𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐬 || 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐚✔

Chapter 8

Chaeyoung's house is wide and empty most of the time. There's a color scheme for each room - the living room is shades of oranges and reds, "like an Arabian sunset", Chaeyoung claims, the kitchen is fashioned to look like an old Italian bakery, even though the family is never here to actually cook in it, and all three of the bathrooms have aquatic themes. There are pictures on the walls of a younger, black-haired Chaeyoung with her sister and parents hung up in almost all of the hollow rooms. They're always in the same pose with the same smiles, arms wrapped around each other in the same way - even their choice of outfits remain constant in most of them. Chaeyoung told me they take a family photo every year for their annual Christmas card, but it's really the only time they're ever together as a unit. It's not that they don't love each other. Chaeyoung has assured me they certainly do, they just choose to live independently. Her parents are at work a lot of the time and her sister has long since moved out. The Park daughter has spent the majority of her free time alone and, until recently, she's preferred it that way.

"Not now, though," she said once, her finger circling my navel. "I prefer to spend time with you."

She had smiled so joyfully that it was all I could do to not crush my face to hers in a kiss. Instead, I remained rigid and gave her a tight smile.

I don't know what part of me is in control anymore. The part that likes Chaeyoung, or the part that wants to forget any of this ever happened. Sometimes I can't stop myself and I'm falling onto her couch with her on top of me after school and kissing her until I'm dizzy and sometimes I don't even say goodbye to her after class and head straight home. On those days, Taylor glares at me particularly nastily, but she has yet to say anything since that day Chaeyoung left my house after dinner. I know she knows that I know she knows - bear with me here, my brain is all kinds of scrambled - but we have yet to directly speak about it. She's her usual stuck-up, selfish self until Chaeyoung is in her field of vision, and suddenly she'll turn and stare at me with a pointed expression that I try to ignore. My whole life, I've been pretty good at that, but there's a part of me that agrees with Taylor, that thinks what she's non-verbally saying is right.

I shouldn't be with Chaeyoung like this. I'm putting my entire career in danger. And yeah, there are successful not straight Singers and Dancers, but I don't want to be that person. Thinking it kills me, that I'm ashamed of how I feel about her, how I'm attracted to her, how much my body responds to hers when we're together. When I'm not with her, it's easy to think those things, to tell myself that I'm done, that tomorrow is the day I cut things off and move on with my life. When she's not there, I want to be normal. I want to be the Lisa I was before prom night.

But when I'm at her house like I am now, tucked into the same corner of the couch I was the second time we kissed, and she's sitting cross-legged at my side with a notebook in her lap and the eraser end of a pencil wedged between her teeth and her black brows furrowed in adorable concentration, it's hard - impossible, really - for me to picture me living the life I had before her. It was so boring, though I obviously didn't notice then because I had nothing to compare it to. But now, instead of straight, clear sentences, facts and statements, I have questions and mysteries and nonsense. And it's scary how much I enjoy it.

Watching her profile, I set my calculator down in my lap and prop my head up on my palm, elbow on the arm of the couch. A distant, ticking clock is the only indication that time is even passing - being around Chaeyoung makes time move much more quickly than it used to. I focus on that ticking, the clicking of a second forming and passing, like a heartbeat.

Chaeyoung is cute when she studies. For as airheaded as she can come off to be, Chaeyoung has pretty decent marks in every class. Her C in French stresses her out - she claims that she can't help it, that commas just don't find themselves when she writes and it all sounds rambled and rushed. That's just the way Chaeyoung's brain works, on hyperspeed, trying to keep up and even go ahead. She can't stand being in one place physically or mentally or any way you can think of. It's one of my favorite things about her. She has colorful thoughts, and before I really got to know her, my world was in black and white and I didn't even notice until she stained it red.