Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Good?” someone breathes in Rumi’s ear. She knows her girls’ voices inside out and upside down, knows them afraid, exhilarated, victorious, broken — but her stomach swoops as she realises she can’t place, for a moment, whether it’s Zoey or Mira whose lips are pressing against her skin, their voices transformed are they are by desire, arousal. For Rumi. Wanting Rumi. Her skin is sweat-slick, and her heartbeat drums hot and sluggish through her whole body, her patterns a muted kaleidoscope; she can’t think.

“Good,” she breathes, and turns her head. It’s Zoey’s dark eyes that meet hers. Little wisps of baby hair are plastered in dark, damp curls across her brow, and the heat in her gaze is secondary to the concern — the bottom of Rumi’s stomach drops out further, sticky, aghast. Zoey doesn’t need to worry about her. She needs Zoey to not worry about her. Rumi closes her eyes for a long moment, lets her body list against Zoey’s — her balance is muddled by the tangle of their limbs, and that’s alarming too, the way she can barely pinpoint which way is up, only closer and further away and even those require triangulation, being, as the three of them are, triangular. She thinks it’s Mira who’s touching her thighs. She knows it’s Zoey whose breasts press against her own; she had taken off her shirt when they began, and it had felt electric, then, to watch the way her girls’ eyes were glued to her. The power she had over them; how much they wanted her body. It had felt like a better, brighter kind of being on stage. Zoey’s hand — she knows it by feel, smaller and rougher than Mira’s, differently callused — skims up the line of Rumi’s waist towards the spill of her breasts between them, and Rumi bites back a sound she doesn’t want to hear. She does not want to know how she might sound.

Rumi had done her research. She had prepared for sex the way she would for any new experience: as an obstacle to be conquered when the time came, as something she could prime herself for through training, something she would be ready for if only she worked hard enough in advance. But she hadn’t expected it to be anything like this. The hot sticky overwhelm of it all. She had thought they would talk more; she had, cringing, practiced dirty talk in the mirror, the way she’d heard tops croon low and sweet in American porn, the way she thought her girls might like. She had known Zoey swooned for women with twice Rumi’s muscle. That Mira’s breath went shallow, for just a moment, whenever somebody took her to the mat in training. And Rumi had known, objectively, that she herself was attractive. It was an asset. It was her career as much as her voice was, that she looked good on stage, that she knew how to pose and smoulder and blow kisses and sketch finger-hearts in the air, that she was desirable. That had been the point of the dating ban, those first few years of their careers: she was selling the fantasy of herself.

She hadn’t realised sex would be so quiet. Only: Good?, and Okay?, and Do you want —?, and the hot spill of breath between three bodies in a bed, and Rumi’s favourite sheets all sweaty so that she will have to wash them in the morning. And the smell of it all so pungent. It’s hard to find the stage on which she can perform. She twists towards Zoey, feels the stab of foreboding then that she has forgotten Mira behind her — and that at least is a familiar anchor, that she mediates, she divides herself, she never plays favourites, and so Rumi twists as best she can to look at Mira instead. Zoey presses herself eagerly against Rumi’s back. Her breasts are cool against Rumi’s overheated skin.

Mira tugs Rumi closer to her; there’s a small, private smile on her lips, and Rumi feels the crushing weight of fondness swelling in her own chest in response. She loves her girls so much. Mira’s hair fans out across the sheets like someone has pressed pause on a sunset; her hands twine around Rumi’s waist. Branding, Rumi thinks. A better kind of marking. Her patterns throb sludgily with the thick mess of sensation, and she reaches clumsily back for Mira, wants to touch her somehow, properly, the way she’s supposed to. Wants this to be good for her. Mira knows what she’s doing. God knows Rumi has seen enough to know that’s true. Misgiving stalls her halfway through, and Mira takes her hesitance for indecision; she reaches up, smirking damnably, and takes Rumi’s hand into hers, not interlacing their fingers but guiding it where she wants it. Mira’s waist, first. Up, to the full swell of her breasts. Rumi’s breath comes shallowly as she skims her thumb over the dark, raised nipple there, and something goes taut inside her as she watches Mira gasp.

She likes it. She really could like it. It’s just — so much, so much burning. Zoey’s hands feel like they’re everywhere now that Rumi doesn’t have eyes on them; every place she touches stays sensitive even after her fingers have moved on, primed for the contact and left wanting in its wake, Rumi’s skin rippling with a sensitivity she’s never known. The penthouse air-conditioning sends breeze swimming through the room, and Rumi shudders with her whole body. She’s burning up, but somehow cold. It isn’t exactly the temperature. It feels so strange, having taken her shirt off — leaving her upper body bare.

They know. They know and they want her still. They know and they’re touching her, and Mira gasps throatily under Rumi’s patterned hand, and Zoey presses greedily to the patterned expanse of Rumi’s back, and it is the greatest gift they could have given her — to see her and touch her like this — and she can barely stand it. She feels like a primed weapon. Like the way a barrel breathes before its trigger is pulled. Her skin feels the way a beach looks in a windstorm: the waves and the sand both peel away from themselves in sweeping sheets. She had watched porn for this. She knows what she should do, should say. Her hands are shaking. Her whole body is shaking. She does not want to be touched. She never wants them to stop touching her.

“Rumi,” Mira says, a long, slow moment later, once she has drawn her eyes open again with a honeyed and languorous grace. Behind her, Zoey stills. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Rumi tries to say. Her voice is very choked. The hardest part, she thinks, is that she wants it so much; she has never been this wet in her life. Even that sensation is almost stifling. She feels it every time she shifts. “I’m, I’m —”

“You’re hyperventilating,” Mira says.

Rumi has always gotten nauseous when she fails at something. It roils now, horrible and sick, in her gut, a messy cocktail with the arousal already lingering there. Behind her, Zoey pulls away, putting distance between their bodies; the cool air-conditioned space knifes between them and Rumi hears a horrid, guttural whine, then realises a second later it’s her own. Her throat feels raw. Even that sends fear jittering through her.

“Don’t stop,” she begs. “Please, please, just don’t stop.”

Rumi hadn’t altogether understood what she was hearing, that night those weeks ago, at least at first. It was foreign to her. She had been, she remembers distinctly, in a bad mood: her white noise machine had broken, and it had thrown her entire ritualised evening routine out of step with the ghost of itself. She was the kind of person who couldn’t even start doing her skincare unless she had showered for exactly seven minutes. It had to be perfect; it was something she could always make sure was perfect. Something where every variable was under her control. So she had been jittery already, and in the too-quiet penthouse apartment somebody had cried out, and Rumi had been on her feet — she hadn’t been sleeping, really, only dozing with a thin sheet draped over half her body as the air conditioning roared — before she could quite process what she had heard.

Mira’s bedroom. Rumi’s heartbeat in her throat; a broken half-cry that sounded almost pained. The Honmoon answered to her still, but it felt different now, beat throughout her entire body instead of just at her fingertips. Rumi had not burst into the room — some instinct had kept her fear self-contained, cautious — but she’d eased the door open quietly enough not to be heard, in case something truly was wrong or in case something wasn’t. She was glowing, she knew, in the dim light. She couldn’t help it. Mira always slept with a night-light on anyway, and so she could make out the room clearly enough: the sheets pushed aside, Mira’s air conditioner rattling on full blast, two bodies silhouetted on the bed in the lavender lighting as though they were one. Rumi’s brain scrambled to parse it. It was Zoey’s head on the pillow, but Mira’s long legs that were drawn across the bed like elegant brushstrokes; that was because Zoey’s legs were spread, bent. Her knees were hooked over Mira’s shoulders. She was trembling. Illuminated by Mira’s Rattata night-light, she fisted a hand into the long straight starfall of Mira’s hair and pulled hard and made another sound.

“Oh,” Rumi said, inept. Too loudly. The room wasn’t silent — both of them were breathing hard, and the air conditioning still hummed above their heads — but both of them froze, and Zoey’s head shifted just slightly until she could lock eyes with Rumi in the doorway. She looked — euphoric, dazed. Startled. The flush began to build high on her cheeks, and Rumi watched the embarrassment roll in slowly like the tide on Dadaepo Beach. She was the cause of it. She flinched away, then did what she did best: she backed out of the room quickly and slammed the door closed, breathing hard herself. Her heartbeat had dropped from her throat into her stomach. Her gut. Lower. Her blood felt too hot in her body.

Mira caught up with her in the hallway, a silk robe dragged around her that Rumi suspected she had stolen from an overseas hotel despite their being famous pop stars who definitely had the money to buy a hundred of their own. Their Osaka concert, maybe. Rumi thought she remembered Mira wearing this robe: the way it fell slightly too short and left the bulk of her legs exposed, the lean musculature that bracketed her knees. The way it didn’t quite accommodate for her bust, and so sat wide on her shoulders, leaving a triangle of collarbone and pectoral muscle and cleavage exposed beneath the swan-like grace of her trachea. Not that Rumi had been looking. “Rumi,” Mira said, when Rumi looked away from her too quickly, and then, when Rumi wouldn’t look back up from the ground, “Rumi-yah. Hey. Relax.”

