Seungwan was certainly not in love with Joohyun. She might not be the best at feelings and dealing with them, but she wasn’t completely inexperienced either. She’d been in enough relationships to know that love, actual sustainable love, didn’t grow out of acquaintance or even friendship. Only the true intimacy of dating someone, kissing them, seeing all sides of them, could really lead to love.

But she was thinking about it.

When exactly had Joohyun stopped being just her beautiful neighbour with a pretty smile? Was it around the time Seungwan had started avoiding her instead of seeking her out? Was she too far gone to salvage?

Every time they met in the hallway, these questions and many more sprang up in her mind, freezing her in fear. She didn’t know how to act anymore, too afraid that Joohyun would see right through her, which was a silly concern, really, when she’d probably been this obvious for ages. But now she knew and that made all the difference.

Joohyun had stopped dating; she’d mentioned it in one of their hallway conversations. It was the only thing Seungwan could remember from that particular chat, to be completely honest, since she spent most of them too busy trying to keep her heart from beating out of her ears. But ever since that day, she spent her weekends unnervingly aware of Joohyun’s presence, just two walls between them. In the silence of the apartment, she almost imagined that she could hear her steps.

She knew she was getting stuck in her own head, making the whole thing bigger than it was. But who could she talk to? Certainly not the demon children, especially now. Yerim would probably tell her to focus her energy on tutoring and Sooyoung… She wasn’t sure, but she knew it would involve relentless mocking in some way or another.

There was Seulgi, of course, but she could imagine her disappointment if she knew how Seungwan was acting. She wouldn’t scold her, not if Seungwan looked pitiful enough, but it wouldn’t erase the truth. That Seungwan would have been that kind of friend. The kind that wanted more than Seulgi could ever give and pulled away faster than she could follow.

And the worst part was that she didn’t even have the time to think about this in the first place. In between work, studying and meeting Yerim for their tutoring sessions at the campus café, she barely had time to breathe, so she really couldn’t afford this constant and pointless stress.

She sighed deeply and tried to relax her tense frame. To be fair, her work in tutoring Yerim was probably a considerable factor in her overall stress levels. It felt like she was the one failing physics, which was a new and completely terrifying experience for her. She was spending all her mental energy trying to keep her inner overachiever from full-blown panic and that didn’t leave a lot of resources to handle her emotional crisis.

Sometimes she really wished she was an inanimate object. She could only imagine the peace of mind that came with being eternal, immobile and uncontactable. Especially that last one.

“Would you want to be something like that? A tree, maybe?” she asked the corpse in front of her distractedly. She was supposed to be finishing up some reports, but she kept getting distracted, so she’d left her office for a quick walk around the autopsy room. The view wasn’t great but it was a chance to stretch her legs. “You’re dead, so I guess anything would be a step up.”

A tree would be a good start, but there was still all that trouble of staying alive. She’d have to put out roots and branches and leaves, find water and nutrients, fight for sunlight. Knowing herself, even without a brain she’d find a way to stress about it.

She should just be a rock. Rocks just sat there and did nothing. They had nowhere to go, no obligations, no expectations. They stayed in the same place forever, enjoying the view and slowly eroding. She could handle eroding.

“You think I’d make a good rock?” She came closer to the dead body, a little too tempted to lean on the autopsy table and start sharing her woes. But that would be too much even for her, right?

“I don’t think it’s going to answer you,” a voice suddenly sounded from behind her. She yelped in surprise and whipped around, hands gripping the cold steel of the table for support. “Oh, I didn’t mean to surprise you,” Joohyun quickly added, looking startled herself.

“Just for future reference, you should always announce your presence when you enter a morgue,” Seungwan said, still out of breath. “It’s never a zombie, but I don’t think I’ll ever not assume it’s a zombie.”

Joohyun frowned a little, probably confused at the barely coherent explanation, but she nodded nonetheless.

“Hi,” Seungwan finally remembered to say. She smiled sheepishly at her unexpected guest, who looked a little stiff. Probably just the morgue effect. “How did you get in here?” she asked after an awkward pause.

“I was going to bribe the security guard, but he just let me in when I told him I was your friend. He said you could use the company,” Joohyun said uncertainly.

“Oh, yeah, that’s… I thought the walls were a lot more soundproof than they actually are and he caught me in quite a few compromising situations,” Seungwan admitted, hand rising to scratch at the back of her neck. Joohyun’s eyes widened and she quickly looked around the room with an unreadable expression.

Seungwan understood her discomfort after a moment’s confusion. “Not with the corpses!” she was quick to explain, waving her hands for emphasis. “Right, I can see how my phrasing could be a little misleading. I meant normal stuff. Singing along to my headphones and talking to myself a lot.”

Joohyun seemed more comfortable, now that she only had to deal with the normal everyday weirdness that came with Seungwan and not anything extra involving dead bodies. Both women relaxed, finally moving closer together so they weren’t talking from opposite sides of the room. “Hi,” Seungwan repeated, a little awkwardly, once they were within normal talking distance.

