After All This Time

A soft splash.

Minkyung looks up from her soup to see Yebin dabbing at a spot on the table in front of her with a napkin.

She raises an eyebrow.

Yebin pouts, scrunches her nose up, mumbles something under her breath and Minkyung thinks that Yebin might just be the cutest thing she's seen all day.

Or all week. Or all month. Or all her life.

This is a problem, she knows, but she does not have to resolve it just quite yet so Kim Minkyung will let it sit and grow.

Grown adults do not run from their problems but Minkyung does not feel like a grown adult so she will run for as long as she can, for as long as Yebin is willing to chase after her.

Yebin drops grains of rice onto the table and Minkyung has to cover to hide her smile.

Yebin has always liked Minkyung.

Always.

From the moment that Minkyung set foot into Pledis and opened and spoke to the other trainees, Yebin has been smitten. She had not admitted to herself then that she had been smitten but she knows this now, and knows that she definitely was then.

She has never fought the realization because there has never been a reason to fight it. Minkyung is tall and gorgeous and smart and y and kind and considerate and dorky and organized and focused and disciplined and talented and most of all she loves all of them fiercely so of course it makes sense that Yebin fell for her and continues to fall for her every single day.

Even though that is the number one thing to never do.

Yebin knows this.

It's the unspoken number one rule of falling for straight girls as a girl.

Don't.

The Pristin girls are clingy.

They have always been clingy and touchy-feely and Minkyung loves how freely they snuggle up to each other, lives off of the small touches of encouragement, the lightest pats of you-got-this, the of hands through hair or on arms, hell, even that one time Zhou Jieqiong grabbed her in public and then spun away smirking.

But nothing feeds her heart quite as much as when Yebin fits her head on Minkyung’s shoulder, snuggles into a comfortable position and just uses her as a pillow.

She knows Yebin uses everyone as a pillow so she tries not to think too much of it but she watches Yebin's chest slowly rise and fall and somehow that drowns out the noise of the world and Minkyung knows, knows, knows that she is in trouble.

Then Yebin slowly, sleepily winds her fingers around Minkyung’s hand and Minkyung lets herself rest her head on Yebin's crown.

Yebin does not want to think about it.

Thinking about it is going to mean that she has to remind herself that this is all just her own doing, that she is the one that initiates it all, that Minkyung is kind and loves them all and knows that Yebin needs extra love and thus gives it freely and it does not mean what Yebin wants it to mean.

So she shakes the thoughts out of her head, settles for nuzzling up to Minkyung, gets pats on her head for her troubles, pouts and drinks in Minkyung’s soft chuckle, light fingers tracing patterns in her hair.

If she just closes her eyes, she can almost fool herself into believing this is real.

Yebin loves everyone.

Well, Yebin loves everyone she gets to know properly. Minkyung knows this. She knows that Yebin also likes cuddles and that Nayoung finds cuddling that much in public a little embarrassing because she is the leader, so the role automatically falls to her next, as sub-leader.

She knows Yebin occasionally snuggles up to Kyungwon and the rest of the 98-line and the younger ones too but part of her takes particular pleasure in being the one that Yebin goes to first.

Why that is, she lies to herself, is because of the innate human want to be wanted. It feels good to know that you are someone's first choice and Minkyung knows that she is an but she cannot stop because she does not know where Yebin would be if she did and she does not know if she can deal with that.

“Hey,” Sungyeon says, “unnie.”

Kyla looks up from her book, then back down but Minkyung knows this is her way of saying that she is listening.

“Hm?”

“Are you just going to keep doing this?”

Minkyung knows fully well what Sungyeon is referrin