Rumi felt like a child being scolded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I heard —” Her cheeks were colouring. It was the one reflex even Celine had not been able to train out of her; she could feel the blood beating, somehow, in her throat as she flushed. “I thought that — someone was hurt. I won’t — I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t mortified, exactly. She should have been. Something like it beat its wings in the furrow of her gut, renewed with each flash of memory: the way Zoey’s back arched slightly off the bed, the tremor in her thighs as they clamped around Mira’s head, the way Rumi had stood there for a moment too long, watching. Desire, she supposed. Desire she hadn’t earned the right to feel. She had known her girls were in love with each other, that they loved her too — Zoey had said in whatever way you want it to mean, unnie, we don’t want to push and then gone delightfully red when Rumi had pressed a careful kiss to her lips — and she had known that neither of them were virgins, no matter that they were still technically under a dating ban that spanned the first seven years of their contracts, no matter how this could damage them if the secret ever slipped the penthouse walls. Somehow she had not put two and two together. Maybe she had shied away from the thought because it stirred too much up in her gut for her to safely consider it.

She hadn’t — been able to see Mira’s face, when she was standing in the doorway. Occupied as it was. But Zoey had met her eyes for a moment, and there was — Rumi knew her girls, okay, she knew how Zoey looked when she was doing something for the first time and the way she looked when it was closer to the hundredth. It had been the latter. Rumi felt herself flush harder at the concept. It hadn’t been until after everything with the Honmoon, all those months ago now, that the three of them had had that tearful conversation that ended with Zoey’s voice, spring-bright and tentative — Girlfriends? — and Rumi and Mira rushing to reassure her Yes, yeah, of course because neither of them could deny Zoey anything she wanted. But that had been months ago now. Months, perhaps, of the two of them in each others’ beds while Rumi turned her white noise machine on every night at precisely 9 pm.

“Rumi. It’s okay,” Mira repeated doggedly as Rumi felt the realisation hover over her for another moment, curling like the inside of a barrel wave before breaking in thunder and foam over her head — but Mira was sort of diminished too, something very small in the way she held herself, the way she always looked when she thought she was being judged. Rumi couldn’t meet Mira’s eyes, but neither was Mira exactly looking at her. She felt the burn of Mira’s dark eyes somewhere around her collarbone.

She scrambled for something to say, some way to fix it; that was her job. White water or blood beat in her ears. She could not stop thinking about the way Zoey’s mouth had fallen open, about the gentle way Mira’s hand had cupped the underside of Zoey’s thigh as if to hold it out of the way; arousal was still unfurling itself lower in her body, sticky and insistent. How humiliating. That was it: not mortification exactly, but shame at her own reaction. Mira was still not looking at her, and Rumi had to show that she did not mind, that she would defend this secret the same way she had fought to protect everything else her girls set in her hands, and her head was a tangle she could not even begin to tease apart. The wires got crossed for just a moment: she blurted, too honest and not honest enough, “Why won’t you have sex with me?”

She hadn't meant to say that.

They finally both looked at each other. Mira chewed on her lip, like she always did when she was deciding whether what she wanted to say was too blunt; Rumi cringed at herself and opened her mouth to apologise. To take it back. It wasn’t like she was fucking entitled to it, after all. She had just thought — Because — Well, she — She knew she was desirable by faceless fans. She had thought — the way Zoey flushed sometimes when she came with Rumi to the gym, or the way Mira would occasionally look Rumi up and down when she was dressed for a red carpet event and then take a long, slow sip of her drink — maybe they would want her. Maybe someone could. But then she had always stood a little apart from the two of them; they were a triangle, but it was isosceles. She understood. There was some invisible flaw that kept her separate; she had always known it, and her girls were beginning to catch on, the way she had always been afraid of.

Mira said, with her jaw set just a little, “Because both of us know how to ask for something when we want it, Rumi. It’s literally not any deeper than that.”

“I can —” Rumi began, indignant, but she knew herself; that was, she admitted, a very fair point. She swallowed hard. Her skin still felt too tight, too hot; she struggled to drag her eyes away from the elegant breadth of Mira’s shoulders, the hard jut of her clavicle. A claw worked its way up Rumi’s insides, grasping and sharp; she had not known how badly she wanted until it had collapsed upon her. Wanted what? Yes. This. All of it. She backed away, her breath dragging shallowly in and out of her. She was an adult woman. She should be able to admit to things like wanting her girlfriends to — what? Fuck her? Or had she been getting fucked? Rumi didn’t entirely know how her limited vocabulary applied to lesbian sex. Or what else Mira and Zoey did together. Had they —? She did not know whether either of them owned sex toys, but it seemed abruptly like they must; they knew themselves so well, both knew exactly who and what and how they wanted. Mira had seemed so unconcerned by the prospect of being caught with her head between a woman’s legs. She was more worried — Rumi could tell, even with her head in knots — about being caught by Rumi.

She swallowed hard. Ducked her head in something like a bow.

“I would,” Mira said, deadly serious. “If you wanted to, Rumi. If you asked me for it. What the hell gave you the impression I wouldn’t?”

“Oh,” Rumi had said, pitchy, her voice going rough around the edges. And then she fled. She wasn’t proud of it. It was, she had always thought, her worst trait, even beyond the neuroticism and the perfectionism and the way she tended to obsess: that abrupt and burning need that came over her to be anywhere except where she was, where she was being observed, where she was somebody real. Like that question about a tree falling in a forest, except a performer without anybody watching. She had let herself out of the penthouse, still in her pyjamas, and headed first to the private gym, where she tried to burn off the worst of the everything with weights. Then she had moved to the treadmill. Then, once she began feeling like a hamster or a lab rat, she had slipped out a window and into the dark.

She ran from rooftop to rooftop, her breath finally punching its way back into her stomach rather than sitting too shallowly in her throat as it came faster. She did this often. It wasn’t a risk. No one would believe they had seen Huntrix’s Rumi on a Yongsan rooftop; anyway, no one ever did.

When she got back — late, past midnight, though the sky was still lit by the unearthly gleam of the city — she had crumpled into her own too-quiet room and, shuddering, slid a hand between her own thighs. She was aching. She could not stop thinking about what she had seen. Rumi did this occasionally, when she wasn’t exhausted — it was good for her body, she thought, in the same way that they had taught her to tense everything in her body and then release it when she started having panic attacks at sixteen — but it felt stifling, now, impossible to deny. The room was too hot. She writhed against the sheets she had just changed. Touching herself had never been like this before that night: she had felt, for the first time, like it was something she needed. Worse, still: it was something she could not keep herself from wanting.

“Unnie,” Zoey says now, carefully, like Rumi is a glass vase or a crystal daesang trophy. “Are you sure —”

“Please,” Rumi repeats. Her body lists backwards towards Zoey’s until the gap between them closes again; the hot-flushed skin-to-skin contact is at once a burning relief and nearly too much. Hunger claws at the worst parts of Rumi. She wants to push closer and pull away, caught in the yawning, demanding chasm between the two: being touched is unbearable, but being untouched is worse. When she is touched, she thinks wildly, she exists. Her girls have never touched her much. She had spent her teenagerhood telling them she did not like it; now it’s as though those years without contact were all the peeling-back of the sea from the shore, her body the bare sand far past the low tide mark, in the minutes before the tsunami. She is ravenous for the flood.

“We can slow down,” Mira murmurs. Her voice is so familiar. Rumi knows it distorted and distraught and literally backwards, that time they had been fucking around in the studio, and knows it pulled taut by arousal, and knows it like this too: unguardedly fond, the rare pearl of Mira’s alto when she is focused so wholly on somebody else she forgets to be self-conscious and feign indifference. Her hand rests protectively on Rumi’s kneecap. It had been shattered once, when they were both nineteen; the Honmoon had woven it back together then. Mira had sung it back together. “Rumi. You don’t —”

“I want it,” she says raggedly. It’s not a lie. It comes out with the cadence of one — that is, indistinguishable from the truth, at least from Rumi’s lips, but with a bitter aftertaste. She does. She wants it so bad her body thrums with it. When Zoey nudges a cheek absent-mindedly against Rumi’s shoulder, it feels as though her entire nervous system melts, and then melts down. When Mira takes her hand away from Rumi’s knee, her body physically cringes away from the too-cool rush of air in its wake. “I’m just — I’m not used to — It’s just new.”

“Sex?” Zoey murmurs, too perceptive.

Rumi swallows. “No,” she says. Then, cringing — “Well. Yeah. But I meant — being touched. Like, at all.”

The simple fact of it is that she has grown up without much skinship in her life. She was Celine’s ward, with — all that entailed, with the occasional brushes of hair out of her face or the tugging down of a sleeve. And then she was a trainee at an entertainment company. And then she was an idol. And all her life, she was covered; the only time she saw her own shoulders was when she was locked in the bathroom. So somebody touching her, skin to skin, was always rare. Through adolescence, the compression shirts she wore underneath her looser outfits at dance practice had been short-sleeved; she had traded them in, eventually, for ones that covered her entire arms, just to be sure. Just to be certain. She cannot actually remember the last time somebody has touched any of these parts of her bare.

