A/N: A note for a certain scene: Tiffany hurt her ankle during Hoot era and couldn't perform for a while, and after one of their wins, when Seohyun was making a thank you speech, Jessica couldn't wait to address Tiffany and literally grabbed the mike from Seohyun so she could do so. You can watch that here.

When Jessica wakes up, there’s a girl in her bed. Long, black hair spills over a face she knows as well as her own and falls into eyes she could have looked into forever.

Tiffany smiles at her. “Jessi,” she says softly, trailing her fingers along Jessica’s arm, from wrist to elbow, then back again. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Jessica says dumbly. What is Tiffany doing in her bed? Maybe there was another storm in the night. Jessica can sleep through the apocalypse, so it’s not like she would have known.

“Well, it’s almost noon,” Tiffany laughs. “Not sure if it still counts as morning.”

Jessica tenses. “What about the performance?”

“What performance?” Tiffany asks indifferently. “We don’t have any schedules today.”

“What do you mean? We have – you have The Boys to perform. Don’t tell me you forgot.”

“Jessi.” Tiffany puts her hand on Jessica’s arm. “You worry too much.” She leans toward Jessica, and it makes the blankets slip down her torso, revealing tantalizing stretches of smooth, creamy skin. Jessica can’t help but stare.

“My eyes are up here,” Tiffany says, sounding amused.

“Sorry.” Jessica flushes, mortified. “I just – I. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Tiffany doesn’t look mad or disgusted. “You can look if you want. I don’t mind.”

Jessica meets her eyes with comically wide ones. She somehow manages to get out, “What?”

“You can look,” Tiffany repeats, “or touch, if you want.” She smiles, and Jessica almost stops breathing. “I want—” She blushes, and somehow she does it prettily, which doesn’t surprise Jessica, because Tiffany does a lot of things prettily. “I want you to.”

Jessica’s lungs almost give out on her. This doesn’t sound like a joke – Tiffany wouldn’t make a joke like that. Tiffany wouldn’t play with her. Right?

“Jessi.” Tiffany puts her hand on Jessica’s cheek, her touch gentle but firm. “I know you like me. I like you too.”

Her heart is the next part of her body that threatens to fail. “You do?”

Tiffany nods, her eyes bright, her face soft. Jessica wants to memorize her like this, wants to hold this moment close to her and return to it when she misses Tiffany the most.

“I like you,” Tiffany says again.

“Steph,” Jessica says helplessly. “Tiffany. I’ve been thinking about this for so long. Please tell me—”

“Jessica,” Tiffany cuts her off. “You think too much.” She smiles and leans in, making Jessica’s heart thunder, and then Tiffany’s lips are on hers—

Jessica flies up in bed, her heart racing, slamming against her ribs before sinking into the pits of her stomach. It’s far from the first time she’s dreamed about Tiffany, but her dreams have never been this realistic. This cruel.

Tiffany groggily gets out of bed, feeling like she barely slept even though she got a decent number of hours (as in more than three). She thinks she might have dreamed, but she can only remember a shadow of a smile, a ghost of a touch.

She presses her fingers against her temples until her headache starts to fade away. What little remnants of her dream that she held onto disappear with it. She thinks about their performance, the lines that she’s supposed to cover, the void there will be amongst the eight of them. She thinks about Jessica.

The last thought brings a smile to her face. Maybe Jessica turned back into a girl, she thinks. Maybe it was just a 24-hour thing, and she’ll walk out and see Jessica with long hair and soft curves and a smile that wouldn’t twist her stomach into knots.

Maybe.

“Oh.” Taeyeon’s face falls when she sees Jessica. “It’s you.”

“It’s nice to see you too,” Jessica says dryly, watching as Taeyeon ladles soup into nine bowls.

“Sorry.” Taeyeon gives a sheepish smile. “I was just – you know.”

“Yeah.” Jessica had hoped too. “I know.”

Taeyeon gestures to the bowls. “Can you help me put these on the table?”

“Sure.” Jessica grabs one in each hand. Only when her back is to Taeyeon does Taeyeon speak.

