Merry Christmas, miwa_harmony!!!
Title: Pedal To The Floor
Recipient: miwa_harmony
Group(s)/Pairing(s): SNSD, Sunny/Tiffany (Sunny/Taeyeon, Sunny/Hyoyeon)
Word count: 7100
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): None.
Summary: Car games.
Notes: Special thanks to my as-yet unnamed beta for her unparalled patience. And happy holidays, miwa_harmony!
"You're driving home to California?"
"Well, yeah," said Tiffany. Taeyeon hadn't contributed anything more than an emphatic blink to the conversation for at least twenty minutes - she didn't even say anything when Tiffany fished for attention by announcing her impending engagement to Kanye West in the middle of a monologue about whether or not her final essay for communications actually fit the prompt - so it was a little weird that she was even listening hard enough to catch that. It wasn't like Tiffany didn't get that, anyway - sometimes it was nice to have a long, sleep- deprived communion with the cheesy fries in front of you, just like sometimes it was nice to just talk, without worrying about being an interesting conversationalist.
"That's so far."
"2000 miles, or something," Tiffany said lamely. Of all the strange conversational points for Taeyeon to latch onto... "Maybe 2500? But I mean, I've done it before."
"Are you going by yourself, then?"
Tiffany nodded absently.
"Bet the gas money's expensive."
Tiffany squinted across the table at her poker-faced friend. Taeyeon's angle was slightly more obvious now, but Tiffany still couldn't quite wiggle the ultimate intent out of it. "I thought you were flying back to Korea for winter break," said Tiffany, reaching out for Taeyeon's last fry.
"I am," said Taeyeon. "But I have this friend..."
-
Taeyeon's description of her friend had been on the ramblier side (shorter than me, with a blonde Justin Bieber haircut... no, actually, it looks pretty cute, all things considered, she has the facial features to pull it off, and it should make her pretty easy for you to pick out... anyway, you have her number in your phone, right? See, you'll be fine), but she'd still somehow forgotten to mention the awkward possibility of the girl being entangled with a lanky, nondescript boy, one small hand firmly gripping his ass, neither one of them showing any signs of needing air.
Tiffany sidled up to the curb, put her relic of a minivan in park, and began to rap her long pink fingernails on the steering wheel, trying not to stare. She gave up after a second and honked the horn. The couple didn't jump apart cartoonishly like she expected - instead they slid apart, languidly, casually. Tiffany had half a mind to count the number of the people perched variously around the parking lot who could witness this particularly public groping session if they looked this way, but she only got to three before the girl had shifted her attention to Tiffany, wide eyes blinking at her, one of the boy's arms still wrapped around her.
"Uh, hi. Sorry about that. Are you Sunny?"
"Yeah," confirmed Sunny, breaking into a grin. "You're Tiffany, then? Guess we're going on an adventure."
-
Tiffany's friend Yuri had solemnly offered to write her a list of icebreaking conversations when she'd heard, but Tiffany had laughed it off. "Who do you think I am, Seohyun? It'll be fine. I'm charming. I'm sure we'll get along great."
But she may have slightly overestimated the value of life stories (turns out, at the ripe age of twenty-two, two of them can't even get you out of Gainsville) and underestimated the value of natural chemistry - Sunny is an adept enough conversationalist never quite lets them lapse into awkward silence, but Tiffany didn't predict her compatriot's lack of regard for the license plate game.
"I think we already had that," Sunny said to the passenger's window when Tiffany trumpeted "South Dakota!"
"That was South Carolina," said Tiffany. "That's a common enough one, but I would remember if we had found South Dakota. Only three people live in South Dakota in the first place, so it's kind of a big deal to find one of them out and about in Florida."
"Mmm," grunted Sunny. Her interest in United States geography had thus far proved minimal.
"Maybe they were going to Disney World... have you been to Disney World yet?"
"Nope," said Sunny absently. "Sounds fun though."
"That's what you should have spent your break doing!" declared Tiffany. "I guess you can't really go alone, though, and everyone wants to be around their family for Christmas."
"Tends to be the case," agreed Sunny.
"Who are you staying with, again? Your aunt?"
"Cousins," said Sunny. "Older cousins. They live in LA. Married and childless, both really into their really boring computer careers something."
"Do you know them very well?"
"No," said Sunny, a weird kind of vulnerability slicing into her casual tone. "Better than loitering around Gainsville for three weeks by myself, though. So thanks for that."
There are a lot of things Tiffany could say to that - 'why didn't you fly home to be with your real family', for one, or 'you can totally come hang out with me when we're in Los Angeles', for another, but before she had the opportunity to settle on an option, Sunny had opened their folded piece of paper on the dashboard.
"South Dakota, check," she said.
