The Sleeping Princess of the Club Room?
The midday sun in May had turned just a little too warm.
The moment they opened the door, a breeze came streaming in through the wide-open window to greet the two of them first. The door and the window were both supposed to be shut, so Suyeon squinted against the unexpected wind.
Then she tilted her head down toward the faint sound of breathing drifting up from below.
"Snoooo... snoooo..."
There lay Yeoncheong, sprawled across the big table as if it were a bed.
Perhaps an animal plushie had been pressed into service as a pillow—Suyeon carefully smoothed out the squashed penguin rolling around on the desk and set it back on the shelf, while Seoha draped the long coat that had been nothing but a nuisance all the way here over the back of a chair. Running in that thing couldn't have been comfortable. No wonder the scholars of old never ran anywhere, Suyeon thought.
Rising on her toes to muffle her steps, Suyeon crept slowly toward her friend.
Yeoncheong, her legs dangling off the edge of the desk, was sleeping without a care in the world.
Is she really asleep? Or is she just waiting to jump-scare someone?
Suyeon waved a hand in front of her face, then stuck out her tongue.
"Her back's going to ache. Wow, she's really out cold."
The height was right, but it was still a hard wooden table. Suyeon herself occasionally stretched out on one to shake off her fatigue, but she could never actually sleep the way Yeoncheong did.
She withdrew her waving hand and turned to Seoha, who had come along with her.
"She only did the tug-of-war this morning, right?"
Granted, they were whispering, but with no sign of waking even at voices this close, it was hard to believe. Anyone walking in would assume she'd spent the whole morning sprinting around the field. There was nothing left of the girl who had complained all morning about being bored out of her mind.
Seoha gazed down at her dead-to-the-world friend, lips pursing thoughtfully.
"She has fewer events than the rest of us—maybe she just poured everything she had into that one race."
Remembering how seriously Yeoncheong had taken last year's sports festival, it was a plausible guess. Suyeon nodded vaguely, conceding it might be true.
But still. No matter how you looked at it—
"Is it even possible to not wake up like this?"
She was like the sleeping princess from a fairy tale.
Suyeon's fingers hovered just above Yeoncheong's face, drifting close enough to touch. Even when her fingertips brushed skin from time to time, Yeoncheong only wrinkled her brow slightly; her soft, even breathing never wavered.
"How exhausted can you be? Someone could carry you off and you wouldn't even notice."
At her friend's muttered remark, something seemed to spark in Seoha's mind. Carefully, she reached out toward the hem of Yeoncheong's skirt, and the two fingers that pinched its edge began to lift it, slowly, slowly.
"Wh-what are you doing?"
"Shh."
Seoha hushed her startled friend, then bit her lip.
"Aren't you curious? Whether she'd really go out in nothing but her underwear even wearing a skirt this short."
Yeoncheong complained they were stuffy. Complained that if you were already wearing underwear, what was the point of layering anything else on top. Hers went beyond disliking safety shorts—it bordered on outright loathing—so it stood to reason she might have skipped them again today, didn't it?
It was a mischievous curiosity worthy of a child ten years their junior.
Suyeon, who had been about to stop her, fell hook, line, and sinker for the argument herself. Before she knew it, she was swallowing hard, her eyes fixed on the sliver of bare skin creeping into view.
Seoha's fingertips moved as one with the breeze drifting through the window, her whole body radiating the iron resolve of someone who would absolutely, positively not wake her friend. For a long moment, the slow lift continued.
Fwp.
A skirt that short was never going to do its one job as clothing. It flipped over with an airy little flutter.
"Tsk."
"Yeoncheong, you're all talk."
The two reactions—a smack of the lips, and a sigh of disappointment—told the story without a word needing to be said. As expected... no matter how stuffy they were, apparently the sports festival was an exception, and the safety shorts were on.
Resigning themselves to fate, the two of them were contenting themselves with snapping a photo of Yeoncheong snoring away, blissfully unaware that her skirt had flipped—when Suyeon murmured, low, as if ending things here would be a waste of such a golden opportunity.
"No one else is around. Since we've come this far... want to see how far we can go before she wakes up?"
"Love it."
She could never have done it alone, but having Seoha as an accomplice was a tremendous source of courage. From Yeoncheong's perspective, a friend who had recklessly supplied exactly the wrong kind of bravery.
