Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Four years and six months earlier

Rumi had not been sleeping well. The summer had been unpleasantly hot, and the air was trapped in her apartment; the window was open wide, but it looked straight out into another brick building that was radiating almost as much heat as her own, and her bedroom door was propped open with a book, as if that could help with airflow.

It was after eight, it should have cooled down by now, but it felt like Rumi was only getting hotter, trying to edit the email in front of her but having to wipe sweaty hands on her trousers before the trackpad of her laptop would register movement.

She groaned, taking a sip from her water bottle. This was getting her nowhere; she was too tired to write this well. She could try to sleep, but she felt restless - her leg was jiggling under the desk, and she'd been sitting here for… god, over twelve hours, she realised, checking her watch. She gave herself a short social media break, flicking through Instagram stories, lips pursing as she saw the advertisement.

She shouldn't, really.

She really shouldn't.

But it had been a while - someone at work had asked her only the other day when the last time she'd had some fun had been (Rumi was fairly certain it was meant to be a joke and not an attack on her character, but she couldn't be certain).

She shouldn't, probably, but she'd been staring uselessly at this email for at least ten minutes, she wasn't going to be able to sleep until this heat cooled anyway, and Celine was always bothering her about needing to spend more time away from her desk and with people.

Rumi squinted at her phone, at the woman in a bandana who was grinding on someone whose shirt was so sheer it may as well not have tried.

This was maybe not exactly what Celine meant.

But. The digits in the rotating text artfully covering someone else's chest were today’s date, it started in two hours, and that would give her enough time to send this email, get ready, head over there, and only be late enough to (probably) not be too much of a nerd about it.

And most importantly, if she remembered rightly, this club venue was air-conditioned.

Chapter Text

“Absolutely not,” Zoey laughed, nudging into Mira's arm, the plastic of the booth sticking to her thighs as she shifted into her. “She looks like she'd eat me for breakfast. For a light snack.”

“Kind’f thought you were into that,” Mira said with a lazy drawl, springing a lock of Zoey's hair and leaving her fingers close enough to her cheek that Zoey leant into them, still laughing at her.

“You just want to make this hard for me tonight.”

“I like to watch you work for it,” Mira said, not even bothering to try and pretend like she wasn't being a dick. It was her turn to pick, Zoey's turn to make it happen, and though Zoey (very privately) thought she was better at this than Mira, Mira had a face that made most people say yes before she even spoke. Zoey knew her own strengths, and her own face wasn't quite that persuasive. Thankfully, though, Zoey could chat like it was her job. (It kind of was her job, but that was besides the point.)

It was an unfair competition, but it was also a fun competition, and Mira's smile sharpened. “One more veto le-eft,” she teased.

Zoey grumbled under her breath, watching Mira's eyes skim over the room and stall somewhere very dangerous. Zoey was already protesting with a quiet whine even before Mira nodded over at the woman standing by the bar, posture perfect, long purple braid down her back. “Mira no, what? She is literally the second prettiest girl in here. And she's been talking to that other woman for like, an hour. There's no way.”

“Third prettiest,” Mira told her, in that voice that meant Zoey would take first place in her eyes for most things. “I believe in you. You can convince anyone to do anything. It's your superpower.”

“I'm not that good.”

“You wanna veto?” Mira gave her a dare of a smirk, and Zoey narrowed her eyes at the pair of women in the corner of the room.

They had been talking for far too long. There was no way.

But. The woman was wearing an actual honest to god suit - no jacket, but a collared shirt clasped at the throat with a silver brooch, and suit pants that were so well tailored they'd grabbed Zoey's attention the second the legs in them had walked in, and she'd caught her eye more than once over the last hour.

The rules of their game meant she could strike out and get two more vetos back. All she'd have to do was embarrass herself a little bit, and if there was one thing Zoey was good at…

“Fine, but when this doesn't work, you owe me a dance to make me feel better.”

Mira laughed, settling back into the booth as if she was about to enjoy a movie, and Zoey bopped her on the head with the bottom of her beer as she exited. “You want some popcorn with that smirk?”

“Another beer will do just fine, quit stalling.”

Zoey made a face at her, taking a winding way around to them and finishing her own drink. At least they were near the bar, that made this slightly less challenging.

The conversation they were having seemed incredibly boring, the other woman doing most of the talking, something about finances, by the sound of it. Zoey heard the word ‘interest rates’ slightly too many times from the small amount of their conversation she was able to hear over the noise of the bar, and she focused instead on making sure she was standing just slightly too close. She left enough room for it still to be comfortable, but the bar area was packed, and it wasn't long before she was squeezed in between her target and the bar, feeling the woman’s body on hers. Instead of shifting away, the woman's body tilted, opening out almost as if to try and include her in the conversation, and suddenly this didn't seem quite so impossible anymore.

Zoey tilted her head up to look at her to confirm, and her eyes caught on a deep brown, flecked with amber warmth, looking back at her with a directness that shocked a laugh out of her. “Sorry,” Zoey said. “I feel like a sardine, but I am desperate for a drink.”

“No problem, I don't mind,” the woman said, and Zoey's eyes widened without her permission. Her voice was beautiful - full and edged with a meaning that made Zoey flush, incredibly aware of every heated part of her body pressed against her. “What are you drinking?”

The person that the woman had been talking to shifted, and Zoey was dimly aware that they'd said something; the whole room had narrowed into the lips in front of her, the arm her chest was pushed against, the downwards flick of the woman's lashes as she looked at where their bodies touched.

“Gin and tonic,” Zoey said. “Aren't you… with someone?”

“Aren't you?”

Oh. She'd been paying attention.

Zoey swallowed, not quite sure who was hitting on who anymore. “Uhm. Yes,” she said. She normally did this part later, but she'd said that as if she'd been watching them and discounted them, and that had to be righted. “We’re good at sharing.”

The woman’s head tilted with interest, but before she could say anything further, the barman put a hand out. “What can I get you?”

“Two gin and tonics, please,” the woman said, not looking away from her. “Ryu Rumi.” There was a hand out. To shake? There was a hand out to put her hand in and shake, what formality.

“Hwang Zoey,” Zoey said, taking the hand and feeling it squeeze hers with a gentle strength, a second touch lighting on the back of her hand with a respect Zoey was rarely afforded as someone who a) liked to hang out with people older than herself and b) always got mistaken as younger than she was. “And uh - Kang Mira. My girlfriend.”

“Does she want a drink too?”

“Beer, usually,” Zoey said, giving up on trying to manage this conversation. The woman looked away, trying to get the barman’s attention back, and Zoey felt the loss of her attention physically, looking wildly back to find Mira, bottle to her lips, watching them with a dark intensity, nodding at her with an entertaining speed to make her get back to the job at hand.

Right. Crap. Yes. This was happening.

The woman was paying before she could say anything, handing her two drinks and keeping one for herself. “Nice to meet you, Zoey,” the woman said, gifting her with a smile that made Zoey actively understand the meaning of the phrase ‘going weak at the knees’, leaning hard against the bar as Rumi turned and made her way out of the crowd, towards the dancefloor, not looking back.

“What the hell.” The woman that Rumi had been talking to did not look particularly pleased to have been abandoned. “She didn't buy me anything.”

“Sorry,” Zoey said faintly, pressing her spine into the bar and using it as leverage to shift herself back upright, stepping over to Mira.

“Did she just… buy us drinks?” Mira asked, her face flushed, taking the beer from Zoey's fingers.

“The third hottest woman in here just bought us drinks. Her name is Rumi. Her voice is magic. I can still feel where her arm was on my skin. I'm in love. I think she wants me to follow her?”

“She didn't buy us drinks for you not to follow her. She didn't even look back, why was that so hot? Go, go, please make this happen for us.” Mira was actually flapping at her, and Zoey nodded quickly, taking a steadying sip of her gin, and heading towards the dancefloor.

Chapter Text

The purple hair made her almost as easy to find in a crowd as Mira, and Rumi's eyes caught on Zoey's like she'd been waiting for her. Zoey put one hand just above Rumi's hip, sliding in front of her and finding something close to a rhythm to the trashy 90s pop this queer night always pumped out.

“I was expecting two of you. Was I wrong about that?” Rumi asked, lips close so she could feel her words as much as hear them, and Zoey shivered at the air inside the curve of her ear, feeling her cheeks warm.

“No, Mira's just waiting for me to bring you to her.”

Rumi raised the glass in Zoey's hand, twisting it to put her lips over the smudge where Zoey had drank from it, taking a sip and handing it back and jesus fuck why was everything this woman did so attractive?

“Bring me to her? Is this a game you like to play?”

“If it is, then I am absolutely winning right now.”

Rumi looked oddly delighted by that, one arm snaking around her to hold her closer. “How do the two of you work? Do I need to wait until we’re with her to kiss you?”

Oh, and she was considerate, too, as if Zoey needed another reason to want this woman. Her hand was splayed, comfortable and steady in the small of her back, and this couldn’t really be called dancing, now, it was more some kind of gentle sway that Zoey never wanted to stop. “Not normally,” Zoey said, but Rumi’s lips looked soft, a slight slick of gloss on them that Zoey wanted to lick from her. “But. Maybe today. I'm too into you, she'd be sad to miss it.”

“You're into me?” Rumi repeated, dark lashes fluttering in a blink as a pink spotlight swept across her face and continued past into the dark crowd around them.

It had probably been too blunt. She had to know how hot she was; she was, like, Mira-level attractive, but the minuscule chance that she could think otherwise got Zoey to double down. “Uh, yeah, both of us are, if that's not already super clear. You're, like.” Words very rarely failed Zoey, but in this moment, they did, and she gestured ineffectually across Rumi's entire everything instead. Zoey admired the line of her throat as she laughed, her body pressing closer, so Zoey could feel her warmth flush her skin. “As soon as you walked into the bar, I was like, oh, wow, she's so hot she could ruin my life and I'd thank her for it, but then you got to talking to that person, and you just look like you really listen, you know? You look like you ask really thoughtful questions, like you actually properly think about how someone's going to feel about something before you say it, which is like the opposite of what I do, uhm - clearly.” Oh, god, what the hell was she doing, this wasn't Zoey’s I want to take you home with us chat, this was Zoey just saying what came into her head in a way that normally caused conversational road accidents.

It was too dark in the bar to see her face, but the movement of her body stopped, and Zoey followed suit, shifting her weight from one foot to the other uncertainly. “Uh-” she started, but Rumi's voice interrupted her, raspier and more intentional. “I was intending to dance a little longer this evening, but I think we need to go now.” There was a flash of teeth, and the sparkling lights from the disco ball on the ceiling reflected in her eyes. She'd found Zoey's hand, and she turned, their fingers linked, pulling her behind her. “That was far too adorable not to be able to kiss you about it.”

Zoey's hand felt warm where it touched her skin, and she gripped her gin like it could stop her from gripping Rumi's fingers so tight that it would give away how hard it felt suddenly to catch her breath, how dry her mouth felt.

Mira's first smile was for her: proud, but brightly knowing, like she had never had a doubt that Zoey could pull this off, and Zoey grinned back, despite feeling a little bit like she'd had the tables turned on her at some point by the woman holding her hand. Mira's second smile was for Rumi, welcoming, but with a curious tilt of her head and a coiled anticipation.

Mira accepted Rumi's double-handed handshake and bow with that ineffable grace of hers, somehow making the formal greeting seem like something playful.

“Rya Rumi,” Rumi said, sliding into the booth to the right of Mira.

“Kang Mira.” Her arm raised, and Zoey fit herself underneath it.

“How old are you?” Zoey asked. She looked about the same age as them, but Zoey had never been very good at guessing.

“24.”

“Ah, we're the same age,” Mira said, grinning. “Zo’s 23.”

She was kind of hoping she'd be the same age as her, but Mira's grin only grew at the face Zoey made. Why was she always destined to be the youngest person in every group of people she was ever in? Surely one day that had to change.

“And impossibly cute,” Rumi told Mira, her eyes dipping down to Zoey's lips in a way that completely faded Zoey's pout. She couldn't have known that the not-so-secret way to Mira's heart was through complimenting Zoey first, but the softening of the sharp edge to Mira's smile definitely gave it away.

“Amongst other things,” Mira agreed, kissing the top of Zoey’s head fondly.

“What brought you here tonight?”

“We wanted to find a pretty girl to take home with us,” Mira said easily. Mira leant forward, and Rumi swayed towards her, the movement slight but inevitable, and Zoey’s hand clutched at Mira’s leg under the table because if they kissed in front of her right now, she was not going to be held accountable for her actions. “Do you think we’ve found her?”

There was a glint of challenge in Rumi's eyes as she sipped the last of her drink, putting it down slowly, and Zoey couldn't look away from the two of them, the tension that was already palpable, the way Mira's eyes tracked the movement of Rumi's fingers and the shifting muscle of her forearm. “You owe me a drink first,” Rumi said. “And then we'll see.”

Zoey was scrambling out of the booth and fishing her wallet out of her pocket before she'd even finished her sentence.