“Jessica—”

She doesn’t turn around. “If you’re going to tell me that it’s okay, then I’d rather you not say anything at all.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“If you’re going to bring her up…” Jessica can’t bear to say Tiffany’s name. She doesn’t need to; she’s sure Taeyeon knows to whom she’s referring.

“We’ll miss you,” Taeyeon says. “That’s what I was going to say.”

Jessica’s spine stiffens. It’s unlike Taeyeon to say such things out of nowhere (it’s unlike Taeyeon to say such things at all), and she briefly wonders if she’s dreaming again, but she dismisses the notion immediately.

“I put extra baechu in the soup for you,” Taeyeon adds.

Jessica puts the bowls down on the table and returns to the kitchen. Taeyeon is stacking dishes in the sink, her hands busy and head down. Jessica smiles a little. “Taengoo,” she says softly. “Thank you.”

Taeyeon doesn’t take her eyes away from the sink. “I mean it,” she says, “and I still think that you should talk to her.”

Jessica’s smile slips away. “We already talked about this.”

“I just don’t—”

“Good morning, Taengoo,” Yuri says, walking into the kitchen. Her voice sounds forcefully bright when she adds, “Jessica.”

“Good morning,” Jessica says listlessly, wondering who came up with the greeting. It’s not like mornings are always good – in fact, mornings are rarely good, and it’s a stupid thing to say.

“You should think about it,” Taeyeon says.

Jessica’s jaw clenches. “And you should—” She breaks off with a glance at Yuri, who looks confused and still won’t make eye contact with her. Does Taeyeon think that she hasn’t thought about it? It’s all she thinks about; Tiffany is all she thinks about.

“The soup smells good,” Yuri says, in a transparent attempt to diffuse the tension between Jessica and Taeyeon.

“Yeah.” Jessica closes her eyes and tries to dredge up some composure. It’s harder than she expected, harder than it’s been in a long time. “It smells great. Let’s go have some.”

Breakfast is a half-hearted affair, with everyone looking at Jessica at some time or another, mostly from the corners of their eyes. Jessica isn’t blind and she doesn’t miss the snuck glances, but she doesn’t address them either.

She’s tired. It’s partly from sleep deprival, but the thought of a nap holds no appeal to her. For the first time in forever, she has a whole day of spare time and she doesn’t want to sleep. What has her life come to?

Someone nudges her in the side. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Jessica looks up and meets Soonkyu’s concerned gaze. She should be angry at her for talking with Taeyeon behind her back, but she’s too tired to be angry. “I’m not hungry.”

“You should still eat,” Soonkyu insists. “I bet you won’t eat while we’re out.”

“I’m not hungry,” she repeats tonelessly.

“The soup is good,” Tiffany interjects. “There’s a lot of lettuce in it. You like lettuce, don’t you?”

“Cabbage,” Jessica corrects automatically.

“Cabbage.” Tiffany’s smile is adorable. “Sorry, you know I’m not good with this stuff.”

“It’s okay, I’ll forgive you for this terrible character flaw.”

Tiffany rolls her eyes, but she’s still smiling. “You’re so kind.”

“I know, right?”

“Stop flirting already,” Sooyoung says through a mouthful of food. “We have to go soon.”

Jessica almost drops her spoon. She doesn’t dare look at Tiffany, so she misses her faint blush.

“We still have leftovers in the fridge,” Hyoyeon says. “Make sure you eat lunch.”

Lunch is the last thing on Jessica’s mind, but she nods anyway. She tries to give Hyoyeon a grateful smile, but given how Hyoyeon won’t look at her, it’s completely pointless.

“You look tired, unnie,” Yoona says. At least Yoona is willing to look at her. Why are the maknaes taking this better? “You should get some sleep.”

Jessica shrugs. She has a feeling that sleep will be hard to come by until she can wake up from this nightmare.

“I can’t believe that the day has come that we’re telling Jessica to get more sleep,” Sooyoung says lightly.

Jessica doesn’t even respond to the joke. She just keeps her head down and works away at her soup like it’s a chore she has to complete. It’s one of her favourites, actually, and she would appreciate it a lot more if her stomach didn’t feel like the rest of her: tense and listless.

