I really enjoyed the amount of cap locks comments I got from last chapter hehe. You guys are cute ;) Thanks for holding out for this update guys <3 Enjoy.

“Is it okay…if I kiss you?”

Taeyeon can’t believe what she’s hearing. She pinches her own thigh, thinking she’s lost in some stupid, teenage fantasy right now. However, the searing sting on her thigh says otherwise because, even after sinking nails into her own leg, Jessica’s still looking at her with huge, unwavering eyes, filled with…curiosity? Taeyeon can’t even begin to try to decipher that look because she’s too busy trying to remember how to form words, maybe even a just thought, or conjure a breath—maybe even just function like a generic human being.

“P-pardon?” Taeyeon asks quietly, still not trusting her senses.

“Can I kiss you?” Jessica repeats.

“I th-thought you were straight?” Taeyeon whispers softly.

The younger girl shrugs. “To be honest, I don’t really know,” she says truthfully, uncertain of her new developing feelings for the girl.

“Oh.” Taeyeon blinks too many times, still unable to comprehend what Jessica’s asking permission for.

“So…can I kiss you?”

The word ‘no’ teeters on the tip of Taeyeon’s tongue because it only takes a split second for her brain to become submerged in horrifying panic and she’s experiencing too much fear all at once. She’s scared she’s going to enjoy kissing the girl too much; scared that Jessica’s just toying with her feelings; scared that Jessica might actually reciprocate her feelings—scared of everything under the sun that has to do with the girl sitting beside her, asking for consent to share a kiss.

Taeyeon wants to say ‘no’ because it’s safe. No means that whatever is happening between them can’t escalate and no means that Jessica can’t bury her way further into Taeyeon’s heart.

But how can she possible say ‘no’ while every fiber of her being is screaming ‘yes’? Words die on Taeyeon’s tongue when she can't find her voice. Instead, she gives Jessica a brief and shy nod.

Jessica drapes an arm onto the couch, behind Taeyeon’s head, to brace herself as she leans in. “If you want me to stop, just tell me okay?” she gently tells Taeyeon because the fear is clear as daylight on the girl’s face.

“Okay,” Taeyeon whispers, unsure if the other girl even hears her as Jessica starts to creep forward.

As Taeyeon’s eyes squeeze shut, Jessica moves in slow, careful not to spook the girl. For something that only takes a few seconds, it feels agonizingly drawn out for both of them as Jessica gradually closes the gap between them. When their lips finally make the barest contact against one another, Jessica lets her eyes drift shut and she holds her breath.

It’s not as nice as she remembers, in fact, it feels a lot like kissing a statue as Taeyeon’s paralyzed by the feeling of the girl’s lips on her own, once again. However, it only takes a few seconds for Taeyeon to slowly soften into the touch and, when her lips finally melt into the contours of the other girl’s, Jessica feels the warmth spread from the junction, straight into her chest where her heart starts to pound. She almost forgets to exhale her held breath as she presses a little firmer against Taeyeon’s lips, craving to be closer.

When Taeyeon finally begins to kiss her back—and Jessica's convinced the other girl is finally alright with the notion of what they’re doing—she relocates her hand from the couch to Taeyeon's neck to caress the smooth skin there. She feels the girl flinch under her fingertips, but Jessica breathes an internal sigh of relief when Taeyeon sighs into at the new contact.

Just as Jessica uses her hand to draw Taeyeon a little deeper into their kiss, she thinks she hears something faint in the background.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

If she wasn’t so distracted by the lips on her own, Jessica would have been able to hear the sound of the digits being punched into the electrical lock. Taeyeon, on the other hand, has the ears of a fox when she notices the abrupt sound of their front door opening.

Even more abruptly, Jessica unexpectedly finds herself cold and she opens her eyes to find herself alone, with a gap between her arms where Taeyeon was maybe just a millisecond ago. ‘What the—’, she blinks and looks around and thinks she might see a distinct Taeyeon–colored blur fly across the living room and the bathroom door slamming shut. Jessica squints in disbelief and thinks if the girl had run any faster, she might have been able to even put a little Taeyeon-shaped hole through a wall with the way she had bolted.

“ICE CREEEEAAMM—yah, babo, what’re you doing?” Sooyoung asks her roommate as she comes into the living room to find Jessica zoning out, staring off in the distance, and Sooyoung is obviously unaware of what was happening in their dorm, just a few minutes ago. “Are you staring at walls?”

Jessica can’t form a thought outside of the lingering warmth on her lips. “Uhhh.”

“Sica’s spacing out again! Someone call a doctor, she’s lost her mind!” Sooyoung chirps.

“Yah, babo, you’re going to lose more brain cells doing that.” Hyoyeon laughs, pushing into the back of Jessica’s head with her knuckles.

