A/N: I have a twitter @purplecapes if you want to talk to me. It's not much, but it's something. Hope you enjoy!

Dear Bae Joohyun,

When you smile, I fall apart and I wish the world would just turn a bit slower, so I can be there in slow motion just thinking how lucky I am to be here with you. Even when my days get hard, I know I can count on you to give me strength. 

Sincerely, Me

There it was, another letter. Seulgi didn’t know why she was still doing this. Maybe she should really accept it, that she was some sort of masochist. She said before that she wasn’t, but her words said one thing, and yet her actions said another. 

“Hey what are you writing?” Joohyun appeared behind her, eyes curious as she tried to sneak a glance at the letter. 

Seulgi jumped in her seat, throwing her notebook containing the letter off her desk with the flick of her wrist. Oh god, if Joohyun saw the letter, life would just end right then and there. 

“No-NOTHING!” Seulgi practically yelled out, to which Joohyun’s eyes widened in surprise. “So...Sorry. Yo..You sur..surprised m-me an...an...and I pa...panicked.”

“I won’t tell anyone else what you were writing. It’ll be our little secret. What is it?” Joohyun spoke with such a soft and quiet voice that Seulgi saw stars in her eyes. She looked so mischievous, so down to earth that she just fell in love with her all over again.

“Love letters,” Seulgi blurted out. Holy , moved faster than her brain again. Why does she keep on doing that? 

What the is wrong with me?

“Ooooh, that’s so cute!” Joohyun squealed. It reminded her of Sooyoung. Huh, even though they were step-sisters, they sure had that in common. 

“Right…” Seulgi said, not really knowing what to say.

“Tell you what. If you tell me who it is, I will do my best to get you together.”

It’s you. “Oh, t-that’s...I’d ra...rather n-not say.”

“Please!” Joohyun clasped her hands together and leaned forward, so close that Seulgi could feel her breath on her skin. Mint. It affected Seulgi to the point where she just blinked for a while until she found her bearings again.

How could I refuse you? “It’s Sooyoung.”

.

“Sooyoung?” Joohyun’s hopeful expression turned softer then, her hands unclasped and were put to her side. She didn’t look that excited anymore.

“Yes…” Seulgi lied. Oh god, she had a lot of explaining to do later. “...Sooyoung.”

Joohyun just stared at Seulgi like she was an alien, as if she really didn’t know what she was. Sure Seulgi felt invisible, as if no one noticed if she was there, but she wasn’t an outcast, not like Sooyoung was, and here Joohyun was looking at her like one. 

“Ca-can you read it to me?” Joohyun asked so timidly she almost thought it was a different person. 

Seulgi bit her lip, knowing there was no getting out of this, and bent over to pick up her notebook. She opened the book to the page, away from Joohyun’s prying eyes and started to read.

“Dear...Sooyoung…” As she read the letter, her eyes glanced intermittently at Joohyun and found her paying utmost attention. It was...different. She seemed normal then, as if she was not the goddess on the pedestal she put her on. Joohyun was just a normal girl just like her. 

Joohyun felt real to her, and it made it so much better.

“...Sincerely, Me,” Seulgi finished and closed her notebook, not wanting Joohyun to find her name instead of Sooyoung’s instead. 

“That’s...beautiful,” Joohyun whispered, her eyes turning misty. She wiped them with her sleeve and she whimpered weakly. 

“Are you okay?” Seulgi worried. The last time she had ever seen Joohyun cry was when she lost a game of chess against a FIDE master in an exhibition match. The girl was seriously competitive, and to have her crying over a simple love letter was something Seulgi had never thought would happen. 

“Yeah, I’m...it’s fine. Those letters remind me of Seungwan’s. You write like her, you know? Like the person you’re talking about means the world to you, as if you live and breath just for them.”

You have no idea. 

“I...lov-like Sooyoung.” I’m so sorry Sooyoung. 

“I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone, but I think I should tell you since you’re so in love with her.” Please, god no. “I’m her step-sister,” Joohyun said through her sniffles and tears. “I know it’s a surprise but it’s true. No one knows cause if people found out, they’d compare us two, and I don’t want that to happen to Sooyoung. I wouldn’t want her to be Joohyun’s sister. I want her to be her own person. I want her to be Sooyoung.”