-
"You know I can't drive, right?" said Sunny, her eyes fixed on the map spread across her lap as Tiffany checked the rearview mirror before changing lanes.
"You can't?"
"I mean, I can drive, I just couldn't be bothered to get an international permit since I'm only going to be here a year. I like how you marked the places we could change in pink pen, though. Is that what that means?"
"Oh... yeah it is."
"You'll have to drive the whole way. But that's fine, right?"
"Yeah," said Tiffany absently. "I guess, I mean, I was originally just going to drive by myself. So yeah, of course it's fine. I'm glad to have the company."
Tiffany's eyes were fixed on the road, so she could feel, rather than see Sunny shift her gaze to Tiffany's profile. Sunny stared for a full minute before she said, "Your Korean's really good."
"Thanks?"
"The way Taeyeon was talking, I thought we'd be communicating with hand gestures or something."
"That's flattering."
Sunny side-stepped the mumbled comment entirely, and continued merrily rambling, "But it's good that she was just joking around because my English is terrible ."
"Even after a semester at the good ol' University of Florida?"
"Yeah... I mean, I can understand it okay. Rest stop, two miles," Sunny parroted off a road sign as if to prove it, her finger following it across the car window until it was gone. "That's where you pee, right? I kind of have to pee."
"Already?"
Sunny looked sheepish.
"Have you ever been to one of those, though? They're pretty gross. Like, you know, really gross, like probably-only-cleaned-twice-a-month gross. We're better off waiting for the next gas station."
"Will that be soon?"
"Of course, we're heading into middle America. It's like one giant field full of gast stations."
-
There wasn't a gas station.
By the time Sunny peeped around the back of the minivan to release Tiffany from where she'd been serving her time out, tipped diagonally on the driver's door of the minivan, Tiffany had had her hair whipped across her face by nine different vehicles. Sunny made a kind of grimace, but Tiffany didn't know her well enough to differentiate between Tiffany-Hwang,-you-know-it-all-dickface-we- should-have-just-stopped-at-the-rest-stop grimaces and I'm-a-little-embarrassed-you-just-heard-me-whizzing grimaces. She settled for an awkward smile. "Little early on the trip for you to lose your squat peeing virginity, huh?"
Sunny shrugged. "The squatting part is fine. Some of our toilets are built like that in Korea. Just... with a hole, so the urine doesn't just loll around in the dust like that."
"Right," said Tiffany awkwardly, perilously aware of her own ditziness. "I think I knew that. Probably get more privacy than one car door, too."
Sunny pursed her lips into a not-smile and headed back around the car to climb back into the passenger seat.
It was probably for the best Tiffany noticed the text from Sooyoung that said "just hit the three hour mark, does she hate you yet?" before she settled back into driving, because she'd been seriously considering making the crack about Sunny's soda habit extending the life of their road trip.
-
But there was seriously nothing like it: Sunny was the type of person who bought herself a couple of sprites every time they stopped at a gas station, all of which got left half-empty, sprawled thoughtlessly across the eight cupholders in Tiffany's minivan (actually, an alarming percentage of them mysteriously ended up in the backseat, even though Sunny spent 98% of driving time with her legs stretched across the front dashboard). On their third mass sprite can trash dump (they don't bother with recycling bins at gas stations in the middle of nowhere, which wouldn't necessarily bother Tiffany except that she's pretty sure her friend Seohyun gets a psychic vision of malfeasance every time she so much as walks near a trash can with a stack of old paper or a cardboard cereal box), Tiffany stains her arm with sticky liquid, so she finally says what she's been thinking since Sunny dumped her first seven cans.
"Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper if you just finished them?"
"They get flat," said Sunny absently.
"That's what the bottle ones with the caps are for. You could just buy those."
"It's not the same," whined Sunny.
It was hardly a spat, but Sunny still treated it as if she'd won, lording about, and opening her next sprite can with a tacit air of smugness as Tiffany pulled back on the highway.
"Ahhhh," she declared, with the emphaticness of a girl who'd spent too much time in the mirror rehearsing solitary CFs. Tiffany rolled her eyes, but grinned.
"How do you know Taeyeon?" Sunny asked, propping her feet back up on the dashboard.
"Choir," said Tiffany absently.
"Ah, yes," said Sunny. "Choir. Who knew that would end up being the lesbian pickup joint for all of campus."
There was a long pause, as Tiffany replayed that sentence in her head to make sure she'd heard what she thought she'd heard. Sunny's endorsement aside, her Korean wasn't what it could be.
"Lesbian pickup joint?"
"Yeah," said Sunny. "Aren't you and Taeyeon...?"
"Aren't me and Taeyeon what?" God, did her voice usually come out that shrill?
"A thing?"
