind and kindness cruel. Taeyeon doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of things. But she does know one thing, and it’s that she’s tired of hurting Jessica.

“I feel like my body just reacted on its own. She kissed me, and I didn’t see it coming at all, and I never—I never thought about her like that, but I kissed her back. And then we…”

Sunkyu holds up a hand. “I don’t want or need to hear the rated details.”

“There were no rated details!” Taeyeon splutters. “What do you think we did?” Sunkyu gives her a look. “We just kissed a bit, okay? She’s good at kissing, too good.”

“I really didn’t need to know that.”

Taeyeon puts a hand over her forehead like she’s feverish, although her skin feels not warm but clammy.

“Why did I kiss her back?”

“Do you really regret it?” Sunkyu asks in a reasonable voice. “I mean, obviously you think you made a mistake, but if you could go back and do it again, would you have pushed her away?”

Would she have? Could she have? Taeyeon thinks about it again, and the look in Jessica’s eyes, the way Jessica said her name. She thinks about it, turning the question over and over in her mind, like a spool of thread that just gets more and more tangled as she works at it, and she still doesn’t have an answer.

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I just know that I don’t want to hurt her anymore.”

“I think…hurt would be hard to avoid,” Sunkyu says delicately. “Not just for her, but for you too.”

“I don’t have the right to be hurt, given that I was the one who screwed everything up.”

“We all have the right to be hurt, Taeyeon,” Sunkyu says gently, “and you know, you worry that you don’t care enough about Jessica, but…I think that you care a lot more than you realize.”

I care more than I want to, Taeyeon thinks, and it’s a familiar feeling, because that’s how she felt for years about them, that she cared for them, needed them, loved them, more than she wanted to, more than she was comfortable with, but at the same time…

It’s not the same. It’s familiar, but not the same.

Jessica Jung, do you know what do you do to me? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Jooyoung tells them that Jessica’s coming back the next day, and Taeyeon feels something leap and then drop in her stomach. Anticipation, followed by dread.

The other girls are all happy and excited, although Sunkyu throws her some worried looks. Sooyoung and Hyoyeon jokingly discuss throwing her a welcome back party, complete with cucumber bouquets.

“You guys are so evil,” Yuri declares. “I like it.”

“Yeah?” Tiffany asks with a grin. “Evil appeals to you?”

“It doesn’t appeal to you?”

“I like my girls nice.”

“And your boys bad?” Sunkyu asks with a sideway grin.

“Oh please,” Sooyoung snorts. “Have you seen Mr. Hwang? He’s hardly a bad boy. He couldn’t be farther away from it, actually.”

“I don’t know, her old boyfriend was even nicer, I think.”

“Guys,” Tiffany says in a loud voice. Well, a louder voice. “Can we stop talking about me like I’m not here?”

“I’m sorry, Fany,” Sooyoung says. “Would you like to talk about Mr. Hwang to us?”

“No more than you want to talk about Mr. Choi.”

“I think you guys are sick of me talking about him,” Sooyoung sighs sadly.

“Just a little,” Sunkyu says, holding her thumb and index finger apart by half an inch or so. “It’s okay, it’s nice to live vicariously through your love lives.”

“You could get your own love life,” Sooyoung suggests.

Sunkyu makes a face. “Too much work. And besides, what are friends for?”

Taeyeon snorts. She doubts that Sunkyu wants to live through hers. Well, she doesn’t exactly have a love life, just a lot of conflicts and questions to which she doesn’t have answers.

“TaeTae?” Tiffany asks. “Is everything okay?”

Taeyeon blinks, snapping out of her thoughts. Tiffany’s eyes are bright and concerned, and her hand is a comforting weight on Taeyeon’s arm. Taeyeon takes her wrist and leads her to the corner of the room.

“Everything is fine with me.” The lie comes out so calmly and evenly she can almost believe it. Almost. “I wanted to ask about you, actually. How are things with him? Is everything alright?”

Tiffany lowers her lashes. “They’re fine.” Her voice is steady, bland. Sort of like him, Taeyeon thinks. “We haven’t had any problems.”

Taeyeon’s not an idiot; she knows the utter lack of infection in Tiffany’s voice doesn’t mean anything good.

“Is this what you meant earlier, when you said you didn’t know what was wrong, but you weren’t happy?”

“You remember what I said, huh?”

“Of course I remember. You don’t think my memory is that bad, do you?”

Tiffany lifts her eyes and gives a gentle smile. “No, I know you have a great memory, I just thought you had bigger things to worry about, that’s all.”

“Bigger things,” Taeyeon repeats. “And what are these bigger things?”

“Do you remember when I told you that I wanted you to be happy? That’s still what I want, you know. That’s what I’ll always want.”

“Because you feel guilty?” The words slip out practically of their own volition.

There’s something dark in Tiffany’s eyes; maybe it’s hurt, maybe it’s something else. “Because you’re my best friend. Because I care about you.”

“I care about you too.” Taeyeon pauses. “I want you to be happy too. You don’t talk to me anymore, you know. You ask me what’s going on with me, but you don’t tell me about your life. You don’t tell me anything.” Hurt slips into her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Tiffany says sincerely. “I’m just—confused. I’m trying to figure things out, and I’m sorry if you think that I’m holding out on you. I’m not; I just don’t know what to do.”

That makes two of them, then. Taeyeon wonders what Tiffany’s confused about – she said herself that there weren’t any problems between them, but maybe they lack more than problems. Tiffany has always been a romantic, looking for the butterflies and the fireworks, and maybe she hasn’t been able to find them with him.

Taeyeon doesn’t need butterflies or fireworks, or candlelight dinners, or walks hand-in-hand under the stars. She just wants someone with whom she can be herself, feel comfortable, have serious conversations and then joke around in the next second. Someone funny, and kind, and not hard on the eyes.

Maybe her standards are too high.

“You can try talking to Sunkyu,” Taeyeon says. “She’s practically a relationship counsellor now.”

“Did she counsel you about your relationship?”

“You know I don’t have a relationship.”

Tiffany smiles. “Do you want one?”

“Fany—”

“I’m just saying, if you want a relationship, then go for it. If you don’t, then it’s okay too. Just go after what you want, you know? Because if you don’t, and you change your mind one day, it might be gone. We only have so many chances.”

Taeyeon nods, feeling the heavy solemnity in Tiffany’s voice like a physical weight. “I feel like I might have used up all of mine already.”

“You don’t know until you try, right?”

“Have you tried?”

Tiffany blinks, her lashes casting long shadows on her cheeks. “What?”

“You told me to go after what I want. Well, you should go after what you want too. And if you don’t want him—”

“I never said I don’t want him.”

“You don’t need to say it. I’m not a block of wood all the time, you know.”

“A block of wood?” Tiffany repeats, sounding bemused. Then she chuckles, seeming to get it. “You only seem to be that when it comes to your own life.”

“So you think I’m stupid and blind too, huh?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily use those words,” Tiffany says delicately. “Let’s go with ‘a little dense’.”

Taeyeon thinks about the way Yuri had looked at Tiffany, and she wonders if Tiffany knows, or if she’s not the only one who’s dense. Or maybe it’s not that, maybe people only see what they want to see.

“Thank you for the kind words,” she says wryly. “You always knew just what to say.”

“Hmm,” Tiffany says quietly. “If only I knew just what to do.”

“I think we all wish that.”

Tiffany gives a wry smile. “Too bad the world isn’t a wish-granting factory.”

“Yeah,” Taeyeon murmurs. “Too bad.”

A/N: The line "the world isn't a wish-granting factory" is from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.