Joohyun returned the greeting a little stiffly and Seungwan finally started to wonder why she’d come in the first place. Had something happened? “Is everything okay?” she asked, trying to keep the worry from her voice.

“Yes,” her visitor quickly replied. Then she paused and pressed her lips together like she was mulling something over. “Well, no. I suppose not,” she added after a moment. She suddenly looked a little uncertain, and her eyes darted around the room again.

Seungwan watched her silently, waiting for her to elaborate. In the silence before she spoke, she remembered that she was supposed to be panicking, but somehow her concern kept her too focused on Joohyun to start cycling through familiar thoughts.

“Why haven’t you come to see me?” Joohyun finally blurted out. Then she grimaced, her eyebrows furrowed deeply, and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “No, that’s not – I was going to ask if you were mad at me first,” she muttered, more to herself than anything.

The question was so unexpectedly direct that Seungwan was shocked speechless. In her desperate scrambling for a plausible answer, she almost missed Joohyun’s accidental confession. “Did you have a speech prepared?” she asked after some surprised blinking.

“No,” Joohyun quickly replied. “Just… A general outline,” she added shyly, picking at the sleeve of her blazer.

“I’m not mad at you,” Seungwan was quick to assure her, intentionally ignoring the other question. It was proving very difficult to come up with an excuse when she couldn’t tell her about her feelings or about Yerim.

To her surprise, Joohyun didn’t go back to the topic. Instead, she sighed softly. “The outline is unnecessary, I know what this is,” she said rather cryptically. Seungwan was a little afraid to find out more, so she simply stood in place, studying her friend.

“I’m not as oblivious as you think,” she started with a voice tinged with hurt. “I know that Sooyoung and Yerim keep things from me. But if they wanted to tell me, they would, so what’s the point in confronting them? I won’t force them to say it.”

It felt like Joohyun’s thoughts were following a path that could be very dangerous for Seungwan, but she couldn’t find it in herself to worry about that. It was like all the stress of the past weeks had slipped away, pushed out of her head by the hurt in Joohyun’s voice, in her eyes. She felt the urge to grasp her hand like she had done with Seulgi, but she knew it wouldn’t be the same, so she held back and waited for the rest.

“After all, they’re so much younger than me. They live in an entirely different world. The things they keep from me, I might not even understand them.” She was talking a little faster now, trying to push the words out before they had the chance to stick in . Then she paused and looked straight at Seungwan and for a moment it seemed like they really had stuck there. She swallowed and tried again. “I didn’t think you would do it as well. I thought… I thought we might be in the same world.”

Seungwan took a step forward before she could even register what she was doing, but Joohyun immediately stepped back, maintaining the space between them. She clearly wasn’t done, so Seungwan settled for clasping her hands tightly together as she waited.

“I never see you after work anymore, so I got off a little early and I came here. I was going to ask you, I even had an outline, but… I don’t have anything to ask. I think I just wanted to see you. I just missed you,” she admitted quietly. Her eyes were bright and shimmery and Seungwan felt something clench painfully in her chest.

“Please don’t cry,” she requested weakly, because it was the only thing she could think of. If Joohyun started crying she knew she would too, and she definitely had a lot to cry about. More than her friend needed to hear right now.

“Please don’t lie to me,” Joohyun returned with a small smile. Her voice was brittle, but the attempt at humour was clear. Seungwan risked another step forward, then another, until she was finally close enough to reach for Joohyun’s hands. She yielded them without protest and stood silently as Seungwan held them between her own, rubbing her thumb over them in soothing patterns.

“I didn’t want to lie,” she admitted in a whisper. Joohyun sniffled and suddenly all she wanted was to hug her tight and never let go. “And I didn’t want to avoid you either,” she added truthfully.

She felt so silly. She’d made such a big issue of something that was so clear. She’d turned the question of Joohyun over and over in her head, so many times that she’d forgotten that all that really mattered was Joohyun herself. She’d been beating herself up over the illusion of choice when all along there was only one choice she could ever make.

“I didn’t know you missed me,” she said, a little selfishly. Her thumbs moved in ever-slower circles and she felt a small smile tug at her lips as Joohyun still made no move to pull away.

“Of course I did,” she replied softly, and her hands moved in Seungwan’s grip as she shrugged. “You’re my friend and I love you.”

All that mattered was Joohyun’s happiness. Everything else came second. Everything else, she’d deal with it as it came along.

“It’s… Not really my secret to tell,” she started hesitantly. She captured Joohyun’s eyes, attempting to impress the gravity of her next words. “You have to promise to keep it to yourself.”

Joohyun nodded gravely, the tears that had threatened to spill moments before already retreating to reveal the same old clear depths.

“You really have to promise, because if she suspects anything, I’m pretty sure she’ll kill me,” Seungwan insisted. Joohyun quirked an eyebrow, but nodded again, a muttered “I promise” spilling from her lips.

