it could kill me
2030.
(14 years ago. Sabine is a sophomore in college, Yunhua is a freshman.)
On a typical morning Sabine gets her fill of caffeine from the gas station across the street, from the dusty one-off fridge suspiciously placed several isles away from the regular corner drinks in the form off-brand energy drinks that are probably not FDA approved, in whichever flavor her grubby hands can reach first—only taking care to avoid bubblegum blast. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
But it wasn’t a typical morning. She was headed to the library, panicking and running late to a make-up exam because someone on the other side of the wall forgot to turn off his music that he left blaring out the speakers all night. Alex somehow slept fine. Sabine hadn’t. Jackass.
So she forgoes the bacon egg and cheese and energy drinks for the day because the gas station’s the other way, and as luck would have it, the pop-up campus coffee cart that runs around the college to raise money for something-or-another was sitting right outside the library. She figures that if she’s going to be late, she might as well be an extra minute late and caffeinated for the exam.
“Hi!” perks a bubbly voice from the cart, a ponytail of straight black hair shooting up as she notices Sabine blundering over with a halfway-zipped up bag slung over her shoulder. “We’re raising money for the—”
“Yeah, so can I have some coffee?” Sabine feels a little sorry about it, but she really doesn’t have time and she needs some kind of stimulant in her stat or she’s going to start digging up the earth and consuming it raw.
Poor girl, she looks a little shaken, because this is clearly her first—and probably only—day on the job, and she’s not, and by the looks of her expensive-ass looking clothes isn’t, and probably won’t ever need to be, used to grumpy customers. “Sure—erm, our menu’s over here, and the special is the—”
“Yeah, I want the coffee?” exhales Sabine. Why does this random ass pop up coffee cart have so many damn options?
“Er—okay… Black coffee’s okay?”
Sabine nods impatiently.
“What size?” asks the girl, staring at her with eyes all twinkling, At first Sabine was annoyed but maybe she’s starting to feel a little disarmed…
“Uh...” Oh god, what sizes is coffee again? It’s been so long since she’s been to a café. Something about venti and tall, but which one is the—
"Big.” Sabine splutters out shamefully.
“A large it is!”
Dammit, why couldn’t she fucking think of the word large? Now on top of everything she’s embarrassed herself in front of a cute girl. Thanks, Alex.
“That’ll be a dollar… coming right up…!”
The girl grabs the pot and turns to serve Sabine, who’s in the middle of reaching into the bin to pay with a crumpled up bill, when her fingers graze her arm and—
“ah!”
The girl trips, falling face-first onto the counter, flinging the boiling-hot pot of coffee at Sabine’s arm. The pot falls and shatters at their feet.
“OW!”
“Oh god, are you okay? Are you burnt?”
“No fucking shit I’m burnt—who makes coffee that hot!? Are you crazy?”
The girl ignores her. “I. I think you need to go to the nurse’s office. I’ll take you, We’ll both go—”
“I’m fine. I gotta go to class, just take the money and—”
The girl’s fist grabs at her t-shirt. Sabine’s starting to think that this girl is acting not so cute after all.
“I really think you should go nurse,” she says in a condescending tone of voice. “Stop being a little brat—”
???
“You’re calling me a brat?” Sabine yelps out, half in an attempt to suppress the stinging pain boiling up the skin of the back of her hands, the other half a mixture of confusion and indignance. “Why are you mad at me? You’re the one who threw boiling coffee at me?? Oh god, you’re bleeding!? Why are you bleeding!? Why are you wearing open-toed shoes—”
“You have to go…” the girl babbles, the grip she has on her t shirt going slack and white as she starts to go pale. “Stop being a stupid little brat and go nurse…”
…
And not even a thank you when she’d lugged her all the way to the nurse’s office to get her patched up.
Just a delirious, smug grin, lips upturned, weakly mouthing: “heheh… made you come nurse.”
Condescending anemic sorority bitch. Sabine didn’t even get a chance to drink her coffee. Now she’ll have to explain all this to her chem professor and give up on the make-up credit.
