Midterms Over, Jealousy Unleashed
The next morning.
Nayun, who had finally drifted off to sleep, stirred awake under the insistent shaking of her host.
She was just thinking that even a few hours of sleep left her feeling refreshed—her friend's shamelessness notwithstanding—when:
"Oh, you're up. Hurry and wash up, we need to get ready. I'm already done."
Considering it was because of her that Nayun had lost half the night's sleep, Yeoncheong's remark left her utterly dumbfounded.
"Hey. Are you seriously not going to acknowledge what you did to me last night?"
"What did I do? I put you in the bed so your back wouldn't hurt. You should be thanking me, honestly."
Worse still, she couldn't even recall what she'd done in her sleep.
The sheer audacity of someone who'd thrown everything into chaos and then played innocent. Nayun swore then and there that she would have her revenge, if only out of indignation at being the one wronged.
"Go wash up. I'll make you some toast."
"Toast?"
"You need something in your stomach to get through the day, even if it's simple. I don't make this for just anyone, you know? Show some gratitude."
And yet she was the guest here. The care was almost enough to make Nayun feel guilty about being the freeloader.
Rubbing her palms together as she hauled herself upright, Nayun couldn't help but soften a little.
True, she'd been the one to cash in her Favor Pass, but she hadn't exactly been considerate about it either—and honestly, what friend in the world went this far, making breakfast for her guest?
But then—
"Oh, right. Girls or not, you can't sleep all tangled up like that. No matter how jealous you are of my chest, understood?"
"Ugh..."
Poking and prodding the sore spot she had no chance of ever fixing, over and over.
At Yeoncheong's mischievous little sermon, Nayun quickly hardened her heart again.
She'd expected Suyeon to come storming in making a scene the moment school started, but perhaps because exams—an actual important matter—still remained, she was nowhere to be seen.
Then, the instant the last midterm ended, she charged into the classroom.
"You guys! Nothing happened, right!?"
"Nooothing, Suyeon. We haven't even had closing homeroom yet—what could possibly have happened?"
Teacher Jisu was still in the classroom at that exact moment.
A heavy silence settled over the room.
Yeoncheong's class had always finished their exams first, so Suyeon had apparently just assumed today would be the same.
"Ah. I'm so sorry!"
Suyeon bowed at the waist in apology, then covered her face and bolted.
They watched for a while as she whined to Seoha outside about why no one had stopped her.
Once the door closed, the teacher glanced around the classroom, waiting for quiet, her lips twitching with amusement.
"Hmm... the grade head teacher told me the term isn't over yet and not to let you slack off... but a day like today deserves a break, don't you think?"
"Yes!"
"Only ever this eager to answer, hm~?"
Teacher Jisu chuckled at the class answering with one voice.
"You all worked hard on your midterms. Have fun today! And from tomorrow, come back to school with your heads on straight. Got it?"
Sensing the glances being sneaked her way, Yeoncheong braced her stomach and answered with everything she had.
"YES!!!"
The teacher flinched at the deafening response, waved them off with a grin—go on, get out of here—and Suyeon and Seoha, waiting in the hallway, motioned for them to hurry out too.
"Yeoncheong, let's go."
Yeoncheong grabbed her bag—lighter than it had been in months—and left the classroom with Hasol and Nayun.
A flock of uniforms spilled out onto the streets.
And the group's biggest concern, as Yeoncheong and her friends naturally blended into the crowd, wasn't where they were going—it was what had happened last night.
Hasol had been holding her curiosity in check, saying she'd hear about it together later, so the collective intrigue was sky-high.
"Tell us already. You two really didn't do anything yesterday?"
"Oh please~ we went to study. Obviously nothing happened."
Under Suyeon's suspicious interrogation, Seoha joked it off—as if anything could have happened—though a flicker of concern crossed her face.
Her worry was purely for Yeoncheong's sake.
"Of course nothing happened. I found the lamp and went straight to sleep. Right?"
Yeoncheong, who had no memory of the night, looked to the friend who'd stayed over for confirmation. But for Nayun, dreaming of revenge, there could be no better setup.
"Hmmm... who's to say?"
At that evasive answer, one by one the group came to a halt, and the eyes of the friends who had fallen back behind them locked onto the two of them.
