CHAELISA One-shots

Professor Manoban

**

When Chaeyoung woke up, she immediately knew she wasn’t at home.

Home to her had always been a vague concept. Throughout her entire childhood she’d heard other kids talking about their beautiful bedrooms, decorated with cartoon heroes and posters of boybands, in which their parents kissed them goodnight when they went to bed. Chaeyoung had never known such thing. Both her parents were busy businesspeople, abroad half of the time and practicing a ton of hobbies otherwise. Mason and Claire Park never wanted children in the first place and it really showed – even though they sincerely tried to embrace Chaeyoung with love from the day that she was born, the young girl often found herself in the hands of friends or neighbors, on a daily appointment with her parents’ answering machine.

And then, one day, even the answering machine stopped responding.

As long as both her parents were alive, Chaeyoung still believed that she would ever have something like a true home to go to. That someday, after middle school maybe, she would get to move out of her desolate little room at boarding school and exchange her rickety bunk bed for a king size boxspring with lime green sheets and her very own desk to create her drawings at. But then her father’s car left for a business conference it would never reach and her mother decided to drown her grief in the arms of another man, and that’s when Chaeyoung solemnly promised that she would never, ever allow herself to feel at home in a house that was owned by her uncle, who married a woman that was not his to love.

Now, over seven years later, Chaeyoung had slept in so many different places that she lost her every feeling of discomfort. A bed was a bed, that was it. Sometimes there was noise at night, sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes she shared her mattress with someone and sometimes she didn’t. Usually her only concern was the time at which she would have to get up again – but ever since mobile phones were invented, even that was not an issue anymore.

That’s why it was uncommon for her to, as a first thing when she opened her eyes, feel that something was off.

A lovely smell of flowery shampoo filled her nostrils when she rolled over, only to have some wonderfully soft sheets hugging her like a bunch of cottony clouds, pulling her back to sleep. She was just thinking that this must have been the best bed she ever slept in when it slowly started to occur to her whom it belonged to.

Her heartbeat elevated when she opened one eye and discerned the silhouette of an elegant woman sitting in bed next to her, her knees pulled up to support the book that she was reading. At times Chaeyoung wondered if her bed partner ever did anything else than reading, but as a professor in English she was probably assumed to always be on top of the newest literature.

Because she was so immersed in her reading, Chaeyoung closed her eyes again and took advantage of the lecturer’s lack of attention by pretending she was still asleep. A smile curled around her lips while she subtly shoved closer to the pretty woman and her somewhat sore muscles made her relive flashes of the previous night.

“Good morning,” an angelic, somewhat amused voice said right next to her. “So you’re not running away this time?”

Chaeyoung mumbled some incoherent syllables as she snuggled closer to her girlfriend. The two previous times that she’d slept in this apartment, she’d indeed snuck out before Professor Manoban had even opened her eyes – but back then she’d been sleeping on the couch, not with her. This was a totally different situation than a kind professor helping out a temporarily homeless student.

Lisa merely chuckled when she closed her book and carefully put it on her nightstand, which set her arms free to cuddle Chaeyoung . “I know you’re awake,” she whispered into the student’s ear.