Notes: [1] this one doesn’t have too much funneyz in it but this chap is a mandatory one to set the subplot for YulTi. If youre not into YulTi you might not enjoy this chapter tho L
[2] I apologize if this fic isn’t as comedic as you expected it to be. I don’t really write humor and I admit I really at it u___u but anyway hopefully you’ll enjoy this chapter!! o/

To Tiffany, Kwon Yuri is a walking paradox.

Her first impression of Kwon Yuri wasn’t nice. Tiffany has heard rumors about the taller girl; how she has gotten herself into a fight, how she managed to snag three Hongik University female students’ numbers in a night, et cetera, et cetera, but those were all just – rumors. Some true, most of them not. Kwon Yuri did get into fights. If the food fight incident down the school canteen (where she ended up nursing Nichkhun’s black eye and Taecyeon’s broken leg) does count.

(Additionally, Kwon Yuri came out unscathed. And grinning. Tiffany briefly wonders who the real man is.)

While she’s friends with nearly everybody in the campus, the marriage system has given Tiffany a chance to scratch the surface of Kwon Yuri for whatever depth is in there. And without the whole marriage fiasco, she wouldn’t have known the other side of the coin – the Kwon Yuri who pulls her along for a singing-in-the-rain adventure in the afternoon downpour last week, the Kwon Yuri who comes home at 10 PM with a street pool tournament trophy, the Kwon Yuri who cooks her breakfast and brings it to her bedroom with a folding table kiddies use to draw…

There’s also the Kwon Yuri these days who’s quieter, more contemplative, more… evasive. She’s still the Kwon Yuri who cooks her surprise breakfasts with weird Middle Eastern menu, but she’s spending more time away from their shared flat, and it’s not Tiffany’s fault that she’s thinking whether her husband has eaten dinner or not even when she’s in the warm embrace of her boyfriend.

It’s Saturday. There’s no time to worry about the piles of homework left in her room when she’s resting her head on Khun’s manly man chest, a hand wrapped around her shoulders. A DVD played but isn’t spared a single glance. Kisses are exchanged. Dialogues spewed by the actors incoherent to Tiffany’s ears serving as a background music to their tongues duel endeavor.

A Samsung in bubble gum pink case buzzes, ruining their liplock. Tiffany groans, Nichkhun chuckles, the actors in the movie continue on with their march to the mafia’s den.

Another buzz comes and Tiffany’s too lazy to stretch her hand to the table. Her patience (or whatever left of it) is being tested by the loud LINE message pings and the unnecessary vibrations. Regretting her choice of setting, Tiffany gets it when Nichkhun tells her to not leave messages unread, just in case it’s something important.

TaeTae: fany
TaeTae: i just came home from my part time job and
TaeTae: whys ur husband sprawled-eagle on our floor
TaeTae: take her home and bathe her and make babies in the shower or smth smh
TaeTae: nvm lol she bought us popsicles go on w/ your boyfie business sorry for disturbing

Tiffany Hwang: yul said she’ll be out for a pool with her friends????? :(

TaeTae: uhhh

TaeTae: wait wait

.

.
TaeTae: i totally forgot i wasn’t supposed to tell you that
TaeTae: don’t tell her i accidentally grassed on her

Classic, idiotic Tae. No wonder she’s still single.

Tiffany Hwang: your secret is safe w me but srsly what happened to yul??? :((((

TaeTae: hmm
TaeTae: oh look at the time!! i need to feed jeshka
TaeTae: see y l8r

Tiffany Hwang: :((((((((

“Ugh, Yul.”

“What happened?” Nichkhun asks, a brow raised by a glint of worry. She shouldn’t have groaned out loud. Yul.

“Nothing particularly worrying, for once,” and it’s only half a lie, for once – it’s not Yuri accidentally breaking a school property with a catapult-launched Frisbee for once (she really should stop being friends with Jiyong and his lackeys), or her getting locked in an arcade after an endless round of air hockey with Yoona for once.

“Now that I think about it. She’s rarely here, isn’t she…”

Tiffany knows an answer to that, but her tongue is being strangely uncooperative. “I don’t know,”

It’s clear as a day that Nichkhun isn’t satisfied by her obvious half-lie. It’s clear as a day that she won’t be enjoying the night as much as she should be.

Ugh, Yul…

She wakes up to the smell of American breakfast reminding her that she isn’t alone in her flat. Which means Yuri’s home, which means she’s presented a chance to confront Yuri about her suspicious absences whenever Khun docked himself on their shared flat.

