PART & PARCEL

“Is it too late?” Sana asks, and here’s how it always starts with her.

Nevermind that it’s not a question in search of an answer. A normal person could, should, text you. Hey, what’s up? or something equally inconspicuous before turning up the dial, are you busy? can I, like, come over?

Instead, she’s at your doorstep again, twirling a bundle of honey-blonde between her fingertips as if she doesn’t know what all that does to people. Some people say, incorrectly, that these are the hours of the night shared with ghosts. And to that you say: No, these hours belong to Sana, clearly, and apparently nobody fucking else.

Now in a way, you do get it. It’d be easier to turn back over in your bed and ignore the elegant simplicity of a text message, or one step beyond that, do the unthinkable and finally tell her no, but when she’s standing there - there with that face, like a thousand different excuses or a million little reasons why she needs something from you, right now - and all she has to do is push her lips together, eyebrows going high-

It is a bit like magic, after all, this feeling when she comes around.

Everything that happened before - her visits, the first one and then the next - no matter how impossible, gets washed away, and suddenly all you have is her. Her voice, her hair, and a sneaking suspicion that the time apart really isn’t such a bad thing, because you don’t always have a guess as to what comes next.

Of course, you were always going to let her in.

“I saw the lights were on,” she adds, starting to shrug off her coat like she knows you will.

“I mean, I’m here,” you say, non-committal.

“Yeah. I can see that.”

The door’s half open and the only substantial hesitation you have is when you peer over her shoulder. There’s another girl, propping herself up against the doorframe, with a pretty head of glossy, sable hair falling gracefully down her shoulders, and she looks at least a few years younger than Sana. You smile cautiously at her before giving Sana another, much longer glance. In response, you receive a wink that’s as subtle as a brick through a glass window (which only raises more questions). You ask the one that seems most important.

What else would Sana, of all people, possibly want to bring you if not some plaything or another. You’ve seen it all: girls who liked her money, girls who liked her body, girls who just flat-out liked girls, whatever. The dynamic always seemed to be, as long as everyone is having a good time, nothing to get hung up about - because at the end of the night, everyone comes around to Sana again.

And she comes around to you.

Why question it.

“This is a little… irregular,” you say with a nod of your chin, as you step back from the door. “Who’s the plus one?”

Sana motions the girl in with a sweep of her hand and throws you another disarmingly flirtatious smile - the same one that’d first left you utterly hooked by this strange person, who had, when you first met, walked into your life for five minutes, then fucked your lights out the way she wanted. She goes further with this, of course, teasing a warm smile and slanting an eyebrow.

“I figured I’d bring you a gift,” she coos, in this sultry, dusky sing-song of a voice that really needs no followup whatsoever, other than maybe take my clothes off right now, as she makes a show of how she’s pushing her shoulders back, like there’s an audience to be impressed with the curve of her bust. “Since we were celebrating.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the occasion?”

“Whatever the hell you’d like,” Sana chirps.

With that, she takes you by the collar. And even though the girl she brought is in the middle of, like, peering around curiously in your foyer, Sana leans up on the balls of her feet and kisses you hard. It’s a real kiss - no preamble - which is sort of funny, given you would have been more than okay with some. So, naturally, you’re caught entirely off-guard. It takes a full ten, fifteen seconds of feeling her hot little mouth pressed insistently up against yours, your mind gone blank with the suddenness of the moment. Your body taking it for granted.

Meanwhile, the other girl blinks - long, dark lashes batting the curve of her cheekbones slowly until Sana has moved to stand in front of her with the full, earnest intention to cup her jaw, tilt her head down a smidge, and kiss her too (very thoroughly, also, in her own way).

Sana lets the girl go with a sharp draw of air and a peck. Then she looks at you, just this side of playful. The way her teeth flash over her bottom lip suggests how she’s enjoying, to her bones, this state of affairs: a dalliance with control, with desire, where she can flaunt it.

She tells you to relax, unwind, which you suppose is code for taking another of Sana’s friends and bending her over every horizontal surface in your flat and fucking someone the way you’ve wanted for the last however-long it’s been since Sana dropped back into your life. You’ve done as much. Some rotating cast of characters: Mina, Chaeyoung, Nayeon, the raven haired girl with the perfect tits; some names and faces starting to run together the more Sana pops up at your place with a girl under one arm, usually looking half bored and half shy - or at least putting up some pretense that might justify Sana telling them to strip down while she’s already eyeing you with this look like she’s wondering which article of clothing you’ll be ripping off her first.

“Does she have a name?” you ask, with a nod vaguely in her direction. Of course it’s a loaded question. What’s her name doesn’t matter. You don’t know most of their names.