Especially under the searing stares of Suyeon and Seoha, Yeoncheong elbowed her friend frantically.
"Hey—hey! Hello? Nothing happened, okay? Say it like that and things are going to get weird!"
"I wouldn't say nothing happened."
Nayun kept letting the ends of her sentences hang open as questions, dodging any clear answer. Had she somehow been nursing a grudge without Yeoncheong realizing? All this deliberate savoring and stoking of suspicion...
Yeoncheong had wanted some time to talk it out between the two of them, but her friends made that impossible.
What on earth happened? Tell us. The interrogation pressed on.
Nayun glanced at her once, then let out a sigh that said there was no hiding it anymore.
"Well... you smacked my butt. You grabbed my chest. We slept in the same bed. And... ah, you basically clung to me and sniffed me and stuff."
One finger at a time.
As she unfolded the four fingers she'd kept curled, the memories of the night came rushing back to Yeoncheong, and she exploded.
"You can't explain it like that! You have to give the context too!"
"Ohhh~ so you're admitting it's the truth?"
"Hup."
She'd clapped a hand over her mouth too late—the transparent reaction was as good as a confession.
Barely two months had passed since the semester began and spring arrived, yet the chill of midwinter radiating from behind her had every hair on her body standing on end.
Suyeon's arms, locked around her from behind before she knew it, were filled with the iron resolve of a woman who would not let her escape.
Yeoncheong squirmed and protested her innocence.
But given her usual track record, the signal that something had, in fact, happened had already gone up.
"And you said nothing happened..."
Seoha's dead eyes curved, only the corners of her mouth lifting.
"Heep!"
A bizarre sound burst from the suspect, whose skin had crawled like that of a startled ox.
If you're going to be angry, just be angry normally. Why do you always have to be so terrifying? Yeoncheong mentally criticized her friend's forced smiling—briefly.
Then, as always, she called a time-out and appealed to Hasol for help.
But today was different.
"It's always 'time-out' with you. What do you think this is, a sporting event?"
"Exactly. No time-outs today. If you want to explain yourself, you do it like this."
Because the two friends, their jealousy sharpened into something dangerously focused, weren't having it.
To be fair, it was a relief that it was people who knew—Hasol, Nayun—rather than total strangers. No new, unknown rivals were being added to the roster.
It was more the degree of the behavior, you might say. She'd done for another friend things she wouldn't even do for the ones who loved her, and they were thoroughly sulking about it.
"W-wait—hip! Hahah—!"
As Yeoncheong had predicted, the first strike was the hard part; from the second on, it came easy.
Suyeon and Seoha, flanking her front and back, kneaded and tickled every inch of her—chest, arms, everywhere.
In the middle of the street, strange cries erupted from her—neither laughter nor quite moans—but the passersby merely glanced over, assuming a pack of girls in the full bloom of youth were just horsing around, and moved on.
Only after patiently explaining herself, one word at a time, amid her torture(?) was Yeoncheong finally set free.
Her stomach clock—which had gone from laughing itself sore to whimpering—deserved some of the credit, though she insisted, absolutely insisted, that the noises had nothing to do with being hungry.
Anyway.
When they arrived at the place they'd chosen to get lunch sorted first, she pressed a hand to her forehead at the sight of that red little menace she'd been seeing for days on end.
"Unbelievable... tteokbokki again..."
It's close. It's delicious. It comes out fast. The menu's varied. And so on.
For all the reasons they dredged up, here they were—again—at the snack shop.
Maybe she'd just never noticed before, back when they didn't eat out together this often: the sight of girls in identical uniforms all eating the identical tteokbokki.
Yeoncheong sliced into the pork cutlet she'd ordered in self-defense and asked, "Aren't you sick of it?"
"Not even a little. It's delicious every single time."
As Suyeon chewed her rice cakes and opened her mouth, a freshly cut piece of pork cutlet slid right in.
"That's the thing," she declared, wearing the face of someone who owned the whole world. "You order the pork cutlet. That's what keeps the balance."
"Un... believable."
"Same here."
This time it was Seoha, seated across from her, opening her mouth with a little ahh.
