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not-everything-is-so-primitive · 2 months ago

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I'm super hypoglycaemic rn, post-run, but honestly I think it heightened the experience of reading this chapter? I know by this point I should be used to @straywrds writing, because it ALWAYS wrecks me in the best ways, but I still get the air knocked out of my lungs every time I read anything from them. I think this might be one of the most heart-wrenching works from them yet, but trust me when I say that it's a real COMPETITION when you go through all their works. Read this series, and then read all their other works, and thank me later

greed | by design chapter three

pairing: hyunjin x reader ; chan x reader | wc: 30k | genre: adult romance | warnings: heavy angst ; mutual pining/sexual tension ; dark ideation ; age gap ; hurt/comfort ; adult and sexual content. reader discretion is advised. this series contains heavy themes that could be upsetting to some. if you're concerned it might be an issue for you, please read the detailed list of warnings. this work is for adult audiences.

Hyunjin, unhurried, handsome, so tangible and so close, raised his hand then, bringing it near your face, gently pressing his index finger onto your cheek to collect a raindrop. His touch lit a wildfire inside of you that no deluge could put out. “It’s raining,” he said, his deep, expressive gaze fixated on the drop he had stolen from you, but not for long because he looked into your eyes then. “It’s okay,” he added with a smile, offering you his hand. “Come with me.”

Greed is, perhaps, among the most complicated concepts of the human psyche, mostly because it can take so many forms that one is often completely unaware it has woven itself into their heart. It camouflages itself as something else—sometimes, even, as something noble, like concern.

One time, when you were nine years old, some girls in your class started some sort of unofficial hopscotch tournament. The prizes were nothing more than pretty rocks found on the beach or cheap chapsticks that were supposed to smell and taste like fruit but smelled and tasted like anything but fruit. There was also a fake, dollar store pearl necklace. A small dalmatian plush toy. An old Tamagotchi. Stuff like that. Everyone brought something from home.

Long story short—you were very good at hopscotch. You quickly climbed your way to one of the two finalist spots in the tournament, but unfortunately twisted your ankle at the end of recess. It was nothing. It didn’t even hurt by the end of the day.

The next day, though, the girls prevented you from participating in the tournament because they didn’t want you to get hurt. Insisting did nothing. Part of you knew these girls didn’t want to get in trouble because exchanging items like that was not allowed at school, and if you got hurt for real, you’d need to see the nurse and it would risk exposing the whole thing.

Part of you knew you were better than them at hopscotch. You didn’t even want any of their trinkets. Well, maybe except for the Tamagotchi. But still. You just wanted to play and make new friends. Back then, your father often told you that Christopher was a good boy but that you should hang out with girls more instead of spending your weekends looking for frogs under rocks with him.

You were too young to understand the entirety of the situation then. It was only later that you were able to see it as a whole. You were only nine years old but your father was witnessing you growing older and approaching that frightening moment in a young girl’s life—puberty. And maybe he figured it wouldn’t be long before Christopher would drag you into the forest for purposes other than frog hunting and he didn’t like that.

The girls had been children, just like you were. Maybe Monica wanted Lexi’s plastic diamond ring. Maybe Stef wanted, badly, the little Sailor Moon figurine you brought to add to the prize list. If she had asked you would have given it to her.

But asking. Asking was one of the most difficult things anyone had to do in the course of their life. Because it exposed them. It bared them, displaying their want, their desire, displaying what they lacked. What was missing from them. It showed the world how greedy they were, and there was real shame in that—unwarranted, but it was still there, and very real. So of course Stef wasn’t going to just ask for it. In this world, we all strive to look like we don’t care. About anything. Ever. It’s easier to live this way, to hide ourselves under several layers of nonchalance—because it makes sure we don’t have to make ourselves vulnerable to others.

Greed took so many forms. Envy and jealousy were symptoms of greed, manifestations of it. So was longing, or selfishness. You had reached a point in your life where you wondered if all those words, all those emotions, perhaps, were just synonyms. Maybe they all meant the same thing.

You were not above it. You had been greedy, too. You couldn’t tell for sure but maybe you had always known you would never be good enough for Chris, yet you had let him love you nonetheless. You let him kiss you, then you let him confess his love and let it grow into something so big, so rooted into him that some parts of himself became parts of you and vice versa. Then you let him marry you. And then you let him put a baby inside you.

You had been greedy when, all those years before, you had let Liam fuck you just because you wanted to feel something. Anything. Just because you thought it would be your only opportunity in life to feel desired and wanted, as shallow as it might have been. You had been greedy when you found out you were pregnant and that your first thought had been that you, for sure, could not keep this baby because it was going to wreck your entire life.

Judith was your punishment for it all. Not her, but her loss, which was just as heavy and tangible. The jealousy you had felt when Chris would hang out with girls. How selfish it had been to let Liam touch you and then fuck you even though you did not want him. Because maybe you did it to see if it would get a reaction out of Chris.

It felt as though you could not be that anymore—greedy. Because it required some stamina. It demanded some life, some… something. Anything. And you had been stripped of all of it. You remembered the last greed that haunted you for a long time, and perhaps the ghost of it still did.

You wouldn’t have been able to tell this to anybody, but you had been greedy to let Chris stay. To hope that he would love you again. And you were ashamed. It had been greedy at first and now it was just… cowardly. Which might just have been another version of greed anyway.

It took too many forms to compile them all, which, you felt, made it the most insidious feeling of them all.

Insidious because you had genuinely believed all this time that you had gotten rid of it. That your heart was dead and would remain dead and that it meant you would never taste the sweetly bitter taste of greed on your tongue. It was true, it was an honest thought, but you had never believed it made you a better person than anybody else. It just made you an empty person.

And then one day, everything changed.

The morning after your conversation with Hyunjin, you went to sit outside to watch the sunrise. You refilled your water bottle and closed the shop, walking the short climb uphill for a better, unobstructed view. Most days, you did not mind the trees. If anything you found it quite beautiful. The way light filtered through them, reflected in hundreds of echoes of luminescence, scattered on the grounds or structures, caressing them, changing them.

But that morning you were craving for something different. Something had changed within you and you weren’t sure what it was, you just knew it required action to make it real, to make it official.

Maybe you had known all along. That aloneness might have been forced upon you—that you had been made alone and lonely and miserable, but that you would need to do something about it to test the bars of this prison, to challenge them. Not escape them, per se, because you did not believe you would ever not be alone. But, it turned out, no matter how unattainable you were, no matter how broken, somebody had visited that prison. And you were still alone, sure. But a different kind of it.

So you walked. The sky was a dull gray when you set out, making your way on the dirt road leading to the gate and the main road. There was nothing else in the area—nothing that could be seen anyway. Just a forest and a road and the sound of the river flowing downhill. On some days, the iodine breeze, coming from the shore, made it all the way here, blending with the other scents. The evergreens, the decaying pine needles on the ground, the damp riverbank. Together, they became something else. Still very much distinct—nobody could mistake the smell of the ocean for the smell of trees—yet changed by one another.

It gave you something to think about.

That day was one of those days. Saltiness permeated in the air along with the rest of it. The morning dew on the grass, rendering it cold and slippery. The trees releasing their pollen. Flowers growing in patches at random places. You walked unhurriedly, knowing you had plenty of time, listening to the forest waking up around you. Finches and chickadees flew over you, crossing the narrow dirt road to get from one tree to another, searching for food or a mate or perhaps both. As you progressed, the trees became more sparse, allowing you to see the river.

It was wide here, and the water was always calm in that spot, making it look like a lake. You had seen it all your life and yet it fascinated you still to this day. Once, when you were little, you had gathered all your courage to ask your parents why they called it a river when it didn’t look like one. Your mother explained that it was a river and just that. That day, your mother found an old school book of hers. You wouldn’t have been more than five or six years old, small enough that every aspect of the world seemed grand to you. It was your mother who taught you that lakes became rivers—that they were the same body of water. She used the poetic approach with you, adding that rivers, even the smallest ones, would ultimately spill into the sea and that it meant everything was somehow connected. She said the place where the river curved and became wide and calm was not really a lake, just a river taking a break before continuing its journey to the estuary and the ocean.

You thought of your mother that morning when you slowed down to take in the sight of the river taking a break, becoming something else while remaining exactly what it was—a river. Just that.

You heard the common loons before you saw them. Stretching your neck as you walked uphill, trying to see anything as the dawn was still shy and the world still quite dark. Dark but not opaque like night—dim but see-through. Gossamer. Your mother had taught you that word when she showed you her mother’s wedding veil, made of delicate tulle and lace. Your mother had taught you many things but she wasn’t done schooling you when she died.

You wish she were still alive because things were weighing on your heart that only a mother would be able to untangle. She would have been the only person to truly understand how it felt when Judith died. And all that it entailed.

The common loon’s haunting call filled the air, loud and quiet at once, occupying as much space outside as it did inside you. You kept walking, knowing their voices would follow you. When you reached the top of the hill, you went to sit past the trees, on one of the big flat rocks that had been put on the edge of the river to stop people from descending into it. It was enticing after all, this place where the river rested before it became something stronger, but it was treacherous as the undercurrents were quite strong here.

But the ducks did not mind the undercurrents this morning. You watched them as the sun slowly rose on the horizon, breaking through the forest on the other side of the river. It was a pair. Two adults and their two chicks. It had been your father who told you that common loons mated for life, which meant the same pair would reunite in their chosen place to nest, mate, and raise their young. And when the time to migrate would come, they would go their separate ways more often than not but still reunite come spring.

Since that day, you had nothing but admiration for them. How much faith did one need to have to leave the partner you had known all your life and the place where you had raised maybe dozens of chicks, only to hope that you would see them again when winter ended?

But what happens if one gets lost? you had asked your father. And he told you that common loons would only pair with another if their mate passed away. Last year, your father attended a high school reunion. Long story short, he reconnected with an old friend—Marcy. Marcy and he had briefly dated when they were teens, and it looked like she would have been down to relive the experience. You understood that he did not want to betray your mother, but sometimes, you feared for him, because he could not move on.

You reminded him of the common loons one day, thinking it was a solid argument as to why he should call Marcy back. And then you were faced with a truth so ugly and so terrible that you had buried it somewhere deep within you—you had discovered the difference between could not move on and would not move on. Your father would not move on. By choice. Maybe, like you, he refused to let greed permeate him, and chose misery instead.

The ducks swam gently on the water, the parents feeding their chicks with whatever they found under the surface. You wondered if they were the same two common loons that you had seen for the past several years. Or if one had been lost and the other had moved on. If it were the case, you wondered if they remembered their old mate. If they missed them.

You wished your mother were here. Right now. Sitting next to you, watching the ducks and the sun as it rose in the sky.

You would tell her about Hyunjin.

You would tell her about his paintings. About the kindness with which he treated you—you, a complete stranger. You would tell her he didn’t feel like a stranger the way other people did. Others were strangers in the sense that there was distance between you and them, and perhaps even a wall of sorts. Hyunjin was a stranger but it was not a wall that separated the two of you—it was a door. And he had opened it last night, politely but decidedly.

You would tell your mother you had never spoken with someone as direct and as honest as him, and that it made you want to be more like him. Because you liked being treated like that. You would tell her he did not hesitate to make space for you, to share weed and liquor with you. You would tell her about the charcoal sketches he showed you.

There was no one else in the world you could possibly tell these things. That you had forgotten what happiness felt like the way expats forget their home country—they remember it like one remembers a movie instead of their past.

You would tell your mother that Hyunjin was the closest thing to a genuine memory of happiness that you had felt since that awful day when they put your daughter’s dead body in your arms.

You would tell your mother that you did not want to let him be more than that. That it had already been too much. That each smile was a betrayal to Judith.

Every flutter of your heart was a betrayal to Chris.

It could not be stopped—something about last night’s encounter had reignited your heart. And you felt it this morning. It seemed like a frequency emanated from it, steady, echoing the sun rays or perhaps bird song.

Greed.

Complicated. Intricate. Unavoidable.

You wanted it all. You wanted to respect your daughter’s memory. Also, you wanted to respect your marriage to Christopher because you had loved him all your life. Also, you wanted to feel something other than the crushing weight on your heart—in other words, you wanted to let Hyunjin soothe some of that pain, let him hold some of that burden for you.

But you couldn’t have it all, could you?

You stared at the horizon before you, making sure to notice the beauty in it. But all that you could see was the way Hyunjin looked a lot like the place where a river could come to rest before it started again, only to become something stronger. Grander.

You had never been one to believe in fate before—there had been no need for it in your life. Not really.

It had been so long since anything made sense. Harmony had ceased to exist the moment Judith’s heart failed.

But before her, there had been a painting for which you developed a liking, a fascination. The fascination extended to its creator. The painting depicted loss—the same loss that would be forced upon you years after you discovered it. Maybe you loved it even more after. You certainly understood it better. Unfortunately.

It had not been a comfort, not really—Loss, the painting, was more like an anchor to you. Something that you could look at and remember that you were not dreaming. That even though it felt like it, you were not trapped in a nightmare. You needed to be reminded of that sometimes, or else you started to hope you would wake up soon.

Out of all the camping grounds in the world, it was at yours that Naro’s direct descendant ended up. And the colors of Hyunjin’s soul were familiar to you—so was the damage in it.

And so, it made sense. Somehow. That it was all related. For so long, the pieces of the puzzle had been floating in chaos. And now, one by one, they were finding their place within one another, showing you little by little the illustration their whole would become.

And you did not know what it would become.

But today, for the first time in a long while, you wondered what it would all amount to. With genuine curiosity. Today, you wanted to see what the pieces of the puzzle might reveal—if they revealed anything in the first place. Chances were that the image would be abstract or blurred or maybe something terrible.

However, you still wanted to know. And if that wasn’t the manifestation of whatever changes had occurred within you, then what was it?

You left the shop in Allie’s hands after staying with her a little longer than you needed to, but the cause was noble—you helped her set everything up for the opening, and then you stayed even as the first clients came by. It was almost always the same kind of clients who were here this early into the day. You had the smokers who wanted to make sure they wouldn’t run out of cigarettes with their coffee. You had those who would go fishing and needed bait. You had parents who absolutely needed milk or juice for the kids. Then you had what you called the true vacationers—they were up at sunrise just because. For no other reason than they might as well stay up if they got awoken by a bird nearby or something. They had no worries at all, and often felt like taking a little walk around—they stopped at the shop to get a coffee or a bottle of water, or just to have a conversation with another human being.

Allie was just the right person to work the mornings. A widow in her 50s, she applied for the job last year, admitting that she craved human connection and wanted an opportunity to find it in a place like Riverside Campground. Neither you nor Chris had any hesitation in hiring her.

“I think you’re all good here,” you told Allie after doing a last checkup of the self-serve coffee machines.

“You go sleep now, stop making excuses not to,” Allie retorted with a playful smile. The smile faded a little and her eyes took an inquisitive look. “Are you alright?”

The tone with which she asked the question shook you, as though you knew it meant much more than just how are you.