She wanted to knock that smile off her face right there in the nurse’s office. God, what a bitch.
2031.
(13 years ago, a year forward: Sabine is a junior in college.)
So how did she even let this happen?
Sabine’s been staring at her dorm room ceiling for what must’ve been at least half an hour, rewinding and replaying her disjointed memories of last night which have only now started to flood back one by one in a blur. Nestled against her, snoring ever so quietly, is a tiny head stuck stubbornly into her personal space, and arms uncomfortably grappled around Sabine’s arm in what must be some kind of MMA fighter move.
Attempting to disentangle her arms for probably like the fifth time to no avail, she tries to figure out how she and the girl from the coffee stall, which she remembers from last night her name is Yunhua… had ended up in the same bed and ended up—
Sabine’s eyes dart around the room, little details like the slight tear across one of the posters, the normally neatly-placed fixtures on her work desk all askew, the red little bite marks across the top of Sabine’s chest…. only serving to confirm her returning memories.
Sabine grabs a bundle of her duvet with her free arm and scrunches it into her mouth to let out a groan of frustration.
She turns to sneak the briefest glance at this Yunhua girl… She is, at least, exceptionally pretty. Peeking past the crests of the crumply sheets are glimpses of skin like warm almond milk, her cheeks flushed with color aglow in the morning light… Her hair, which Sabine has to admit, does smell nice, is still so shiny and flowy even when it’s all disheveled, draped over her soft neck, covered in h—
Sabine’s stomach lurches. Sabine quickly looks away to spare herself the embarrassment..
But it’s her personality. If she had just been arrogant, Sabine would’ve been able to look past it, but no: it’s the combination of her smart, shy prep-girl exterior that thinly veils the entitled, bratty, and condescending little bitch inside. Even yesterday, after having played so shy at the bar, making Sabine almost believe she’d been wrong about her all this time, she—
She…
Her eyes, fluttering open, starstruck when they pull apart… Her lips relax into a mischievous little smile. ‘hehe… I got you to make out with me.’ she says, with a low purr through a smirk, and a voice much unlike the one she’d put up for herself moments before. ‘So easy.’
She’s rude, she’s insufferable, visibly spoiled, and so, so condescending, Sabine decides. She’s no different from all the other little brats in Greek life who walk around campus acting like they own the place with no one to challenge them on it, and with the strength of the stink on this girl with her designer bags and sorority-glam makeup and expensive-ass phone it never took getting to know her for Sabine to sniff out her type right away.
So condescending…
‘Good girl.’ she coos, mingling her gentle breath with Sabine’s sharper, rougher stutters, gently stroking her scalp with her fingertips, ‘just like that.’
So demanding…
‘You have to hold onto me, baby.’ she commands, catching her wrists by her hands and placing them gently on—.
So…
Goddammit, Sabine’s face starts burning up, and she has no recourse but to shove her blankets into it again.
This girl had spent the entire night doing to Sabine exactly what she hates most—walking all over her, along the flush lining her cheeks, acting like she owns the place, taking whatever she wants from her without needing to ask as if she already knew her weaknesses, and the worst part is in her drunkenness and horniness Sabine could barely talk back because she kept getting her right.
*Like when without even needing to ever ask she somehow knew to call her a—
…And when with the her teeth she—
Goddammit! How is it possible that she finds this freak so attractive in bed?
“I see you can’t take your eyes off me still?”
The girl nestled up to her stretches her arms and legs, shivering as she yawns loudly and performatively, making sure all the relevant marks against her flushed skin are on display as her motion lifts the covers ever so slightly.
“Not at all.” Sabine responds, deadpan. “In fact, I made it a point to look away from you for the better part of an hour.”
“Oooh, so grumpy. Bad dreams, handsome? Hungover?” she prattles off while she checks her phone.
Sabine rolls her eyes, a little jealous of all the notifications on Yunhua’s phone. “You seem like you slept well.”
“I did!” she says through that mask of oh-so-fake cheerfulness. “I always sleep well after—”
Sabine groans, pinching her nose. “Okay, okay, I get it, we fucked, damn!”