So Tiffany wastes no time and pries herself away from her bed, raking her bed hair with her fingers while dragging her legs to the kitchen. Yuri is there, eyes half-lidded, setting two plates of pancakes on the table.

“You don’t mind something quick?” Yuri asks without really looking at Tiffany - eyes on the clock far behind her.

Tiffany nods, her mind distracted from the multi-tasking of hatching a plan to bring up the topic. “I’m fine with anything. What’s with the hurry?”

“I have a morning duty.”

That snaps Tiffany away from her reverie. Yuri? Doing morning duty?

“Are you sure you’re not just deliberately avoiding me?”

Tiffany isn’t sure where did her newfound bluntness come from, but from the way Yuri stops her munching, she hit bull’s eye alright.

“Nah,” Yuri replies, short, not looking up from her plate, totally avoidant. “You’re imagining stuffs.”

“Yeah. I sure am.”

Breakfast is eaten in silence. Yuri finishes first, washes her plate uber-clean with a speed that would probably break her a Guinness, mumbles out a quick see ya, and somehow Tiffany’s left alone with no answer and even more questions. Another opportunity lost to hesitation.

Tiffany finally lost her patience one Friday, so she quickly seizes Yuri’s right hand and drags her to the bench outside the main school building, ignoring the taller girl’s plea that consists of multiple s and owies and do you even clip your nails. Dragging Yuri away from Jiyong and his lackeys, she pretends to miss the “Yul is whipped’ sing-song coming from the bunch, to the tune of South Korea’s national anthem.

Yuri stands with half of hanging, a hand rubbing the crescent-moon shaped marks left by her… actually rather long fingernails. Tiffany pats the empty space beside her. “Sit.”

“Fingernail play and now you’re going dictator? .”

Now that the both of them are seated and Sooyoung is subbing for Yuri’s “after school class duty” (after she bribed her of course; everything has price tags on them nowadays, even friends), Tiffany clears and turns to her side. Watching Yuri play with a stray cat.

A bony, ugly stray cat with round eyes and deep but loud mewls. Yuri picks the cat up and brings it to her lap. “Fany, meet Yoona.”

Tiffany tries a little bit too hard to suppress her laugh, but she succeeds anyway. “Okay, serious talk time. Do you really have to go out whenever Khun drops by?”

‘Yoona’ purrs, missing the pats coming from Yuri’s now-stopped hand. “I don’t want to be a bother,”

“You can always lock yourself in your room. Is there really a need to crash on your friends’ places?”

Tiffany fiddles with the hem of her skirt, tracing on the contours of the sewn threads. “I mean. The flat is ours. I just – I feel bad, because sure you can be noisy, but you’re one hella husband. Me and Nichkhun aren’t that good of cooks.”

“!” Yuri shoots a finger to her side, sending her squealing. “Me and Yoona will tag-team you into submission. I know all of your weak spots, woman.” Tiffany couldn’t find the strength to fight back as Yuri crawls closer to her, a hand tucking ‘Yoona’ close to her chest. The cat’s loud meowing brings her eyes to Yuri’s chest… ahem, the cat.

What’s with Yuri and her habit of not buttoning her shirt correctly? She can see stuff. Not necessarily bad stuff, but stuff she shouldn’t dig further.

Before she’s blinded by her unresolved , Tiffany kicks Yuri away in the thigh. “Oh god, we’re so embarrassing.”

“Fany, help me out.” Yuri fishes out her phone from her skirts pocket, handing it to Fany while pulling ‘Yoona’ close to her shoulder. “I’m gonna send this to Yoongie. She’ll thank me for reuniting her with her long-lost twin sister…” Yuri trails off, side-eyeing the cat’s ‘property’, “… brother.”

Tiffany laughs at the Yuri-‘Yoona’ duo through the LED monitor. “Yuri?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you into me?”

Which would explain the whole “I’ll just crash into my friend’s place so I won’t have to see my straight-as-a-ruler crush making out with a guy who’s totally hotter than me boo-hoo” woe.

For a second, something incoherent to Tiffany flashes over Yuri’s complexion. Tiffany’s a second too late to decipher the meaning behind the way Yuri’s grin faltered, the way Yuri’s eyes avoided the phone’s camera lens, the way her grip on poor little ‘Yoona’ tightened. For a fraction of second.

“Love makes you a moron, right?”

Tiffany isn’t sure where Yuri’s going with that, but she could relate. She lets Yuri finish.