“Yes I’m alright, what is it?” you responded with that rehearsed voice and that rehearsed smile that you hated so much.

From behind the cash register, Allie tilted her head slightly, observing you. A group of four, all of them in fishing gear, was approaching. You could hear their voices through the windows. They sounded excited.

“Nothing,” Allie replied. Then she immediately added, “I don’t know, you seem a little different.”

Part of you wanted to run away from this place—and this conversation—as quickly as possible. You were not the kind of person who talked about these things, certainly not with your employees. Not because you didn’t like them but precisely because you did. You wanted to pretend that you were whole. You didn’t want them to know they worked for a wreck of a human being. Out of concern for them. Out of shame and guilt. Out of greed, perhaps.

The few seconds it took for you to come up with an appropriate and believable response were more than enough for Allie to understand that whatever you were about to say would not be the truth.

“I’m not used to working overnight,” you said anyway. A lame attempt, but an attempt nonetheless.

“That’s not really what I meant,” she told you. “I meant different in a less melancholic way.”

You stood near the coffee machines, your eyes fixated on the woman behind the counter, frozen in shock. Panic took over you—you had never told Allie about Judith, not directly. But the older employees, or your father, or Christopher’s parents, would sometimes talk about it, and word usually got around. The team was very sensible about this and never really brought it up. Allie had talked to you about it last year. Because she was a mom, too, and only a mother would understand this loss. She said you reminded her a little bit of her daughter. She hugged you that day, but never talked about it again.

Case in point—Allie knew about it all. She knew about the gaping wound in your chest.

Today, right now, Allie had become the first witness of your betrayal to your daughter. And you did not know what to do about it.

“It’s a good thing,” Allie added, her smile returning to her lips. She shook her head and pushed a strand of graying hair behind her ear. “Remember what I told you last fall?”

Yes, you remembered. It was something that had been told to you before, in passing, in less direct words. It happened last year on the last day of the season—much like opening day, the camping ground organized a big party to end the season. Bonfires, music, barbecue, drinks of all kinds. Allie wasn’t even scheduled that day but she came anyway and sat with you by a bonfire while you were making for her your famous ‘fire apple’, which was an apple coated in butter and brown sugar, slow-roasted over flames. Few words had been said, except Allie had told you, “You’re allowed to be happy, you know?” And when that hadn’t gotten her a response, she added, “Or at least, you’re allowed to be something other than sad.”

You did not think it was true. The others didn’t know. They didn’t know about what had happened when you were seventeen. The baby that you had been too scared to keep. So it made sense that they couldn’t comprehend the entire situation—they simply did not know that you had failed so many times. That life was punishing you for what you had done. For the thoughts you had. The doubts you had—how you had not been sure that you wanted to have a baby with Chris.

That you had wanted to want it.

There were no doubts, however, about the very real love you had for your unborn daughter. From the moment you knew she existed within you. That love became unconditional. That love became an integral part of you. But maybe none of it mattered, not if you had been secretly wishing that it would take a long time for you to become pregnant.

Was there a word for wishful thinking, but in a negative context?

Just a manifestation of your deepest, darkest thoughts, perhaps?

Whatever it had been. It was all your fault.

“I remember,” you told Allie with a nod. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.” You didn’t really mean that and you could only hope she hadn’t noticed. “Have a nice day, Allie.”

And she wished you a good day in return, urging you, again, to go home and sleep.

You grabbed your things and made your way toward the employee parking lot where you immediately saw that Chris’ truck was there already. You sat behind the wheel of your car, pondering over Minho’s breakfast offer. He sounded like he meant it when he invited you, and the truth was you kind of wanted to go. But another, worse truth was also lingering in your chest—you needed time to process all those thoughts crowding your mind.

You needed time to get used to the bitter, unpleasant taste of shame on your tongue, and no amount of bacon or orange juice would help with that. How much time? It was hard to tell, and maybe you’d never actually get used to it. Maybe you’d just be forced to live with it. The same way the rest had been thrown at you against your will.

The same way aloneness was forced upon you.

You dreamt.

The dream was fuzzy, neither good nor bad. A nightmare but not really. It was hard to call a dream a nightmare when it was just a copy of your life. It would be like admitting to something terrible, something that should remain secret, unspoken.

But you dreamt of a city you didn’t know, a metropolis, walking in its crowded streets, everything around you a blur. In this dream, you were making your way to the cemetery where Judith had been buried, only, you were lost. And you couldn’t at all figure out where to go. You asked faceless passersby for directions but they did not see you, or pretended not to. Only, you were not scared. You were unhappy and upset but this was no different than your usual.

I want to see my baby, you kept telling these strangers. Tell me where to go, please.

But they said nothing at all, and somewhere in your heart, you knew it was because there was nothing to see in the place where your daughter’s name was engraved onto a pretty crescent moon-shaped tombstone. No amount of tears that you would cry into the soil that covered Judith would ever bring her back, nor would it change anything.

In this dream, you kept walking in the city you did not know, stopping in front of a building, a shop of sorts, with a large window at the front. There was something displayed in the window—a painting, almost as large as the glass that separated you from the canvas. This painting did not exist in reality yet you recognized it as a self-portrait. It showed a young man sitting in front of an easel, painting a lake. His face was mostly hidden behind his dark brown hair. Black but not quite. You stared at the painting for a long time. It seemed like the lake inside of it was almost too lifelike, as though the man was bringing it into existence just so he could drown in it.

And then you woke up.

The house was quiet. Quiet in a way a house was quiet nowadays—so not really. The steady humming of appliances in the kitchen did very little to cover the noises coming from outside. Cars. Their engines, the tires on the pavement. It was a small street and there weren’t too many cars passing by, but when there were, you heard them.

Your neighbors too. You heard them. On the left of your house was an empty lot but on the right was a couple in their 70s. Lovely people. They had a few children who were no longer children because they had children themselves. Many parties and barbecues occurred over the summers with everyone in this beautiful family reunited. They weren’t too loud and it’s not like the parties went on until impossible hours. Truth be told, you were so busy during the summer that it didn’t bother you.

It’s just that you heard them. Cassie and John, and the cars, and the children on their bicycles. And while you were aware that hearing anything at all was a privilege and should not be taken for granted, you couldn’t help but wish that you didn’t, sometimes.

This—all of this—just reminded you that life went on for everyone else except you. You were stuck somewhere in the past or perhaps in many places. In a mall in the next city over. In a hospital room. And yet nowhere at all. Maybe somewhere under the river, buried, forgotten.

You rolled into your bed, lying on your side, facing the space where Christopher should be. Would have been if you were anything other than… this. You touched it. The mattress, the sheets. You pressed your face onto his pillow, inhaling his scent. It was just strong enough that you knew for sure he had slept here last night, sometime before you came home. At least he had been alone, because your pillow smelled like you and not like Summer.

It was with your head on your husband’s pillow that you remembered your dream. You rarely dreamt and when you did, the memory of it didn’t usually follow you into the real world. But it did today, images from it lingering behind your eyelids, playing like scenes out of a silent movie. A city. You, just walking. A man and a lake. A shop.

You opened your eyes again, realizing that you were having an idea. A dangerous one. Frankly, a stupid idea. And you really shouldn’t listen to it. You should forget that dream and the reasons it haunted your mind, but instead you pushed yourself up and made your way to the bathroom for a shower, telling yourself that whatever was occurring in your head was more like being colonized by thoughts rather than having them sprout within your mind. You took your time, more than you ought to. You shampooed your hair twice. You conditioned it mindfully. You washed your body carefully, the way you would if you loved it. Pretending that you loved it and that it was not a graveyard. You rinsed everything off. You applied lotion.

It didn’t take a lot of time before the smell of coffee invaded the first floor—you let the coffee machine brew your cup while you returned upstairs to put some clothes on, scrolling your phone to find an address. You had been to that shop before but it was a few towns over and you just wanted to make sure.

It was greedy. What you were about to do. It looked like a generous thing—to an outsider and perhaps even to yourself if you were less self-aware, it would appear as an act of kindness. And it was. But it was so many other things too—things too frightening to even think about.

So instead of thinking about them, you put on some comfortable clothes, poured your coffee in your favorite travel mug—it had a funny frog on it—and left your home only to get in your car and drive away. The whole time, you wondered what it meant. That you were going where you were going and doing what you were about to do. You wondered if it was as significant as it seemed to be to you.

You wondered why your heart was fighting so damn hard to stay alive—to keep beating, to keep feeling, when you had wished for the exact opposite for so long. All this time you thought you had some semblance of control over it all. You thought you had some anchor somewhere, something keeping you where you needed to be, which was to say, as far away from happiness as you could be.

But that day, you drove the hour it took to get to a small art supplies store, run by a lady who liked to visit the camping every other year or so. It was so tiny it was difficult to imagine the shop could hold much and yet you knew that any artist could find what they wanted here, and more. It was a sunny day but the shop was cool because the lady installed air conditioning two years back.

She recognized you from behind the counter, calling you by your first name, which she remembered, and offering you a kind smile. The wall behind her was covered in shelves that were covered in so many things. Canvases. Paintbrushes. Archival grade glue. Wax, pencils, ink.

You had no control over the smile you offered her in return.

“What can I do for you today, young lady?” She always called you that but you did not feel young anymore. “Are you planning another art workshop for the camping ground?”

You always planned an art workshop at the camping ground, most often for kids, but sometimes one for teens and adults, too. But there was rarely much of a crowd on those, as though grown-ups were too intimidated, whereas children felt no pressure to perform. They came, they spread colors on a canvas and they were content with just that. It was more complicated for adults. They thought they had to be good. They thought they had to know how to paint. But nobody in the world needed to be good at what they did for the first time. Or for the hundredth time. The truth that adults seem to forget, intentionally or not, is that you can keep trying and doing things even if you suck at them.

“Yes, but that’s not why I’m here today,” you replied, scanning the wall behind her and then the other shelves around you, searching for what you were looking for. “I would like to buy your best, fanciest watercolor paints, please. And aquarelle paper and brushes obviously. The whole kit someone of high skill would need to paint.”

Those words released a tangible taste on your tongue. Something sweet. It reminded you of honey with the way it coated the inside of your mouth and went down your throat as you attempted to swallow it down. It didn’t get stuck in your throat. It just existed within you.

You had never really been good at any of it. Making friends, talking to people. Being happy.

Healing.

But it didn’t mean you should stop trying even though you sucked at it, right?

It was mid-afternoon by the time you made it back home. You would have been expected over at Riverside some time ago but you also knew that nobody would actually care enough to text you, not unless the campground was short-staffed. Or on fire. And you had been extra careful, checking the schedules twice, making sure that nobody had called off.

You weren’t Chris, so it meant they wouldn’t notice you weren’t there unless somebody needed something specific from you. Or if they couldn’t find Chris, for one reason or another.

There was something comforting in that. Invisibility. It felt like your own little superpower—to have the ability to disappear from people’s minds. You left no trace where you went. You were polite and kind and understanding, and yet so forgettable. You were not fun or special the way Christopher was. Christopher stayed in people’s minds long after he had parted from them.

You, on the other hand, did not.

Which is why you drove back home instead of going straight to Riverside Campground as you initially planned. The thought had occurred to you about halfway through the ride—that Hyunjin had probably forgotten you.

Nothing about you was substantial enough to leave any mark on people. While it could be comforting, it was not an easy thing to accept and it would have been a lie to say you were one hundred percent okay with it, but you were also aware of the situation and knew better than to keep any sort of hope. Like the hope that you existed somewhere in Hyunjin’s mind even today, several hours after your private moment with him.

What a humbling experience it was. Because you couldn’t get him out of your mind. You thought of his paintings and the way he used color or the way light hit some of his pieces, giving life to them through his agile impasto technique, adding depth with the shadows it left behind. And that made you wonder if there could be beauty buried somewhere within you, should you be seen under the right kind of light. That led you to wonder what kind of light would ever be the right one for such a miracle to happen.

So you went home, unnoticed, leaving the brown paper bag containing the art supplies on the kitchen table and immediately making your way upstairs. You had showered earlier but you needed to be under the water again, perhaps to wash away some of the things lingering within your skull. You shouldn’t even be thinking of him at all. Hyunjin. It was cool that he was related to Naro but it was another thing to remember fondly the way his lips moved when he spoke. The exact shape of them as he said certain words, like alone, or love. Or when he said your name.

You shouldn’t be remembering the words he said to you because he must have said them to be kind after you forced your secret upon him. When he said that your soul had many colors in it, or that he hoped he would see you again for drinks.

You shouldn’t be remembering the way it felt when he hugged you, holding you in his arms for a brief instant. He was strong but he held you delicately, almost like he was afraid to break you. Couldn’t he see that you were beyond that already? Crushed? Destroyed?

Distracted would have been another good word to describe you as you returned to your bedroom, wrapped in a towel, to find some clothes. You asked the smart speaker for information on the weather to help you figure out your outfit and settled for a sundress, as the day would get warmer around the sunset, and cooler overnight.

You got dressed. The whole time, you wondered if perhaps you ought to use wrapping paper for the art supplies, or maybe just slap a colorful bow on the bag. But then it would seem like a gift and not just an apology for not keeping the right kind of paint at the general store. However, it really was a gift, because no fucking camping ground sold high-end art supplies at their shop. They were lucky if they had a shop at all. Nobody in their right mind should have expected to find such art supplies in the same shop where they bought live worms for fishing trips. Or tarps. Or toys to play in the sand.

It was just a way for you to say thank you. Something had changed within you thanks to him, and because he had forgotten you didn’t mean you shouldn’t be grateful. He had shown you an exclusive sketch by Naro himself, and that alone meant more than he could even realize.

You were thinking of Hyunjin’s hands as you went down the staircase, remembering it from videos seen online where he was painting, and it was all that you could see—his hand, the paintbrush he held, and the canvas on which he applied colors. He held the brush in a very particular way. His fingers were long and graceful, and his brushstrokes were just as elegant, perfectly balanced. Strong when they needed to be and delicate when it was required. The videos he posted were pretty short but you could watch him for hours, truly. There was something fascinating about the way he painted. As though he painted like one danced, or played the violin. Like it was his soul the paintbrush was spreading onto the canvas, not paint.

But you shouldn’t be thinking about any of that. At least not in the way you were.

Which is why you almost collapsed from shock when you heard a voice coming from the kitchen.

“What’s that?”

Chris.

Your first reflex was to look through the front window to verify that you weren’t hallucinating. You gulped when you saw that his pick-up truck was indeed parked right next to yours. He must have come in when you were in the shower.

After taking a deep breath, you made your way to the kitchen only to find Chris holding the paper bag and inspecting its contents. Your heart dropped before it entered a frenzied race—your pulse quickened so much you could feel it through your ribcage. In fact, you feared he would hear it from where he stood.

You figured it wouldn’t feel much different if he had caught you straight-up cheating. With a cock in your mouth and all.