Sometimes, when they were wearing shorts in a summertime practice room, Zoey would cross her calves over Rumi’s as they slumped beside the mirrors. Sometimes Celine would cup her cheek in one palm; she doesn’t any more. Sometimes, Zoey or Mira would take one of her hands and hold it, and Rumi would memorise the texture of their palms, their fingers, all the time aware of the hollow place inside her where wanting was meant to go. It had been easier to just kind of excise it. She isn’t used to wanting things so badly that the desire demands to be felt. It’s a consequence, maybe, of being offered things that she is finally able to have.

“Unnie,” Zoey says again, her voice scrapey-raw and cracked open. Rumi winces. She hates making Zoey sound like that, like her throat is lined with guilt. Zoey presses closer behind her, trembling faintly, and says, “You’ll tell us if it gets too much, though?”

Always us. Isosceles. “I’ll tell you,” Rumi promises, lies; she thinks she would say anything, honestly, to get her girls to keep touching her. Mira smiles up at her, seemingly soothed. Zoey presses a quick and fleeting kiss to the shell of Rumi’s ear. The air conditioning rattles through the coiled heat in the room, literally the best model of air conditioner that money can buy — Bobby insisted — and Rumi shifts uncomfortably against the sheets, her skin prickling with heat the aircon doesn’t even begin to wash away.

All of it feels so impossible. Her moment of respite erodes: a hand skims up the length of her spine, and she screws her eyes shut. Zoey — she thinks — kisses her throat. Somebody’s hand traces the shape of her hips with a sort of greedy haste. It feels good to be wanted. It feels good to be wanted in a way that can really change her. Someone’s nail traces gently over a sensitive spot on the inside of her tricep, and she shudders, cannot bear it, cannot un-bear it, cannot undo it, cannot fathom trying. A thumb sweeps over her nipple. She jolts. It feels like a snakebite, that pinprick-sharp spearing of pleasure through her skin with an almost violent immediacy; it radiates outwards through her like it’s gotten into her bloodstream, most intense as it rushes along the highways of her arteries, slackening and softening at the capillaries, where it diffuses through every part of her. She thinks it’s pleasure. It might be pain. She knows she doesn’t want it to matter.

“Never stop touching me,” she breathes again, and Mira chuckles in reply, maybe says something else, maybe doesn’t. Rumi can’t really hear anything. Her heartbeat roars at her temples. She can barely make out her own whine — humiliating, vulnerable, animal-small — as the two of them bundle her gently onto her back against the mountain of pillows on Mira’s bed. This would be why Mira has them, she supposes. She cracks her eyes open and finds Mira in front of her, on her knees, nudged into the narrow space between Rumi’s ankles; her shirt has been shed too, and something knots in Rumi’s throat at the sight of her, the hard lines of her shoulders, the soft undone spill of her hair over her collarbones and deltoids and — lower — breasts, the way it frames her cleavage. Her nipples are both obscured. It’s almost like a pink censor bar, Rumi thinks, and the silly thought takes nothing away from the sense of awe, only exists alongside it. Mira skims her hands up Rumi’s thighs. She looks up at Rumi as she shuffles closer with her eyes half-lidded, dark with pupil, and it hits Rumi like a punch to the gut exactly how much she wants her.

Fear is familiar. She knows not to want things. The icy frisson of it grounds her, for a moment, until she completes the sentence — she knows not to want things she can’t have. For so long, everything that mattered had been in that category. Rumi does not know what to do with herself now that everything has changed, now that everything she used to want has been torn apart, now that she has to make herself again without even the outline of her old self as a stencil. She had wanted a golden daesang and a golden Honmoon and to pour herself, like molten gold, into the mould that had been cast for her. Now she wants the basest fucking things. She wants her best friends to touch her where she’s wettest. She wants to be wanted. She wants the oppressive closeness of a body against her own, one that doesn’t dissolve into special effects if she hits it hard enough, one that knows the real shape of her and doesn’t flinch away. How fucking humiliating is that?

Zoey plasters herself to Rumi’s side with a particular fire in her eyes like the one she gets when she wins an argument, or when she’s proved right — her stubbornness satisfied — as she leans down and attaches her lips to Rumi’s breast. Her hands are still roaming across the expanse of Rumi’s skin. She and Rumi are wearing matching pyjama pants. Rumi’s blood thunders when Zoey’s thumb sweeps beneath the waistband for just a moment, like she’s gauging Rumi’s reaction. The sound Rumi makes is not one she will ever admit to. Zoey actually laughs, light and bell-like and utterly earnest, turning her head to rest it against Rumi’s chest — then goes back to what she had been doing. Rumi wants to wonder how she even has the coordination, to keep moving her hands while she sucks marks into Rumi’s skin. She doesn’t think she could do that if she tried. Her head is a tangled knot comprised of one long, forgotten fuse.

She wants to — she’d watched porn for this, she’d practiced, she knows what she should be doing, but none of it will coalesce in her brain. Mira’s hands work over the clothed bulk of Rumi’s thighs. She whines again at the featherlight touch. Shudders when it becomes firmer. Mira pauses with her hand sprawled broad and possessive over the plane between the crease of Rumi’s hip and her waistband, tentative, and Rumi rasps out what she thinks is assent. One of Mira’s hands shifts, then, to cup Rumi through her pyjamas. A knuckle ghosts over her clit. Rumi jerks so violently she nearly takes Mira’s eye out with her knee, and then she’s gasping out apologies as best as she can string them together, but Mira is only smiling, fond and sweet, and Zoey is cackling with an earnestness like Rumi is already in on the joke, and something unspools a little in Rumi’s chest. Zoey leans up again to kiss Rumi quick and sweet and almost innocent, as her hands wander upwards and carefully cup Rumi’s breasts, one each, with a gentleness Rumi does not deserve. “Unnie,” she breathes. Rumi gazes at her, the flyaway strands of her hair gone curly in the heat, the bareness of her: her lips untinted, her cheeks freckled with acne scars, her shoulders unclothed. The shape of her own small breasts. Something that Rumi is allowed to look at. Something Rumi is allowed to want. Zoey visibly shivers as Rumi watches her, then leans back down and mouths again at Rumi’s nipple, leaving a spit-slick trail in the wake of where she fits her lips to Rumi’s body.

Mira’s hand shifts where she’s cradling Rumi’s pussy through her pyjamas, her fingers ghosting through the fabric against Rumi’s clit, and Rumi cannot work out how to stop trembling each time the minute shifts in position send heat starbursting through her. It never felt like this when she touched herself. Had been duller. Good, when she worked herself up for long enough, but not — not like this. “Jagi,” Rumi gasps, and doesn’t know which of them she means. She wants to be touched. She wants to be held. She wants to be fucked so hard, she thinks, that it unmakes her, and then she can work out how to make herself again in the shape of someone who has sex, who knows how to weather their own desire, who knows how to touch and be touched. She knows. She’d researched. “I — I’m — please, I need —”

“Lift your hips, yeah, jagiya?” Zoey breathes, and she does. Mira tugs her pyjamas down and leaves them tangled around her knees. The air is almost cool for a moment on her bare thighs, and she cringes when she realises how wet she is — the air works on it coolingly like it would on sweat. Fuck. “There you go,” Zoey says, and Mira is murmuring something soothing too, then presses a too-gentle kiss to Rumi’s thigh, not the inside but the swell of it just above her knee, and Zoey is babbling against Rumi’s skin. “Good girl — yeah, just let us — fuck, you’re so, you look so.” There’s no object. Like it’s a complete sentence on its own. Mira’s eyes flick directly to Rumi’s — her — she isn’t used to even thinking about it, fuck, doesn’t know what to call it, her pussy, her cunt, whatever, and it feels so foreign to have it observed. Like, suddenly, it exists. Like suddenly her pleasure is real. Rumi curls in on herself, cringing at the exposure, but lets Mira sweep her hands over Rumi’s bare thighs as she looks her fill.

(Her girls — it occurs to her abruptly and with shocking immediacy, like the thought has leapt fully-formed from her skull and taken up weapons — have also been wanting for a very long time, unsatisfied. That isn’t Rumi’s fault, but it is something that she can fix.)

Her heart is going so fast she thinks her smartwatch might protest in a minute. She is up to her ears in the white water of her blood. She thinks she feels good? She thinks it’s good, when Zoey’s hand traces over her collarbone and settles on the swell of her shoulder, cradling her deltoids. Her skin pinpricks to attention. It feels impossibly raw, like she is the peeled fruit on one of the platters Celine would always bring to Rumi after an argument. The peacemaker, split open. Mira’s hand skims gently, slowly, up her leg and — when Rumi mewls shaky assent — to where she’s wettest, a broad gentle touch over her labia, tentative, searching. “Please,” Rumi breathes. She know she sounds — what? Wanton? Uninhibited? The good news, of course, is that her girls have always known her better than she knows herself, in every way except for the one that mattered: Mira knows what she is asking for, and Rumi chokes on air as she teases at Rumi’s skin before sliding a single finger gently inside her. It’s effortless. She’s so fucking wet. The sound she wants to make gets stuck in her chest. Zoey’s hands roam over Rumi’s torso, her lips up the column of Rumi’s throat until they find Rumi’s chin again and then her mouth — everywhere Zoey has been is cool beneath the air-conditioning, a dizzying contrast to the flushed-warm rest of her body. There is something inside her. One of Mira’s fingers is inside her. Rumi trembles, too overwhelmed by pleasure to actually have it overcome her: she feels like a fried circuit board. The breaker switch keeps tripping when the current gets to be too much.

