It’s not that Jiwoo can’t go. She totally could if she wanted to, if she had any interest in it. She just…doesn’t find it exciting and never has, never got the appeal of it.

She has never been able to understand why anyone would willingly lock themselves in a dark place where anything or anyone could jump at them at any time. She’d rather just stay in her well-lit home, where no scary creatures or characters would attempt to give her a heart attack or two. But, just to clarify, it’s not that it scares her or anything like that, that would be pathetic. It’s just that she’d rather spend her time doing other recreational not-life-threatening activities.

However, peer pressure and seeing her friends laugh at Haseul when she asked if there would be any pigeons there, prompted Jiwoo to immediately accept the offer of going to a haunted house for Halloween.

Besides, anything seems less scary than the idea of Hyunjin taunting her over being a scaredy-cat for the rest of eternity. If she has to make some sacrifices to assure that her eternal peace is left intact then so be it, she’d rather have a bad night than a bad life filled with Hyunjin’s teasing.

Jiwoo has many fears; heights, the dark, bugs, angry kittens, just the usual stuff really. However, nothing beats Hyunjin, she definitely takes the top of that list.

Heejin is always trying to convince Jiwoo that the girl is really not that bad, that she’s just a soft giant that likes to tease people, ‘especially people like you’ she would say (whatever that means). But it doesn’t help that much cause of course Heejin would say that about her girlfriend, Jiwoo can’t be convinced by Heejin’s completely biased opinion no matter how hard she tries.

It’s not that she doesn’t like Hyunjin because she does, she really does. She just fears her….slightly…a lot. Not to the point in which it prevents her from enjoying Hyunjin’s company, though. It is a weird relationship but honestly what else could be expected from forming a friendship with your best friend’s girlfriend who used to bully you in middle school -thing which Jiwoo is completely over with, by the way-.

She understands that that was many years ago and honestly everyone is an awful person when they’re in middle school. She doesn’t hold it against Hyunjin any longer, especially after the girl had cried in front of her while asking for her forgiveness (and shortly after telling her that if anyone found out about that she would kill her, but that’s not the important part here).

The moral of the story is that Hyunjin is a great friend that Jiwoo loves a lot and all that, but still, that doesn’t mean Jiwoo is okay with telling her about the not liking haunted houses situation. She knows she won’t let her live over that. So, she accepts the offer to go to one, decision which is now making her want to die.

She finds comfort in having Haseul there with her, the other girl is horrible with horror too so at least she won’t be alone with her struggles.

*

God bless Jo Haseul. She’s the only thing keeping Jiwoo sane right now.

As they stand in line to enter that cursed place, Haseul is already clutching Jiwoo’s hand. Jiwoo acts totally cool about it and even laughs it off, slightly teasing Haseul over it, but she holds her hand back with just as much force, if not more.

“Hey, it’s not that bad,” Jiwoo offers Haseul a reassuring tone.

She has been trying to convince herself that it really isn’t that awful. It isn’t more than a dark corridor with painfully fake-looking décor and corny background sounds of thunder and howling wolves with some cheesy Friday the 13^th music mixed into it.

“Yeah,” Haseul says sounding the farthest thing away from convinced, “What’s there to fear about people jumping at you in ty costumes, right?”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing!” Haseul repeats.

They awkwardly laugh, knowing they are both just as terrified as they were five minutes ago.

Hyunjin and Heejin are too distracted with being a couple in front of them to notice their utter terror, not like they would care anyway, they’d still force them to enter.

Jiwoo’s heart accelerates as an employee announces they’re next to enter. It needs to be a group of eight and so the four of them end up getting clumped up with some girls that are next in line.

Jiwoo notices the girls behind her all gasp when the employee tells them four is the number of people going in next, she assumes it is because their group consists of five.

Upon hearing those news, they quickly rearrange themselves in a way that makes the shortest girl, dressed as what seems to be a frog, completely disappears while standing in the middle of the group.

Jiwoo gasps in amazement, she feels as if she just witnessed a magic trick. She almost feels like clapping at their raw talent, it’s exceptionally amazing cause all the girls are mostly short, all except for one blonde girl that stands out from the group for being the only tall one. She’s also very hard to miss given that she’s dressed up as a mermaid, costume which consist of a very tight and long skirt that barely leaves any space for leg movement, resulting in the girl having to practically jump in order to move.

“Okay, you’re good to go!”

Jiwoo knows that this particular employee is not supposed to be the one scaring her, but the words still make her shiver.

As she starts walking through the haunted house, she tells herself that she can’t see anything that’s in front of her cause of the fog and the barely existing sources of light and totally not because of her teary eyes. They’ve barely taken any steps, she can’t already be crying.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,” She hears Haseul murmur next to her over and over again and it’s honestly just as creepy as the haunted house.