It was difficult to read Chris, today especially. You had no idea why he was here as it was past his lunch break and he usually avoided you unless he really couldn’t. His shoulders and neck were stiff as though he was nervous and it made you wonder if something had gone wrong back at the campground.

Then Chris proceeded to grab one of the items from the bag to look at it under the light spilling from the nearest window. A slight frown appeared on his already tense face. “You picked up painting?” He looked at you in a way that hinted he was trying to be nice about it, but after knowing each other for so long—and after many lost games of Pictionary—he knew you did not have the capacity to sketch even the simplest of objects.

You ran your tongue on your lips. Your mouth was very dry all of a sudden, enough that it felt a little like your trachea was closing in on itself. You cleared your throat to rid yourself of the lump getting stuck in it, which was shame-shaped.

The mere fact that you wanted to lie to Chris about this excessively minor event said a lot about the entire situation. In this instant, a vast sadness overcame you. As though you were realizing something that had been under your nose all this time. Only, your brain wasn’t letting you access the entirety of the revelation.

All that you knew was that despite how seemingly inconsequential this was—meeting Hyunjin—it had shifted things within you, things you previously thought were cemented to your bones.

You inhaled deeply, bracing yourself so you could be brave and not lie to your husband. Because there was nothing to lie about. “It’s for Hyunjin. He traveled with art supplies and the airport lost his bag.”

A cloud passed in Christopher’s eyes but it was only temporary. You saw it but you pretended you didn’t—for your own sake. For his, too. It was barely anything anyway. The kind of cloud that covers the sky momentarily one afternoon and you wonder if it’s going to ruin your day or not, and in the end the blue returns and it doesn’t rain. And you realize there was never even a risk of precipitation.

Maybe, deep down, you were hoping Chris would be angry. Upset. Jealous. Because at least that would mean he still cared. That would mean there was still something to be upset about. After all, you were upset when you saw Summer wearing his hoodie. But he stood there in the kitchen with sunlight caressing his handsome face, on which an expression that was neither anger nor jealousy or even disappointment had appeared.

“He paints?” Chris said, his voice steady and low, but clear as day.

“He’s the guy who asked for watercolors yesterday, remember? Jeongin wanted to know if we sold any,” you reminded him, causing Chris to nod before he returned the tube of Phthalo Green to the paper bag.

“I remember.” He stretched his neck—Chris seemed less nervous, or maybe more of something else. It was difficult to tell. “That’s really nice of you.”

The worst part of knowing Chris had fallen out of love for you was that he was still your best friend. He was still the guy you grew up with, the one who would take you frog hunting, the person with whom you shared the most memories. But it was as though that best friend was buried underneath layers of dead soil and you no longer had access to him. Or maybe you did, only you didn’t know which tool to use for the excavation. Today, Christopher looked more than ever like an archeological miracle. Something perfectly preserved, but no longer active. Just remains. The skeleton of what once was.

You couldn’t help it—you shared your enthusiasm with him anyway. It was greedy. Maybe you just wanted to get a reaction out of him. Something. Anything. “You know, Naro?”

Another nod.

“Well, they’re related,” you explained. “Naro is his great-great-grandfather or something.”

A strange smile painted itself on Christopher’s lips, this place that was once so, so familiar to you. “Wow,” was all he said, with a sigh he tried to conceal.

Every second without a burst of anger was like another blade in your heart.

“What a coincidence,” you chose to say. You did not know what to say, but you knew you had to say more. You knew it had to be you—it always had to be you. Who soothed the awkwardness of conversations. It was your ball and chain, your burden, your duty. “Are things okay at Riverside? I wouldn’t have expected you at this time of the day.”

Chris went to the fridge to pour himself a glass of pineapple juice. You could tell it was out of nervousness—he needed to be moving because it was easier than standing there and looking you in the eyes. You couldn’t blame him.

“Everything’s fine with the campground,” he replied, and he sounded a bit more like Chris then. He drank his juice and put the glass in the dishwasher, turning to you. “I came to see you.”

Your heart jumped but you immediately caught it, making sure to give it a good kick as a warning. Christopher was more than your husband—your lives had been intertwined for as long as you could remember. There was a plethora of reasons why he would have wanted to see you and the scenario in which he suddenly loved you again was the least possible of them all.

Your words got lost somewhere between your brain and your lips, falling back into your throat as that lump that was still stuck there made breathing difficult. You gulped, staring at Chris as he made his way back to you, closer than he had been, studying you. “I worry about you,” he said under his breath. “When’s the last time you had a real meal?”

This wasn’t new. There were times when you figured Chris possibly felt guilty about not loving you anymore so he overcompensated in other ways. You hated those thoughts. You hated that they lingered in your brain, no matter how hard you tried to push them away. You wouldn’t want him to know you felt that way. It was so ugly, so awful.

“Did you eat breakfast?” he insisted.

“I had coffee,” you recalled, realizing you couldn’t answer his first question.

“You don’t look well. Sit down.” Gently, Chris nudged you towards the nearest chair. “Your dad called me. He’s worried, too.” With this, he proceeded to grab food from the fridge. By the look of it, he was making you a turkey sandwich.

“Ah, I understand your surprise visit now,” you sighed. Honest to god, you did not mean for it to come out as caustic as it did. You really were an awful wife. When the hell was he going to divorce you, for fuck’s sake?

“I’m not here just because of him,” Christopher went on, carefully spreading spicy mayo on your favorite bread. “I’m here because I know you lied to Jake. I spoke to him. I don’t care that you lied to Jake to take the night shift,” he added, turning to you. “I just wish you didn’t feel like you had to lie to me about something as insignificant as that.”

You felt so small then, in your sunlit kitchen, sitting with your hands on your knees. You felt small and stupid and ridiculous, even. Of course.

“There would have been a time you would have just told me,” he kept going, still making that fucking sandwich. “So it made me worry.”

Your fingernails sank into the skin of your thighs. You looked through the window—from your point of view, all you could see was the sky and the trees in the backyard, which were beautiful. You liked this house. You wished it had been a happy one.

“I just wanted to be outside,” you admitted, and it was true.

“I know.” And you knew he knew. He knew that you liked spending nights outside to put your thoughts back in order, or as close to orderly as they could be anyway. “You didn’t have to lie to me, you know?” His voice was soft but firm at the same time. “You never do.”

You buried your face into your hands. Chris was right. You fought the tears as best you could because you didn’t want him to see you like that. Next thing you knew, gentle fingers were wrapping themselves around your wrists, pulling your hands away. He was right there. Chris. He had lowered himself to look you in the eyes, and he didn’t do that often these days. You loved him in that moment, or maybe you loved the memory of what he used to be.

You did your best to memorize it all. The shape of his lips. The color of his eyes when the sun spilled into his irises. His scent. The feeling of his fingers on your skin. You didn’t want to forget any of it, no matter how painful. You never wanted to forget what it had felt like to be loved by him.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, your vision blurring.

“Don’t.” A frown appeared between his brow, and he thumbed a stray tear away as it rolled down your cheek. “Just tell me if I need to call Dr. Carroll.”

The therapist you saw from time to time, no more than once a year, mostly to appease your father. You had nothing against him. Dr. Carroll was an excellent psychotherapist, it’s just that it was a waste of time for you. Nothing would ever fix you. Nothing.

You flinched, understanding the implications of what Chris was saying.

“I’m not going to kill myself if that’s what you’re thinking.”

It was him who recoiled this time—Chris physically pulled back a few inches, letting go of you. He hated it. He couldn’t stand it when you said those words out loud, but after having them haunt your mind for so long, you were familiar with them. Chris seemed to believe life was sacred. You believed that too, once. Maybe. Happiness had never found you easily but maybe you used to think something like that at least when Judith lived inside you.

Any parent would tell you the same—if they lost their child, they wouldn’t want to keep going. Simple as that.

But you went on. For some reason. And now you were here in this kitchen, with your husband staring at you like you were a horror movie, and maybe you were.

“Don’t say that.” Chris stood, returning to his sandwich-making duties. “You know I hate it when you say that.”

In some ways, you envied him. His sorrow was undeniable but presented itself so differently than yours. It was as though Chris had this urgency to live, and to live fully. Like doing otherwise would be a dishonor to Judith. You felt the complete opposite of that. It’s not that you wanted to die—it’s just that you didn’t know how to exist in a way that didn’t fill you with shame, so you were stuck somewhere between two worlds.

“I know. I’m sorry,” you mumbled as Chris slid a plate in front of you. You stared at the sandwich like you had never seen a sandwich before, or like you had seen a million.

“It’s alright.” Chris put his hand on your head and ruffled your hair a little. Gently. Kindly. Almost like he still loved you. “I’ll call your dad to tell him you’re fine.” The smell of his cologne blended with the scent of the outdoors that clung to him. He had been around someone who mowed a lawn and you knew what that meant. “I have maintenance tonight but wanna have dinner at Marlene’s tomorrow? Some of the staff will be going to celebrate the season.”

He did that sometimes. When he pitied you. Or maybe it was for other, more complicated reasons. It didn’t matter—you fell for it almost every time.

“Sure, why not?” You did love Marlene’s cooking, and it was always comforting at the campground restaurant. It had been renovated since but it reminded you of your childhood nonetheless—bonus if Chris was present.

Chris nodded and proceeded to put the ingredients back into the fridge. He took his time but you knew it was just because he wanted to make sure you were actually eating the sandwich. It was good. He had used all the things you liked. You ate it while staring at the sky and sometimes at him.

But he got a text from Jeongin—there was a problem back at the campground, something minor about an electric panel. So Chris left. He wished you a good rest of your day and said, “I’ll see you later,” and he left. And the paper bag with watercolors was still on the table and he hadn’t been angry about it, or jealous, and you wish he had been.

How greedy of you.

You ate your sandwich in the empty, quiet house. And then you put the plate in the dishwasher and headed out, driving the short ride to Riverside Campground while listening to the local radio station. It wasn’t particularly good but it was distracting enough that while it played, your brain wasn’t full of stuff. You knew it was effective as soon as you turned the engine off because the noise in your mind came back.

One might have believed you were a religious woman if they could hear your thoughts as you walked through the camping ground, holding this paper bag. They were closer to prayer than to rational thinking.

I hope he won’t be there. I hope Minho also won’t be there. But deeper, quieter—I mean, I’d like to see Hyunjin again. I hope I don’t see Chris around. I hope he cancels dinner tomorrow so I don’t have to pretend to be alright around him. I hope I see him tonight. Maybe I should call Dad and ask him to come for dinner at Marlene’s, too. And then, when the familiar sound of an electric lawn trimmer echoed from one side of the campground, you decided to go the other way, even though it would add twenty minutes to your walk. I don’t really feel like seeing Summer today. Chris will probably be with her. I don’t hate her. I wish I hated her. I wish I was her friend. I wish Chris had been angry at me.

It all came down to the same thing—the thoughts were expressed with different words but they held a similar hidden meaning, which was that you wished you were somebody else. Or rather that you weren’t you. Maybe life would be less complicated if you weren’t… that. If you weren’t a woman selfish enough to secretly want her husband to be jealous because she bought art supplies for a handsome young man while secretly wishing this aforementioned handsome young man somehow remembered her at all. The same way she remembered him. Which is to say, a way that involved her lips and maybe her hair, and the way her body felt against his.

How greedy of you.

Before you knew it, you were walking on the path leading to the RV shared by Hyunjin and Minho. It was mid-afternoon on a bright sunny day and regardless of your abstract, prayer-like thoughts, you really didn’t imagine anyone would be there. Realistically speaking. You figured you’d leave the bag somewhere near the door, hidden from view, and go back. Maybe you’d go hang out at the shop or at the park office. Most people spent the day doing all sorts of outdoor activities before coming back to rest in the evenings.

Needless to say, you found yourself a little puzzled when you saw that Minho was standing outside the RV. Though a part of your brain reminded you that people were free to do whatever the hell they wanted to do with their time, you still found it strange. You allowed yourself to observe him as you walked, slowing down your pace. He was taking things from larger containers to put them in a fancy backpack. There was a radio playing at a low volume somewhere inside the RV, the sound of it spilling from the open windows.

That didn’t stop him from hearing you as you approached. To be fair, this was the quietest part of the entire campsite. “We missed you at breakfast,” was all he said at first.

You were far away enough that you thought you misheard him. Surely you must have misheard him. “Excuse me?” You picked up a pace, finding yourself curious and eager to see where this conversation was going.

“Buh-reak-fast,” Minho repeated, exaggerating his pronunciation. “I made food for you!”

He looked up from his task then, studying you from where you stood, which was a few feet away. He put the backpack down, leaning against the RV, adopting a comfortable, nonchalant posture, which invited a conversation.

You took a step closer, a frown appearing over your eyes as they danced around the perimeter as though they were looking for something. Or someone. And maybe they were. But you didn’t want to be looking for anything so you focused on the man before you, only no words came to your mind and even less on your tongue.

His inquisitive expression turned a shade darker as his eyes squinted. “You didn’t think I meant it when I gave you the invite, did you?”

You gulped, wondering if you were an open book for just about anybody who came across you. “I mean—” But nothing else came, so you pressed your lips together, your heart beating erratically.

“Hyunjin was right I guess,” Minho sighed. “He said you wouldn’t come because you probably thought I was just being polite,” he added as an explanation. “He said you guys spent some time together last night.”

“He told you that?” But really you meant, Hyunjin talked about me? And it was stupid. Naive.

“He tends to be right about people. Annoys the shit out of me,” Minho sighed. “For future reference, when I say something, it’s because I mean it, not because I’m trying to be nice.”

You nodded, giving yourself a few seconds to evade his gaze and let your cheeks cool off. “Noted.”

As you came closer, it became evident that Minho was gathering fishing gear. He took a few instants to secure everything and zip up the backpack.

“I’m sorry,” you said, and you meant it. “I worked all night and then… It’s true that I wasn’t sure if I should come or not.”

Minho offered you a gentle smile, motioning you to sit down. “Do you want lemonade? A beer?”

“No, but thank you so much though.” You realized you spoke the words before really thinking them over. You were just used to staying away from people, especially strangers. “I just came here to drop this.” You gave the paper bag a little shake. “Is Hyunjin here?”

“He’s around.” Minho scanned the area, twisting his neck. “He said he was gonna walk by the river. Is that for him?”

“Just a little something.” You could leave it right here. Only you didn’t. “I’ll try to find him. Thank you,” you added with a smile that you almost meant.

You followed the same path you had last night when you unexpectedly smelled weed—you went over the short fence and landed on the soft grass, the feeling of it familiar underneath the soles of your sandals. Today, the air smelled like the first few days of summer, when the trees and plants were still a little shy but undeniably alive. You remembered feeling like this, once.

Around you, the river was just as alive too, flowing urgently and sparkling under the bright sun. You held onto the handle of the bag as you walked cautiously, still wondering what the hell you were doing here. And also, what the hell you would tell Hyunjin.