Seulgi kept silent as Joohyun whimpered through her explanation. Sooyoung thought Joohyun hated her, but here Joohyun was saying she loved Sooyoung so much she didn’t want anything to hurt her. Once again, Joohyun had ways to make Seulgi’s heart swell with pride. 

“Thank you for telling me,” Seulgi said without so much as a break. After seeing Joohyun like this with her heart laid bare, it felt easier to talk to her, like this was real Joohyun, and the real Joohyun was so beautiful. 

“Your stutter is gone,” Joohyun pointed out.

Seulgi smiled and nodded. “I guess it is.”

//

Home was something Seulgi dreaded going to. No, it wasn’t that sort of thing where she got abused or anything. It was much, much worse. It was empty. Without fail after school, she would come home to an empty house and it stayed that way until ten or maybe even eleven, around the time she was getting ready to sleep. That was when her Mom came home from the hospital, gave her a sorry smile that she came so late, that she didn’t get to eat dinner with her, and then after those empty apologies, she would do it all over again the next day. 

Seulgi had learned to not trust anything her Mom said, even the things she thought her Mom really meant. Like, “This year will be different!” or “You’ll talk to more people, I’m sure of it.” Hopeless optimism.

Seulgi knew she was just like her Mom, selfless in a bad way. That was why she was gone for most of the day, always taking up overtime because she knew it would help someone out. What she forgot about was her daughter at home in need of a mother, a friend, a confidant. It seemed after her dad left she lived alone in that house. Seulgi understood. Truly, she did. Sometimes people forgot what mattered most. 

For her mom, it was her. For herself, it was still her. 

A bit selfish, right? She could really stand to be selfish right now. 

“The carnival’s in two days,” Seulgi said aloud, catching Sooyoung’s attention, whose head rose from writing something in a notebook Ms. Hyoyeon gave them for the project. Today, it was to write a series of speeches about brotherly (or sisterly) love. 

“Yeah, and? Are you seriously telling me you’re going?” Sooyoung still wrote in the book while she talked and her eyes were on Seulgi. It was impressive and Seulgi would’ve said something if she wasn’t feeling so down. 

“Maybe. I just…” want something good to happen “...want to win some stuffed animals, you know?”

Sooyoung rolled her eyes. “Stuffed animals. You, Kang Seulgi, willingly going to a social gathering, which I know you are deathly scared of, just for some stuffed animals.”

No, of course not. “Yeah well, I like stuffed animals,” she said. She did, really, and her room was full of them. Her Mom gave her one every birthday without fail, as if that would fill the void she left every day.

“Seungwan asked you to come, didn’t she?” Sooyoung stopped writing then, getting a bit defensive.

“NO!” Seulgi coughed. “I mean no,” she said more timidly. “It’s not that. It’s...I really want to win some stuffed animals.” Even for the simplest things, she found a lie to give. 

Sooyoung merely set her pen down and crossed her arms. She looked closely at Seulgi, her eyes staring her down, and Seulgi avoided Sooyoung’s burning hot gaze. She should tell her to stop, but Sooyoung was Sooyoung and if she told her to stop, then she would do it even more. 

“Okay…” Sooyoung said finally. “...but I get to come with you.”

“But—”

“No exceptions,” Sooyoung said quickly to which Seulgi could only nod and confirm. “Besides, I don’t trust you to just carousel through the crowd. Who knows? Maybe you’ll have a panic attack if left to your own devices.”

“I am many things, but I am not the type of person who gets panic attacks just from walking through a crowd,” Seulgi sneered. 

“And I’m not the type of person who s their teacher,” Sooyoung retorted back. “Tell me something that isn’t a lie and I’d be more inclined to believe you later.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Well then I’m not lying either!” Sooyoung shot right back. “What do you do when you wake up in the morning, hmm? Take a run, eat breakfast with the tv on or something, or do you just lie in bed fighting if you wanna get up or not? Sometimes, I wonder why you do get up in morning just to torture yourself.”

Seulgi kept shut, her teeth grinding on each other. Sooyoung had it right, slammed the hammer down in the middle of the nail. She only sighed in a response and looked down into her own notebook and started writing.

