Brazen Yet Reckless, Reckless Yet Brazen
For some reason, Suyeon was alone in the club room. At first, Yeoncheong thought she must be deep in thought about something.
"Suuh... suuh..."
But her chin resting in her hands, Suyeon showed no sign of opening her eyes, and between the whirring of the fan and the patter of rain against the window, only a shallow, steady breathing could be heard.
Yeoncheong crept close enough to touch her, and still she showed no sign of waking. She was asleep.
'Did she have PE this afternoon?'
It amazed Yeoncheong how she'd managed to fall asleep in the brief window before Yeoncheong arrived after final period—and that she could sleep so deeply even while her head bobbed precariously.
As everyone knows, sleeping in that position means a stiff neck when you wake up.
So she reached for the penguin plush among the stuffed animals claiming the bookshelf. Its owner, Suyeon, always had something to say about it, but it was long, just the right size, and plushy soft—perfect for use as a pillow.
Her hand, kneading the penguin plush with practiced ease and about to offer it as a pillow, suddenly froze.
'...If I want to put what I learned into practice, isn't now the time?'
Seoha was nowhere to be seen, and only Suyeon was here. On top of that, she was half-drowned in sleep. Now, surely, she could seize the initiative with a simple opening move.
Then her friend would be flustered by Yeoncheong's unusual behavior, and soon she'd be poking at those flushed cheeks in embarrassment... snrk.
Just imagining it was delightful. Yeoncheong wiped the drool creeping from her lips and made up her mind.
Returning the penguin plush—so nearly condemned to pillow duty—to its rightful place, she approached carefully and gazed down at Suyeon.
'Hmm... what approach should I take?'
Hasol had told her to hold her hand first, or to try offering a compliment she didn't usually give.
In other words, catch the other person off guard with unexpected behavior and take control.
What would work best on a sleeping friend, though?
As she pondered, Yeoncheong's gaze landed on that bobbing head. The moment she saw it, a strategy came to mind—she hopped up onto the desk and woke her friend.
"Suyeon, Suyeon? Your neck will hurt if you sleep like that."
"Mmm... five more minutes..."
She must have been exhausted. The sight of Suyeon whining with her eyes squeezed shut brought a smile to Yeoncheong's face unbidden.
Biting back the laughter leaking through her nose, Yeoncheong offered this instead: she casually rested her friend's head on her own thigh.
"Sooo comfy..."
Apparently Suyeon thought she'd been given the penguin plush Yeoncheong loved to use as a pillow.
A soft smile settled on Suyeon's lips, and she even nuzzled her head against it in contentment. Yeoncheong, picturing the reaction that would come when she realized the truth, had a very hard time holding in her laughter.
The longer she held out, the sweeter the payoff would be. She tried her best to endure, but the limit was drawing near—her lips trembled and a sound began to leak out.
She could hold back no longer. Cupping both hands around Suyeon's ear, she whispered.
"Is my lap pillow really that nice?"
"Eeh...?"
Lost in sleep, Suyeon couldn't make sense of the words—only blinked drowsily at the voice piped straight into her ear.
So this is why she keeps doing that to me.
It wasn't the reaction she'd been hoping for yet, but it was already fun.
If she wanted to seize momentum, she'd have to commit fully.
The reaction she truly wanted was still to come, so she swallowed her embarrassment and moved on to the follow-up line. This time without cupping her hands—leaning in even closer, she whispered with her breath tickling Suyeon's ear.
"I said, is my lap pillow really that nice? You can't even get up, can you?"
This time her ears seemed to have delivered the intel properly to her brain—the mismatched eyes snapped wide open.
Yeoncheong tilted her head slightly and met the eyes of her friend lying on her lap.
"Hi there~?"
Does she think she's dreaming?
Clapping beside her ear, waving a hand in front of her eyes, pinching her cheek—after triple-confirming this was reality, Suyeon's eyes gradually grew wider. The red that started in her cheeks spread across her whole face and all the way to her ears.