“Well,” Yuri smiles to the camera, “I’m pretty sure I’ve been pulling a smart move these days.”

Over dinner, the topic comes up again. Somehow. Maybe Tiffany’s been thinking about it consciously and subconsciously, constantly, unhealthily.

“So, like… can we go back to how it usually was?”

Tiffany couldn’t see the face Yuri’s making right now, since the taller girl is washing the dishes with her back to her, but Tiffany could almost feel the temperature in the room drop by 0.00001 degree. There’s a pause, then Yuri points out, “But we’re the usual us.”

Tiffany raps her finger on their table, eyes finding the ceiling. “No, I mean – like, the next time Khun drops by, you’re staying here.”

“You want a third-wheel that bad? Go to Eunhyuk, he’s the go-to lover-snatcher. The Break-Up Agent.”

She couldn’t help but snort. Bitterly. “Why are you so bitter these days?”

Yuri turns around so quickly she’s caught off-guard, or maybe that’s the point, because Yuri flaps her arm around, flying some of the foam in her hand to Tiffany’s wide-eyed face. To her horror, Yuri laughs out loud. “Since when are you into soap operas?”

“Playing the card on me aren’t you, Kwon Yul?”

Yuri doesn’t flinch when Tiffany gets out of her seat, with foam marring her left cheek left unwiped. They stand in silence before Tiffany leaps onto Yuri, who quickly gets into defensive mixed martial arts stance, but what Yuri didn’t expect is the possibility Tiffany aiming for her shirt instead to wipe the foam away – which is what happened, and when Yuri tries to shake Tiffany off, everything’s already too late.

Tiffany smiles at the gaping wet mess on Yuri’s ultra-white tee-shirt.

Yuri fakes a deadly wound, clenching on chest tightly, face contorted into something so stupid Tiffany wishes she has her phone with her. In shaky imitation of something Darth Vader-like, “Where did you learn that move, wench?”

“A week with Kwon Yuri taught me a lot. She can be a real sweetheart, but most of the time she’s such a prankster I begin to see patterns.”

It’s hard to keep up their after-dinner role-playing when Yuri looks like she’s having a seizure. The unnatural trembling and all. And the face. “But do not forget; the Kwon Yuri you dubbed as an washed your underwear and made you breakfasts.”

“Fine. Oh woe, such virtues must be repaid, no?” Tiffany cringes internally at her own stage play, “I suggest us two spending the next weekend just the two of us. What say you?”

The sudden drop of the act surprises Tiffany. Yuri shrugs. “Aww, I can’t. I promised Hyorin we’re going to see a movie together. The day’s the premiere showing.”

Ahh. -goddess Hyorin. No wonder she goes all the way to the point of marking her calendar.

“How about this weekend?”

“I have plans… with Khun.”

“Ohh.”

Now they’re back to square one. “Sorry.”

Yuri steps closer to her, pats her shoulder, and grins. Her usual Kwon Yuri -eating grin. “Don’t mind me. Have fun with your boyfie.”

“Yul—“

“Nuh-uh.” It’s the way Yuri walks past her with a slight ballroom twirl and the same grin Tiffany’s gotten used to that holds the words back in . “Fany-fany, we can go out later when we’re both sad and lonely and deprived. Plus we’re going to spend some time waking up to each other’s bed hair anyway.”

Tiffany nods. Unsure.

“Husband and wife.” Yuri winks, and something in Tiffany’s heart drops. “Friends.”

She doesn’t know how she’s still standing there stupidly while Yuri’s already in her room for a minute or two… until she realizes how there’s a blotch of foam and sink water in her shoulder. The exact spot Yuri patted earlier.

“KWON YURI!”

Life is a cycle of uncertainties and big-mouth moments for one Tiffany Hwang. Between stealing glances at Yuri, who’s laughing with whoever she’s phoning right now (sounds suspiciously like Hyorin), and trying to glue her eyes to her phone so she won’t mistype her LINE messages for Khun for the fifth time, Tiffany finds that multi-tasking doesn’t come in pack with social life and alluring eyesmile. She needs to lock herself in her room and focus on Khun, Khun, Nichkhun. Because it’s only fair. Because Nichkhun has his eyes set on her and her only.

And it’s not like she’s even attracted to Yuri. The constant not-so-subtle glances is a deep-rooted sense of curiosity. Meddling is her middle name.

When Yuri hangs finally hangs up, Tiffany stands up to grab herself a glass of water, preferably an overly cold one from the bottles in the fridge to knock some sense into herself.