She hears shrieking from the girls behind her and the sounding of the tall blonde girl’s awkward leaping grow faster and faster the deeper they walk into the house.

She tries to find amusement and relief by focusing on them cause, honestly, they are a funny group. Another blonde shorter girl keeps screaming back at the monster saying, “Don’t try it, I have the power of God and anime on my side!”

It steals a giggle from Jiwoo every time, giggle which quickly transforms into a piercing scream as she turns around and is met by some gruesome scenery which keeps becoming more realistic each time. Her screams also keep getting louder and more desperate. She wonders if there’s any correlation between the two.

“I don’t want this anymore!” Jiwoo screams and reaches out to hold Haseul’s hand but is only met with air. She frantically looks around, trying to find her partner but it’s too dark to really recognize anything around her and the more attention she pays, the more scared she gets, so she quickly gives up in being reunited with the girl.

Oh God, she thinks, we lost a soldier.

Okay. So maybe as she stands alone in the dark corridor, no comforting hand to hold, screams being all she hears and barely being able to differentiate what terrors lay in front of her, things start getting too much for Jiwoo.

Every noise she hears has her almost breaking her neck from how fast she moves her head from side to side, trying to identify where it is coming from.

Things don’t get any better for Jiwoo as she enters the next room. Blood is splattered all over the place, and the walls are covered with inverted crosses which make Jiwoo feel dizzy. A bunch of coffins lay here and there. She stops next to one, trying to catch her breath after all the gore and spooky content she just had to consume.

It happens so fast that Jiwoo barely notices it. She hears a loud bang and from the coffin that she’s currently leaning on, a person pops out. She shrieks in terror. At first, she thinks it’s some type of doll but as the thing keeps moving closer and closer she realizes it is, in fact, a real person.

She notices pale skin, very realistic blood drooling from even more realistic looking fangs and piercing red eyes that, according to Jiwoo, hold death in them.

The vampire-creature-girl in front of her opens , flashing threatening fangs and making a deadly sound which convinces the terrified girl that she’s about to be eaten alive. Jiwoo takes a step back, trying to escape from her predator and trips over, falling right into a puddle of blood and noticing things that look like organs surrounding her. She feels nauseous and somehow finds energy to scream even louder. She screams for so long that her lungs start to miss air and her head begins spinning around, so much so that her vision becomes blurry and- Oh God, she’s going down.

She’s lying on the floor and sees vampire girl looking down to her, not seeming that intimidating any more as a worrying look takes over her face. Jiwoo would have even noticed how pretty of a human she actually is had she not been in the middle of passing out.

“Are you OK?” Asks the pretty vampire girl, but Jiwoo can’t understand her.

“I- I think I’m dying,” Jiwoo’s voice is shaky, barely audible among the chaos of the haunted house.

The girl comes closer and suddenly everything goes black.

*

Jiwoo wakes up in a place she can’t recognize. Her surroundings start getting clearer and clearer and soon enough she reaches the conclusion that rather than being the afterlife, this is just the outsides of the haunted house.

“At least we know we’re good at our job, I mean if she passed out and all,” Jiwoo hears an unknown voice say.

The comment is shortly followed by a grunt and a “Shut up, Jungeun.”

Jiwoo finally feels strong enough to lift her head and properly open her eyes, she’s fast to recognize pretty vampire girl right in front of her, concern evident in her eyes. Jiwoo feels like passing out again cause the girl is so so very pretty and it makes her feel irrationally nervous.

She then recognizes the rest of the people around her; Haseul is sitting by her side, Hyunjin and Heejin behind her.

Hyunjin sighs when she notices Jiwoo is conscious, “Oh no, she lives.”

Jiwoo ignores her as she continues to mutter ‘maybe next time’ under her breath, feeling too tired to deal with the teasing.

Scattered around the room are the five girls that joined them in the haunted house, all eyeing her curiously, and she notices two new additions to the group.

There’s one tall raven-haired girl looking like some knock off Samara from The Ring, it’s almost scary enough to trigger Jiwoo’s fight or flight response (in this case she would flight), and then another blonde girl, who also looks like a vampire. As Jiwoo had recently found out, she’s named Jungeun and so she refrains from calling her pretty vampire girl number two.

“Jiwoo, is it?” Talks original vampire girl, and maybe it is from the hit that her head just got,  but Jiwoo thinks that her name sounds outstandingly pretty coming from her, “Are you alright?”

Jiwoo feels everyone looking her way as she talks, “Uh yeah, I think I just, um, got too spooked.”

The girl in the frog costume speaks in the background, no one other than a girl with tiny bat wings attached to her back seems to hear her, though, “Oh thank God, now I can laugh without feeling bad.”

