Yongsun wakes up from the loud electronic beeping of the front door opening and sits up in her bed. She always had trouble sleeping, but during her solo promotions it got worse. And even now, on a well-deserved rest, Yongsun twitches and wakes up from every little rustle, unable to rest properly. Her body is too used to the wake-ups at 4 in the morning and night drives to the company building, to the studio, to Music Bank, to radio stations.

There are five people, besides Yongsun, who know the code to her apartment – her manager, Yonghee-unnie, Byulyi, Wheein, and Hyejin.

She hears the door shutting with a gentle 'click' and immediately knows that this is not Yonghee-unnie or Byulyi. They wouldn't bother to be quiet. Wheein would never show up without telling beforehand, especially at – Yongsun looks at the time on her phone and chokes a little - at 3:28 am. And Hyejin had been to her apartment only once, when Yongsun held a housewarming party. She is so not the usual guest around here. Plus, she's in the middle of her solo album recording and practically lives at Woosang's studio, so the probability of her breaking into Yongsun’s house at such a late hour is close to zero.

So, that leaves only one option: it's one of the managers, which means that something has changed in her schedule, which means that she will have to get up and start to prepare. Yongsun doesn't know for what exactly, but that's nothing. She'll get there.

She comes out of the bedroom barefoot, trying not to pay attention to the instant numbness of her toes against the cold floor, and squints helplessly, struggling to seek out the hunched figure in the darkness of the hallway.

"Unnie?" She whispers and pokes around for glasses she forgot last night on a coffee table.

"Wow, I am your unnie now?" The familiar hoarse voice reaches her ears, and the goddamn butterflies in her stomach immediately respond with excited trepidation.

Yongsun puts on her glasses, turns on the light and immediately winces at the cold artificial glow of the lamp. In bright light and with a normal vision she easily recognizes none other than Ahn Hyejin standing in the hallway, propping up the wall with her shoulder, tired, sleepy, with a shy smile on her soft lips. She lazily fiddles with the car keys, her huge bag lies on her feet, and there are music sheets with uneven handwriting and a crumpled corner of some colorful magazine sticking out of opened zipper.

"Hyejin?" Yongsun blinks in confusion. Like if she opens and closes her eyes for a specific amount of times, the hallucination will disappear. "What are you doing here?"

"Were you waiting for someone?" Hyejin ignores her question. She is still standing at the front door, kicking the rug with the toe of her tattered sneakers.

"I heard the door opening," Yongsun replies, strangely mesmerized by the movement of Hyejin's foot. She kicks Yongsun's brand new rug, then twists her thin ankle, and kicks again. (Hyejin could never stand still, especially when she's nervous. She always jerks her shoulders, arms, legs, twists and turns, as if she wants to go to the toilet, shifts from foot to foot, frantically snaps the pen cap, getting on the nerves of everyone around her. “Restless soul,” Wheein jokingly says. Yongsun finds this quirk of hers weirdly charming. Well, truth be told, Yongsun finds everything about Hyejin charming.) "Thought it was my manager."

"Ah."

There it is, their usual silence that always around when they are alone. Both Yongsun and Hyejin got so used to the lack of words between them that they stopped considering it as awkward. If they finally have something to say to each other, they will definitely do it, but for now both are quite content to stay silent.

Hyejin is wearing oversized clothes again, and they hang on her like a potato sack. Correction: a very stylish potato sack that looks like it's made specifically for Ahn Hyejin to wear. No one but her can look so good in this terrible vomit-colored hoodie and old grey sweatpants rolled up halfway down her right calf (Yongsun still stares at her bare ankles and even forgets to be embarrassed about her shameless gawking).

"Should I… leave?" Hyejin asks quietly, and Yongsun looks up at her face. She's not wearing any makeup; she bites her lower lip nervously and generally looks small and fragile in her ugly oversized hoodie. "It's just that your house is closer to the studio than mine. I have a day off tomorrow, but I'm really tired, so I thought I could sleep on your couch, and tomorrow morning I would go to my apartment-"

She continues to mumble something under , but Yongsun doesn't listen. Just shortens the distance between them in three steps, gently takes Hyejin by the elbow, immediately shutting her up by that gesture, and pulls her to the direction of the bathroom. Hyejin only has time to throw off her sneakers.

