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For a moment, all Jisu knows is the sensation of falling.
It’s a moment that lasts an eternity. All of her organs press up towards her throat, crowding each other like a mass of bodies all trying to push through one exit. Like a tsunami thundering through a storm drain. Her feet and hands are numb and her head feels over-full, like it’s bound to explode. It might as well.
Then there’s a flash of light, bright as anything, before the whole world goes black. The last thing she notices are the pinpricks of color dancing behind her eyelids.
Minhee pinches her nose and jumps. The cold blue chlorine of the pool greets her feet, before rushing up and enveloping her wholly. It reminds her of when she was seven, and her parents made her join the swim team—they wanted her to learn to swim, but she hated every second of it. She never told her parents why, but every afternoon before they buckled her into the car and drove her off to practice, she’d wail and wail and wail until her breath ran out. They thought she was afraid of the water.
It wasn’t the water. It never had been. It was the other kids—they teased her for being slow, for being weird, for not looking like them. They never talked to her except to make fun. It was the first time she’d ever felt so alone, so out of place, but it was far from the last.
But anyway, she never learned how to swim.
She kicks up toward the surface, floaties wrapped around her upper arms. They’re the same ones she’s had since she was fourteen-- Little Mermaid patterned, scratched and faded to hell until the only remnants of Ariel are a couple patches of red. They were embarrassing then, and at twenty-three, they’re embarrassing now.
Her mom is lying on one of the lounge chairs by the pool, a romance novella she bought off a whim from the new big box bookstore in town tented over her face, shielding her from the harsh noonday sun. She’s asleep and snoring.
Minhee ducks back under the surface, legs awkwardly propelling her toward the shallow end, where she likes to do handstands. She doesn’t like to do them when nobody’s watching, because she’s kind of afraid she’ll drown.
The smooth brick lip of the pool sears the soft white flesh of her underarms when she props herself up on them. She hisses and splashes water on it until it’s cool enough to bear. Her mother stirs, lets out a quiet choking sound, and then snores so loud that a bird perched in their mulberry tree flaps away.
She gets out of the pool by hiking a leg up to the lip, pushing herself up and out of the water with her hands and her shin. She flops down onto her side and rolls to stand. Little pieces of dirt and rock from the concrete decking stick to her wet skin.
Each step against the ground sounds like the wet slap of a fish, leaving footprints that quickly take to drying out. There’s a faded green-and-blue check towel and a folded scarf on their glass table, and she drapes the towel over her mom’s exposed skin and wraps the scarf around her waist.
At that moment, for no particular reason, she chances a look up. Storm clouds, sickly yellow and grey, pile up on the horizon, while the sky above Minhee’s house is the kind of deep blue that makes you dizzy, nauseous, that makes you think of the bad kind of dream that itches under your skin even when you wake. She squints into the brightness, and squints some more when she thinks she sees a falling star.
So white it burns purple, it streaks through the atmosphere, growing bigger and bigger with each passing moment. It’s with alarm that she realizes it’s quickly approaching the plains behind her house. She scrambles over to watch, bracing her arms atop the high privacy fence and wedging her feet up against the slats, using friction and strength to keep herself up.
The collision is anticlimactic. For a second, the meteorite slows, and Minhee swears for a second it takes the shape of a person. Then, instead of hitting the ground with a skidding boom, it seems to just--drop softly into the tall grass.
She jumps off the fence, ignoring the way the raw edge of the wood splinters and scrapes her arms. She scurries over to the shade under their awning and grabs her sunhat and her glasses, hurriedly sliding her floaties off her arms and not looking to see where they fall.
By the time she makes it out into the front yard and then back around the other side of the fence, the storm clouds have gotten much closer, much faster than she would have expected. She squints at them like they’ll reveal their secrets to her. They continue to be storm clouds.
The plains behind her house are demarcated by a long, bent-up and rusted chain-link fence. The property was sold to become a Wal-Mart, but it never ended up getting built. Probably they saw the town Minhee lives in and decided it wasn’t worth it. Minhee agrees.
There’s a giant hole under one of the Private Property-- KEEP OUT! signs that periodically dot the length of the fence, probably made by some teenagers with bolt cutters and 80-proof vodka. People hold parties out back here, sometimes, because not a lot of people live on Minhee’s street and it’s a wide space that nobody cares about. Minhee watches her step not to dig her heel into some broken bottle.
Suddenly it feels like she’s racing the clouds. The meteorite/fallen star/person(?) isn’t far, pale pink smoke winding up towards the sky to mark its resting place, but for some reason every time she looks up there’s less and less blue.
More even than the race, it feels like she’s losing. It’s like when she was eleven, and they were taking a family trip to the waterpark--it was the only day they could go, her mom taking off work and her step-dad finally getting up off the couch. Minhee had been looking forward to it for weeks. But the day before, her mom sat her down and told her there were thunderstorms predicted for tomorrow, and they probably wouldn’t be able to go in the end. But Minhee had remained hopeful, even as her heart sank and her gut told her that this sliver of happiness she’d been waiting to take would elude her, like so many others.
This happens to her a lot. This sinking feeling that tells her she’s going to lose, that it’s all going to go wrong. By now she’s lost hope about those good things.
She hops over a bald, charred ring of stones, once a bonfire, and measures each step until she gets to the thing that fell from the sky. The air comes into her labored lungs ragged and humid. A thorn finds its way into the ball of her foot, and she wastes precious time hopping around and tugging it out.
A big fat drop lands heavy on her bare back, pushing on her diaphragm until she wheezes out a breath. She comes to a sudden stop when she reaches the fallen object.
Unbelievably, it’s not an object at all. That split-second glimpse of a person was the truth, and in a smoking crater, curled up like she was just born, is a girl with electric blue hair. She’s as naked as a newborn, too, her skin glistening like she’d been lying in the rain for hours, not a minute.
“Who are you?” Minhee wonders, her heart pounding in shock. Her limbs tremble as she reaches down to touch the girl’s body, maybe to wake her up, maybe just to see that she’s real. It’s hard for Minhee to convince herself that she is.
When her fingers brush the golden skin of the girl’s upper arm, it’s like a bolt of lightning from the blue, racing up and stopping her still before she restarts. Her movements are slow and jerky like an unoiled animatronic, but she pulls her hand back and stands in the now-pouring rain to watch the shivering body of the girl. Then the girl stirs.
She turns over onto her back, stretching and groaning. Minhee quickly averts her eyes from the movement of her bared breasts and the tuft of blue hair between her legs, watching instead the scrunch of her eyes and the dissatisfied coil of her plush pink lips.
It’s hard. The girl’s nipples are these pretty brown things, pebbled by the breeze, tantalizing. She looks away again.