Zoey kept glancing back at them as she ordered, watching Mira say something, her face straight, but a little curl to her eyebrow that meant she thought she was saying something funny. Rumi tipped her head back as she laughed, and Zoey had to be called twice by the bartender before she remembered she was supposed to be ordering drinks. There had been a little flicker of surprise on Mira's face as Rumi actually laughed at her joke - and they’d called her cute, ugh. Mira was a lot of things, but something about the precise symmetry of her face and the way she held herself, the aloof kind of scan that she did of every room she walked into, and the sharp, incisive way she looked at people meant that most people thought she was unapproachable when they first met her. She'd even talked to Zoey about it more than once, like she was looking for advice to become more personable, like it was something she felt like she might need to change about herself.

But as Zoey slid their drinks onto the table, Rumi had her chin on her hand, head cocked, eyes steady on Mira's face, those incredibly kissable lips breaking into a wide smile. As if she could see past what everyone else noticed of Mira, and into the person Zoey loved.

Over their drinks and warm flirting, their conversation started light: their jobs, upcoming holidays and travel, a popular TV show that almost everyone Zoey knew had been watching recently. But as the flirting became more intentional - Rumi’s hand landing on hers and remaining there, curling around it, and Mira’s arm sneaking around Rumi’s shoulder until she had both of them under her arms, looking particularly smug about it - their conversation deepened, too. Zoey was normally comfortable in her designated role as Awkward Silence Avoider in conversations, and the flirty persona she normally employed for this as a foil to Mira’s cooler detachment drew laughter out of Rumi. But then Zoey found herself accidentally getting comfortable and going on a tangent about a stupid thing she’d done as a kid with a roll of tape and an egg that had ended in multiple trips to the hospital, only one of which was her own. It was the type of rambling that she really didn’t normally let be seen by anyone she was trying to sleep with because my god, this had been a turn off for people more than once in her life, and Zoey had thought she’d learnt better. But Rumi’s smile softened into something that felt more genuine, and the more Zoey dropped into her normal conversational style, the more Rumi seemed to open up. And even better, as Rumi started to talk more about her life - about growing up with an aunt that had been so protective she’d had to fight for every inch of independence, about how worried she’d been that fighting for herself would break their relationship and how much she loved that it hadn’t - the more Mira started to. Mira even actually mentioned her own parents in passing as she talked about having to be almost too independent, which was possibly the first time Mira had mentioned them to someone this new ever.

Mira elbowed Zoey as she made a possibly too offensive statement about a coworker, her filter now completely removed, either because of the drinks or, more likely, the flattering way that Rumi seemed to find her more entertaining the more she stopped trying. But Rumi just laughed, from her position now completely tucked into Mira’s side.

“Cute but terrifying,” Rumi said, tilting her chin to look up at Mira, and Mira’s eyes sparkled back at her.

“One time someone wasn't taking no for an answer, and I almost called an ambulance pre-emptively.”

“I've been doing martial arts for slightly too long for that to be a healthy life choice,” Zoey agreed.

Rumi's eyes lit up, and the conversation descended into hapkido and taekwondo, one summer that Rumi had tried ssireum and hated every second of it, and how Zoey's dad had tried and failed to get her interested in sunmudo.

“Did you two just accidentally become best friends?” Mira asked dryly.

“Sure as hell hope not,” Zoey said, getting another one of those full-bodied laughs in response.

Rumi's fingers shifted, trailing across her wrist, her eyes flicking between them, a little uncertain edge of a tooth visible against her lip, and Zoey was already blushing before Rumi even said, “My apartment isn't far from here.”

Their drinks had been empty for a while, and Zoey pushed her glass away, standing and holding out a hand, not even certain herself which one of them the offer was for. “Shall we?”

Chapter Text

Mira’s brain felt hazy, like the last few hours had scattered all her thoughts, brought them back together with startling clarity, then exploded them out of existence. The hand on her hip was still tracing small, gentle patterns, and Zoey was murmuring something drenched with sleepy content.

“I’m uh- going to need to leave the house at 5am for work tomorrow,” Rumi said suddenly. “I can leave you a key or something for you to post back through the door, but I’d need to show you how to lock it, it’s weirdly complicated, I can show you now, or-” she sounded horribly apologetic, her words coming fast and sharp, and it was too much anxiety for a moment Mira wanted to hold close to her chest. She glanced at her watch, finding it close to one in the morning.

“We can leave now, let you sleep,” Mira interrupted, kicking at Zoey’s thigh as she groaned in protest.

“I don’t wanna move. I’m cosy.”

“Ten minutes,” Mira bargained, finding Rumi pouting at her now, even though she’d been the one to bring this up. “But if you fall asleep, I’m not carrying you home.”

“What kind of horrible girlfriend are you? Oh,” Zoey said, sitting bolt upright in panic. “We can’t leave, we haven’t given you our number yet.”

Rumi jerked in surprise, but the tension of having to navigate the conversation of what time they were leaving bled out of her at Zoey’s frantic patting of the bedclothes. “Zoey, I’m not kicking you out immediately. I’m saying you can stay, if you want, I would just need to show you how to lock up.”

“No, you can’t let us do that, what if we rob you?” Zoey told her, leaning over Rumi to make a few ineffectual swipes towards the floor, finally leaning so far over that Rumi had to grab for her hips to keep her from slipping from the bed.

“Are you planning to rob me?”

“Well, no, but,” Zoey said, face reddened from the strain as she came back to the bed, purse in hand, opening it to start rummaging in it and coming up victorious with a pen. “Oh. Assuming you want to - I mean, assuming you want. Our number. If you. Want?”

Mira opened her mouth to say something, because honestly they were both conspiring to ruin the last ten minutes of peace of this night with their combined dumb anxieties, but before Zoey could stumble any further Rumi put a hand high on her thigh and kissed her until her shoulders dropped, her hands shifting to the back of her neck in automatic desire to bring her closer. “I’d love to see you both again,” Rumi said, with so much warm assurance in her voice that Zoey went bright red, mumbling something inaudible and taking Rumi’s hand in hers, writing her number there.

Mira didn’t need to ask to know Zoey’s answer, and she said “Us too,” allowing herself one last moment to enjoy Rumi’s hand on her skin before she kissed the inside of her elbow and sat up. “C’mon, Zo, let’s let her sleep.”

“Ugh, fine,” Zoey said, kissing the digits of her own number and rolling out of Rumi’s bed. “I s’pose we’ve got work tomorrow, too.”

“I really didn’t mean to kick you out,” Rumi said, sitting back against the bedhead and drawing a blanket around herself. Her hair was only half-covering her chest, her lips still reddened, and Mira tore her eyes away from her to grab for her shirt, pulling it on and giving her a reassuring smile.

“You’re not. We’re just being sensible because you need to be up in four hours and if Zoey gets woken up by an alarm before 6am she will become a monster.”

“And we’ll see you soon anyway, right? You’ll text us?”

“I’ll text you,” Rumi promised, standing, holding the blanket around herself, her shoulders a bare, beautiful slope as she led them to her front door. “You’re sure, you don’t want to-”

“We’re sure,” Zoey said, reaching to kiss her in the hallway. “Sleep well.”

“I had a really good time, with you,” Rumi said, blushing a little, like she thought she was saying too much, her eyes on Mira, her hand hovering between them. “Get home safe.”

“We had the best time,” Zoey told her honestly, as Mira ducked her head to kiss her, hard, instead of saying it out loud, not the gentle goodbye that Zoey had given her but something heady and demanding, needing her to understand that she hadn’t nearly had enough of this: the way Rumi kissed her deep and bold, like she was drowning in her, like she wanted to drown in her.

When Mira pulled back her heart was thudding, her breath difficult, and Rumi stared at her, eyes dark. The hand on her chest had been fisted in her shirt and pulling her further towards her, but Rumi’s fingers spread, lightly pushing at her. “Don’t kiss me like that unless you want more.”

“I want more,” Mira told her bluntly. “But you’ll have to call us for it - next week?”

“Next week,” Rumi agreed, laughing a little and putting a hand over her eyes, the one still on Mira’s chest now actively pushing her towards the door. “Please leave before I decide to drag you back to my bed and call in sick tomorrow.”

Zoey opened the door, then darted back to steal one last kiss, both hands on her cheeks, before coming back to Mira’s side and falling against her. “Bye, Rumi.”

“Bye,” Rumi said, holding one hand up in a wave, giving them a smile as Mira closed the door on her, before she could convince them that calling in sick was a better option.

“Why’d you write it on her hand? Why not put it in her phone?” Mira asked as they sat on the night bus, Zoey half-asleep on Mira’s shoulder.

“Romance,” Zoey yawned. “I wanted to leave our mark on her.”

“You’re so weird,” Mira told her fondly, kissing the side of Zoey’s head, and trying not to fall asleep on this bus herself.

Chapter Text

Rumi's alarm blared through a hazy dream of the gentle touch of lips against her thigh, the shiver of blunt nails across her stomach. She flicked on the light and groaned, padding barefoot to the other side of her room to turn her alarm off, eyes screwed shut against the offense of her lightbulb. Her muscles protested as she made her way over to her bathroom, a reminder of an ache that made her smile, stupidly, at her own reflection in the mirror.

She looked this tired more frequently than was probably healthy, but she never looked this satisfied: cheeks still rosy, her eyes somehow looking larger in her face, the lines of stress of the last few months swept clear. Her body felt loose and settled, an odd kind of energy filling her as she squared her shoulders.

She was exhausted, but this day was going to be good. Nothing could ruin the warm confidence she felt - like she could take on the world, like the night had been so unexpectedly great that she now felt like her day could be as well.

“Ridiculous,” she told herself, but she was still smiling as she washed her hair and got dressed for work.

It was with a jolt at her desk that she remembered the number on her hand, and she tilted her hand towards herself, her stomach dropping, making a sound that made one of her co-workers look towards her. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Rumi said, standing and walking fast to the bathroom. Examining her hand under the harsh glare of the bathroom lights made no difference. She could make out something that could be an 8 or a 2, something that was probably a 9, something that might be a 6 or a 5 or an 8.

She took a photo of it as if she'd be able to reverse engineer it, the exhaustion suddenly falling heavier around her.

She’d showered their number off.

Oh my god.

She combed back through their conversations for anything identifiable, but nothing stood out - everything they'd spoken about had been too vague to be places she could find them.

She had no way of getting in touch with them. They were going to think she didn't want to message them; that she hadn't had a good night, or hadn’t cared, or didn't like them.

It followed her back to her desk with a heavy regret: the thought of Zoey waiting for a message and getting sadder throughout the day, the idea of Mira pursing her lips and shrugging that shrug she'd given as she spoke about her parents, like she couldn't let it be seen that she felt anything. Or worse, the idea of them going about their day without sparing her a thought, Zoey with a bright ‘Oh well, it was a fun night,’ and Mira with a shrug of nonchalance that she actually meant.

She wasn't going to be able to send the message she'd been crafting in her head subconsciously for the past two hours. She'd wanted to make sure they knew how much she'd enjoyed herself, how she'd never felt so close to anyone before, just from their conversation. How the rest of the evening had felt like they'd shared something deeper and more intense than months spent with people she’d once dated.

She'd have toned all of that down into something more suave, probably. Or she'd have tried, at least. But she wasn't going to get the opportunity now, and she was still cursing herself for her stupidity as she considered her options.

For a wild moment she actually thought about putting her own face on missing posters with ‘if you’ve lost this Rumi please call this number’ up near the bar, but that was definitely the lack of sleep talking, and she landed on a slightly more sensible option by the end of her working day that saw her making her way back to the bar she'd been in last night.

The bar had only just opened when she entered, and the person behind the bar was flipping through their phone as Rumi came over to them. “Uhm - hi,” Rumi said.

“What can I get you?”

“I’m wondering if I can - leave my number behind the bar?” Rumi asked. “I met someone here last night, and they uh-” The barman was looking at her without a hint of interest, and Rumi winced, forcing herself to continue. “They gave me their number, but I lost it. So if someone comes in here and asks for Rumi, by any chance, can you maybe pass my number along?”

“Sure,” the barman said, with a level of enthusiasm so low that Rumi couldn’t help but think her number was immediately going to go in the trash. Still, she wrote it and her name on the post-it that he provided, watching him stick it behind the bar. “Anything else?”

Rumi hesitated, racking her brain for anything else that might work. “No, thanks,” she said eventually, after he raised two impatient eyebrows at her, leaving reluctantly.

Hopefully, that would work. In the meantime, she had at least five emails she needed to send before she could sleep.

Chapter Text

Mira's phone pinged, and her heart jumped, a physical jolt in her chest that she tried to breathe slowly to ignore. She had message previews off because Zoey's messages were more often inappropriate for work than they were safe for it, and she glanced at the clock. 4pm. If this wasn't Zoey finally giving her good news, the excuse she’d been telling herself that maybe she took today off work and slept in was gone, and she opened the message with her eyes half-closed against what it might contain.

Zoey: nothing. NOTHING MIRA. im going INSANE. what if she woke up and regretted it or if she's like lol threesome ticked off the bucket list no need to ever do that again. I didn't dream how great that was did I?? She has to have enjoyed herself right?? WHY HASN'T SHE MESSAGED

Mira: she'll message.

