based on the expression on Kyungwon's face in 170510 YuWoo vlive when siyeon says goodbye and kisses her.

Kyungwon should have seen it coming. After all, Siyeon had everyone wrapped around her finger. Even the damn CEO of Pledis doted on her sometimes like she was his daughter. Or maybe a niece. Nevertheless, Siyeon had a way of making people fall in love.

Maybe it was the way she danced around so messily and yet so gracefully in over-sized sweats and big button-downs she had most definitely "borrowed" from company seniors. (They wouldn't mind. They never did when it was Siyeon, and Kyungwon couldn't blame them.) Or the way she ate three servings of black bean noodles as a pre-dinner snack and grinned at their trainers with black-coated teeth when they tried to talk her out of her fifth meal of the day. Or the way she would shamelessly incorporate English vocabulary into her speech without caring if it made sense at all. Or the way she could stumble out of bed at five pm on a day they had no schedules in nothing but a big t-shirt and gym shorts with a rat's nest of hair and makeup smudged from their late event the night before and still look broadcast-ready. Kyungwon didn't know exactly which part of Siyeon it was that affected her so much.

Kyungwon's father always told her that in the world, there were hammers and nails. Everyone was one or the other. Her twin was a hammer through and through, beating down papers and assignments and tests, always looking forward, forward, forward and never looking back to see the people she'd left in her wake. Her twin was the golden child, and for Kyungwon, when she was young, looking at her twin made her feel hate. A little bit for her twin, but mostly for herself.

Kyungwon was a nail in a family of hammers. When she was little, she wanted to be just like her father: big, bold, and loud. So she tried, but quietness, in trying to be loud, only comes out as awkwardness. Kyungwon knows that now. And so, Kyungwon would never be the golden child she so wanted to be.

Siyeon, like Kyungwon's twin, was a golden child. The golden child. Pledis' daughter and soon to be the nation's daughter, as she would sometimes boast after practice when everyone else was doubled over with sweat trailing down their cheeks to their necks, collarbones, and then absorbed into the collar of their damp shirts. Siyeon would still be hopping from one foot to the other, ready for more. Siyeon was a golden child, but Kyungwon could never feel hate for her the way she did her twin when she was younger.

Maybe it was the way Siyeon didn't make her feel less than, even when she was barely into middle school and having to help someone four years older than her, so unlike her twin, who would too easily go silent when asked about Kyungwon's rank at school and study habits. Or maybe it was the way Siyeon so easily accepted her into the tight-knit family of female trainees when her twin would never bring friends around home, too embarrassed to admit to them that the school clown was only just down the hall. (Kyungwon guesses it was a small mercy to her twin that they never looked alike.) Or maybe it was how, for all the confidence and bluster, Siyeon still admitted weakness, was still confident enough to know her limits and be proud of them. Her twin would sooner quit than admit anything came less than instinctually. Kyungwon didn't know hammers could be soft like Siyeon. All the hammers she knew just hit and hit and hit until they broke and they couldn't be repaired. She didn't want to think about that anymore.

And so, like everyone else under the roof of that gray building on that quiet corner in Seoul, she found herself wrapped around Siyeon's finger.

It wasn't different at first, her feelings towards Siyeon. She loved Siyeon like the quirky yet charismatic spitfire she was, loved Siyeon for her supposed "rapper hand gestures" and her penchant for overspending on Girls' Generation merchandise, loved Siyeon like one would any close trainee who was her senior in every way in the practice room and her junior outside it. She can't even pinpoint the change. All she knows is at some point, it got harder to let go of Siyeon during a hug, got harder to school her face out of the goofy smile that would slide on when Siyeon kissed her cheek, got harder to take her eyes off of Siyeon when they were practicing.