Is this how she reacts when she's embarrassed too? At the adorable sight, Yeoncheong's grin would not go down.
"Hi... HIGIYAAA!!!"
Having finished assessing the situation, Suyeon let out a bizarre shriek and tried to bolt upright—but Yeoncheong's quick reflexes cut the attempt short.
"Hahaha!!!"
"Let go! Let me go!"
"You're too cute, no way I'm letting go!"
A flawless success—her confidence pierced the sky. Never had she been so full of swagger, and there was no reason on earth to release a friend too flustered to function.
The pent-up frustration from being pushed around lately by Suyeon and Seoha melted away completely.
But then, cornered mice do bite cats.
She'd assumed Suyeon, whose endurance was no better than her own, would just keep taking it—but pushed past a certain threshold of embarrassment, Suyeon bared her counterattack fangs.
Since she wouldn't let go, Suyeon burrowed in deeper instead.
The head on her thigh shot down in one motion to her crotch. With her friend plastered flat against her stomach, a flustered Yeoncheong jerked her hips back.
"H-hey!"
Suyeon wrapped both arms around her waist so she couldn't escape. Then, shaking her head side to side like a drill, she tickled her belly.
"Eee...! Eeek!"
She was groggy from sleeping, sure. And this wasn't like Suyeon's usual personality, sure. Those two moments of complacency left Yeoncheong's rather private midsection exposed.
In an instant, the tables had turned.
Remembering the vibrating-bell incident and a few things from before that, apparently her stomach really was her weak point.
Yeoncheong couldn't even tell her to stop—she just bit her lip and desperately fought down the strange sounds leaking out.
"What did you do to me!? Did you take weird pictures of me? Tell me right now!"
Her embarrassment sublimated into boldness, Suyeon pressed the attack, demanding a full confession.
But all Yeoncheong had actually done was torment her with a lap pillow and a few whispered lines.
There was nothing more to confess, and with Suyeon's head relentlessly rubbing against her thigh and stomach, she had no room to speak anyway.
In the end, it finished when Suyeon—worn out from her own frenzy, or more precisely, when her embarrassment dipped back below the threshold and her senses returned—released her friend.
"Um... Yeoncheong, are you okay?"
"Hah... huueeh..."
The sight of Yeoncheong sprawled across the desk was something to behold.
The sustained, intense stimulation had made even breathing difficult—her flushed chest rose and fell with ragged breaths, her half-lidded eyes gazed blankly at the ceiling with a slightly unfocused haze, and somewhere in the lingering aftershocks, strange little sounds kept slipping from her mouth.
And Suyeon, who as always acted first and thought later, was herself deeply mortified by what she'd done.
"Y-Yeoncheong?"
Even with a hand waving before her eyes, Yeoncheong just blinked stupidly, showing no other reaction.
She'd heard that laughing too hard could cause hyperventilation and real trouble. What if Yeoncheong was in that state too?
Suyeon looked down at her friend with eyes full of worry.
"Should I throw some water on you?"
"You... crazy... girl..."
Turns out there's no better conversation tool than water, huh.
Yeoncheong, unresponsive until now, weakly moved her lips between rough breaths.
***
Yeoncheong was absolutely not the type to make the first move like that. Which meant someone had put her up to it.
Acting on that judgment, the result of Suyeon's relentless interrogation was the full picture of events.
"Ahh~ so you wanted to see me or Seoha all flustered and helpless? So you asked Hasol and Nayun for advice?"
"S-so what! Is it wrong for me to do that?"
Embarrassed at having her true feelings exposed, Yeoncheong started with an outburst.
It looked exactly like a small animal puffing itself up on purpose, and Suyeon couldn't help the smile curling at her lips.
"Nope~? Nothing wrong with it. Speaking of which, wanting to take the lead so dashingy... you really are a man at heart, Yeoncheong."
