your hand in mine

ii

I had a great time last night. L.'

"Oh my god, you're banging Liam."

"You really need to rethink your whole relationship if you have that little trust in him," Roseanne fires back easily, grabbing the card out of Ashley's hands and reading it again.

'I had a great time last night.' Somehow, she's absolutely sure Lisa didn't even think of the dual meaning when she neatly signed what looked to be an outrageously expensive piece of paper and put it in the bouquet, the size of which was toeing the line between charming and obnoxious. Roseanne squints at it, holds it up with one hand, barely hiding an amused smile. Lilies. The only flowers she's sure she isn't allergic to, as she told Lisa yesterday.

So she's the type to remember things. Interesting.

"Yeah, and Ash," Hyeri pipes up from where she's lounging on Roseanne's couch, "Liam was with you last night. The entire night. I know because we're roommates with really thin walls. Can I start looking for another apartment please?"

"Besides," Roseanne says again, eyes still on the card. "I have a boyfriend."

"Ah, yes," says Ashley, plopping next to Hyeri onto the couch and eyeing Roseanne. "The one and only Lynnwood Sha, the love of your life."

"Last name was a little excessive."

Ashley shrugs. "You get the point."

Roseanne puts the bouquet down on the coffee table carefully, and then sighs, turning to face her best friends since high school. Hyeri Lee and Ashley Choi, always up to no good, always in pairs. Roseanne wasn't always part of the trio. She remembers Hyeri punching her in the face back in school - with perfectly good reasons, but it still hurt like a bitch. She remembers Ashley hating her guts freshman year - a feeling that intensified when her older brother went through 'a Roseanne Park stage', as Hyeri put it. She must have done something right when she turned him down, at least in Ashley's eyes, since they've become tentative friends after that.

Not that she would've accepted Minho Choi's advances if Ashley wasn't there. She was barely seventeen, and he was well over twenty four.

Now, she's almost twenty four herself. Time's a funny thing.

"So you finally dumped that dude?" Hyeri asks Roseanne.

I had a great time last night.

Would you have had a great time knowing why I was there in the first place?

"I," Roseanne rubs a hand down her face, smooths it over the scrubs she's still wearing. She's only in her second year of med school, so technically it's a little early for hospital shifts, but her mother helped her pick up a few. She sighs. "It's complicated."

Hyeri and Ashley immediately get their faces to express well-practiced sympathy. She thinks it's unnecessary. They all know she's the only one out of the three who's ever liked Eunwoo enough to talk to him, let alone date him.

The reason she sighs is not because she's actually contemplating her relationship with Eunwoo - it's because she was supposed to be telling her friends all about their fake break-up, but Lisa's bouquet messed everything up and she slipped and said the wrong thing.

According to their plan - Eunwoo and hers - she actually doesn't have a boyfriend anymore. It makes sense. Perfect sense.

She had to go and complicate everything further.

"She's just a friend," Roseanne says, and it takes tremendous effort not to slap her own forehead as soon as the words are out of her mouth. This is not going according to plan at all.