Seulgi wonders if Sooyoung will ever shut up.

The sky is gradually lightening to a soft, autumn blue, clouds skittering across its surface like cotton blown in the wind, and while she notices these minute details, she can’t help but pray that Sooyoung’s tongue falls out sometime soon.

She’s sprawled freely on the bench next to her so Seulgi’s sandwiched between the two women, and she knows the redhead’s not doing it because she’s naturally an obnoxious person (she’s surprisingly sharp and intuitive for being a child at heart), but because she just can’t pass up the golden chance to and watch her burn red at her clever quips.

“So, what about that first smooch? I didn’t see you that way, but you’re quite the player, Unnie. Well, then again, you are Aphrodite.”

Seulgi chokes on air, coughing out fragments of words meant to scratch at Sooyoung’s ears and render her mute, but they end up escaping incoherent, the model guffawing as she slaps jovially at Seulgi’s back and tells her to breathe.

“Aphrodite?”

“Sooyoung, close your mouth.”

“Maybe a story for another time.”

There’s gentle warmth that curls around the back of her left hand, as sympathetic as it is reassuring, and the fire burning angrily for Sooyoung dies down into warm embers meant for somebody else, Seulgi softening from the simple touch.

“I do have some game, would you like some classes?”

Amusement plays in Joohyun’s tone, leaning to flash a lopsided smile in Sooyoung’s direction, and Seulgi wonders if it’s okay to let them form a bond of friendship - they’re surprisingly more alike in personality than she’d thought, and one Sooyoung in her life is enough.

“How did you know about our shoot?”

Seulgi marvels at the way Joohyun’s attention rockets towards her at the first word that leaves her lips, gaze attentive and unwavering, serving to fluster her, and she’s glad she’d managed to get her sentence out before the words had a chance to stumble.

“Oh, I didn’t know. I was out for some business and I happened to pass by. I was surprised, too, when I saw you.”

Sooyoung beats her to the question.

“This early in the morning? Were you painting something?”

“No, I had a meeting of sorts to go to,” Joohyun says lightly, leaning back into solid wood backing. “Do your shoots normally take place outside?”

It’s easy to miss the secrets that seem to revolve around Joohyun like a dark veil - the way she expertly slips around personal questions only to direct them to her counterpart, never fully answering inquiries of herself, and constantly being vague - because she still manages to play the part of an open mystery book.

“Well, I’m going to go take a nap. We’ve been up since, what? One in the morning? Right?”

Seulgi takes a moment to recall the digital numbers on a blinding phone screen and nods in affirmation, only realizing then how long they’d been awake despite it only being seven and the fatigue that’s been steadily climbing its way to her eyelids to attach weights to them, urging them to close.

One glance at Sooyoung tells her that she’s just as tired as she is, although she hides it behind a facade of hyperactivity, and Seulgi knows that her words are not just an excuse to leave them alone, watching her smooth out her coat of navy blue and brush her hands over her jeans.

They’d changed out of the outfits for the clothing line they’d worked with into their own clothes, and Seulgi’s glad she’d thought to wear a sweater and jeans for the cool fall weather.

“You should take Seulgi to bed, Unnie. You know, be a considerate girlfriend,” Sooyoung says with a wink.

Seulgi jumps at the label Sooyoung slaps on them without warning, her eyes darting to assess Joohyun’s reaction, and she only receives a smile in return, the curve of soft lips working to steady her.

So they’re together now.

“I’m going to get going. See you, Princess. Bye, Unnie.”

Seulgi watches the redhead’s retreating form, her strides longer and taking her away faster than her’s ever would, shoulders pulled back and back straight like they’ve been trained to be, and she can’t help but admire Sooyoung’s grit.

She’s always admired her.

“Have you really been up since one? Why didn’t you tell me that you had a morning schedule? I would have brought you back much earlier if that was the case.”

Joohyun has lines of concern etched into her face, and though she knows it’s sincere, Seulgi can’t help but wonder why she cares so much about her well-being.

No one else she had dated before (she says dated, but all they really used her for was her social status and body) had ever been concerned on whether she was getting enough sleep or eating as well as she should be, focusing on one thing and one thing only and usually getting what they desired, because she had been weak-willed and naive then.

“It was worth it. I’m fine.”

She makes a clumsy attempt to reassure the older woman, but then again, she’s always been a bad liar. Particularly when she communicates through body language and expressions - words are far easier to manipulate, but she’s never been able to bend them to her will.

There’s a sort of tentativeness to Joohyun’s motions as her hand lifts to approach Seulgi’s cheek, eyes trained on hers, asking a silent question for confirmation that it’s okay, that she isn’t overstepping any boundaries, and Seulgi allows her to with a flutter in her chest at the gentle show of respect, letting her eyes gradually come to a close when comforting warmth cups her face and a thumb lightly over her cheekbone.