The girl’s eyes are open, wide and swimming, dark like Minhee’s. She’s staring straight at Minhee, at her swimsuit-clad body. Minhee stares back.
“Did I fall?” Is the first thing the girl asks, her voice smooth and deep. She sits up with difficulty, propping herself up with her hands behind her back.
Minhee just nods, those rusty animatronic joints scraping back into motion, extending out a hand to help the girl up. The girl’s hand is soft against hers. It’s bigger than hers, too.
“I’m Jisu,” the girl says, brushing away the dirt stuck to her skin. Minhee tries not to watch the way her breasts jiggle with the movement, tries not to watch the-- whatever that is --sitting between Jisu’s legs.
She unwinds the scarf from around her waist and thrusts it at Jisu. Jisu takes it and wraps it around herself, but not around her breasts.
“You should, um,” she gestures up by her armpits, showing Jisu that she needs to pull the scarf up over herself. Jisu cocks her head in confusion, but seems to get it after a moment, and finally her chest is hidden from view. Minhee feels herself untense.
“Thanks for waking me up,” Jisu says, like she didn’t just fall from the sky. Like there isn’t a blade of grass stuck to her cheek. Like when she reaches her tongue out to nudge it off it’s not too long to be human.
Minhee doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be scared. There’s something off-putting about Jisu, but there’s something else that draws her in.
Jisu reaches out and holds her limp hand. In the distance, lightning strikes, and Minhee holds her breath and counts until the thunder rolls.
“What’s your name?” Jisu asks, guiding her back in the direction of her house. How Jisu knows that that’s where Minhee came from, Minhee doesn’t know. She wants to ask Jisu where she came from, but she’s scared. She thinks Jisu might be an alien.
“Minhee.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Jisu says, squeezing her hand. Minhee squeezes back. Her heart squeezes until it feels like it’ll implode.
“Thanks. Yours is pretty, too.” Out here, you don’t really hear names like Minhee and Jisu’s very often. You don’t see people that look like them very often.
“I think you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” Jisu says, right as they reach the hole in the chain-link fence. “Honest.”
Minhee wishes she wouldn’t be honest. She pulls her hand from Jisu’s grip to duck through the hole, and doesn’t let Jisu grab it again when she follows.
“Thanks,” Minhee says, her heart louder than the thunder that’s now closer than it was before, her palms wet not from the rain but from sweat. Her eyes dart nervously from clapboard house to clapboard house, until they find themselves on her house’s rusty mailbox.
Jisu hums, like she doesn’t know what she just did to Minhee. Maybe she doesn’t. She looks around in curiosity, like she’s never seen a suburban neighborhood before. Maybe she hasn’t.
Her mom is waiting for her in the front yard, standing right outside the covered porch with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Where were you!?” Her mom asks, not mentioning Jisu’s presence at all.
“I was--” she glances back, and Jisu isn’t behind her anymore. A turn around and Jisu isn’t anywhere to be seen. “I--” she sighs, “sorry, eomma.”
For a moment, she thinks maybe Jisu never existed at all, if not for the way the wind skates over her bare skin and the shawl that isn’t there anymore.
Jisu hides in the bush under Minhee’s window until it gets dark enough that the sun has probably gone down. She’s drenched to the bone but not shivering, the storm like a warm, wet blanket. It feels sort of like a public bath, if a public bath was in a bush in a very strange place.
She knows it’s Minhee’s window because she saw her through the blinds earlier. She felt a little creepy for peeking in like that, but she can’t just risk entering Minhee’s mom’s room, so she tries not to stare at Minhee’s side profile for too long. It’s a good side profile though, she has a pretty nose and high cheekbones and a round face. Her eyelashes are long.
When it’s so dark that every flash of lightning hits the world like strobe, Jisu pops her head out of her bush and pulls Minhee’s window the rest of the way open.
Minhee doesn’t notice her when she sticks one leg over the windowsill, or when she’s got half her body in the house and half her body out, or when she slumps down onto the beige shag carpeting. She only notices, her ears covered by a pair of headphones, when Jisu rests her chin on her shoulder to peek at what she’s doing.
Minhee shrieks and jumps, the sharp corner of her collarbone bashing into Jisu’s chin and sending them both to the floor. The headphones land on the base of her chair with a clatter, and their legs are tangled where they’re sitting. Minhee’s foot is dangerously close to Jisu’s tentacle, which writhes at the idea of contact. The movement is visible through the thin fabric covering Jisu’s crotch, drawing Minhee’s attention.
“What are you doing in here!?” Minhee whisper-shouts, pulling her legs back to fold them under herself and grabbing Jisu by the shoulders. “Where did you even go earlier?”
“I hid under your bush,” Jisu says, leaning into the touch. “I didn’t want your mom to see me.”
“Now she thinks I’m crazy,” Minhee hisses, standing and--much to Jisu’s dismay--letting go of her to go sit on the bed. She pulls a light-box from her loose plaid pants and clicks something on it, and the tinny strains of music that had been leaking from the shell of her headphones stop.
Jisu stands up after her, curiously peering around the room. Most of the wall is taken up by pictures of rail-thin girls in makeup and strange outfits, some of whom have hair as bright as Jisu’s. Minhee’s hair is dark and pin-straight and shaggy, the tips falling into her eyes and curling around her ears.
“Maybe you are crazy,” she says, inspecting a little clay sculpture of a cat. It’s painted orange, with a white nose and paws. Next to it is another sculpture of an orange cat, and next to that a smaller grey tabby.
“She nagged me through dinner for letting her get rained on,” Minhee sulks.
“She probably would’ve nagged you until her deathbed if you showed up with a girl that fell from the sky,” Jisu says, because it’s probably true. She doesn’t know Minhee’s mother, but she did have one of her own back home, and she knew her. She doesn’t know her anymore, but that’s fine. She only thinks about that sometimes.
“Why did you fall from the sky?” Minhee asks, which is a question that Jisu can’t answer. “And why didn’t you explode?”
That’s one she can.
“Magic,” she says, “technology, but it’s magic. Those are the same thing, really. You can call it one or the other.”
“Technology isn’t magic,” Minhee argues, as she puts her light-box down on her desk. “We know how technology works.”
“I don’t.”
“Just because you don’t--”
Jisu cuts her off. “Do you have any clothes I can wear?”
Minhee eyes her critically up and down. “You’re a lot smaller than me…”
“I’m tired of being mostly naked.”
“Why were you naked in the first place?”
Jisu shrugs. She doesn’t really remember, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she’s here, now, in Minhee’s teal bedroom, and she needs clothes.