“Good, that’s good,” Vampire girl nods, “Sorry about that, by the way. It was kinda my fault.”

Jiwoo shakes her head in protest -which hurts a lot-, but before she can speak again she’s interrupted by Heejin, “I think we should take you home now, get some rest.”

Haseul agrees with her, and even Hyunjin shows signs of concern for Jiwoo.

Heartwarming, she thinks.

“Are you gonna like, sue us?” Speaks for the first time the Samara looking one.

Jungeun gasps, and glares at the girl, “Hyejoo, don’t give her ideas!”

Pretty vampire girl rolls her eyes and shushes them both. She returns her attention towards Jiwoo, who’s still pathetically lying on the floor, and her expression softens.

She offers her a hand and helps her stand up. Jiwoo expects the hand to be cold so the warmth surprises her. She then feels dumb as she remembers the girl is not an actual vampire.

“Can I make it up to you, please?” The girl says with pleading eyes.

Jiwoo takes her time to answer, unable to process the words. She blames it on her recent blackout and not in how nervous the girl makes her feel for some reason.

“Ah!” Says vampire girl suddenly, “I’m Sooyoung, by the way.”

“Sooyoung,” Jiwoo repeats, she likes the way it feels on her lips, “Well, what do you have in mind?”

“Anything you want,” Sooyoung smirks.

The crowd around them ‘oooh-s’ and remind Jiwoo that they aren’t alone. She notices a girl with pink hair looking interested for the first time in the night; Jiwoo had envied her early over how unbothered she had been while walking through the haunted house. This is the first time she shows any emotion and engagement with what’s happening around her.

“Drive me home?” Jiwoo says, her voice coming out a whole octave higher than it usually is.

Sooyoung smiles, “Sure, might even treat you to some food in the way, who knows.”

*

The idea of grabbing dinner is left behind as every restaurant they try to visit is currently having some sort of Halloween special which Jiwoo refuses to deal with given that she’s still trying to recover from her incident. The only spooky thing allowed near her right now is Sooyoung in her vampire costume, and that’s only because she’s nice to look at.

They’re now sitting at the porch of  Jiwoo’s house, munching on leftover candy.

“So, how did you end up in a place like that one?”  Sooyoung sounds amused, “I doubt it was your idea.”

Jiwoo huffs and feels her cheeks slightly turn warmer in embarrassment, “My friends wanted to go. I honestly didn’t think it’d be that bad.”

Sooyoung shrugs, “I’ve seen worse reactions.”

 “Really?!” Jiwoo’s eyes light up.

“No, I was just trying to make you feel better.”

“Oh,” Jiwoo’s face immediately drops and out of habit she softly hits Sooyoung on the shoulder. Somehow that transforms into Jiwoo’s hand lingering very close to Sooyoung’s, so near the other girl that she can practically feel her body warmth.

As the night progresses Jiwoo’s body finds itself angling more and more towards Sooyoung’s, slowly getting closer till there’s practically no space left in-between the two and they’re leaning against each other. It happens without them meaning to, one second they’re at a safe socially accepted distance for two girls that are practically strangers and the next they’re at a very intimate proximity in which Sooyoung can feel Jiwoo’s unsteady breaths against her cheek.

It’s almost as if their bodies speak a language that they cannot control.

Jiwoo had notice Sooyoung uncomfortably blinking and rubbing her eyes for the last hour, thing which honestly is starting to get concerning and impossible to ignore the closer they get.

“Hey, you OK?” Jiwoo asks seemingly out of the blue.

It catches Sooyoung off guard, the girl clearly having no idea what Jiwoo is talking about, “Hm?”

Jiwoo uses her head to point towards Sooyoung’s direction, “Your eyes, are they bothering you or something?”

“Oh,” Sooyoung says flatly, she’s been trying to make her itchy eyes not obvious for the entire night, but clearly it hasn’t been successful, “Yeah, it’s just the stupid contacts.”

Jiwoo’s mouth shapes as an ‘O’ as she remembers the girl in front of her doesn’t actually have unnatural red eyes and is still in her costume (minus the fangs, which she took out earlier right before eating a chocolate bar Jiwoo had given her. Sooyoung had blushed as her fang removal procedure hadn’t been graceful at all and probably one, if not The most unflattering image she had shown to any stranger ever. Jiwoo had found it adorable).

“Need help with that?” Jiwoo says, understanding the struggles of putting and removing contacts with no mirror. She’s totally not speaking from experience here, it’s not like she’s legally blind and struggles every morning of her life for at least three minutes trying to get her contact lenses in the right position. If that were the case why would she offer her help, right?