“Unnie,” Juhyun starts as Jessica’s on her last spoonful.

The spoon is an inch away from her lips. “What?”

“Are you—” Juhyun looks like she’s worried about what to say, lest that her words would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. “Do you feel alright?”

Jessica puts the soup in and swallows. She pushes back her bowl and stands up from the table. “I’m fine,” she says with as much conviction as she’s capable of, and walks away before they see through the lie.

Jessica stays in her room, resolving only to come out when they’re all gone. Maybe not even then. Maybe she’ll just stay here until they come back. That sounds like a decent plan.

A knock on her door jars her from her thoughts. She doesn’t feel like getting up to answer it, but the knocking persists. She has a feeling she knows who it is, and she’s never been able to deny her.

She opens the door and plasters her usual look of blankness across her face. It’s more of a default setting than a conscious expression, but her system must be screwed up, because it’s not coming easily.

“Hi,” Tiffany says softly.

Jessica swallows. “Hi.”

“I just came to say…”

“Goodbye?” she supplies blandly.

“No,” Tiffany says. “I came to say that – I’ll be thinking about you.”

Jessica looks away from her, scuffing her foot across the ground. She had to dig out the biggest pair of slippers they had to fit her feet. “Don’t think about me,” she says, even though Tiffany has been all she thought about for a very long time. “Just concentrate on the performance.”

“I can do both,” Tiffany says brightly. “I’m great at multi-tasking.”

Jessica manages a half-strangled laugh. “Steph.”

Tiffany holds out her arms, and Jessica is about to step into them when someone calls Tiffany’s name from the hall. It sounds like Taeyeon. It’s late, Jessica realizes, and Tiffany probably should have left already.

But she didn’t. She stayed to talk to Jessica. It’s terrible and selfish, but Jessica wishes that Tiffany could stay with her for the rest of the day. For the rest of all the days to come.

Tiffany has dropped her arms, but she’s standing closer to Jessica. Too close. Not close enough. “Jessi,” she says gently. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

Jessica nods, not trusting herself to speak.

“I’ll miss you,” Tiffany says. “You’ll watch, right?”

Jessica doesn’t want to watch; she wants to be there with them. She doesn’t want to see how easily they would fill in for her, how smooth the performance would be anyway, like they don’t need her at all. She doesn’t want to be left behind; for the past four years they’ve been all that she’s known, and she’s terrified that they would discover they’re actually better off without her.

It’s just one performance, she tells herself. You’re being ridiculous.

“Jessi?”

“You’d better win, okay?”

Tiffany smiles. “Hopefully I won’t have to wrestle the mic from Juhyun like you did.”

Jessica remembers the thrill of winning not as potent as the ache of missing, the painful presence of absence, remembers the words ready to spring off her tongue, not nearly enough to convey all the things she wanted to tell Tiffany.

She smiles too. “Are you planning your winning speech already? A bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”

“We’ll win for you,” Tiffany says, very seriously, before she breaks into a playful smile. “I’ll get to the mic first.”

“Fany,” Taeyeon calls impatiently from the hall. “Come on, we have to go.”

Tiffany looks apologetically at Jessica as she leaves her room, leaves her. Jessica’s legs move of their own accord as she follows Tiffany, who stops near the front door. “Bye, Jessi,” she says.

Jessica’s throat is tight. She squeezes out a “Bye, Steph,” and then Tiffany’s turning away, heading out the door to follow the rest of the girls. Jessica would have gone with them, would have been thinking longingly of her bed and given almost anything to be able to stay there. It’s funny, how she has that now and all she wants is the opposite.

You don’t know what you have until you lose it.

Taeyeon is the last to leave. “Get some rest,” she says gently, and then she’s gone too, and Jessica’s left all alone in the dorm that’s meant for nine and far too big for one.

Jessica stares at the door, even after Tiffany’s long gone, thinks about the look in her eyes and the sight of her upraised arms, the beginning of a hug. It’s like before, when she missed the contact that never came. She misses what could have been.