“Here,” Minhee says, throwing a pair of soft black pants and a threadbare yellow shirt Jisu’s way. The front of the shirt has a cracked vinyl chicken on it and reads Turkey Trot 2012. “That should fit you.”
“Thanks,” Jisu says, and strips down. Minhee covers her eyes.
“Warn me!” She squeaks, balling her hands into fists and then flattening them out again. She spreads her fingers to peek through as Jisu pulls the shirt over her head.
“Um,” she hedges, as Jisu tries to figure out which side is the front of the pants. “What is that thing?”
Jisu cocks her head. When she looks up, Minhee is staring straight at her tentacle. Under the attention, it twitches.
“Oh, that’s my tentacle.”
“Your tentacle,” says Minhee, flatly.
The pants are soft and loose against Jisu’s legs, sitting low enough on her hips that the very edge of her pubic hair peeks out. The shirt Minhee gave her is short, revealing a sliver of her golden skin between one article of clothing and the next.
“It’s an instrument of pleasure?” Jisu tries, thinking Minhee isn’t comprehending her.
Minhee’s ears are brightly flushed, her entire face a matching shade of puce. She blinks awkwardly.
“I’m going to bed.”
“So what do you even do here?”
Much to Minhee’s chagrin, Jisu stays overnight, in her bed, attached to Minhee like a limpet. Minhee wakes up sweating.
“Like, what’s your job?” Jisu asks. She’s fiddling with the loose fabric of the basketball shorts Minhee lent her. The tank top she’s wearing, also Minhee’s, gapes over the top of her cleavage. She looks good. She looks edible.
She looks like a lesbian-- Minhee, are you sure you want to be hanging around those kinds of people?
That’s what her mom would say.
She pulls her work shirt on over her sports bra. It’s a really ugly shade of green that makes Minhee look washed out and ill. “I’m a gas station cashier.”
Jisu hums. “What’s a gas station?”
“It gives fuel for cars,” Minhee explains, “people stop there to get snacks and stuff, too.”
“Oh, cool. Can I come?”
“Uh.”
The AC in the station is perpetually half-working, a wheezing sickly sound that she can somehow never completely tune out. Today, though, it’s just a backing track to Jisu’s incessant chatter, scouring the shelves for things that interest her and bringing them up to Minhee to ask what they are. Behind the counter, Minhee has a couple of those tiny bottles of Malibu that she takes occasional shots from to pass the time. It’s two in the afternoon and she’s already well on her way to tipsy.
“Here, Jisu, try this,” she says, holding one of the Malibu bottles out for Jisu to inspect.
“What is it?”
“Alcohol. You know what that is, right?”
Jisu scoffs. “Of course I know what alcohol is,” she hesitates, and then, “I’ve never really tried it, though. You’re not allowed to until after you finish your military service.”
“Well you can have some now, even though you haven’t finished your service,” Minhee says, offering the bottle to Jisu.
Jisu takes it. “I finished my service,” she uncaps the bottle. “I just never got home.”
She downs the whole thing in one gulp. Minhee is honestly impressed. There’s a deceptively large amount of liquid in that bottle.
“Oh,” Jisu says, pulling the bottle away from her lips to look at it again. “It doesn’t taste like how I’d expect.”
“There are a lot of different kinds of alcohol,” says Minhee, “my favorite is… hm… soju, maybe? It’s tasty, and it’s got a decent alcohol content. I really like the strawberry kind. They don’t really have that here, though.”
“Am I supposed to feel dizzy this fast?”
Minhee giggles. “Lightweight. That’s how I was when I first started drinking, too, but you’re tiny. Must be even worse.”
“I am not tiny!” Jisu huffs, crossing her arms and wrinkling her nose. “I’m a normal size, okay?”
“Sure,” Minhee concedes, throwing back the rest of her own Malibu.
“Hmph. I’ll show you,” Jisu says, reaching for another bottle.
She does not show Minhee. Jisu feels woozy, and she’s laughing a lot, and nothing feels better than being plastered directly up against Minhee’s body as they spend Minhee’s break together at the back of the building. Minhee’s all giggly from the alcohol, too, their cheeks pressed, flushed, together. The exchange of heat is intoxicating.
“Do you wanna smoke a cigarette?”
“Oh, what is that?”
Minhee pulls a squashed box from the pocket of her jeans, opening the lid and pulling out a little white cylinder. She sticks it in her mouth and conjures a flame from the device in her hand.
“Here,” she says, muffled, before pulling the stick out and exhaling a plume of smoke. She tucks it back between her lips before she puts the device in Jisu’s hand, and then her soft, small fingers are manipulating Jisu’s.
“Hold it like this, and put your thumb up here-- right, and then slide it down and press that button. No, faster. You have to produce enough friction to spark the flint. Spark the steel? Spark one of them.”
Something warm and funny pools near Jisu’s groin, electric twinges sparking near her tentacle at the same time the lighter sparks and catches flame.
“Good,” Minhee takes the now-quiet cigarette from her mouth, puts it in Jisu’s. Jisu is giddy with the knowledge that her lips are touching something Minhee’s lips just touched. Did Minhee flick her tongue to wet the base of the filter? Did she trap it for a moment between her teeth? Did she think of Jisu as she inhaled? “Now put the flame to the edge of the cigarette-- that’s it. And watch, and once it goes red, you can take it away and inhale.”
Jisu thinks of Minhee when she inhales. She thinks about how Minhee took air into her lungs through this cigarette, took that oxygen into her blood, sustained her flesh, kept the beat of her heart, and she thinks about how she’ll be doing the same thing. It’s like she’s inhaling some of Minhee. It’s like they’re coursing through each others’ veins.
They trade the cigarette back and forth until the nicotine high hits them both, and they just lean into each other as their heads and hands and whole bodies buzz.
They figure it out. Jisu stays out until Minhee’s mom retreats to her room, and then she climbs in through the window and they share their space. They go to Minhee’s work together--it takes Minhee’s manager a week to even notice Jisu’s presence, and when she does she doesn’t give a fuck. They get drunk and smoke together, and Minhee sneaks Jisu snacks and lies when she takes inventory and takes food from the fridge once her mom is asleep.
But people start to notice. It’s not a huge town. People start to ask, and then they start to talk at the wrong ears. And then the wrong ears start interrogating Minhee.
“I heard from the neighbors that you’ve been hanging around some blue-haired girl when you’re supposed to be working. Does she even have a job, I mean-- who even is she?”
“She’s just a friend I made, eomma,” Minhee grumbles, kicking her black work shoes off in the front entrance. “I mean, isn’t that what you want me to do?”
Minhee’s mother purses her lips and crosses her arms. “I’m just not sure she’s a good influence.”