Yunhua raises her eyebrow and throws Sabine a side glance, dropping her little act. “I was gonna say a night out at the bar. I didn’t even say anything about all that, sheesh.”
“You—” Sabine wants to retort, when…
Is that the faintest slip in the clarity of those annoyingly bright little eyes?
“Um…” whispers a voice quite unlike any that Sabine knows to be this girl’s. Fragile, vulnerable, and wanting—a gentle wanting not like the smoldering cinders of lust but like billowing grass expectant of rainwater. “…so did… did you not like it…? Was that not okay…? I thought—”
Sabine is taken aback by the tone of her voice.
“N…no..?”
Sabine looks at those eyes welling up with the hint of bright tears, for this briefest of moments without all the pretense and the attitude and her annoyance mellows, and it sinks in slowly and sticky like honey in her heart that she knows for sure what she saw last night in those eyes has nothing to do with the alcohol.
“It’s fine… I liked it. I wanted it, and I don’t…” Sabine mutters out. So goddamn embarrassing. She looks away.
“I don’t regret it.”
The brightness returns in the girl’s eyes, Sabine thinks, but the next thing she sees is Yunhua’s rolling those very eyes at her as she yawns out: “Knew it. Good to know that you were that into it, though.”
She—
This girl drives Sabine insane. “You—I wasn’t the one who was screaming and whimpering like a little—”
Sabine stops herself.
Yunhua snorts.
“A little what, Sabine?” she drops her voice low, leaning ever so slightly closer into Sabine’s neck. “Go on, don’t be shy.”
The whisper of a breath caresses her warm skin. Sabine tries her best not to let her voice quiver.
“Please, you’re insufferable.”
“What, I just want you to finish your sentence is all, weirdo.” The girl pouts. “It’s not like I’m out here denying that you’re hot as fuck and you have a good sense of rhythm and that you have those nice long fingers and how it’s cute when that dommy mommy act of yours falls apart as soon as I pPpp—”
Sabine panics and slaps her hand on the girl’s mouth. This bitch—she knows far, far too well that with every little quip she’s sending Sabine’s stomach careening towards the center of the earth. She’s giggling through her palms even as she clamps them down harder and harder.
“Shut up or I’ll fucking kill you.” bites Sabine, her face heating up from embarrassment. Yunhua puts her hands up in resignation, rolling her eyes. For some reason Sabine imagines that if she could speak she’d be saying ‘fine, fine, no seconds this morning, I get it.’
God, this annoying little minx.
She can feel a warm breath—the brat is about to start licking at Sabine’s palm, she’s sure—when Sabine’s phone clatters out her morning alarm. Oh thank god.
Sabine lets go of her one-night-stand’s mouth to stop the alarm.
“You can find your way home, right? I have to go to class and I’m not letting you stay here.”
Yunhua feigns a pout. “You’re kicking me out? So ungentlemanlike.”
This knocks Sabine off guard. What in the audacity—
“N—no? God, you’re miserable. Just because I’m…”
“I was just joking, damn. Loosen up a little…” Yunhua mutters, kicking off the blankets to get on her feet.
Sabine looks away sheepishly, not wanting to stare. “Ever assume the better of someone and let your hair down once in a while? It’s not just sex that’s more pleasurable when your ass isn’t clenched to oblivion, you know.”
Sabine scoffs. “And how would you know?”
“Oh please. You’ve had that stick up your ass since last year.”
…Last year?
Oh.
“You little monster,” growls Sabine. “So you do remember.”
Yunhua laughs, sticking her tongue out before tossing her shirt over her head. “Oops, had it not come up in conversation?”
“God, you’re so annoying. Get out my room, you whore.”
Yunhua throws on a random pair of sweatpants from Sabine’s drawers. “Yeah, yeah. Call me when you want these back.”
She clicks her tongue and winks. So lame.
Sabine rolls her eyes. “Leave it outside the door tomorrow or something. I don’t have your number.”
“Pfft… Okay, whatever. Bye! Call me.” The girl slips past the door.
…
…
That little shit.
