The soiled pair of puppy-printed socks hangs at the top drawer of her bedside cabinet — and if she's to crane her neck a little to take a peek at the small living room, she's certain that a tattered copy of Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami sits with its pages down on the arm of their couch.

 

(Surrealism isn't exactly something she appreciates, but she lets the book stay untouched.)

 

Pulmuone’s ‘I’m Real’ tomato juice is stocked up on her mini fridge, and a shirt that she’s sure does not belong to Aeri lies on her bedroom floor.

 

All these things are scattered around Jimin’s home like they actually belonged there.

 

It should indicate a tremendous amount of stress, the clutter (and the owner of the clutter), but not today — an impending breakdown is already predetermined and scheduled the moment Jimin realized that her supposedly short nap last night had transformed into a full-blown sleep.

 

Never in her life did she imagine a four-hour slumber to feel more like a curse than a blessing.

 

Aeri throws her sympathetic glances during breakfast, and all she could reply was a nonchalant shrug, because you know, ‘the devil works hard but med students work a -ton-raised-to-the-highest-possible-power harder’. 

 

(Law students would disagree, but hey, this is not about them.)

 

“You left your shirt,” Jimin places her phone between her shoulder and her cheek, balancing a pile of books on both of her hands, “and will you please, please, stop hogging space in the fridge? Tomato juice doesn’t even taste that good.”

 

“I know, trust me, I hate the taste too,” Minjeong whispers, “and I told you not to drink them —” she demands on the other line, the aggressive clicks of keyboard reverberates in the background, “sorry, I’m in the middle of a class, call you later?”

 

“Why would you even answer in the first place,” Jimin murmurs, (it wasn't a question, more like an afterthought) placing her books on top of the study table with a loud bang. 

 

It was silent for a minute, the typing stops, and only Minjeong’s sharp intake of breath could be heard from the receiver — and get this, Jimin has heard Minjeong sigh a thousand times (outside and inside the walls of her bedroom) to recognize this one wasn’t elicited by pleasure. 

 

Stress, most probably. 

 

Then Minjeong laughs, like laugh laughs, prompting Jimin to push the phone away from her ear. The sound was smug and sinfully irritating, and she hasn’t had her daily caffeine fix yet.

 

“Your contact name,” Minjeong chuckles, barely getting a word out, before she hears a reprimanding voice, a professor, yes, asking to elaborate the grounds for annulment.

 

All that law jargon, and Jimin kinda dozes off because first, that is not her thing and second, she can’t see herself tying the knot. You can’t reach the point of separation if there’s no existing  commitment in the first place, right? So she’s sparing herself the troubles — and the line went dead, thank God.

 

She would later learn the joke Minjeong made out of her contact name in the middle of a heated moment on the couch. Minjeong is marking a spot on her collarbone as she scrolls on the latter’s phone like a wife on a mission. She lets out a sigh of disbelief, pushing Minjeong away as her focus zeroes on the name.

 

“Booty?” Jimin shakes her head, “really, Minjeong?”

 

Minjeong laughs, runs a hand through her hair, grabbing her phone and settling it aside.

 

“So when you call, it’ll be like ‘Booty calls’, get it? Cause that’s what we’re doing, and I don’t know. I like a good pun.” She throws her head back, amused at her own deteriorating sense of humor. 

 

Jimin glares at her.

 

Minjeong guwaffs at the reaction, “Come on,” she reaches for Jimin’s hand, “admit it, it’s funny.”

 

“Real mature.”

 

Jimin kicks Minjeong out that night, but not before climbing onto her lap and kissing her aggressively as a goodbye.

 

Minjeong left a shirt, again.

 

Jimin shakes her head, greets the attendant in the laundry shop and glares at Minjeong’s flannels through the glass of the machine. When she complained to Aeri about it earlier, her housemate was kind enough to entertain her endless tirade, offer a warm smile and a piece of advice. 

 

“Talk to her.”

 

Except, Jimin wouldn’t — she forgot (an! excuse!), because the next time she meets Minjeong, it would be at the younger girl’s apartment, and flannels did not seem like a good topic to be brought up when you’re already .

 

Jimin learns how to cope with Minjeong's piling amount of clothes inside her closet — and okay, maybe it wasn't the most brilliant idea of all, but it's what her sleep-deprived brain could easily come up with. 

 

“That's mine,” Minjeong states after meeting Jimin for an impromptu coffee session because their schedules, finally, matched. 

 

Normally, Minjeong would frown, as Jimin would have expected her to, this is her shirt after all, but the younger girl looks pensive, eyes running through the fabric.

 

(or at Jimin, who knows?)

 

“You left it again,” Jimin sips on her coffee, focusing back on her case study analysis, “and I used up all my clean clothes.”

 

“The laundry shop is literally a corner away from your apartment,” Minjeong states, and Jimin imagines the cogs inside her head running, the arguments already lined up beneath the younger girl's sleeves.

 

It's difficult when they argue, over trivial things, that is — because Minjeong depends on philosophies, and Jimin is a woman of science. It's a whole lot of crazy that ends up with Jimin pressed against a wall, or vice-versa, depending on the argument's intensity.

