Ever felt like you're watching yourself outside your body?
A/N: finally, here's the ending for the SooFany thing. So with this it ends as a four-shot. The previous three are here: BLINDFOLD, BINOCULARS, CAMERA. I dunno what else to say, honestly. Just that it's always harder getting in someone's head and writing about it when they've lost themselves completely in fear. This is what this four-shot is about mainly: fearing the self. Now let's see how Sooyoung likes being watched instead of doing all the watching.
EYES
The lights are dim, the room not spinning at all. It used to spin. Just from Tiffany’s scent lingering above their heads, it would spin. Just from the mere sight of Tiffany’s bare back and Tiffany’s neck and the sweat forming on Tiffany’s shoulder blades and… Okay. So ‘mere’ isn’t the right word. But for now, the room isn’t spinning. There’s a tingling in her stomach, though. Sooyoung swallows, a lock of her dark brown hair shifting from her exposed cheek to just in front of her eyes. The other cheek is pressed to Tiffany’s still bra-clad chest.
“Morning,” goes a whisper.
“Morning,” Sooyoung whispers back. Her chapped lips seem drier after brushing against the edge of Tiffany’s lace bra. She wets them with the tip of her tongue and takes a breath. “Sorry,” she says.
Tiffany’s chest rises, securing a new lungful of air. She raises her arm slightly to stroke the back of Sooyoung’s head, the rest of the arm against Sooyoung’s neck. They had fallen asleep like this, with Tiffany flat on her back, right beside Sooyoung, who’s still rolled on her side with a leg over both of Tiffany’s, an arm over Tiffany’s stomach and her head on Tiffany’s chest. Nearly naked. But not just yet.
Tiffany is still on her back, down to her underwear. Sooyoung had already gotten back into her shirt before they both drifted to sleep. She could’ve put her pajamas back on, too. But she figured she owed Tiffany a bit of skin.
“Sorry,” Sooyoung says again.
“Yeah, well,” Tiffany replies.
Sooyoung takes another breath. Not that she has anything else she knows how to do or can do at the moment. Last night was okay. The room spun around, her senses blaring wildly at her to tear Tiffany’s clothes off, push her down on whichever which place and stick something up her ass or her mouth or up that thing she now swears she has dreamt about licking for the longest time. She can’t bring herself to say it, just as hard it is for her to actually do it. Do as in to stimulate it. She sighs. She figures it’s too embarrassing. She takes another breath. The room teeters a bit. She had just gotten a whiff of Tiffany’s perfume.
“Or is it lotion?” she mumbles.
“What lotion?” Tiffany asks, turning her head toward Sooyoung’s, almost as if kissing the side of her head.
“Nothing,” goes the reply.
“Right.”
“You sound annoyed.”
“Bingo.”
The room slowly teeters once more. Sooyoung feels the side of her head pounding against Tiffany’s lips, unsure whether or not she wants the latter to notice as well. She lies still, pondering. And all the while the spinning of the room begins to quicken. She dares not close her eyes just yet, now daring to do something other than escape reality for a change.
“I have work today. I have to get up,” Tiffany says, already starting to do as she just said.
“Don’t,” Sooyoung protests, clinging onto Tiffany’s body while pulling her back down onto their bed. “Please don’t.”
A soft giggle escapes Tiffany. “Ha! Or else what? I don’t suppose you can come up with something worse than not wanting me,
right?”
“I…”
“Yeah, didn’t think so-”
“But-”
“Whatever.”
It was barely a conversation. But off Tiffany went and here Sooyoung lays, alone, gritting her teeth while blaming the lamp in the corner. It’s stupid, she knows. But she’s doing it anyway. What else is there to do now?
“Oh, right,” she mumbles.
She leaves the bed, staggers toward their door and safely finds the door post to lean on. She clears her vision for a good five seconds and starts to walk again, this time toward their bathroom. This is Tiffany’s routine and she knows it well. Bathroom, kitchen, living room, front door. Never going through the same room twice. Why it had always been that way, she doesn’t know up to now. Safe to say, however, that each of those spots is not spinning the way their bedroom was up until she left it. Strange, she thinks as she approaches the bathroom door.
“Get out,” immediately goes Tiffany’s demand at the click of the door opening inward. The shower is turned on, the water splashing onto the frosted-glass door. Sooyoung could barely make out Tiffany’s silhouette just behind it.
“I said get out!” Tiffany repeats, this time much louder. It echoes but not enough to make the room move. Sooyoung remains perfectly still, daring herself to do something other than escape again. It isn’t about spinning rooms anymore or something in her head telling her that rooms actually do move during certain times. It’s stupid, she knows. But she also knows that there’s something about Tiffany.