“Done supervising my calls, Mom?” Yuri asks from the living room. Tiffany rolls her eyes even though there’s a wall serving as a partition.

“Curiosity kills the Hwang.”

She drinks, slowly, totally not because she’s still constructing a perfect excuse for her not-so-subtle glances.

“Me and Hyorin aren’t an item.” Yuri states.

Tiffany welcomes the information with a loud gulp.

“Not yet, anyway.”

She chokes on her water. Silently thanking the wall separating the living room and kitchen, Tiffany walks back into the living room looking as natural as possible. “Take me out on a dinner once you’ve bed her. I deserve that much as your wife.”

Yuri snorts, eyes on a stupid K-Drama about vampires and music on the TV. “You didn’t even cook when you and Nichkhun hooked up. It was your turn, OK.”

“Well, you can cook—“

“It was your turn—“

“I was in the yacht—“

“I ended up having dinner with Hyorin. Bora won a lottery and spent all her cash on Chinese dishes with too much artificial seasoning.”

Hyorin. Again. “I asked you to go with us. Khun doesn’t mind.”

This time Yuri whips her head to her way, brows furrowed and teeth-gritted tight. She exhales, long and dragged, hugging the pillow on her lap tightly. Maybe she’s channeling her annoyance towards Tiffany to the poor cushion. “I might get angry for real, you know…”

She shouldn’t have said it. The word ‘Khun’ and ‘Hyorin’ is probably their taboo words. Similar to Tae and Sica’s ‘cucumber’.

Silence settles in. Not the comfy kind.

“Sorry. Why are we fighting so much these days?” Yuri’s the one who breaks the silence for them, eyes on the TV but not on the TV at the same time. Yuri looks a little lost – something un-Yuri-like. “This feels… stupid. Fighting over your boyfie. Or my not-girlfie.”

“We’re so stupid.”

“That’s the word. Stoo-pid.”

They spend the rest of their afternoon scrolling through ty weekday TV lineups and a bunch of small talks in-between, both too tired for a proper conversation (and knows at this rate they’ll somehow end up fighting the urge to bite each other’s heads off again). Even though Tiffany doesn’t do much daily chores today and Yuri has a day off from her part-time job. The exhaustion is real even though they glued themselves to the couch.

Sunday comes without a hitch. Tiffany picks on her clothes under Yuri’s intense supervising, which involves more nagging than necessary even though it’s just…an outing… with her boyfriend, who is not someone she pulled out of a blind date. She and Nichkhun have known each other for quite a while – at least a “while” enough for her to know about the existence of a mole near his armpit. And his allergy towards Calvin Klein products. That should be enough to prove how they’ve bonded quite enough, but Yuri isn’t buying it.

“How about this one?” Tiffany twirls in her knee-length sundress and tops it off by doing a curtsy. Yuri shakes her head in disapproval.

“Nuh-uh.”

All Tiffany really wants to do right now is to pull Yuri’s smug face to the mountain heap of her “disapproved clothes” on the floor. “Yul, I’m really confident with this one. Can’t you see me beaming?”

Yuri wags a finger while her face is scrunched up into something Tiffany desires to land a punch on. “Mmmm. Daddy gives this one a ‘no’ out of ten. Less ‘cleav and I’ll give you a ‘maybe no maybe yea’.”

“Fine. I’ll just wear the school uniform.”

Yuri blanches. “Your so-called UNIform lost its top buttons. Don’t you have something more prudish?”

“Yuri. It’s just Khu—“ That word. “You-know-who.”

“Still a boy. Unless you can prove me otherwise.”

She’s about to retort, but Yuri is already on her feet and she’s dragging her steps to Tiffany’s open and totally ransacked wardrobe, prodding her unsanitary, sweaty-from-street-basketball hands into Tiffany’s zone of sanitary things. Before she could pull the taller girl out and readies her spray-type antiseptic out, Yuri throws her plainest, most unrevealing tee shirt and a pair of her uniest sweatpants at her.

She makes a face. “This is for a McDonald breakfast walk.”

“Listen to daddy!”

“Yul, I can’t look like a hobo when I’m out with my boyfriend!”

“You dress like a hobo when you’re with your husband.”

An eye-roll and an exhausted breath. “Are we really fighting now when I only have, like, ten minutes left to dress? He’ll pick me up at 10.”

Regardless, Yuri’s glare doesn’t falter. “Fine. The sundress is the most okay out of those 21^st Century Clothes, OK?”

