Pajama Party, Huddled Together
Aegyo.
And not just any aegyo — aegyo from someone who seemed like she'd never done it once in her life. Just how much destructive power would that carry?
The answer was spread out right in front of Seoha's eyes.
"Insane. Since when does the top-ranked student do aegyo this well?!"
Nayun slapped the desk, cackling, while Hasol covered her mouth and repeated the same words over and over like a robot that had lost its language functions. Suyeon's mouth had fallen so wide open she could've fit her whole fist inside.
And last of all, there was Yeoncheong.
"Seo, Seoha~... I wanna pway anothew game... won't you pway wif me?"
She wore a blissful grin as she replayed the footage — a piece of blackmail preserved for all eternity.
When had she grabbed her phone? When had she hit record? Seoha's aegyo-laced voice played on an endless loop.
Doing it yourself and hearing it through a speaker were two entirely different things. The star of the video, eyes wide and rounded, waved her hand at the camera. It was a pace unlike the perpetually composed Seoha — but then.
"Whoops, nope~ Not happening."
As if she'd anticipated exactly this reaction, Yeoncheong snatched the phone back out of reach and needled her with a smirk.
A complete reversal of their usual dynamic. Seoha's face burned red as she huffed, her lips twitching.
"Delete that. Right now."
"Nope. I'm keeping it forever."
There was genuine menace in that voice, but Yeoncheong only shook her head. Who knew when a chance like this would come again? She had to milk it for all it was worth.
When she played the saved clip again, Seoha's aegyo started up once more. There was too much forced effort in it to be called natural, but it beat hearing nothing at all.
Besides, Yeoncheong simply could not believe that the owner of that voice — halting mid-sentence, deliberately stretching out her words, mumbling her pronunciation — was the cold, aloof friend standing right in front of her.
Even the target of this relentless psychological assault had her limits. Her urge to lunge across the desk gradually died down.
She stopped trying to grab the phone, but her whole body still trembled — proof that her fury was far from spent.
"Ha Yeoncheong. Are you prepared to face the consequences?"
"You guys tease me like it's three square meals a day anyway. Besides, that's a problem for future me to deal with."
Honestly, she did worry about receiving all of this back double someday — but backing down out of fear would make her less of a man (though she wasn't a man anymore).
When would a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this ever come again?
Even if it killed her, some things you just had to do.
Seoha stared holes through Yeoncheong, then took several deep breaths and recovered her composure.
"Hah... Fine. Let's just keep playing."
The night was still young. They'd barely finished dinner before gathering around to start the games, after all.
At the time, even Seoha believed her chance for revenge would come around soon enough.
She really, truly did...
"This is rigged! Straight-up rigged!"
Seoha shot to her feet, slamming the desk.
It was the same reaction as the first time she'd tasted the bitter cruelty of claw machines.
Her raised voice and rare loss of composure were fascinating enough to watch, but the truly fascinating thing was something else entirely.
"Ah... it seems the goddess of fortune has decided not to abandon me today."
Yeoncheong set down her fruit card and shook her head with mock regret.
She hadn't come in first even once since then, yet somehow, impossibly, she'd dodged every single penalty. Since Yeoncheong avoiding last place was as miraculous as winning first, her streak of near-misses had the corners of her mouth climbing sky-high.
Her posture was getting sloppier by the round, and with the penalties never landing, there was simply no opening for revenge.
"Seoha went and did aegyo just to keep this game going, and fortune still won't smile on her today. Hey guys, aren't you getting tired? Should we take a break?"
"I'm not tired yet."
Normally this would be the point to call it, but drunk on the moment, Yeoncheong showed no sign of stopping.
The problem was that Seoha looked ready to resort to physical violence at any second. Mediation was required.
Just as the three friends were exchanging glances over how to defuse things, Nayun let out a resigned sigh and crawled toward her bag.
"I brought a nice light game too. Tic-tac-toe. You know it, right?"
"First one to make a line wins?"
"Yep, that's the one."
There were five of them, and wasn't tic-tac-toe a one-on-one game?