She let go of Joohyun gently, then rushed into her office to grab the nearest notebook. When she returned, she opened it on an empty table, calling Joohyun over. “This is the secret,” she said, feeling almost relieved.

Her visitor studied the open pages with a small frown. “This is thermodynamics,” she remarked after a moment. Seungwan nodded. “Thermodynamics isn’t a secret, Seungwan, it’s a well-understood physical theory.”

“Well, Yerim certainly doesn’t understand it,” Seungwan replied with a chuckle. Joohyun gazed at her blankly. “She’s failing physics, I’m tutoring her,” she quickly explained.

“She’s failing physics?” Joohyun parroted, suddenly speaking so loudly that Seungwan almost flinched. “And she didn’t tell me?” she continued, still very loudly, now flailing her arms for emphasis. Seungwan was beginning to worry that somebody would hear them and barge in, but just then Joohyun turned around and started making her way towards the exit, looking intent on stomping all the way to Yerim’s dorm.

Seungwan nearly fell over in her rush to stop her, hands clenching desperately around her arm. “No, no, no, you can’t go,” she said hurriedly. “You’re going to talk to her, and if you do that then she’ll trace it back to me and I’ll end up like him,” she added sombrely, nodding in the direction of the nearest corpse.

Thankfully, Joohyun’s arm remained safely in her grip, as its owner stopped in her tracks to study the dead body. “Was he murdered?” she finally asked, her voice the usual mix of dread and curiosity that people tended to display at the topic.

It seemed that the crisis had been averted, so Seungwan tentatively diverted her attention to the corpse in question. “Um, no, heart attack,” she said once she’d identified it. “But still very much dead,” she pointed out with a frown.

She awkwardly loosened the probably painful grip she’d kept on Joohyun’s arm, smoothing out the crinkled fabric of her sleeve in a silent apology. “You did promise not to tell anyone,” she reminded Joohyun in a mumble.

“That was before I knew what the secret was,” Joohyun whined cutely, but she didn’t protest the issue further. Instead, she made her way back to the notebook and flipped through its pages. “Why didn’t she just ask me?” she huffed, looking almost offended. “I studied physics extensively in college, she knows this.”

“That’s what I said! That she should have asked you,” Seungwan elaborated. She didn’t really know about that second thing, but it only made her more frustrated with stubborn Yerim. “But she really wants you to think that she’s got it all together. I think she doesn’t want to let you down.”

Joohyun pursed her lips in displeasure, clearly agreeing with Seungwan’s assessment. “Well, she should have considered how heavily she is imposing on you. She shouldn’t be asking for so many tutoring sessions.”

“No, no, I just tutor her on the weekend,” she was quick to clear up. “It’s just that I have to go through all the material first and that takes a while since I don’t really know this stuff.”

“You don’t know the material?” Joohyun asked, voice raising once more. Seungwan nervously eyed the door, wondering if her friend had reconsidering her promise in favour or berating Yerim for choosing the worst tutor possible. “That is a completely unfair work-load to put on you, does she have no conscience?” It was Yerim, so the question was up for debate, but it was probably rhetorical anyway.

Although it was nice to know that Joohyun wasn’t just doubting her tutoring abilities, Seungwan began to feel uncomfortable at the way her friend’s eyes were still on her, as though she were weighing her up. Joohyun crossed her arms and let her finger tap against her bicep as she pondered.

“Alright, that settles it then,” Joohyun suddenly declared. “You’ll come to my place after work and I’ll explain all this to you. It’s the least I can do, since I’m forbidden from giving Yerim a piece of my mind,” she added with a complicit smirk, leaning over to bump gently against Seungwan’s shoulder.

Seungwan looked at her in equal parts shock, relief and gratitude. She couldn’t stop herself from latching onto Joohyun with all her might and babbling words of thanks into her ear while she patted her back soothingly.

“Thank you so much, really,” she repeated once she’d finally pulled away. “I was getting so stressed out studying this, you don’t even know. I started having my old college stress dreams. You know, where you wake up and you’re late for a test, and then you don’t even know where it is. And when you manage to find the room, you realize you didn’t bring anything, not even a pen, and then you finally look at the test and suddenly calculus is all about weather patterns in the Scandinavian peninsula and also everything’s in Russian.” Joohyun looked at her in mild confusion. “I had that one last Tuesday,” she added unnecessarily.

Joohyun took another look at the notebook still on the nearby table, then closed it and tucked it under her arm. “Okay, we’ll start studying tomorrow,” she said decisively. Then she fixed her eyes on Seungwan and broke into a large grin. “And tonight, you’re coming over for dinner.”

As Seungwan smiled back, happiness flooding her chest like an explosion, she thought of how silly she’d been. She knew now that there was nothing she could do to stop her feelings for Joohyun. They were as inevitable as the tides, the alternation of night and day, the pull of one magnet to another. But more importantly, it didn’t even matter. All that mattered was that smile on Joohyun’s lips. All that mattered was keeping it there.