But when you do a double-take, remembering to steal a good look, you’re not sure you’ve ever seen anyone pull off that perfect little white dress quite the way she does - the kind that goes right up the back, tucked under the neck, sleeves coming to a neat point across her fingers. Sana may or may not have a thing for pretty girls in cute dresses, but this is, without question, the most obvious bribe you’ve ever witnessed in your life.

Sana’s still smirking - so much for being considerate, you think for a second, until you’ve got a dainty hand stretched into yours like you’re brushing up with royalty. And well, maybe you’re getting a better look now that she isn’t bathed in the calm, assured wickedness that two A.M. might only ever know - the dark curling like wind around her fingers and down the lines of her spine, cajoling.

She is gorgeous.

And she says -

“Chou Tzuyu,” in this charming little voice that’s even more mesmerizing than you anticipated, this taut thread winding itself up between the two of you. She says her name with a gentle sigh, a light in her eyes that you know, intimately, not to trust, but you get the sense that she’d rather you make an exception for her - or at least for the night. “Everyone calls me Tzuyu.”

You feel a squeeze at your fingers, an anxious reminder from Sana’s thumb, as if she feels the reverie in which you’ve lapsed. It draws you back, just slightly so.

“Tzuyu,” you say, taking mental note of the faint smile that shadows in at the corner of her mouth when you do. “How much do you know?”

She twists in Sana’s direction, and oh, look how eager and innocent and coquettish Tzuyu’s making herself in front of her, smiling. What do I say, the gesture is asking. You can see her effort to hold back a giggle or two as she bites her lip, trying, as all the pretty girls who come through these doors often try, to come up with something cute and modest and small that’ll allow you and Sana to picture exactly the right thing. You can tell when a person is not used to having an audience.

“I know Sana…” Tzuyu’s voice trails as she gives Sana a furtive glance. “She talks about you a lot. And I figured, you know.”

“What? That we were good friends?”

“Sure,” Tzuyu laughs to herself lightly again. “Whatever makes it easier.”

Sana has her fingers threaded beneath Tzuyu’s chin, studying her like she’s an artifact that belongs behind glass. Expensive. One of a kind. And oh-so-excessively fragile.

The way Sana touches her, she may be trying to prove the point, guiding her body’s angles and edges towards whatever form she sees fit, with just fingertips and the slightest tug, showing you exactly how malleable the girl can be. The look on Tzuyu’s face is hardly discomfited when her dress slides past the dips of her shoulders or the slope of her waist, when the fabric gets crumpled in Sana’s hand like the most expensive balled-up tissues in the universe. You can’t decide what animal comes to mind: perhaps a deer, some cute, unknowingly doomed elk.

“No underwear,” you note, watching.

Sana draws herself a little closer to Tzuyu with an appreciative gaze, lips gently landing at her shoulders, neck.

“Why bother?” Tzuyu muses. “What were we going to use them for?”

A pull here, a tug there, and the dress puddles around Tzuyu’s feet, silk shimmering like the inky dark of a starless sky. And just shy of a pedestal and perhaps a fucking moonbeam, she’s the spitting image of perfection: porcelain skin stretching out over a masterwork of curves and bone and muscle. A sculpture, a study in the form that so frequently leaves people just absolutely dumbstruck and thirsty in their wake.

Sana trails her hand around the width of her hip - drawing your eye along the skin of her leg, up and around the perfectly curved thigh - stopping to splay her fingers just so at the base of her spine, as if in demonstration of ownership. Like this: mine.

“Don’t get it confused,” Sana tells you. “The whole naive innocence thing is a total fucking misdirection.”

“Tzuyu,” you say again, this time noticing the way it feels in your mouth, syllables sweet and sticking to its roof like honey - maybe something more of an excuse to move forward and touch her yourself, palm her face, brush your thumb over her bottom lip. A taste, something subtle but intense, spreads to the back of your throat, the moment her teeth graze gently over its pad. “Is that true?”

“Are you asking me what kind of girl I am?”

“I didn’t put it exactly like that.”

“Just answer, sweetheart,” Sana says, brow quirked in a faux-display of nonchalance, fingers still pressed, spreading gently at her neck. She’s enjoying this a little too much. Though, you’re enjoying this too. It doesn’t have to be an either-or kind of scenario.

“It’s better if you say it,” she adds after a second of consideration, and even though it’s obvious by now she’s only prodding and that this is a foregone conclusion, Tzuyu puts an emphatic twitch in her lips - red, wet, a vision in crimson - like the thought is deeply troubling and will likely require lots and lots of thorough explanation later.

“Fine, okay, in that case,” Tzuyu starts with a weary sigh, and then with a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it flash of a smirk, there’s no way anyone’s buying any of this, “I’ll say: I’m whatever kind of girl you want me to be.”

Sana was right, and she didn’t even need to go so far as to say it. It’s clear - you want her.