Your train of thought came to a stop abruptly when you heard his voice. It came to you faintly at first, as though it was carried by the wind. But you kept going, reaching the spot where you could see the space where you and Hyunjin had been last night.

He was there today again, sitting on the big boulder, his phone to his ear and a closed sketchbook with a few pencils on his lap. He wore knee-length jean shorts and a loose, white tee. You wondered if Hyunjin’s beauty ever didn’t look effortless.

The silence lasted long enough that you thought the call had ended, but then he spoke again, in Korean. You didn’t understand what he was saying but you caught the tone of it, the shakiness of his voice. You felt it somewhere within you like an echo, like you had heard it before but on your own lips.

He said a word then—Dara—and you knew it wasn’t a word. You knew it was a name. He spoke it with pain and with love, and it seemed like you understood the sorrow you had seen in the man’s brown eyes.

Dara.

Who was she? A lover, obviously. Only a lover would evoke such deep emotion in someone, and you could hear that in his voice. Was she his girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend? Future girlfriend?

And then it hit you—it was violent enough that you had to retreat and hold onto the fence behind you, hiding to make sure Hyunjin wouldn’t see you after you let out a faint gasp.

Resentment. The painting. The two lovers, bound together by pain and tragedy. And all of the other paintings about love that you had seen on Hyunjin’s page, like the one whose background was a deep Alizarin Crimson, only the background spilled over the two subjects who were kissing, turning them red, too. Hyunjin’s perspective on love was soul-stirring, sentimental, painful. Only somebody who went through true heartbreak would feel this way—or be able to recognize it in others.

The greedy, ugly part of you wished Hyunjin’s heart didn’t belong so ardently to this Dara so that he would fall in love with you someday. Or maybe not fall in love with you—maybe just… whatever it was that people did these days. You weren’t exactly sure what it was. It seemed like everybody was in some sort of situationship with someone they met on an app. The others were waiting for their crush to get out of the situationship they were in. It wasn’t that you wanted Hyunjin to love you—it wasn’t even that you wanted Hyunjin to desire you. Well, it would be nice if he did, but he looked like a young god so there was no chance this would ever happen.

It’s just that he had seen you.

For the first time in a long, long time, you had let him see parts of you that you hadn’t let anybody else see, and he hadn’t pushed you away. He had told you that your souls had colors in it. He had shown you kindness. And then he held you in his arms, even just for that brief instant.

Once a year, sometimes twice but rarely, you went out of town to some shitty bar just because. You sat there at the counter and at some point into the night, when all the pretty girls had disappeared, a man would buy you a drink. You let him buy you the drink and it never went any further. At most you thanked him, but you rarely even did that. It was just some sort of reminder that maybe, just maybe, someone would want you again. Someday. If you weren’t with Chris anymore.

Last night, stupidly, had felt like the equivalent of that, but better—like Hyunjin had bought you a drink after seeing all of your wounds and deciding he didn’t mind them all that much maybe.

But he said her name again on the phone. Dara. She must be beautiful. Surely, she was. Surely, his whole entire heart belonged to her, with the way he painted love so raw and powerful, and red, and real.

You did the only thing that made sense then—you turned around and walked back, cursing yourself for being like this. A traitor to your husband and your dead daughter. You went over the fence and walked the path back to the RV. Minho was still there, scrolling his phone and sitting on a camping chair.

“He wasn’t there? I mean he’s a good swimmer but I hope he didn’t fall in the river,” he started jokingly but he was serious.

“He’s on the phone,” you replied, putting the paper bag on the steps near the RV door. “It seemed important, so I’ll just leave this here.”

“Oh.” Minho frowned as he was thinking things over. “Want me to give him a message then?”

“Not really, it’s pretty straightforward.” You took a deep breath. For courage. The air still smelled like the world should be beautiful.

“Another time for breakfast then, miss boss?”

“Another time,” you said as you walked away, the sun burning your eyes and your skin. Things were simpler at night. Emotions were simpler to conceal. You hoped Minho didn’t read your face accurately because you weren’t proud of the things going on in your mind. It had been a mistake to come here—to let your heart off its leash. The kind of mistake it was almost impossible to unmake.

The day after, you kept yourself busy with things around the campsite. Phone calls to contractors for last-minute repairs and then overseeing those repairs, sometimes with Chris, sometimes not. You spent a lot of time at the park office doing paperwork because it kept your mind off things while making you feel productive. And the office was air-conditioned, which was a great incentive. You sat at the counter and chatted with Jake and with the clients he welcomed in. You stopped by the shop too, to make sure everything was stocked up.

You called your father. Well, your father called you first but you were with one of the contractors and couldn’t take the call, so technically you called your father back. He said Chris invited him for dinner tonight but he wasn’t sure he could make it because your aunt had broken her wrist and he had told her he would help her out. It’s fine Dad, you assured him. You were too busy here at Riverside to go visit your aunt after her bad fall and you were glad to know her brother would be there for her.

It was only well into adulthood that you had wondered what it was like to have a sibling—you had never needed one before because you grew up with Christopher. He was a part of your family and you a part of his. You sort of wished you had a sister now, someone who would be able to advise you on the situation you were in. Which wasn’t even a situation, you reminded yourself. It was more like a string of situation after situation, a whirlpool of events that you found yourself stuck in and you couldn’t get out of.

The sun was beginning to descend onto the horizon when people started telling the group chat they were headed to Marlene’s. You took care of closing up the park office while Jake headed out, taking your time. Chris’ mom stopped on her way to the shop to say hello—she would take care of the general shop while the staff had dinner. You had the feeling that she had offered just so you didn’t have an excuse not to go. And you knew that people did that with good intentions so you didn’t resent them for it, not really. You just wished they let you decide what was good for you and what wasn’t.

Still, you made your way to the campsite restaurant. It was maybe your favorite time of the day, when the sun was low enough that its light shone a pretty shade of amber, filtering through tree branches, illuminating the world with warm incandescence. It was the sort of lighting you always looked for when visiting a museum and viewing paintings—you liked to see it recreated on canvases. Renoir had been particularly good at this, although today his paintings carried a commercial reputation, often disdained by art lovers over the world. You could understand that his style—saccharine and bright and saturated—was not for everybody, but you never understood those who claimed he was not a talented painter. In any case. He painted light just the way you liked to see it.

Sometimes you liked to imagine how people would paint the moments you were in. Like right now. This sunset, this path you were walking on, the people around you. Tired parents and tired children, exerted after a day spent at the pool or the waterpark. Young couples coming back from a hike, older couples taking a leisurely walk after dinner before heading to their RV for an early night in. You had grown up in this place and you had seen more people in it than you could ever remember, but all of them were beautiful in their own way, and all of them, you felt like, would be the perfect subjects for a Renoir-like painting. With the remnants of sunlight caressing their hair or their cheekbones or their lips.

A lot of people were already at the restaurant when you got in. A few campsite patrons, of course, but most of them were done with dinner at this hour, leaving enough space for the staff. You ignored the four tables occupied by them at first, crossing the dining room to say hi to the kitchen staff, asking if they would join you, too. You got a few yeses and a few noes, but Marlene thanked you sincerely for the offer, mentioning that Chris had offered the same. Of course he had. Chris would never, ever leave anybody behind.

You went to sit with the others, choosing the empty seat next to Allie’s. You were surprised to see her as she rarely participated in such events. She asked about your day as you got settled in, pretending not to notice that Chris was at the other side of the four tables brought together, sitting with Summer, her father, as well as Jake and Jaime, who he got along with.

“Hey boss,” Jeongin said with his usual brightness.

“Hey,” you responded, doing your best to make your smile believable, but by now you were pretty sure you were rather good at it.

“I wanted to say thank you for the other night.” His cheeks turned pink, which you found adorable. “It was fun.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Though, if you don’t ask Lucy out by the end of this summer, I’ll run out of patience.”

The pink on the young man’s cheeks became a little darker and he hid behind his glass of soda for a few seconds, taking a large sip from it. “I—I—” he stammered, searching for his words.

Your smile became genuine then. It reminded you of the first few weeks with Chris when you still couldn’t believe he had been in love with you for all these years and yet at the same time you couldn’t believe you hadn’t seen it before, because it was so obvious.

“I’m just joking of course,” you added softly. “But she’s a nice girl, isn’t she?”

“She is, boss.” Jeongin nodded. He smiled, looking at the table while he ran his thumb over a scratch on the wooden surface. “I just figured, you know. It might be weird with her dad and stuff.”

Christopher had told you the same thing once. You couldn’t help but feel immense empathy for Jeongin—you squeezed his hand in yours, inviting him to look you in the eyes. You had known him for a while now and you did believe to have a good relationship with him. He was among your most trusted employees, and you knew he looked up to Chris a lot.

“You’re a good man,” you told him, keeping your voice low so as not to be heard by anyone other than Allie and Jeongin. “If my daughter were to date someone like you, I would be happy.”

Jeongin froze in his seat as the weight of your words reached him. Allie put a comforting hand on your shoulder, perhaps sensing that you needed it. Jeongin knew. About you. About Chris. About the rift between you two. Maybe he didn’t know the extent of it but he knew enough to understand how difficult it had been for you to say the words my daughter out loud and you could see the gratitude in his eyes.

“Thank you, boss,” he said under his breath. “Let me get you a drink—”

“No, no it’s fine.” You shook your head. “Dinner’s on me anyway. On us,” you added, a little louder, looking at Chris. “Right?”

“Of course,” Chris replied without hesitation. “I’m starving, shall we order?”

A few people got up to the counter to give their orders while a few others stayed back as they figured out what they wanted. Jeongin kept looking over his shoulder, glancing at you, almost like he was worried.

“That was a kind thing for you to say,” Allie told you. “He likes you guys a lot.”

“We like him too. I meant what I said.”

Allie sighed faintly, her hand returning to your shoulder for a quick squeeze. “You seem a little better than the other morning,” she pointed out.

You remembered the river and the common loons and the sunrise, and your heart as it was being reignited.

“Didn’t you say I looked less melancholic the other morning?” you questioned, using Allie’s exact words.

“Yes. But you also looked like you felt bad about it,” she explained. Allie was very direct—something she said had come after losing her husband, as she had been a very reserved and closed-off person who kept her opinions to herself before. “Would you like to come by for coffee sometime? We could have a chat, just you and I. Away from here.”

It sounded like a good idea in theory. You knew that you needed it. You knew that you couldn’t possibly make sense of all these thoughts spinning in your mind on your own. You’d need someone else, with an outsider’s perspective, to guide you through them.

You also knew, essentially, what she would tell you. What anybody would tell you. Because you knew what you would tell a friend of yours in that situation.

Some things you just weren’t ready to hear.

You were picking at a dinner you weren’t particularly hungry for, listening to the lively conversations around you and letting them make you feel alive when you heard the bell of the restaurant door ringing. At first, you didn’t even look up—you only did so when you noticed that Christopher’s voice quieted down. So naturally, you glanced at him to see if something was wrong, maybe expecting him to be looking deep into Summer’s eyes with a loving gaze. But he was looking in the direction of the door, where two men stood, speaking in low voices in a foreign language.

Tonight, Hyunjin’s hair was in a low bun that rested on the nape of his neck. He wore loose, comfortable clothes—a T-shirt and shorts. Minho wore a similar outfit. The two of them had a rugged look to them that you hadn’t necessarily seen before, hinting that they had spent the better part of the day outside.

Your heart did a stupid little jump in your chest as you watched them scan the room, looking for the best seats. When Hyunjin finally turned to you and caught sight of you, his expression changed. It softened and yet became unreadable, the way a lake would freeze in the winter months, its surface becoming smooth and solid, yet you knew there was much going on underneath.

Minho waved at you and it took you a few seconds to wave back. Hyunjin offered you a smile that you weren’t sure what it meant but you also smiled back, clearing your throat as they walked away, invited to order their food by a Marlene who was eager to give good service to her clients. And to go home for the night as soon as possible.

“You know these gentlemen?” Allie asked, trying to sound as innocent as she could and failing miserably. “I don’t think I’ve seen them before this year, but one of them came by the shop to buy worms this morning.”

So they did go fishing after all.

You cleared your throat again, unable to resist a glance at the other side of the table where Chris was as invested in his conversation as he had been earlier, now sitting with Jeongin and Summer and discussing a TV series they all particularly enjoyed. He did glance back at you, just half a second. Just through the corner of his eye—it was so imperceptible that you might have made it up, just like you wanted him to be jealous yesterday.

You took all the time in the world to bite into your pizza and carefully chew it.

“I mean they’re clients,” you replied, taking a large sip of soda to chase it down.

“As are hundreds of people on this campground and not all of them say hello to you,” Allie pointed out. “They’re quite handsome, aren’t they?”

You choked on your soda—badly enough that it prompted Hyunjin, who was ordering his food, to look in your direction. You pretended you didn’t see him.

“We had a chat, yes,” you told Allie. You knew better than to lie to her. And why would you lie? It’s not like there was anything to lie about anyway. “One of them is related to my favorite painter. What a coincidence, right?”

“It’s so cute how you love art. You should go back to Paris,” Allie said with a firm nod. It was one of the first things you ever told her when you met Allie. How you had loved visiting all of the museums in Paris when you traveled there for your honeymoon. Chris had preferred the vineyards in the south of France, but it had been a lovely time. Maybe the happiest you had ever been.

“This place isn’t gonna run itself,” you pointed out. “And I’m not going to put it all on Christopher’s shoulders,” you added when you saw that Allie was about to talk back.

She made a face that showed how she understood what you meant and returned to her food. You ate too, silently, only speaking when directly spoken to, glancing at the other side of the dining room where Hyunjin and Minho were having dinner. You thought that maybe once or twice, you caught them glancing back but it had to be a coincidence—or rather, your group were the only other people in the diner by now and some were quite loud at times, and, of course, it would cause someone to look this way. Right?

It lasted a while—no more than fifteen minutes. You sat there, wondering whether you should get up and go talk to them. To Minho, but to Hyunjin, too. Wondering what you would say to him anyway. Wondering if you were upset that he hadn’t come talk to you after you bought him painting supplies. But you couldn’t possibly be upset about this, could you? What kind of person would that make you?

Jeongin left first—he was off duty tonight and you knew he needed the rest. Allie left right after him since she’d need to be up early to open the shop tomorrow morning. It allowed you to also gather your things and walk away—leaving in the middle, neither the first nor the last, would ensure some sort of camouflage. It would leave you unnoticed. It would not raise questions.

So you gathered your things and brought your plates back into the kitchen yourself to rinse them yourself but Marlene basically threw you out, claiming you were wearing the wrong attire to be on this side of the counter, but really you knew she just wanted you to take it easy. You still took a few instants to inquire about her walk-in inventory, making sure she wasn’t going to run out of anything—it seemed like the campground was especially full this week.

The dining room was almost empty when you went back. Chris, Summer, and Jake were the only three people left.

Hyunjin and Minho were gone, their table empty and clean.