“It’s you, you know that?” Sooyoung says, braving the fact that Tiffany might just tell her to scram again in response.
“Oh so now it’s my fault?” goes Tiffany’s voice, which is slightly being drowned out by the running water.
“No, it’s not your fault,” Sooyoung says as she presses her two palms on the frosted-glass door. “It’s not your fault that you make me feel a certain way-”
“Like making you feel that I’m a person you shouldn’t make love to?! Well, gee, thanks! That’s really comforting of you to say!”
“No, I don’t mean it that way. It’s just-”
The room starts moving again, the water spewing out of the shower head now roaring in Sooyoung’s ears. She swallows, her palms no longer on the frosted-glass door but in mid-air. And right in front of them is Tiffany’s bare, wet body.
“Just what? Say it to my face!”
“I don’t want…”
“Say it!!”
Sooyoung shakes her head, biting into her lower lip as if it would save her.
“Get out.”
“Fany-ah…”
Tiffany shrugs then she slides the door closed without so much as another word. Sooyoung doesn’t bother to reply, either. Instead, she lowers herself onto the floor and sits down right in front of the frosted-glass door and Tiffany’s now barely visible self.
The room is still moving. She wants it to stop.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Left.
She thinks of begging it to stop teetering but she figures she deserves to get dizzy this time around. She knows nothing is actually moving. But before her is a series of movement, frame after frame. She knows it because she sees it. Perfectly still, she watches the room move around her. The frosted-glass door, the bathroom tiles, Tiffany’s silhouette. This is all still real and she knows it. But she has spent too much time letting her eyes get the best of her, feeding off of everything she sees, that much of how real things really are is but a distant memory now. There’s always that ideal, that beauty she spots in everything. Much of which she found in Tiffany. Much of which she has been too afraid to touch. Because what if at that moment she finds out that she’s been wrong all along? That in truth, beauty isn’t in everything. Or worse, that beauty is beyond what she is worthy of.
That fear is what drives her thoughts from one end of her head to the other, making sure that one wrong move and the thoughts could go straight through her skull, past the hard tissue and out her head like a gunshot. It’ll kill me, she always thinks.
“Fany-ah?”
“What?”
“You sound annoyed.”
“Because I am.”
“Why?”
“What kind of stupid question-”
“Why?” Sooyoung repeats.
A sigh escapes Tiffany. She turns the shower off. Feeling as vulnerable and helpless as she is naked, she sits on the floor and presses her right palm against the door. “Because you should already know why. It’s not about not having sex, okay? Well… not entirely about that. It’s just that you make me feel like I’m not good enough for you, you know? Each and every time you tell me you want me you just end up not acting like you mean it. That’s just it. You stop. And everywhere stops all together, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t,” Sooyoung replies from the other side of the door, shaking her head.
“Then maybe we should just call this off.”
The frosted-glass door stands between them. This is reality right now, Sooyoung tells herself in her thoughts. This is how much we know about each other. This tiny fragment of a person, more than a shadow but less than a reflection. We’re barely here.
“Fany-ah,” Sooyoung says, again pressing both palms against the door. “Can you see me from back there?”
“Barely,” goes Tiffany’s soft reply. Energy has left her. Like she said, everything has just stopped.
“I do want you, Fany-ah-”
“Don’t. Just… don’t…”
“I do! So please just hear me out. I do want you. I always will. Just the sight of you overwhelms me. And I’m just scared that anything beyond that might… might…”
There is no word for it, Sooyoung realizes. This feeling of regret before anything even happens. This emptiness out of being completely filled with every opportunity to seize the one thing she already has and will probably always hold. She thought of love at first. Maybe it’s one of those exaggerations born out of wild passion, she once told herself.
No.
No, she now tells herself. Love must be everything pure in the world. It’s everything that is good. This isn’t it. This is a hole of nothing emerging from too much of something. This is addiction. This is lust. This is everything I want just within reach and I need it. I’ve had so much of it that it’s unreal. It’s too good to be love. I see it. But not everything I see can be real. Tiffany is lust. Tiffany is. I see her. Need her. Want her.
She no longer cares. “Let the thought shoot out of my head!” she screams as she slides the door open then flings herself into Tiffany’s arms. Body wash, now she’s sure of it. This scent, this sensation running down to the small of her back, the dripping from the shower head. She sees nothing, but feels the contours of Tiffany’s wet body right under her palms. She finds Tiffany’s lips with hers, soft and full. She nibbles away while the rest of her body awakes to the rest of the pleasure before her.
“Sooyoung-ah…”
That voice. She wants it. Needs it.