Sooyoung didn’t bother to say anything further, but she did give Seulgi one last look before going back to her own notebook. 

It was silent. The air was heavy. Seulgi hated every second of it.

Seulgi knew she should say sorry, come clean about what she really meant. Sooyoung was trying to help in her own way, just as Seulgi helped Seungwan in her own way. Everybody had different methods, some more forceful than others, and Sooyoung’s was to make her face the truth, come clean about herself to fix herself. 

Her statement about panic attacks was a big, fat lie. Fourth grade, New York City Times Square, halfway across the world, she lost her Dad in the crowd. She held his hand tight, but before she knew it, her hand grasped thin air and everything just seemed to slow down. Her breathing got faster, her heart started pounding against her chest, and she collapsed right then and there. They found her a few minutes later, but the damage had already been done.

Funny, here she was thinking about New York City halfway across the world, and here’s Joohyun and her mother in the same school, in the same house, and she couldn’t say she felt any closer to them. 

“You should’ve seen her Sooyoung,” Seulgi said, breaking the silence. “She was so happy when I said Seungwan loved her.”

Sooyoung didn’t say anything so Seulgi continued. 

“AndImayhavetoldherIwaswritingloveletterstoyou.”

“WHAT!” Sooyoung darted up from her seat, chair screeching back before it fell with a thud. 

“I PANICKED!” Seulgi yelled back. “SHE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT I WAS WRITING!”

“AND NOW I’M YOUR LOVER? HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE?”

“I SAY STUFF I DON’T MEAN WHEN I’M PANICKING, OKAY? WHAT DO WE DO?”

“First…” Sooyoung calmly said, although Seulgi could see in her eyes and how twitched that all she wanted to do was scream her heart out. “...let’s calm down.”

Seulgi pursed her lips and nodded. It was the most sensible thing to do. She should learn how to relax herself in stressful situations like Sooyoung did. To be honest, with the amount of times she messed up because of it, it sounded like a good idea. 

“Okay,” Seulgi agreed, breathing in and out. “So the story is that I was writing one of the letters to her. She came up behind me, I shoved everything off my desk in response, and so she got really curious. And I can’t deny Joohyun, I think you already know that.”

Sooyoung rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know. I hate that about you. No backbone.”

Seulgi didn’t bother shooting back with a retort. She didn’t have one, and even if she did she wouldn’t say it because if there was one thing she prided herself on, it was that she couldn’t say a bad word about someone. (Actually it went both ways. She both loved and hated it at the same time.)

“So? What do we do?”

“Right uhhh…” Sooyoung shook her in disbelief as she tried to fix what Seulgi ed up. “...we err have to go along with it.”

“What?” Seulgi couldn’t believe this.

“If not me, then who? Her? I know you’re not doing that anytime soon. Seungwan? Good luck saying that you love her girlfriend. I’m the only one who can fake it, so just buckle up and keep writing. One for her and one for me now.”

“Why for you?”

“Because she’s going to ask to see your letter duh. God, use your brain for once.”

Seulgi would very much like to agree to that statement. 

Sooyoung exhaled in a sort of exaggerated kind of way, like she had just finished a long and difficult test and she was just glad it was over. But that was the thing, it was not over, far from it actually. In fact, the only time this stupid situation could be over was if Joohyun somehow  fell in love with her, then maybe Sooyoung would finally be satisfied.

“Glad we got that out of the way. If I was in a bad mood, I would’ve punched you right then and there.”

Seulgi’s eyes widened in fear. She glanced at Sooyoung’s gloved hand and she could already feel her fist pounding her on the face, ribs, and stomach. It felt terrible, by the way, even though she didn’t feel anything. Just the thought of it hurt her.

“Anyway, the carnival. I’m coming with you. But now that it seems I’m your secret lover, I guess it’s a date.” Sooyoung shot Seulgi with a sharp look. 

“Sorry,” Seulgi replied timidly. 

“Oh no worries. Maybe I’ll just KISS you in front of Joohyun. See how she reacts,” Sooyoung teased with a eating grin. 

“Oh don’t you ing dare,” Seulgi hissed.