"Like, dating?"
"Yeah."
"No," said Tiffany. "I don't - what - where did you even - no, definitely not." She made eye contact with Sunny long enough to watch the other girl's eyes widen and shut, before Sunny broke off into giggles.
"That was emphatic," she said. "Is she not your type or something?"
"No, she's not my type," said Tiffany. "My type is men."
"Seriously?"
"Do I really give off that much of a lesbian vibe? That it's actively shocking that I'm not gay?"
"I don't think it's ever something you can just tell about, no matter how good your gaydar is," said Sunny. "But you're friends with Taeyeon."
"So?"
"I've just yet to meet a female friend of hers that she hadn't... slept with."
"Huh," said Tiffany. Sunny gave her a long, appraising look before she turned to the window and very deliberately changed the topic of conversation to Starcraft 2.
-
"You'd better be having a breakdown in the desert or something of comparable gravity, because I'm about to get on my flight home and I don't have time to talk to you about nail polish."
"I love you too, Jessie," laughed Tiffany, idly tracing a carving of "R + M 4ever luv" someone had very intently carved into the top of a picnic table. "But we're in Alabama, so it'll probably be at least another day before I can promise any desert breakdown phone calls."
"Oh," said Jessica. "Is it winter there?"
"I'm pretty sure that winter thing's a myth," grinned Tiffany.
"Or we're two California girls perpetuating our own delusional belief that the weather never gets cold by going to college in Florida."
Tiffany laughed.
"That's exactly what I'm going to do when I get on this plane," said Jessica. "Laugh. I'm going to fly over snow, and I'm going to laugh at all the little people below me who actually have to experience real coldness. I'll laugh at you too, you and your stupid old minivan. How's it going with your new... buddy, by the way?"
Tiffany glanced over to where Sunny was doing lunges in the long grass. "She's nice enough. We're stopped at a picnic spot right now, although I can't for the life of me figure out why any person would want to picnic this close to an interstate. But I think she's starting to feel a little cramped in the car. This is her first long drive."
"Well yeah," said Jessica. "Isn't she like, Korean Korean? You could drive across Korea like eight times in the time you guys have been driving."
"Maybe more like one time," allowed Tiffany.
"Depends on what we're counting as 'across'," mused Jessica. "Um, I think we're about to start boarding, were you calling for a reason?"
"Yeah, actually," said Tiffany, pulling her feet up onto the bench with her. "You know my friend Taeyeon?"
"Uh huh."
"Did you have any idea that she... liked girls?"
Tiffany took Jessica's silence as deep thought until her phone crackled with a high-pitched inhale that gave her silent laughter away. Tiffany hung up on her. Immature, but satisfying. It's not like Tiffany's got a better chance at getting the last word in anyway. Witticisms have never been her forte. In the heat of the moment she's lucky if she gets out something as clever as "your hair looks stupider than usual today".
Tiffany stood. Sunny had disappeared into the tall brown grass, flat on her back so that all Tiffany could see of her were quick snatches of color, and the grass rearranging itself as she moved. She was making grass angels. When Tiffany hovered over her, she smiled unrestrainedly and sat up, covered in crumbling grass.
"Back to the box?" she asked.
"It's almost dusk, we gotta get going if we're gonna make it to the motel," said Tiffany.
Sunny made a squeal of distaste, but reached her arm out to be pulled out anyway. "My legs are going to compress in that car," said Sunny. "That is the last thing I need."
-
"So, what do you like best about being in the US so far?" asked Tiffany, after a particularly long silence. Sunny startled from the window.
"I don't know," she said lazily. "There's some good candy here. And some movies and video games that haven't been released yet at home. And people are a lot more willing to try out-of-the-norm sex... positions, and stuff," said Sunny brazenly. "But you never know. Maybe I was just dating the wrong people in Korea."
"Huh," said Tiffany.
"I don't know if makes up for the lack of snow," said Sunny, shivering.
-
All the built-up tension in Tiffany melted away at the sight of the lopsided plastic Christmas tree in the lobby of their motel, decorated entirely with ornaments that proclaim "Louisiana!". How many souvenir shop pit stops it must have taken for someone to amass such a collection of tourist baubles. It was sweet to think about. "I love Christmas!" Tiffany declared to the lobby at large.
But the only person there to hear her was the front desk clerk, a bored-looking girl about her age, who gave her a look that dared her to make small talk about the holidays.
The girl was still taking her sweet, apathetic time getting the room keys when Sunny found her, creeping up unnoticed until she trumpted "There's a bar across the street!" right into Tiffany's left ear.
"Ow! I thought you were going to wait in the car!"
"Yes, but that was before I saw there was a bar across the street," said Sunny. "Some messages need to be relayed immediately."