“You really should get some sleep. It’s not healthy. I’ll drive you home,” Joohyun says softly.

Seulgi’s quick to respond, unwilling to leave just yet, not when Joohyun’s making her feel things like this. “No. No, I want to stay.”

Joohyun looks worried, the familiar crease of her brows that betrayed her the first time not hesitating to do so again, though this time, her lips follow suit, pursing in a line that looks to be drawn, and Seulgi can tell she’s chewing the inside of her cheek.

The hand melding warmth against her face has yet to fall away, and the undivided attention it offers her has Seulgi fiddling with the hem of her sweater of red and white, rubbing soft cotton between her thumb and forefinger as a means of distraction.

“How about this, then?”

A soft tap of a thumb against her cheekbone ushers her to look up, and Seulgi obeys the silent command, searching Joohyun’s face for an answer to her question.

“We’ll stay, but only if you promise to sleep.”

“Sleep? Where?”

Joohyun’s collecting her bag off of the ground and scooting away from her until she’s perched at the very end of the bench, the hand that had been cradling her cheek moments before patting her lap, a gentle gesture that’s clear enough so Seulgi understands immediately, heat flushing her pink and broken syllables harsh against her tongue.

“N-No I’m fine. D-don’t need - uhm, sleep. Not tired.”

It’s obvious Joohyun doesn’t believe a word she says, though she thinks she sees something close to affection coloring pools of black when she manages to muster up enough courage to look at her, a small smile curling her lips and making crescent moons out of pretty eyes.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to drive you home.”

Joohyun motions to stand, but Seulgi finds herself shooting forward to catch the tips of slim fingers, her hand jittery from nerves that won’t settle for steady calm, and sighs out of inevitable defeat.

“ . . . I’ll sleep.”

This time, Joohyun’s smile is undisguised, white teeth revealing themselves in slivers between red lips as she takes back her seat on the edge of the bench, placing her satchel at her feet, and tilting her head as a sign to do as she’d promised.

Despite how thin the woman is, she’s surprisingly comfortable, a perfect pillow for Seulgi’s tired body and though she’s tense at first, her muscles gradually relax so she goes limp, and the aches from being up and about so early begin to fade.

Joohyun’s scent of vanilla, and the warmth that seeps through her sweater, lull her to a sleepy stupor, and she finds herself succumbing to the fatigue she’d been putting off for so long.

It scares her how easily Joohyun’s slipping her way between thorny defenses and iron walls, how she makes her forget what it’s like to guard her heart, brush off ghost memories of what it’s like to hurt, and settle for aching loneliness in her bones.

She wonders why she doesn’t run away when her heart’s starting to burn.

~

Seulgi wakes to a muffled voice and a hand gently curled over her left ear.

“ - with someone at the moment. No, not a client. The meeting went fine, Yerim.”

Yerim? She’s never heard of that name before.

“Okay, I will. Mhm. Good luck. I love you, too.”

Everything is muffled, and then it’s not, and fingers are carding through her hair instead, working through tangles with the kind of patience that’s rare to find.

“Joohyun?”

Seulgi’s voice should have gotten lost in the space between them, but distance doesn’t have a chance against Joohyun’s attentiveness, the woman reacting to her call just as if she’d screamed rather than murmured a whisper.

“Good morning, are you feeling better now? I’m sorry if I woke you. I had to take the call.”

“Yes. And it’s okay.”

The clacking of heels on cobblestone pavement has Seulgi jolting up from Joohyun’s lap, head swiveling to face the newcomer.

The owner of the confident steps is a girl.

A white blouse, black skirt, and a purple coat draped over one slim arm contradicts her youthful features, her entire image screaming ‘expensive’, the clothes hugging her body in ways that simple department store outfits never could, and black, three-inch heels coming to a pause in front of them.

“I thought you would be here, Unnie. Though I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting Korea’s top model to be on your lap.”

It’s a staggering opening line if Seulgi’s ever heard one.

The girl has the same sort of confidence Seulgi sees in Joohyun, though perhaps a bit louder and rougher around the edges, almost as if she has yet to perfect it, but it’s confidence all the same - the kind that comes straight from the core and through the heart.

She even mirrors the older woman’s odd way of weaving together words that exude a sort of formality.

She looks to Joohyun for some clearance, catching shock in normally steady features for a fleeting moment before it’s being softened into a defeated smile and a shake of her head.

“I should have known you would find me.”

The girl grins, offering a brief image of a child beneath the mask of an adult.

“Don’t I always, Unnie?”

Just as Seulgi’s beginning to feel out of place, a hair breadth away from plunging into cold waters of abandonment, Joohyun reels her back in with a hand molding into the small of her back, guiding her onto shore.

“This is Seulgi. Although you already seem to know who she is.”