“Look who we found!” Sunny laughs while pushing Yuri, who’s holding bags and bags of ice cream.

“Why am I carrying this all again?”

“Where’s Taeyeon?” Tiffany asks baffled, looking around the living room. “She said she was dying for ice cream.”

“JOOHYUNIE, ICE CREAAMMMM,” Sooyoung bellows outside the maknae’s room.

“Coming! Just give me a moment, Unnie!” Seohyun calls out from her room.

Whatever heavenly silence Jessica was sitting in, just a few seconds ago, is now filled with the noisy chatter of all her groupmates, yet she can barely hear them through her thudding heartbeat that’s viciously pulsing in her head. Jessica chuckles to herself as her own fingertips ghost over the warm, lingering tingle all over her lips and the ice princess is completely unaware of Sunny and Yuri exchanging quizzical glances over their groupmate, who seems spaced out more than usual.

“There you are!” Tiffany barks when she catches the small kid leader exiting the bathroom.

“What? A girl can’t pee in her own home?” Taeyeon retorts.

“Here, the mint chocolate chip is yours.” Tiffany smiles and presents Taeyeon with the personal-sized pint.

“Here’s some spoons!” Yoona says, dropping a handful of them onto the coffee table.

“Okay, Girls’ Generation, we got work to talk about too!” Tiffany switches into her manager mode and starts hustling all the girls over to their horseshoe-shaped couch.

“Taeyeon, do you need a spoon?” Jessica picks one off the coffee table, trying to find an excuse to talk to her leader.

“S-sure,” she replies, leaning in to the take the utensil. The pink painted on Taeyeon’s cheeks doesn’t go unnoticed by Jessica.

“Come on, come on,” Tiffany’s still herding the girls to the couch and, when she sees Taeyeon hovering by it, she forcefully sits the girl down, clearly oblivious to the tension between her two groupmates.

“F-fa-fany…” Taeyeon’s voice of protest comes out so weak and bashful, no one even hears her besides herself—and maybe Jessica, who’s smirking a little too hard.

“KIDS, COME ON!” The pink monster bellows in the dorm.

Even though there’s a small gap between Jessica and Taeyeon on the couch, the latter is trying to keep her cheeks from flushing bright red, so clutches her small pint of ice cream harder before taking her iced palms to her own cheeks. She can practically feel Jessica’s gaze boring into her the entire time.

As the couch starts to fill up, Sooyoung wades her way into the mess of girls. “Make waaaaaaay,” she chimes, choosing to squeeze into the small spot between Taeyeon and Jessica. One of them breathes a sigh of relief and the other shoots unnoticed eye-daggers at her roommate. Sooyoung wedges into the small spot between the short girls and takes a moment to look between the two of them. Taeyeon can tell just from the way Sooyoung is glancing between them that word has traveled between their members about their little fight, though she has no idea what Sooyoung’s actually heard through the grapevine.

“Aww, see isn’t this wonderful?” Sooyoung wraps her long arms around both the girls’ necks and pulls them in tight. “Isn’t this so much better when you kids are playing nice?” she grins brightly at their cozy proximity and Taeyeon blushes when she catches Jessica’s cheeky grin.

Jessica doesn’t mean to, but the longer she stares at Taeyeon, her mind gets a little fuzzy at the memory of kissing those lips. At the thought, she habitually pulls her lip between her teeth and the gesture makes Taeyeon gulp nervously as—

“YAH, JOOHYUN, I’M GOING TO EAT YOUR ICE CREAM IF YOU DON’T COME OUT,” Sooyoung screeches from between the two girls.

Jessica cringes at her ringing eardrums, but Taeyeon laughs in utter gratitude for her comedic friend, capable of rendering an awkward situation into a brighter atmosphere.

***

Jessica steps out of the shower and binds her wet body with a thick towel and wraps her hair in one too before she leaves the bathroom. She heads for her room and lays out her hair towel on her pillow before she collapses onto the mattress, careful of keeping her long wet, honey-brown tresses from soaking the bed.

She wishes that she could catch Taeyeon alone at some point, but it’s near impossible now that they’re promoting the new song and they’re constantly in the company of all their group members. They never had a chance to talk after that incident in the living room and Jessica is worried she’s confused the girl even more—hell, it’s not like Jessica hasn’t confused herself even more too.

But even through all that confusion, it’s clear to Jessica that she really, really wishes she and Taeyeon could catch a moment of privacy because all she wants to do is kiss her again and again. She sighs and lets her fingertips ghost over the contours of her lips, trying to recall the warmth pressing against them from a few days ago.

 “Am I ever going to be able to come into our room and actually find you not ?”