“Everyone wanted me to say bye and goodnight,” Chris told you. “We’re getting beers with the kitchen staff,” he added, waving his beer bottle at you. You knew he would only drink one because Chris was on duty for the night.

“I’ll head home, Dad said he’d call me to update me about Martha.”

“I hope your aunt’s gonna be alright,” Summer blurted out. She rarely spoke to you these days and you knew why. You understood why. She wanted to fuck your husband and she was actually mature and kind enough to feel bad about it. “She’s so sweet.”

“She is sweet but she’s also stubborn as fuck, so she’ll be just fine,” you retorted, finding it surprisingly easy to act like a human being around her. Maybe it was out of despair. “You guys have a nice night—”

You walked out of the diner as you spoke and surprise muted the last syllable of your sentence. The door fell closed behind you, the familiar bell ringing with it as you found yourself outside again. The sun had disappeared behind the horizon but its light lingered as it did in the summer, unrelenting and unrelentingly beautiful. The highest point of the sky had turned a dull gray, but everything below was a lovely gradient of lavender, blue, and golden shades.

In any case.

Hyunjin was waiting for you, leaning against the trunk of a larch tree.

The reason you knew he was waiting for you is because he straightened up as soon as you exited Marlene’s diner, putting his phone in the pocket of his shorts. Something inside you made you glance around and look for Minho, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Hey,” Hyunjin started. A smile as enigmatic as the sunset sky hung on his graceful lips. “Are you going somewhere? I mean—do you have like a minute or two for me?”

You realized you had frozen in place when you saw him walk towards you and it prompted you to move, too. As though you wanted to put some distance between you and the diner. Or rather, the people in it.

“Y—Yeah, no, uh, no, I’m not really going anywhere,” you managed, blinking slowly as you stopped in your tracks once you stood in front of Hyunjin. It was as though you had forgotten how tall he was and how broad his shoulders were. Like he wasn’t quite the same person from a distance as opposed to just a few inches away from you.

“Cool, thanks.” His teeth sank into his bottom lip for just a few seconds as he averted his gaze, quickly taking a posture that hinted he was looking for a place to sit down.

He located a bench on the other side of the larch tree, which faced the river. It was a quiet little spot and you often saw people sitting on this bench, eating ice cream cones and chatting while looking at the water in front of them. He invited you to join him there with one motion of his long arm and you followed him with a glance for the diner over your shoulder.

“Did you have a nice dinner?” you asked, impatient to break the ice. Your heart was beating fast in your chest, your pulse shallow, rendering your breath a little short. “Seems like you guys spent the day outside.”

Hyunjin nodded, his smile returning to his lips. “Min wanted to go fishing and he made me go with him.”

“You mean he physically dragged you to the boat and threw you on it?” you asked playfully, tilting your head to the side.

“Exactly like that. It was more like a kidnapping,” Hyunjin added in the same humorous tone. There was a pause then, maybe to allow both of you to get used to one another and to the quietness of the world. “Dinner was excellent, yes,” he said finally. “You too?”

“I wasn’t too hungry,” you admitted. “But I never didn’t enjoy a meal at Marlene’s.”

“I bet I’ll say the same by the end of the summer.” Hyunjin sat more comfortably on the bench, laying his arm on the backrest.

You gave him a nod and a non-committal hum as a response, unsure where to go from there. You enjoyed the momentary silence between you two, noticing the little details about him. The way he was fidgeting with the zipper of his backpack, the gracefulness of his fingers. The honey color of his skin, now sunkissed after a day outside. The wind in the stray strands of his hair. You had never seen anyone like Hyunjin before, and it made you wonder if you would ever see someone like him after.

“How was fishing?” you inquired, but it turned out that Hyunjin spoke at the exact same time as you.

“I wanted to say thank you,” he said simultaneously. “Oh,” he added in the awkwardness of the moment.

“Oh,” you added also, your cheeks turning warm despite the ambient air turning cool.

Another silence fell upon the two of you. You sat there on the bench, facing the river with your two hands on your knees and your heart in your throat. In that moment, you remembered the time you got so sick Chris had to drive you to urgent care. It was a few years back. It was the first winter after losing Judith. You hadn’t known at first that you were ill. You were fatigued, you had headaches—nothing out of the ordinary for you. It escalated a little and you needed medical care before you realized it. But you really hadn’t known.

It wasn’t about being in denial. You weren’t in denial that something was happening to you right now. That you felt some kind of way about the man sitting next to you on this bench. You just couldn’t pinpoint what it was—you had known nothing but grief and sorrow for so long that you didn’t think you could recognize anything that wasn’t it. You didn’t think there was space in your heart for anything that wasn’t it.

“Uh…” Hyunjin started again, cautious, carefully unzipping the front pocket of his backpack. “Yeah, so. I’ll just say it. I wanted to say thank you for what you did for me.”

That caught you off guard. “What I did for you?”

“You brought me paint tubes and paper and brushes and all that stuff,” he said, speaking very slowly as though you were suffering from amnesia and he needed to remind you of these things. “You bought these things for me. They were all brand new.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“It’s nothing?” He cocked his head to the side.

“Well you asked for them at the shop didn’t you?” you retorted. “You’re a painter. A really good one at that. Obviously you need paint.”

Hyunjin stared at you for a few seconds, his gaze lingering in unusual places like your hair or the straps of your sundress, or the diner behind you.

“But I know they don’t sell stuff like that in Stormhaven because we looked for it before we asked for it here at the shop,” Hyunjin explained, still in this slow, very teacher-like tone. “So you went somewhere else.”

“Yes,” you replied in the same voice, wondering if he took you for an idiot and if you should be offended, but something in his eyes told you that you shouldn’t. “I know a great art store a couple of towns over and—”

He interrupted you. “How long did it take you to get there?”

“What?” What kind of conversation was that even?

“How long did you drive to get to that art supplies shop? Because I checked online for art stores in the immediate area and there aren’t any,” Hyunjin insisted, waving his phone to emphasize his point.

You blinked slowly. It seemed like so many steps on his part just for a few tubes of paint. At least that’s what your brain was telling you, reminding you that nothing meant anything, that life was just a series of events that were or weren’t interconnected.

“I don’t know,” you managed with a shrug. “An hour maybe.”

“An hour and then another hour to come back,” Hyunjin repeated, more like a statement than a question. “You did all of that just for me, a stranger. So why are you saying it’s nothing? It’s really not nothing to me.”

He seemed a little upset. Like you had just dismissed him in some way.

You blinked again and it was like you were seeing him for the first time. Like you were seeing everything else for the first time, too.

Because you had been just about to lie to him. Which is what you would have done normally. You would have said that you had an appointment in that area and that you were going anyway. You would have said that you were meeting a friend who lived over there for coffee and had gone shopping with her and thought, Well, why not? Why shouldn’t I buy a few supplies? as you walked past them. It was like second nature to you—you didn’t even think about it. It just happened the same way breathing did.

As though you didn’t want people to know you had gone out of your way for them. Not Hyunjin, but not Chris either, not even your father. It had been the same with your mom too, and so many others. What an awful thing. As though you were ashamed of how much you loved other people, how deeply you cared about them.

Because your lies weren’t inherently evil didn’t make you any less of a liar. And you hated liars. You hated lies and deception and anything that wasn’t the truth. What did that mean about yourself?

How many other parts of yourself had you concealed? How much of your soul was buried deep enough that nobody—not even yourself—would ever find it?

Hyunjin relaxed all of a sudden—his shoulders turned limp. “Sorry,” he said under his breath. “I didn’t mean to sound angry.”

You must have had a strange expression on your face for his entire demeanor to switch like that. You gulped.

“You were right to be,” you admitted, suddenly feeling very small and very stupid. You were realizing something important about yourself and it seemed like you ought to be alone during this moment. “You’re not nothing.” You paused then, just to take a deep breath. To give yourself a little courage. “I wanted you to have what you needed so that you could paint. I like your work, or what I’ve seen of it,” you explained slowly, your gaze fixated on the slow-moving water before you. “And I had a good time the other night. When we sat by the river.”

“I had a good time too.” Finally, after playing with it for minutes, Hyunjin unzipped the front pocket of his backpack. “It’s just. Kindness isn’t nothing.” He was speaking at a low volume—low enough that you could barely hear him. But you could hear him, and you listened. “There are many people who make me feel like I’m not worth it, but you drove all this way to get me paint and it means a lot to me. So I made a little something for you.”

With that, Hyunjin pulled something out of his backpack. You recognized it immediately as the aquarelle paper pad you bought for him—at that sight, your heart picked up a pace again. He opened the notepad, flipping through the first few pages on which you caught a glance of some sketches. There wasn’t much color on them, but it was quite the opposite for the page he stopped at.

Carefully, he tore that page off the pad and handed it to you. “There. Just a little something to say thank you.”

You took the sheet from him, your gaze going from his face to his painting and back to him as though you couldn’t believe it. And yet you were now holding a painting that Hyunjin had made. The paper felt heavier than it should have in your hand. You studied it, trying to take in the sight of it all at once, but you couldn’t stop noticing the tiniest details. The night sky and its lifelike colors. It wasn’t just any night sky—it was yours. It was the one over your head night after night. With the stars and a few hazy clouds adding some purple to the inky dark blue. The moon could be seen behind the clouds, hiding and yet visible. Beautiful nonetheless.

The painting depicted a river also but not just any river—this river, the river you saw and heard and smelled every day. You recognized it. You recognized the riverbank and the intricate curves of it, you recognized exactly where this was. But there was so much to see. The delicate reflections of the light spilling from the windows of the cabins in the distance, on the other side of the water. The stars and how bright they shone. The tall grass and the reeds just shadows in the night but recognizable anyway.

The evergreens. One in the foreground, one you couldn’t see entirely. Just some branches. The rest could be imagined. You knew because you knew which tree it was. It was a black spruce and whip-poor-wills liked to rest on its lower branches to sing their nocturnal song. The rest of the forest was more of a blur in the background as it was in real life—just like the mountains on the other side of the river.

To Hyunjin, it was just a painting depicting a corner where he had spent some time one evening, but to you, it meant so much more. This was the exact spot where you came across him the other night and had that long conversation with him. It was the first time you admitted to someone—of your own volition, not because they had heard something from somebody else—about the darkness that resided within you. The sorrow that lingered. That night was the first time you had allowed someone to really see you since you lost Judith.

And you had never really expected it to happen. As in, you never thought you’d actually let someone see you in a vulnerable state again, but you just assumed that if you did, they wouldn’t stay around for long. It was just too heavy. You were just too heavy, like a fire sucking the air out of a room, suffocating everybody inside.

And yet Hyunjin was here tonight with gentleness in his eyes and paint on aquarelle paper.

“Oh wow,” you managed after a while, your throat tight. You stared up at him. “Hyunjin, it’s… it’s so nice of you, that’s…” For some reason, at that moment you remembered his portfolio and his Insta page and realized you were holding an artwork of great value in your hands. “It’s beautiful. It looks just like it, too. That place.”

“I painted it from memory,” he explained. “It was my view that night, while we talked.” He hesitated, his eyes going from the sheet in your hand to the notepad he held. “I painted another one too.”

Intrigued, you watched as he opened the pad once again, going through pages until he found what he was looking for. His cheeks had turned the color of summer cherries when he handed it to you.

Your entire body, it seemed, caught on fire when you grabbed it.

To put it simply, Hyunjin had painted you.

It was another painting depicting a scene from that other night, with the same dark blue and purple sky, but in this one, the moon was out, and its light was illuminating the woman sitting on the grass. She sat elegantly, in a way you did not think you had sat, with her body slightly tilting at the back, resting on her two hands, her face turned towards the sky as though she was bathing in the moonlight. A couple of mini liquor bottles rested next to her, as well as a walkie-talkie.

It was you, except it couldn’t be you, because you weren’t this beautiful. Your hair floated in the night like a siren’s would in the sea, or something like it, the light of the moon reflecting on it in Hyunjin’s expert brush strokes. You knew this must have been difficult to blend in watercolors and yet it looked seamless. Likelike.

No, not lifelike. Enhanced. Because you did not look like this. The curves of your body did not look pleasant like that, or appealing. Your posture was not the one of a demigoddess, and your lips did not have the color of a ripe peach. It was not like looking into a mirror, it felt more like staring at a stranger. The expression on your face was blurry due to the hazy aspects of watercolor but it was enough to see that it was complex. Deep. As though your sadness had beauty in it.

You sat there, staring at both pieces of art, speechless.

“I wanted to remember that night. And you,” you heard Hyunjin say. And he was very much there, right there, yet his voice came from another world.

There were so many words crowding your throat and shoving each other, racing to be the first to spill from your lips, that it took you several more seconds before you were able to speak at all.

“I don’t know what to say,” you admitted under your breath, your voice weak and quivering.

“You don’t need to say anything,” Hyunjin pointed out, taking the notepad back from you. He didn’t seem upset.

“No, it’s just—” You began, stopping mid-sentence with a frown, your gaze following movement on the other side of the river. A bird. It was narrow here, and you recognized a member of the thrush family. Your mother would have known which, but you didn’t. “You painted me so pretty. And—” You paused again, searching for the bird in the dense forest but the day was darkening fast. “It’s just that. That night—it—it meant a lot for me. I never really talk about Judith. I don’t want people to know about her. But I wanted you to know about her. Does that make sense?”

Hyunjin, who was putting his notepad back into his bag, came to a stop slowly, staring at you. Really staring at you. Not really like he was seeing you for the first time, rather like he was visiting a museum for the second time to see an exhibit there and understand it better.

“It makes perfect sense,” he replied softly. “I understand because I felt the same.”

“Like you wanted me to know about that girl?”

He nodded, zipping his backpack and leaving it on the ground, clearing his throat. “Dara. Yeah.”

Dara. So you were right about that name, about her. About the woman you thought was in his art, painted crimson and vermillion.

But you were a woman in one of his paintings too, now. And you did not know what to do about this.

“You’re so nice, and kind, and—” You paused, sighing. “I don’t understand how this could have happened to you.” And truly, you did not. She didn’t want to love me back, he had said. What kind of person could that woman be to refuse someone like him?

But if you were to be fully honest with yourself—almost in an ugly, gruesome way. Weren’t you building a cage around your own heart ever since you laid eyes on Hyunjin? Not even willing to admit to yourself that he was handsome? That his scent, blended with the smell of the outdoors, made prickles appear on your skin? That his sunkissed skin was inviting? That you wanted to run your fingers through his silky hair? Weren’t you pretending that you hadn’t felt anything when he helped you over the fence, just holding your arm, or even worse, when he hugged you? When he pressed you against his chest, embracing you? Weren’t you pretending that you didn’t feel it between your legs when his warm breath tickled your neck? Weren’t you pretending that it didn’t overwhelm you that he painted for you?

That he painted you? That he painted the texture of your skin, the curves of your body, and the way your shirt hugged your breasts?

“Things just happen, we’re not really meant to understand them I think,” Hyunjin wisely pointed out. “It’s also in our nature to try and understand them, though.”