Suyeon struck first, slipping off the slippers that dangled precariously from her friend's toes to eliminate the variable. They had already confirmed that mere brushing touches wouldn't wake her, so rather than touching so much as tickling—she kept her touch light and teasing.
Yeon-cheong. Daeng-cheong-i. Like you. So cute. So lewd.
With her finger raised like a brush, she traced invisible words onto the bare skin.
"Hee, heehee..."
Just as expected.
As if such light touches could never rouse her from her depths, Yeoncheong only smiled goofily in her sleep. With that, the two friends confirmed it was safe, and their touches grew steadily bolder.
Hands that had at first played around relatively dull spots like the area below the knee were soon poking and prodding at her arms.
"I guess it's because she's not completely lacking in the soft stuff, but rubbing her belly feels really nice."
"Right?"
They gently explored the bare stomach that the bunched skirt couldn't quite cover.
Still not waking up, even for this?
Curiosity that had long since curdled into stubborn determination led Suyeon and Seoha onward, to an even more private territory: her thighs.
"Heh heh... hyut."
Yet even as they stroked her thighs, Yeoncheong only rolled over as though shooing away a fly. It was almost as if someone had slipped her a sedative.
By this point, Suyeon half suspected she'd woken ages ago and was simply playing along because of the mood.
"Not waking up at this level... makes me want to hide her away somewhere nobody knows about, while she's asleep."
If she's actually awake, what kind of reaction would she give? Baiting the hook, Seoha glanced down at her defenseless friend.
But all Yeoncheong did was curl in on herself slightly, as if her ear were ticklish.
"Suyeon, while we're at it... should we carve some kind of mark on the inside of her thigh? You know, to claim her as ours?"
Fishing is a game of patience. Apparently one cast wasn't enough to be sure—Seoha gave the inner thigh a gentle tap and watched the reaction once more.
Suyeon's jaw dropped wide open, and then, perhaps remembering Yeoncheong was asleep, her voice dropped to a strangled whisper.
"A m—a mark, a MARK?! Se-Seoha, are you into tattoos or something?"
"Pfft. No, not tattoos. Not that she'd look lovely even with one."
Even as she cleared up the misunderstanding, Seoha's red eyes never stopped studying her sleeping (?) friend.
She had deliberately thrown out a line dripping with suggestive ambiguity, and—just as predicted—Suyeon, whose defenses against the lewd turned out to be weaker than she looked, went scarlet to the ears. Yeoncheong, for her part, didn't so much as change color, sleeping on in perfect tranquility.
Is she genuinely asleep?
Seoha was lost in thought, tapping the inside of Yeoncheong's thigh with her index finger, when—
"Hey guys, Siyeon said you two were in here... huh...?"
Hasol and Nayun flung the door open and strode in, and the scene that greeted their unprepared eyes was as follows: Yeoncheong, apparently asleep, with her skirt flipped up. Suyeon's face red as a ripened apple. And in the middle of it all, Seoha's hand fondling the inside of a sleeping friend's thigh—
"Uh, um... er?"
"Holy shi—"
One of them went wide-eyed, darting her gaze between Suyeon and Seoha; the other just barely managed to swap the profanity for the name of a native Japanese dog breed.
And so, while everyone fidgeted, none of them quite able to explain—
"Haaaahm... slept great."
Yeoncheong stretched out right where she lay on the desk and sat up.
As if the commotion had woken her, she rubbed at her eyes, blinked, and the blue eyes that finally found their focus registered the awkwardness hanging in the air.
"Hm? What are you all doing? Did you open the door early because you knew I was headed to the bathroom?"
"Uh... yeah. Right. Go ahead."
"Thanks."
Hasol and Nayun stepped aside, and Yeoncheong hopped down from the desk and slipped out of the club room.
Tap-tap-tap-tap. In a hurry, apparently—the sound of running feet faded down the hall.
Once she'd made absolutely sure the door was shut, Hasol launched into a lecture about what on earth they thought they were doing at school.
Meanwhile...
'Crazy. Crazy girl. CRAZY GIRLS!!!'
The moment Yeoncheong reached the bathroom, she washed her face first. Fanning her hands did nothing to cool the blaze in her cheeks.
A short while later.