 

“Yes,” Jimin hums, “but I can't squeeze it into my schedule. And your shirt's just there, so might as well?”

 

“That's my favorite, don't ruin it.”

 

Jimin laughs, “Right, and you just leave it around.”

 

“In my defense, I was in a hurry,” Minjeong pushed a slice of cake towards her direction, “and I forgot.”

 

“Okay, grandma.”

 

“But I'll be taking my load today,” Minjeong hums, and Jimin glances up to observe the sudden stiffness on Minjeong's stance, “would you like me to take yours too?”

 

Jimin sighs, reaches across the table to plant a kiss on Minjeong's cheek, “Please, oh my God. Thank you.”

 

Minjeong stares at her for a while, and it makes Jimin stop, afraid that she has crossed a line, but Minjeong grins sheepishly — devious, if Jimin's last brain cell would permit her a bit of eloquence — and the action allowed her to relax.

 

“I better get something out of it,” Minjeong breathes, fingers drawing circles on top of Jimin's hand, “I hate laundry shops.”

 

“Oh, you would,” Jimin says, not bothering to raise her eyes up to the younger girl, “dinner at my place?”

 

Minjeong's laughter echoes and Jimin finally gives her some attention. Minjeong's raised eyebrow insinuates something. Her eyes have a glint of mischief in them — and oh, maybe they both have different things in mind.

 

Jimin shrugs her off and the latter frowns.

 

They stayed at the café for another fifteen minutes before Jimin ended up leaving earlier than planned. One of her blockmate called for a meeting, and it's such an inconvenience because she wants a nap, and she hasn't eaten anything other than a spoonful of cake Minjeong managed to shove into .

 

Her phone pings and a message pops up.

 

gu bao ruo:

 

you look really good in my shirt

but i wonder how it would feel if i were to take it off  ;)

 

booty:

 

shut up

did you take my laundry

 

gu bao ruo:

 

i did

and oh, aeri was eyeing me weirdly

i had to assure her i wasn't a ert or sumn

 

booty:

 

you ARE a ert

 

gu bao ruo:

 

says someone who straight up approached & asked me if i wanted a bed buddy 

at a library, of all places???

seriously jimin??

 

It's true. She was reading a research article entitled “the stress-relieving benefits of having casual and non-comittal ” the time she met Minjeong. Jimin was eager to put the whole thing into test (she was drunk, okay), and what better subject than herself and a complete, and equally exhausted stranger on the verge of another breakdown?

 

Looking back, Jimin doesn't even know if the article was peer reviewed or just a piece grabbed out of a Cosmopolitan mag—

 

gu bao ruo:

 

did u fall askeep

asleep* 

 

booty:

 

no, 

also, i was day-drinking at the time

high on red bull whatever

and you agreed?

 

gu bao ruo:

 

well

i wasn't really one to pass up on opportunities

especially if they're for “science”

[photo attachment]

 

Jimin drops her phone on the floor, quickly gets on her knees, locks the screen and shoves the device back into her pocket. The selfie burning a space at the back of her head, the expanse of Minjeong's neck, the dips of her —

 

“Jimin, are you okay?” Chaeryeong whispers on her side, cautious as to not disturb the meeting even more.

 

“Yeah,” she could feel the creeping blush on her neck, “yeah, just slipped.”

 

Chaeryeong grins, “that's alright. Ryujin likes to send those kinds of pictures too at the worst possible times, so I get it.”

 

Jimin chokes on air, “What?”

 

Chaeryeong laughs and Jimin watches her, horrified.

 

There weren't any rules. Jimin and Minjeong just made a casual set-up, have managed to keep it thriving and afloat for months, and now they are here. Minjeong leaves her things at Jimin's apartment, unconsciously or not Jimin lets her, because it's nothing big, right? It's all good.

 

Their spare time isn't enough for anything more profound than what they currently have anyway.

 

(Although, they might already be deeper than they let on. Both are just painfully stubborn.)

 

“Why are you leaving so soooon,” Minjeong groans, slamming her head on the book she's picked up when Jimin left the bed, her laptop placed on her lap, “we haven't even —”

 

“I'm sorry,” Jimin says weakly, “you know how it is.”

 

Minjeong sighs, “You owe me.”

 

Jimin tilts her head and smiles as she shimmies into her pants, “I know.” Then she leans in to Minjeong's ear, whispers something that leaves the younger a blushing mess, the red on her chest slowly spreading through her neck.

 

She smiles teasingly. Minjeong throws her a pillow.

 

“Get dressed, you'll get cold,” Jimin hands Minjeong the band shirt she took off and discarded on the floor after Jimin arrived at her apartment that day, “and I told you to stop placing your laptop on top of your legs.”

 

“It's called a laptop for a reason,” Minjeong rolls her eyes.

 

“And I believe the condition  is  called erythema ab—” Jimin clicks her tongue, not sparing Minjeong a glance as she opens her phone, bombarded by messages from Chaeryeong — seemingly implying a life and death situation, but it's actually just Yeji — and a single text from Aeri asking her if she's going home tonight.