“You’re right,” you conceded. “Trying to find meaning in them.”

Hyunjin nodded faintly. You both allowed silence to creep in between you two as the night covered the sky lazily. Frogs were beginning their night song here and there, some close, some farther. The sky was neither blue nor dark—the lavender gray had taken over it for now, before nightfall would spill over the world. You used the last remnants of light to look at the painting Hyunjin gifted you once again.

“This means a lot to me,” you murmured. “It’s just so…”

“I’m glad you like it,” Hyunjin responded, looking around, perhaps searching for the frog that was singing nearby.

The other painting was stuck in your mind the way one was blinded by the sun if they looked at it for too long. No matter where you looked—even if you closed your eyes, it was still there, engraved in your retina.

This—all of this—was too much. The feelings you didn’t want in your chest. The images haunting your eyes and your mind and your heart and your cunt, even. And somehow it wasn’t enough, as though your dormant heart demanded more even.

“You didn’t sign it,” you pointed out, realizing Hyunjin’s signature didn’t appear on the other side of the page either.

Hyunjin gave you an appraising look and you waited while he was coming up with an answer. You had seen his portfolio and his social media profiles. You had seen his art. He used to sign each of his paintings with his initials—a simple but efficient HHJ in the bottom right corner of the canvas. And then at one point, he just stopped. It was around the time when he started incorporating more reds into his art.

“I could make an exception for you,” he said finally, retrieving a pen from his backpack. It was attached to what might have been a journal, or maybe it was a simple notebook.

“You don’t have to,” you assured. But he had already taken the sheet from you and was using the back of the notebook as a temporary table on which he lay his painting to apply his signature on the bottom right corner.

You looked for red in the painting. It was in the purple of the sky and in the warmth of the light coming from the cabins across the river. You remembered the other painting and the colors he had used to paint you. Your skin. Your lips.

He signed Hyunjin, just that, and gave it back to you.

“I’ll cherish this all my life,” you said, and you knew it was true. Hell, it felt wrong to hold it just like that. You wanted to go home right now and store it carefully, somewhere safe.

But you also wanted to stay right here.

“Did you have dessert?” Hyunjin blurted out all of a sudden.

The question surprised you—you turned to him as though he had spoken to you in a foreign language.

“Did you have dessert with your dinner?” he asked, motioning at the diner behind you. The lights had been turned on inside, illuminating his sunkissed face, highlighting the details of it. The curves of his lips and those of his nose. The softness in his eyes. “Could I buy you an ice cream?”

For a second, then two, three, four, and five, you stared at him and he stared at you. It was not so much that you were reading him—perhaps you were trying to see your own reflection in his irises, as though you would understand his viewpoint. His eyes were the color of earth. Of rich soil on a rainy day. His eyes were the color of the bark of an oak tree dampened by dew on a late spring morning.

If you weren’t greedy, maybe, you’d go home and forget all about tonight.

“No, you can’t buy me an ice cream,” you replied, suppressing a mischievous smile.

Taken aback, Hyunjin sat straight on the bench. “Oh—it’s fine, I—”

“Friends don’t pay for ice cream here,” you interrupted him. “It’s always free. I’ll just… maybe I’ll go back to my car, I don’t want to damage this—” you added, showing him the precious painting you were still holding.

“I’ll take care of it.” Hyunjin was putting the notebook and pen back into his bag. He slipped the painting between two pages of his notepad, freeing you of it. “I’ll give it back after we eat.”

“You better,” you teased, standing up, followed by Hyunjin. “Bet that thing will be worth thousands in a few years.”

“I doubt that,” Hyunjin responded, hesitant, walking by your side and hiding behind his hair but you could see that he was blushing. “It’s just a tiny thing that I painted in the middle of a lake when Minho wasn’t having me rowing the boat.”

You chuckled, shaking your head. “Didn’t Monet buy a whole boat so he could go on the Seine and paint from the water? Your argument is therefore invalid.”

Hyunjin found absolutely nothing to say—he stared at you, dumbfounded, speechless.

“I just find it interesting that you’d do this—paint this, I mean, and give it to me—and act like it’s nothing,” you said with a shrug. “When not ten minutes ago, it was you who were scolding me for exactly the same thing? How did you word it already?” You pretended to think about it, only, you would never forget his words. “Kindness isn’t nothing.”

Hyunjin sighed and rolled his eyes as though he was exasperated, but his smile said otherwise. He raised his hands like one would raise a white flag. “You’re right. You’re right. You got me there.”

“I was just joking anyway,” you reassured him. “I don’t care what it’s going to be worth in ten or twenty years. I won’t sell it.”

You had made it to the small ice cream shop located right next to Marlene’s diner. The owner, who was a good friend of your father’s, was putting the chairs away for the night. You liked Frankie—he was like an uncle to you. He had been there for your father when your mom had passed. He had tried to be there for you when you had lost Judith, but you had not let him. You had not let anybody help you then, not even Chris.

“Frankie, did you turn off the machines?” you asked Frankie, grabbing a couple of the colorful folding chairs and bringing them to the tiny shed where he kept them.

“You know I did not, Squishy.” He always called you like that. “And you know that even if I had, I’d turn them back on for you.”

You turned to Hyunjin, who had put his backpack on the steps leading to the ice cream parlor and was helping out with the chairs, without being asked, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

Kindness isn’t nothing.

“Frankie has been spoiling me since my early days,” you explained.

“Well, it was hard not to,” Frankie confessed, running a hand in his gray hair. It was all gray now—you could have sworn that just last summer, there was still brown in there. He seemed more tired than usual. “Those two kids kept coming to beg for ice cream. Sometimes, kids are so cute, you know? You just can’t say no.”

You and Chris. Chris and you. You used to be inseparable—all of your summers and weekends spent together, exploring the camping ground, always discovering more of its secrets. And regularly bargaining your way to an ice cream cone.

“Sounds like sometimes you just can’t say no even when they’re all grown up,” Hyunjin added with a wink for Frankie. “Give me those,” he added for you, taking the two folded chairs you had just picked up. “I got this, Mr. Frankie, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, thank you, son. That’s very kind.” He turned to you. “That’s a nice guy right there.”

The man gave Hyunjin a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and returned behind the counter of his ice cream parlor, disappearing momentarily while he was washing his hands. Frankie and his wife had struggled for a long time to have a child—they had given up when their daughter, Lucy, had decided to show up. Their miracle, they called her. They were a little older than other parents when they had her but they were amazing parents anyway. Maybe better, wiser parents too. Lucy was the girl that Jeongin was so desperately crushing on, too. It was a lovely family.

“It’s fine I said,” Hyunjin insisted when you grabbed another chair. “I’ll do it, okay?”

You stood in front of him—it was dark now, or at least the lights from the ice cream shop made the rest of the world seem like the night—and you blinked, just staring at him.

“I can do it though. I help Frankie or other people around the campground often,” you replied.

“Are you going to fight me every time I’m being nice to you?” Hyunjin grabbed the remaining four chairs and brought them over to the shed, carefully piling them over one another. “I know you can do it. You’re wearing a nice dress, I didn’t want you to get dirt on it.”

You looked down, smoothing the fabric of your humble off-white, yellowish sundress, pulling it down as though you could cover your knees with it, suddenly overly aware of your body inside of it and the way some of its curves might make it look. It was a little tight around the cleavage area too. The floral pattern of it—little roses, printed in a rustic style—had looked cute when you bought it. It seemed so stupid now.

“Oh.” You cleared your throat. “Of course. Thanks.”

You went to fetch the padlock from Frankie and locked the shed closed. The old man offered both of you to come in and wash up—it was significantly cooler inside too, which was nice, despite how cramped the ice cream parlor was. In the end, you ordered your usual, which intrigued Hyunjin so much that he ordered the same thing.

You liked Frankie’s frozen yogurt but anybody in their right mind knew that ice cream was obviously superior—and since you owned this damn camping ground, why should you settle? You had come up with the ultimate order, which was: in a cup, half a frozen yogurt of a fruity flavor of your desire. Tonight, it was strawberry. Then, the other half was vanilla ice cream—and Frankie made his soft-serve with real cream and real vanilla, so it was insanely good. Topped with fresh fruit—in this case, local strawberries and raspberries because Frankie had some—and when you wanted the experience to be as good or better than sex, the cup was sprinkled with just a little bit of salted pistachios.

A few minutes later, Hyunjin and you were walking away, back in the direction where you had come from, holding your ice creams in your hands after saying goodbye to Frankie.

“Oh my god—” Hyunjin quickly put a second, then a third spoonful of your delicious creation in his already rather full mouth. “Tish ish sho foking ghood!”

“I keep telling people that they should not disregard frozen yogurt but should also not settle for it, you know? People think compromises are a bad thing, but they can be so enlightening.”

To be fair, Frankie’s products were excessively tasty, which largely helped. Still, there was something endearing in watching Hyunjin eat his ice cream, complimenting each aspect of it like it was the first time he had eaten it at all.

“You’re a genius. You could be a millionaire if you sold this in tubs,” Hyunjin retorted. His face, illuminated again now that you two were walking in the light spilling from Marlene’s diner, was serious.

You shook your head, giggling. “You’re adorable—” You cut your sentence short, although you didn’t even know what else there was to say. This was all getting too familiar. Was it weird that you said that? Maybe. Definitely. Warmth spread at the nape of your neck and you quickly shoved a spoonful of ice cream in your mouth to cool off.

“No, it’s just, it’s really good,” he insisted, waving the frozen yogurt/ice cream cup at you, walking again, and you followed him.

The bench was empty and the two of you returned there, sitting to enjoy your dessert. In silence for the first few minutes. You tried to listen to the conversations that you could hear from the diner but it was too fuzzy to make sense of any of the words, and your heartbeat was too loud in your ears.

Your gaze landed on Hyunjin’s backpack. Somewhere in there was the painting he made for you. And there was also the painting he made of you. You wondered if he also painted Dara, today, while on the boat.

You wondered what he was telling her the other day when he was on the phone with her.

“When I bought the paints and stuff for you,” you started before you could think this over, “I wanted to give them to you. I mean, in person.”

Hyunjin looked up from his precious ice cream, staring into your eyes, but saying nothing.

“I went to your RV,” you went on. “Minho was disappointed I didn’t make it to breakfast,” you added, recalling that moment. “I—uh—I went to give you the bag. He said you were by the river. But you were on the phone, and it seemed important. I didn’t want to bother you, so I left it with him.”

Maybe he knew that this was some sort of invitation to speak—Hyunjin nodded slowly, faintly, more for himself than for you, and ate more of his ice cream quietly as the sounds of the night took over the forest.

“Do you remember what I told you the other night?” Hyunjin began, looking up at the sky. There weren’t too many stars yet—it was too early for that.

Not only did you remember, but you had thought about it enough that you figured you had put many pieces of the puzzle in their place. But you weren’t going to tell him that. “I remember. It was about Dara?”

Hyunjin took a deep but shaky breath. He forced more ice cream into his mouth. “Yes. I was talking to her.”

You didn’t pretend to be surprised. “Is she somebody you work with? Do you have to talk to her often?” After all, you had to work with Christopher every day, didn’t you? Maybe it would hurt a little less if you didn’t.

“I don’t work with her, I guess,” Hyunjin explained. “It’s more like… our studios are next door.” He sighed. “We see each other every day. We collaborate on projects all the time. She’s my friend.”

You almost dropped your cup of ice cream, managing to steady your grip on it at the last second. You found yourself completely unsettled by Hyunjin’s revelation. You hadn’t really expected that. Well, you expected something, sure, since he was talking to her on the phone. But not this. Not like this. Not she’s my friend in the present tense.

“And you’re able to be her friend after what happened between you two?” you asked softly, suddenly concerned for Hyunjin’s well-being, even though you weren’t sure what had happened exactly.

“I was her friend before I fell in love with her. It’s hard to explain.” Hyunjin left his half-eaten dessert on the ground next to the bench, sitting with his knees pressed to his chest.

You gave him the space he needed, aware that you had probably pushed a little too hard. It was none of your business anyway, was it? And yet.

You had told him so little about Judith and it had opened a whole new dimension for you. A part of you really, really wanted to do the same for Hyunjin. If you could somehow manage such a feat.

“I don’t want to insist,” you told him. “But if you want to talk to someone—I can be that someone. I want to be. I know it’s difficult to talk.”

“It’s not difficult with you. I like talking with you,” Hyunjin replied. You couldn’t see his mouth as it was hidden behind his knees. “I just… I don’t even know where to start. And it’s not like I haven’t told the story before. I have. I went to therapy because of it.”

“Didn’t it help?” you questioned, trying to focus on the latter part of his sentence and not the first, so as not to melt into a puddle.

He shrugged. “Yes. No. I went for months and talked about Dara plenty, but all that my therapist would focus on was me. He said the reason I wasn’t getting over her was because I had other, deeper issues we needed to address. I didn’t like that.”

You thought about it for a second and it appeared to you clear as day. “You didn’t like that because he made it—your sadness—not about Dara anymore?”

Hyunjin inhaled sharply, apparently surprised by your response. He pressed his mouth onto his thighs, closing his eyes, disappearing behind his hair momentarily. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled, almost strained.

“It felt like it was all I had left of our love. The pain. The longing. And he wanted to take it away from me by making it about other things. So I stopped going.”

It was instantaneous—your throat shut tight and your eyes tingled with tears that you fought to hold back. It hurt to hear him say those words. It hurt for him and it hurt for you.

Because what else was left of your love story with Chris if not for that? The pain? Were you holding onto that pain because it was all that you had? Even if it was going to kill you?

You discarded your ice cream, leaving it in the pebbled soil at your feet, reaching a trembling hand towards Hyunjin. You had no idea what the fuck you were going to do with that hand. You wanted it in his hair, caressing it, tucking a strand of it behind his ear to reveal his deep and soulful gaze. You wanted to cup his cheek and caress his silky skin. Something was calling you to him—something inside of you that you did not know how to control.

But, gently, you rested your hand on his back. He jumped—just a little recoil because he was surprised—but leaned into your touch, moving closer to you until your entire arm was around his back. Each inch of your skin that touched him was immediately ignited and hyperaware, awake in the night.

“Minho was pissed,” Hyunjin went on, sniffling. You couldn’t see whether he was crying or not and maybe it was for the best. It might just break you if you saw tears on his almost too-handsome face. “Because he was the one who got me to see his psychiatrist. He was worried about me.”

“That’s because he cares about you though,” you pointed out.

“I know. But he doesn’t understand,” Hyunjin mumbled, playing with one of his shoelaces, keeping his hand busy. “He thinks I shouldn’t be friends with her anymore. He suggested that I should cut ties with Dara completely during the trip. To see how it feels.”

You would know a thing or two about not letting go.

You took a deep breath, unsure of what you should say next. Perhaps it was best not to say anything. Maybe—no, definitely—the best, most reasonable option for you right now would be to come up with some comforting words for Hyunjin and call it a night. Tell him to get some rest, that sleep would do him good. Then drive home, and go to bed, too.