Jessica opens her eyes and sits up on her elbows, finding Sooyoung with a dramatic scowl on her face. She can’t be more grateful for good company to keep herself from sinking farther into silly thoughts. “Haha, but I’m so hot, how could you possibly complain?”

“Aish, I get it, you have a nice body,” Sooyoung growls before picking up one of the many shirts off the floor and throwing it at her roommate. The fabric catches Jessica in the face and she whines at the impact. “No need to remind me that I’m an ironing board, thank you,” Sooyoung mutters, coming into the room to collapse onto her bed.

Jessica’s nose twitches at an aroma that whaffs off her roommate when she hits the mattress, sending up a small gust of air. “What’s that smell?” she asks, feeling a rumble in her stomach.

Sooyoung grins. “Yoona made some spicy chicken stew. If you’re lucky, there still might be some left.”

“Not if you got to it first,” Jessica grumbles, stripping off her towel and putting on the grey shirt that Sooyoung had thrown at her face. She hastily puts on her underwear and whatever sweatpants she finds on the floor before she books it out of the room. God knows if there’s good food in their dorm, it’s a free for all fight between nine girls, who could probably eat their own bodyweight in food. As soon as she rounds the corner of the kitchen, Jessica immediately hits another body and watches papers scatter into the air.

“!” she reaches out to grab onto Taeyeon, who’s recoiling from the impact. “Sorry! I wasn't looking where I was going.” She gulps once she realizes whose arm she has her hand wrapped around.

“Oh my god!” Taeyeon clutches her heart from being startled, “I’d really appreciated not being killed before going to work,” she scoffs. Jessica watches Taeyeon briefly meet her gaze before the girl shyly turns her eyes away and crouches down to pick up her papers.

“Sorry, here,” Jessica crouches down and starts helping the other girl gather her papers.

“N-no, don’t worry about it,” Taeyeon stutters and swats Jessica’s hands away. “I-it's okay, I got it.”

Jessica creases her brows in concern when she finally looks at Taeyeon and sees the girl’s face is pink. Is she sick? “Are you okay?”

“F-fine, I just—,” Taeyeon hisses when she slits the pad of her fingertip against a paper edge.

“Did you cut yourself?”

“It’s fine,” Taeyeon tells her, but winces when she puts her finger in and induces a sharp sting when she the taste of metal off.

“Seriously, are you alright? You look sick; maybe you should go lay down or something?”

“I ju-just have a lot of preparations to go through for the ra-radio show today,” she keeps stuttering and Jessica notices how uncharacteristically her hands keeps stacking the papers the wrong way as portrait and landscape keep mixing in her grasp.

“Can I do anything to help?” Jessica asks quizzically.

Taeyeon keeps her eyes to the floor and she can't control her face when a small smirk briefly flashes over . She tries to press her lips tight to hide it, but Jessica spots the sheepish look. “N-n-no.”

“Taeng, seriously, I’d like to help if I can.” Jessica thinks that the poor girl is under enough stress as it is.

Taeyeon finally lets a short puff of laughter escape before she briefly looks at Jessica with darting eyes before returning them to the floor. Her cheeks look redder. “Co-could...could you go put on a decent shirt?”

“Wha—” Oh. Jessica looks down and finds the shirt that Sooyoung had randomly tossed her has a neckline that plunges deep enough that it cuts off halfway down her sternum. It doesn’t help that her wet tresses have soaked into the fabric, making it cling tightly onto the curves of her body. “S-sorry,” Jessica stammers and stands up, using a hand to pull the neckline close as she hands Taeyeon a stack of her papers back to her. It’s Jessica’s turn to blush and she’s not sure why because it’s not like they all haven’t seen each other at one point or another between wardrobe changes and living together.

Taeyeon stands too, taking her papers back while trying to stifle her laughter. “S-sorry, it’s just that—you know—you're not exactly...bad to look at,” she chuckles and covers her eyes while her cheeks burn.

Jessica laughs too when she finds the girl’s crush on her kind of endearing. “You're not ugly either,” she laughs and, Jessica being Jessica doesn’t exactly think about her actions beforehand, so her hand naturally reaches out to playfully slap Taeyeon’s before she makes her way back to her room for a quick change, with the promise of spicy chicken stew completely forgotten.

She misses out on watching Taeyeon flush so red that when Tiffany comes around the corner, she finds the kid leader standing in the kitchen, in a quivering, bashful mess. She tries to send Taeyeon to bed, thinking she has a fever.

***

After an exasperating day, Taeyeon stands in front of the mirror, like a zombie, and rubs at her sleepy eyes. ‘So close to bed’, she thinks as she sloppily squeezes toothpaste out of the tube. She lazily moves the toothbrush around , making a half-assed attempt at brushing. She gets into about a minute of scrubbing until another body comes rushing into the bathroom and shuts the door behind her.