“Thanks.” She wastes no time pulling up the sundress out of the makeshift Himalaya on the floor, not forgetting to blow a kiss towards the taller girl as she scurries to the bathroom to change. She does all these in autopilot – completely forgetting that she was in her room and she could just shoo Yuri out so she could change in peace. Not that Yuri is into her bod or anything.

Still, maybe she’s just a little too giddy at the thought of having someone being so worried about what she wears for a quickie date. The attention is flattering.

She scurries back into her room and throws her previous clothes at Yuri, who’s lying on her bed, to get her attention. Yuri karate-chops thin air out of reflex and ended up with her pants covering 2/3^rd of her head. “Okay. You look OK.”

Tiffany smiles at Yuri’s stuck out thumbs-up. “Finally.”

“You have six minutes to do something about your hair.”

“Wait. Don’t you have a movie outing with Hyorin?”

Yuri shrugs. “Yeah, but I’m not going to give more effort at dressing up just for a movie outing with a friend, ya know.”

The statement pushes a breath of relief out of Tiffany.

Five minutes later, she finally gets her hair done. Oddly enough, Yuri was oddly silent. Curious Hwang looks over her shoulder to find Yuri gazing at their rather low ceiling, looking oddly complacent.

“Yul?”

Yuri wastes no time sitting up, arms crossed, brows knitted, lips tied into a bow. “Sorry. I was thinking… a rare feat for me to do.”

“How was it?”

“Exhausting.”

Tiffany smiles at the Yuri-like answer. They’re on the right track on their “restore the usual YulTi dynamic” (subject name to change) project. Despite the continuous slip of the banned words (Khu* and Hy*rin), they’re faring better at brushing off annoyances and minimizing the chance of them getting into another emo banters. Strangely, finding out the reason why both of them care so much about banned words is in the bottom of their priority. And it’s definitely not the mystical L word, because Tiffany has Khun and Yuri has… whoever is in her mind right now.

The doorbell rings like finality and Tiffany quickly grabs her handbag. “I’ll be off, then.”

“Okay. Don’t forget to bring back something for dinner. Take-outs? Get your boyfie to pay for you.”

“I don’t want to look… materialistic.”

Yuri shoots her The Look. “He rented a yacht for you.”

Oh right. Yacht. A Chinese dinner wouldn’t compare to the yacht. “Okay.”

She’s not sure whether her heart is thumping for the movie + walk + dinner combo with Khun or the way Yuri loops her hand around her shoulder and pull her into a half-hug. She’s not sure why she’s feeling The Heat. Maybe July comes a little bit earlier.

“G’luck.” Yuri grins, and Tiffany feels mushier inside. “Should anything happen, you know who to ring.”

She rolls her eyes. “Will you dash out of the theater if I called you in the middle of the movie?”

“After the credits roll, yeah.”

She pinches Yuri by the bridge of her nose, eliciting a gritted owiee out of the taller girl. Hearing the doorbell rings for the hundredth time, Tiffany wiggles out of Yuri’s arm. “I’ll be going for real now.”

…why does it feel like she’s parting for a five-month long voyage?

“Don’t forget to buy me dinner.”

She waves to Yuri, and she’s replied with a gesture she’ll have to get used to – Yuri crosses two index fingers in front of her chest with her usual Yuri Grin in place, the one that sets the deepest part of her tummy on fire. “Husband and wife.” Yuri notches up her grin higher, if possible. “Friends.”

Yuri might be an insensitive idiot, a sports-nut, a girl who comes home smelling like smoke and asphalt and everything urban and unhealthy. But she’s also the one who cooks up weird Middle-Eastern menus for breakfasts. She’s also a good friend. If someone who lights your cheeks up on fire even counts as a friend.

To Tiffany, Kwon Yuri is a walking paradox.

SCHOOL-YEARS MARRIAGE PROGRAM Q&A CORNER #2

Teacher in-charge: Kim Shinyoung

Krystal Jung, class 1-3 (wife of Amber Liu): Is it possible to tell whether your friend is a lesbian or not by the length of her ring finger?
Answer: Do you believe in internet or Logic?

Stephanie Hwang, class 2-1 (wife of Kwon Yuri): THIS IS NOT LOVE. THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT LOVE.
Answer: This is not Twitter. Or Weibo. Post your teeny emo whining elsewhere.

Notes: [3] for the next chapter, we’ll switch back to TaengSic and some Krys because shes one hella sassy (i love <3333) ;DDD