Minhee wants to laugh at the idea that Jisu would be a bad influence on Minhee, when all she’s done since Jisu got here is teach her how to smoke and drink and steal.
“Why does she have blue hair? Is she a lesbian?”
Minhee doesn’t know how to answer that, doesn’t know how to lie, so she turns the truth into a joke. “It grew out of her head that way.”
Her mother fixes her with a long, unimpressed look. Then she shakes her head, heaves a quiet sigh, and turns to retreat further into the house. The sight of her thin back turned to Minhee makes her angrier than if her mother had stayed and yelled. Because this way Minhee can’t argue, can’t show her upset, can’t pour it back into her mother until they explode. This way if she lunges and starts shouting her mother goes, Stop acting like a child, Minhee, infuriatingly calm. Infuriatingly wrong.
Minhee can’t think of anything else to do, so she balls up her fists and stomps to her room.
The bed is cold when Minhee wakes up. She squints blearily at the red numbers of the alarm clock on her nightstand-- two in the morning. By all accounts, Jisu should be passed out cold.
If she’s not in bed, then she’s outside. Jisu doesn’t go into the rest of the house unless Minhee’s mom is working a night shift.
It’s warm and humid outside, a breeze swaying the stunted scrubby trees dotted throughout the neighborhood. Only a couple of them are tall enough to reach over top the roofs of the houses they line. The tree in front of Minhee’s house is one of them.
That’s not how she’s going to reach the roof, though. Despite its height, the tree is in no way strong enough to bear the full brunt of Minhee’s weight. She adjusts her shorts where they’re riding up and hoists herself up onto the fence, balancing precariously before scrambling up onto the mossy black shingles.
Jisu is nothing but a silhouette against the ambient glow coming off the town, hunched over some strange device. She looks tiny.
“What are you doing?”
Jisu startles, turning around to face her with owlish eyes, limned by the dim green glow of the device in her hands. A lengthy antenna protrudes from the top of it, while the base is bulky and angular. Minhee has no idea where she got it or where it was hiding.
Jisu hesitates. “I’m waiting to see if they’ll contact me.”
Despite the fact that being this high up makes her queasy, Minhee crawls over to where Jisu sits, scooting close to her until their bare thighs are flush.
“Where did you even get that?” Minhee asks, tracing the edge of the device with a careful finger. She tries to distract herself from the sensation of Jisu’s skin against hers, and largely fails.
“I remembered the other day that I came down with it, so I went over to the crash site and dug it up,” Jisu explains, “luckily it’s intact.”
“So you’re, what, leaving?”
“If I can,” Jisu says. “When they come for me.”
Something nasty and clingy in Minhee hopes they never do.
“You wanna go see the stars?” Minhee asks, the keys to her ancient hatchback dangling off her pointer finger. “If we drive forty minutes out west we can see the Milky Way.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Jisu says, not looking up from the magazine she stole from the gas station. “I’ve seen the stars enough.”
“You’ve never seen them with me, though, have you?” Minhee asks, grabbing Jisu by the wrist and tugging her up. “We can smoke together. The stars look even better when you’re high.”
“High?”
“You’ll see. Once it happens, you’ll know. It’s kind of like being drunk, in a way.”
“Oh, I like being drunk.”
Minhee snorts, handing Jisu a ratty crewneck sweater, thinned from years of use. “I know you do.”
On the way there, she lets Jisu choose all of the music, rifling through the array of her CDs to pick whatever suits her. Since Jisu doesn’t recognize any of the titles, they end up listening to a hilarious selection of genres.
Minhee feels herself grow impossibly fond of this girl who, she’s beginning to think, fell from the sky just for her. It’s a giant warm thing growing in her chest, spreading into all of her limbs, making her head buzz. She thinks it’s possible she might never need to smoke weed again. She thinks it’s possible she could live off this alone.
She parks the car on the shoulder of a gravel road, red soil and deep ruts from rain. Thistles line the edges of a powered-off electric fence. In the distance, over the horizon, wind turbines blink red in warning, and the night breeze cards through the tall grass as it moves like a wave.
Together they scramble up the hood and onto the roof of the car, sitting opposite one another, cross-legged with their knees touching. Minhee ignores the flush of her ears and slings her drawstring bag off her shoulder to rifle for the stuff.
“What’s this plant?” Jisu asks, when Minhee pulls out the little jar of bud she keeps, dropping a few nuggets to start with into the grinder she painted jeureumi onto when she was in high school.
“That’s weed. Cannabis. We smoke it to get high, it’s a really nice feeling. It’s, like-- warm, and buzzing. Can be pretty euphoric.”
Jisu claps her hands, her round eyes getting rounder in delight. “Oh, I’m so excited. Is it better than being drunk?”
“Some people think so. Some people don’t like it. I like it. It’s also really fun being high and drunk.” She scoots back, just enough so she has space to put down the rolling paper. She misses Jisu’s warmth almost immediately.
“If I like being high, we should try that sometime.”
I want to try everything with you, Minhee doesn’t say. She shakes the ground-up weed onto the paper, creases it up so it tumbles into line.
“It is pretty out here,” Jisu muses, tilting back onto her palms. Her head is turned to the sky. Minhee stares at her throat. “It’s different being in the sky. Darkness and stars all around you… the artificial smell of recycled air, the walls of a ship. Here there’s wind and grass. And you.”
Minhee smiles, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake as she finishes rolling. She makes eye contact with Jisu when she licks the edge of the paper, before sticking it into place. She twists up the end, because she likes the look. She hands Jisu the American flag lighter she found on the side of the road when she was eighteen, sticking the filter side of the joint between her lips and leaning forward.
Jisu flicks the lighter on like Minhee taught her, cupping her hand around it and bringing it up to the twisted end. Her eyes flick up to Minhee’s, a small shy smile on her lips. Minhee aches for her.
The joint catches, and Minhee leans back, breaking contact with the flame. Jisu lets the lighter go out, and Minhee immediately mourns the sight of her face, her view taken up by a giant splotch of after-light impression. She closes her eyes and inhales.
It hits her when she finishes coughing. She smiles, tilting her head back, chasing that dizzy feeling. She hands the joint to Jisu.
“It’s a little different than a cigarette. With a cigarette it’s like, you’re inhaling it, but with weed it’s better to suck it into your mouth and then inhale.”
Jisu follows her instructions, holds when she says hold, breathes out when she says to. There’s a stern turn to Minhee’s words, a commanding undertone. Jisu doesn’t know how to breathe past it. It chokes her on the way back up, freezes her over, folds her forward until she’s coughing into Minhee’s lap. She holds the joint out to the side, trying not to crush it under the force of her weight.