Kyungwon had always been good at putting off dealing with things that were hard. Her friends at school had known her as a master procrastinator. And for how Kyungwon knew she was a bit slow, it didn't take a genius to know Pledis' policy on staring too long at fellow trainees. Even the boys were reprimanded when their eyes lingered too long on the curve of Nayoung's lower back during coed dance class. She couldn't imagine what they would say about her, a girl staring at another girl, one seven years her senior and three years her junior. Kyungwon wasn't stupid. She knew what happened to gay idols. There weren't any. And gay Kangs? Kyungwon put the thought out of her mind quickly when she could almost hear her father's hammer-anger and her Mother's quiet, sharp nail gaze. And gay-

Kyungwon cut off that line of thought altogether. The way she saw it, she wasn't ignoring the fluttering in her chest when Siyeon looked over at her with frosting on her nose and a huge, goofy grin on her face, she was just putting off thinking about what it meant. After all, thinking had never been her strong suit, especially not when it came to people.

Maybe she should have predicted that her willful denial of any excess of emotion towards Siyeon wouldn't go unnoticed for long. After all, she and Minkyung had always been close, and Minkyung had always been much too perceptive for anyone's good (except, maybe, her own). Her penchant for sniffing out tension between people and her love for drama was a deadly mix, and Kyungwon should have expected that she wouldn't be safe from the prying eyes of her best friend for long.

Kyungwon startled as Minkyung slid into the booth seat opposite hers, setting a plate with a large piece of chocolate cake down between the two of them with a sharp clack. She then shifted to one side to slip two forks out of her pocket and onto the table next to the plate. Minkyung picked up one of the forks and proceeded to scrape a large portion of icing off the side of the slice, bringing it halfway to before pausing and looking up at Kyungwon. "You do know she's a kid, right?"

Kyungwon blinked once, twice, before glancing at the cake and then back up to Minkyung. "The cake's a she?"

Minkyung, mouth full of frosting, shot Kyungwon a look that could be in the dictionary beside the definition for "are you a damn idiot?" Or it could be if a deadpan dictionary was a thing. "No, you dumb nerd, your little crush. She's a kid."

"Crush?" Kyungwon's mind was racing. Minkyung couldn't possibly know. Minkyung couldn't possibly know because no one could know. If no one knew, maybe it wasn't real. Just like the weird pangs in her heart when she had sat next to that girl in middle school who wore her hair in a messy braid and always let Kyungwon borrow a pencil. When Kyungwon went on to the public high school, the girl had moved to America to live with her father. The pangs stopped and Kyungwon no longer knew whether they had really happened. Or at least she had gotten good at forgetting that feeling. She had been doing so well too. If she didn't look long at the girls in her phys ed class in high school, they didn't draw her eyes. If she didn't meet eyes with the girl handing her coffee at the university cafe, she wouldn't mess up her words. It had become easy. It had become second nature. After all, she had grand plans, and those plans would never be compatible with the way her heart raced when she looked a little too long at Siyeon. She had done so well. She couldn't let it catch up now. She picked up the fork that still remained on the table and tried to not let her hand shake. She cut a small piece of the cake off the corner and focused hard on that. She didn't let her voice waver. "I don't have a crush."

"Uh, okay." Minkyung raised her eyebrows at Kyungwon, clearly unconvinced.

"I-I don't have a crush! Least of all on a she." Kyungwon spat out the words, hoping they would come across as incredulous and not as a desperate attempt to deny the painful truth.

Kyungwon wanted nothing more than to run and hide. She'd been doing so damn well. What more could she have done? What more could she do? What if-Minkyung interrupted her racing mind. "Well, when you stop pretending, whenever you want to talk, you know. Text or find me, I guess."

Kyungwon opened again to try and make Minkyung understand. There was no crush. There were no feelings, but Minkyung was already standing to leave. "W-wait." Minkyung turned to look at Kyungwon. "I-there is no crush. And if there was, it wouldn't be a-a she."

Minkyung smiled at her with a weird look of sympathy. Kyungwon didn't know why. What in her life could someone like perfect Minkyung possibly sympathize with? "Kyungie, you're not the only one with a violet in her lapel."

Kyungwon furrowed her eyebrows. "I don't-I don't understand."

Minkyung gave her a small smile, more a quirk of the lips than anything, and left, breezing out the door with a carefree air about her that only she could exude.