And you could draw a nine-square grid on any scrap of paper. Just as they were wondering what on earth she'd brought that she was acting so smug about—
"I made a special game board. Playing on this should be fun, right?"
"You little... you absolute menace!"
What Nayun pulled out as her "board" was a photo from the day Yeoncheong had been laid up with a nasty cold — the one with the apple slices on her head.
Cropped in close on just her face, forehead blissfully bare, it was prime tic-tac-toe real estate. Naturally, the subject of the photo was not about to sit still for it.
"When did you even take this?!"
CRASH.
It was Nayun's self-sacrificing decoy play. Suyeon and Hasol seized the moment — and Seoha, pinning her down from both sides.
"We're gonna go grab more drinks and snacks. Wait here."
"Wait, Hasol. Suyeon. I wasn't done yet—"
"Nope. Seoha, you need to cool that head of yours off."
The two grabbed their jackets and hauled her outside, Seoha dragging her feet and protesting the whole way — a truly comical sight.
With Hasol and Suyeon out cooling Seoha down, and thanks to Nayun's sacrifice, the house finally settled into a ceasefire.
"Whew... whew..."
"Wow... that took it out of me. I've definitely burned off everything I ate for dinner."
Toward Yeoncheong, now somewhat deflated after expending all that energy, Nayun gave her lips a meaningful smack.
"Hey. Stop messing with Seoha."
"Why? Do you have any idea how much I've had to take from her?"
It had only been a few hours of board games, but clearly it wasn't enough to vent everything Yeoncheong had stockpiled.
Her comic timing was simply too good. Nayun herself teased her now and then — okay, often — so she understood exactly what Yeoncheong had been lying in wait for.
"Still, that's enough for today. Seoha's past her limit."
Jokes aside, the one taking the hits always handled them better than the one dishing them out.
Unlike Yeoncheong, who'd been born sturdy with a natural gift for absorbing punishment, Seoha looked like she'd never taken so much as a single hit in her life. If anything, she was the teasing type — the attacker. Which meant being on the receiving end like this was practically a first since birth. The odds of it stopped being a joke and turned into genuine rage were climbing by the minute.
Yeoncheong wasn't entirely oblivious either — she flinched at the words "past her limit."
Nayun pointed at the friend's phone, sitting abandoned on the desk, and landed the final blow.
"You've got the video anyway. Tease her with it once in a while when it's about to fade from memory. You're smart enough to figure that out, so why are you being like this?"
"...Tch. Fine, fine. I get it."
Yeoncheong grumbled under her breath and fiddled with her phone for a moment.
Nayun texted Hasol that it was safe to come back, then looked up as if something had just occurred to her.
"Oh, Yeoncheong."
"What?"
"Send me that video too."
Stopping Yeoncheong was one thing — Nayun still had her own agenda to attend to.
Footage of Seoha doing aegyo? There was no way she was letting a treasure like that slip by.
Seeing as leaving had been the whole point, the friends simply stopped by the nearby convenience store, picked up a few bags of chips and some buy-two-get-one drinks, and headed back.
Breaking out the board games with penalties on the line again? Not with that mood in the air.
Suyeon quietly cleared the cards and Jenga tower off the table, and Hasol declared that since it was getting late, they should skip the noise and just gossip instead.
"Yeoncheong, really — thank you."
"Hm? For what?"
"Thanks to you we got an amazing dinner, and now we're having this cozy pajama party."
It was Hasol opening with pure compliments, preemptively preventing a repeat of what had happened earlier.
And honestly, Yeoncheong's cooking was outstanding every single time, while their own households made a pajama party like this nigh impossible thanks to their parents.
So there wasn't a single false word in Hasol's praise.
Nayun, who'd perked up at the word dinner, smacked her lips at the memory of the meal from a few hours ago.
"Right. Tonight's dinner was especially good."
"R-really? I put in extra effort today. Figured I owed you all for the get-well visit, too..."
Who on earth would complain about being told the food they cooked was delicious?
Yeoncheong, flustered, fiddled with the hair that fell to her shoulders.
