"Maybe we will be everything we say
Maybe all that we dream will fade to gray
Either way, I will stay with you"

She had been sitting there for a long time.

The sand beneath her had gone cold, which told her that noon was well behind her now. The sun she'd watched standing straight overhead had since moved on and was pulling itself slowly down toward the horizon. The waves kept coming in regardless — reaching her feet, then retreating, reaching and retreating, just like it had for years far older than she had existed on Earth. Salt gathered on her lips from the wind off the water, and she didn't wipe it away.

Megan wasn't exactly thinking. Thinking implied some fixed point being navigated toward, and she wasn't doing that. Hmm, maybe the better term was "receiving" — letting whatever surfaced come up without pushing it back down. There were three years of her life that looked, from the outside, like something to be envious about: stage lights and cameras and schedules so tightly packed there was no room left to wonder about anything. To some extent, that was true. In the background was very unpredictable. Some days she could relax, some days she couldn't. The true life of a star!

Then the contracts ended, and everything held together by structure was simply released. Friends, teammates, and mornings pulled awake by the same alarm in the same vicinity all went back to wherever things go when a shared life disperses. Megan had not cried. She had prepared herself to, had braced for some heavy reckoning, but nothing really came. It ended like how all good things ended. At least there was no grand farewell, no salty goodbyes. KATSEYE faded into obscurity eventually, overshadowed by other rising groups. It's okay, they had a good run. There was no use dwelling on it.

And now here she was, sitting in front of the water with nothing owed to anyone.

Yoonchae.

Truly, she had no regrets about it. That much was settled.

Back when it first became clear to her, part of her had turned the question over: say something, or don't. Close the distance, or hold the line. She'd held the line, and she didn't wish she'd done otherwise.

She'd been young then, and tired considering they were constantly performing, and what she needed most in that period was not to love anyone but to find somewhere she didn't have to be anything in particular. Yoonchae was that place. Reliably, without Megan ever asking her to be — she was just there, in whatever room, at whatever hour. She was thankful for the years Yoonchae stayed by her side. It's been quite a while since Dream Academy. They met 2021, and it was now 2029. Oh, how time flies so fast. It flies so fast when you're with the person who served as your greatest comfort, A.K.A, Yoonchae.

She could message Yoonchae right now if she wanted to. The number hadn't gone anywhere, and hundreds of thousands of photos of them together hidden from the world still lived in her cloud storage. She browses through them for nostalgia sometimes and nothing more. Goodness, it really has been a while.

Yoonchae was in Seoul. Word had reached Megan at some point, through whatever channel news travels once the years start moving. Yoonchae was busy with new projects and building a career that no longer needed a group name to hold it up. She was becoming Yoonchae on her own terms, and it made Megan prouder than anyone in the world. This was Yoonchae's biggest dream, and she was finally achieving it. She remembers watching the news report and getting that odd sense of deja vu, remembering the time Yoonchae performed with Yeonjun on stage without the rest of KATSEYE. Megan stalked the livestream at 2 am, and felt in her bones that it was some kind of foreshadowing.

They were all adults now, in their own careers. But Megan did not grieve this, because she already knew this was eventually going to happen. At least she lived it to the fullest, and she can move on with her life.

So, here she is now! Back in Honolulu, with her own beach house that she bought with her own money. For a girl who's done everything at this point, she needed the rest.

Growing up was a strange thing, and not in any of the ways she'd been told it would be.

She remembered how ordered everything had been before. It definitely wasn't easy, but at least everything was orderly and managed by someone else's hand. There were schedules and plans and people whose job was to tell you what came next, and your job was simply to follow the line they laid out and get better at the thing they'd asked you to get better at. We'll provide everything you need. And they had, thus came the part Megan never prepared herself enough for: how disorienting it was when they stopped.

Now every question was hers to answer. Every audition, every rest day, every feeling she'd been putting off acknowledging until there was time — she had finally redeemed the time lost once the contracts ended. And love, she'd come to understand, was not what it looked like in films. Films gave you a scene with a score under it and a transformation that happened in a moment. What she'd learned was that love was a decision made over and over again, and that it asked you to account for full weight of a life the other person had been building without you. She was still working out whether she was ready for that accounting.

She'd asked herself that honestly today. Answer was: she wasn't sure. Though, at least being unsure wasn't so terrifying anymore. She had already accomplished a lot in life and found herself through the angsty teen years and the transition between immature and mature.

So there she sat, on the sand in Hawaii, in front of an ocean that didn't care about any of it — with no plan, and nothing expected, and nothing being waited for...

...or so she believed.

She heard the footsteps in the sand before she heard the voice.

She waited, the way the shore waits, knowing what's coming and letting it arrive in its own time.

"I thought I'd find you here."

Korean or English — it didn't matter which. That was Yoonchae's voice, unchanged after all these months. Megan sighed defeatedly, smiling to herself the moment it registered into her ears.

She turned slowly. Yoonchae was standing in the sand with her sandals in one hand and a large bag in the other; her feet pressed into the ground, her hair longer than the last time they'd seen each other and lit gold by the sun going down behind her. She wasn't dressed for a long flight or a reunion; she looked, simply, like she had always been there and Megan was only now looking up.

