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She had meant to decline the video call.
Mizi and Sua peer at her with twin expressions of consternation, differentiated only by Mizi’s awkward smile and the tight furrow of Sua’s brows.
“Um,” says Sua, “are you in his bed?”
Hyuna clutches his sheets, pulling them higher on her chest to cover herself.
“That was fast!” Adds Mizi, with a nervous, high-register, chattering giggle, “I mean, normally when you two break up, you stay away… um… a bit longer? You broke up with him around lunch yesterday, but it looks like you… spent the night? And when you texted me… anyway! I’m happy for you! Really! Love conquers all! I hope you have fun with your very amorous affair! It’s not a bad idea at all.”
“I thought you said it was really it this time,” reminds Sua.
“Listen,” Hyuna grouses, and there’s a sex-ragged thickness in her voice that strains Mizi’s expression even as her cheeks tint, powdering her cheeks the same colour as her hair. Sua hunches over, arms crossing over her chest as if the second-hand embarrassment is chipping away at her being. “We all make mistakes.”
“Well,” says Mizi, dragging out the syllables, a long, pitched extension of the word, “I don’t really know, but if you want to hear my opinion, and you want to know what I think—then I think a mistake only happens once. Or twice. At the very least it stops being a mistake and starts being a choice after the eighth time in six months.”
“‘Your life’s a ditch’,” translates Hyuna, “‘stop dragging around a shovel’.”
“Just me! Just a personal opinion!” comes Mizi’s flustered response. “I never said you’re making things harder on yourself, even though it does seem like that, sometimes!”
“So are you not going to the cafe with us?” Sua hasn’t looked at the camera since Hyuna opened her mouth, eyes directed to her lap as she speaks, “It’s fine if you’re… busy.”
“I’m going,” says Hyuna, “I really am this time! I don’t want to spend another second in his bed.”
“… Okay,” says Sua, unconvinced.
Mizi politely doesn’t respond to Hyuna’s statement at all.
“Really,” Hyuna says, “I mean it! It’s not even my fault I’m here.”
“I’m sure it was very sudden,” replies Mizi sympathetically, and the worst part is that her fumbling sincerity continues even as her mouth continues to stay open, “I’m sure you were thrown into a giddy romantic situation that made your heart start pounding and had you remember why you two loved each other in the first place. You must’ve come to many Luka-related realizations in the five hours spent between you saying you never wanted to see him again and ending up in his bed. I’m sure the flowers he got you were even bigger than the last ones.”
“I was drunk,” Hyuna says, fingers tight around the trowel, her mouth not missing a chance to humiliate her further—it takes a lot for someone who dips their toes into dipsomania as often as Hyuna does to get utterly trashed the way she did last night, but when she does, she gets handsy—she wasn’t so fucked up that she doesn’t remember the person she was attempting to hit on carefully calling the most recent person on her call list, or texting Mizi a string of characters that barely resembled words when he had gotten her into the cab. She wants to say that she wasn’t the one who initiated it, but half the marks she left on his neck last night had been from when she had started mouthing at him in the taxi. “He didn’t get a chance to get me flowers this time.”
“… I’m sure that other parts of you felt that pounding then.” Comes Sua’s dry response.
“But anyway!” Mizi says, loudly enough to rattle walls and whatever train of thought was set on the rails to pass Hyuna’s mouth gets shaken off the tracks, “anyway! At least he said sorry! That’s good enough!”
Silence sinks into the air like a stone.
Mizi’s smile falls, “huh? He didn’t? But what he said was so mean… you wanted to go with him, and he said—.”
“I was drunk.” Is Hyuna’s defence, it’s equally unconvincing when she repeats it. “I was drunk, it happens. A lot of people sleep with their exes! We aren’t getting back together this time. It’s a one-time deal.”
“You said that last time,” Sua points out.
“And you love him,” adds Mizi, “I know you love him, if it was just sex you could find someone else… but I don’t think that loving him is enough if this keeps happening. He didn’t say sorry last time either.”
“It was just sex,” comes Hyuna’s retort, “Listen, I know it was dumb; I know it was a bad idea, but we really are done; not even an acupuncturist hits a nerve as often as he does.”
“Are we?” Luka says—his voice is sudden, as the bed sinks to accommodate his weight, springs creaking further with how Hyuna jumps—he wasn’t there when she woke up, she had assumed he had already left, but one of his arms crossesover Hyuna’s chest, securing the blanket further against her chest as he pulls her against him. His hair is damp, and she can feel droplets of water track down her skin when he moves to brace his chin against her shoulder. He had just come out of the shower, then. “That’s not what you said last night.”