The feel of Tiffany’s left breast. Her neck. Her jawline. Her soft earlobe.
“Sooyoungie…”
The feel of her hand going in between Tiffany’s thighs, tracing it upwards to a hot, melting spot. The initial push.
“Sooyoungie…”
That voice. A tiny moan. A tightening around her two fingers. Tiffany’s haggard breathing.
The room is moving now. It actually is.
Cold bathroom wall. Tiffany’s warm, moist, bare body. A sloshing within the heat. Her own shortness of breath. The thought is long gone, out of her head and now manifesting as action. This is real. This is addiction. This is lust. Finally, this is Tiffany. This just is.
“I do want you,” Sooyoung manages to whisper, barely catching Tiffany’s lower lip between hers. “I do… I really do…”
“Finally, you do,” Tiffany whispers back.
“I always have. I always will, Fany-ah.”
“Then we’ll do this again if that’s the case. I love you, Sooyoungie. I need you… Want you…”
Still wet from the bath, the two seek more comfort in their bedroom. It spins, they teeter. It wobbles, they bounce. Collision after collision after collision. Now, Tiffany’s nape. Her shoulders. Her bare buttocks. The lingering smell of her secretions. The sloshing - the seemingly endless sloshing.
No words. Everything is in the tightening. Sooyoung feels it. She knows it. Again and again, she will feel it. Past breakfast, past lunch. All throughout the night. This might as well be Tiffany’s new routine, one both of them will remember well.
The following morning enters bathed in sunlight, orange emerging from the dusk. Sooyoung opens her eyes to greet it, exhausted. Her head is pounding like mad. “What the…”
That lamp is still in the corner. Her sheets are still in disarray. Sweat stains run from the collar of her top down the middle of her chest. She stares at her right fingers and they seem to be coated in translucence. “I see it,” she mutters to herself. “Last night-Wait. Fany-ah?”
Nothing.
So the thought went. That was last night - just a wet dream. She now laughs to herself, bearing the mark on the side of her head where the thoughts of Tiffany burst out of, like a gunshot. Might as well have been, she now wishes.
So here is the regret right after something happened.
So here is the emptiness after being completely filled with opportunity to seize the one thing she already had and will probably always hold had she not given in to it.
She had managed to keep herself from herself all this time.
Despite her fear.
Despite Tiffany’s disappointment.
Despite spending the past weeks watching that video she took of Tiffany.
Despite that co-worker.
Despite Tiffany having left her three months ago.
This is real. Now she really sees it, left with nothing more than the remaining scent of Tiffany on her fingers. Of addiction. Of lust.
EYES
The lights are dim, the room not spinning at all. It used to spin. Just from Tiffany’s scent lingering above their heads, it would spin. Just from the mere sight of Tiffany’s bare back and Tiffany’s neck and the sweat forming on Tiffany’s shoulder blades and… Okay. So ‘mere’ isn’t the right word. But for now, the room isn’t spinning. There’s a tingling in her stomach, though. Sooyoung swallows, a lock of her dark brown hair shifting from her exposed cheek to just in front of her eyes. The other cheek is pressed to Tiffany’s still bra-clad chest.
“Morning,” goes a whisper.
“Morning,” Sooyoung whispers back. Her chapped lips seem drier after brushing against the edge of Tiffany’s lace bra. She wets them with the tip of her tongue and takes a breath. “Sorry,” she says.
Tiffany’s chest rises, securing a new lungful of air. She raises her arm slightly to stroke the back of Sooyoung’s head, the rest of the arm against Sooyoung’s neck. They had fallen asleep like this, with Tiffany flat on her back, right beside Sooyoung, who’s still rolled on her side with a leg over both of Tiffany’s, an arm over Tiffany’s stomach and her head on Tiffany’s chest. Nearly naked. But not just yet.
Tiffany is still on her back, down to her underwear. Sooyoung had already gotten back into her shirt before they both drifted to sleep. She could’ve put her pajamas back on, too. But she figured she owed Tiffany a bit of skin.
“Sorry,” Sooyoung says again.
“Yeah, well,” Tiffany replies.
Sooyoung takes another breath. Not that she has anything else she knows how to do or can do at the moment. Last night was okay. The room spun around, her senses blaring wildly at her to tear Tiffany’s clothes off, push her down on whichever which place and stick something up her ass or her mouth or up that thing she now swears she has dreamt about licking for the longest time. She can’t bring herself to say it, just as hard it is for her to actually do it. Do as in to stimulate it. She sighs. She figures it’s too embarrassing. She takes another breath. The room teeters a bit. She had just gotten a whiff of Tiffany’s perfume.
“Or is it lotion?” she mumbles.