She wants to be doing something. Touching them — Zoey’s honey-golden skin, the lean lines of Mira’s paler form, spread before her. Making her girls feel good too. It had sounded so appealing; instead she is lying here like a piece of meat as her girls work her body over, too dizzied by pleasure to even really move, and not even coming. This is what she had not wanted. This is exactly what she was afraid of: that she would be bad at it. That, somehow, sex would be something she could fail.

“Love you,” Zoey says breathlessly, wriggling against Rumi’s side as she mouths at Rumi’s throat again. Everywhere her body presses against Rumi’s feels overheated. Rumi opens her mouth, tries to say it back — it’s muscle memory at this point, not rote exactly but certainly practiced, a familiar call and response — and makes only a hoarse horrible sound in her throat. All she can feel is Mira’s finger inside her; she cries out as Mira crooks it and her body thrums in response. She thinks perhaps she should not be this overcome by one finger. Usually in porn, even the lesbian porn she had found, they just went straight to two, or something bigger. But Mira watches hungrily from beneath her, and she so clearly knows what she is doing, where to press to make Rumi cry out, and — and Rumi’s body betrays her, the way it has always threatened it will one day do. Her patterns glow with a sludgy iridescence. Rumi whines, wordless, and gives herself over to sensation.

Rumi can remember, pretty clearly, the day she realised she was basically clueless about sex. It had been before they’d had the girlfriends talk, but not long before; after the Honmoon was torn open and rewoven, but not long after. Zoey had demanded truth or dare. Rumi had been generally pretty reticent; her girls struggled to really embarrass her with dares, because her skin had gotten pretty thick after years and years of odd penalties and demands on stages and variety shows, and she was content to sip on her soju — the alcohol was new, too — and occasionally get up and perform whatever weird dare her girls came up with while the two of them grilled each other. “Last person you slept with, go,” Mira had said, and Zoey had gone crimson and mumbled “Nayeon unnie,” and the world had come crumbling down just a little bit.

“You slept with the enemy?” Rumi demanded, because it was — sue her — the first thing that came to mind. She had other objections, too. They were still under a dating ban. The three of them had met TWICE, like, twice at most — ha — so it must have been a casual thing, which was dangerous, and anyway surely Nayeon was too old for Zoey. Unless Zoey liked that. Rumi felt herself going crimson with an emotion she didn’t know how to name; in hindsight, it was at least partly jealousy, that someone else had had something Rumi hadn’t even allowed herself to want.

Zoey’s cheeks, too, had gone very pink. “TWICE sunbaenims are not our enemy,” she said hotly, at the same time as Mira blurted, “Let’s not be throwing stones here, Rumi,” then winced like she immediately regretted it. She had been drinking too, but not that much. Rumi recoiled from the sting.

The three of them stared at each other for a moment, all breathing harder than they should have been. Then Rumi snapped, “I didn’t fucking sleep with —”

“I’m sorry,” Zoey said, quelled, eyes abruptly wide and guilty. Probably that she had brought it up. Or maybe that there had been anything to bring up in the first place. Rumi did not know exactly why she was so upset at the thought; she could think of a hundred good reasons, and none of them were actually why. It wasn’t safe. Zoey could have been caught, outed. There were six or seven years between them. It was against their contracts. She clung to those, tried to convince herself they were the reason this — fury had boiled in her stomach, because then it was something she could rationalise, and that way it could boil itself off into nothing and leave only the residue of regret behind. She turned up the metaphorical heat in her gut to make it happen faster. Zoey should never look like that, as though she’d been slapped; Rumi had to fix it.

“No, I’m,” she said, and laughed. “I’m. Sorry. You can — You just startled me. No, you’re right, they’re not our enemy. We should — I should definitely show them some more respect.”

Mira eyed her testily, but said nothing. The peace knit itself back together over the shadow of a wound that only existed when it was not directly observed. It tasted golden; Rumi sipped her peach soju again and stewed.

She hadn’t realised they slept with people. It had always been very simple for her: it was against her contract, so she didn’t do it. She did that a lot. Couldn’t tell the difference between rules that were rules, and rules that were more like suggestions that she keep it behind closed doors. But then a very different sword had also hung on the thread of her naked body, anyway — her patterns humming for so long beneath her clothes — so it had never been something that tempted her, never been a rule she was interested in flouting. It was jarring to realise that both Mira and Zoey were familiar, on some level, with sex. That there was yet another world they were both part of and she was not.

(It — had been different for both of them than for Rumi, she supposed, growing up. Her patterns had been one thing — but even beyond that, she had always known she was going to be an idol. She was her mother’s daughter, Celine’s ward, a legacy trainee. The fact of her eligibility was a foregone conclusion. Zoey, growing up in America, had complained frequently of the culture shock that was the trainee dorms once she had moved over after auditioning; even Mira had become a trainee much later than Rumi had, post- rather than pre-adolescence, and besides she had always been more rebellious than Rumi was ever inclined towards. She dealt with shame by pretending she didn’t feel it. Rumi dealt with shame by swallowing it whole and letting it steer her towards perfection.)

Months later, after walking in on Mira with her head between Zoey’s thighs — after the horrible next morning, wherein Rumi had cheerfully and forcefully insisted everything was normal and completely refused to talk about it, sipping her morning coffee across the kitchen island from Zoey with both of their cheeks cartoonishly flushed — Rumi had resolved to stop being ignorant. She was capable of learning things. She wanted to — be prepared. (Mira had said, honeyed despite the brusqueness, If you asked me for it; Rumi did not feel equipped to ask. She would not make a fool of herself. But if she knew more, maybe —)

Anyway, she had barely known where to begin. Her knowledge about sex was comprised of two main domains: the very brief, euphemistic talk Celine had given her about reproductive basics when she was nine years old because it was important general knowledge, which had been very — functionally oriented, and the more suggestive lyrics in sunbae girl groups’ songs that Rumi had covered as a trainee. There was little overlap between the two beyond the general concept of men. (Rumi was about eighteen when she had realised she liked women too; it had been of little consequence, since she intended never to act on it, just the same way that she would never go out with or kiss or touch or fuck a man, at least while her contract forbade fraternisation. She had folded it into her chest, since she doubted Celine would approve and the idea of telling her girls had felt — gauche, somehow. Like stolen valor. She had had one opening to tell them, back when Zoey had tearfully come out to her, and had clumsily missed her opportunity; since then it had felt too late. It didn’t matter, anyway. It hadn’t mattered until she had taken the bravest leap of faith in her life and kissed Zoey full on the mouth; that had been her first.)

Rumi, though she was not meant to, was aware that you could access foreign porn online. How difficult could it possibly be? The idea was just that she would have some concept of what to expect, of what typically went on when the goal was — pleasure, or connection, or whatever, rather than reproduction. Mira had set up an expensive VPN for her years ago for the purposes of watching Japanese TV; she set it to the first city in America that popped up, opened an incognito window, and typed the word “pornography” into the address bar in English. Then she winced; the results were entirely news articles. Maybe that wasn’t the most efficient method to go about sourcing it. An online message board, once she had followed enough links, gave her better advice. The first video she found autoplayed. Rumi screeched and slammed her laptop closed, no matter that she was in the penthouse alone — her girls each had solo photoshoots — and that she had already locked her door and turned on her new, replacement white noise machine. At three in the afternoon. Even that felt sort of obscene.

But — here was the information she needed, when she mustered up the courage to open the laptop again. It became a recurring thing. She triple-checked her door was locked, and then triple-checked her headphones were connected and then most of the time could not stomach keeping them actually in her ears, and then messed with the settings on the new white noise machine until she was satisfied. (She hadn’t been able to find the exact same model to replace it, even with Bobby’s help. Which was a stupid thing to get annoyed about. But it didn’t feel the same.) And then she watched porn videos. Most of the time, it made her cringe; sometimes it turned her on.

Which was fine. She was — mostly allowed to be doing this; she was reliably informed it was normal, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t possession if she didn’t download it. Probably. Anyway, no one else could possibly have any way of knowing. No one would demand to see Ryu Rumi’s browser history. Nobody would see her on the street and somehow know that she had been watching videos of people having sex and even liked it a bit, like it was some sort of visible stain on her. (When she had gotten her first period, she had gone about her full day of training without realising, without anybody pointing it out to her, and then gotten back to her dorm room to find a massive bloodstain on her pants that was clearly visible to anyone looking at her; she had had a sobbing breakdown in the shared bathroom and then refused to look at her roommate, an older girl named Jeongeun who always asked Rumi how her day had been, as she emerged from the bathroom having stolen one of Jeongeun’s pads. It probably, when she considered the memory for more than two seconds, explained a lot about her. But psychoanalysis was for people who needed therapy, and Rumi was doing great.)

This wasn’t like that. Nobody could look at her and just know, except maybe her girls, and they already knew the worst parts of Rumi anyway.

She didn’t take physical notes, although she did, for an embarrassing two minutes, seriously consider it. But she got her head around it. Learned what to expect. There was a choreographed sort of flowchart involved that was relatively consistent across most of what she saw: kissing turned to making out turned to heavy petting, to clothes coming off, to sex — they’d strap each other, or one of them would come on the other one’s fingers, or they’d spread their legs and scissor. The scissoring intrigued her. Rumi was definitely flexible enough for it — she was a dancer and a fighter — but it didn’t exactly look comfortable; still, she understood that sometimes the wanting overtook every other sensation in a body until it was the only one left. Sometimes she made her own forearm cramp when she was masturbating and didn’t notice until afterwards. It wasn’t as difficult as she had been afraid it would be to cast herself or her girls, mentally, in the roles of the performers; she got off to it. Which was allowed! It was the whole point! Embarrassment curdled in her body every time she came to a video of women fucking each other, but she had to shake it. How else would she be good at it. How else would she make it good for them.

It was in her nature, it always had been, to want to be the best at everything she did. Wasn’t that a good thing? And she was better prepared, now. She had stolen lines from the videos, translated as best she could, and employed them with her best stage presence to startling effect. “Like what you see?” she’d teased, the next time she caught Zoey’s eyes lingering on her as the two of them worked out together. The flush that came over Zoey had felt like victory. Was it not? It was proof that she was ready, that she knew how to do this. That this was something she could finally have. She just had to do it right.

Eventually, shaky, Rumi scrapes enough of her wits together to roll onto one side towards Zoey. Mira, between her legs, pulls away as Rumi shifts the angle of her hips, two of her fingers dragging free from inside Rumi and — Rumi cringes, even as the sight sends a bolt of desire all the way through her and jumps from her skin to Zoey’s in every place they’re touching, like chain lightning — glistening with arousal. Rumi’s. From her — her body. She’s never seen — But she swallows hard and rolls further, until she’s above Zoey, gazing down at her. The flush comes home to Zoey’s cheeks.

“Unnie,” Zoey squeaks, abruptly flustered. Despite herself — despite everything — Rumi grins, because it feels like somehow she’s won. Mira laughs softly; she must have wiped her fingers on the towel thrown over the end of the bed, because as her hand comes up to caress Rumi’s butt it’s mostly dry. The touch is open-palmed, casual, possessive. Rumi needs to focus. She still shudders at the touch, but it — is easier to bear, now that she has been so sated for a little while, now that she has spent however many minutes — hours? — lying on her back as her girls took their fill of touching her. Or as she took her fill of being touched. Both? Neither? It had felt selfish, no matter that both of them had that stubborn blaze in their eyes whenever she caught them looking. Rumi leans down to kiss Zoey now, folding one arm to get close enough but leaving herself propped up on the other, and jumps as one of her breasts brushes against Zoey’s chest with the shift in angle.

She knows how to kiss, at least. She’s had plenty of practice these last few months. Zoey’s hands keep wandering over Rumi’s body as their lips move together, and Mira crawls up the bed with an exaggerated groan like she’s exhausted from moving half a metre, and Rumi laughs despite herself — her girls are so utterly themselves, even now. Zoey makes a grumpy little noise against her lips. Probably because she thinks Rumi isn’t paying her enough attention, even as they’re literally kissing, even as Rumi feels like she’s trying to swallow Zoey whole and that even that wouldn’t be enough, she’s that hungry, she wants her that much. Her body blazes with it. She inhales sharply and pulls back. Mira, on Zoey’s other side now, reaches out to brush her tangled, sweat-curly hair out of her face like she can’t help the impulse; Rumi understands it on a visceral level. Whatever Zoey wants, she gets.

“Zoey,” Rumi says now. Her voice is very hoarse and sounds somehow alien, like Rumi-who-has-sex is a new and different person. She settles her weight a little lower and then shivers when Zoey’s thigh fits neatly between her legs, an abrupt and devastating pressure against her clit that threatens to unmake her, but she fights to keep her voice steady. “What do you want, pretty? What can I do?”

Zoey’s eyes flicker between Mira and Rumi, bracketed on either side of her like bookends, very dark. Rumi has never seen her pupils this dilated. It lends a heaviness to her gaze, a weight, her appraisal lingering even after her eyes have moved on. “Unnie,” she says, to whom Rumi isn’t sure, and then — hesitates. She looks at Rumi again. Rumi tries not to flinch and isn’t sure why. How must she look, she wonders — devastated, made a mess of? Her hair had been left unbraided, which was probably a mistake. It must be so tangled by now. She had wanted — not to look like Rumi of Huntrix, for some reason, wanted to be the version of herself that only her girls got to see, unbound and private — but she will be fighting the tangles with a hairbrush in the mirror for hours now. Her skin must be very flushed. She knows she gets red when she’s embarrassed. She wonders if her pupils have swollen like Zoey’s, if there is evidence of how turned on she is written across her eyes, or in the sweat on her brow, or in the way her hands are — even now — faintly trembling. If it’s possible to look at her and just know; if she has been turned inside out by touch.

Zoey worries a lip between her teeth for a moment, her eyes searching Rumi’s face, and then her lips firm for just a moment with resolve. She’s so brave, Rumi’s Zoey. She always is. “Are you, like,” Zoey says, her voice very small — Mira’s brow furrows — “okay?”

Rumi’s chest goes cold. There’s a cavern, she thinks, somewhere inside her where her viscera are meant to go. Ice-studded. The demon realm burns, but Rumi’s own personal hell has always been cold. “Just let me,” she says, still perched atop Zoey with strands of hair falling messily around her face. “Let me, um —”

“No, could you — answer the question, Rumi,” Mira interrupts, her eyes a little shadowed too. “Please,” she adds a beat later. Rumi swallows. Mira had never used to notice when Rumi brushed off too-probing questions or shrugged her way out of a conversation she did not want to have; Rumi had, over the years, gotten very, very good at it. It stings, to know that her girls have learned that facet of her. That Rumi is somebody capable of impossible, world-ending deceit. That she can lie like it doesn’t bother her to do it. Somehow, though, the lash of guilt is almost healing; the pain of it feels in some ways like atonement. Here is one more way in which she is known more wholly and completely by those who love her. She cringes away from that peeled-open sensation, but — she is trying to be better. She wants to be better.

More importantly, she had promised her girls she would be better. She would be honest. No more lies.

“I’m,” she says, and swallows. Even resolved to honesty, she doesn’t quite know what to say. Zoey’s brow furrows, and she props herself up on her elbows, craning her neck to look up at Rumi; Rumi looks away, flushed. She had wanted this to be easy. When she prepares for a new dance choreography in advance, the first proper run-through comes easily to her; when she warms up her voice properly, she can sing just about anything she tries. She is used to being good at things. But here she is. “It’s. Just a lot.”

“We can slow down,” Zoey says, fervent and immediate.

“We can stop,” Mira adds. “We don’t have to —”

“I want to,” Rumi insists. Her voice cracks, humiliating; she drops her weight to the side and sits back on her heels, which feels a bit like admitting defeat. “I really wanted to — do this. I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You don’t need to,” Zoey insists. She reaches out to touch Rumi’s shoulder, her small, callused hand cupping the still-tender skin of Rumi’s deltoid, and Rumi feels her body go limp as she’s touched again; it’s all she can do not to melt into it. God, she just wants to be held. She wants — She wants so much. She is not used to having to pay attention to what exactly that so much is. Zoey swallows, says, “Unnie, you’re. Crying a little bit?”

“I wanted to be good at this,” Rumi says. She is, it turns out, crying a little bit. Fuck. Nothing burns her up from the inside out more than crying where people can see; it genuinely turns her stomach a little, an uncomfortable and liquid burn that sours her entire body. Mira watches her from Zoey’s other side, then, hesitant, reaches out to set a hand on Rumi’s ankle, the only part of Rumi she can reach now that Rumi has pulled away a little, and drags her thumb gently back and forth across the nub of bone. Rumi withers. Says, again, “I wanted to do a good job.”

“God, Rumi, could you be any more yourself,” Mira says. It’s not exactly a reproach, but there is a degree of accusation there — but then Mira winces like she’s heard her own words, adds, “I meant that in. Like. A loving way. Because I — you know.” She’s gripping Rumi’s ankle harder than she needs to now; it hurts a little bit. “Like, love you, and all that. Just so you know. Sorry that came out wrong.”

Zoey, while Mira speaks, has been regarding Rumi and biting her lip. Rumi has been watching Zoey watch her, something like trepidation building in her stomach as Zoey visibly comes to some conclusion. “You’re,” Zoey says, and then hesitates, her voice still small — she hates pointing things out when she notices them, is always afraid she’s going to upset people somehow — “Unnie, you’re. Talking like this is your first time?”

“I mean, yeah,” Rumi says. “It doesn’t matter. I — What?” Defensiveness curdles in her belly as Mira visibly double-takes. Zoey doesn’t look surprised, but there’s a horrible sort of apology in her eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?” Rumi demands. She isn’t sure which of them she’s talking to. Isn’t sure what she fears more: pity, or confusion.

Mira blinks hard, then says, “Rumi. I. I love you; you’ve really gotta, like, get in the habit of telling us stuff.” She seems flustered somehow; her cheeks have gone dark with what might be embarrassment. “We could have been. You know.” She gestures broadly with her right hand; her left hand is still resting on Rumi’s ankle, and despite everything, despite the embarrassment crawling up the column of Rumi’s body, the contact is grounding. “Less — overwhelming, or whatever. Whatever you needed.”

“No, it’s —” Rumi blinks back her tears, furious with them and with herself. It feels so profoundly like failure. Not three minutes ago, she had had Zoey delighted and flustered beneath her, and the world had been brilliant, and then somehow Zoey had looked at Rumi and seen whatever the stain on her was, the thing that made it so obvious she was not suited for — any of this. Intimacy. Love. Sex. “It really was perfect,” she insists. “I was — I was the problem, I think something’s just —” Her voice breaks on a sob. Jesus. “— wrong with me. I wanted it too much, or something. I always —”

“Unnie,” Zoey says softly. “Jagiya. No.”

“Don’t say that,” Mira adds. Her voice is harder, but she looks Rumi in the eye with a stubborn protectiveness. When Rumi opens her mouth: “No. Don’t.”

“But I was just,” Rumi says, and tries to grasp for her failures; it feels like there must be thousands of them to list, but only one springs to her tongue. Still. “Lying there,” she says, like throwing it in Mira’s face. Here’s the proof. “Letting you — do stuff to me.”

“So?” Mira says blankly.

“So I was being selfish!” It had seemed so clear when it existed only inside the echo chamber of her mind. Now, observed, the thought seems somehow diminished. But Rumi lifts her chin, like a challenge: Look at me and tell me I’m still worth it. Look at me and tell me I am somehow worth your effort.

Zoey frowns. “That’s not true,” she says, sounding so genuinely offended that Rumi is actually taken aback.

Mira sets a placating hand on Zoey’s shoulder. “Okay, pillow princess,” she says, which is not jargon Rumi has encountered but whose meaning seems relatively intuitive. Despite everything, she blushes. Mira swallows, like she’s searching for words, then adds, “And — like — even if that was true, Rumi. Even if it was selfish to — take it. You’re allowed to be selfish sometimes, you know.” Mira ducks her head, like she can’t look Rumi in the eye and say earnest things to her at the same time. “You can be selfish with us. Like, we don’t — need you to be a perfect idol who, like, only lives to make other peoples’ lives better. That’s not real. No one’s like that.”

Rumi feels so seen that it scalpels her open. She cringes, hugging her knees to her chest. “Mira,” she says, helplessly.

“You’re allowed to have, like, wants and needs and — whatever,” Mira says doggedly. “We want you to have the things you want, okay? Is it really that hard for you to realise that we might, like, want good things for you, or are you the only person capable of making other peoples’ lives better?” Rumi winces. Mira’s face does something complicated and stubborn, and then she says, “I want you to be selfish with us. I want to know what you want, Rumi.”

“We want you to be happy,” Zoey adds, heartbreakingly earnest. Rumi’s stomach flips. “We want to know how to make you happy.”

“Oh,” Rumi says. It’s so — it’s so embarrassing to have it spelt out. That she had spent so long wanting not to want anything at all. Maybe, if she was selfless enough, Celine would — their fans would love her, and the world would love her, and she would save the world and then, finally, she might have earned a place in it. Maybe, if she just worked hard enough, she would be worth something. There was no room for wanting there. Selfishness, Celine had always taught her, was anathema to everything a Hunter had to be.

“Oh, baby,” Zoey says, distraught, as Rumi feels her own face crumple. “Hey. Hey, come here.” She opens her arms and makes grabby hands, and Rumi, heedless of both of their nakedness, goes; Zoey folds her arms around Rumi’s body like it’s something precious. Rumi feels a sob hitch in her chest at the thought. The problem with being so raw is that no part of her is left to soften the blow of being cared for, and as Mira shuffles up to wrap her arms around both of them too, the sticky weight of it all tumbles out from Rumi’s throat: she is here. She feels humiliated. She is crying in her girls’ arms and they are holding her like it doesn’t matter. There is no way for her to turn away from her embarrassment, nowhere she can flee to, and instead it rises in her chest and — overwhelms her. Overtakes her. Like a tiny Rumi on Dadaepo Beach, insisting that she was so fast she could outrun the waves as the tide came in, feeling the cold ocean lap at her feet. The only thing she can fucking do about it is cry.

“Hey,” Mira says, a little stilted but clearly trying not to cry herself. “It’s okay.”

Rumi shudders. The weight in her chest thickens — guilt, humiliation, somehow even the cloying aftertaste of a grief she cannot put her finger on — and then, somehow, ebbs, has gone blunter when she takes another breath, softened. Eroded, somehow. Zoey pets her hair in short featherlight strokes, the same way Celine would when Rumi was a child and has not done since she was nine years old, the same way Rumi has been yearning for since she realised Celine would never do it again; another sob ricochets its way from her, somehow cleansing. She says, her voice thick and shattered, “When you guys touch me, it’s just —” Her body is melting into it even now: Mira’s arms around her, the burning presence of her skin. She feels unspooled. Like she has been starving and shown a feast and she has gorged herself: too much of what she needs will undo her. “It’s so — it’s so much. I don’t — I can’t think. When you’re.” She shivers against Zoey’s chest. “You know I don’t — I don’t think anyone’s touched, like, my back or my chest or my tummy since I was —” Suddenly she can’t even put a number on it. She thinks before my patterns, when she was young enough that they were only burgeoning from a place over her heart, when her shoulders and her navel and her back were all bare of them, but even then she had only had Celine. Even then, Celine had not touched her very often.

“I mean, you’re obviously touch-starved,” Mira says — matter-of-fact, like everybody knows this. Then, a moment later in the voice that means she’s gone red, “What, it’s a real thing. Duh.”

“I feel like,” Zoey says. When she speaks, still holding Rumi against her, Rumi can hear her voice buzzing in her chest. “It’s also — pretty normal for it to feel like a lot, your first time. Anyway.” She pets Rumi’s hair with a little more force, her voice slightly higher-pitched: “Or is that. Was that. Was that just me?”

“You’re not a good example,” Mira says. “You’re, like, really sensitive.”

Even now, the implication stings: that there is a history here Rumi has been left out of, set apart from. But its bite is dulled by the fact that she is literally between them — cradled, held, loved. Wanted, too. “Sensitive?” she says, shyly, and Mira laughs.

“Yeah,” she says. Her hand rubs absently up and down Rumi’s torso, over her obliques, with a casual possessiveness. “Zoey’s suuuper sensitive. It’s, like, really easy to get her off.” Rumi tries not to twitch. “Shame she has the refractory period of a middle-aged man.”

“I have intense orgasms,” Zoey says defensively, like it’s a well-worn embarrassment for her. Rumi lifts her head just to take in Zoey’s face — somehow, the best cure to being flustered by something is seeing Zoey be even more flustered — and finds Zoey grinning back down at her, visibly pink but with a self-possession Rumi usually only sees her wear on stage. Like she knows exactly what she thinks of herself like this. Like it’s something she has never made to feel really, truly self-conscious about. Rumi feels an intense stab of gratitude at the thought; maybe she does not have to hunt down that woman from TWICE after all, if, miraculously, she had nurtured Zoey’s confidence like this in a way that Rumi has been trying to do for half a decade.

“Yeah?” Rumi says. The storm in her chest, she thinks, has rained itself out; in its place, in the well-watered earth, other things are beginning to sprout again. Her voice sounds almost foreign, and she realises it’s because she’s never listened to herself flirt before. Not without a full face of makeup and a costume chosen by stylists. Mira must catch whatever vibe she’s putting off, because she presses closer until she can look at Rumi in the face with a measured, tentative curiosity.

“Yeah,” Mira says, very carefully, but smouldering just a little. Rumi feels her cheeks heating. Which is ridiculous; she had taught Mira this expression after months of practicing it in her own mirror, the ending-fairy almost-glower she had learned from watching and rewatching Red Velvet music videos. She should be immune to it. She’s not! Mira says, her voice thick with suggestion, “You wanna see?”

“Hey, shouldn’t I be the one in charge of offering that?” Zoey demands, wriggling one arm out from around Rumi so that she can swat Mira on the shoulder. Mira cackles; Zoey pouts. A moment later, both of their eyes flick to Rumi in nervous, perfect sync.

Rumi swallows. “Yeah,” she says. She does. She has already seen it once and the vision had literally haunted her for months. Like, she’d seen it when she closed her eyes — Zoey’s parted lips, her breathlessness, the shape her back made as it arched off the bed. Rumi swallows again. Abruptly she remembers that she is naked, that Zoey beneath her is naked too, that Mira behind her is only one article of clothing removed from being the same. Her body reminds her of its borders. Of exactly where it is touching the world.

“You’ve,” Mira says, like she’s choosing her words carefully. She glances away, then back up at Rumi again. “You’ve got to — it’s fine if you get overwhelmed, but please talk to us, okay?” There’s a grating earnestness in her voice that Rumi rarely hears. “And if you can’t talk, like — tap me to stop. Like when we spar, okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Rumi says, and Mira’s answering look is withering. Rumi winces as she backs down. “Um. Yeah, I’ll — yeah. I promise.”

“Okay,” Mira says, and takes a deep breath; her chest presses against Rumi as it expands. Rumi swallows again. Her throat feels dry. Then the two of them look at Zoey, again with a synchrony Rumi can only dream of them emulating on stage when they’re actually dancing; Zoey’s eyes widen quickly, like a little bug, and she makes a high noise in the back of her throat and then squeezes her eyes shut like she hadn’t meant to.

Mira smiles. Rumi feels herself actually giggle, her fondness boiling over inside her and spilling out onto the stovetop of her lips. “Jagi,” she says, “you’re so cute.”

“Don’t say that,” Zoey squeaks. Rumi grins. That’s reassuring too, that Zoey reacts to undivided attention and to compliments the same way undressed in bed as she does in a recording studio and an oversized hoodie; she reaches out to cup Zoey’s face, emboldened by the familiarity of it, delighted by Zoey’s fast, embarrassed blinking. Zoey leans her cheek into Rumi’s hand, then turns her head to brush her lips over the heel of Rumi’s palm. Rumi’s body prickles hot all over. The abruptness of it makes her feel like she’s lost her balance halfway through a jump.

“Rumi-ya,” Mira says, and Rumi jumps, startled. “You want to help me make Zoey come?”

“Oh my God,” Zoey says into Rumi’s hand. She’s so red. Rumi, electrified, nods cautiously, watching Zoey’s face for her reaction, and then smiles when Zoey’s eyes flicker back to hers and she gives a barely-there nod. Rumi does want. The wanting descends on her wholly and impetuously, like a monarch who expects not to be denied, and flushes her body hot with blood. She thinks, dizzily, of Zoey’s breathless gasps. Zoey blinks slowly back at her, squirming slightly in place with a bug-pinned-to-board air about her, as though she feels Rumi’s gaze like a physical weight; her body seems composed, Rumi thinks, of places to hold. The handfuls of her breasts. The swell of her hips and her tummy. The round shapes of her ass. Rumi wonders how she had gone this long without just reaching out and — touching. Zoey tilts her head, then grins, bashful but almost cocksure, and very deliberately bites her lip.

The three of them shuffle again; it feels like a well-practiced dancethe way Zoey and Mira move together, and practiced too is the way that Rumi fits herself into the shape of their movement even without knowing the choreo. She knows her girls. That’s enough. Rumi gazes up at Zoey from between her legs, feeling a thrill of inverted deja vu, and runs her hands up Zoey’s thighs just the way Mira had been doing to Rumi before. There’s a joke somewhere about rock-paper-scissors, but the gut-punch of arousal knocks Rumi enough out of her head that she can’t scrape the brain cells together to put it into words.

Agonisingly, thrillingly, she realises she’s still wet. Like, she — she had never stopped being — physically lubricated, had not stopped to wipe it away mid-crying session, but she’s getting wet again. She pauses, uncertain. Mira sprawls out beside her, stopping to pull her hair over the marble sculpture of her shoulder before leaning in to kiss a freckle on Rumi’s bicep, and says, “God. You’re both so hot, Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” Rumi says. She feels dizzy looking at Zoey like this — her trimmed pubic hair, the perfect angles of her legs, the way she’s golden-brown everywhere. Zoey swallows — Rumi watches her throat bob with it — and then, holding Rumi’s gaze, spreads her legs slowly and deliberately as Rumi tries not to choke on her tongue. The insides of her thighs are paler. Less tanned. And Zoey is — so wet, too. Her — her pussy is swollen with arousal and truly, genuinely glistens under the light, and if Rumi were only looking at her pussy she might mistake the image for something pornographic, but the real killing blow is the context of the rest of Zoey’s body. The whole of her at once. The heart-shaped face that Rumi has loved for longer than she knows what to do with, the bare shapes of her torso and waist and hips, her sweaty brow and the dark, curly hairs plastered there — Rumi has never felt arousal as encompassing and demanding as this. She’s so turned on she might die. She never wants desire to stop feeling like this — it beats in her body as she watches it beat in Zoey’s too.

Like she’s dreaming, she trails her hand slowly, cautiously up the inside of Zoey’s thigh, watching with trepidation for a stop that never comes. Zoey only watches her back, her eyes dark, her lips parted. And then Rumi is — touching her. Strokes over the slick-messy skin of her labia. Rumi drags her fingers gently, gently higher, watches Zoey twitch as Rumi’s fingertips brush her clit; it’s like she’s been plugged into a wall socket, supercharged. Rumi did that. She fucking did that. And Zoey had — trembled, as though she’d been struck, and the sound she makes as the air whistles between her lips is pleased.

Mira reaches out for Rumi’s other hand and laces their fingers together; her skin is paler than Rumi’s, the ridge of calluses along the top of her palm familiar as it brushes over Rumi’s skin. From the haft of her glaive. She’s leaning her head on Zoey’s tummy, the sculpted angles of her nose and lips softened by the light and by the context, and she gazes down at Rumi between Zoey’s legs; her eyes, too, have the glint of wanting in them. She looks — she looks really, visibly aroused. From looking at Rumi. Rumi’s head spins again, but it’s a good mindfuck, a pleasurable dizziness; “Mira,” she says, then hesitates. Her voice comes out hoarse.

“You look so good,” Mira groans, sounding equally wrecked. Zoey, for her part, makes a breathy sound when Rumi rubs her fingers over her clit again — first as gentle a touch as she can manage, and then, experimentally, a firmer pressure, the way Rumi likes it when she’s touching herself. Zoey’s gasp sounds giddy, startled. Like she has been caught off guard by her own pleasure. Rumi needs to hear it again. She needs to hear it, she thinks, every night for the rest of her life.

“Can I,” she says, at once oddly desperate for it, and slides her fingers down Zoey’s pussy towards the core of her.

Zoey makes a weak, reedy sound. Then, when Rumi hesitates: “Yes,” she snaps, “come on, please —” bossy, grumpy almost, and Rumi grins. Abruptly she’s on solid ground. Familiar territory — it’s cast in a new light, but she knows her girls. She knows the way Zoey sulks when she’s forced to ask for something she desperately wants. Rumi leans down to brush her lips over Zoey’s hipbone in a way that feels somehow devotional, oathswearing. Then, feeling like she is splintering apart, she slides her middle finger inside Zoey so slowly that it must be frustrating.

“I can take two,” Zoey says sulkily. It probably means something that Rumi doesn’t second-guess her — Zoey knows her own capabilities — only does it immediately, pulls her finger out and presses two back in, faster, more insistent. Her entire body sings when it punches a gasp from Zoey’s chest. Zoey squeezes so tightly around Rumi’s fingers that she thinks she might actually hear a knuckle pop — Mira catches her eye, lips pressed tightly together like she’s trying not to laugh — and her body seems to unspool somehow, a sinuous spilling-out of pleasure that ripples outwards from her belly like a stone has been tossed into a pond. Mira untangles her fingers from Rumi’s other hand and reaches down, herself, to ghost them over Zoey’s clit; her pinky just brushes Rumi’s wrist as she does. She uses her third and fourth fingers, Rumi notices. Not like Rumi, who has always used her second and third. Zoey makes a very high-pitched sound, sort of keening. “Fuck,” she says, her voice sounding somehow scattered. Like when she drops her notebook in the studio and loose pages flutter everywhere, her words strewn across the floor. “Fuck, I really — I know we were joking about this but I’m going to — ohmyGod, unnie, please —”

Mira laughs, delighted. Rumi feels too breathless, too hot, to trust herself to say anything. She fucks Zoey on her fingers the same way she fucks herself, keeping them crooked sightly, feels Zoey spasm around her again — it is mindblowing to realise that that is the inside of her body. That Rumi’s hands, made for the hilt of a sword and spidered over with demon patterns, are inside her, and it’s good for her. It’s making her feel good. And she’s so wet it feels impossible. And the sounds she’s making — Rumi crooks her fingers a little more as Mira rubs steady little circles over Zoey’s clit, practiced like she knows exactly how Zoey wants it, and Zoey swears loudly. Then, quieter, another of those strangled gasps. Like the sound she wants to make has failed to battle its way free. Her whole body goes tense as she comes on Rumi’s fingers, grinding her hips up into Mira’s hand, tremors running through her; her jaw has gone slack and pleased, her eyes fluttering closed, the fan of her lashes distractingly perfect. Rumi’s heart fidgets like a snare drum in her chest. It feels better than any victory.

Rumi, trying not to shake, follows Mira’s lead: she rocks her hand steadily until Zoey’s trembling changes tenor and Mira pulls her hand away to skim it over Zoey’s hip. Then Rumi leans down to rest her head on Zoey’s upper thigh. She’s breathing hard herself, like she’s just done four hours of dance practice with no breaks. “God,” she says. Dizzy, candid: “I’m going to be riding that high for, like, the next month. Oh my God.”

“You’re a natural,” Mira says approvingly. There’s a hunger in her eyes that mirrors Rumi’s own.

“Unnie,” Zoey says. She sounds almost feverish; Rumi pulls her fingers gently free and feels her breath catch in her throat at the stickiness of them, the too-tangible evidence of Zoey’s arousal. Of the fact that Zoey had come apart, shaking, while Rumi had been inside her. Zoey props herself up on her elbows, shakily. “Unnie, let me touch you, please, please —” Like she wants it selfishly, Rumi thinks. Like she wants Rumi because it would satisfy her, not just because she wants Rumi to feel good. It feels shocking, that Rumi could be important to somebody else like that. Rumi feels so taut, like a garotte strung between two points, like a guitar string not yet plucked — like any moment now, she could quiver into harmony.

They shuffle again. Zoey scrambles on top of Rumi, her hands greedy again, mapping Rumi’s body like she thinks she’ll die if she stops touching her; Mira sprawls elegantly on one of her thighs, pinning it down, and blinks catlike up at Rumi with a self-satisfied smirk. Ugh. Rumi’s so mad that it works on her. The room seems to unfurl into its component parts as the two of them lay their hands on Rumi’s body: the rattle of the air conditioning and, separately, the low tinted lighting and, separately, the harsh sound of Rumi’s breathing. Separately, the white ceiling. Separately, the glow in her chest of being loved. The sweep of hands over her skin. They touch her only sensually at first, both of them — her back, her navel, her shoulders, her calves — but Zoey, Rumi thinks, is too hungry for it and her hands wander again between Rumi’s thighs. Mira groans, a shocking drawn-out sound that Rumi immediately wants to hear again, and reaches up to touch Rumi’s pussy too. She has never been this wet; it’s a little embarrassing, the slick sound her girls’ fingers make as they explore her. Separately: she has never been this turned on. Separately: she cannot remember the last time she felt this loved, this wanted, this safe.

When Rumi had touched herself alone, it had been — not difficult, but it had taken effort, to turn herself on, to work herself up, to make herself come. Her girls do it with a shocking ease. Rumi shuts her eyes as the prickling of pleasure heightens throughout her body, squeezes hard at the hand interlaced with hers — she does not remember when one of her girls had given it to her, but recognises it, now, as Mira’s, from the way it feels against her own — says, shocked, “I’m. That’s. Yes, yes,” and it sounds needy, sounds like she wants it, sounds like she’s being selfish. Someone’s lips brush against her belly. She hears Mira groan again, incredulous. Then someone is pressing their fingers inside her again, and Rumi feels her jaw slacken as though she is a passenger in the movement, feels herself go taut like she has never been more her own pilot — for one perfectly clarified moment, as her wanting peaks, she belongs to herself. She does not know what sound she makes. Only that she feels so fucking good she can barely stand it. She clutches clumsily for her girls, grabs whatever she can reach and tugs them both close to her and just — holds them, shaking, for a minute, all of their bare torsos pressed together. Mira’s cheek is smushed against hers. Zoey gives a great big sigh, like all the air has been let out of the balloon of her lungs at once.

They breathe together, Rumi still shuddering, for one more breath. Two. Then: “Fuck,” Mira says, sounding unmade, and Rumi feels her reach a hand between her own legs.

Mira touches herself with a frenzied intensity; Rumi can feel the shape of it in the way Mira’s forearm shifts against her thigh, the three of them tangled together enough that it’s hard to see exactly what Mira is doing. She’s still wearing her pyjama pants. Rumi thinks of her slipping a hand down the front of them and feels bowled over by arousal. Zoey pets Mira’s thigh gently, her eyes fluttering open every so often before slipping shut again, and Mira makes a series of entertaining scrunched-up faces as Rumi runs her nails down the broad, perfect expanse of Mira’s back, before shaking against the two of them with a choked-out “Fuck” and collapsing heavily again atop them. Rumi’s blood fizzes. She wants to see that again. She wants to make Mira come. She wants to touch and be touched and feel the victorious rush of it, of the faces her girls make, the electric shock of having a finger that isn’t her own brushed over her clit — she wants it all. She wants to have it, selfishly, delightedly.

“I could — we could — go again,” she says, her tongue clumsy. She feels a little unhinged. Unleashed, maybe. Her head is spinning with it. Emboldened, she adds, “I could definitely come again.” It doesn’t feel dirty to say. Her body thrums with possibility.

“That’s, like, so great,” Zoey says sleepily. She presses her face into Rumi’s shoulder, like she’s trying to hide. “I’m so happy for you, you can menace me another time —” Her hands, somehow, have managed to lace themselves around Rumi’s waist while she wasn’t paying attention. “— I am having my nap now. Cuddle me or else.”

Rumi feels herself melt before she’s even actually processed what Zoey is asking for; what their maknae wants, their maknae gets. “Okay,” she says. She can hear the fondness in her own voice; it must be really obvious, if even Rumi is capable of detecting it. Her body is still ticking with arousal, like the gentle pings of a cooling engine, but she snuggles obediently closer to Zoey and says, “Wow, Mira wasn’t kidding.” Zoey blinks sleepily up at her. She quite genuinely looks like she is struggling to keep her eyes open.

Mira rolls over and slots neatly into place behind Rumi, her bare breasts squishing against Rumi’s back. The touch doesn’t burn any more, but Rumi still melts into it happily; better still, Mira slings an arm over her waist. She’s rangy enough that she can reach all the way over Rumi’s body to touch the jut of Zoey’s hipbone. “I told you so,” Mira says, sounding gratified. “Refractory period of a middle-aged man.” Her hand slips back from Zoey’s hip to Rumi’s, and she leans closer, her breath fanning warm over the shell of Rumi’s ear. Then she grinds her hips filthily against Rumi’s ass, a crude and sinuous imitation of fucking her; Rumi feels her breath catch in her throat. “We can shower together later if you want,” Mira murmurs lowly in her ear.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rumi says weakly.

Mira chuckles. Zoey makes a sleepy, reproachful sound and says “Cuddling now”; her voice is muffled where her mouth is squished into the pillow. Tenderness swells abruptly in Rumi’s chest like an overripe fruit, lingering impossibly long on the vine.

“Yeah,” she agrees, her body gloriously sated, her heart perfectly full. “Cuddling now.”

This, too, is what Rumi wants. She holds and is held. They fit together so well like this, the three-person spooning, like nesting dolls — Mira then Rumi then Zoey, with a puzzle-piece ease. They’ve done this same pose a thousand times for magazine spreads. Here, though, like this — observed only by each other — it’s better. Rumi’s whole body thrums with the contact. They’ve never cuddled without shirts before, and even without the horny fog clouding her mind, it’s delightful on a purely tactile level — Zoey runs hot, while Mira is cool behind her, nuzzling sleepily into Rumi’s neck now that her guard is down enough to do so. It’s all Rumi needs.

Better: it’s all Rumi wants. And it’s all hers.

She had expected to doze off; she thought maybe she would nap. Her body, though, has other plans. Rumi cracks an eye open to actual sunlight, milky-pale Seoul winter sunlight because Mira never draws her curtains, and knows it must be far later in the morning than she usually sleeps in. A body is still pressed against her back, flush from shoulder to knee. In front of her, Zoey is sitting cross-legged on the bed and stroking Rumi’s hair.

She visibly startles when she realises Rumi is awake, and her smile is the too-earnest one that’s a little fragile around the edges, when she’s trying hard to be enthusiastic but is somehow afraid she will be turned down, turned away, rejected. “You’re awake!” she says. Her voice sounds faintly strained. Rumi smiles, which feels like the most natural thing she has ever done, and watches the foreboding in Zoey’s eyes wash away. “Do you want coffee? Tea?”

It’s such a simple, meaningless question. Rumi breathes past the first, instinctual flash of Don’t worry about me, I’ll sort myself out, haha and lets the question actually penetrate the shell of her body, mulling it over as Zoey’s fingers card through her unbraided hair. She can already tell it’s hideously tangled. She’ll worry about that later. “I’d like tea,” she says, soft, with maybe more gravity than the pronouncement deserves; still, answering it had taken effort. She had sunk further into herself and asked What do I actually want?

Zoey grins at her and slips off the bed to fetch it, pressing a parting kiss to Rumi’s brow in the same sweet effortless way she has been doing these past few months; Mira makes a very disgruntled sound when Rumi shifts, tugging Rumi closer and nuzzling more tightly into her back. She does not, clearly, want to get up. And so Rumi is held; wants, and is wanted; the world does not end. There are no cameras. There is no demon come for her half-soul. “Huh,” she says out loud, blinking hard, and then, “I’m — not a virgin.” She thinks, at least. Nobody will be able to tell when they look at her on the street, that this is a woman who had had sex last night and — eventually — liked it, but Rumi will know, will hold it close to her chest like the best kind of secret, a shared one. It feels starbursty. Like a night sky in her chest.

“Congrats,” Mira says in a distinctly non-congratulatory tone, meaning something more like Shut up, I’m asleep. Rumi laughs out loud. It tastes sweet on her lips.

Zoey tiptoes exaggeratedly back into the room, playing like a secret agent in a children’s movie, with two mugs in her hands; she sets one on the bedside table and hands the other to Rumi, who has to adjust her angle very, very carefully until she’s upright enough not to spill tea all over herself or the bed while still horizontal enough to keep her Velcro-strip girlfriend placated. Zoey’s eyes linger on her as she sips it, searching. “Good?” Zoey says, like she really, really cares about the answer. The tea is made just how Rumi likes it.

“Good,” Rumi says. This time, she knows she really means it.