She saved her number on her phone while she was asleep.
Sabine forgets they share a class together. Even if she’s typically good at maintaining her cool disposition, this much pressure is just not fair—how is she supposed to act as though everything’s normal when she’s seen the girl sitting the next bench over make the kinds of faces she’d never ever imagined she could—
Christ, van den Berg, just focus or you’ll lose your scholarship.
It doesn’t get easier for the first couple classes, but she still mostly manages to ignore the girl as though nothing had happened, although sometimes she catches her staring and winks, sticking her tongue out. Sabine looks away, disinterested, pretending to have been staring at the fire extinguisher mounted next to where the girl's sitting. Sometimes she makes sure to visibly sneer, just so the girl doesn’t start getting any ideas.
She doesn’t text the number the girl had saved on her phone.
And the semester starts to come to a close, just like that. Group assignments pass, and (thank god) they’re split into different groups. Sabine thinks Yunhua’s presentation is a lot of cute decorations and no substance.
Finals season arrives, and she gets a message from her supervisor at the peer mentor center.
Great, she mumbles to herself, mouth full of sandwich. She’d forgotten she’d even signed up, a decision she was quickly beating herself over the head for because of course she’d be asked to tutor during the busiest part of the semester.
Well, at least the pay is supposed to be good. Hopefully it’s a smart kid who’s just really anal about their grades, so she won’t have to actually do any teaching, just nodding and listening.
She slogs her way to the seminar room as indicated, and when she juts the door open she—
Oh goddammit.
Nursing a chai tea from the library café, spinning her expensive-looking pen, and failing miserably, is Yunhua Sen.
The girl shoots to her feet, letting her purse fall to the floor from her knees. “Oh. hey!”
Sabine snags the door behind her before it can completely shut, and makes to leave. “Sorry, wrong room.”
Yunhua clatters out from the table, grabbing Sabine’s elbow and jabbing her foot against the door.
“Nooo, come back! I really need this…”
Sabine rolls her eyes, letting the door fall and shut. Yunhua slips and stumbles as her leverage against the door gives.
“First of all,” she snatches the pen out Yunhua’s hands, twirling it between her fingers and effortlessly as the two of them sit back down. “Your thumb is getting in the way. That’s why it’s not spinning, dumbass. You gotta flick your thumb down when it comes round.”
“Wow.” The way she pretends to go breathless just because Sabine knows how to spin a pen would’ve made Sabine laugh if simply being around Yunhua didn’t piss her off so much.
“I’ll be honest,” she continues, “I have no idea how I didn’t even think of that."
“Well, now you know, stupid.” She lets Yunhua take the pen back, and watches as she fumbles with her hands trying to do it a few more times. “No idea how you plan to go through premed if you can’t even handle a pen, but whatever.”
She watches as Yunhua throws up her arms and gives up entirely.
“Anyway.” Sabine clears her throat. “Second, if this is about our research ethics class, I’ll kill you. You pay zero attention in that class, and now you want help?”
A gleam in the girl’s eyes. “Uhuh? And how come you get good grades even though you’re staring at me all the time?”
“Shut up,” Sabine mutters unconvincingly. Sabine should’ve known not to start. “When I get zoned out I just tend to look at the—”
“Yes, yes, the fire extinguisher, I know.” Yunhua laughs, but the light in her eyes are gentle, like she’s willing to let it go for now. “Whatever. Just help me, I’m dying out here. My paper’s in dire need of help. Coleman is trying to kill me.”
Yunhua slides her seat next to Sabine’s, casually and naturally. Sabine sighs.
“Coleman is a pretty easy grader, you know. You just need to make sure you’ve explained your thinking to her step by step…”
The tutoring sessions proceed, surprisingly enough, smoothly and without much incident. Besides that one light flirtatious jab, among some others, Yunhua makes sure not to bring up their intimacy, sensing the other girl’s genuine discomfort with the subject. After three sessions, Yunhua texts her number with her “B” and several big grin emojis, a thank you sticker, and a picture of a cat.
Sabine responds with a “nice.”
They don’t text much afterwards.