WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY

It’s not even twelve hours apart - the first time you exchange pleasantries, all careless and untroubled, to the moment you’ve got Heejin in the back of a taxi and your hand so far up her skirt that it has you emptying your wallet at the end of the ride and slapping the biggest tip you’ve ever left into the cabbie’s open palm, silence full of disapproval.

It isn’t planned or anything.

Heejin doesn’t simply wake up one morning with a craving for your cock. It just sorta happens.

And then It happens again a week later. The third time just a few days after that.

The fourth time, the two of you barely spend a night apart before Heejin’s back in your apartment, thighs shaking violently as you fuck her into the springs of your mattress.

“I’m trying to figure it out,” you puzzle, holding a coffee mug to your cheek while taking note of how Heejin slips her arms back beneath the black straps of her bra at the foot of your bed. “Why a rabbit?”

She laughs first. Looking back over her shoulder when she responds, “why not? It’s cute.”

“Yeah. Sure. And incredibly provocative.”

“You’re really hung up on it, aren’t you?”

“Um. I just think it’s interesting.”

“Does that mean it’s going to end up in one of your articles?” She asks, tossing her hair back over her shoulders. “Something about it on the front page?”

“Why would you think I’m going to write about rabbits?”

Heejin smiles, bright and cheery and increasingly full of mischief. “About this breeding kink of ours.”

“Ah.”

Her hands reach to her hips like she’s ruminating through all these possibilities, the things she could do to you, the things she has done to you. And as she crawls back onto the bed, your eyes follow hers - all brilliant and huge, self-aware of just how pretty they are.

She lets out this pinchy little laugh, and leans in to kiss your jawline. Bites it for good measure. “ Ah, he says, pensively.”

“We went over this,” you start, leaning back into the headboard. “It’s just not a kink. Wanting to cum inside a pretty girl is, literally, basic biology. Like, it’s so foundational, it’s in my DNA.”

“And I get sooo turned on thinking about your DNA,” Heejin snaps back, and she’s got that edge in her voice again: playful, mildly threatening. “Besides, there’s more to it than that.”

“Isn’t there always.”

“It’s the ownership,” she breathes into your neck, “the intimacy, the risk –”

“Risk?” you say, laughing as you jump into the middle of Heejin’s explanation. “What risk? There’s literally no risk when you’re on the pill.”

“ Ugh. You’re the worst, you know that? Who’d thought I’d have to explain what fantasy means to a writer.”

Before you can do anything about it, she kisses you three times. Twice on the cheek, once on the lips. And it’s as close as you’ll get to anything like retaliation - you flip her underneath you, drag her panties down her thighs, and fuck her again.

That’s how it goes. Like it’s some sort of cosmic law. It’s been this whole thing.

-

So again, you write - when it all starts, you’re writing.

There’s this story.

Your editor’s the one demanding it from you. Find it, embellish it, fucking outright fabricate it - whatever it takes so long as the article arrives on her desk before she finishes her coffee on Monday morning.

Between you, there’s always this dynamic: work comes in, you’ll point your finger to the ceiling, saying, “trust in the creative process,” and then she threatens to kill you. Hence it’s her drumbeat; you’re marching to it.

“You know, I think I might know a guy,” you shout over the top of your glass and down the bar, when the topic of LOONA comes up over drinks. You end up phoning a friend of a friend, pulling a string, making a promise you never intend to make good on, and it has you sitting in an unremarkable conference room on the fourth floor of your office a little after lunch the following day.

So, as it starts, there’s this girl sitting across the table from you - Heejin, she says, and it rolls so nicely off her tongue as she does, like the name was simply hers. You notice it immediately, and if you were any younger, the kind of age where you could fall in love with a girl just off the end of a smile, your heart would be rocketing out of your chest.

Now, honest to god–

(Not that you’re god-fearing or honest or virtuous, it’s just a turn of phrase, and that’s how you earn your keep.)

–it kicks off innocently enough between you, as most things do.

Just to put it in perspective, there’s never before been a celebrity profile you’ve written that hasn’t fallen neatly into one of three categories: (1) astonishingly talented, (2) breathtakingly gorgeous, or (3) certifiably insane. So, as you puzzle about that track record now, there should be absolutely no reason at all for you, a professional, to let this girl, another twenty-something-year-old idol who’s too pretty for her own good - with a voice that runs just a little deeper, raspier, perhaps more sultry than you’re used to hearing - ever get the better of you.

“I don’t know, I guess I was expecting someone… different,” Heejin says, somewhere in the middle of things, folding her fingers neatly beneath her chin.

Your eyes flick up from the notepad in your hands and find this look in the deep browns of her eyes, like she’s studying you from across the conference room table, gazing into the contents of a test tube. You lift an eyebrow, and she does the same; there’s a bit more suggestion to it than there probably should be, but you’ve been stoking it, fanning it, from the moment you’d both sat down.

“Expecting?” you ask, if only to point out what had thrown you off-kilter, and you can feel your weight shift in your seat.

After all, it had been just that morning when you met Heejin for the first time. She was standing perhaps a little out of place beside the door to her dressing room, kicking snow off the bottoms of her boots. You told her you liked the color of her dress, a welcome departure from the grays and browns that usually filled your office. Her hair was curtaining her face and after pulling it back, tucking it neatly behind her ears, she smiled brightly back at you - thanks, it’s vermillion.

You weren’t aware of it then, and it won’t become clear to you until much later, but you do fall for her there, if at least just a little.

“Well, see, it’s my publicist,” Heejin starts to explain. From that alone you’re certain you’ve got the rest puzzled out. She steeples her fingertips together, continuing, “the way she talked you up, she made you out to be, like, totally despicable. Said you were no better than those creeps that sit in the bushes outside my apartment.”

Okay, so unfortunately, part of that’s not entirely unwarranted. To a girl like her - to the scrupulous companies that stand to gain, to lose - all that concerning secrets to hide and hell to pay, you could be absolutely despicable. Afterall, if there’s a labor that goes into making someone like Heejin come across as the kind of perfect that everyone believes her to be, you’d be the first person looking to undo it.

It’s nothing personal, you reason, and you’re smiling back across the table. “ Hey. Low blow. I haven’t sat in a bush in years.”

A quiet smile shadows in the corner of her lip and she fires back at you, “so you’re saying you’re just a little despicable.”

“Oh, ya know,” you reassure her, gesturing your hands to the side, one palm up and the pages on your notepad splaying out in the other. “More or less comes with the mileage.”

“All joking aside, I’ve seen guys…"

Heejin dips her eyes a moment to laugh out loud. And you’re becoming familiar with the sound, sweet and throaty and genuine. Harmonic.

"You know, I’ve seen guys climb trees. Really, I’m serious. This was just last summer, around the time Haseul broke up with her boyfriend and moved into our apartment. Don’t write that down. I’m standing at the sink, washing dishes, and I see this guy. He’s just balancing there with his feet hooked around some of the branches, a camera against his face with this massive lens. I bet you he could probably see the bacteria on the window.”

“You wash dishes?” A handbag that costs more than a month’s salary, these dainty fingers that look like they’ve never seen so much as a scratch, and you’re picturing her, or struggling anyway - washing dishes.

“ Ugh, it’s been this whole thing,” Heejin says, floating her fingertips to her collarbone. “There was a rumor that the housekeeper had been talking to the press. So our management fired them - and then the dishwasher broke. Company was supposed to buy us a new one, but they haven’t yet - because they’re cheap as shit. Don’t write that down either.”