“There you go,” Minhee’s voice slips in through the full-body jolt of each cough, her hand smoothing over Jisu’s back soothingly. “Breathe, that’s it.”
Jisu’s face is bright red, full of blood, and there are tears splattering against the tarnished hood of the car. A smile splits her face in two.
She hears Minhee take a hit above her, seizes hold of her diaphragm, and sits back up. The whole world suddenly flows thick as molasses, wrapping around her and squeezing. Her head spins. Every movement feels like a frame of film, and Minhee is so beautiful it takes her breath away again.
They trade back and forth, that pleasant slowness trickling through their veins, until they both grow limp and happy and Minhee maneuvers the joint for both of them. Jisu just squirms happily, content to be there with Minhee, to be touching her. To be touched by her.
“Did you like being in space?” Minhee asks.
They’re lying side-by-side, their hair tangled together, watching the stars shimmer and pulse with their heartbeats. Minhee is half-curled into Jisu, her head resting on the defined muscle of Jisu’s upper arm. The curve of her eyes makes Jisu’s breath catch.
“I like being here more,” she says, honestly. “I like being with you.”
“Even though we’re stuck in this stupid town?”
Jisu hums, turning her head back up to the night sky. Out here it’s like black velvet, each star a jewel on a rich woman’s dress. Minhee spends a while trying to point out constellations before admitting she doesn’t know much about it, and was mostly making things up.
“That right there is Zeus’ scrotum,” says Minhee, pointing up at a series of stars and moving her hand as if to connect the dots. “It’s called that because it looks like balls with a lightning bolt coming out of it, and Zeus is like the god of lightning.”
“Balls? Like, just regular ones? The kind you play with?”
“Well, I mean, I guess you can play with them in a sense…? But no, I mean, like, testicles.”
“Oh,” Jisu squints, trying to see what Minhee means. “What are testicles?”
“Oh. Nevermind, then.”
Jisu whines. “You can’t just not explain, c’mon.”
“Nah, don’t feel like it,” Minhee yawns wide, sticking her tongue out like a cat. “I’ll show you on my phone later.”
“Fine,” Jisu pouts, settling in closer to Minhee.
Minhee rolls another joint, letting Jisu light it for her again. Their faces are so close together. Jisu could reach out and brush her fingers over Minhee’s lips.
“What if I was in space with you?” Asks Minhee, voice wavering. “Would that be better than here?”
“Anywhere with you is better than anywhere without you,” Jisu says, too honestly. She watches Minhee freeze, go silent, but she doesn’t take back her words. Minhee deserves to hear them. “When they come get me, we’ll get out together, okay? I’d take you anywhere.”
Minhee’s fingers twine with her own. They finish off the joint. Minhee rolls another.
“Let’s shotgun the next one,” Minhee suggests.
Jisu tilts her head. “Shotgun?”
Minhee smirks. “I take a hit and then breathe it into your mouth. I’ve always wanted to try.”
“Oh! Uh, yeah. That sounds like fun.” It sounds like their faces will have to be close together. It sounds like their faces might have to touch.
Suddenly, Minhee’s face is right in front of hers, sealing their lips together, prying Jisu’s open with her own, pushing air into Jisu’s lungs. Her mouth is soft, and the little piece of metal through her bottom lip is as intoxicating as the scrape of her teeth. The tension in Jisu’s groin only grows, and she finds her hips kicking forward without meaning to. Minhee gasps against her mouth, and Jisu pushes forward, desperate to devour her. To lick into every sound Minhee will give her, to press them together until they’re one.
The joint falls from Minhee’s loose grip, extinguishing itself in a flash of sparks when it hits the car roof.
Minhee pulls her in by the hips, rolling until she’s on top of her and grinding down. Jisu’s tentacle moves with interest, trying to escape the confines of Jisu’s pants, to press up against Minhee and feel her. Minhee groans at the feeling, and Jisu pulls the sound into her mouth, rolls it into her cheeks, swallows it down.
“Take my fucking pants off,” Minhee whispers, voice hoarse and panting.
Jisu scrambles to follow her orders, undoing the fly of Minhee’s jeans and pulling them down over her hips and ass, marveling at all the skin she gets to see again. They change in the same room, but they turn their backs when they do. She hasn’t seen Minhee like this since the day they met, when Minhee was in her bathing suit. She wants to see Minhee like this forever.
Minhee pulls Jisu’s track pants down in return, baring her own thighs, baring how her tentacle aches in the confines of the panties Minhee bought for her at the dollar store. How it aches for Minhee, reaches for her.
They rut against each other until Jisu comes, shaking through her orgasm, and then she slings Minhee’s thighs over her shoulders and presses her long tongue into her folds until she comes, too.
Then they put their pants back on. They do it silently, and they drive home silently. And they don’t talk about it.
It happens again. The kissing, that is. And the not-talking-about-it.
“Put that back,” Minhee says, “you don’t need a third energy drink.”
“But they make me feel all tingly,” Jisu pouts, but concedes, letting the Red Bull clatter back into the fridge.
Minhee is up front, her feet crossed on the counter and an unlit cigarette stuck in the strap of her sports bra. She’s dedicatedly trying to mix a mojito out of nothing but what was already in the gas station. Jisu honestly thinks the peppermint-Sprite combo is a stroke of genius.
“Hey, I never asked,” Jisu says, loitering around the broken and empty hot dog machine, “but what are those little pieces of metal in your face?”
Minhee tugs at the metal in question with her teeth, tugs at the one on her ear with her fingers. “They’re piercings. They’re just decorations. I think they look pretty.”
“Can I get one?” Jisu asks, eager. “I could get one on the other ear, so we’re like a matching set.”
Minhee smiles, but it’s nervous. She says, “yeah. You normally need an ID, which you don’t have, but I could buy a piercing needle and do it for you.”
“Does it hurt?”
Minhee shrugs. “A little? It’s really not that bad. The worst is the cartilage, honestly.”
Jisu sidles up to the counter, shoving her face to Minhee’s until they’re breathing the same air.
“Did this one hurt?” She asks, whispering, running her thumb over the plush of Minhee’s bottom lip, feeling the pad of her finger catch against the silver ball, so cold and hard compared to her skin.
“Less than you’d think.” Minhee’s eyes drop to Jisu’s lips. “It healed quickly, too.”
“That’s good,” Jisu says, leaning in.
The front door chimes as a customer enters, and Minhee pulls back with startling speed, looking as if she’d been organizing the lighters all along.
“Where’s the restroom?” The man, big and burly, asks. It’s good he didn’t seem to see anything.
Jisu’s chest still aches when she loses Minhee’s attention.
The world outside is baking, and Minhee’s mom is gone for the day, so she brings Jisu out back into the pool.
