Forbidden Feelings (Purinz / Chaewon x Yunjin)

Gravitation (M)

NOW.

Yena, who Chaewon had always been under the impression was the other straight girl amongst their friend group, returns to Korea for her birthday weekend in August with a girlfriend in tow.

They make plans to meet up and get dinner when Yena announces in the #cheongjuicy group chat that she'll be visiting Seoul for a few days before going back to Cheongju to see Kyujin and her parents, and that everybody had better free up their schedules for her.

Oh, and that she has a surprise for everyone. With a winky face at the end.

(Yunjin immediately starts a separate group chat where everybody can place their bets on what the surprise is. Chaewon votes for piercing in an inappropriate place, Wonyoung picks tramp stamp but like one of the REALLY trashy ones, Kazuha guesses husband, and Yunjin goes for drastic haircut.)

They settle on a restaurant and a time after enough arguing that Chaewon just mutes the chat for a while and asks Yunjin to tell her when and where to show up. Kazuha brings Sakura, Wonyoung brings Yujin, and Yena shows up with Yuri.

(Nobody in Yunjin's betting pool guessed girlfriend.)

Yuri seems a little overwhelmed by the (loud) responses to her introduction as Yena's girlfriend, so Yena does most of the talking, telling the adorable story of how she and Yuri got together after meeting at a mutual friend's birthday party.

Yena reaches out to take Yuri's hand once she's concluded the entire timeline of their relationship with the story of their first kiss — at the top of a ferris wheel when Yuri took her to a fairground in downtown Cheongju for their second date; Kazuha almost starts crying — and they exchange sickeningly sweet lovestruck smiles.

Chaewon glances at the few inches of space separating her hand on the table from Yunjin's next to her, and wonders if she'll ever be able to look at anybody other than Yunjin the way Yena is looking at Yuri. She wonders if Yunjin will ever look at her like that.

Karaoke is the next stop after dinner.

They hire a room that can fit all eight of them, order a round of drinks, dim the lights, and immediately start queueing up songs.

Naturally, it turns into a contest after about the second song. Sakura does a flawless cover of a song by some Japanese idol band Chaewon's never heard of, Yena sings the newest Ariana Grande song in fluent English, and then Kazuha starts rapping over an English hip-hop song in what Chaewon thinks is French.

Repeating je m'appelle Sakura, Yves Saint Laurent, bitch over and over makes Chaewon dubious as to whether those are the actual lyrics or just a Nakamura Kazuha Original, but it's hilarious enough that they unanimously crown her the winner.

Thankfully things are a little less competitive once Sakura stops gloating, although that might have something to do with the several bottles of soju Yena and Yunjin bring back from their trip to the bar. Kazuha quizzes everyone on their favorite Girls Generation song and promptly adds all of them to the queue. Yena and Yuri duet on a particularly soppy ballad about endless love and soulmates that has everyone pretending to gag while discreetly wiping at their eyes. Yunjin, Wonyoung, Yena and Yuri end up embroiled in a particularly enthusiastic duet-off of Disney songs. Sakura puts on the Wonder Girls and enlists Chaewon, Kazuha, Yunjin and Yujin as her backup dancers for their new cover band that Wonyoung dubs the Average Girls.

After stumbling through the choreography for Tell Me, Chaewon escapes back to the sofa and sinks down onto it to catch her breath and give her feet a break from dancing. She's checking her phone and replying to a text from Minjeong when she feels someone sits down next to her. Chaewon glances up from the screen, momentarily pausing her graphic description of how she'll dismember Minjeong if she even thinks about touching Chaewon's tub of ice cream in the freezer, and even in the low light Yunjin's eyes are bright.