They were friends who occasionally ordered pork cutlet themselves and asked for a bite; Yeoncheong shared her tteokbokki with them anyway, so giving a piece was no hardship.
But today, both Suyeon and Seoha simply sat there, mouths open, waiting to be fed. And after Nayun's little exposé earlier, the right to refuse was, naturally, gone.
After quietly feeding Seoha her piece of cutlet as well, Yeoncheong shot a glare at the instigator of this entire situation.
"Hey. Don't you have something to say to me?"
"Huh...? Ah, I can cut my own food, thanks."
Nayun speared a neatly sliced piece of her cutlet with her upright silver fork and brought it to her mouth.
The owner of the pork cutlet lifted her sauce-stained knife, just a little.
"Hey... I'm holding a knife right now, aren't I?"
"So petty. Don't get greedy just because you ate two pieces."
"Two pieces? No—no, that's not the point."
Her eyes had darted to the plate for an instant; Yeoncheong shook her head and pressed on.
"I'll admit everything else, but I'd like to correct the record on one thing."
Fortunately, since she'd raised it herself, Nayun didn't dodge.
Had she really taken two pieces of pork cutlet? After chewing it over for a good long while, Nayun covered her mouth and answered.
"About what?"
"When, exactly, did I ever touch your chest?"
The butt slap—she could concede that. She'd been ambushed mid-giggle, totally defenseless; fair play.
Sleeping in the same bed, the clinging, the sniffing—she'd remembered it all, however belatedly; conceded.
But the claim that she'd grabbed Nayun's chest—that she couldn't concede, not to the end. All the more because Suyeon and Seoha had been asking whether she'd secretly been a pervert all along.
"Wow. You grabbed them like that and you don't even remember? That's cold. Genuinely."
Nayun wrapped both arms over her chest and played the victim.
Yeoncheong couldn't hide her exasperation.
"I. Am. Asking. Exactly. When. That. Happened."
"When you shoved me down onto the bed. You grabbed everywhere to keep me from squirming away."
Had all that recent studying made her this quick?
The way she'd deliberately condensed the story and dropped a key word here and there was no amateur's handiwork.
But Yeoncheong knew exactly what circumstances the incident had occurred under. So she could refute it with total confidence.
"Everyone, you heard her, right? That happened in pitch darkness. It was an emergency touch, unavoidable. And how was I supposed to tell front from back, when there's barely any difference between the—"
No telling who moved first, but Seoha's and Suyeon's hands clamped over her carelessly flapping mouth.
Those who have little treasure what they have. Teasing someone for being flat was one thing—but saying there was no difference between front and back was another thing entirely.
Her blue eyes rolled and rolled as she sized up Nayun.
Her chin propped on one hand trembled, as though that fist could close at any moment; and behind that sweetly upturned mouth came the faint sound of teeth grinding.
Her eyebrows and facial muscles were twitching, the forced smile a hair's breadth from collapsing—and the hand gripping her fork was white-knuckled.
Somehow it occurred to her that the red glistening on that fork might not be tteokbokki sauce, but her own blood.
Yeoncheong instinctively dragged her chair backward and put distance between them.
Once Yeoncheong and Nayun had traded their respective blows(?), the five of them left the snack shop with their bellies full.
Seoha had taken the leash on the two snarling girls to keep their squabble from turning into a real fight, while Suyeon and Hasol put their heads together to decide on the next destination.
"Where should we go?"
It was tradition, on the last day of exams, for all of them to go out together—this would already be the fifth time.
Counting every other outing they'd shared, it was no exaggeration to say they'd hit just about everything worth visiting.
Besides—
That was aegyo on my part. Yours was worse. Spreading rumors is bad. Getting hit with facts is worse.
It would be ideal if they could redirect the bickering pair's familiar, scuffling energy somewhere else entirely.
"Hmm... let's try somewhere a little different today."
Saying that, Hasol showed Suyeon the place she'd searched up on her phone.
"How about this?"
"Ooh, nice. Perfect for letting off steam."
Having reached their agreement, the two quickly passed the news along to the others.
"Guys! Let's go!"
"Where?"
In answer, the two friends just grinned—you two are going to love it—and took the lead, dragging Nayun and Yeoncheong along at the front of the pack.