"Chaechae," Megan said, breathlessly, like her body had finally come alive after months of laying dormant.

Yoonchae smiled, and only now did Megan realize that smile had been committed to memory long ago without her consent. God, it was beautiful. She sat down beside Megan in the sand without a word and without a question.

They stayed quiet for a long time. The water came in and reached their feet, cold and brief, then pulled away again. The sun had gone deeply red by then, and the sky was gold along one edge and ash along the other, with a band of violet in between.

"It's been months," Megan said. She wasn't accusing anyone of anything.

"It has," Yoonchae said. She let the sea breeze fill in the silence before she added, "But I'm here now."

Megan looked out at the water. When she was younger, she had imagined a moment like this would feel large, would rise from somewhere inside her and take over everything, the way songs always described it. She could see now that it was so much farther from reality. She was aware of the warmth of Yoonchae's arm next to her own and the sounds of splashing waves and its sizzling once one arrived at shore.

"Yoonchae," she said again, more softly. "Why are you here?"

Yoonchae took her time with it.

"Happy Lunar New Year."

She paused.

"I missed you."

Megan smiled. She smiled because the life that used to be managed by someone else's calendar was hers now. Theirs, maybe, eventually?

"Are you hungry?" she asked.

They laughed, and the sound of it went up into the air and was carried off by the ocean and became part of the night.

Yoonchae had brought tteokbokki.

She produced the ingredients from her bag, the rice cakes and the gochujang already sliced. Looks like Yoonchae really had come prepared. Megan leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen and watched her set everything out on the counter. 

After silently watching Yoonchae, admiring, Megan came up behind her while the sauce was starting to reduce and put her arms around her, pressing her face into the back of her shoulder. Yoonchae tensed up for just a moment before melting into the touch. She still had that salt that the beach carried in her hair and her skin from that afternoon, and Megan breathed it in slowly, staying there without saying anything, her chin resting on Yoonchae's shoulder as she watched the pot.

...Megan started swaying.

A slow side-to-side, her arms still loosely around Yoonchae's waist.

"Stop," Yoonchae said.

"I'm not doing anything."

Yoonchae reached down and adjusted the heat on the stove with great deliberateness, as though the act of it settled the matter. Then she giggled.

Megan felt the giggle echo in her eardrums, down to her veins that eventually pumped into the chambers of her heart.

"The food is going to burn," Yoonchae said, still laughing.

"It's not going to burn."

"Megan."

"I'm stirring it." She reached around her and gave the pot one single, unhelpful stir. Yoonchae made a sound of protest and took the spoon back and Megan laughed and let herself be displaced, stepping back just enough to give her room while keeping one hand on her waist. Yoonchae stirred the tteokbokki with great dignity. Megan watched the back of her neck and said nothing and was very happy.

They brought their bowls outside and ate on the porch steps with the ocean in front of them again. The ocean splashed and sizzled just like this afternoon. It brought Megan great comfort.

"Thank you," Megan said, when they were done.

Yoonchae looked at her sideways. "You didn't know I was coming."

"That's what made it a surprise."

Yoonchae turned back to the water with a small smile, and Megan assessed her in the low light.

The years had changed Yoonchae's face. Megan had been away long enough now that she could see it plainly. The teenage softness was gone. The girl who had shown up to their first rehearsal at fifteen had become this goddess of a woman. Goodness, how breathtaking.

They had met when Yoonchae was fifteen and Megan was seventeen. Two years had felt enormous then. Now they were twenty-one and twenty-three and the distance between those numbers meant almost nothing at all.

Megan reached out — then stopped. She looked down at her hand, turned it over, and rubbed the last of the dried sand from her palm against her jeans carefully that was quite frankly slightly absurd given the circumstances. Then she reached out again and cupped Yoonchae's face, her thumb resting just below her cheekbone.

Yoonchae didn't move nor did she flinch. She let herself be looked at.

There had never been time, and they both knew it. The industry gave you no room for anything personal, anything that you could call yours, let alone something it would have looked at sideways.

"We never had time," Megan said.

"No," Yoonchae agreed. "We didn't."

And there was more to it than time, and they both knew that too. The industry had not been built for what this would have been. It was not kind to same-sex couples anywhere, and hello, imagine the scandal if they were figured out to be dating within the group. Management would tear their hair out! They had been twenty and eighteen and not ready to pay that. They had been eighteen and sixteen and not even sure what they were paying for. There was nothing to mourn in that. It was simply just the truth of it.

Megan's hand was still on Yoonchae's face. She thought about whether it would have been reciprocated, if she had said something back then, and she knew the answer without having to reach for it. She had always known, it was never a question of whether. It was always a question of when, and when had simply taken its time arriving. Her heart did not ache over that. There was always going to be time for them. There was always going to be a world for Megan and Yoonchae, even if it takes multiple universes, even if all the universes had that world.

Yoonchae's eyes had not moved from hers.

"Yoonchae," Megan said.

"I know," Yoonchae said.

Megan leaned in, and Yoonchae met her halfway. Below the porch steps, the ocean washed in over the wet sand and turned over seashells worn smooth over years of being moved that way. The water drew back, and the shore received it, and this too was received by both of them.

They had finally kissed after almost a decade of wanting to, because they finally have the time to.