-
Tiffany was not, as it turned out, imagining the weird tickling feeling in her nose. She had an silver feather stuck up her nostril.
"The fuck-- " she grunted, coming up so fast she hit her head on her headboard. She had managed to get out of her skinny jeans and into pj pants, but apparently the top half of her body had proved too much effort. Her sequined top was a little the worse for wear for having been slept in, and wrapped around her neck (choking hazard, drunk Tiffany!, she thought, as if she could transmit the warning back in time and keep herself from leaving it on) was a black boa, dotted with silver feathers.
Only it wasn't really dotted with silver feathers, not anymore. They'd all been picked out, and she'd been sleeping in a pool of them. She gave herself a minute to process that, to see if some memory of where feather- picking would resurface with a moment of clarity. But nothing. Except that her head hurt. And so did her stomach.
She very seriously considered waking Sunny up immediately to ask what the hell had even happened and see if she knew how to work a coffee machine, but that felt cruel.
Still, someone had to know what a bad mood she was in.
"How come you didn't pick up?" Tiffany asked sullenly when Jessica answered the phone on her fourth try.
"I thought you were a telemarketer," said Jessica. "Your area code was 337. Where the hell is 337?"
"Henderson, Louisiana," Tiffany sighed.
"Are you using a pay phone?"
"No? There's a phone in my motel room."
"So what happened to your cell phone?"
"I can't find it," Tiffany grunted. "Usually I just keep it on the bedside table but I put it somewhere else and I... there was this bar, next to our hotel..."
"And you're waiting for Sunny to wake up so she can fill your drunk ass in on the details, got it."
"It was her idea. I would have been perfectly happy to watch the America's Top Model marathon, for the record."
"You are notoriously difficult to get out to a bar," deadpanned Jessica.
-
"We crashed a bachelorette party," suggested Tiffany, when they'd finally strapped in and set off for their fast food breakfast. "That's reasonable."
"Oh come on, it's obvious," said Sunny, sprawled across the passenger seat in full sunglassed Diva mode. She pointed to her relic from the night before, a tiara with two pieces broken off. "I was crowned queen of Henderson."
"But that doesn't explain my boa," said Tiffany.
"Sure it does," said Sunny coyly. "It's my boa. But my most faithful servant stole it from me when I was at my most vulnerable."
"Servant? Hey - "
"You're driving me around my kingdom as we speak!" laughed Sunny. But the wounded look Tiffany shot her way got her, and so Sunny reached to where her plastic tiara sat, rung around a sprite can in the front seat cupholder. Gingerly, she placed it on Tiffany's head.
"I crown thee princess of Henderson, Louisiana," Sunny giggled.
The morning shifters at the McDonald's drive thru didn't seem to find the costume nearly as funny as they did.
-
Tenuous though their grasp on the previous night's memories were, in their stead was a weird new kind of camaraderie. Yesterday's careful, amicable posturing had evaporated - Tiffany's suggestions of car games to play were no longer met with solemn apathy, but loud, convivial rejections of "are we eight?"
And her hands were everywhere. "What's in here?" she asked, holding up a green-tipped canvas Whole Foods bag.
"Oh," frowned Tiffany after a glance. "I don't know. It's a care package my friend Sooyoung made me. I guess I kind of forgot about it."
Sunny took that as license enough to pick through it, holding each item up to Tiffany for inspection. Protein bars were the nicest thing to be found - Tiffany could just picture Sooyoung giggling as she stuffed the bag with the weirdest junk she could find in her closet - which turned out to be toe socks, spray deodorant ("how does that even work?"), two Sanrio keychains, a Cold Stone Creamery coupon, a celebrity-penned children's book, and three boxes of condoms in different sizes.
"Well there's a challenge if I ever saw one," said Sunny, holding up the box of magnums. "Why didn't you tell me we were supposed to get you laid on this trip?"
Tiffany blushed. "It's just a joke. My friend..."
"Wouldn't want to be disappointed, would she," said Sunny. "You don't have a boyfriend, do you, Fany-ah?"
"N-no," said Tiffany.
"Good," said Sunny, satisfied, settling back into her seat. "It's best that way. I never have a boyfriend."
-
"Best orgasm you've ever had."
"What?"
"You don't know that word?," asked Sunny, her hand flying to hover above her nether regions, "When you..."
"No!" said Tiffany, picturing a real life reenactment of Meg Ryan's restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. "I do. Somehow. I don't know. I was expressing disbelief."
Sunny giggled, leering at her all the while. How did a person even do that? It was like she was two people at once. It was incredibly disconcerting.
"I can't, um, think of any one in particular..."
"You're lying."
"I'm not lying!"
"Everyone has that one," said Sunny seriously.
