Taeyeon was “straight”. The alternative wasn’t feasible. She was just a young, wild girl, fooling around, and it wasn’t serious. But it was. Because she loved Sunny. And she knew she loved Sunny, and at 6 a.m. after she had the most ually-induced emotionally lightening experience of her life she fell asleep next to her panic-stricken, and doing that exact thing has not ceased, even to this day.

So that night, under the guise that they were just friends, they went to sunny’s room and shut and locked the door. Sunny lit candles and she had this playlist on, some songs of which Taeyeon still doesn’t know if she either wants to touch herself to or cry to or never listen to again. But she digress. They sat next to each other, and giggled. “Are we really going to do this?” Taeyeon laughed. Sunny laughed. Taeyeon told her that she had never done this before. Half of her was calmed by the fact that she had some inkling of how to touch Sunny, because it was how she’d want to be touched. But it was more foreign to her than a man’s body. More foreign to her even though she’d had that physiology all her life. Because none of that matters when you want to love someone for more than just their body.

So they listed how they were going to do this. They would kiss first, and then they outlined the next steps and how they would do them one at a time and then they would stop and talk about it and make sure they still wanted to do it or go to the next step and if at any point one of them wanted to stop, that was it, they would stop. They didn’t stop.

Taeyeon had “boyfriends” before– pubescent men she could seduce into loving her with her femme looks and overtly ual nature. That was easy. Girls weren’t. Girls were what she really wanted. And when something ever matters to her, she is usually perplexed and terrified and cowardly and confused.

These boys never made her , she made herself , they just happened to be there while it happened. They never made her cry for any other reason than that she felt unwanted. They touched her to warm her up to touch them, not because they wanted her to be that completely vulnerable and literally and metaphorically .

So roughly four hours into the first night of the long awaited physical enactment of their already raging love affair, Sunny was between her and she didn’t have any clothes on and she knew what was about to happen because they had talked about this and she can’t even phrase into words how badly she wanted it but she’ll tell you that it was just about as much as she wanted to run away screaming because she was not gay.

Sunny could sense that. Sunny asked her what was wrong. She told her the truth. Sunny smiled. she doesn’t remember what Sunny told her, but it was something along the lines of the fact that she didn’t have to be worried, and that they could go slowly and that she just had to lay back and close her eyes and not think about anything but how good it felt.

The most poignant memory she has from that night was looking down at sunny, and feeling like she wasn’t worthy of such a perfect person loving her like this, and even though she kept on with her nonsensical thoughts sunny made her come in that back-arching, oh-my-god-please-don’t-stop, repeated exhales and sighs, waves of that familiar high that keep crashing through your body and afterwards you don’t think, that was great, you think, She loves sunny kind of way. That kind of .

And she thought that was as good as it got, until Sunny made her do the same thing, and that was even better. They laid next to each other for a while after that, limbs intertwined, the playlist still on repeat, the candles burning out. The sun was rising. her real life was dawning again. Sunny was falling asleep, but her eyes were peeled open and staring at the ceiling.

She hasn’t grown out of that yet. But she is not entirely unhappy that it happens. It tells her it means something. It shows her what matters. It scares the mother ing out of her but it’s never there while she is staring in some woman’s eyes like sunny’s the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

And so she knows it’s not what she is doing that’s wrong, it’s what the world would say about it that is. She is never afraid of it until she realizes it’s another notch in the “reasons the world will exile her” belt.

And so she thinks to herself, it will be okay because eventually there will be a woman that she wakes up next to who doesn’t make her feel that way because she knows sunny’ll be there after breakfast, and that even if everybody else looks with disdain, Sunny won’t. Sunny’ll be there if other people walk out.

But the truth is, the only people who walked away, were Sunny herself.