Suyeon, who'd returned after tidying up the board games, added her two cents.
"It'd be so fun to go camping together sometime. I can't wait to see what Yeoncheong cooks for us."
"So it's already settled that I'm the one cooking?"
When Yeoncheong shot her a glare, Suyeon breezed right past it.
"Oh come on~ we'll all pitch in. I just meant you'd be the head chef."
"You promise?"
Thanks to the topic Hasol had so aptly tossed out, the overcharged board-game atmosphere shifted gears completely.
With camping on the table, the camping plans two of them had traded in the group chat a while back came up as well.
"Hey, hold on. Are you even allowed to go camping as club activity?"
"That's 'camping' in name only. We have to tour the local area and write a report. Our teacher kept hounding us that there was leftover club funding and we absolutely had to spend it."
"Yeah, ours kept telling us not to leave any of the budget unspent either."
"If you hand money back, it just makes more work for the student council. They have to grill you on why it went unused when you said you needed it, and worst case it affects next year's club budget too."
"Oh, really?"
That was presumably the kind of insider knowledge only the student council would have, because it was news to Yeoncheong and the others as well.
Seoha nodded along in agreement.
"No matter how flush the school is with money, you can't just spend it carelessly."
And so, bit by bit, Seoha joined the conversation, and the whole board-game affair seemed poised to pass into history as a harmless episode.
By the time the short hand of the clock crept toward one, Hasol yawned and looked around the room.
"Hhaaaam... guys, should we start heading to bed soon?"
For their age, they should've had energy to spare, but hours of nonstop board games and gossip would wear anyone out, even without leaving the house.
"Yeoncheong, time for bed. Wake up."
"Mmh?"
Especially after the dinner prep that had rivaled a royal banquet. She'd focused harder than she ever did studying for exams, all because she refused to lose a penalty game — and after wrestling with Nayun over the forehead tic-tac-toe board, Yeoncheong was already dozing off, her head bobbing.
The friends finished cleaning up quietly and shook her, this way and that, but she was far too deep under to stir.
"Ugh... do we really have to carry her to the bed again?"
Even with four of them, moving a whole person to a bed was no easy feat. Just as Nayun grumbled and grabbed one of her arms, Suyeon made a proposal.
"Hey guys. What if she just sleeps with us?"
The one whose eyes lit up instantly at that suggestion was Seoha.
"Sounds good. We won't have to struggle hauling her onto the bed, and when she wakes up she'll climb in on her own."
The biggest perk — sleeping right beside Yeoncheong — went diplomatically unmentioned.
Suyeon's proposal passed unanimously, and Yeoncheong was carried to the middle of the makeshift bed, her own blanket and pillow laid down over her.
"Wow, she's really not waking up. She must have been exhausted."
They tucked the pillow under her head and pulled the blanket up, and Yeoncheong melted into a dopey smile as she sank into deep sleep.
The others took turns at the bathroom, finished their bedtime preparations, and switched off the lights — and a hush settled over the room.
"Oh, it's warmer than I expected."
"Yeoncheong laid hers out on the floor on purpose. She left the heating on so it'd be nice and toasty for us."
They'd wondered why the bedding was already spread out before dinner — turns out every action had its reason.
Suyeon, pressed snugly against Yeoncheong's left side, smirked.
"Isn't this the first time all of us have slept together like this?"
"Nope. Don't you remember the school trip?"
"Oh, right, that. Yeoncheong insisted up and down that she didn't want to, remember?"
At Hasol's words, Suyeon nodded along as if the memory had just surfaced.
"That's right. We watched a horror movie that night and she clearly couldn't sleep, so I told her to sleep next to me."
"Yeah. I was kind of lonely, actually."
Seoha, who'd claimed Yeoncheong's right side, murmured as she too drifted back to that night.
Everyone had days like that — when you went to bed exhausted, only to find your eyes wide open in the dark.
As if their earlier yawns and complaints of sleepiness had been outright lies, the friends — Yeoncheong excepted — whiled away the deepening night in hushed, murmuring chatter.