"Maybe everyone you know."
"I mean, you have had them, right?"
"Yes!"
"Some women don't," said Sunny in the same tone of voice she might use to talk about people afflicted by famine, or a weird genetic affliction.
"Well I am not one of them," said Tiffany.
"Was your best one during masturbation? Because you totally shouldn't feel embarrassed about that. Who knows you better than you do? And some men are just bad, selfish - maybe your boyfriends have been - "
-
"Is that Soonkyu girl really this bad at keeping you company?"
"Do you ever answer the phone like a normal person?"
"Not when you call," Jessica said serenely. "Where are you? It's loud."
"Gas station," said Tiffany. "Sunny's peeing."
"So glad you thought of me," said Jessica.
"Do you ever feel like your life's a Sex and the City episode?" Tiffany'd been thinking up that line in her head for a good twenty minutes - the weird little yelp of excitement Jessica made on the other end of the phone was immensely satisfying.
"Did you find out you hooked up with someone in a drunken stupor last night?" Jessica asked. "Omigod, you did not. You did, didn't you?"
"Sex and the City is not full of random hook-ups," said Tiffany defensively. "I know it's misrepresented that way, but the girls are always - "
"Oh my god I don't care, tell me what happened!"
"Nothing happened," Tiffany mumbled. "Don't be ridiculous. All I meant was that sitting in a car with Sunny is like sitting in a car with Samantha Jones."
"Oh," said Jessica, disappointment creeping into her voice. "Well. Maybe if you were more interesting, I wouldn't have to keep making up stories about you."
-
Texas was always fine until you were a hundred miles out of San Antonio, when the welcoming hills had fully transformed into lifeless, flat plattes. Suddenly there were ten-minute stretches with no other cars in sight. "We're aloooooone," said Sunny dramatically, wiggling the radio tuner again, fighting the static, only to end up back on 96.1, the only station they could still pick up, which seemed to be entirely dedicated to covers of "South of the Border" and "Deep In The Heart of Texas".
"We could put my roadtrip mix back on," said Tiffany hopefully.
"No," said Sunny emphatically. "If I ever have to listen to that LMFAO song again..."
"Party rockers in the hooooooouse tonight," crooned Tiffany, making up as much of a dance to go along with it as she really could while keeping her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes on the road.
"Stop!" giggled Sunny. "Stop."
"It was kind of a boring mix," admitted Tiffany.
"It's hard not to get tired of something after six hours," allowed Sunny. "Even three'll do it sometimes. Like this landscape - it's like we're on another planet. Where are the trees? Are you sure we're moving?"
Tiffany nodded, letting the conversation lapse into silence as Sunny stared out the window in renewed wonderment.
"Do you think I'm boring?" Tiffany asked.
"What kind of question is that?" asked Sunny, wrinkling her nose.
"An idle one," said Tiffany carefully. "There's no one to talk to but me. I'm not very funny. I guess I was just... wondering. If you were sick of me yet."
Tiffany half-expected Sunny to turn the question around on her, to turn on that high-pitched serene-sweet charm voice she had, and ask "Why, are you sick of me, Fany- ah?"
But Sunny didn't. She twisted her lips in thought for just long enough to make Tiffany start to feel self- conscious before saying, "No. You haven't bored me yet. And if you can't do it in fifteen-some hours in this stupid car... well. Maybe you shouldn't worry about it so much anymore."
Easier said than done.
-
Tiffany couldn't figure out why Sunny was so insistent about coming into the motel lobby with her until she asked the front desk clerk, "Is there a liquor store in town?" in placidly accented English.
"It would have been nice if there had been another old country bar right there," explained Sunny sadly. "But we'll always have Henderson. And sometimes you've got to make your own party. And that's is what we're doing tonight."
"I'm really into whipped cream vodka," Tiffany confessed once they'd finally found the liquor store, four wrong turns and a miracle later.
Sunny threw her a disgusted look. "I don't think they have that here. Even if they did - are you telling me you'd have the guts to take a bottle of that up to him?" Sunny tossed her head towards the scruffy middle-aged man behind the counter. He looked like something out of a cowboy novel,
"I'd make you do it," stage-whispered Tiffany.
"I wouldn't do it," said Sunny. "I could, but I wouldn't. Not for whipped-cream vodka. We're buying real alcohol."
"I'm not drinking straight whiskey," whined Tiffany. "And it's not like they're going to have Soju in Fort Stockville."
"Fort Stockton," corrected Sunny.
"Whatever."
-
"You're friends with Taeyeon."
There were certain inflections Tiffany was supposed to hit, in the saying of that sentence, but at four, pondering five, "shots" of tequila (they'd been eyeballing them in the plastic hotel water cups), she couldn't produce them the way she was supposed to. She just sounded like a drunk girl stating the obvious.