After wiping the leftover water from her face with her hand, she lifted the hem of her skirt just slightly and inspected the inside of her thigh—the spot where Seoha's hand had been.
'Good thing I kept pretending to sleep... if I'd kept it up any longer it would've been a disaster.'
The truth was, she'd woken the instant the two of them burst through the door.
But imagining how her friends would double over laughing if she suddenly sat up, she had kept the act going—and then, just as Seoha had planned, the atmosphere turned so strange that she'd lost her window to break it off.
A mark on the inside of her thigh... if not a tattoo, was she planning to slap a hidden sticker on me or something?
If Hasol and Nayun hadn't shown up, how far would it have gone? A shiver of goosebumps rippled across Yeoncheong's skin.
It had been unbearably stuffy, but right now she was truly glad she'd worn her safety shorts.
And she made herself two solemn promises: never again would she sleep defenseless in front of Seoha—and she'd get her revenge.
After her nap (?) through lunch break, Class 2's Seoha and Suyeon cruised to clean victories in volleyball and tug-of-war, while Yeoncheong and her two friends spent the interval idly chatting with their classmates Siyeon and Seobin.
With the underclassmen's group events underway, the third-years gathered on the athletic field to prepare for the three-legged race.
Though no one had said a word about it, the lunchtime incident had left things awkward between them—so Yeoncheong made a point of raising her voice.
"Hey. Ready to lose for the first time in your life?"
Class 2 had been cruising along, living up to their pre-tournament billing as favorites, and now the moment had finally come to spend the stamina she'd been hoarding all day. Whether she understood Yeoncheong's intent or not, Suyeon played along, shoulders squared, matching her beat for beat.
"That's my line. You finished one measly tug-of-war this morning and rested the entire time since, and you're talking big? Consider yourself lucky we're on different classes. I was planning to make you sit around sucking your thumb all day tomorrow, too."
"......Ha! W-well, there's still the obstacle race, and the class relay. We've got plenty left, don't we?"
For exactly three seconds, Yeoncheong's mouth opened and closed without a sound. Then she burst into an awkward laugh and started listing off the remaining events—all of which happened to be common events with no preliminary rounds, nothing she could still win.
"You already lost, though?"
"Yeah, Yeoncheong. Your opening gambit lost."
Hasol and Nayun, standing beside them, snorted with laughter at the sight.
Granted, the opponent was their friend too, but weren't they supposed to be backing their own classmate here?
"I—whatever. Forget it."
Yeoncheong's lips flapped for a moment before she shook her head and changed the subject.
"Baek Suyeon. Who's running for your class?"
"Us? Seoha."
She plopped the Seoha standing beside her directly in front of Yeoncheong—as if to say, from now on, you talk to this one.
Seoha's eyes swept up and down Yeoncheong in a rapid scan, and the memory of the lunchtime incident made Yeoncheong flinch—but she managed to keep her expression smooth and pressed on.
"First-year? Second-year?"
"A second-year."
"Then we'll be running in the same heat."
The moment the answer landed, a grin crept onto her lips before she could stop it.
Sure, she'd been the one pretending to sleep first, but this was the perfect opportunity to pay Seoha back for lunch. Especially remembering that Seoha had been the more aggressive one of the two—this was, frankly, the best possible setup.
She let the smirk that had been tugging at the corner of her mouth drop for an instant, then coolly proposed the bet. Laughter slipped out between Seoha's lips.
"Pfft. You really do love your bets, huh? Even though you lose every single time."
"Ahem. Ah-HEM. No changing the subject. You in, or not?"
Seoha asked who was running from Class 1.
Whether she accepted was entirely up to her, so Yeoncheong answered with everything she knew.
"...And Seobin's running with a first-year. The second-year running with me is Chaerin."
With the information in hand, Seoha ran the numbers at lightning speed. The three-legged race was an event where partnership chemistry mattered and variables abounded—and Chaerin, the girl who idolized her, paired with Yeoncheong?
Drop a subtle hint right before the start, and it might just work, the calculation concluded.
"Deal. I'll play along."
Seoha accepted the challenge without hesitation.
Humming a little tune, she began to ponder exactly what penalty to inflict on the friend who had dug her own grave.
And with a fist pumped secretly in triumph, Yeoncheong headed off across the field to find her second-year partner.