“What lotion?” Tiffany asks, turning her head toward Sooyoung’s, almost as if kissing the side of her head.
“Nothing,” goes the reply.
“Right.”
“You sound annoyed.”
“Bingo.”
The room slowly teeters once more. Sooyoung feels the side of her head pounding against Tiffany’s lips, unsure whether or not she wants the latter to notice as well. She lies still, pondering. And all the while the spinning of the room begins to quicken. She dares not close her eyes just yet, now daring to do something other than escape reality for a change.
“I have work today. I have to get up,” Tiffany says, already starting to do as she just said.
“Don’t,” Sooyoung protests, clinging onto Tiffany’s body while pulling her back down onto their bed. “Please don’t.”
A soft giggle escapes Tiffany. “Ha! Or else what? I don’t suppose you can come up with something worse than not wanting me,
right?”
“I…”
“Yeah, didn’t think so-”
“But-”
“Whatever.”
It was barely a conversation. But off Tiffany went and here Sooyoung lays, alone, gritting her teeth while blaming the lamp in the corner. It’s stupid, she knows. But she’s doing it anyway. What else is there to do now?
“Oh, right,” she mumbles.
She leaves the bed, staggers toward their door and safely finds the door post to lean on. She clears her vision for a good five seconds and starts to walk again, this time toward their bathroom. This is Tiffany’s routine and she knows it well. Bathroom, kitchen, living room, front door. Never going through the same room twice. Why it had always been that way, she doesn’t know up to now. Safe to say, however, that each of those spots is not spinning the way their bedroom was up until she left it. Strange, she thinks as she approaches the bathroom door.
“Get out,” immediately goes Tiffany’s demand at the click of the door opening inward. The shower is turned on, the water splashing onto the frosted-glass door. Sooyoung could barely make out Tiffany’s silhouette just behind it.
“I said get out!” Tiffany repeats, this time much louder. It echoes but not enough to make the room move. Sooyoung remains perfectly still, daring herself to do something other than escape again. It isn’t about spinning rooms anymore or something in her head telling her that rooms actually do move during certain times. It’s stupid, she knows. But she also knows that there’s something about Tiffany.
“It’s you, you know that?” Sooyoung says, braving the fact that Tiffany might just tell her to scram again in response.
“Oh so now it’s my fault?” goes Tiffany’s voice, which is slightly being drowned out by the running water.
“No, it’s not your fault,” Sooyoung says as she presses her two palms on the frosted-glass door. “It’s not your fault that you make me feel a certain way-”
“Like making you feel that I’m a person you shouldn’t make love to?! Well, gee, thanks! That’s really comforting of you to say!”
“No, I don’t mean it that way. It’s just-”
The room starts moving again, the water spewing out of the shower head now roaring in Sooyoung’s ears. She swallows, her palms no longer on the frosted-glass door but in mid-air. And right in front of them is Tiffany’s bare, wet body.
“Just what? Say it to my face!”
“I don’t want…”
“Say it!!”
Sooyoung shakes her head, biting into her lower lip as if it would save her.
“Get out.”
“Fany-ah…”
Tiffany shrugs then she slides the door closed without so much as another word. Sooyoung doesn’t bother to reply, either. Instead, she lowers herself onto the floor and sits down right in front of the frosted-glass door and Tiffany’s now barely visible self.
The room is still moving. She wants it to stop.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Left.
She thinks of begging it to stop teetering but she figures she deserves to get dizzy this time around. She knows nothing is actually moving. But before her is a series of movement, frame after frame. She knows it because she sees it. Perfectly still, she watches the room move around her. The frosted-glass door, the bathroom tiles, Tiffany’s silhouette. This is all still real and she knows it. But she has spent too much time letting her eyes get the best of her, feeding off of everything she sees, that much of how real things really are is but a distant memory now. There’s always that ideal, that beauty she spots in everything. Much of which she found in Tiffany. Much of which she has been too afraid to touch. Because what if at that moment she finds out that she’s been wrong all along? That in truth, beauty isn’t in everything. Or worse, that beauty is beyond what she is worthy of.
That fear is what drives her thoughts from one end of her head to the other, making sure that one wrong move and the thoughts could go straight through her skull, past the hard tissue and out her head like a gunshot. It’ll kill me, she always thinks.
“Fany-ah?”
“What?”
“You sound annoyed.”
“Because I am.”
“Why?”
“What kind of stupid question-”
“Why?” Sooyoung repeats.