“Not quite true. I know her public image, but I’ve yet to know who she is to you, Unnie, or who she is beneath all the fame and glory,” the girl says, eyes sliding in her direction at the final word. “It’s a pleasure to be of acquaintance. My name is . . .” The pause is brief, but there, and Seulgi catches the glance shared between girl and woman. “Bae Yerim. Joohyun unnie’s younger sister.”

The resemblance is as clear as day once Yerim mentions their relationship, not so much in appearance (though they share the same willowy figures), but in their demeanors of grace and elegance, and if Seulgi thinks about it, Yerim is the mirror image of what she would have imagined if Joohyun had mentioned having a younger sister.

“Kang Seulgi. It’s nice to meet you, too.”

Yerim tilts her head to the side, the way birds do, and her eyes soften to a gentle brown, as if she finds Seulgi endearing, or something along those lines, and Seulgi’s not sure if she should feel offended or relieved that the younger Bae doesn’t seem to consider her a threat.

“You’re quite the opposite of your celebrity image, Seulgi unnie.”

Seulgi knows what her celebrity image is. The fierce and charismatic alpha model, short of words and an exterior cold as ice, a monster on sets, a magnet for female fans who desire to be her, and a trophy for men who want to have her.

She’s far from proud of the public’s fantasy character of Star Agency’s Seulgi, a hero who only exists in the diaries of those who will never know her.

She supposes she should be grateful Yerim doesn’t see her in that light.

“Although that still doesn’t explain why you were on my sister’s lap in a park at eight in the morning. Care to explain?”

At this point, Seulgi’s lost on what to say, her eyes leaving Yeri to settle on Joohyun who tangles their fingers together and lifts their conjoined hands in the air, a clear elaboration for an answer that requires no words.

Yerim stays silent, staring at Joohyun’s blatant response as if she’s still reading words scribbled down beneath her questionnaire, and the tension that builds from the unsettling quiet has Seulgi fidgeting and focusing on the heat threading between their skin, hoping the same heat doesn’t creep its way into her cheeks.

“Unnie, we need to talk. Now.”

~

Sooyoung knows Seulgi better than she knows herself.

Sooyoung has always been sharp and distrusting, not easily swayed by cloying words and sweet gestures, and innocence and naivete have never been in her word bank - it was just the way she was.

So Seulgi had been a puzzle that never quite fit together in her head, someone who clashed against her idea of a steadfast world of cunning people not to be trusted, and Sooyoung had been drawn in by the untainted purity of a kind soul.

Seulgi has always had awkwardness clinging to her like a second skin - even as a child, a trait that should have been off-putting, but on sweet and innocent Seulgi, was viewed by all as endearing, especially when it led to clumsiness in both physical and verbal aspects.

Until it wasn’t.

She’d always expected Seulgi’s naive innocence to come crumbling down one way or another, because nothing gold ever stays, but she’d never imagined it would be dealt a blow by something that would set Sooyoung’s anger into an inferno of indestructible flames.

Sooyoung had known that the boy would be trouble the moment she’d laid eyes on his muscular frame and dyed blonde hair, the very image of a conquistador searching for gold on untrodden land, only to put the land to waste after his selfish means was satisfied.

By the age of seventeen, Seulgi had looked the part of a high school heart throb (by then, they’d already been accepted into the agency which didn’t help matters), even when she didn’t seem to realize it, and Sooyoung had noticed plenty of hungry eyes thrown in the older girl’s direction with gossip to boot, and had had to, on more than one occasion, endeavour on damage control.

Needless to say, the relationship hadn’t ended on friendly terms, Sooyoung had been suspended for dealing a well-executed roundhouse kick where the sun didn’t shine, and even through Seulgi’s endless waterfall of tears, she’d still managed to scold her.

Innocence is easily broken, but naivete is something stronger and far more ignorant.

Seulgi was plenty naive, and Sooyoung had had to watch as the older girl slowly turning into a woman, continued to trip over the same step again and again, while she learned how to catch her from below without crashing down herself.

A girl named Krystal had been the final push that caused the teetering wall of naivete to come crashing down into nothing more than rubble with Sooyoung there desperately trying to patch the wounds that the blow left behind.

Krystal was strikingly beautiful and a foreigner at that, who transferred to their high school and wreaked havoc among both the faculty and student body - an immediate star in the campus who decided that her target would be none other than innocent heart throb, Kang Seulgi.

Sooyoung had watched, a silent spectator, as Seulgi was whisked away in a whirlwind of hot and steamy romance, a fire which burned bright initially, but one that she knew wouldn’t last long, not when Krystal continued to hoard a pile of firewood back from the flames that Seulgi loyally fed like she had with all the others.

Eventually, the fire had burned out, just as Sooyoung had predicted it would, leaving just another charred pile of ash in Seulgi’s tired heart that Sooyoung knew the older girl would never be able to fully cleanse.

That was when Seulgi changed.