Neither of them know how to swim, it turns out. They lay their towels out side-by-side, complimentary checked patterns, and Minhee plops a six-pack of hard cider on a bag of ice.
The pool is cold and refreshing, but Jisu hisses and hops around when she gets in above her belly button. They huddle together in the shallow end, pressed chest-to-chest, and from this angle and in the harsh noonday light she can see the wispy blue mustache above Jisu’s upper lip. They don’t duck under or really paddle around at all, because Jisu isn’t allowed to get her new piercing wet.
Minhee had followed through on her promise, buying a needle and jewelry online and straddling Jisu on her bed to push the sharp implement through the soft of Jisu’s right earlobe. If they hadn’t been in the house, they would’ve kissed.
Jisu’s wet shirt and shorts swim around her. Minhee wants to tell her to take her clothes off. She wants to take her own bathing suit off. She wants them to be naked together, she wants to feel Jisu. It’s maybe the first time she’s actually admitting it to herself.
She digs her fingers into Jisu’s golden skin, which looks green under the cast of the chlorine. She lifts her up by her waist and presses them together, gets Jisu to hook her legs around her hips. Gets to feel Jisu’s tentacle press up against the strip of skin between her belly button and crotch.
“Oh,” Jisu sighs into her, draping her arms over Minhee’s shoulders. “Oh, we’re doing this?”
Minhee doesn’t answer with words; she dives in and kisses Jisu fiercely, mashing the metal of her lip piercing into Jisu’s lower teeth. Jisu slips her tongue in without hesitation, the tip of it reaching the back of Minhee’s throat, making her gag a little. She hums and swallows and pushes through.
Jisu’s sharp hip bones press into the fat of Minhee’s belly every time she humps desperately forward, searching for friction.
“I need you inside of me,” Minhee gasps, dropping Jisu back onto her feet and quickly divesting herself of her swimsuit. “I need you inside of me now .”
Jisu strips, too, wrestling with her shirt and shorts, until they’re both standing completely naked next to little rafts of fabric. Minhee scoops them from the water and throws them onto the pool deck.
Jisu’s tentacle writhes with arousal, and Minhee can’t subdue her curiosity about it any longer. She stares, unabashedly, watching the appendage--pink, like Jisu’s lips, thrashing in the water. There’s a visible opening at the tip.
“What does it do?” Minhee asks, eyes fixed downward, breathless.
Jisu pulls her closer, until their breasts mash together, the feeling of Jisu’s pebbled nipples electric against her own.
“It has eggs,” Jisu whispers into Minhee’s ear. “I can put them in you, if you want.”
“Fuck,” Minhee’s back arches, pressing their stomachs together. Jisu selfishly imagines filling Minhee’s with eggs. “Yes, do it, fuck.”
There’s no reason for Jisu to argue. She lets her tentacle search for Minhee’s folds, dragging over her clit and up against the soft skin of her labia. The friction is delicious, and she keeps seeking it, thrusting forward again and again until they’re both worked up and ready.
“Put it in already, goddamnit,” Minhee curses, throwing her head back and moaning loudly when Jisu breaches her entrance. She can’t bring herself to care if there are neighbors around to hear.
Jisu fills her up just right, better than her fingers or any toy she’s used. The tentacle twitches against her walls, trapped by her heat, the tip pressed up against her cervix. Jisu’s breath is ragged against her ear, the girl panting and whimpering through her pleasure.
“Move, c’mon,” Minhee urges, rolling her hips against Jisu’s.
She expects Jisu to start thrusting, but she supposes she shouldn’t have--her tentacle doesn’t seem to stiffen like a human penis would. Instead, it pulls back on its own, bunching up and stretching her at the base when it has nowhere else to go, blocked by the close press of their hips. She keens when it thrusts back in, insistent pleasure building when the movement rubs her clit.
“Just like that,” she breathes, before diving in to leave marks on Jisu’s throat, nipping and sucking at the soft skin there. Jisu whines, long and high, speeding up her thrusts and clutching Minhee’s body closer to hers. “Good girl, good. ”
They pant through their mutual release, Minhee shuddering through the sensation of tiny, pea-sized eggs flooding her cunt. Her eyes roll back in her head, and she slumps until her upper back hits the lip of the pool. Jisu squeezes her legs where they’re wrapped around Minhee’s hips.
She holds Jisu close until Jisu finishes coming, breath shaky, thighs trembling. She feels full, warm. She feels whole.
“I love you,” Jisu whimpers, “I love you so much.”
The words burn Minhee’s skin like hot oil, and she can’t help how she flinches away from them. She hopes the way she kisses the fragile skin behind Jisu’s ear is enough.
Here, in Jisu’s arms, Minhee feels like she’s losing. She’s racing those storm clouds, again, she’s in the last heat of the swim meet. Her arms are getting tired and her breaths are growing shallow and short. She’s three heartbeats from drowning.
Minhee doesn’t know if Jisu can feel it, how they’re falling together.
Minhee can.
Wan light from the half moon filters in through the slats of Minhee’s blinds. Someone’s setting fireworks off somewhere across town. Jisu’s face is so, so close to hers.
If they were high in the prairie she would kiss her. If they were alone in the pool they could fuck. But they’re not--Minhee’s mother is in the other room. The world here is so much smaller.
“We can’t,” Minhee whispers, eyes dropping to Jisu’s lips. They’re still stained blue from the popsicle she stole from Minhee’s fridge earlier. It matches her hair.
“Why not?” Asks Jisu, bringing her hand up to rest in the dip of Minhee’s waist. To squeeze the fat padding her middle. To touch, just to touch. Minhee feels the scope of her world narrow down to that point of contact.
“It’s not allowed,” Minhee says, still whispering. “Not here. Not under this roof.”
“Then let’s get out from under here.”
“I can’t,” Minhee chokes on it, her throat closing around the idea of getting out. She swallows it down, but she wishes she didn’t have to. “I don’t have a degree, I work a dead-end job, I don’t have any marketable hobbies… I can’t make money. I can’t afford to live alone, much less support both of us.”
Jisu’s breath kisses Minhee’s lips, blue raspberry and spit. “We just have to wait a little longer,” she says, going nearly cross-eyed to keep her gaze on Minhee’s face. “They’ll come, and we’ll go away together. There’s nothing the stars don’t allow.”
But Minhee is tired of hearing about them. About how they’re coming. Because they haven’t, and it’s been months, and she’s pretty sure that at this point they won’t.
“They’re not coming, Jisu,” she says, pulling away. Putting distance between them. Catching her breath. “They aren’t.”
She hates how Jisu immediately looks hurt.
“What? What are you saying? Of course they’re coming. They promised.”