But Marlene kept liquor in the walk-in cooler. Away from prying eyes—only a few privileged individuals knew where it was, and you were among them.

“Do you want a drink?” you heard yourself say, barely audible enough to be heard over the steady sound of the river. “I know a place.”

At this, Hyunjin reappeared from behind his knees, staring at you with damp eyes. “A drink?”

“I owe you one after all, but we don’t have to.”

“You really don’t owe me anything.” And yet. Gradually, Hyunjin returned to a more normal sitting position. He wiped the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. “But I could use a drink. It was a long day.”

A smile sneaked its way onto your lips. It was a gift sent from that thing that you could not control within you, hidden in some secret corner. You gathered the mostly melted ice creams and discarded them in appropriate bins and guided Hyunjin back near the diner, explaining how Marlene liked to keep a good bottle of Hennessy or a fancy scotch around for dire situations.

“A woman of refined taste, this Marlene,” Hyunjin commented. It felt good to see him smiling again. “You never know when you need to get wasted.”

“Indeed.” It seemed wise to avoid the dining room and the staff—in other words, Chris—and go through the back door. “It’ll just be a minute, okay?”

“Take your time. I’ll text Minho to let him know I haven’t been kidnapped.” With that, Hyunjin pulled his phone out of his pocket and walked away, aimlessly, typing on the screen of his device.

You used your master key to enter the kitchen directly. From here, the conversation was loud and clear, and you heard Jake, Marlene, and Stacy discuss one of the new hiking trails that had been opened in the state park right next door. Jake was very interested in it and was telling the two women about an upcoming one-day trip to the park with Christopher, Jeongin, Summer, and a few more people. It seemed to you like it had been planned just now, right after you had left.

You stood in the dark and quiet kitchen, knowing you did not need to hear any more of this and yet waiting. Maybe you wanted to hear the excitement in Christopher’s voice, but all that you heard was Summer asking Frankie—who had apparently joined them—if he thought Lucy would want to come too. Maybe Chris had already left for the staff house, where he usually stayed. To keep an eye on things from a little closer, but mostly so he could avoid you more easily. It just gave him a good excuse not to stay in the same house as you too often.

You gathered all of the courage you had—which wasn’t all that much—and made your way to the dining room, standing in the door frame, eyeing the scene before letting anyone see you. He wasn’t there. Chris. You cleared your throat softly and it was Stacy who saw you first, and Marlene second, followed by the others. You couldn’t read the expression on Summer’s face, but you wished you could. It would make it a lot easier for you.

“Sorry to interrupt—” you started, stammering through your words a little. “Marlene, I just wanted to know if I could borrow some sugar?” It was the code you had come up with for the liquor she kept.

The corner of Marlene’s lips curved into a lopsided smile. “Sure thing, honey. You know where it is. Take as much as you need, but be careful not to overdo it. You’ll get diabetes”

“I’ll be careful,” you promised. “Can I grab the fancy one? I’ll get you a replacement.” Jake also knew about the Hennessy—he suppressed a chuckle by swallowing a generous amount of beer.

“Make yourself at home,” Marlene insisted with a wink.

You thanked her and did your best to wish everyone a good evening as warmly as you could, but it was always about not overdoing it. It was hard to tell when you did. When Frankie inquired Did your friend like the ice cream? You assured him that he very much did, of course. Thank you so much Frankie, and make sure to call if you need anything.

The Hennessy was exactly where it was supposed to be—on the highest shelf in the walk-in cooler, hidden in a small crate that once contained bell peppers. Marlene just put more stuff on top and nobody paid it any mind. You shoved the bottle in a tote bag you found in Marlene’s office. The whole thing took less than two minutes and you exited as quickly as you entered, relieved to put as much distance as you could between you and this place. For some reason.

The sounds of the night had increased in volume again—there were more frogs now, and among them was the loudest and your favorite—the gray treefrog, whose thrill-like breeding call was eerily similar to a bird’s voice. They were hard to spot, and you had seen those frogs just a handful of times in your life, but you enjoyed their musical display, which was also how you could tell that summer had definitely begun.

It did not stop you from hearing Hyunjin’s voice. At first, you thought he was still on the phone. But then you heard the bell from the main entrance to the diner, and more voices. Most importantly, Christopher’s.

“Ah, boss! There you are,” Jake said. “We were starting to wonder if you ghosted us or something.”

“Sorry for keeping you,” Hyunjin immediately interjected. “I should go anyway—” He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he let it float somewhere in the air, allowing the frogs and the owls to fill the silence.

“Oh no, I shouldn’t be keeping you from going back home and resting after your long day! It was nice meeting you.” You could almost hear Chris shake Hyunjin’s hand. “Careful on your way back, yeah? I know some parts of the pedestrian paths aren’t great over the RV sites, but we’ll get to fixing them in the upcoming weeks.”

Hyunjin coughed nervously. “Sure, yeah, yeah, thanks, Christopher. Goodnight!” Two things became simultaneously obvious to you.

That Hyunjin had told Chris he was going home instead of telling him that he was going to hang out and have drinks with you.

And also that Hyunjin was a terrible, terrible liar.

The warmth that Hyunjin seemed to constantly elicit in you came back ferociously, spreading from your chest to your belly like an oil tanker spilled into an ocean, making the air in your lungs hot and thick. But sweet, too. There was nothing to hide and Hyunjin could and probably should have told him where he was going, and with whom.

You remembered the painting. Not the one he gave you—the other one. The one that gave you chills, that made you press your thighs together. It was stupid because his heart belonged to another. It was stupid because you were married and because you were broken. You were the kind of broken that wasn’t even worth taking to the repair shop. You were the kind of broken that nothing could be done for, or with, or about.

You did not like the part of you that was greedy—that part was urging you to make yourself seen, to make sure that Chris would know you would be with Hyunjin. But what would you even gain? Because even if he felt the same thing you felt when he was with Summer, would it make a difference? You weren’t even jealous. Not anymore. You weren’t jealous because Summer was prettier and younger than you. It had taken you a while but you had even stopped being jealous of how happy she made Chris. Some days, you really just wanted to beg him to please just fuck her and put an end to your misery already.

That would be too ugly of you. Chris didn’t need that. Not after what he had gone through.

So you stayed put, listening as the main group walked away. At this hour, the camping ground was mostly quiet and empty—on the first days of the season, especially the sunny ones, people hurriedly did as many outdoor activities as they could, meaning that by this hour most of them were probably sound asleep.

Hyunjin quietly reappeared after turning the corner of the building, his backpack on his shoulders and his hair secured in a tighter bun. He seemed ready for an adventure, but he stopped and stood there, facing you, and you stood with your back pressed to the wooden wall behind you, staring into the man’s eyes, which were as beautiful as the night around you. You didn’t tell him, you almost said.

But you didn’t tell him.

So that made two of you.

Hyunjin motioned at the tote bag whose handles rested on your shoulder. “You got the stuff?”

You nodded. “Let’s go.” You wasted no time, regretting your choice of footwear and overall fashion decisions as you made your way towards one of the unpaved paths that circled the camping ground.

Most of these were surrounded by more densely wooded areas or tree lines. Chris wouldn’t need it because he knew all the trails by heart, but you used your phone to light up the ground just to make sure neither of you would trip over something. There wasn’t much conversation while you walked, except for when Hyunjin cursed under his breath because a mosquito got him. Two seconds later, you heard the zipper of his backpack and then the vigorous spraying of bug repellent, its strong and potent scent reaching you.

“Is your blood tasty, Mr. Hyunjin?” you asked, looking over your shoulder, suppressing a smile as Hyunjin was shoving the bug spray back in his bag.

“I’m a Michelin-starred restaurant,” he replied, scoffing, visibly displeased. “Minho said he liked having me on the boat because I attract mosquitoes and it’s good for fish. He called me live bait all day.”

Your own laughter took you by surprise—it spilled into the night as clear as the moonlight, echoing in the silence. You couldn’t remember the last time you had actually laughed like this, a true laugh. A laugh that didn’t come at a price, that didn’t need to be exchanged for something else, tears, excuses, or even shame.

Just a laugh because something was funny.

The silence that followed it was heavy and you realized it was so because you had stopped in your tracks. Hyunjin, who was close behind you, had also stopped. You were just stunned by this new feeling in your chest but Hyunjin seemed to believe there was another, bigger problem.

“Everything alright? Did you see something? Are there bears out here? Wolves?”

“Bears?” You turned to him. “Wolves?”

He seemed a little nervous. “Yeah?”

“Of course there are bears, but now’s not the worst of the season,” you replied as though it was evident, meaning for it to be reassuring. Only Hyunjin did not seem relieved to hear that at all. “They only really bother humans when they get ready to hibernate. There are no wolves in Maine though,” you added, certain this would comfort him.

Hyunjin’s uneasiness was visible even in the dark. You bit your lip, savoring the mild pleasure you got from the sight of him, but quickly went to put an end to his fears. “You can worry about the mosquitoes more than you should worry about bears,” you concluded. “I haven’t seen one on these premises in two years.”

That did it—Hyunjin gulped thickly but gave you a resolute nod before the two of you resumed your walk. The world fell quiet again, the way nature was silent, which was to say, not at all. Exactly the way you liked it.

“Where are you taking me?” Hyunjin inquired after a few minutes, trying to see through the tree line and recognize your location in the campground.

“Not too far from here,” you assured. “There’s this nice little place by the river and—” Your sentence was cut in the middle when you felt something cool and wet and tiny on your shoulder.

Worried once again, Hyunjin squinted, turning his phone light on too. “What is it?”

“Ah, shit—” you mumbled, locking eyes with him, unsure whether you should laugh or not. Another raindrop fell on your arm, quickly followed by another on your leg as you remembered the weather forecast on the radio earlier, which your brain had conveniently made you forget.

A raindrop landed on Hyunjin’s lip and you followed it with your gaze the same way a sinner begs for holy water. More rain fell on your cheeks and you stood as Hyunjin watched it roll on your skin like tears would. A slight frown had appeared on his face, as though he was taking a few seconds to process what he was seeing.

He was a stranger.

But he shared the blood of your favorite painter, the one who created your favorite painting in the whole world. It was your favorite long before you knew it was a prophecy, or perhaps an omen. Maybe you should have known. You should have opened your eyes before instead of being so rational all the time and taking everything at face value.

Maybe you should have realized long ago that life has a voice and that it uses it to speak to us. Some call it fate or destiny. Some call it God. You weren’t sure what you called it, or what you thought it was. You just knew that it had been there the whole time, like a thread weaving the events of your life together. Everything that had ever happened to you had led you to this.

Hyunjin was a stranger.

But you knew about the cracks in his heart, and he knew about the void in yours. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled in the sky, and you felt it in your chest, no matter how far the storm was.

You took Hyunjin’s hand. His skin was smooth and warm, like honey left in the sun for too long. He squeezed your hand a little, leaning in closer to you so he could be heard over the rain, which was gaining in intensity.

“Where are we exactly? If we want to get to the RV? Is it far?” he asked, pulling away to see your reaction.

You were shocked by everything that had happened in the last thirty seconds and by Hyunjin’s sweet warm breath that tickled your skin. It took you longer than it should have to give him a response. “No, not too much,” you managed, your voice higher than usual. “If we follow this path, the RV site is at the end of the road on the right.”

“Alright, let’s go.” Taking the lead, Hyunjin started again, illuminating the path like he had never feared bears would maul him. One might believe he thought that rain was lethal to you or something, with how determined he was.

The more it rained, the faster you walked, and the tighter Hyunjin held onto you. Or maybe it was you who held onto him, you couldn’t say. You passed the opening that led to the little spot by the river that you liked, promising yourself to visit it soon. Also trying to focus on anything but what was happening. You had to buy milk, and maybe eggs too. You’d definitely need fabric softener. Yeah, you would have to go to the grocery store tomorrow. You’d also go see your father, but there would undoubtedly be a lot of things to do on the campground, as was always the case after a good rainfall.

Hyunjin caught you just in time when you slipped in the mud—by then, you were completely soaked. He saved you from a nasty fall. After that, you made sure to look where you were going and to stop thinking about everything and anything.

But then that meant the other thoughts didn’t stop.

What the fuck am I doing here? What am I doing? Where am I going? Why am I running in the rain with a guy I barely know who's… how many years younger than me exactly? Seven, eight years? More? More, I think. What the fuck are people going to say? Is my dress see-through now? Oh god I think so. Fuck. I should have worn the dark one instead. My hair probably looks like shit too. But who cares? Who cares what I look like? It’s not like he’s taking me back to his RV because he’s trying to get into my pants. And even if he was—WHICH HE IS NOT BY THE WAY! EVEN IF HE PAINTED ME. HE’S JUST AN ARTIST—I’m married. I’m married to a man who does not love me anymore but I’m married anyway. I’m married to a man who I know doesn’t want to be with me anymore but refuses to divorce me out of respect for me and our relationship and maybe out of respect for our daughter too. What the fuck am I doing here? How did I get here?

It just kept going until you reached the motorhome shared by Hyunjin and Minho. It was completely dark inside, and while you were in a hurry to get out of the very cold rain, you became self-conscious.

“I don’t want to wake him up,” you told Hyunjin as he was searching his pocket for the key.

“Don’t worry. If it’s raining, he’s outside sleeping in a tent,” Hyunjin replied with a shrug. His hair had come undone and was completely drenched. “He likes the sound of the rain.”

He unlocked the door and let you in first—knowing this RV well after having done a maintenance run on it, you turned on the kitchenette lights on your left, leaving enough space for Hyunjin to come in and close the door behind him while you were getting rid of your mud-soaked sandals.

As soon as the door was closed, the rain became a muffled noise, distant, barely real. Out of breath, you leaned on the counter to catch your air—it had been a long time since you ran for that long, especially in those conditions. You looked to your left to make sure that Hyunjin was fine, but as soon as your eyes met his, the two of you froze.

It was eerily quiet here. The RV was huge—it was meant to accommodate up to four people very comfortably and six if they wanted to squeeze in there a little. Yet he was right there. Hyunjin. He smelled like bug spray and petrichor and mud and strawberries. His hair was pure chaos—wet, messy, all over the place—but it took nothing away from his effortless beauty. Your heart skipped a few beats. It was because of all the running and not because his shirt was sticking to him like a second skin, exposing a lean and toned body, hinting at enough muscle to make you avert your gaze and blush.

“I forgot it was supposed to rain, but in my defense, they said it would be later into the night,” you said to diffuse whatever weight was falling from your chest to your stomach. It did not work—the feeling lingered. And descended even lower.

Hyunjin was silent. He had removed his backpack and left it in a safe corner and was staring at anywhere except you. A little—or very—self-consciously, you did your best to smooth out your hair.