Sunny's returning giggle sounded distant - she was dangling off of the motel bed they'd spread themselves across, fraternizing with the floor, her back arched gracefully against the edge of the the mottled green and pink of the shiny bedspread. "Good catch."
"That's not what I meant," whined Tiffany. "Obviously you're friends with Taeyeon, but I was talking about..."
Sunny poked teasingly at Tiffany's thigh with one pointed, socked toe.
"Hey! I'm trying to ask you a question."
"So ask me a question, then," said Sunny, pulling herself up to sitting position in one swift movement, and meeting Tiffany's gaze with weirdly wide-eyed attentiveness. Tiffany blinked, momentarily distracted.
"Okay," said Tiffany. "Remember when we were talking about lesbians... about Taeyeon and lesbians, and you said the thing..."
"Remind me," said Sunny temperately.
"You said you thought we were... you know... sleeping together..." (Sunny started giggling again) "...because you'd never met a friend of hers that she wasn't with."
"A female friend," corrected Sunny.
"Yeah," said Tiffany heavily. "So I'm just saying. You're her friend. And you're a girl."
"True," said Sunny.
"So... have you?"
"Have I what?" More giggling.
"Ugh," said Tiffany. "I wish you were still hanging so I could push you off the bed."
That only made Sunny laugh harder. Tiffany slid back across the bedspread, pushing herself against the headboard, back stiff like a monarch, and waited.
After a moment, Sunny composed herself, twisted her lips. "I did sleep with her, one time."
"Just one time?"
Sunny nodded mutedly.
"Hmm," said Tiffany, considering. "What about that guy?"
"What guy?"
"The one that you were... oh come on, you remember! When I met you! You were standing on a curb, with a guy, and you two were..."
"Oh," said Sunny. "Yeah. Jason."
"Oh yeah Jason," Tiffany parroted.
"What about him?"
Tiffany shrugged. "I mean, who do you like?"
"Out of Jason and Taeyeon?"
"Yeah," said Tiffany emphatically.
"Neither," said Sunny. "Both. I don't know."
-
Ten miles outside of El Paso, in the middle of a very serious Tiffany pontification about her top five favorite romantic comedies (Sunny picked first, but her scope was much more limited), Sunny said, "Sexuality is really complex."
"Yeah," said Tiffany, befuddled.
"Like, people just expect you to check a box, and be done with it. Straight, gay, bi."
"I never said that!" said Tiffany. "I didn't say anything - "
"No," said Sunny. "I wasn't talking about you. Just, generally. That's what people expect, I think. And it's just not that simple."
"Nothing is ever that simple," said Tiffany, with a long- suffering sigh. Sunny smiled and patted her arm placatingly.
"There's a certain equality implied with bisexuality," continued Sunny. "Like when you say it, it means I like both, like you like both basically equally - "
"And you don't?" asked Tiffany. She was out of her depth. None of this was anything she'd ever put a lot of thought into.
"I..." Sunny hedged. "Had a girlfriend. My first year of college. Back home, I mean. I wasn't looking for a girlfriend. It's kind of a funny story, the night we hooked up, I was actually angling to get with this guy - but I found her instead."
Tiffany could sense a transformation in Sunny - her body language was softer, her voice wistful. But she couldn't tell what it meant, or see all the signs. The problem with driving like this, all at once, meant you had to experience hours and days of your life out of the slits of your eyes. You missed things that way.
"The whole time we were together it was like - my whole axis changed. Like all this time, all my life, I'd been checking out cute boys, but once I was with her - suddenly I catch myself in a ramyun shop, watching the girls that passed. And then we broke up and I changed back. I almost got married."
"Seriously?" Tiffany's bark of disbelief sounded almost, uncomfortably, like laughter. She started to apologize, but Sunny kept going.
"Seriously. It felt... it was really good, for awhile. And then I just felt trapped. So I decided to study abroad, and we... I broke up with him," said Sunny. "Dated a couple of other men. None seriously. And then, right before I left, I spent the weekend with Hyoyeon."
"Is that the girlfriend?"
"Ex-girlfriend. Yeah. Nothing even happened that weekend... not really. It's just that I shifted back. It was so easy to laugh and say I had a phase, before. But you can't call it a phase when it happens twice. Now it's just part of me."
"Sexuality is really complex," said Tiffany hollowly. She wasn't used to having nothing to say.
-
"Will I look stupid if I run five laps around the gas station to stretch my legs?"
"Yes," said Sunny, without hesitation. "Plus you hate running."
"I run all the time!"
"And you hate it all the time," said Sunny. "Go pee, it's going to be sunset soon, we're bleeding time."