“Jisu, it’s been months. Don’t you think if they were coming for you, they would already be here?”
Jisu’s face hardens, and she sits up and scoots back until the distance between them has become a chasm. “You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not--”
“They’re coming, Minhee. You don’t have to believe it but they are. And if you don’t believe me then I guess I won’t take you with me when I go.”
And then she’s up, grabbing her jacket and shoes, sliding out of the window.
Minhee watches her back with disbelief. She touches her fingers to her lips and swears she can feel the ghost of Jisu still on them.
When Jisu is out of sight of the window, she turns around and falls asleep. She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t dream of anything in particular.
The gas station is as sluggish and empty as ever. A lump has lodged itself in her throat since Jisu left her a week and a half ago, and it hasn’t dissipated in the slightest. When she’s alone, and it’s quiet, it only seems to get bigger.
She sighs and knocks back another Malibu. Maybe she’ll go out and smoke a couple of cigarettes on her break. Maybe she’ll sit here until she turns to dust.
Maybe Jisu will come back. Maybe she’s just-- maybe Minhee should’ve gone after her, maybe she’s in danger. Stuck. Maybe she wants to come back to Minhee but she can’t.
Maybe they came for her already. Maybe Jisu really left without her. Maybe Minhee’s the one who’s stuck, now, maybe she wants to go to Jisu but she can’t. Maybe she’s just projecting.
She closes the blinds. No use looking outside and waiting for someone who isn’t coming.
“Get out of bed,” Minhee’s mom barks, wrapped in her dressing gown and looming over Minhee’s threshold. “You’ve been wasting away in this fucking room for weeks now. Get your useless ass up.”
Eyes red, high and crying, Minhee glares at her mother. “I’ve been going to work.”
“You haven’t been helping around the house at all. Your room is a pigsty. Your bathroom is a disaster. Have you even done a load of laundry? What is wrong with you?”
“Just get out,” Minhee says, miserably, burying her face back in her pillow. It’s wet and snotty and smells bad. She doesn’t have it in herself to care.
Minhee’s mom slams the door on her way out.
She has a doctor’s appointment. Her mom forced her out of bed, shoved her car keys in her hand, and stood in the driveway to watch Minhee pull out of it.
She’s sitting in the waiting room next to a pair of old women who are talking about their deaths. One of them is saying how she needs to make sure to write her house to her niece, and not her no-good son.
“I’m not letting that boy have my house,” she says. “If he wants to go around with men then he’ll have to suffer the consequences.”
Her friend nods in agreement. The air smells like disinfectant, and the seats are the same color as her work shirt. Across from her is a framed abstraction of an elephant seal. At least it’s not an elephant. Every dentist she’s ever gone to is obsessed with elephants.
“I mean, what happens when we allow that kind of behavior? It’s a slippery slope.”
Minhee turns away and tunes them out.
The air is stale, and in the corner of Minhee’s room her old princess-themed CD player crackles out the strains of the album she shoved in there. The house murmurs with rain, another summer storm. Her window is closed and locked.
She doesn’t jolt when something hard hits the pane. She figures it’s starting to hail.
Another hard thing hits the window--probably another piece of hail. When Jisu was there, it hailed once--tiny ones, the same size as her eggs, and they blanketed the ground in white so if you squinted it kind of looked like snow. Another tap. She turns her back to the closed blinds so she doesn’t have to keep thinking about her.
“Minhee!” Comes muffled through the glass, and Minhee shoots up.
She scrambles over to the window and fumbles with the latch, hooking her fingers around the raised lip and dragging it to the side. Fresh air pours in, followed by rain and a drenched Jisu.
“What--”
“They’re coming,” Jisu gasps, brandishing her clunky communicator. “They’re at the edge of the solar system, they’ll be here in three days.”
Minhee blinks. “What?”
“C’mon,” Jisu says, standing up, acting like nothing at all happened. Like she wasn’t just gone for over a month. “Get your shit together.”
“But--”
“I was mad, okay? And I’m sorry. And I shouldn’t have said that, or left you, but I was pissed and honestly scared that you were right. But you weren’t, and they’re here, or they will be here soon, and--”
Minhee hits her. Not hard enough to really hurt, but hard enough to prove a point. Jisu pouts and rubs at her arm.
“You have the fucking audacity--” she’s speechless with anger, red bubbling in her throat and teeth. She clenches them together before trying to mobilize her tongue again. “You leave me for a month. For more than a month! Not a fucking word! Do you know how fucking depressed I was?” She hits her again. “What is wrong with you!?”
“I’m sorry,” Jisu whines, “I’m sorry, okay? How many times do I have to say it for you to forgive me? I’ll say it ten million thousand times, I swear, I’ll--”
Minhee huffs and turns away. “I’m not fucking talking to you.” She hates how the flame in her chest expands and glows in Jisu’s presence, even when she’s mad at her.
“Wha-- Minhee, c’mon,” Jisu pleads, grasping for Minhee’s hands, reaching only thin air. “I’m sorry. ”
Minhee ignores her, crawling into bed and pulling the covers over herself.
“I’ll… should I go, then?” Jisu whispers, and Minhee can’t take the brokenness of her voice.
“Go take a shower,” she mutters, “you’ve been god knows where for a month. Just take whatever from my closet.”
Her lips quirk up when Jisu makes a little happy whimpering sound before dashing off to the ensuite without another word.
After the world’s fastest shower, Minhee feels the bed dip behind her. Shivers a little when the blanket is lifted, letting in some cold air. Jisu slots herself against Minhee’s back, shoving one arm between Minhee’s rib cage and the mattress and draping the other over Minhee’s waist. She lets out a little content sound when she buries her cold nose straight into Minhee’s jugular.
Minhee’s still mad. But she lets herself have this.
“You’ll come with me, right?” Jisu prods, seemingly undeterred by Minhee’s cold shoulder. “You hate it here. I know you’re mad at me, but you should come.”
Of course she’s coming. But she doesn’t tell Jisu that, just keeps pointlessly rearranging bags of chips on the shelves and ignoring the questioning looks her coworker keeps sending her at Jisu’s sudden reappearance.
“I’ll pack all your things for you,” Jisu tries.
Minhee glares at her. There’s no way in hell that would make anything better. She’s borne witness to Jisu’s folding skills before.
“Okay, uh,” she thinks, “I’ll give you a foot rub. Or, or, I’ll give you a back massage every day. Or both. I’ll eat y--”
Minhee claps her hand over Jisu’s mouth before she can continue. “Not in public, idiot,” she hisses, glancing at her coworker. He seems largely uninterested. “ Yes, I’m coming with you. But I’m still pissed at you.”