“Last night was a mistake,” Hyuna repeats.
Luka hums, unconvinced, pressing his lips to her cheek—once; twice; teeth lightly pinching her face before uttering an “I’ll make you breakfast. What do you want?” against her.
“You’re terrible at cooking,” Hyuna says, jerking her head away, and later she realizes it’s her tone that makes Luka smile and the girls grimace—she calls him ‘terrible’ like it’s praise like she’s wrapping up his worst qualities in fondness, displaying it like a gift. “You’re going to burn everything.”
“Um,” says Mizi, when Luka’s tongue peeks out of his mouth, hot and wet when he flattens it against her face, “we’re still here.”
“Don’t lick me—what are you? A dog? Stop it!” She wedges a hand between their faces, and Luka kisses her palm, “Sorry, you know how he is.”
“… Sure do…!” Says Mizi, who seems to witness Luka’s clinginess the most for some reason—she’s like a trigger for his PDA to amp up several notches, when he usually keeps his hands to himself. It can’t be anything like jealousy, Hyuna thinks, because Mizi is taken (though he did have a longstanding distrust of Isaac and Dewey, even after they started dating each other, which had led to their fourth breakup when they started university) maybe it’s some sense of competition? Mizi and Sua are consistently sappy with each other, but he never acts this way around Sua alone or others who stick to their partners like syrup. She doesn’t really know what he’s trying to achieve when he’s acting like this.
“They can just hang up if they don’t like it,” he mutters, interrupting her train of thought, nuzzling against her palm. “They don’t need to stick around for something intolerable.”
“Like how you aren’t sticking around for Hyunwoo’s wedding,” Hyuna bites.
“You act like he wants me around in the first place.”
“Of course he wants you to go,” Hyuna says, “listen, I know you two didn’t get along as kids but—“
“Um,” says Mizi, “actually Sua and I are gonna go! Let’s just meet up another day!”
The call drops in the next second, and Hyuna wedges her arm between them, forcing space as Luka’s other arm wraps around her—an ambush predator constricting its prey.
“You are never happy with me,” his voice is carefully even, measured in an artificial way that signals budding frustrations, “you are only content when you’re in my bed, I might as well invest in chains to keep you here.”
“That’s not doing you any favours.”
“I love you,” Luka says, she can feel the palpations of his heart against her arm, his rabbiting pulse despite his calm face, “I love you. That should be enough. You love me, but you don’t trust me.”
“You said you hate Hyunwoo,” Hyuna mutters, “and you said you didn’t want me to go to his wedding either—even if you hate him, I can’t tolerate that.”
“Because it’s not fair,” Luka says in turn, “it’s not fair and that’s what’s intolerable.”
“Me going to my brother’s wedding isn’t unfair.”
“We should’ve gotten married first,” he says petulantly, head dipping to lean against her shoulder, awkwardly bowing his head in their lopsided hug, “I was… unhappy, and perhaps it was petty to say everything I did yesterday, but we were together longer than they were. We were together first, we were together before anyone else. I wanted to marry you before he even met that woman.”
Hyuna pauses.
“We can go,” he says quietly, “I will acquiesce if it matters to you, but he doesn’t like me. The invitation feels like he’s mocking me.”
“Hyunwoo wouldn’t mock you, I know he teased you a lot when we were kids, but he’s not rubbing it in your face or anything.” She tries.
“If you don’t have work today, then stay in bed,” he mumbles.
“I love you,” says Hyuna after a moment, the phrase coming out piecemeal as if prised from her throat, “sorry I got so heated yesterday. I’m not with you only for sex, you know that right?”
Luka gives a hum that gives no indication of his agreement or disagreement.
“I never thought about marrying you,” she admits, “but if we last this time, I’ll think about it. The girls are trying to calculate our breakups and get togethers by measuring the moon and the stars."
"Are they?" Luka says, "I've already tried that; our signs are very compatible, so we shouldn't be breaking up at all.”
”I’ve never pegged you as someone into astrology.” She starts, and like that, they’re back to normal.
She doesn’t end up leaving the bedroom that day, after all. Still, she notes at the back of her mind that despite all his justifications and excuses and bartering, Luka didn’t say he was sorry again, not even once. He probably won’t next time either.