A sigh escapes Tiffany. She turns the shower off. Feeling as vulnerable and helpless as she is naked, she sits on the floor and presses her right palm against the door. “Because you should already know why. It’s not about not having sex, okay? Well… not entirely about that. It’s just that you make me feel like I’m not good enough for you, you know? Each and every time you tell me you want me you just end up not acting like you mean it. That’s just it. You stop. And everywhere stops all together, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t,” Sooyoung replies from the other side of the door, shaking her head.
“Then maybe we should just call this off.”
The frosted-glass door stands between them. This is reality right now, Sooyoung tells herself in her thoughts. This is how much we know about each other. This tiny fragment of a person, more than a shadow but less than a reflection. We’re barely here.
“Fany-ah,” Sooyoung says, again pressing both palms against the door. “Can you see me from back there?”
“Barely,” goes Tiffany’s soft reply. Energy has left her. Like she said, everything has just stopped.
“I do want you, Fany-ah-”
“Don’t. Just… don’t…”
“I do! So please just hear me out. I do want you. I always will. Just the sight of you overwhelms me. And I’m just scared that anything beyond that might… might…”
There is no word for it, Sooyoung realizes. This feeling of regret before anything even happens. This emptiness out of being completely filled with every opportunity to seize the one thing she already has and will probably always hold. She thought of love at first. Maybe it’s one of those exaggerations born out of wild passion, she once told herself.
No.
No, she now tells herself. Love must be everything pure in the world. It’s everything that is good. This isn’t it. This is a hole of nothing emerging from too much of something. This is addiction. This is lust. This is everything I want just within reach and I need it. I’ve had so much of it that it’s unreal. It’s too good to be love. I see it. But not everything I see can be real. Tiffany is lust. Tiffany is. I see her. Need her. Want her.
She no longer cares. “Let the thought shoot out of my head!” she screams as she slides the door open then flings herself into Tiffany’s arms. Body wash, now she’s sure of it. This scent, this sensation running down to the small of her back, the dripping from the shower head. She sees nothing, but feels the contours of Tiffany’s wet body right under her palms. She finds Tiffany’s lips with hers, soft and full. She nibbles away while the rest of her body awakes to the rest of the pleasure before her.
“Sooyoung-ah…”
That voice. She wants it. Needs it.
The feel of Tiffany’s left breast. Her neck. Her jawline. Her soft earlobe.
“Sooyoungie…”
The feel of her hand going in between Tiffany’s thighs, tracing it upwards to a hot, melting spot. The initial push.
“Sooyoungie…”
That voice. A tiny moan. A tightening around her two fingers. Tiffany’s haggard breathing.
The room is moving now. It actually is.
Cold bathroom wall. Tiffany’s warm, moist, bare body. A sloshing within the heat. Her own shortness of breath. The thought is long gone, out of her head and now manifesting as action. This is real. This is addiction. This is lust. Finally, this is Tiffany. This just is.
“I do want you,” Sooyoung manages to whisper, barely catching Tiffany’s lower lip between hers. “I do… I really do…”
“Finally, you do,” Tiffany whispers back.
“I always have. I always will, Fany-ah.”
“Then we’ll do this again if that’s the case. I love you, Sooyoungie. I need you… Want you…”
Still wet from the bath, the two seek more comfort in their bedroom. It spins, they teeter. It wobbles, they bounce. Collision after collision after collision. Now, Tiffany’s nape. Her shoulders. Her bare buttocks. The lingering smell of her secretions. The sloshing - the seemingly endless sloshing.
No words. Everything is in the tightening. Sooyoung feels it. She knows it. Again and again, she will feel it. Past breakfast, past lunch. All throughout the night. This might as well be Tiffany’s new routine, one both of them will remember well.
The following morning enters bathed in sunlight, orange emerging from the dusk. Sooyoung opens her eyes to greet it, exhausted. Her head is pounding like mad. “What the…”
That lamp is still in the corner. Her sheets are still in disarray. Sweat stains run from the collar of her top down the middle of her chest. She stares at her right fingers and they seem to be coated in translucence. “I see it,” she mutters to herself. “Last night-Wait. Fany-ah?”
Nothing.
So the thought went. That was last night - just a wet dream. She now laughs to herself, bearing the mark on the side of her head where the thoughts of Tiffany burst out of, like a gunshot. Might as well have been, she now wishes.
So here is the regret right after something happened.
So here is the emptiness after being completely filled with opportunity to seize the one thing she already had and will probably always hold had she not given in to it.
She had managed to keep herself from herself all this time.
Despite her fear.
Despite Tiffany’s disappointment.
Despite spending the past weeks watching that video she took of Tiffany.
Despite that co-worker.
Despite Tiffany having left her three months ago.
This is real. Now she really sees it, left with nothing more than the remaining scent of Tiffany on her fingers. Of addiction. Of lust.