It was a little weird, how many months of casual acquaintance could be simulated and crunched into a couple of hours.
When she got back to the car, Sunny had the roadmap spread across the hood of the minivan, her small hands anchoring it against the ripple of wind.
"Arizona's the one with that big rocky hole, right?" Sunny asked Tiffany as she approached, not taking her eyes off the map.
"The Grand Canyon," said Tiffany, hunching over Sunny's shoulder. "But it's up there somewhere, we're going this way."
"Maybe we can go on the way back to Florida," said Sunny hopefully.
-
Cross-legged on the motel carpet, undaunted by the layer of dust she'd resurrected on contact, Sunny studiously unzipped her suitcase. "I'm too stiff for this," she complained. "Are you sure we can't sleep in our clothes?"
"Do what you what," said Tiffany, sprawled across the bed face down. "Here's another question - how do you feel about spending your winter vacation in this motel room? Because I am not getting back in that car."
Sunny laughed, but it was weak. A pity giggle. Tiffany was used to those. "Oh, hey," said Sunny. There was a sloshing sound. "Look - "
"No," said Tiffany. "I hear that tequila and I am telling you to put it away." A couple of years of frat parties may have given Tiffany the constitution of a sailor (or at least what passed for it in a small asian girl), but she had never been a three nights in a row kind of girl.
There was more giggling, and more rustling, as Sunny tucked the bottle away and kept rifling through her suitcase to find her pajama pants. Tiffany's suitcase was in similar disarray, she was sure, they seemed to be getting worse with each subsequent motel. Seohyun probably had a book somewhere about efficient packing. She'd have to ask to borrow that, when they got back.
"Hey," said Tiffany. "You never told me about you and Taeyeon."
"Hmm?"
"When I asked," said Tiffany. "You told me about Hyohyun - "
"Hyoyeon."
"Right," said Tiffany. "You told me about a lot of stuff, but you forgot to tell me about what I asked in the first place. You and Taeyeon."
"Why are you so curious?" said Sunny teasingly. "Jealous? Because I'm sure Taeyeon would - "
"Shut up," groaned Tiffany.
Sunny did. There was a small, girlish grunt as she lifted herself off the floor, and a couple of cushioned footsteps as she let herself into the bathroom to change. Tiffany thought about pushing it, asking again, but that would have involved movement.
It felt like it took hours for Sunny to come back, but it was probably only minutes later that she sat next to Tiffany's sprawled form, the change in weight distribution shaking Tiffany out of a not-quite-doze. Tiffany was on the verge of saying something utterly silly about how thoroughly her body had been fucked with, after three days of fast food, monotonous vistas, and, of course, the alcohol, but -
"I think I wanted to know if it'd be different," said Sunny, tracing Tiffany's elbow. "With another girl. Another girl, I mean obviously I'd..."
"I got you," said Tiffany. "No worries."
"After I found out Taeyeon was... well. It made sense to try with someone I trusted," said Sunny. "And she's a very pretty girl. So... I went for it."
Tiffany lifted her head up off the bedspread, tilting just enough to see her companion's face. "Just like that?"
Sunny shrugged. "I know how to get what I want."
"So was it different?" asked Tiffany.
"Of course," said Sunny, softly, almost to herself. "Of course it was."
-
There were two beds in the room, but Tiffany woke up wrapped in Sunny's messy limbs. She couldn't twist to see the clock without alarming her bedfellow, but it was still dark, and the muted tv seemed to be playing a get-rich- quick infomercial. The wee small hours. When had they fallen asleep?
Sunny's right hand, balled into a fist (plus a couple of inches displacement - Tiffany wondered if sleeping that close to the headboard made Sunny feel taller or something) was the only barrier between their faces. She looked different, shrouded in the flickering, unreal color of the television. Or maybe it was the lack of makeup - her eyelashes were short and delicate, not even reaching her cheek, nothing like the big black caterpillars she batted around all day. Her lips -
- Tiffany needed to extricate herself from this situation. Easier said than done - Sunny was a shifter, constantly twisting herself into new positions, changing the game, and Tiffany was strangely paranoid about jostling her out of sleep.
They were in Tuscon that night, in a three star hotel that housed actual people - people there to see their families, people there on business, not just ghosts drifting through. There were even amenities - a kitchen, a swimming pool, a gym. More importantly, there was a hallway. That way she could steal out of the hotel room and catch her breath without having to think about it. She should have brought her phone, though, she realized as she sank down on the ugly red carpet. That kind of foresight would have been helpful.
Or would it? Who would she call, Yuri, Jessica? To what - ask them if they thought sexuality was complex? If it was a thing they thought about? Or if they were like Tiffany, and never wondered -
The door opened. Sunny was rumpled, squinty at the sudden hallway light. "What are you doing out here?"