Taeyeon’s lazy eyes snap wide open when she catches Jessica’s eyes in the mirror. She spins around with newfound anxiety burning on every nerve and numbly holds onto her toothbrush. “Wha’ru do’n?” Taeyeon sputters with mint foam filled in .

“Can you just spit and rinse?” Jessica asks, sounding a little short on breath.

The kid leader looks hesitant at first, but she turns back around to spit out the foam and flush out with water before turning back to Jessica. “Did you need something?”

Jessica nods with a bit of enthusiasm and steps into Taeyeon. ‘Oh—OH!’ Taeyeon thinks herself foolish when she thought Jessica had actually needed some sort of toiletries or work advice, but now Taeyeon gulps when she sees the girl’s tongue dart out over her lip before she’s leaning in closer.

“You ran off on me last time,” Jessica tells her, thinking of last week when Taeyeon had practically teleported right out of her arms. She decides to anchor Taeyeon this time and slides her hands into the girl’s hair, admiring the feeling of the locks, shorter than her own, between her fingers. It feels so different—and wonderful—being this close to someone else.

Jessica marvels in the way Taeyeon immediately sighs at the contact, eyes closing and head rolling back at the sensation. “J-jessica,” she sighs powerlessly.

“Do you know how hard it is to get, like, one minute alone with you?” the younger girl chuckles.

Taeyeon just swallows so hard that the sound fills her ears, and it’s practically deafening for her to hear her own nervousness. She’s also not sure how her skin’s is burning hotter than it already was. “W-what’re you doing?” she stutters anxiously as she’s totally intimidated by the girl’s stare, which feels like it’s setting her on fire.

“Please don’t bolt on me,” Jessica whispers heatedly before pulling Taeyeon in. She kisses her, hard and hot—nothing like last time—and Taeyeon involuntarily groans at the sensation.

Their mouths meld against each other’s a little easier this time as Jessica’s lips slide against the menthol water coated all over Taeyeon’s mouth and chin. The kid leader’s breathing changes at the drop of a dime and her breaths are coming out ragged and erratic between kisses. “S-sica.” Her hands fist hard into sides Jessica’s loose shirt and she thinks she’s getting dizzy from the touch and sound of their lips wetly sliding against each other. “W-what’re we d-doing?” she stutters against the other girl’s mouth.

“I don’t know,” Jessica sighs, a little distracted by the cool tingle all over her lips. “I like kissing you.”

Taeyeon sighs a whimper into , hating how good it feels to touch Jessica like this.

To her disappointment though, the other girl leans away to talk. “You like kissing me too, don’t you?” Jessica asks rather boldly, not ready to take no for an answer.

Taeyeon’s knees are practically reduced to putty and she has to lean back against the sink to keep her balance. “T-that’s…that’s a really dumb question, Sica,” Taeyeon manages to chuckle through her trembling nerves.

Jessica smiles before she leans in again. “Then I don’t think we have a problem,” she grins before gingerly working her lips against Taeyeon’s again.

When the door handle rattles violently, Jessica feels hands immediately hit her shoulders and she stumbles back. She blinks the confusion out of her eyes as she finally realizes someone’s outside and Taeyeon looks at her apologetically for the action. “YAH!” There’s banging on the door now and Jessica and Taeyeon share a brief panicked look. “Some of us have a 4:00AM schedule in the morning!” Sunny shrieks from outside. “This bathroom better be free in ten minutes!”

“I-I’ll be out in five!” Taeyeon calls apologetically through the door.

At the sound of retreating footsteps, Taeyeon presses her fingertips into her closed eyes for a moment, trying to retrieve her senses. She presses so hard that spots start to form on the back of her eyelids and she takes her hands away to run them through her medium locks. She takes in a slow inhale and blows out a long exhale, trying to regulate her body temperature. Once she feels like she’s retrieved some composure, she makes the mistake of looking back at Jessica and it feels like all her efforts are instantly wasted. Jessica steps towards her, but, even at arm’s length away, it’s already too close for comfort for Taeyeon.

“Taeyeon?”

“Y-yeah?”

“I hope it’s clear that I like you too,” Jessica tells her with a smile.

The kid leader swallows nervously, unsure of how to reply to the statement as Jessica takes another step into her space. Hands slide up her jawline and gently cup her cheeks before pulling her in for another kiss, but it’s slow, tender and makes Taeyeon’s heart pound viciously in her chest.

“Sweet dreams, Taengoo.”

As Jessica leaves the bathroom first, Taeyeon thinks she might be living in the sweetest one right now.