Except You, Love

• Bonus Chapter: 3 •

You are my prologue, my epilogue

Lisa has plans. It involves a stainless steel mixer. Or so Chaeyoung thinks. Either way, college is hard and the real world is waiting, but for one day, it's just them—happy and together.

❁❁❁

February 14, 2008

Undergrad, senior year is a fluctuating, temporal thing. At times, it comes and goes in a blur in a rush towards imminent adulthood. At others, it slows to the minutiae of work, study, love. Where highschool felt like one care-free note, college hit several different registers all at once. The demands of growing up—of going somewhere, becoming someone, doing something significant—pushes and pulls them in conflicting directions, and sometimes trying speeds.

Right now, it slows to the meandering of lines emerging from the page of Chaeyoung's sketchpad. Her lips pull up at the scenes of their morning being laid out in strokes of graphite—a tangle of hair and bedsheets and soft curves. Yellow used sparingly to highlight where sun kisses along edges of a hip or breast or shoulder.

It is the lazy and hazy kind of morning in the dead of winter that necessitates sleeping in and extra cuddles for warmth. This semester has been hectic, schedules overloaded for a last push before Spring Break, but today was long ago marked off by Lisa on their shared Google calendar as dedicated to staying in sweats and doing absolutely nothing.

For a short while, they do precisely nothing but enjoy the simple pleasure of the other's company. Without purpose. Unfettered indulgence in an aimless, comforting co-presence.

With Lisa wrapped around her body to siphon off Chaeyoung's heat, the early hours have been spent burrowing in bed and each other, pushing off papers and projects and deadlines. Feet hooked at the ankles, knees and elbows tucked this way and that, fingers skating and stroking in search of open skin. Gazes in search of smiles. Doors and lovers' secrets opened by a familiar touch or a feather of words. Years compacted into minutes and muscle memory. The outside world delayed and waiting.

Snow had come down heavily on the overnight shift, bringing out ploughs and their loud engines early, before New Yorkers had their first coffee, to make the commute easier for the urbanites to dive into traffic and the daily metropolitan rush. The sky has calmed down since, a light curtain of white scrolling past their window at a more leisurely pace now—a pretty backdrop to pretty green eyes Chaeyoung can't stop staring into and pretty rosy lips that she can't stop kissing.

Their favourite music flits in the air, a hum from the vintage record player carrying sweetness in ambient streams. Atmospheric and choral and a little ethereal, not unlike the weightlessness of being a lot in love.

So, Chaeyoung has wanted to keep drawing and keep kissing.

But Lisa has plans.

No intent to idle the day away in this cocoon of soft sighs and muffled voices and breathy laughs that Chaeyoung is wholly resistant to leave. No amount of protest or bribery can persuade her otherwise. Not even when the sketching is paused in favour of Chaeyoung straddling her, desire as bare as Chaeyoung's upper half on which Lisa's gaze fixates. The prospect of guaranteed sex only causes a mild dent to steely resolve.

When roving hands and bucking hips and wet inner thighs risk steering them off-course of her day's itinerary, Lisa promptly steers them out of bed and stations Chaeyoung on the couch, like an adult time-out.

"There better be a good reason, Manobal," Chaeyoung challenges, eyes narrowed and lips thin, "to say no to this."

"There is." Lisa gulps, sounding less sure when her eyes flicker over Chaeyoung's chest where her arms are crossed in complaint, hoodie back on. Her gaze lingers at her last name emblazoned across the college sweater Chaeyoung has long co-opted as her own. "It's a surprise."