"I don't know," said Tiffany honestly.
"Come back inside," said Sunny. "You don't have to sit out here on the carpet. I'm not going to invade your pondering space."
You can't promise that, thought Tiffany intently, like if she thought it hard enough her little danshin would pick it up telepathically. But Sunny didn't, blithely reaching out a limp arm to help her out of her crouched position. "Come back inside," she said again, dragging Tiffany across their unlit room and settling her on the unused bed before she slipped back under the covers of the mussed one.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked, after a minute, when Tiffany didn't move from her seated position on the edge of her bed.
Brave, not boring. "I guess I was just... wondering about what it was like being your girlfriend," said Tiffany.
Sunny waited so long to reply that for a moment Tiffany was sure she wasn't going to acknowledge it at all.
"You'd hate it," she said, her voice unusually small. "Think of all the weird sex things you'd have to learn."
-
"I bought you a present," said Tiffany, after they were settled and driving again. Everything about their final day was barely, intangibly off - they'd slept the morning away, only an hour out of Tuscon and it was already almost mid-afternoon. But mostly their atmosphere is off - not stilted, not unpleasant exactly, but not normal either.
"You did?" said Sunny, whipping her head in surprise. "Where?"
"The Tuesday Morning store next to the restaurant," said Tiffany. "Obviously."
Sunny wrinkled her nose in confusion as Tiffany handed her the unwrapped, tall blue can. "What is it?"
"Snow in a can!" said Tiffany brightly. "For Christmas in Los Angeles!"
"What?" said Sunny. "How do you - "
"You spray it on windows," said Tiffany. "I know it's dumb. I just thought it was funny."
"America is so odd," said Sunny, staring at the can in her hands.
"Yeah," said Tiffany.
"But thank you," said Sunny. "It's kind of sweet."
-
Nice as it was to be in a part of the country that was populated enough to have its own NPR station, somewhere in the depths of wilderness radio and country music Tiffany had forgotten that all NPR played at night was terrible, meandering jazz covers of vaguely recognizable melodies.
The only people Tiffany had ever met who were as intent about NPR as Lee Soonkyu were white stay-at-home moms. But Sunny'd been quiet for a good part of the hour, and even though her face was pointed towards the window and there was no way to be sure - surely this qualified as a nap. Surely she could risk changing the station to something she could sing along -
"Are we close yet?"
Tiffany started, her hand still hovering out towards the tuner knob. "Um, 128 miles, we just passed a sign."
"Aish," mumbled Sunny. She shifted, her arms flailing out weirdly. For a split second Tiffany was sure she was going to grab for her hand - but she didn't. "What is that in hours? I thought once we crossed into California we'd be home free."
"Two, I think," said Tiffany. "God, can you imagine being that far from the beach? It's not even really California if the air isn't a little bit salty, I don't think. And people live there."
"People live everywhere," said Sunny. "Everywhere we've been. "
"Not West Texas," quipped Tiffany.
But Sunny was intent. She looked at her lap, and Tiffany could tell they weren't talking about the people of Indio, California anymore. "I want to say thank you," said Sunny.
"For what?"
"For taking me with you," said Sunny. "Obviously."
-
It was raining in Pasadena, and the soggy mix of moisture and fallen leaves that paves Sunny's cousins' driveway was unfamiliar beneath their feet, after all these days of standing on concrete and dry, ashy prarie grass.
"You want to hear a joke?" Sunny asked, as Tiffany fiddled with the persnickey lock on her trunk.
"How dirty is it?"
"I'm insulted at the very insinuation," Sunny laughed, stretching out the last word with a weird purr, languid and lulling enough that Tiffany didn't anticipate being snapped around and pushed against the back of the minivan. Sunny's hands slid up around her cheeks. Tiffany giggled. Sunny rolled her eyes.
"So unsexy," she groaned. Tiffany only has just enough time to realize Sunny was really, actually leaning in before she was there, lips cold and glossy against Tiffany's. The kissing part was the same as always - wet, messy - but there were other adjustments, tilting down instead of up, Sunny's ample chest pushing against her own. It was over before it began.
"Now I have to do the lock again," pouted Tiffany. Sunny grinned saucily and pilfered the keys from Tiffany's hand - a blatant ploy for prolonged physical contact, but she was gone a second later, on her tippy toes to lift the trunk door above their heads. It was weird, to be suddenly sheltered from the rain, but already dripping wet.
Sunny, armed with her bag and suitcase, turned to face her. Tiffany expected a 'see you later' or a 'thank you'. She didn't know why she kept coming up with expectations for Sunny. The other girl never followed them.
What she said, before she disappeared into the dark house, was, "We can think about it."