Zoey: you dont KNOW THAT

Mira: I believe it. She might just be at work still and can't message when she's there. Give it at least 12 hours before you give up

Mira snagged some frozen pizzas on the way home, because that was the level of effort today deserved, and she could feel her chin slowly dropping, her neck jerking back up as she tried not to fall asleep on the couch. She felt lips on the top of her head wake her out of something close to sleep, and she reached up, getting a full body falling into her lap moments later.

She didn't need to ask; the dimming of Zoey's normal sparkle said it for her. “Nothing, huh?” she asked.

“No,” Zoey said, nuzzling into Mira’s neck and staying there, her breath warm and damp against her neck. It was far too hot for this, but Mira didn’t let her go, pressing a line of kisses over her forehead. “Love you,” Zoey mumbled, grabbing a slice of the pizza Mira had already demolished half of. She tried to sit up, but Mira tightened her arms, and Zoey settled back against her slowly, reaching to tilt her face towards her until she couldn’t look away from the gentle care in her eyes. “Oh,” Zoey said, pursing her lips. “I thought I was the only one freaking out.”

“It’s dumb,” Mira said, kicking a leg back into the base of the couch. “It was just a one-night stand. It shouldn’t matter.”

“You look exhausted, Mir,” Zoey said, cupping her cheek and kissing her. “Go shower while I finish eating? Then I’ll come join you and we can cuddle the sadness away.”

“I’m not sad,” Mira said, even though it felt enough like a lie that she could feel a small knot of discomfort make her look away from Zoey’s eyes. “I’m just… I feel like we’re getting rejected. I think she’d have messaged by now if she was going to.”

“You don’t know that,” Zoey said. “She could have just fallen asleep, god knows I want to.”

“You’re sure you gave her the right number? What if you wrote it down wrong? What if she can’t get hold of us for some reason?” Mira asked. “I know, I know, Occam’s razor, but I was just so sure she was going to message.”

“We could go back to the bar?” Zoey offered, and Mira nodded her approval of that idea, shifting her from her lap and untangling her arms from around her shoulders. “I didn’t mean now, Mir, you look like you’re asleep with your eyes open.”

“I want to,” Mira said, “What if it is that she can’t message us for some reason? What then?”

Zoey stared at her for a moment, then sighed heavily. “I should have kept my mouth shut, it’s like I forgot who you are for a second.”

“You don’t need to come,” Mira said, already grabbing for her wallet, running one hand through her hair and the other across her eyes.

Zoey groaned theatrically. “As if I’m going to let you go fall asleep in public and get your wallet stolen. But we go, look around, and if she’s not there, we come right back home and go to sleep, okay?”

“Deal,” Mira said, sealing it with a kiss and grabbing for her keys.

*

They entered the bar two hours after Rumi left it, just as it was starting to grow busier. There was no trace of a purple braid, and they left after three slow circuits of the bar.

Neither of them saw, nor asked for, the Post-it note with their names and a number on it behind the bar.

There were a few exhausted tears shed on Mira’s pillow that night, but it took Zoey’s optimism a little longer to dim.

“I think we need to let this go,” Mira said finally, a month later, when she brought up the idea of going back to the same monthly lesbian night they’d met Rumi at, and Zoey had said ‘no!’ with such urgency that Mira was genuinely starting to get concerned.

“I will. I am,” Zoey said. “I just…” her shoulders slumped forwards, holding her iced coffee with both hands and sucking hard from the straw. “I don’t normally care so much about being rejected, but I really do this time. I don’t want to run into her there. She clearly doesn’t want to see us again, and I can’t bear the thought of her being there and avoiding us. It's embarrassing.”

Mira nodded, hand covering her wrist. “Okay, Zo. We can chill tonight instead, we don’t have to go. But we’ve got to stop talking about her so much, yeah? I don't like how stuck on her I feel.”

“Sure,” Zoey said, in an incredibly unconvincing tone.

They passed a storefront with a familiar shade of purple the next day, and keeping the name that came to mind inside instead of saying it out loud felt almost worse.

Chapter Text

“You look tired.”

Rumi bit back a sigh, purposefully crunching her foot down on top of orange and red leaves the way she had when she was a kid on these walks, mittened hands held warm in her mother’s. “I’m fine, Celine.”

Celine hummed, not saying anything further, but shooting her a look that said plenty.

“I know it’s been too long,” Rumi said, reaching to touch her elbow. Her breath was misting slightly, and Rumi squinted at the watery sun, dipping low over trees, dark lines half-bared against grey clouds. It was one of the first Autumn days that had a proper chill in the air, and Rumi regretted not bringing a warmer coat. “I didn’t mean to cancel on you so many times. Work has just been-” she winced, realising the opening before it came fully formed out of her mouth.

“Have you seen anyone?” Celine asked. “Outside of work, I mean?”

Rumi shrugged one shoulder, because no, of course not, who would she even see? Celine’s face said that wasn’t a normal reaction, and Rumi’s shoulders hunched uncomfortably. She’d been living here for two years now, it probably was time to start trying to make friends, but… god, it felt almost impossible to even know how to go about doing that as an adult. She had no time to take up a hobby or go to meetups, and though she had some superficial friendships with people at work, none of them were people she could just… ask to hang out outside of it.

“Have you thought about taking a vacation?” Celine asked. “We could go somewhere warm, before winter gets here. My treat.”

Oh, she really was worried if she was offering to buy her an entire holiday. “I’m okay, Celine, really. I just - took on a little bit too much a few months ago, and I’m still trying to hand things back.” It had started as a distraction, but Rumi had already worked long hours, and it was beginning to get unsustainable.

“But you’re trying to? Hand things back?” Celine asked.

“Yes,” Rumi said, which was true, it just… hadn’t entirely happened yet. “I just need to keep going for a little bit longer, prove myself until the next promotion round, and then I can…”

Celine pursed her lips. “That’s what you said about your last promotion.”

“I’m fine, Celine.”

Celine’s breath misted, and she looked at her with something weighted and careful. “I know. I just want you to be happy, too.”

“I am happy,” Rumi said automatically, more sharply than she’d intended, and she really didn’t want to think about why that felt like a lie.

Celine nodded, hand reaching to hover over her shoulder before she drew it back. “I don’t mean to nag,” she sighed. “I just worry about you. I don’t like to watch you working yourself into the ground. But if this is what you need to do to get where you want to be, then…”

Rumi bit her lip, watching Celine swallow and look up at the sky; she tried so hard not to push her, now, as if she was worried they’d go back to the days when Rumi had stretched their relationship so hard it had almost snapped, as if she could push her away just by loving her too hard. “I didn’t mean to snap,” Rumi told her quietly, putting an arm around her and leaning into her side. “It’s been a long week. I love you.”

“I love you,” Celine told her, giving her a quick, fierce side-hug.

“I’ll try and look after myself.”

“Thank you,” Celine told her.

“How are you?” Rumi asked, and they wound their way around the lake, talking about glassblowing, Celine’s newest hobby - it changed every two months, the woman was almost as bad as Rumi, and retirement was not suiting her well - and the work she was getting done on the house, until the sun started spreading low pinks and oranges in the sky.

Rumi said goodbye to her at the gate to the park, with a promise to call her later in the week (which she would keep) and take more lunch breaks (which she would keep for at least a week). The light jacket she had on was nowhere near warm enough, and she ducked into a cafe on her way back to the apartment, shivering, glad that at least she’d worn a hat to protect her ears from the wind, shaking out her fingers as she queued for a chai she could use to warm her hands on the rest of the walk home.

She had her chai in hand as she spotted them, freezing in place, her drink sloshing slightly over the hole in the lid. She would have thought the pink hair would have caught her attention first, but it was the cadence of Zoey’s voice - the bright patter of it - and her eyes found them, in a corner, facing each other in a booth, both of their attention held completely by their conversation. Mira watched Zoey as she spoke with one hand under her chin, a gentle smile on her lips that tugged something warm into Rumi's stomach even as adrenaline stopped her breath and stuttered her heart.

She swallowed, taking one tentative step towards them and stalling.

In their eyes, she would just be a one-night stand who had gone back on a promise to call them.

It had been over three months.

The time didn’t stop the urgent way she wanted to be part of the warmth of affection she could see in the way Mira’s eyes tracked Zoey’s gestures, in the way their knees were bumping together under the table, in the way Zoey spoke like she was trying to share every word in her head and her heart with Mira.

Rumi was lonely, she knew, she could admit that to herself. But they had each other, and she knew without even asking that they were the type of people to have a large and varied friendship group. She was clinging to something that they would have forgotten months ago, because it was the closest she’d felt to anyone in - god, all year, but they had talked like they picked up people from bars frequently. She would be just one of many, and she flushed, stepping back towards the door. She could already see the scrunched-up way Zoey would look at her, trying to place her, or recognising her and looking away so she didn’t have to speak to her. Or worse, Mira’s eyes looking through her, like she didn’t remember her at all.

She left before they could look up and she would have to see any reaction at all.

Chapter Text

The café was full, but Zoey had managed to swoop into a booth while Mira was getting their coffees, and they had been sitting in the warmth and safety of their favourite café for long enough that they’d had to get a second round of caffeine. “What about-”

“No,” Mira said, barely glancing at the phone screen Zoey had turned towards her, an attractive brunette on the screen, the Eiffel Tower behind her and a few carefully crafted sentences of introduction under her name and age.

“Aw, come on, she’s cute.”

“I’m not… ugh, Zo,” Mira groaned. “It’s been like, two weeks, let me sit on this breakup for a bit.”

“You’re moping,” Zoey pointed out, because Mira had been quieter since it had happened, in her head in a way that Zoey hated to see.

“I’m not moping. I’m reassessing my life choices.”

“I didn’t think you liked her that much,” Zoey said, unable to help the guilt from creeping into her voice.

Mira kicked at her under the table, taking a sip of her water. “You don’t need to try and find me someone else, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It kinda was,” Zoey frowned. “She didn’t like me.” It had been a horribly tense first meeting - maybe one of their worst introductions, and Zoey knew that her discomfort had made it worse; she knew she’d talked too much, rambled about things that she should have kept to herself, trying to fill the silence that had begun almost as soon as Zoey had introduced her job as a sales engineer. As soon as she’d mentioned the tech company she worked for, Mira’s new girlfriend had said that she boycotted them for political reasons. Her reasons were probably even fair, but Zoey didn’t have the luxury of boycotting her employer when it came to making rent, not now, not when Mira had lost her safety net this year and her anxiety about it meant they'd foregone their normal pastries - and Mira's second coffee.

“Which shows she’s an appalling judge of character that I can’t have in my life,” Mira told her flatly, wrinkling up her nose. “She was rude to you.”

“She was fine,” Zoey sighed. “I got nervous and talked too much, I was the one who ruined it.”

“No,” Mira said. “Afterwards. She was rude to you afterwards. Don’t feel bad, Zo, it was on her. She showed some colours I’d never have been into, even if it hadn’t been you she was talking about. So stop it, okay?”

Mira had put on her serious voice, and Zoey was too scared to ask what had been said to put that spark of anger in her eyes. “Okay,” she said quietly instead. “Alright. I just feel like our luck has been shit this year. We haven’t met anyone we both liked, except-”

“Rumi,” Mira agreed, nodding. “That’s what I want. Someone that you’re comfortable with. You don’t need to love them, but I do want you to be able to be around each other, and for you to feel like you can be yourself.”

“Maybe we used up all our luck with her,” Zoey said, settling back in her seat and thinking about the way Rumi’s eyes had felt, curious on her, like she wanted to reach inside her to get to know every thought she’d ever had; the way the person who Mira had just broken up with had barely looked at her once, eyes sliding past her as if she was trying to dismiss her existence. “You’re right,” she said finally. “I’ll stop feeling bad about it. She was kinda rude to me. Rumi would never.”

Mira snorted. “It’s probably been too long. We should probably stop using her as the bar.”

“Can’t,” Zoey sighed. “She set it and then abandoned it in my heart. Or my vagina. One of the two. It’d help if I stopped accidentally dating men when I know that somewhere down the line I won’t want to be with them when they meet you and won’t stop joking about a threesome even though I’ve told them you’re gay, or when they decide the relationship has become too complicated, or when they expect me to marry them to make their parents happy because ‘it’s not like you can marry her anyway’, or… whatever else has gone wrong this year.”

“It’s not your fault that they’re easier to meet.” Mira tapped at the table for a moment before saying, slower, “I think I’m going to take a break from dating other people for a while.”

“Oh,” Zoey said, blinking at her.

“You don’t need to,” Mira assured her. “I’m just a bit tired of meeting people who are so not right. I think I need to reassess for a while. Stop dating people that are…”

“Too much like you,” Zoey put in.

“I dated someone with the same name as me once, and now it's all I ever hear about,” Mira said, with a tease of a grin that made the tension in Zoey’s frame dissipate. “But yeah, I’m gonna go off the apps for a bit. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not going to try for it, you know? Maybe just ‘til the new year. Focus on you, and work, and making sure we can make rent without running out of money for toothpaste at the end of the month for a bit. Pick up another dance class or two.”

“Okay. You sure you don’t want me to join you? It’s only a couple months, I really don’t mind.”

“You love meeting new people, Zo. You basically treat dating like a way to make new friends.”

“I find the best of friends are those you sleep with along the way,” Zoey said, smiling as Mira’s head tipped back with her laughter. “Okay. If you’re sure. Just let me know if that changes at all, yeah? You’re the most important thing in my life.”

“Same,” Mira said, reaching out to tangle their fingers together. “Love you.”

Zoey hummed, closing the dating app and putting it back in her pocket, focusing on the person in front of her who looked like she’d forgotten how to trust her own judgement of people. “Love you. You’re my favourite forever.”

Chapter Text

It had been raining too hard for their usual walk, but when Rumi had suggested that Celine come here instead, she hadn’t expected it to be quite this embarrassing. Celine was perched on her armchair, looking around herself with a frown of judgement. She’d cleaned, hadn’t she? She’d tidied all of her paperwork away. She’d even dusted the baseboards and the light fixtures, which was something she couldn’t remember having ever bothered to do previously.

“Tea?” Rumi asked, going through to the kitchen at Celine’s nod and filling the kettle.

By the time she was back, Celine was standing by her workstation, looking at the neat piles of papers and the laptop there like it was offending her.

“Uhm?” Rumi asked.

“Rumi,” Celine said slowly, as Rumi put the teapot down on the corner of her desk and sat in her office chair. “Have you… ever had anyone over here before?”

“Of course I have,” Rumi said, but she could feel herself flush because as soon as it came out of her mouth she was fairly certain it wasn’t true. Had she? Oh, god, maybe she really hadn’t. Wait - yes, she absolutely had. “Of course I have,” she repeated, more confidently. Mira and Zoey had been here. They hadn’t spent much time in the living space, that was true, but, they’d been here.

Celine looked at her suspiciously. “So… you normally have friends over to sit on a single armchair while you… roll around on an office chair,” she said, with a droll twist to her lips. She was looking at her apartment as if the contents of it were physically hurting her, and Rumi followed her eyes, seeing for the first time the total lack of personalisation. She should have put some Christmas lights up or something. “What do you do with these friends?”

“Oh, uhm,” Rumi said, because she was absolutely not going to go into what she’d done with Mira and Zoey in this apartment. “Watch TV?” she asked tentatively.

Celine looked at the bare wall opposite Rumi's armchair, then back to Rumi.

“On my laptop,” Rumi added, patting it as if it could save her from this conversation.

“Right. Rumi,” she said gently. “Have you made many friends here?”

“Of course I have,” Rumi said, offended, despite the fact that she knew she was blatantly lying to Celine now.

“Right,” Celine repeated, in a way that meant she didn’t at all believe her. Rumi had always been terrible at lying - especially to Celine.

“I’ve got friends,” Rumi repeated, more forcefully, thinking about the people at work who she sometimes got coffee with. They mostly talked about work, sure, but they were people she spent time with. They had to count for something.

“Well,” Celine said. “I’d love to meet them.”

“Of course,” Rumi found herself saying, mentally kicking herself as soon as the words fell out of her mouth and into Celine’s trap.

“Maybe you can invite them around to ours for Christmas?” It was always ours with Celine, that had never changed; Rumi’s bedroom was always ready for her, however many years it had been since she’d moved out. “I’d love to meet them. I could make a larger variety of food if it’s more than just the two of us.”

“I don’t know if anyone would be able to come for Christmas,” Rumi said faintly. “They’ll be with their own families.” Or real friends. One of the two.

“Well, they’re welcome for the week. They could come a few days before - stay for the weekend if they have no other plans, or go home if they do. No pressure. But it would be lovely to share the holidays with someone else who loves you.”

Rumi felt a lump in her throat, staring at Celine, not sure if she was still trying to trap her or if she’d actually started to believe that there was anyone else in the world who cared about her anywhere near as much as Celine did. As if anyone Rumi knew would be anywhere near close enough to say yes to that idea.

“I’ll ask the question,” Rumi promised.

“Please,” Celine said, eyes on her, and Rumi moved the conversation swiftly back to Celine’s current ice hockey obsession before she could trap her into any further promises she had no idea how to keep.

Rumi got to work as soon as Celine left, writing an email out to two people in her team, saying that her aunt had offered to ‘cook the team lunch’ near Christmas. As expected, the next day she got back two politely worded declines, and she patted herself on the back for managing to keep to her promises without having to figure out how to make any friends.

It was less than six months to go until promotion season. Until then, she didn’t need friends.

Chapter Text

Rumi was scanning through a report for final edits when her phone rang, and she picked it up without checking the caller ID.

“Hi, Rumi.”

Rumi winced, rolling back from her laptop and mouthing something violent at the ceiling. It wasn’t that she’d been avoiding Celine, exactly. She’d been going to call her on the weekend. She’d been planning to respond to her messages. She’d just been… putting it off.

“It’s less than two weeks until Christmas, I need to know how many people I’m catering for. Have you asked your friends if they’re able to come?”

“Yes, sorry, I meant to call,” Rumi apologised. “I asked, they’re busy.”

“Oh,” Celine said, after a moment, a quiet exhalation. “The whole week?”

“Yes?” Rumi asked tentatively, and Celine’s sigh was heavy.

“Rumi,” she said, her words slow, a wavering kind of sadness in her voice. “You don’t need to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying!” Rumi said, her voice too high for Celine to be able to believe her.

“You used to be so good at making friends,” Celine said, like Rumi’s lie about lying wasn’t even worth acknowledging. “Before your mom died. I remember our vacation in Busan, when you held court in the pool area. You were organising games, you got all the shyest children to join in, you made three penpals.” Her voice was wavering with a sadness that hurt, and Rumi put a hand up to her collar, holding herself steady. “And then - your mom, and you just. Stopped. And now all you do is drown yourself in work, like you don’t want to need anyone anymore in case they leave you too, and I can’t help but feel like you learnt that from me. I’m so sorry, Rumi. I feel like I’ve fai-”

“No, no, Celine, don’t - you’ve never done anything but,” Rumi interrupted, wanting to stop that sentence from even forming in Celine’s mind, sudden tears in her eyes that she didn’t know what to do with at 2pm on a Thursday in an open office. She stood, finding an empty room and ducking into it. “You’ve never done anything but support me.”

“I’m sorry,” Celine said, taking a breath. “I didn’t mean to - I’m just. I’m missing your mom today, I think.” Rumi could hear the tears in her voice, even though she was trying to hold them back. “And I’m so worried about you. I know you’re an adult, I know you can look after yourself. But you just seem so lonely, and I hate that I’ve had a part in making you that way.”

“I’m not lonely,” Rumi told her gently. “I’m not as good at making friends as I was, maybe, but I do have them. You’d like them, I think.”

“Would I?” Celine asked, and somehow it didn’t even feel like a lie when Rumi continued.

“Yeah. One of them is just… the sunniest person I think I’ve ever met,” she said, smiling just at the memory of how Zoey’s smile had lit up the bar, and made it impossible to concentrate on the conversation that she was supposed to be having with someone else. “Just… an all round lovely person. She gives out compliments like it’s the only way she knows how to think about people. And the other one just, sees the world in a really interesting way? She’s really funny, and she says things like she wants you to think she’s being mean, but she’s only ever kind.”

“You’ve… really made friends?” Celine asked.

“Yeah,” Rumi said, wondering if she actually was telling the truth. Yes, it had been too long and they’d have moved on, but – it wasn’t impossible that they could be friends. Mira’s voice asking, ‘did you just become best friends?’ echoed from her mind to her chest, and she knew, suddenly, that if she’d gone up to them in that café and spoken to them, they would only ever have opened their table and conversation up to her again. She might not be able to be more to them, anymore, far too much time had passed for that, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get to know them. And more importantly, she couldn’t ever have Celine thinking she’d failed her. Not Celine, the one person in her life she had always been able to rely on, who had taken in stride so many difficult things about her and loved her through all of them.

“Where did you meet them?”

“A gay event night, they’re dating,” Rumi told her.

“So you’ve got things in common,” Celine said, like it was something she should find special, and Rumi nodded even though she couldn’t see her.

“Sure, lots of things. One of them even does martial arts.” She paused, then added, “I wasn’t exactly lying to you, but I maybe didn’t… try very hard. I didn’t think they’d want to come. They’ve got each other. I asked some people at work instead. It just felt like a lot to ask of them.”

“I didn’t raise a scaredy-cat,” Celine told her, her voice steadying, and Rumi’s laugh loosened a tight knot of concern in her chest. “You need to take risks, sometimes, Rumi, or you won’t get close to anyone. The worst they can say is no. I’m sure they’d be flattered to be asked.”

“Okay, I’ll ask,” Rumi promised.

She didn’t think about how the hell she was going to fulfil that promise until after she hung up the phone.

*

This was categorically insane, Rumi thought, not for the first time, nursing her chai. She’d moved on from coffee after two consecutive days of stakeouts meant she was over-caffeinated and sleeping badly. She’d worked from ‘home’ for two days in a row, hoping to run into them, but this was the first weekend she’d sat here, from opening time, at a table positioned so she could both see the door and be seen from it, and she couldn’t help the buzz of hopeful nerves every time the door opened.

She was trying to read a self-improvement book - it had felt appropriate to load up ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People’ on her Kindle before she came here today - when she finally looked up to see dark space buns, linked hands, and a swing of pink hair.

She stilled, heart beating fast, willing them to look at her, willing them to keep looking at each other so she could keep sitting in the same room as their smiles. Mira recognised her first, stopping dead in the middle of the café, eyes widening and mouth dropping open.

“Rumi?”

Chapter Text

“Oh my god, Rumi?” Zoey's voice was too loud to be polite, looking around frantically before she found her - the person that Mira's eyes had been trained on since she'd realised that, for once, the flash of purple was real and not just haunting her. Rumi stood, hesitating, feet shuffling on the floor, and Mira could feel herself flush. God, of course they’d run into her, after months of talking about her and building her up in their heads like idiots after she’d promised to call them and then ghosted the fuck out of them.

“C’mon, sorry, it’s fine, you don’t need to-” Mira said, tugging at Zoey’s arm, trying to back them both out of this café before Rumi could feel awkward about running into them, or feel the need to try and come up with some kind of excuse.

“You’re here,” Rumi said, and Mira's feet stopped without permission at the breathy kind of wonder in her voice. “Wait,” she said. “Sit? Please? I mean - get coffee first, please, but then - join me?”

“You ghosted us,” Mira said. “I don’t drink coffee with ghosts.”

“I totally do,” Zoey said, and Mira elbowed her in the side.

“I didn’t, I really didn’t,” Rumi said, still hovering near the table so that it wasn’t taken from her by one of the weekend café-goers that looked ready to swoop as soon as anyone left. “Please get your coffees and let me explain?”

Mira folded her arms, but Zoey squeezed her hip, and she sighed. “Fine. Coffee.”

“Oh my god, Mira,” Zoey mumbled as they queued, bouncing on her toes, “We found her.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Mira told her. “Don’t get my hopes up,” she added, as Zoey made a face at her. Zoey’s hand was tight on her arm, casting small glances back over her shoulder as Mira kept her eyes resolutely forward, until their coffees were safely in her hands and she walked them carefully over to Rumi’s table.

“Hi,” Rumi said, looking at them like she couldn’t quite believe they were real, with a wide-eyed wonder that softened the edges of Mira’s hurt.

“Hi,” Mira said. “It’s… good to see you.”

“So good, I can’t believe we ran into you,” Zoey said, and Rumi’s smile widened like she was trying to hold it in place, covering it in a sip from her mug.

“I didn’t ghost you,” she said. “I just lost your number.”

“You lost your hand,” Mira drawled, cocking her head to the side. “Sure.”

“What? No, just - I showered,” she said simply. “It came off. I tried to guess it to call you, but there were barely two legible numbers.”

Mira blinked at the honest confession of it, at the apology in her voice, like showering was the worst thing she could have possibly done. “Oh.” She looked at Zoey, who went steadily redder, irritation leaping at her. Why had Zoey felt the need to put it on a hand instead of in a phone like a normal person?

“Oh my god,” Zoey said, lowering her head to the table and tapping her forehead against it several times. “I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I just put it in your phone.” She sounded so pissed off with herself that Mira felt her glare fall from her face before Zoey had even looked up to be able to see it.

“It’s not your fault. I’m the one who showered before I remembered to take it down. I was just so tired, I wasn’t thinking, and… I’m sorry. I knew you’d think I ghosted you. I tried to find you after - left my number at the bar, went back a few times - but I couldn’t find you.”

“You left your number at the bar?” Mira asked, hearing the disbelief in her voice and trying to reel it back in.

“Yeah,” Rumi said, looking down at her mug, and Mira’s focus was completely captured by the tip of her finger trailing around the rim of it. “I really - I really liked you guys.”

“We did too. We were pretty gutted,” Mira told her bluntly, and Rumi’s eyes lifted from her mug to look at her. “When you didn’t message.”

“We thought you’d just… you know,” Zoey said, miming a tick in the air. “Threesome off the bucket list.”

“No, god no,” Rumi said. “I’d never even thought to put it on a bucket list until I met you.” It was soft and sincere, and it landed somewhere far too close to Mira’s heart.

“We’ve just been trying to date people who totally never measure up to you since,” Zoey said. “Uhm, sorry. That was too much, I didn't say that.”

Rumi laughed. “I almost forgot how flattering you are. You could make anyone feel ten feet tall, you know that?” Mira could physically feel Zoey’s eyes turn into hearts next to her, and she was pretty sure her own weren’t doing much better - Rumi’s laugh could light up the world.

Mira was preparing to ask her to go out with them sometime, but Rumi continued before she could get the words out, “This is going to sound weird, but I - I don’t have many friends here.” She said it with a dip of her eyes, as if she were confessing something almost shameful. “And I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Just, how well we got on. I’d, uhm - I know it’s been ages, but I’d really like it if we could be friends? I know it’s a weird thing to say as an adult, but I don’t really know how else to - ask.” It was stumbling and awkward and dorky as hell, and Mira wanted to kiss her so badly she had to bite down on the inside of her cheek.

“Friends, sure,” Zoey said, sounding completely stunned by the word, but she got her phone out quickly, like she was worried Rumi would take it back before she could. “Friends have each other’s numbers in their phones, right?”

“Yeah, I’m… pretty sure that’s how it works,” Rumi said, giving them both a lovely smile, reaching for Zoey’s phone and putting her number in it.

Zoey pressed call, hearing the buzz of a vibration somewhere on Rumi’s person and relaxing. “Right, no mistakes this time. We’re not going to lose touch again.”

“Okay, are you - this is going to be even weirder,” Rumi warned. “Are you okay with me asking something even weirder?”

“We love weird,” Zoey said.

“Do you have Christmas plans? I don’t know why I’m asking you this, of course you have Christmas plans. But like - around the date?”

“We just spend it together,” Mira shrugged. “We don’t really have any plans, particularly. We tend to just go out to a restaurant.”

“A restaurant?” Rumi asked, frowning between them.

“Yeah, we were thinking Italian this year,” Zoey said. “A roast feels like too much effort for two people, but it makes it feel a bit more special. And it means we don’t need to do any washing up. Why?”

“Well uh -” Rumi said, biting at her lip. “Oh god, I’m just gonna say it, but this is weird, so please feel free to say no. I work a lot, so I haven’t really had time to make many friends in this city. Well, any. But my aunt was getting really upset about it and started blaming herself for some reason, so I lied to her and told her I had friends, and then she asked me to invite them home for Christmas. Would you - by any chance, want a home cooked meal for Christmas in exchange for pretending to be my friends?”

“Pretending to be your friends?” Mira repeated, but Rumi was blushing hard, like this was one of the most humiliating conversations of her life, and she found herself looking at Zoey and shrugging.

“Home cooked meal, you said?” Zoey asked. “Like, a real Christmas dinner?”

“My aunt’s a really good cook,” Rumi said. “She’ll make a full roast, our place is just a couple hours away. You wouldn’t need to lie too much, it’s just saying that we’ve been friends for like… a year or so.”

“We can lie, we’re amazing liars.”

“Will lie for food,” Mira agreed, nodding hard, because this was Rumi, who they’d been talking about non-stop for six months, who was telling them that she had been thinking about them too, and even though she was saying the word friends on repeat like she wanted it to be realistic, Mira would have done a lot worse than lie to a parental figure for the opportunity to spend more time with her.

“Okay. Okay?” Rumi asked, looking between them, something almost wild in her eyes. “I really thought you’d say no.”

“Not to food,” Zoey said.

“Never to food,” Mira agreed, and she was pretty sure Zoey had meant ‘you’ in that sentence just as much as Mira had.

“Okay. I’m going to go… call my aunt, there’s almost no time left for shopping. Are you sure you’re-”

“Yeah, Rumi,” Zoey said, something soft in her voice. “Wouldn’t miss it. We’d love to get to know you better. Food is just a bonus, really.”

“Well,” Rumi said, still blushing faintly. “I think she said come up on the 23rd? Roads will be pretty miserable, so stay until the day after Christmas? If that’s not too long. I can text you the address?”

“Sounds perfect, friend,” Mira said, stressing the word enough that Zoey kicked at her under the table.

They both watched her leave, watched the dorky wave she gave them in the doorway, though Mira caught her own hand doing a movement that felt almost as awkward, and she shoved it back down by her side before Zoey could laugh at her for it. “Should we be concerned that we just agreed to be friends with the woman we’ve been crushing on all year?” Mira asked.

“I don’t know why you care, Miss I’m not dating anyone new until next year.”

“Rescinded,” Mira told her hastily. “Absolutely rescinded.”

Zoey laughed at her, squeezing her hand. “Now we just need to make her fall in love with us via text messages and Christmas carols.”

Mira wasn’t quite sure how Zoey intended to do that, but she was certain there’d be a 25 point plan even before they got back to their apartment.

Chapter Text

Zoey drove to Rumi’s aunt’s for three reasons.

First, it meant that Mira could do her nails in the front seat - deep blue with little gold stars today. She'd had plenty of practice at it, but Zoey was still somehow surprised that she’d managed to get the design so perfect when the road was so bumpy. Zoey hated the smell of nail polish, so the windows were down despite the snow, and they were both bundled up in Christmas sweaters. Mira was currently using the cold air outside as a method of drying the polish quicker, hands held up to the window.

Secondly and most importantly, it meant she got to control the music, which was blasting Christmas bangers - with none of the perpetually sad queer Christmas songs that Mira loved. Phoebe Bridgers was great, but road trip vibes she was not.

Thirdly, the last time Zoey had been navigator instead of driver, they’d missed a turning and not realised for a good twenty minutes, because she’d been too distracted by their conversation. But whatever, she wasn’t going to apologise for being too into her girlfriend to look at her phone.

“So - what do you think we need to do to sell that we’ve been friends for ages?” Mira asked, drawing her hands back and inspecting them critically, giving them a faint smile of satisfaction.

“Yeah, like, what do we do together?”

“Not have sex,” Mira said, and Zoey nodded.

“Yep, good reminder,” she said seriously, fingers hitting the backbeat to Jingle Bell Rock against the steering wheel. “Go out to bars together? Have dinners together? Go to the movies? Do you think she’s a dinner party person?”

“All of those things sound like dates,” Mira pointed out.

“Well I don’t know.”

“She likes martial arts, too, right? Maybe you could take a class together?”

“What dance class would you take her to?”

“Hm,” Mira said, thinking about it quietly for a good minute before she decided, “There’s a type of Brazilian dance that’s actually a martial art, I’ve never done it before. It’d be fun to learn something together.”

“Oh that’s cute, we should totally actually do that,” Zoey said, bouncing a little in her seat. “I’m worried we’re gonna mess this up by accidentally making out with her. If there’s mistletoe anywhere in that house I’m not going to be able to stop myself.”

“I’ll request that it isn’t present.”

“What? Don’t do that!” Zoey said, swatting at Mira’s phone without looking away from the road and getting a laugh and a swift bite to her hand when it drifted too close to her mouth. “We haven’t agreed our backstory though. Like, where did we meet, what do we do together.”

“Mm, okay, I’ll text,” Mira said.

“Ask her if we should bring anything, too, we can stop off on the way. And what she’d have told us about her aunt. And if she thinks her aunt will like us. And tell her we haven’t worked out what our backstory is and we really should and does she think we need to know anything not to fuck this up for her. And-”

“One sec, one sec,” Mira said, fingers moving furiously in the corner of Zoey’s eye. “Yep, okay, got it. I’ll ask her what her favourite flowers are, too, that’s important for friends to know.”

“No, no, ask her what her aunt’s favourite flowers are. Wait, both,” Zoey said.

“Okay. Done.”

They’d sung along to Baby It’s Cold Outside - Mira refusing to make it a proper duet by singing along to both parts herself instead in a way that she knew annoyed the hell out of Zoey - before Mira’s phone dinged.

“Oh, she sent a voice note,” Mira said, pausing the music to play it. Rumi’s voice came through the car speakers a moment later, sounding amused and confused.

“That was enough questions that I feel like you might be panicking, so let’s take this from the top. First, no, you don’t need to bring anything, but my aunt would appreciate flowers if it’s not too much trouble. She loves poinsettias at Christmas. If you really want to show that you know me well, you wouldn’t get me flowers at all, so please don’t get me anything - I love plants, but I prefer them when they’re in soil. My aunt is going to love you so much it will probably be weird, it’s enough for her that I like you. We don’t need a backstory, you -” she paused, laughing. “Was that a Zoey question? You’re not spies, this really isn’t that big a lie. You’re just pretending to have known me for a while longer than you really have. I think it’s enough that we met in a bar and became friends, we don’t need a backstory. There’s nothing about me that’s so important that you not knowing it will reveal our secret conspiracy. You’re not going to mess this up, you’ve done plenty by even agreeing to come in the first place, I’m really grateful to both of you. Please don’t panic. I’ll see you soon? Thanks again.” There was a lilt of laughter still in her voice, and Zoey groaned.

“Great, now she thinks we’re weird.”

“No, now she thinks you’re cute,” Mira said. “That was totally her you’re being cute voice, she used it when you took her bra off like you hadn’t ever seen breasts before.”

Mira found a plant store on the way, calling to make sure they had poinsettias in stock before they stopped off, grabbing a cute looking pot plant as well that the owner assured them was fairly hardy and didn’t need too much looking after, and they settled into the last hour of their drive to Yangpyeong, winding the windows back up and blasting the heating to get the feeling back into their hands.

Mira went the kind of quiet that meant she was thinking too hard, and when Zoey looked over at her, she was staring out of the window. “You okay, Mir?”

“Yeah,” Mira said, but her voice was thick, and Zoey realised that somehow one of Mira’s sadness songs had made it into the shuffled playlist - the O.G., even, Joni Mitchell’s voice cutting high and yearning into the car, singing about homes and escapes.

“You need me to stop and give you a hug?”

Mira exhaled a laugh that sounded too wet, and Zoey’s hand came to cover her knee, feeling its restless bounce.

“I’m glad I’ve got this to distract me this year. It was always gonna be a rough one.”

“Yeah,” Zoey said, squeezing her. “God, they still find a way to make you sad even when you’ve finally gone no contact, huh.”

“Yeah. Stupid,” Mira said.

“It’s not, Mir,” Zoey said softly. “It’s not stupid. I’m so fucking proud of you, you know? For not letting them keep talking to you like that.”

“I'm fine without them, it’s not like I need them, it’s just. This is the first holiday where I’m not going to have to dread their call all day, and get accidentally drunk waiting for it. First time I'm not going to have a conversation that escalates until they’re telling me they wish I was never born. It feels like… I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Like I’ve lost a weight, but it’s still lost, you know?”

Zoey swallowed back the lump in her throat, nodding, keeping her hand steady on the warm skin of Mira’s knee. “You deserve way more than them,” she said, the words feeling inadequate for her fierce need to use the rest of their lives trying to make up for all of the years where Mira got so much less love than she'd needed. “I love you so much,” she reminded her, wanting the words to fit inside the parts of Mira where she knew the loss still sat empty.

Mira put a hand over Zoey's, threading their fingers together. “You're the only family I need, Zo.” Her leg bounced, and Zoey knew she was thinking about her brother just from the way the sharp lines of anger in her face faded into something more hurt.

“You know, you don't need to cut off S-”

“I do. He still lives with them, and they love him. I'm not making him choose. We're lucky we're doing well enough that I've got the luxury of being cut off. He doesn't have that. It's not fair to make people choose.”

That felt pointed, and Zoey adjusted her grip on the steering wheel.

“I'm sorry,” Mira said, her voice softening. “I know this isn't a great time of year for you, either.”

“It's not that bad, I still talk to my parents.”

“It's not a competition.”

“It's fine, it's easier this way.”

“Zo…?” Mira asked, and she hadn't even said anything, but somehow Mira still heard the things Zoey hadn't said. She somehow always had, like no matter how hard she tried to bottle things up inside herself, any bottle she tried to use was just clear glass to Mira.

“Neither of them even asked, this year. Like they’ve finally given up on seeing me for the holidays. Means I don’t need to say no, I guess.”

It had still hurt, far more than Zoey had expected it to, and the careful way Mira was looking at her meant she knew it. “You know I’d be happy to spend any of the holidays at either of theirs. We could alternate.”

“It would hurt the other one too much,” Zoey shrugged. “They’d hold it over each other, and me, and it’d get so ugly. It’s not worth it. Besides, I like our holidays together.”

“Do you reckon they’ll have any Christmas lights around Rumi's?”

“Do you reckon they’ll have ice cream?”

“We’ll find some,” Mira said, reaching at the next stop light to kiss the side of her lips, clumsy and sweet. “Can’t abandon all of our traditions for a cute girl.”

“Just our principles and our pride,” Zoey grinned.

“What principles? What pride?” Mira asked, and Zoey laughed, swatting at her and turning the music back up, singing along with Mariah until Mira joined in, their voices full, like if they sang loud enough the car would expand with enough Christmas cheer to fill them with it, too.

Chapter Text

Mira had what might be described as a less than stellar track record with parents.

There was Zoey's dad, who had spent a good portion of their first meeting asking when she’d told her mom that she was dating someone new and guilt tripping Zoey about always being “the last one to know”, with Zoey's hand gripping her knee hard under the table and her eyes doing a little wet pleading thing that forced Mira not to say anything. The other half of it had been spent trying to get her to talk about sports with him, which. I mean, she'd tried, but once she'd exhausted her surface level commentary on how unlucky they'd been to have that penalty awarded against them at the last world cup and how exciting, weren't FC Seoul on track to actually maybe do well this year (thank god for her colleagues for even teaching her that much) the conversation had devolved into Mira just trying to nod and make noises of commiseration at the appropriate points.

There was Zoey's mom, who spent most of the evening they'd first met complimenting her height by saying that she was almost as tall as Zoey's other partner at the time, talking about him as if he was her favourite child, which had pressed hard on the bruises Mira’s parents had left her with. At one point Zoey’s mom had straight up asked why Zoey felt the need to make her life so complicated, gesturing vaguely in Mira's general direction, like that was all she was to Zoey: a complication of another partner. An unexpected, unnecessary and secondary person in her life. Zoey had responded with a light kind of joke, a deflection that had barely covered her hurt in the room, and Mira had seen the word follow her home, follow her into the night when Mira had held her and she’d tried not to cry.

And then there were her own parents, who, well. The less said about their relationship the better, these days.

So it was with an annoying flutter in her stomach that she got out of the car, trying to tell herself it was because she was about to hang out with Rumi for the holidays and not because she was about to meet someone Rumi had only described to them briefly six months ago, but with an affection in her voice so strong that it had lingered in her memory even still.

“Zoey,” Mira groaned, grabbing for both of their bags. “This was a terrible idea. Parents hate me. I'm the worst person to have chosen for this. Her aunt’s gonna hate me. Then Rumi will hate me and then your twenty five point plan to make her fall in love with us will fail, and-” she was being overly dramatic at least a little bit to make Zoey laugh, and she was rewarded with a potted plant deposited into her arms, a Santa hat pulled over her hair, and a tweak of the reindeer nose on her sweater to straighten it.

“No one could hate anyone in a Santa hat. It's protection,” Zoey told her seriously, giving her a kiss that felt far more like it than the hat did. “Now we just need to remember that we are good friends who definitely don't want to make out with Rumi at every available opportunity.”

“I'm gonna have to stay sober the whole holiday,” Mira realised. “Sober at a family Christmas. This is my worst nightmare.”

“This is definitely the right address, yeah?” Zoey asked, tugging her forwards.

“That's what Naver said,” Mira said, taking in the house. It was large, somewhere between traditional and modern, half of it raised on stilts, with a bridge over a small river leading to the entrance; light birch contrasted with dark walnut, the dark tiled roof with white walls, and there were huge windows looking out over the view of snow-topped hills. Christmas lights looped around the bridge, more wrapped around the house, and a little set of Christmas themed figurines on the roof - enough decorations that it looked like a shop window display.

“Oh my god I love your Christmas decorations,” were the first, enthusiastic words that Zoey said as the door opened. The woman who opened it bore no resemblance to Rumi - long dark hair and pointed features where Rumi's were soft. She held herself like someone who was used to commanding the attention of every room she walked into, and at least that part felt very familiar.

Mira gave a slightly more formal greeting, elbowing Zoey into introducing herself properly instead of staring at the penguin on the rooftop like she wanted to climb up there and steal it.

“Kim Celine. It’s lovely to meet you.”

“We got you some-” Zoey said, thrusting the flowers in front of her.

“Thank you, please come in. Rumi's told me so much about you.”

“Oh, god,” Mira said, and Celine smiled like she'd meant something other than how hard that might make it to keep their story straight, reaching to take one of their bags from her. Before Mira could recover, she came far enough into the hallway to see Rumi, dressed - absurdly - in a sleeveless shirt and plaid pyjama shorts, of all the gayest things. The house was heated well, but not well enough to make that amount of skin on show necessary, and Mira caught herself staring in a way that was definitely not friendly.

“Rumi!” Zoey tore past her to grab Rumi up in a hug, who thankfully managed to look startled for only a moment, her face dipping out of sight as she - far more carefully - folded her arms around Zoey’s back.

“Hi, Zoey.” The warmth of Rumi’s laughter had already settled in Mira’s chest before she looked up and caught her eyes, giving her a smile that felt like a shared kind of affection for Zoey’s slightly over-the-top idea of acting. Her eyes dropped to Mira’s hands, and Mira shrugged.

“I told you not to get me anything,” Rumi said, but she was already coming forward to lift the plant from Mira’s hands, their fingers touching for long enough to make Mira’s eyes flick in a desperate request for aid to her girlfriend. Her girlfriend, who was just grinning at her like she had decided not to be anxious about this anymore, and enjoy Mira’s gay panic instead.

“For someone who likes plants, your apartment is a lifeless travesty,” Mira told her. Rumi didn’t look up, her nose in the soil like she was trying to smell it, but her ears went a deep red.

“Oh, I like you already,” Celine said, something so delighted in her voice that Mira could feel herself straightening in response, standing just a little taller, giving her a faint smile. “Come on through, I’ll show you where you’re staying.”

“There’s not much room,” Rumi said apologetically, and Mira saw Zoey’s head whip around herself, like she couldn’t quite understand what that meant.

“Yes, apologies, you’ll be bunking with Rumi if that’s okay.”

Mira tried very hard not to turn to give Zoey the panicked look that sentence demanded from her face, her smile freezing as she nodded, words failing her. “Totally,” Zoey breathed in a ridiculous display of not at all friendly intentions that made Rumi’s flush deepen.

“Oh, cool,” Zoey said, as they passed an open door that made it immediately clear why there was no space. The room was packed with hobby materials - a sewing machine set up on a small desk with material neatly folded beside it, an armchair with a half-knit scarf balled up in the corner of the seat, a woodworking table with a row of shining tools above it.

“I like to keep myself busy,” Celine said, stopping at their interest, letting them look around at the sheer number of crafting materials.

“Like aunt like niece,” Mira said. Normally, she’d let Zoey do the talking, but she wanted Celine to like her, no longer entirely just because she was Rumi’s aunt, but also because she seemed like a pretty legit person. Celine’s face did something complicated that Mira couldn’t quite figure out, before she laughed, purposefully light.

“Yes, except Rumi puts it into useful subjects.”

“Mira sews,” Zoey offered.

“Not so much anymore,” Mira said, thinking about her sewing machine back at her parents’ place, how she’d thought it had been too big to take when she first moved out, how she’d left not knowing it would be the last time she’d be in that house.

“You’re welcome to use anything you like while you’re here,” Celine said. “I’m not using this room much at the moment. Although perhaps not the jigsaw without tuition.”

“Absolutely not, Zoey,” Mira said without looking at her.

“I could make you a little wooden reindeer,” Zoey said. “Ooh, all of you, I could make little matching ones with little matching noses and-”

“There is no way I’m letting you anywhere near a saw. You can injure yourself with a chopstick.”

“One time,” Zoey complained. “You never let me have any fun.”

“Trouble magnet,” Mira told her, pushing at her shoulder until she laughed. When she looked up, both Celine and Rumi were staring at them, and she cleared her throat. “Uh, we won’t touch the tools. Don’t worry.”

“I was going to ask for help in the kitchen later, but now I’m concerned,” Celine said, with a flicker of a slow smile as she looked between them, then over to Rumi with something warm in her eyes.

“Mira’s a decent cook,” Rumi said, and Mira blinked because what? She did not at all remember telling Rumi that.

“I’m okay,” Mira agreed, shrugging. “I’d love to help.”

“Sous chef it is. I’ll find you an apron,” Celine told her, and Mira felt that strange pride shoot through her again, like she was actually nailing this somehow, despite not actually really doing anything particularly difficult.

Zoey pouted so briefly in the corner of her eye that she almost missed it, and as they moved on, she asked, her voice sweet, “What’s your favourite hobby, Celine?”

“I’m playing badminton at the moment,” Celine told her. “I hear you like martial arts?”

Zoey lit up, and the two of them struck up an animated conversation that Mira could only follow because she’d known Zoey long enough to know some of the basic terminology.

Damn it. How was Mira supposed to compete with this? When Zoey turned on her charm like this, it was impossible not to fall in love with her.

“She’s good at this,” Rumi murmured, a brief touch to her arm that had Mira completely forgetting to try and win Celine’s affection, focusing instead on the woman who had slipped to stand next to her, outside of the dojang that Celine was now showing Zoey around. Rumi’s head tilted to look at her, and Mira’s eyes traced over the sharp definition of her eyebrows, the gentle slope of her nose, the curve of her lips. “You both are.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Mira said, because fuck it, this was a weekend of a chance and she was going to take it. She waited for the slight incline of Rumi’s nod to lean in to say, voice low in her ear. “It’s kind of easy. We’re not really pretending. We just like you.”

Rumi shivered, her lashes fluttering as Mira drew back. “If Zoey’s a trouble magnet,” she said, her voice so quiet that Mira had to lean back in to hear it. “What does that make you, hm?”

Mira’s jaw loosened, and Rumi laughed, tugging at her arm. “Come on, let’s put those bags of yours down.”

Chapter Text

Two hours later, tour complete, introductions successful, and bags safely put away in Rumi’s bedroom, Rumi was standing, hip against the kitchen counter she grew up at, watching one of the people she’d had a one-night stand with knead a bowlful of dough, wearing an apron that said ‘Christmas Festivi-cheese’ and a streak of flour over an incredibly concentrated expression. The other person she’d had a one-night stand with had her butt on a kitchen counter that Celine had never let Rumi sit on - even as a child who weighed substantially less than Zoey did now - legs swinging, wearing a Santa hat that she kept having to flick back over her shoulder, speaking with so much animation that it kept slipping into her face.

They were both so incredibly adorable that Rumi couldn't quite figure out which one of them to look at, and she shifted surreptitiously until she could get them both in her eyeline. It put her within easy reach of Zoey, and Zoey gave her a quick smile as if pleased just to have her nearby.

Any nerves Rumi had felt about this had disappeared with the anxiety in their text messages. They’d been so eager to impress Celine that Rumi had caught Celine smiling over her more than once, something in between entertained and flattered. Mira had been right: this did feel easy, like friendship wasn’t something she had to reach for, as though it had already formed that first night they met over nothing but drinks in a bar, and had just been waiting for them to find each other and pick it up again. Like friendship was something easy, something Rumi didn’t need to find a place for in her life, like it just slid in and fit there.

Celine got out some glasses for wine, looking over at Rumi.

“None for me, thanks,” Rumi said. “I have to do a bit of work later.”

“That’s not very Christmassy of you,” Zoey said.

“My boss doesn't really believe in holidays, unfortunately,” Rumi said, watching Celine put the fourth glass back without comment, despite the disappointed tilt to her mouth.

“There’s still time to get anything we might need, if there's any specific food you’ll want? Are there any Christmas traditions that you would normally follow that we can make happen?” Celine said, coming over to pass a glass of wine to Zoey, and Zoey’s feet stopped kicking a split second after Mira stopped stirring.

“You really don’t have to,” Mira said, her tone neutral, starting to stir again, face tilting so it was obscured from all of them, not noticing the glass of wine Celine slid her way.

Zoey’s eyes were trained on her with something serious in her eyes that Rumi was about to question, before Zoey spoke again with a drawl that even Rumi knew as dangerous, “We have some traditions together.”

Zoey’s grin only found its place on her face when Mira turned, spoon raising in the air. “Zoey,” she said, strangled.

“Ice cream?” Zoey said innocently, but the odd note in Mira’s voice had dropped away, and Zoey looked very satisfied with herself. “What are you talking about?”

Mira waved the spoon in the air in a way that was probably supposed to be menacing, but was completely undercut by the splodge of dough that landed in her hair. “We normally go for a walk around the shops to find the best Christmas lights,” Mira said to Celine. “With ice cream.”

“With… ice cream?” Rumi asked.

“The first Christmas we spent together it was raining,” Zoey said, like that was a sufficient explanation.

“Zoey thinks that if you’re walking in the rain, you need ice cream.”

“Ice cream makes all bad things better.”

Literally none of this made sense, but Rumi nodded because Zoey still had that odd, serious look on her face, like this was important somehow, and though Mira shrugged at her like it wasn’t, her shoulders stayed high and uncomfortable. “I’ll try it next time I have to walk in the rain,” Rumi said, thinking about how miserable her walk from the subway to work could be when the weather was miserable, and where there was a shop that might sell popsicles on the way.

Celine was watching them all with a half-smile, and she nodded. “I don’t know about Christmas lights other than the ones I’ve put up myself, and I can’t promise rain, but we could go on a walk. I’ll add some popsicles to the shopping list.”

“We might want a few other things as well, if we're going to the store, I'll sort a list out. What about you?” Mira asked. “We’re gatecrashing your Christmas, we’ll go along with whatever traditions you've got.”

“You were invited,” Celine corrected her. “But I appreciate that. We do have a few things we like to make sure we do every year.”

"We celebrate it a little more than other people do. After my mom died, I think we tried to keep hold of bits of her,” Rumi said. “Everything I remember about that last Christmas, we kind of still do. It’s silly, maybe, but.”

“Not silly,” Zoey said, reaching out to brush the hem of Rumi’s sweater with the tips of her fingers. The sincerity in her eyes and the press of material into her skin sped a warmth up Rumi’s arm that felt like it ended in her cheeks.

Mira had put the dough to the side and was now chopping herbs, but she paused to look up at her. “Not silly at all,” she confirmed. “What do you remember?”

It was a question that Rumi didn’t normally get asked. Most people avoided talking to her about her mom as soon as they heard she wasn’t alive, but Mira asked it comfortably, like she somehow knew that Rumi wanted to talk about this; she loved getting the opportunity to bring her mom back to life for even a moment. Still, she looked over at Celine before she started, getting a tilt of a smile with a faded, but happy kind of grief in the edges of it.

“We baked cookies together for the first time that Christmas, I don’t know why.”

“She wanted to,” Celine said, with a shrug, like it was that simple, and Rumi saw Mira glance at Zoey, like she knew the feeling.

“Well, she was terrible at it, and so was I, and Celine had to supervise to make sure we didn’t burn the house down.”

“She bought us matching pajamas for Christmas Eve that year. Rumi was obsessed with folklore at the time, and was practicing reading aloud, so we were forced to listen to The Moles and the Mireuk seven times.”

“We still read out loud on Christmas Eve, but not the same story ten times, don't worry. And Celine still buys me pajamas every year.” Rumi said, “You really don’t need to this year, Celine, I have plenty.”

Celine just hummed in response, looking between Mira and Zoey like she was trying to judge their sizes with her eyes, and Rumi laughed, knowing it wasn’t a fight she was ever going to win.

“On Christmas morning, Celine would come in before I was supposed to wake up, and we played Go Stop until it was time to get up.”

“I don’t think you’d like it if I woke you up at 5am these days,” Celine said dryly, “But we still play before breakfast.”

“I love Go Stop,” Zoey said.

“I’ve never played it,” Mira said. “But…” she trailed off, concentrating on slicing cucumbers. When Mira paused, everyone else did too, Rumi noticed. She didn’t speak as much as Zoey did, but when she did, her voice carried weight in the room; it was impossible not to listen to her. “My brother used to sneak into my room in the mornings. His bedroom was next to mine, and I’d knock on the wall when I was awake. And he’d…” she stopped again, her jaw working.

There was a closed-off grief on her face that felt too familiar, and Celine looked over at Rumi as if Rumi would be able to tell her what was happening. She shook her head slightly, because Mira did not look like she wanted anyone asking follow up questions, and Zoey jumped in before Mira continued.

“My mom’s American, so she loves Christmas. She used to make this insane sweet potato casserole that would give you gout just from looking at it. And then in the afternoon, I’d go see my dad and his friends and his friends’ kids at this kid café, even after we were way too old for it. They divorced when I was super young, so a lot of Christmas was just being ferried between them, though, to be honest. But my dad would always make his Christmas presents for me. Said he didn’t hold to the western commercialisation of everything.”

“What did he make for you?” Celine asked.

“He still does,” Zoey said, with something almost guilty in her voice. “He does these little stained glass things. I got a Christmas Tree last year.”

“The cat in a Santa hat was my favourite,” Mira said.

Rumi hadn’t really questioned why they had been able to come with her at such short notice. She'd thought their families hadn't really celebrated. But they both looked sad, like traditions were something they’d lost rather than being able to keep hold of as tight as Celine and Rumi still tried to.

Celine was topping Mira’s glass up with a far larger pour than her previous one, and Rumi said, “Can I have a glass too?”

“What happened to work?” Zoey asked.

Rumi shrugged. “You're right. It's not very Christmassy of me. It would be rude not to be part of the traditions I'm forcing on you.”

“Thanks for inviting us,” Mira said quietly. “It's nice to do Christmas properly.”

“Yeah,” Zoey said, and this time when she reached to touch Rumi, her fingers found the skin of her wrist, her touch light but intentional, and she could feel the impression of her fingerprints against her veins. “Thanks, Rumi.”

Chapter Text

Zoey hadn’t had enough wine to feel this warm; the day had spread it through her, the way Mira had quietly lit up every time Celine had complimented her - Zoey had started counting but stopped somewhere between the twelfth time (the speed and accuracy of her onion dicing) and the twentieth time (the way she’d measured out the next five steps of a recipe without being asked). It was a familiar look on her, but Zoey normally saw it when Mira looked at her and said something like “god I love you” in that sappy little voice of hers that she loved so much; pride in Zoey was normal, but Mira having pride in herself was new. And then Rumi had tasted the batter they’d prepped for tomorrow’s cookies and made a sound that frankly should not have been allowed within 20 feet of a parental figure, and Mira had looked like she wanted to both make out with her and put the entire day in a trophy cabinet.

And look, okay, so maybe Zoey had also been trying to make Celine like her, because Celine was like - actually weirdly cool? Not that Rumi wasn’t, or she was surprised or anything, but Zoey thought of pretty much everyone as her friends, and even she didn’t normally think of parents as people who she’d want to hang out with. But Celine knew so much about so much. And Rumi had been right - it wasn’t hard to get Celine to warm to her, all it had taken was asking questions about Rumi and caring about the answers. She talked about Rumi like she was the centre of her world, and, bonus: it had been making Rumi blush, which was a stupid cute look on her.

Zoey wasn’t even needing to try and carry this conversation anymore, she was sitting back, swirling the last sip of wine in her glass, listening to Rumi make fun of Mira’s focus in the kitchen and watching her startle, eyes closing as Rumi plucked a piece of dough from her hair, watching Celine mark checks down a hand-written list. Listening to the patter on the roof that -

“Wait, is that rain?” Zoey asked.

Rumi cocked her head to the side, her hand still tangled in Mira’s hair like she’d forgotten it probably didn’t belong there in polite company. “Yes, sounds like it.”

“We don’t have ice cream yet,” Mira pointed out.

“I think we have a tub of vanilla in the freezer,” Rumi said. “Do you really want to go out in this?”

“Yes,” Zoey said, putting her wine down to the side.

“You really don’t need to,” Mira said, but Celine was already standing.

“It’s the one tradition you’ve asked of us,” Celine said. “We couldn’t possibly refuse.”

Five minutes later, they were bundled up in rain jackets, Celine holding one umbrella and Rumi carrying another, a spoon in each of their hands as they took it in turns to eat from the one tub of vanilla ice cream.

“You’re right,” Rumi hummed around a spoonful of ice cream, passing the tub to Mira and laughing as she tried to shelter it from getting too much water inside it like it was something precious. “Ice cream makes rain much more tolerable.”

Zoey hummed, watching Mira and Celine laugh at something as their longer legs took them further ahead, the glow of the Christmas lights around the house shimmering in the rain. “It makes a lot of bad things more tolerable,” she said. “The first Christmas we had together, Mira was - not in a good place. Neither was I, really.” She kicked at a stone, glancing at Rumi and finding her watching her with an open kind of question, a reassurance that she was listening that she could feel from her even in the dark.

“How long have you been together?” Rumi asked, after a glance at Celine to make sure that she was far enough away that she wouldn’t overhear the question.

“Three years, it was three years ago. I was at my dad’s, but he was doing that thing he does where he was ruining the time we have together by talking about all the times I was with my mom instead, so I was looking for a reason to leave. We’d only been dating a few months, but Mira called, and she was… not in a good place,” Zoey repeated, remembering the way Mira had sounded that night; not crying, just so tight, like the weight of the world was caught in her throat. “She’d left her parents’ and decided to walk home, but she sent me her location and - I went to pick her up but she wouldn’t get in the car. And it was pouring. She had a coat on but no hood or umbrella, so she was just - soaked. So I parked the car and joined her. She didn’t want to stop walking, so we found the Christmas lights, went into a 7-Eleven to get a hot drink, but the machines weren’t working. So we got popsicles instead. She stopped looking so miserable about the same time we finished them, like it was magic. So we do it every year, even when it’s not raining, now.”

“Sometimes that’s all you need, isn’t it? Just someone to walk with you and make things a bit brighter. You’re very good at that.”

Zoey cleared her throat, shrugging. “It’s not-”

“You’re so bad at taking compliments,” Rumi laughed. “I love how well the two of you look after each other. I loved that about our - uh. First meeting, also.”

The night hid Rumi’s face, but the stumble was enough to make Zoey grin, reaching for her hand in the dark without thinking. Warm, gloved fingers wrapped around hers before she could pull back, and Zoey found all of her words dying as her focus was pulled to the weighted ease of the contact.

“Thanks for coming, Zoey,” Rumi said. “I know this was an odd request.”

“So was ice cream in the rain,” Zoey pointed out. “I'm the Queen of odd requests. And we’d’ve done much weirder things to get to know you better.”

Rumi bumped shoulders with her, the umbrella held at an angle that protected more of Zoey than of her own body, and Zoey nudged closer under its protection. “I like your weird requests. This is fun,” Rumi said. “It’s pretty out here, even if my trousers are getting soaked. I’m glad Mira had you when she was having a bad Christmas. I've had a really good day, but then, you make even bright days brighter, you know?”

The air misted in front of Zoey’s face, thankful for the darkness, feeling her face do something she was kind of glad Rumi couldn’t see, and Mira couldn’t make fun of her for.

Mira and Celine had slowed down to let them catch up, and Zoey dropped Rumi’s hand with a squeeze; Mira passed Rumi the ice cream, their heads falling under Rumi’s umbrella in the process, and Zoey found herself under Celine’s umbrella instead. Mira and Rumi walked ahead, laughing as Rumi tried and failed to hold the ice cream tub and the umbrella steady, their voices not quite carrying, but the laughter in it making Zoey smile in automatic reaction. Celine was looking at them with a soft kind of affection, lit up by reds and greens and blues - and doing the exact same thing as Rumi by making sure the umbrella was more over Zoey than herself. They looked nothing alike, but their mannerisms were so closely aligned that Zoey was sure that if she’d met Celine without knowing the connection, she still would have found her familiar.

“It’s good to hear her laugh,” Celine said. “She doesn’t let many people in, anymore. We don’t,” she amended, after a moment.

“Don’t worry, I’m good at bullying people into friendship,” Zoey said. “Mira was the same when I first met her. She’s normally all sharp edges with new people, but - you’ve made her really comfortable. Thanks for making her feel so at home, here.”

“Of course. It’s really good to know Rumi has the two of you in her life. I worry about her. I could see her getting lonely, she works too hard and she never puts herself first. I worry too much, probably.”

“Yeah, she does,” Zoey said, because even though she was being told something new, it felt like it was confirming something she’d already started to notice.

“I know she’s an adult and has her own life, but it’s hard not to worry and want to fix things for her, like I used to when she was little. But she hates it when I interfere, so I try not to push too hard or get too overbearing.”

“She knows how much you love her,” Zoey said. “Even the first night we met, she was talking about how much she appreciates you.”

“Was she?” Celine asked, her voice quiet. “I do love her. Her mother dying was one of the worst things that’s happened to either of us, but I’ve been able to watch her grow into this… amazing person. Who just occasionally takes too much of her workaholic nature from me.”

“When the worst thing you can say about someone is that she works too hard…” Zoey said, laughing. “She is really great. I’m glad we met.”

“How long have you known each other? I’m surprised she never mentioned you before,” Celine said, and Zoey felt her breath stutter before she found a truth she could actually say.

“Nowhere near as long as it feels like,” she said honestly. “We just kind of clicked. I’ve got a lot of friends, but they’re mostly surface level, if that makes sense? And then we met Rumi, and Mira was literally talking about her parents to her in the first five seconds as if that’s normal.”

“I was assuming something unpleasant had happened.”

“Yeah. They don’t talk anymore. Makes my parents seem totally perfect. Which they were, until they weren’t. My situation is nowhere near as bad, but I miss, like…” she waved, then realised what she was doing. “Sorry, I’m talking too much.”

“No, you aren’t. What is it that you miss?”

Zoey shot her an uncertain glance, but Celine had that same easy to talk to openness that Rumi had, and she let her thoughts bleed out into the wet night air. “Like, having a solid foundation, I guess? I miss it when home was just an easy concept, now it’s just messy and complicated. Except for Mira. She’s the only home that feels steady, which is just… a lot to put on her.”

“Well, you’ve got a home here, whenever you need it. Any friend of Rumi’s is welcome here.”

Zoey felt her throat close at the unexpected ease of the offer, like it was a given, and she nodded, feeling water spatter from her hood down her cheek. “That means a lot,” Zoey told her honestly. In front of them, Mira had brought Rumi under an arm, and they were both grinning at each other, Mira with a tub that was now half full of rainwater, Rumi’s hair slicked wet to her forehead, her arm stretched uncomfortably long to fit the umbrella over Mira’s height. “Maybe I don’t need to put it on just one person,” Zoey said. Her heart thumped hard as it caught up to what she'd said, clearing her throat. “I still talk to my parents, though,” she added quickly, hoping Celine hadn’t noticed the way her eyes had caught on Rumi, or the way Mira was looking down at her, the sparkle of affection in her eyes caught in the fairy lights. “I just can’t talk to them about each other or see them at the same time, which makes holidays weird.”

“I hope we can make this holiday more - you’re shivering,” Celine said, her sentence diverting with a concern that Zoey knew would attract Mira's attention.

“Are you cold? Zoey, if you get a cold from this I’m going to-” Mira grumbled, stalking back over to her, ignoring the rain, bundling her under her arms. “Right, inside, you insane woman. No sneezing.”

Celine was laughing at them, and Rumi had hurried over, her umbrella joining Celine’s in a clash that was not particularly good at keeping the rain from her face. Zoey hadn’t wanted this walk to end, but Mira’s warmth made her realise that her teeth had started chattering, and she nodded, letting Mira tug her back to the house with one hand as she stole Rumi’s umbrella with the other.

When she looked back, Rumi was saying something to Celine with a bright smile, heedless of the rain, and Celine was looking at her like she was the only home she could ever want.

Chapter Text

This house may not have had many bedrooms still available, but it sure as hell had plenty of bathrooms, and Mira spent an indulgently long time in the shower, until the tips of every one of her digits had warmed back through. “You’re gonna get yourself sick,” Mira said, thwapping Zoey with the end of a towel as they got changed - into PJs, at Rumi’s insistence. “We did not need to do that in the rain.”

“Sure we did,” Zoey said. There was a trundle bed made up, but Zoey was lazily sprawled out half-clothed on Rumi’s bed, like she belonged in it. Rumi had left them the room, saying she’d get changed elsewhere, and Mira had just about managed not to ask her to stay. “Traditions are important.”

“C’mon, hurry up, I wanna-” she stopped as Zoey’s hand reached towards her, fingers slightly curled. “Zo,” she said, but she knew her smile was betraying her. It was impossible not to reach back when Zoey’s hand was held out towards her, and she was tugged down onto Rumi’s bed, nose to nose with Zoey, barely avoiding putting her full weight on her.

The bed was comfortable, the kind of holiday soft that you could sink into and never leave. And it was big. Big enough for three big. “Hey,” Zoey said, rubbing her nose - cold - against hers and sliding their lips together. There was something a little bit too desperate in Zoey’s kiss, like she had a point she wanted to make and she didn’t think Mira was listening.

“Hey,” Mira said, forgetting about the bed, forgetting about everything but kissing down the soft dip in her cheeks to the sharp bone of her jaw. Zoey took both sides of her face in her hands, pulling her far enough away that she could focus on her and on something that was trembling underneath the surface of her smile. “Are you okay?”

“You’re my home,” Zoey told her, her voice as serious as Mira had ever heard it. “I need you to know that.”

The words caught in the feeling that had been spreading since Zoey had forced them all outside, teaspoons full of vanilla ice cream and the night full of laughter as rain dripped down the back of her neck where her coat gaped. In the feeling that had been echoing with the night where popsicles in the rain had felt like a lifeline, and that lifeline had dropped her into a love she’d known even then that she’d never recover from.

Zoey did this sometimes, often enough that Mira should be used to it by now; she went from crazy schemes that made her laugh so much that it was practically an abs workout, to this deep, lovely sincerity, and it stole Mira’s breath every time. She ran her fingers over the curve of her eyebrow instead of responding, and she watched Zoey’s eyes flutter closed, felt her chest rise and stop as she held her breath. “I know that,” she managed, finally. “You’re my home, too, you know.”

“I want to make all the traditions with you,” Zoey said, her eyes fluttering back open, so deeply, darkly earnest. “For all of it, Christmas and Chuseok and Seollal, and birthdays and- I want you to like holidays again. I want them to stop feeling like something we’ve lost and start feeling like something we’re building together.”

“Then we will,” Mira told her, her eyes feeling as full as her heart. “We’ll just collect the bits of this Christmas that we like and take them home together. Build our own holidays.”

“Promise?”

“Sealed with a kiss,” Mira told her, following through.

“Are you two almost-” Rumi said, knocking from the other side of the door, and Mira heard the noise come out of her throat before she could stop it, a high-pitched kind of squeak. “Uhm?” Rumi said.

“We’re not messing around in your bed, if that’s what you’re thinking!” Zoey said, pushing Mira away to grab for a glittery shirt and pulling it over her head. “We’re decent.”

“I didn’t think you were until you said that,” Rumi said, laughing, opening the door. Her eyes lighted on Mira, the laughter at her lips gentling into a concern of a question, and Mira knew without looking that Zoey would be insufferably smug.

“She was being sappy,” Mira groaned, putting a hand over wet eyes. “Don’t judge me.”

“Oh. You’re so-” She stopped before she said the end of her sentence, but her voice had gone high like she was watching a YouTube video of a kitten or something, and Mira groaned, trying to gather herself back together, keeping her hand firmly over her face. “Do you want hot chocolate while we wait for Celine to finish dinner?”

“Yes,” Zoey said.

“Does she need help?” Mira asked, peeking from between her fingers.

“No crying in our kitchen,” Rumi said blithely, coming closer to look down at her. Her face was upside down when Mira shifted her hand and blinked her eyes back open fully, and she was looking at her with a soft kind of grin. “Want me to spike it?” she asked conspiratorially, and Mira nodded, hard.

“Done,” Rumi said, reaching to touch a hand to Mira’s shoulder lightly before disappearing with a waft of conditioner that smelt sweet and expensive.

“I love her. And her aunt,” Zoey said. “Maybe we can just collect them as one of our new traditions.” She flopped onto her side on the bed, hand landing on Mira’s stomach and flattening there. “You think the plan is working?”

“She keeps looking at you like she doesn’t know if she wants to hug you or make out with you,” Mira said dryly. “I think it’s working.”

“I really like her,” Zoey said, her hand shifting over her shirt, not purposefully, just like it was helping her think. “She’s really kind, easy to talk to. It feels weirdly easy, doesn’t it? Like we’re just slipping into her life?”

“It… yeah,” Mira said, letting out a breath and feeling her lungs expand into Zoey’s palm. “It feels like she fits us, somehow. And she’s so pretty.”

“Hurts your eyes looking at her pretty. Probably shouldn’t look below her neck with her aunt in the room pretty,” Zoey agreed, then ducked her lips to meet Mira’s with a swift pressure. “I love you, Mir.”

“Love you,” Mira told her. “Even if you do just, like, slam me in the face with unexpected feelings sometimes.”

She managed to make her face look less like she’d been attacked by her own feelings by the time Rumi came in with hot chocolate for all three of them - spiked with rum and peaked with swirls of whipped cream. She started at the edge of the bed, but somehow - Zoey had definitely made space at one point and she’d seen her grab her shoulder at another, so, no, actually, the somehow was definitely Zoey - Rumi ended up between them, one long leg in short shorts slung out along the bed and the other folded so her knee was pressed into Mira’s thigh.

It was taking approximately 80% of Mira’s mental faculties not to put her hand on it. She wrapped them tighter around her mug instead, and then Zoey laughed at something Rumi said - which, fuck, reminded Mira that she was supposed to be listening to this conversation, something about a TV show that Celine had recommended they watch - and Rumi put her head on Mira’s shoulder while she laughed, her breath tickling her skin.

Mira forced her brain to actually parse Rumi’s next words, as her laughter sputtered to a close. “I know this has probably been a bit weird for you guys, but thanks. For pretending to be my friends. My aunt actually just said she’s not worried about me anymore. First time in maybe fifteen years.”

“It’s weirder that it isn’t weird, I think,” Mira said. “It’s always been strangely comfortable, with you.”

Rumi cleared her throat, her knee nudging against Mira’s thigh as she shifted. Rumi’s eyes looked down at the place where their skin met - the almost rough texture of Rumi’s knee against a soft, tender part of Mira’s thigh that felt warm under the touch.

“Maybe we could - I don’t know, actually be friends?” Rumi asked, her gaze shifting to the ceiling, fingers tapping at her mug. “Like, after this?”

Friends was not the vibe Mira was going for, and she debated saying it for long enough that Rumi’s head tipped, a lock of hair falling into her face that she didn’t nudge away, not quite obscuring the bob of her throat as she swallowed.

“Of course, Rumi,” Zoey said, sounding almost as conflicted as Mira felt. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it - she’d asked to be friends when they’d met her in that café, but it was starting to feel like she meant it, like she wanted to just be friends. Even though every touch of her skin made Mira’s heart skid, even though she seemed almost as distracted as Mira was by the line of Zoey’s stomach that was currently on display. But there was a wistful kind of loneliness in her voice, and easing that felt more important than seeing if Rumi still wanted something more.

“Aren’t we already?” Mira asked, and Rumi’s answering smile, slowly creeping up her lips, was so bright it lit something inside her on fire.

They started talking about what friends might look like - Zoey brought up the Brazilian martial arts class that Mira had mentioned, and Rumi was enthusiastic before Mira could be embarrassed by it. They discovered that Rumi's work was close enough to Zoey's for it to be “stupid not to have lunch together at least once” (Zoey's words), and that their favourite café was on the way back from a park Rumi liked to walk in, so “it would be nice to walk together sometime - maybe with coffee instead of ice cream if the weather is nice enough?” (Rumi's).

Rumi was pressed against them, comfortable and hopeful, and it felt like they were making plans for a future Mira wanted to discover with them.

“Dinner will be five minutes.” The door had been open, but Celine still knocked before she popped her head around it, her eyes sweeping over them with a perception that made Mira fight not to squirm in reaction, painfully aware of the amount of Rumi’s skin that was currently touching hers. She held a hand out for their dirty mugs, and as Rumi stood to pass them over, the loss of her body warmth left Mira’s skin more chilled than after the rain.

Celine had made dubu jorim with an assortment of side dishes, and the quiet that fell over the dinner table was only broken when Rumi reached to get the chilli flakes at the same time as Zoey. There was a moment where both of them gestured to the other, and Mira stopped, chopsticks half in her mouth as the car crash of politeness unfolded in front of her.

“You go, you go,” Zoey said.

“No, no, you’re the guest.”

“Okay-” “Alright-” their hands both touched it and each other at the same time, both blushing, doing the same gestures as before and blushing harder, and then both of them looked over at Mira as if they thought she would be able to save them from themselves.

“Idiots,” Mira told them, grinning at them, grabbing for it and spreading it liberally on her own food before passing it to Rumi.

Zoey grumbled something and stuck her tongue out at her, Rumi kicked at her under the table and made a face that was incredibly silly, and Mira felt her grin widen, shaking her head.

She felt eyes on her, and she looked up to find Celine watching them with something concerningly piercing.

“I just want you to know,” Celine said, after a moment, tofu lifted in between her chopsticks as she considered it. “That I’m not a conservative person. Rumi’s sexuality was never an issue, between us. I don’t want you feeling uncomfortable in our house. I’m aware you’re together, you don’t need to hide it from me.”

“Oh, uhm, thanks,” Zoey said, and Mira bobbed her head in thanks as well, mouth full, not quite sure where it had come from.

“In fact,” she continued, ignoring Rumi’s muttered, “Celine,” like it didn’t even interrupt her flow of words, “When I was in college-” Rumi groaned something inaudible, and Mira picked up another piece of tofu slowly. “-I had lots of friends in the arts, and lots of them were gay. Some of them were even non-monogamous."

She said the word with a weighted glance that Mira couldn't even think to try and not react to, choking on her tofu as Celine continued on blithely about the many different types of art her friends had created, her eyes cataloguing their reactions as Mira tried to nod along seriously and simultaneously kick at Zoey to stop the pure hilarity that she could feel bubbling up in her.

She managed to keep herself from laughing until she caught sight of the absolute confusion on Rumi's face, the way her head was ping-ponging between them like she was trying to guess the score in a game she didn't know the rules of. She let out a bark of a laugh that Zoey shot her a look for, which was probably fair given the number of times she’d kicked at her to stop her from doing that very thing, and Rumi frowned at her. “What?”

“Just - you,” Mira said, grinning at her.

“She's embarrassing me,” Rumi pointed out, like the entire topic had just been about that and not a loosely veiled attempt at letting them know she'd clocked them. Hard.

“It’s my god given right as your guardian,” Celine shrugged, and there was a snag of satisfaction in her face at their reactions that made Zoey make a strangled kind of snort of laughter.

Mira refilled Rumi's water glass, nudging the last of the oi muchim that Zoey had been eyeing closer to her, sitting back and watching as Celine and Rumi continue to bicker, and Zoey only took half of what was left until Celine threatened to refill the entire bowl.

Last year, she'd been sitting at a table much like this, served last despite her brother being younger, the conversation limited to polite nothings about the food and the weather and her brother’s job. Celine had known her for less than a day and had said more nice things to her today than she could ever remember hearing from her parents. Zoey’s presence spread a familiar warm affection through her - the nudge of her arm in thanks, the bright smile of satisfaction of the day as she spoke, openly, easily, and perfectly herself. And Rumi…

Rumi was delaying her last few bites like she didn't want this moment to end, pouring more wine for all of them as if to keep them there with the weight of liquid in their glasses. And her eyes were steady on Zoey as she asked her something that diverted her down another path entirely, a story Mira had heard so many times she could listen to just the shape of it and still know its meaning, only looking away from her to smile over at Mira.

No one at the table finished the last of their meals until after Zoey's story was finished, and Mira loved them both for it.