Written In The Stars

Chapter 4: Doubt

Living with Jennie is beautiful, blissful torture.

As a roommate, Jennie is loud and eats all the food, and Chaeyoung has no idea how one relatively short and slender person could possibly use that many towels in a day.

She's sarcastic all the time, she makes up weird words and songs (that Chaeyoung absolutely does not enjoy at all), and she has an Instagram account dedicated to memes she makes out of Chaeyoung's candids. She and Jisoo try in vain to engage Chaeyoung in a prank war but don't seem to realise how massively unsubtle they both are, and always manage to give themselves away somehow (their attempts, however, result in a great deal of fodder for the Instagram account).

Most heinously of all: she's stolen Chaeyoung's fucking pretzel pajamas.

She's basically everything Chaeyoung never wanted in a roommate, and Chaeyoung loves her.

She's adorably undone first thing in the morning, stumbling around the kitchen bleary-eyed until Chaeyoung presses a mug of hot chocolate into her hands. Once the sugar kicks in, she loves to make Chaeyoung breakfast, setting huge stacks of pancakes or waffles in front of her despite Chaeyoung's half-hearted protests. After a few weeks, she starts to arrange fruit in obnoxious (and often obscene) pictures on the plate in an effort to see how hard she can make Chaeyoung roll her eyes.

Once a suitable quantity of carbs and sugars have been consumed, Jennie disappears to shower (which Chaeyoung never thinks about ever), and then reappears before leaving for work. She dresses herself pretty neatly and professionally, considering the amount of oversized black shirts she owns, but sometimes she feels like pulling jokes just to induce a heart attack to Chaeyoung's fashionista soul.

One time Jennie showed up wearing a bright orange bow-tie and Chaeyoung didn't speak to her the whole day. As Jennie doesn't have a set schedule she usually shows up at the studio, and that time was no different. The teasing only increased when she noticed how Chaeyoung was hiding a smile behind her stare of judgement, and the bow-ties became a recurring joke. 'The bow-ties are retina-searingly awful', Chaeyoung points out, but Jennie just grins, and Chaeyoung tries to ignore the fact that she must be really far gone for this girl if she thinks she's sexy even in a blue bow-tie with gummy bears on it. She knows Jennie takes it off as soon she leaves, but Chaeyoung supposes she might have a soft spot for the way the bow-ties are a testament to Jennie's endearing nerdiness. Although it's probably more the fact that the woman she loves likes to make a show of appearing in front of her literally wrapped in a bow.

And yet Chaeyoung isn't able to touch her. Her fucking life, man.

Happily - or not, Chaeyoung can't decide - Jennie seems to have no such reservations about touching her.

Although Jennie isn't much of the skin ship type, every now and then there are hugs and back-pats and shoulder squeezes, and even companionable slaps on the butt which make Chaeyoung yelp and glower even though secretly her stupid, traitorous heart leaps a little every time.

As the summer melts away into fall, Jennie gets so comfortable around Chaeyoung she even starts dropping down into Chaeyoung's lap any time there aren't enough chairs for everyone. No one else seems to think this is weird because they're quite a touchy-feely group, and Chaeyoung has no idea what is a normal amount of touching for two extremely platonic roommates.

She deals with being Jennie's human chair pretty well, she thinks, except for that one time Jennie was playing Mario Kart and she kept shifting her body weight to lean into the bends, and Chaeyoung had to think about her grandmother in a Shrek costume to keep her sanity.

So at some point - specifically, at 7:22AM of a Monday, when Jennie had spent twenty minutes trying to wake up an exceptionally more-than-usual grumpy Chaeyoung - she stops being the one that simply goes with it while carefully keeping her hands to herself and starts being the one who actively seeks out affection, earning herself the righteous nickname of 'Rosie'.