Sooyoung had watched as the girl she loved like a sister became someone foreign, darker and quieter, the doors that had once been open to invite all and any shut, barred, and chained with a warning label plastered over them in bright red.

The naivete was gone, and with it, the light of ignorance.

Her words came few and far between, rather than in clumsy rambles that strung together awkwardly and not quite right, though it didn’t mean that she became a master of language overnight, simply sounding robotic and as Sooyoung had learned to joke - like a caveman.

They had crushed the sweet and innocent Kang Seulgi for the pathetic fact that people saw her as nothing but a golden trophy, and nothing of what Sooyoung saw in her, and Sooyoung can’t help but feel like a part of it is her fault.

Because she’d only dragged on her suffering for a life sentence in the industry of celebrities.

Sooyoung’s going to sue Seulgi for almost giving her cardiac arrest.

She’s kind of, sort of, slightly overprotective with family, and because she considers Seulgi a part of that family, and because she’s by her at almost every given day, Seulgi receives most of her tough love.

So, when she stumbles on that one article with a picture of Seulgi getting manhandled by some big buffoon, she flips her top.

She’s already putting the phone to her ear by the time she has Seulgi’s apartment number punched in (0000 because Seulgi’s memory span is shorter than the length of toothpick) and growling like an animal by the time the older woman picks up.

She’s calm for the first three seconds of the phone call.

“Where are you, Unnie?”

Then, she explodes.

She’s left seething with the phone beeping a farewell instead of Seulgi, and a burning question that has yet to be answered, but most definitely will be.

Aphrodite is a name on a phone screen that Sooyoung suddenly finds hope in, a goddess in a storm that Sooyoung had thought would never end.

It’s in the tremble of Seulgi’s voice and the way the words stumble and flow from trembling lips that catches her attention, the Seulgi she’d once known peeking out of the ashes and rubble of a ruined heart.

When she finally gets to meet Aphrodite, she understands why Seulgi’s found interest in the captivating woman in black and white who exudes the tranquil confidence of a standing tree that even Sooyoung finds respect in.

Hell, she’s different, and Sooyoung would date her, and she knows she’s just what Seulgi needs.

Joohyun is something else entirely, Sooyoung comes to find, a deviousness that seems to be on par with hers, but also a mysteriousness that isn’t as subtle as it should be, something that cloaks the older woman like a shadow.

Sooyoung knows what mystery looks like, because she carries it with her, too, although far more subtle than Joohyun’s is, and it can be because of the difference in size of their baggage, or the fact that she’s simply more experienced in keeping secrets locked away and throwing away the keys.

But even with the lingering void of unknown, Sooyoung is a good judge of character, and Joohyun seems genuine, considerate in a way others had failed to so much as mimic, and a gentlewoman to the very tee.

She’d proved it during her interrogation.

(“Of course not. I wasn’t aware of who she was at first. She simply caught my eye, and I decided to talk to her. I don’t care for fame or money. As for physical appearance, I would be lying if I said I could look over something like that with Seulgi.”)

It’s on their second meeting that Sooyoung’s curiosity takes another twist.

She hadn’t missed Joohyun’s theme of black and white the first time around (being naturally observant, and anyway, it’s hard to look over), nor did she miss the threadbare brown satchel that didn’t quite complement the otherwise elegant visual the older woman sports.

She knows Seulgi better than the woman knows herself, and Seulgi’s always been the type to see the big picture rather than the small details that Sooyoung scrutinizes and stresses on.

It’s subtle, but it’s there often enough for her to notice it.

She notices it in the durations of their conversations. Sooyoung has the habit of studying people while they talk, taking note of every quirk and tick that her counterpart has, and conjuring deductions that, more often than not, prove to be correct.

She’d initially believed that Joohyun simply enjoyed talking to people while maintaining eye contact. It’s respectful, and there’s no harm that can come from it, so she’d only jotted it down in her file labeled Aphrodite and slid it back into her mental cabinet.

But then Sooyoung starts to notice the way Joohyun’s eyes seem to run from anything that isn’t her satchel, her clothes, or Seulgi.

Joohyun’s gaze snaps back and forth like a ping pong ball, and even when it’s subtle enough not to be noticed, well, Sooyoung’s always liked to play sleuth.

Whatever the mystery is, it can wait, because Seulgi is the happiest she’s seen since high school, and Sooyoung isn’t willing to be the one to burst that bubble with her silly probing and prodding through amateur detective work.

She’ll wait, but until then, she’ll keep an eye on her princess’ goddess of love.

~

A/N: The mystery of Bae Joohyun only becomes thicker. I can't confirm nor deny any of your theories or answer any of your questions, because it would all the fun out of the story. Haha. But we do have Joy's side of the story, now, so I hope that clears some things up. More hints, too, though. Thank you for all of your feedback and upvotes. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed!