(no subject)
Flux
Minho/Luna
PG-13, 3776
Learn to love what you're stuck to.
(for firequakes for unniesanta)
PHYS 135A: Electromagnetism
Sunyoung didn't like Physics. It was too confrontational; the study of collisions, friction, gravity. She didn't think of her life as a vector, didn’t have enough direction for that. More often than not she studied her classmates instead of the angry equations on the board. The angle of Jo Jinyoung’s over-plucked eyebrows. The spring constant of the ballpoint pen that Kim Changsun clicked constantly.
There was a boy in Sunyoung's class who dragged dirt into the lecture hall with his sneakers. There would be a trail of large brown prints, the zig-zag pattern on the bottom of his Nikes leading to the third row from the back, which was where he always sat. Sometimes he would come in late with his cleats tied together and dangling over his shoulder, mud streaked across his nose like he'd been fighting the grass instead of playing on it.
He slid into the seat next to her on one of his late days, music pulsing from the side of his earphones that hung in his lap. "Did he say what's going to be on the test?" He asked, gesturing with his head towards the professor. He smelled like dirt and cheap cologne, with an underlying hint of sweat that Sunyoung was, surprisingly, not repulsed by. Eau de Jock. She pointed to an equation in her notes.
He shifted in his chair to get a better look, and their elbows connected.
She felt a jolt. Once, when she was seven, Sunyoung's twin sister had convinced her to stick a malfunctioning string of Christmas lights into her mouth, and that was what this felt like, a bite of electricity, and then numbness. The boy made to apologize, mouth half-open, until he tried to pull away and found himself physically unable to. Their elbows were stuck, conjoined, and pins and needles crawled their way up her arm.
PHIL 010: Language, The Mind, and Reality
Minho knew she was in his discussion, the short girl who smiled too much and tended to become inexplicably fused to his body. He averted his eyes when she walked in, pretended to be fascinated by the second hand of the clock running in circles. Part of him wanted to try again, to see if maybe they could attach their whole arms this time, but the other, more rational part knew that he didn't want to risk it being permanent. She wasn't ugly, even an understated kind of attractive, but he definitely didn't see her in an I-wish-our-limbs-were-attached-forever sort of way.
"If it were discovered that every cat that has ever existed was actually a robot from Mars,” The TA began, "could we still call them 'cats'?" The sign-in sheet had been passed to him and, after initialing next to his name, Minho spent five minutes glancing up and down the roster, looking for a girl who sounded magnetic.
It was his tardiness that would be his undoing. Limited seating in the discussion room meant being forced to sit next to the girl with hair that fell in copper waves and had a very sticky elbow.
"Pretty crazy what happened that one time in Physics, huh?" He said, feeling the words wilt from his tongue. Even as he leaned slightly in her direction to whisper, she matched his movement with an equal and opposite lean away from him.
"Let's not talk about it," She said, her lips curved in something that resembled a smile, without any of the warmth.
Minho felt a brief prick of resentment, a tiny stab at his pride that was, nevertheless, enough to start a slow leak.
They were having a debate on Linguistic Determinism when Minho learned how outspoken Sunyoung was. That was her name, as he'd read at the top of her quiz when he'd been copying answers. She never attacked the opposite side's opinions, but the sunny way in which she presented her argument was it's own sort of threatening, in that it made disagreeing with her feel like kicking a friendly and well-spoken puppy. But Minho was good at kicking, it was sort of his thing.
"If this Determinism thing is true," Minho started, shocking the rest of the room into silence. It was an unexpected deviance from what had been an entire quarter of him half-asleep, with his head bobbing groggily towards his lap. “How come there are things that exist, things that we can't explain? Just because we don't know what it is, or how it happened, doesn't mean it stops being there." The TA, visibly shaken, thanked him for his contribution, and Minho made a point to stare in what he hoped was a very meaningful way at Sunyoung. He wasn't good at subtlety, but she looked sufficiently flustered.
"Hey, Minho," She said after class, and he had to pop a strange and stupid bubble of glee that formed over the fact that she knew his name. "I know something really weird happened in Physics last quarter, sorry if you're messed up over it." Minho was confused by how Sunyoung's smile shifted to adapt to every possible situation, without her lips ever drooping. It was currently projecting a tight-lipped, apologetic awkwardness.
"It's cool, we can pretend it never happened. It's just, you're not a short-circuiting robot or something?" The thought had crossed his mind.
"If every Sunyoung that ever existed was actually a robot from Mars," She said, her smile curling into something more coy and self-satisfied, "Could you still call them Sunyoungs?"
"What?" He replied, not actually caring for an explanation.
ETNM 010: Natural History of Insects
Entomology was a throwaway course, one of those breadth things that most people with rigid four-year plans knocked out before they were juniors. But on the first day of class, there was Choi Minho, a gangly senior with a face that never quite strayed from boyish, his tiny head seeming lost stacked on top of his collection of lengthy limbs. He looked bored, flipping through his textbook in a way that suggested he was more considering it's potential as a pillow than as a tool for knowledge. But when he saw her, he brightened. This was something Minho did that troubled Sunyoung, because it betrayed an expectation of her she wasn't sure she could live up to.
"So this class is lame, huh?" She said, forcing a smile.
"Definitely. I'm surprised to see you here, though. Aren't girls grossed out by bugs, or something?" She was extremely grossed out by bugs.
"I don't know," Was what she said instead, and pulled out a chair. "They're ecologically important."
With every slide the professor showed, detailing the characteristics of various ant species, Sunyoung imagined squishing them with the soles of shoes. Monomorium pharaonis, demolished. Oecophylla margarine, crushed. Her rising urge to impress Choi Minho, stomped to death.
Sunyoung wasn't half as strong as she liked to imagine herself, a painful lesson she forgot but then re-learned every time she cried in public. Which was frequently. Sometimes she wondered if there was something pathologically awry to make her so leaky.
It had been a phone call from her twin, a perfectly innocuous "How are you, how is school, glad to hear it, I'm doing great." But all the while there was that sickening taste of competition poisoning the conversation, the almond residue of arsenic sibling rivalry. Sunyoung exaggerated the status of her cumulative GPA, which was actually pretty pathetic now that she'd realized how uninterested she was in science, and her twin bragged about her rich fiancé, who they’d both realized was uninterested in anything that wasn't himself.
There were few things more demoralizing than bursting into tears in the middle of a phone call with somebody whose pity she wanted nothing more than to avoid, except maybe bursting into tears in the middle of a hallway full of migrating college students. Sunyoung had done both, just to check it all off on her list of Ways to Spend Your Day Hating Yourself.
On-campus life, however, was frustratingly anti-self-pity. There wasn't really a good place to go to cry. Her roommate would ask questions even though she was already a little sick of Sunyoung's waterworks, the communal bathroom was full of smells that weren't exactly lifting to the spirits. So she ended up curled under the empty soccer field bleachers. Maybe a tiny part of herself, one she wasn't proud of-although she couldn't think of much she was proud of, at the moment-hoped that Choi Minho would appear over the top of the rickety metal seats. Her knight in shining deus ex machina. The charmingly disproportionate, popular, athletic boy who probably had a lot of casual sex with girls at parties whose legs looked less stubby in dresses than hers did.
He didn't appear. Eventually she dusted the dirt off her skirt, clutched her notebook to her chest, and sighed a very satisfied sigh. She felt an empty sort of zen.
She lost that zen later, during Entomology lab. "Hold on," Minho said from behind, and moved close enough to her back for her to feel his breath on the top of her head, warm and tickling her scalp. He plucked something off her shoulder and held it in front of her face: a grasshopper, writhing and dangling from one leg. It seemed, in her moment of panic, mutant in size.
She screamed, fell backwards into Minho's chest in her attempt to flee, and felt a jolt that almost knocked her unconscious. Then the lights flickered out.
BIO 030: Human Sexuality
"I thought you weren't afraid of bugs," He said, as they shuffled awkwardly through the doorway of the dormitory. There was no way to move that wasn't awkward, when the back of Sunyoung’s skull was supernaturally attached to his ribcage.
"I lied." He could only see the top of her head, so he couldn't tell for sure, but he bet she was smiling, like always. He was smiling too, dizzy, like he'd been hit with lightning. Nobody who they passed on the flight of stairs shared their excitement. They got disturbed stares instead, as the Minho-Sunyoung joint organism stumbled up the steps like drunk conjoined twins. He draped his arms over her shoulders, so that it looked more like a moving hug than a disfigurement.
By the time they managed to wobble into her (mercifully empty) room, they were giggling. There was something funny about their legs trying to synchronize when they were so closely pressed together that they bumped into each other, his knee hitting the back of hers so that her muscles went weak, causing them both to lurch forward. Their shared clumsiness was endearing to him, and endearment was something he didn't know how to deal with.
They collapsed sideways onto her bed, still fused together. "I kind of want to kiss you," He said. That sounded stupid, and he didn’t care.
"I don't think you can reach," She whispered, "when we're stuck like this." He tried, very lamely, to bend his upper half in a way that would grant him access to her lips, but only managed to bump her forehead with his chin. This set off another explosion of laughter, which was what Sunyoung's roommate walked in to.
The next morning, they awoke as separate people.
"So, I think we're either a government experiment, or soulmates," Minho proclaimed over coffee.
"Soulmates," Sunyoung repeated, amused. That was her amused smile. He was learning how to interpret her very limited facial sign language. "You think we're soulmates?"
"It's a possibility." He now felt sheepish. "You know, in those girly stories, where the heroine feels a shock whenever she touches her lover."
"You're the heroine, right? You’d make a great heroine," She said, laughing behind her hand. This hurt Minho a little because, although it sounded dumb even to him, he was being serious.
"Where's the frenulum?" Sunyoung asked. She was either nonplussed by the penis diagram that sat between them, waiting to be labeled, or was putting on a very convincing poker face. Minho was raging, hypocritically, over how inappropriate it was for a girl like Sunyoung to know what a frenulum was.
"It's, uh. Here." He pointed.
"Are you embarrassed? It's just anatomy" She said, and he hated her for being so cool about it. He felt like it was his dick on the table, pinned down for her observation and careful labeling. He imagined her writing "S H A F T" along the length of it with her purple pen. He also hated that this made him slightly hard.
"Can we do this later? I promised coach I'd clock some extra practice with him," He lied, adjusting his pants.
"You also promised me we'd study for this final," She said and slammed the textbook shut. "Does it really bother you that much?" She leaned in towards him and her polite little smile was disturbingly at odds with the words that slipped out of it. Frenulum, she mouthed. Sexual intercourse. It was the most clinical dirty talk he'd ever experienced, yet, he was embarrassed to note, affective.
"Yeah. I gotta...go."
Minho was so drunk he was confused by the vibration of his phone in his pocket. Why weren't you at the library, did you forget? He had remembered their study date, but had gone to a party instead. It was one of those embarrassing parties full of vomiting freshmen, where everybody got shitfaced just because it made it easier to pretend that you were having fun. Girls in stilettos they couldn't walk in and girls who would put out for anyone, especially a senior with long legs and a soccer scholarship. Yet, with every shade of lipstick added to the palette on the collar of his shirt, he thought about electromagnetism.
I kind of want to have sexual intercourse with you, he typed. He felt bold, deleted the "kind of".
SOC 141: Men and Masculinity
Minho had her blouse half-unbuttoned when she yelled at him to stop. There was a bolt of panic that originated from where his knee touched her hip and traveled up to her throat.
"What's wrong? Oh god, do you not want this? I don't-"
"We should think about what we're doing." She blew a strand of messy hair out of her face. Minho's bedroom was impossibly warm, a sauna of bad decisions, and his sheets smelled faintly of sweat, just like him. "Our bodies have this nasty little tendency to stick together at random moments. Think about what could go wrong with this." She imagined some really compromising positions to be stuck in, ones that would make walking, among other things, impossible.
Minho leaned back, still pressing his fingers into her waist, but he looked defeated. "Then what do we do?"
"Nothing."
She hadn't meant to stare like this, hadn't meant to sit for so long on the hill and let the grass stains ruin her new white dress, but she'd seen the team practicing and wanted to observe Minho in his element.
"That girl is watching you, is she your girlfriend?" Sunyoung heard one of his teammates ask. She averted her attention to the book in her lap, but felt herself tense up. This was a question she wasn't sure she knew the answer to. She knew something was wrong when Minho's laugh was weirdly high-pitched and sputtered like an old car.
"She's in one of my classes, I don't really know her."
And there it was, what she'd been afraid of. He was embarrassed of her. She wasn't cute enough for somebody like him to be associated with. She picked up her things and when Minho stared at her hopelessly, eyes wide, she flashed him a friendly smile that was so contrary to how she felt that she wanted to hit herself.
That night her twin called, and Sunyoung didn't pick up. She just couldn't stand another hostile not-fight, didn't feel like she could force her aggression into passivity. The fact was that even though they were cursed with the same shortness and the same forgettable face, men preferred women like her sister more. She knew how to be fragile in a way that was appealing instead of a liability. She knew how to make people feel comfortable around her, while Sunyoung was too tightly wound to know how to be comfortable around herself. Sunyoung was supposed to be the smart twin, the kind one, the one who didn't get involved with boys who only wanted her for the novelty of their body parts sometimes being welded to her body parts.
It was laughable to imagine Choi Minho as her soulmate. Even her twin, who in theory shared more with her than anyone else, was the object of some very complicated and conflicting feelings. There was nothing for her to do besides forget about it all and get back to work. If she couldn't be proud of herself, she could at least avoid her parent's disappointment.
Yet, a part of her couldn't stop thinking about Minho being a great heroine. She remembered the way his usually deep voice had transformed into a shriek the first time it had happened with their elbows, in the middle of the physics lecture hall, and she laughed despite herself. Why was she the one he was charged to attract, and not anybody else?
CRWT 057A: Introduction to Fiction
She said to do nothing. She put her shirt back on, and he did nothing. She picked up her bag and left, and he did nothing. He stayed awake and stared at the wall for five hours.
He would make them rubber full-body suits to insulate them from the electricity, he thought. He decided he would even be willing to deal with being stuck together forever. Because nothing was the worst thing he’d ever felt.
----
She took his hand, pulling him up onto her horse. Her armor rattled as he clung to her back, arms snug around her waist.
"Are you shaking?” Prince Sunyoung asked. She felt him nod against her shoulder. He was very delicate. "Worry not, Page Minho. I will protect thee with my life."
PSYC 013: Skepticism and Pseudoscience in Psychology
Minho was on his way to the gym when he caught a glimpse of a girl, he knew it was her from the way she walked. Those long strides she took despite her height. His ears roared with tinnitus and his heart beat erratically, rattling around in his chest, as he sprinted to catch up. He couldn't even write it off as fatigue; his running stamina was no joke.
"HEY!" He yelled, causing half the campus to look at him in a way that probably would have made him embarrassed if he could find it in him to care. Sunyoung looked horrified, even tried to bolt, but he already had her by the wrist. It had been about two months now since he'd last seen her, he'd even forgotten about the unexplained magnetic flux between them.
"You're letting you hair grow out," She said, biting her lip, looking up at him. She made him feel like a skyscraper, but bending down would make him feel like her dad, which was worse.
"You dyed yours black. Looks great." She did look great. He was used to seeing her in heels and skirts, but in sneakers and cotton pants she looked athletic and natural. He vaguely remembered her saying something about playing softball in high school, and now he could see it in her. The only thing that was off was that she wasn't smiling, but he figured he could change that.
"You're graduating soon, huh?" Sunyoung said, stirring her coffee.
"This quarter." It was a scary thing to think about, so Minho made it a habit not to.
"Wow. What's awaiting the great Choi Minho out in the Real World? A professional sports career? A boring office job?"
"A relationship with you?" He said, and felt like the cheesiest person alive. Not his finest coffee shop pick-up line. She took a moment to speak, and Minho wondered if she was making him wallow in his shame.
"Listen. You don't want me. I try too hard, I'm not cute enough." She was wrong, wrong, wrong.
"You don't try too hard. I try too hard. I'm so embarrassing, I say really stupid things like that winner just now because I like you too much. I like you way more than you like me, and it sucks."
The acoustic indie music filtering through the speakers filled the silence that followed. It was some song sung in English, a jumble of foreign syllables, and it was only magnifying the sensation of not understanding anything.
When she finally replied, she stared at her feet. "You're not embarrassing. You're the guy all the other guys want to be." He had to laugh outright at that.
"You don't even know, Sunyoung. None of the jokes I tell are ever as funny out loud as they are in my head, I dance like my alcoholic uncle at a wedding, and making out is the only social interaction I can have with a girl without feeling like a dumbass. And only if I'm drunk." He reached out and fumbled for her hand underneath the table, only to miss and grab her knee, which served to compound his point.
DNCE 068: Somatic Techniques and Experimental Anatomy
There were a few complications, a few hiccups that made what were ordinary tasks for other couples more troublesome for them. There was the incident in which their lips got stuck together, which lead to a good hour of breathing frantically from their noses and angling their heads upward to reach oxygen, like two people caught under a capsized boat. Then there were times like the one where their interlocked hands became temporarily impossible to separate, which hadn't been so bad.
They learned to work with brevity. Lips barely touching a collarbone, the tease of finger beds on thighs. Touches that moved quickly across the skin, warm and sticky and static, but insulated by the promise of more to come.
She wrote equations in her notes, and she balanced them. Current over resistance, distance over time, change in Choi Minho multiplied by change in Park Sunyoung.
Minho/Luna
PG-13, 3776
Learn to love what you're stuck to.
(for firequakes for unniesanta)
PHYS 135A: Electromagnetism
Sunyoung didn't like Physics. It was too confrontational; the study of collisions, friction, gravity. She didn't think of her life as a vector, didn’t have enough direction for that. More often than not she studied her classmates instead of the angry equations on the board. The angle of Jo Jinyoung’s over-plucked eyebrows. The spring constant of the ballpoint pen that Kim Changsun clicked constantly.
There was a boy in Sunyoung's class who dragged dirt into the lecture hall with his sneakers. There would be a trail of large brown prints, the zig-zag pattern on the bottom of his Nikes leading to the third row from the back, which was where he always sat. Sometimes he would come in late with his cleats tied together and dangling over his shoulder, mud streaked across his nose like he'd been fighting the grass instead of playing on it.
He slid into the seat next to her on one of his late days, music pulsing from the side of his earphones that hung in his lap. "Did he say what's going to be on the test?" He asked, gesturing with his head towards the professor. He smelled like dirt and cheap cologne, with an underlying hint of sweat that Sunyoung was, surprisingly, not repulsed by. Eau de Jock. She pointed to an equation in her notes.
He shifted in his chair to get a better look, and their elbows connected.
She felt a jolt. Once, when she was seven, Sunyoung's twin sister had convinced her to stick a malfunctioning string of Christmas lights into her mouth, and that was what this felt like, a bite of electricity, and then numbness. The boy made to apologize, mouth half-open, until he tried to pull away and found himself physically unable to. Their elbows were stuck, conjoined, and pins and needles crawled their way up her arm.
PHIL 010: Language, The Mind, and Reality
Minho knew she was in his discussion, the short girl who smiled too much and tended to become inexplicably fused to his body. He averted his eyes when she walked in, pretended to be fascinated by the second hand of the clock running in circles. Part of him wanted to try again, to see if maybe they could attach their whole arms this time, but the other, more rational part knew that he didn't want to risk it being permanent. She wasn't ugly, even an understated kind of attractive, but he definitely didn't see her in an I-wish-our-limbs-were-attached-forever sort of way.
"If it were discovered that every cat that has ever existed was actually a robot from Mars,” The TA began, "could we still call them 'cats'?" The sign-in sheet had been passed to him and, after initialing next to his name, Minho spent five minutes glancing up and down the roster, looking for a girl who sounded magnetic.
It was his tardiness that would be his undoing. Limited seating in the discussion room meant being forced to sit next to the girl with hair that fell in copper waves and had a very sticky elbow.
"Pretty crazy what happened that one time in Physics, huh?" He said, feeling the words wilt from his tongue. Even as he leaned slightly in her direction to whisper, she matched his movement with an equal and opposite lean away from him.
"Let's not talk about it," She said, her lips curved in something that resembled a smile, without any of the warmth.
Minho felt a brief prick of resentment, a tiny stab at his pride that was, nevertheless, enough to start a slow leak.
They were having a debate on Linguistic Determinism when Minho learned how outspoken Sunyoung was. That was her name, as he'd read at the top of her quiz when he'd been copying answers. She never attacked the opposite side's opinions, but the sunny way in which she presented her argument was it's own sort of threatening, in that it made disagreeing with her feel like kicking a friendly and well-spoken puppy. But Minho was good at kicking, it was sort of his thing.
"If this Determinism thing is true," Minho started, shocking the rest of the room into silence. It was an unexpected deviance from what had been an entire quarter of him half-asleep, with his head bobbing groggily towards his lap. “How come there are things that exist, things that we can't explain? Just because we don't know what it is, or how it happened, doesn't mean it stops being there." The TA, visibly shaken, thanked him for his contribution, and Minho made a point to stare in what he hoped was a very meaningful way at Sunyoung. He wasn't good at subtlety, but she looked sufficiently flustered.
"Hey, Minho," She said after class, and he had to pop a strange and stupid bubble of glee that formed over the fact that she knew his name. "I know something really weird happened in Physics last quarter, sorry if you're messed up over it." Minho was confused by how Sunyoung's smile shifted to adapt to every possible situation, without her lips ever drooping. It was currently projecting a tight-lipped, apologetic awkwardness.
"It's cool, we can pretend it never happened. It's just, you're not a short-circuiting robot or something?" The thought had crossed his mind.
"If every Sunyoung that ever existed was actually a robot from Mars," She said, her smile curling into something more coy and self-satisfied, "Could you still call them Sunyoungs?"
"What?" He replied, not actually caring for an explanation.
ETNM 010: Natural History of Insects
Entomology was a throwaway course, one of those breadth things that most people with rigid four-year plans knocked out before they were juniors. But on the first day of class, there was Choi Minho, a gangly senior with a face that never quite strayed from boyish, his tiny head seeming lost stacked on top of his collection of lengthy limbs. He looked bored, flipping through his textbook in a way that suggested he was more considering it's potential as a pillow than as a tool for knowledge. But when he saw her, he brightened. This was something Minho did that troubled Sunyoung, because it betrayed an expectation of her she wasn't sure she could live up to.
"So this class is lame, huh?" She said, forcing a smile.
"Definitely. I'm surprised to see you here, though. Aren't girls grossed out by bugs, or something?" She was extremely grossed out by bugs.
"I don't know," Was what she said instead, and pulled out a chair. "They're ecologically important."
With every slide the professor showed, detailing the characteristics of various ant species, Sunyoung imagined squishing them with the soles of shoes. Monomorium pharaonis, demolished. Oecophylla margarine, crushed. Her rising urge to impress Choi Minho, stomped to death.
Sunyoung wasn't half as strong as she liked to imagine herself, a painful lesson she forgot but then re-learned every time she cried in public. Which was frequently. Sometimes she wondered if there was something pathologically awry to make her so leaky.
It had been a phone call from her twin, a perfectly innocuous "How are you, how is school, glad to hear it, I'm doing great." But all the while there was that sickening taste of competition poisoning the conversation, the almond residue of arsenic sibling rivalry. Sunyoung exaggerated the status of her cumulative GPA, which was actually pretty pathetic now that she'd realized how uninterested she was in science, and her twin bragged about her rich fiancé, who they’d both realized was uninterested in anything that wasn't himself.
There were few things more demoralizing than bursting into tears in the middle of a phone call with somebody whose pity she wanted nothing more than to avoid, except maybe bursting into tears in the middle of a hallway full of migrating college students. Sunyoung had done both, just to check it all off on her list of Ways to Spend Your Day Hating Yourself.
On-campus life, however, was frustratingly anti-self-pity. There wasn't really a good place to go to cry. Her roommate would ask questions even though she was already a little sick of Sunyoung's waterworks, the communal bathroom was full of smells that weren't exactly lifting to the spirits. So she ended up curled under the empty soccer field bleachers. Maybe a tiny part of herself, one she wasn't proud of-although she couldn't think of much she was proud of, at the moment-hoped that Choi Minho would appear over the top of the rickety metal seats. Her knight in shining deus ex machina. The charmingly disproportionate, popular, athletic boy who probably had a lot of casual sex with girls at parties whose legs looked less stubby in dresses than hers did.
He didn't appear. Eventually she dusted the dirt off her skirt, clutched her notebook to her chest, and sighed a very satisfied sigh. She felt an empty sort of zen.
She lost that zen later, during Entomology lab. "Hold on," Minho said from behind, and moved close enough to her back for her to feel his breath on the top of her head, warm and tickling her scalp. He plucked something off her shoulder and held it in front of her face: a grasshopper, writhing and dangling from one leg. It seemed, in her moment of panic, mutant in size.
She screamed, fell backwards into Minho's chest in her attempt to flee, and felt a jolt that almost knocked her unconscious. Then the lights flickered out.
BIO 030: Human Sexuality
"I thought you weren't afraid of bugs," He said, as they shuffled awkwardly through the doorway of the dormitory. There was no way to move that wasn't awkward, when the back of Sunyoung’s skull was supernaturally attached to his ribcage.
"I lied." He could only see the top of her head, so he couldn't tell for sure, but he bet she was smiling, like always. He was smiling too, dizzy, like he'd been hit with lightning. Nobody who they passed on the flight of stairs shared their excitement. They got disturbed stares instead, as the Minho-Sunyoung joint organism stumbled up the steps like drunk conjoined twins. He draped his arms over her shoulders, so that it looked more like a moving hug than a disfigurement.
By the time they managed to wobble into her (mercifully empty) room, they were giggling. There was something funny about their legs trying to synchronize when they were so closely pressed together that they bumped into each other, his knee hitting the back of hers so that her muscles went weak, causing them both to lurch forward. Their shared clumsiness was endearing to him, and endearment was something he didn't know how to deal with.
They collapsed sideways onto her bed, still fused together. "I kind of want to kiss you," He said. That sounded stupid, and he didn’t care.
"I don't think you can reach," She whispered, "when we're stuck like this." He tried, very lamely, to bend his upper half in a way that would grant him access to her lips, but only managed to bump her forehead with his chin. This set off another explosion of laughter, which was what Sunyoung's roommate walked in to.
The next morning, they awoke as separate people.
"So, I think we're either a government experiment, or soulmates," Minho proclaimed over coffee.
"Soulmates," Sunyoung repeated, amused. That was her amused smile. He was learning how to interpret her very limited facial sign language. "You think we're soulmates?"
"It's a possibility." He now felt sheepish. "You know, in those girly stories, where the heroine feels a shock whenever she touches her lover."
"You're the heroine, right? You’d make a great heroine," She said, laughing behind her hand. This hurt Minho a little because, although it sounded dumb even to him, he was being serious.
"Where's the frenulum?" Sunyoung asked. She was either nonplussed by the penis diagram that sat between them, waiting to be labeled, or was putting on a very convincing poker face. Minho was raging, hypocritically, over how inappropriate it was for a girl like Sunyoung to know what a frenulum was.
"It's, uh. Here." He pointed.
"Are you embarrassed? It's just anatomy" She said, and he hated her for being so cool about it. He felt like it was his dick on the table, pinned down for her observation and careful labeling. He imagined her writing "S H A F T" along the length of it with her purple pen. He also hated that this made him slightly hard.
"Can we do this later? I promised coach I'd clock some extra practice with him," He lied, adjusting his pants.
"You also promised me we'd study for this final," She said and slammed the textbook shut. "Does it really bother you that much?" She leaned in towards him and her polite little smile was disturbingly at odds with the words that slipped out of it. Frenulum, she mouthed. Sexual intercourse. It was the most clinical dirty talk he'd ever experienced, yet, he was embarrassed to note, affective.
"Yeah. I gotta...go."
Minho was so drunk he was confused by the vibration of his phone in his pocket. Why weren't you at the library, did you forget? He had remembered their study date, but had gone to a party instead. It was one of those embarrassing parties full of vomiting freshmen, where everybody got shitfaced just because it made it easier to pretend that you were having fun. Girls in stilettos they couldn't walk in and girls who would put out for anyone, especially a senior with long legs and a soccer scholarship. Yet, with every shade of lipstick added to the palette on the collar of his shirt, he thought about electromagnetism.
I kind of want to have sexual intercourse with you, he typed. He felt bold, deleted the "kind of".
SOC 141: Men and Masculinity
Minho had her blouse half-unbuttoned when she yelled at him to stop. There was a bolt of panic that originated from where his knee touched her hip and traveled up to her throat.
"What's wrong? Oh god, do you not want this? I don't-"
"We should think about what we're doing." She blew a strand of messy hair out of her face. Minho's bedroom was impossibly warm, a sauna of bad decisions, and his sheets smelled faintly of sweat, just like him. "Our bodies have this nasty little tendency to stick together at random moments. Think about what could go wrong with this." She imagined some really compromising positions to be stuck in, ones that would make walking, among other things, impossible.
Minho leaned back, still pressing his fingers into her waist, but he looked defeated. "Then what do we do?"
"Nothing."
She hadn't meant to stare like this, hadn't meant to sit for so long on the hill and let the grass stains ruin her new white dress, but she'd seen the team practicing and wanted to observe Minho in his element.
"That girl is watching you, is she your girlfriend?" Sunyoung heard one of his teammates ask. She averted her attention to the book in her lap, but felt herself tense up. This was a question she wasn't sure she knew the answer to. She knew something was wrong when Minho's laugh was weirdly high-pitched and sputtered like an old car.
"She's in one of my classes, I don't really know her."
And there it was, what she'd been afraid of. He was embarrassed of her. She wasn't cute enough for somebody like him to be associated with. She picked up her things and when Minho stared at her hopelessly, eyes wide, she flashed him a friendly smile that was so contrary to how she felt that she wanted to hit herself.
That night her twin called, and Sunyoung didn't pick up. She just couldn't stand another hostile not-fight, didn't feel like she could force her aggression into passivity. The fact was that even though they were cursed with the same shortness and the same forgettable face, men preferred women like her sister more. She knew how to be fragile in a way that was appealing instead of a liability. She knew how to make people feel comfortable around her, while Sunyoung was too tightly wound to know how to be comfortable around herself. Sunyoung was supposed to be the smart twin, the kind one, the one who didn't get involved with boys who only wanted her for the novelty of their body parts sometimes being welded to her body parts.
It was laughable to imagine Choi Minho as her soulmate. Even her twin, who in theory shared more with her than anyone else, was the object of some very complicated and conflicting feelings. There was nothing for her to do besides forget about it all and get back to work. If she couldn't be proud of herself, she could at least avoid her parent's disappointment.
Yet, a part of her couldn't stop thinking about Minho being a great heroine. She remembered the way his usually deep voice had transformed into a shriek the first time it had happened with their elbows, in the middle of the physics lecture hall, and she laughed despite herself. Why was she the one he was charged to attract, and not anybody else?
CRWT 057A: Introduction to Fiction
She said to do nothing. She put her shirt back on, and he did nothing. She picked up her bag and left, and he did nothing. He stayed awake and stared at the wall for five hours.
He would make them rubber full-body suits to insulate them from the electricity, he thought. He decided he would even be willing to deal with being stuck together forever. Because nothing was the worst thing he’d ever felt.
----
She took his hand, pulling him up onto her horse. Her armor rattled as he clung to her back, arms snug around her waist.
"Are you shaking?” Prince Sunyoung asked. She felt him nod against her shoulder. He was very delicate. "Worry not, Page Minho. I will protect thee with my life."
PSYC 013: Skepticism and Pseudoscience in Psychology
Minho was on his way to the gym when he caught a glimpse of a girl, he knew it was her from the way she walked. Those long strides she took despite her height. His ears roared with tinnitus and his heart beat erratically, rattling around in his chest, as he sprinted to catch up. He couldn't even write it off as fatigue; his running stamina was no joke.
"HEY!" He yelled, causing half the campus to look at him in a way that probably would have made him embarrassed if he could find it in him to care. Sunyoung looked horrified, even tried to bolt, but he already had her by the wrist. It had been about two months now since he'd last seen her, he'd even forgotten about the unexplained magnetic flux between them.
"You're letting you hair grow out," She said, biting her lip, looking up at him. She made him feel like a skyscraper, but bending down would make him feel like her dad, which was worse.
"You dyed yours black. Looks great." She did look great. He was used to seeing her in heels and skirts, but in sneakers and cotton pants she looked athletic and natural. He vaguely remembered her saying something about playing softball in high school, and now he could see it in her. The only thing that was off was that she wasn't smiling, but he figured he could change that.
"You're graduating soon, huh?" Sunyoung said, stirring her coffee.
"This quarter." It was a scary thing to think about, so Minho made it a habit not to.
"Wow. What's awaiting the great Choi Minho out in the Real World? A professional sports career? A boring office job?"
"A relationship with you?" He said, and felt like the cheesiest person alive. Not his finest coffee shop pick-up line. She took a moment to speak, and Minho wondered if she was making him wallow in his shame.
"Listen. You don't want me. I try too hard, I'm not cute enough." She was wrong, wrong, wrong.
"You don't try too hard. I try too hard. I'm so embarrassing, I say really stupid things like that winner just now because I like you too much. I like you way more than you like me, and it sucks."
The acoustic indie music filtering through the speakers filled the silence that followed. It was some song sung in English, a jumble of foreign syllables, and it was only magnifying the sensation of not understanding anything.
When she finally replied, she stared at her feet. "You're not embarrassing. You're the guy all the other guys want to be." He had to laugh outright at that.
"You don't even know, Sunyoung. None of the jokes I tell are ever as funny out loud as they are in my head, I dance like my alcoholic uncle at a wedding, and making out is the only social interaction I can have with a girl without feeling like a dumbass. And only if I'm drunk." He reached out and fumbled for her hand underneath the table, only to miss and grab her knee, which served to compound his point.
DNCE 068: Somatic Techniques and Experimental Anatomy
There were a few complications, a few hiccups that made what were ordinary tasks for other couples more troublesome for them. There was the incident in which their lips got stuck together, which lead to a good hour of breathing frantically from their noses and angling their heads upward to reach oxygen, like two people caught under a capsized boat. Then there were times like the one where their interlocked hands became temporarily impossible to separate, which hadn't been so bad.
They learned to work with brevity. Lips barely touching a collarbone, the tease of finger beds on thighs. Touches that moved quickly across the skin, warm and sticky and static, but insulated by the promise of more to come.
She wrote equations in her notes, and she balanced them. Current over resistance, distance over time, change in Choi Minho multiplied by change in Park Sunyoung.