Jisu sighs in relief, back sliding down the door of the fridge until her ass lands on the ground. “Okay. I can work with that. That’s good. Well, not good, because I’d rather you not be mad at me, but--”
“I’d be less mad at you if you were quiet and let me work,” she lies, trying to prop up a pair of chocolate bars so she can stack them like cards.
“No you wouldn’t, you like it when I talk,” Jisu says, “you told me,” she did, and she’s regretting it. “Plus, you’re not working.”
“I’m an architect.”
“Not a good one.”
She nails Jisu in the head with a hard caramel. “Still mad at you. Watch your mouth.”
“Okay, okay, jeez,” Jisu says, rubbing the point of impact, but she’s smiling. Minhee turns around again so Jisu won’t see her smiling, too.
Jisu comes up behind her, wraps her arms around Minhee’s waist.
Minhee balances a chocolate bar atop the two triangles she made. “I should ban you from this store.”
“I thought you were ignoring me?” Jisu’s breath smells like bubblegum against her cheek. She probably stole it. Minhee’ll lie on the inventory anyways.
“I am,” Minhee says, and does her best to do so.
“Awfully talkative for the silent treatment, I have to say.”
Minhee doesn’t respond. She’s carefully trying to make another triangle atop the other two.
“Ughhhh,” Jisu groans, loud and annoying, straight into Minhee’s ear. “Ughhhh!”
Succeeding in her chocolate card tower, she moves on to constructing a coliseum of chip cans. Jisu stays glued to her back.
“I’m bored,” Jisu complains. “You’re just gonna let me be bored?”
She is. Jisu left her for a month. It’s the least she deserves. She can put up with a little boredom.
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter whether she’s in the house or not. Where they are is no longer relevant. Because tomorrow they’re getting out. Minhee is getting out. She’s not gonna lose, she’s not going to let herself lose. She’s going to take the escape ladder with both hands and feet.
“Is that all you got?” Minhee asks, looming over Jisu. She’s been edging her for a while. She’s still mad at her, and they’re still not talking. “You’re pathetic.”
“Please,” Jisu whines, rutting up into Minhee’s cunt, trying to chase her own pleasure.
Minhee made herself come four times already. “Hmm… you can’t beg a little better? Maybe then I’ll give you what you want. Let you empty your pathetic eggs inside me.”
“Please, god, please, I want to so bad, Minhee-- fuck, you’re killing me,” she squirms against the bedsheets. “ Please let me come, let me fill you up, let me put my babies in you--”
“Fine,” Minhee concedes, if only because she kind of also wants Jisu to come inside her already. “But you’re doing all the work.”
She flips them over so Jisu’s on top, and Jisu immediately collapses so they’re chest-to-chest, belly-to-belly, her arms too weak from arousal to keep herself up. High-pitched whines escape her throat, muffled against the bruised skin of Minhee’s collarbone.
Jisu clutches desperately at Minhee’s shoulders, rutting shallowly forward with her legs hanging limp around Minhee’s hips. She wraps them around Minhee’s knees so their calves are touching.
“Ah-- c’mon, baby, come for me. Put your eggs in me.”
“Fuck, fuck,” Jisu groans, her mouth wide open and drooling, spit pooling in the hollow of Minhee’s throat and dripping onto the pillow below. For a moment, the tension in her stomach multiplies, stretches taut, and then something catches and the thread unspools, and she’s coming.
“Fuck!” Minhee cries, her final orgasm shaking her as she feels Jisu’s eggs start to push into her body. It’s enough that she feels her lower tummy start to bloat, pressing a little against Jisu’s heaving torso. “You did it, baby,” she catches Jisu in a brief, tooth-knocking kiss. “Your eggs are in me. Your babies.”
Another pathetic spurt of eggs and thin fluid enters her at the words. Jisu’s body is fully limp against hers, now, even her ever-restless tentacle completely still. Every breath she takes falters before it enters her lungs.
Minhee rubs Jisu’s back as they both come down, as the high fades and suddenly they’re just two bodies pressed sticky into each other, now, and the eggs are less sexy and more crampy, and they both smell like clean sweat. There’s nowhere else Minhee would rather be than with her.
“I’m not mad anymore,” she whispers, causing Jisu to twitch in her hold. “I love you, Jisu.”
Jisu sniffles. “I’m still sorry I was such a dick,” she pouts even as she initiates a kiss. “I love you too.”
“It’s okay,” she jokes, “when we’re in space we won’t have anywhere to run from each other.”
“I’ll take an escape pod to a distant system every time you’re mean to me.”
“You’ll be wasting fuel,” Minhee breathes, wincing as she shifts her hips away from Jisu’s. Her tentacle slips from Minhee’s folds, followed by a handful of frog-like eggs. “If you’re taking the escape pod every other day.”
“You could just not be mean to me,” Jisu says, widening her eyes so they sparkle a little more than usual. “I’m your baby, you can’t be mean to me.”
Minhee snorts. “Let’s take a shower.”
They don’t get up for another hour.
“Any minute now,” Jisu assures her, one arm around her waist while the other supports the weight of her communicator. “I gave them the right coordinates. I think.”
“Not very reassuring,” Minhee says, checking once again that she has her suitcase. It hasn’t seen fit to disappear from her hand since she last checked it was there two minutes ago.
They’re standing in the field out behind Minhee’s house, the one Jisu crashed in all those months ago. The slight dip of a crater has all but disappeared, covered over by human and animal feet, patched by new grass.
“ We’re almost there. Entering orbit. ”
Minhee jumps out of her skin. “Who the hell is that?”
“Copy that, Channie. We’re out here waiting,” Jisu says into the receiver of the communicator, before clicking a button and leaning away. “Those are the people coming to get us.”
It still doesn’t feel real to Minhee. That she’s about to fly into space, away from her shithole town, with her alien girlfriend and her alien girlfriend’s alien friends.
She didn’t resign from her job, but she did leave her mom a note. It’s not very long; she doesn’t have much to say to her. It’s enough to tell her she ran away with a girl. It’s enough to say-- don’t come after me. Don’t look for me. You won’t find me, and I’m happier now anyways.
“Any second now,” Jisu says, her head turned toward the sky. Minhee doesn’t bother to follow her gaze. She doesn’t need to look for UFOs when her girl is right here.
The air around them crackles, suddenly static, charged. She watches Jisu’s hair raise off the back of her neck like they’re about to get struck by lightning. A huge draft of wind rushes down and out, flattening the grass around them and nearly blowing them away.
She doesn’t take her eyes off of Jisu.
“They’re here,” Jisu says, meeting Minhee’s gaze. Her eyes are sparkling, velvet black pinned with diamonds. “Let’s go.”
They join hands and run.