"Take a shower, you smell like bad delivery food and energy drinks," Yongsun says, pushing her into the small bathroom and closing the door right before her nose. "I'll bring a change of clothes."

Yongsun scolds her stupid pounding heart as she searches for some spare shorts and T-shirt in the closet. She is thirty years old, but the thought that Ahn Hyejin came to her house at 4 am transforms her to a nervous schoolgirl all again.

Stupid, she tells herself when a -eating grin unwillingly spreads across her face, come to your senses.

She opens the bathroom door slightly, only to put clean clothes on the dresser and leave, but her gaze suddenly catches on the exposed patch of tan skin, and Yongsun's brain just stops functioning for a second. Hyejin has already left the shower and now stands on a soft, fleecy rug, drying her hair with a large towel, and Yongsun, in fact, sees only couple of bruises on her knees and graceful curves of her wide hips, everything else is covered with a towel, but Yongsun's sight immediately goes dark, and she's dizzy and- oh god, she's blushing.

"Sorry!" she squeaks, throws the clothes at Hyejin's face and slams the door with a loud 'thud'.

"What-"

"Sorry!" Yongsun shouts again, placing her forehead against the bathroom door. "I didn’t mean to!"

Hyejin is silent for a while, and when Yongsun is already desperate to receive any reaction, a dull voice whispers from the bathroom: "It's okay, unnie."

If Yongsun hadn't been stupid and in love, she would have moved away from the door, made an impromptu sleeping place for Hyejin on the couch, and went back to her warm bed to continue watching a dream about dinosaurs dancing her solo choreography.

But Yongsun is stupid, and Yongsun is in love with Ahn Hyejin, so she just stands there, propping up the bathroom door with her whole body, smiling the most idiotic smile in her arsenal. And, of course, after a few minutes the door opens, and Yongsun, just like a main character of the most cheesy and banal k-drama, falls right into Hyejin's arms.

How embarrassing. And how wonderful.

Hyejin smells of Yongsun's shampoo and Yongsun's shower gel, so she allows herself one second of weakness and nuzzles maknae's shoulder, breathes in the pleasant warmth of Hyejin's soft and clean body.

Throughout this second, she is absolutely, infinitely happy.

Then the reality drops on her like a bucket of cold water, and she recoils, blushing deeply. An apology is about to escape her lips, but Hyejin pulls her back, smiling that grin of hers, the one that made Yongsun want to smile back and kiss her round cheekbones and squinted crescent eyes and wrinkled nose.

"Why are you like that?" Hyejin breathes somewhere behind Yongsun's ear, sending a wave of goosebumps down her spine.

"L-like what?" Yongsun manages to splutter, seriously wondering if she was dreaming right now, if all of this was just an imagination of her sleep-deprived mind. Because Hyejin's arms wrap around her waist, clinging to the fabric of her pyjamas, and she exhales regularly into Yongsun’s neck and presses against her with her whole body, as if she has done it hundreds of times before. It just couldn't be real.

"Cute," Hyejin mutters wearily.

"You need to sleep," Yongsun replies quietly. "And so do I."

"Let's go sleep together?" Hyejin pouts in an attempt to appear charming. At that very moment, pressed against Hyejin's warm body, Yongsun would not deny her anything at all, with or without aegyo.

She just nods dumbly and leads her into the bedroom, lays her down on the free side of the bed and crawls under the cold blanket herself, not daring to shuffle too close to her unexpected bedmate. She turns off the main light but leaves the nightlight and can see gratitude in Hyejin's eyes.

Yongsun still remembers all of her little habits from the years they shared a room, even after all this time. Like the fact that Hyejin doesn't like to fall asleep in complete darkness, so their room almost all the time stood with the lights on. They often had arguments considering this, because Yongsun already then was suffering from bouts of insomnia, and Hyejin just couldn't stand the pitch-black darkness in the room (and that's why she preferred to sleep in the living room with a TV on, but it was uncomfortable as hell, Yongsun tried it once). They both were stubborn and impatient and loud while arguing, and after some time Byulyi predictably got tired of their nightly squabbles and just bought them a huge sunflower-shaped nightlight, which, if Yongsun remembers correctly, is still somewhere in the boxes with old things that gather dust in the back of the dressing room.

"Unnie," Hyejin whispers.

"Yes?"

"I finished recording my title song today." There is so much pride in her tired voice that Yongsun can't help but smile