"Of course... do you have any idea how many years I lived as a man?"
Though for all her tough talk, the way she pouted was honestly nothing but adorable.
And besides, Suyeon had already seen plenty of truly dashing moments from her—like fighting on her behalf when it mattered. Any more dashing than that would just be greedy.
Suyeon reached out for the blue hair. Tidying the strands mussed from all the squirming on the desk, she let her lips part gently.
"You're already plenty cool. Why try to be cooler?"
"...Don't tease me."
Getting reduced to helpless giggling from having her stomach rubbed for a bit must have been a shock.
She was reading her honest words in the most crooked way possible.
The hand that finished straightening the stray strands drifted down softly to touch Yeoncheong's chin. Then, with a light tap of her index finger, she turned her head up and met her eyes.
Unlike with Seoha, both her cheeks were faintly flushed. Words to express what she felt wouldn't come easily. Her eyes, pointlessly darting left and right, seemed to finally make up their mind—and fixed on Yeoncheong.
"You're enough as you are. You have so many moments where you're cooler than you think you are."
The sky pouring through the window behind them was unbearably gloomy, yet the face of the friend before her grew redder by the second.
Still, she never once looked away.
Because even if it embarrassed her, she had to convey what was in her heart.
Failing to notice feelings expressed this far deserved death, but fortunately, Yeoncheong managed to survive.
Being told such mortifyingly sweet things always made her chest tingle. The tingling was in her chest, but she couldn't help scratching her cheek, lips opening and closing.
"Thank you. That makes me... happy."
"...Yeah."
Silence followed—perhaps she had nothing more to say.
The two, facing each other, self-consciously glanced around the room and drummed their fingers on their knees, scrambling for another topic.
"S-so anyway, where did Seoha go?"
It was a stroke of luck that Seoha wasn't here right now.
She wouldn't need to get jealous seeing this scene, and it had naturally become their next topic of conversation.
Suyeon seemed just as eager to escape the awkward atmosphere, deliberately raising her voice.
"Ahh! She went to the teachers' office. She's having a college counseling session? With the homeroom department head."
"Just Seoha?"
"She's first in the whole grade. Of course the school wants to send her to the best university possible."
Yeoncheong gave a small nod.
In this country, a school's worth was measured by how many students it sent to how good a university, after all.
She'd heard her own class would begin individual counseling sessions once finals were over. Time was slipping by little by little—and before she knew it, her third year was already past the halfway mark.
The time she spent with the friends she loved was ticking away...
A sudden pang of longing made her say something she normally never would.
"Suyeon, you were really pretty earlier."
"Wh-what?"
She hadn't said it just to escape the ticklish atmosphere, had she?
Hit with a compliment about her looks out of nowhere, the color that had just returned to Suyeon's face flared right back up, and she stammered incoherently. Yeoncheong, catching up a beat too late, added an explanation in her own embarrassment.
"Just because. We're dating now, and even if I can't do it often, I figured it'd be nice to say it once in a while."
"...You are seriously..."
Cuddling herself as if to protect her chest, Suyeon stared at her friend in sheer disbelief.
Maybe it was the gap with her usual image.
No matter how haplessly she got taken down every time, remarks like this, delivered out of nowhere, never failed to shake her heart.
"I wish you'd be just a little more quiet, like when you're sleeping."
"What?"
It would have been even better if she hadn't obliviously tacked on a postscript...
The criticism so naturally blended into the compliment made Suyeon bare her teeth in a grin.
"Is that your way of saying I'm a mess in my daily life?"
"Huh? No... that's not what I meeeant! Gwaaah!"
Suyeon pounced again without even a moment to plead her case. Having apparently figured out by now that her weakness was her stomach, she attacked that spot with relentless focus.
In the end, the one who mediated—without Hasol around to do it—was:
"Hm? Why are you two fighting?"
Seoha, returning from her counseling session.