Sooyoung looks thoughtful for a moment, considering Jiwoo’s offer.

She doesn’t really need the help. With all the years of experience she has working at haunted houses, she’s perfected the art of putting and taking out contacts, she could do it in a second if she needed to. In fact, she could get in full costume at a record time of two minutes with seven seconds. She is the fastest at her job. She has Costume Putting Olympics with Jungeun and Hyejoo every year whenever Halloween comes around and her number one spot has been undefeated for years.

But…anything to get closer to the cute girl.

“Sure,” She finally says, “That’d be…Helpful, yeah.”

Jiwoo eyes her weirdly and giggles at the girl.

She rests one of her hands on Sooyoung’s cheeks and she almost gasps at how soft they are, she’s able to stop herself though cause that would have been weird and she’s not weird.

Her other hand takes out the lenses, one at a time. She struggles for a second and it’s not from having shaky hands or anything like that, she has her hands completely under control just like her feelings. No jittery feelings and no unsteady hands for Jiwoo.

Their faces are awfully close now and Jiwoo tries not to look down, she really does her best to not look at Sooyoung’s lips, but her best is not good enough cause soon enough her eyes are resting at the bottom of the girl’s face.

Sooyoung notices it and can’t hide the smirk that forms across them.

“What now?” Jiwoo asks, her voice sounding tiny and delicate.

“What now?” Sooyoung repeats sounding dumbfounded, which she is.

Jiwoo is the one knowingly smirking now, “The contacts.”

“Oh! Right, that,” Sooyoung snaps out of it and clears , “Just, uh, throw them away. They’re already a week old anyway.”

Jiwoo does as she’s told, and any sign of admiration towards Sooyoung’s beautiful brown eyes is hidden from her face.

Sooyoung’s eyes come off much warmer like this and Jiwoo wants to grow familiar with them. Have brown eyes always been this charming? Jiwoo has them too and practically everyone she knows shares the color, but not none of those are half as beautiful as Sooyoung’s.

You know what else Jiwoo and everyone she knows have? Lips.

And so does Sooyoung and hers are the prettiest lips Jiwoo’s ever seen. She wonders if they kiss prettily too.

Jiwoo never kisses on the first date. she’s the take things slow kinda girl, and though this isn’t even a first date, she wouldn’t mind breaking that rule now.

Being so close like that, all she has to do is lift her face and their lips would be touching.

So close, so easy, so sweet; sweeter than any candy she could have that night.

Jiwoo senses gay panic coming her way and so she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then a second one, and finally a third one.

When she opens them back again she notices Sooyoung staring at her attentively. She seems amused by the girl and not that Jiwoo is projecting her own feelings onto her, but it also looks affectionate.

Sooyoung arches her eyebrows questioningly. Jiwoo just shakes her head in order to avoid a response that could only go along the lines of “I can’t stop thinking about kissing you, so I needed a time to chill out.”

Sooyoung’s lips curve up anyway and for a second Jiwoo has the fear that she’s able to read her mind.

With a smile still plastered across her face, Sooyoung checks her phone. Her eyes widen as she realizes the hour, and a loud sigh escapes .

She looks towards Jiwoo, who already knows what’s coming and can’t help the drop in her heart from having to say goodbye so fast. Yes, spending hours talking about nothing is not enough; plus they went by way too fast, like seconds.

She wouldn’t mind spending some more hours with Sooyoung, just like Sooyoung wouldn’t mind spending the rest of hers with Jiwoo.

“Anyway, I’ll let you go now,” Sooyoung says awkwardly.

“Ah, yes. It got late, didn’t it?”

It suddenly turns quiet on both sides, but it doesn’t last too long.

“Let me walk you home?” Sooyoung says as she offers Jiwoo her hand.

Jiwoo laughs out loud as the other girl guides her to the door, protectively holding her hand as they go up one stair and take exactly four steps towards the entrance of the house.

“You’ve arrived safely at your destination!”

“.”

“Hey!” Sooyoung says defensively, “How can I let you walk alone when the possibility of you passing out again or something like that exists?!”

Jiwoo rolls her eyes and once again hits Sooyoung on her shoulder, this time she lets her hand fall into Sooyoung’s.

“Of course,” She says, “Better safe than sorry.”

Sooyoung nods, “Now, go inside.”

Jiwoo says her goodbyes with a smile even though it physically hurts her to let go of Sooyoung’s hand. As she’s about to close the door, Sooyoung speaks one last time.

“Oh! And by the way, if you get like…Scared during the night, don’t hesitate to call me.”

She winks and tries to sound smooth, but honestly Jiwoo can see how nervous the girl is while delivering her line and she finds it stupidly endearing.

Her smile only grows wider.

“Oh, I definitely will.”