“Ooo Seulgi swearing? Glad to know I can do that to you. I’m just kidding, alright? No need to fight me. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

Seulgi rolled her eyes before she got back to writing in the notebook. “Just...sit down. Who knows when Ms. Hyoyeon will come back?”

“Oh, not for a while I’m sure. You know the brownies I gave her earlier? Well, I laced them with weed so she’s probably high.”

Seulgi laughed, to which Sooyoung followed. She didn't know what Sooyoung and her were. They weren’t strangers anymore, and Sooyoung made it clear that they weren’t friends. Acquaintances then, really good acquaintances. 

That’s close enough to a friend, right?

//

The carnival came every six months, and for years now, Seulgi had heard of the stupid amount of antics her classmates had been doing. Just last year Jung Soojung came dressed to the nines, heels and all, and came out with merely her bra and while she whirled her dress like a lasso. She either got:

A. High

B. Drunk

C. Both

Seulgi picked B, but who knew the truth except her friends? The rest were left wondering why she became an exhibitonist  just for that one night. 

That was only one story, and Seulgi wondered what the story was for this carnival. She had never been to one, as her weekends usually consisted of binge-watching television shows or finding new obscure  movies. She couldn’t tell you the amount she had watched because there were so many. Even Seungwan, a former loner just like her, couldn’t handle the amount of references to tv shows/books/movies she made. It was just too much.

So when she finally arrived at the carnival, was left agape and in awe of the sheer grandiosity of it. From the exorbitant amount of booths ranging from the fortune-telling to the kissing booth to the rides that left her stomach churn with something nuclear, it all made her so speechless.

“What a sight, huh?” Sooyoung asked, gauging Seulgi’s reaction to it, which was a simple nod with wide open. 

“Come on,” Sooyoung said as she took Seulgi’s wrist and dragged her along to try out all the attractions.

They first started at a shooting gallery, which Seulgi found herself beating Sooyoung over and over again until Sooyoung yelled out a single “Ah! That’s it! I’m done with this game!” 

Whenever her and Seungwan played games, she would never win, so it was good to finally feel the taste of victory. Only God knew how much she needed to feel that. 

And so they went on and on, and at every turn, at every game, Seulgi managed to bring Sooyoung to her knees in defeat. She could only laugh as Sooyoung lurched to the ground and yelled, “WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE SUCH LUCK?”

“It’s not luck, Sooyoung. I’m just better than you!”

“You spun the wheel a single and you got the jackpot! I spun it three times in a row and got completely nothing! Not even a simple keychain! Money down the drain! It’s not skill. It’s luck!” Sooyoung shot a middle finger up into the sky. “ you!” she yelled, as if the guy above was to blame for her misfortune. 

After they calmed down and Sooyoung accepted her defeat, they started walking down the lanes with some newly acquired cotton candy in their hands, with Seulgi having the pink and Sooyoung having the blue. But when Sooyoung suddenly stopped mid stride, Seulgi could tell something was wrong. 

“You good?” Seulgi asked to which Sooyoung only gave her a wistful smile. Before Seulgi knew it, she was being whisked away by her wrist to someplace.

“Where are we going?” Seulgi asked and Sooyoung replied with a simple...

“Something fun for me.”

If there was one thing her time at the zoo taught her, it was that there was no preparing for a boa constrictor attack. Sure, you could take the necessary precautions, read a manual or maybe have someone close by to watch. But when the time came and that snake wrapped its coily length around your neck, there was just so much pressure to act. If you were like her and panicked, then slowly and slowly, you would just succumb to the pressure until you died. Because after being pushed into some random tent by Sooyoung, there was no preparing for what was to come and the air was suddenly out.

As the velvet curtain closed behind Seulgi, she said, “Oh come on! You didn’t have to push me!”

“Oh shut up! Enjoy the moment!” Sooyoung yelled back from outside the tent. Enjoy the moment. What?

Seulgi had so many words to say to Sooyoung, most of them curses and all sorts of profanity. Because when she turned around and saw Joohyun staring right back at her, sitting on a chair behind a table, she knew Sooyoung must’ve planned for this to happen. 

The two stared at each other for what seemed like forever. That was until Joohyun broke the silence, and what she said next had to be the most beautiful words spoken in the universe. 

“You’re here for a kiss?”