still good

iii

Chaeyoung's Saturday routine now is: get up, hug the coffee pot, try not to dress too nicely but not like she's not trying at all, drive over to the soccer fields, and cheer her heart out for Hyerin and Hyunjin. Afterwards, Elio has a playdate with the twins ("Chaeyoung he's the most well-mannered child I've ever met. It freaks me out," Jisoo confesses to her.) and Chaeyoung and Lisa spend a few hours going to lunch and talking.

Sometimes Chaeyoung cooks, and if there's any upside to this new friendship, it's that she suddenly has a reason to regularly get groceries. Sometimes they catch a movie. Chaeyoung shows her to all her favorite little art galleries, hidden around the greater D.C. area.

She makes sure to never touch Lisa first; they haven't hugged since their first art gallery visit. She stays a respectful distance away, doesn't flirt, doesn't let herself interpret anything as flirting.

"I hate it," she moans to Jennie who has managed to wrangle a rare early night off even though her project is nearing its most hectic phase.

"Yeah but there's like nothing you can do about it except stop being her friend," Jennie says. She pops the cork on the bottle of wine she brought over. "And that's a really bad look, breaking up with a single mom - aunt? Single aunt?"

"We are not breaking up because we're not together!" Chaeyoung says, nevertheless taking a glass of wine from Jennie.

"Breaking off a friendship," Jennie corrects. "With a woman who gave up her whole admittedly mysterious life to raise her nephew by herself after his parents were tragically killed in a car crash. Really bad look."

"I don't want to break off our friendship," Chaeyoung says. "But I hate not being able to go any further."

"Sucks," Jennie says agreeably.

"That's it? Sucks?"

Jennie takes a huge pull of her wine. "Yeah. It sucks. I don't have any other advice for you. You either stay her friend and just hope one day she's ready or like to put away that part of yourself that wants to get with her. Or stop being friends with her."

"None of those are good options," Chaeyoung says, head dropping into her hands.

"I never said there were good options. Just options. Keep drinking, you sound like you need it."

"Jennie, it's Tuesday," Chaeyoung says.

"Fuck you I haven't had a night off in four months," Jennie snipes back. "I finally got one of the grad students trained up to my exacting specifications so I can trust her to handle shit if I'm not there so I am going to drink this wine, and I am going to listen to your problems, and then I am going to drag myself into work tomorrow because in two months my team is supposed to launch a probe that will travel over six hundred million miles to a do a flyby of some fucking moons in orbit around Jupiter before leaving our solar system on an endless cosmic journey."

Chaeyoung pauses. "Okay, well when you compare our problems like that."

"Thank you," Jennie says. "Now tell me more about how hot she is."

*

There's only ten games in the season, and as the weekends pass Chaeyoung starts to get anxious. She and Lisa have two games left and she doesn't want to stop hanging out. She wants to ask Lisa to do something outside of their weekend hang, but she doesn't want to overstep her bounds, so she keeps it to Saturdays and some texting in between and feels herself slowly sinking into a lowkey frustrated sadness from Sunday through Friday.

It's properly chilly this late in the season, and Chaeyoung layers carefully to go to the game, as well as packing a thermos of coffee. She used to just bring her travel mug until she started sharing with Lisa, and now she brings a thermos with enough for both of them, plus Jisoo.