“I’ll take this,” Hyunjin said all of a sudden, reaching for the tote bag on your shoulder and handing you a dry towel in exchange. There was one hanging around his neck already. “Uh…” He cleared his throat, his eyes dancing once again, struggling to stay fixated on yours. For one second, maybe two, but no more, he looked at you below the neck. “Maybe you’d want a warm shower? And clothes?”

You took the towel from him, blushing violently. It felt as though your brain couldn’t even function properly. You, also, struggled to look him in the eyes. Did you absolutely want a shower right now? No. But did you want to be alone for like five minutes?

Yes.

“O—Okay, well, I’ll wash up, y—yeah,” you managed, stammering your way through your sentence. “Thanks.” You gulped, wrapping your arms around yourself. “I don’t think you’ll have clothes for me.” He was just so lean. And long.

“I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t,” Hyunjin retorted as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He guided you towards the bathroom and you followed him, eyes to the floor, thanking him again, reminding him you knew how everything worked when he tried to explain the shower functions. The bathroom was tiny but fully equipped—this RV unit was the campground’s last big purchase and its most luxurious. To think that Minho had rented it for the entire season…

“I’ll leave clothes here by the door,” Hyunjin told you. “The towels are in the cabinet, help yourself. There are a few combs in there too, for your hair.”

You barely gave him an answer as you had just come face to face with the mirror. Your hair was not the problem. The problem wasn’t even the dark circles under your eyes from your sleepless nights, or your chapped lips from biting at them too much.

The problem was your soaked dress and how it stuck to your skin and how it had turned see-through for the most part and that you could see your black lace bra underneath. You buried your face into your hands, properly humiliated. Rookie move. This was what you got for hanging out with a guy who looked like a young god, no less. Hyunjin was the kind of person who just couldn’t have a fashion faux pas—everything would always look good on him. For instance, his wet T-shirt made him look like he was straight out of an alluring magazine ad for some fancy fragrance.

And here you were with your stupid fucking off-white dress with a black bra underneath because you forgot to do your laundry and it was all that you had. The dress stuck to your curves in a way that made you look like anything but a magazine ad. As you stared into that mirror, you could see nothing of the woman Hyunjin had painted in watercolors. She was a version of you that didn’t exist.

You turned on the shower, angrily at first, swallowing back tears and shame and planning the perfect escape. You would tell Hyunjin thank you so, so much for the shower and the dry clothes but you couldn’t stay. You had to go right now. He’d probably want to walk you back and you’d have to be firm and insist and say no. He was just a very, very nice guy. You had no reason to be associated with him whatsoever. He probably just pitied you because of what you told him that other night, about Judith.

Yes. That was it.

So you toweled yourself dry and found a dry pair of gray sweatshorts by the door, along with a loose tank top and a zip-up hoodie. Hyunjin had even provided you with a bag for any clothing items you wished to discard.

I’m really sorry, I had a phone call and I have to go, you rehearsed in your head as you were getting dressed. To your surprise, the sweatshorts fit comfortably. Thank you so much for everything, I’ll make sure to get the clothes back to you tomorrow. Oh no, no it’s perfectly fine, you stay right here. I insist. I—

Your mind went blank the moment you put on the tank top. The fabric was soft, the shirt was nice and high-quality. But most importantly, it smelled like Hyunjin. Like roses dipped in golden sunsets. Like spice-infused oud. Like smoke, like amber. It made you freeze in place, inhaling a lot more air than you needed, or should. It was a little tighter in certain places but it felt more like a hug than anything else.

Hyunjin’s voice brought you back to reality like tripping over a goddamn canyon. “Is everything alright?”

You cleared your throat. “Yes, yes, it’s all good—thank you, I’m fine, I—” One glance at the mirror confirmed that you probably should have put on your very wet bra underneath the tank top but instead you chose to wrap yourself in the hoodie, which was even softer than the shirt and smelled even more like Hyunjin, almost as though he had worn it at least once without washing it.

I need to get out of here. Fuck.

You pulled the door open and your plans completely fell through.

Hyunjin was busy getting the back room ready. It was normally the master bedroom but you could tell from his and Minho’s setup that they used it as some sort of living room and instead slept in the bunk beds. He was placing pillows onto it and the bottle of Hennessy was on the shelf behind the bed/couch, with two glasses nearby, waiting for you.

“There you are,” he said with a smile when he caught sight of you. “Are you comfortable with the clothes? I have more. We can hang your dress to dry in the kitchen if you want but I don’t think it’ll dry anytime soon…”

“It’s all very comfortable.” Nothing about the way Hyunjin spoke to you made you feel self-conscious about yourself and the way you looked. He really just wanted to make sure the clothes were comfy. His question had nothing to do with the size of the clothes. “Don’t worry about the dress, I’ll wash it at home.”

“I’ll shower too, but I insist that you make yourself at home. Fridge, food, anything,” he told you for the second time. “There are books by my bed if you want, and the TV remote is here.” He handed it to you. “I’ll be right back.”

Not two minutes ago, you were planning your escape. And now you found yourself sitting on this makeshift couch with a TV remote in your hand, facing a black screen because you hadn’t turned it on, listening to the sounds of the running shower coming from the tiny bathroom a few feet away. Hyunjin had cracked open a window by the couch and you also heard the thunder, realizing that it was noticeably closer than it had been before. You listened to the rain as it fell onto what you were certain was Minho’s tent.

For an instant, just a few seconds, you were transported back to your childhood. To that one summer night Chris tried to get you to go camping with him in his backyard and you wanted nothing to do with that. It’ll rain! It’ll be so cool, come on! And of course you went. And of course you stayed for about ten minutes before both Chris and you decided it was best to sleep indoors because the wind was scary.

You sighed—but first, you took a deep breath, inhaling more of Hyunjin’s scent, and it seemed to evaporate most of your brain functions. Except for the one that was responsible for making you notice that the stitching of the crotch on the sweatshorts was pressing at certain places. In certain ways. In certain pleasant ways.

I’m so sorry Hyunjin, but while you were showering, I had a phone call and I’m gonna have to go. But thank you so much and thank you so much for the painting too. It’s just that it’s my father and I don’t want to leave him alone. Over the years, you had become such a good liar. So good that, often, you yourself couldn’t even tell whether you were telling the truth or not. So this wouldn’t be a problem. You just needed to—

It seemed you had remained lost in your thoughts for longer than you believed because Hyunjin reappeared, sporting shorts and a long-sleeved gray tee. He was squeezing his hair dry with the towel, but little drops of water had stained the shirt around the collar. There was something incredibly soft about him at that moment—maybe it was just the warm lighting or the dewy aspect of his post-shower skin.

In any case.

You didn’t go anywhere.

“There’s a phone charger to your left,” he said, motioning towards the cord in question. “I—Uh—I mean, I suppose… people would be looking for you and wondering if you’re okay.”

You blinked, staring at him like you had never seen him before. Everything just felt so different—only yesterday, that statement would have elicited a deep sadness from you, no doubt. It was still there, you could feel it. It’s not like it had disappeared overnight. But there were so many other things alongside it that it was drowning.

You scoffed, shaking your head, still connecting your phone to the cord. “Nobody is looking for me, Hyunjin. It’s fine.”

He stood near the not-couch, visibly uncomfortable. You could almost feel his eyes drilling a hole into your ring finger. You weren’t stupid. You knew exactly what—or rather, who—this conversation was about.

“He’s not going to wander the campground and desperately search for me all night if that’s what you’re wondering,” you murmured. “This isn’t the kind of relationship we have anymore.” Fully sober? I dropped that lore fully sober? Really? “Hey, let’s have drinks, yeah?”

“I bet he will want to know where you are,” Hyunjin insisted, dimming the lights before making his way to the liquor and unscrewing the bottle open. “That’s just why I wanted you to know you could charge your phone. Here.” He handed you a glass that was a little too full of liquor but you gladly took it from him.

You could have told my husband where I was going and yet you did not. But the thoughts remained on your tongue and you swallowed them like a bitter pill, chasing them with the cognac.

“Don’t try to deflect,” you said, squinting, waving an accusing finger at Hyunjin as he was sitting down next to you. “We agreed to pause our earlier conversation and continue it with drinks someplace else. The conversation was about you,” you added. “So let’s resume.”

Hyunjin’s response was instantaneous—save for the exaggerated scoff he let out before. “Sorry, but I’ll remind you that the only thing I agreed to was drinks!”

You turned to him, falsely offended, eyebrows raised, and exactly one second passed before the two of you burst out laughing. You had to press a hand over your lips to muffle the sound and make sure not to wake Minho who, after all, was sleeping right next to the window.

The laughter died out, blending with the thunder. You drank more, letting the liquor smooth out the parts of you that were too sharp. It warmed up your throat nicely. It made you wonder how it would feel to be kissed passionately. With purpose, with lust. You had forgotten those feelings, but drinking the fancy cognac reminded you of tasting yourself on lips that uttered your name fondly.

Hyunjin cleared his throat, coughing faintly after emptying his glass a little too quickly. “Seriously though. There’s nothing to say.”

“I doubt that.” You hesitated, staring at the bottom of your glass, swirling the rest of the cognac in it. “You know, when I went to give you the paints and stuff? I heard that you were on the phone. I get now that it was with her, and you sounded… agitated. Upset.” You finished your cognac for good measure, keeping the empty glass in your hand just to have something to hold onto while Hyunjin’s gaze was on the black TV screen in front of him. “I don’t know the situation and I don’t want to say that Minho’s right, but if it’s a recurring thing. That your friendship with Dara makes you sad and upset. Maybe keeping a little distance between you two wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

The silence was deafening, louder than the thunder outside. You regretted your words instantly, wondering if they had been spoken out of greed. Greed, after all, often comes disguised as something noble, like concern. Maybe you just wanted less of Hyunjin’s attention on Dara. Maybe you were the most selfish person you knew, and everything you had ever done had been calculated to benefit from it in some way.

You knew it couldn’t possibly be true. You knew reality was more nuanced than this. And yet, the whispers in your head were relentless. It was that same greed that had launched the chain of events causing the death of your daughter, so maybe you should have learned your lesson by now.

“I only meant—” you started, but Hyunjin shook his head, raising his hand.

“I know what you meant,” he cut you off. “The reason I was upset is stupid. And inconsiderate. Selfish. It’s not her fault.”

“I know a thing or two about selfishness.” You made yourself a little more comfortable with your back leaning on the wall near the window so that you would face Hyunjin. He was half lying on the makeshift couch, propped on several pillows. “I don’t think you’re inconsiderate. You’re the opposite of inconsiderate.”

“Something really cool happened to her. I should have been happy for her, right? Well, I was. I am happy for her. But my first reaction was to be offended that she told me nothing about the project before. It’s not the first time she does something without me. Obviously. I don’t expect her to do everything with me or to tell me all about every single one of her projects. But this… it feels different.”

He grabbed the cognac and poured himself more, glancing at your glass inquisitively. You handed it to him so he could refill it. It had been a while since you had more than just a beer or a glass of wine to drink—you’d need to stop after this one.

“She submitted a few paintings to an art gallery. They gave her a few spots to expose,” Hyunjin explained. “Which is so cool. And I’m so happy for her.” He took two sips of liquor. “She never told me about any of this. I was still in Seoul when she had the idea behind the series of paintings. I was still in the studio next to hers when she painted them. I was still right there when she submitted them. But I learned about it when I saw a reel about it in her Stories.”

His voice was muted. His voice was more like the ghost of a voice—there was something terribly heartbreaking to it. It made you want to hold him in your arms. Because you understood. You knew what it felt like to lose that closeness with somebody that was once your everything. You start to realize you’ve made a mistake—you start to realize you put too much of your own heart into theirs. You also realize it was inevitable, but that you can’t get those parts of your soul back.

“I’d say you’re entitled to being upset,” you murmured, tilting your head to the side. It caused a dizzy spell for which the cognac was definitely to blame, so you closed your eyes for a few seconds. It gave you some time to think things over. It also gave you some time to realize that you were feeling the effects of the liquor in you. “Did you guys fight?”

“No, not really. I didn’t want her to know I was upset. But these situations have been happening more and more between us. It’s difficult.” He stared through the tinted window behind you, maybe looking at the lightning strikes in the distance. “When I have ideas like these. I just tell her. You know? I like telling her about my stuff. And when she tells me about hers.”

For an instant, you imagined that you were Hyunjin and that Dara was Christopher—it all became obvious then. Clear as day. You may not know their story entirely and it may be different from yours, but at the end of the day, it was all the same. It was always the same. In most relationships, at a given time, there would be someone who loved the other more. It was like an old balance scale trying to find equilibrium except it never did. It never really would. It wasn’t supposed to. Love wasn’t supposed to be equal anyway.

But for Hyunjin, that love was getting tiresome. Because he kept holding the weight of it while simultaneously adding more load onto it to make it substantial. To make it something. You had done that for a while too, with Chris. It was like adding logs into a fireplace while letting the flames lick you and burn you, over and over. Trying so hard just so he would still love you. Just so he would love you again. All that love going nowhere. Lost, forever.

Except Hyunjin was also a lot like Christopher, and so you understood Dara’s perspective, or at least you thought you did. Chris, wherever he went, was loved. He was noticed. Remembered. He was somebody.

You were not.

“Hyunjin,” you started carefully, hoping you wouldn’t offend him. “Maybe she just needs to do something on her own. To prove to herself that she can do it. You know?”

“She knows she can. She’s a better painter than I am, she doesn’t even deny it,” Hyunjin insisted. “I feel so weird inside. I think it’s working. What she’s doing.”

“What is she doing?” you asked, putting your empty glass on the shelf, deciding it would remain empty because your skin was warm and your thoughts fuzzy.

“She’s keeping me away. Emotionally I mean,” Hyunjin explained. He finished his drink and put his glass next to yours before laying down again, on his back this time.

He stretched a little, exposing a sliver of skin between his shorts and his shirt and shivers went down your spine. You decided to keep your eyes closed but it was too late—you couldn’t unsee what you had seen. And you were under the influence enough to wonder what it would feel like to kiss Hyunjin there. Or maybe just brush your fingers on his skin, feeling his toned body under your touch. Or under you.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he went on, completely oblivious to the commotion he had caused within you. “What happened between Dara and me affected me deeply. I never told her it was what made me so distressed, but I wonder if she knew, maybe. I sought comfort from her anyway. I felt alone. I still do. Even when I’m surrounded by crowds I feel so alone, so empty. Then I realized that I needed the comfort to come from her, or else it didn’t soothe me. Then I realized she wouldn’t give it to me anymore.”

“Maybe she doesn’t give it because she knows you’re hiding feelings from her?” you suggested, but every new revelation by Hyunjin just hurt more and more. You swallowed back your tears, remembering those entire days when Chris used to ignore you—for his own sake—making you miserable in the process, only for you to need him to kiss you goodnight and hold you as you fell asleep.

“I don’t think I’m hiding anything. I don’t think I can hide anything. I’m not very good at lying.”

You couldn’t help letting out a faint laugh, no matter how out of place it was. You controlled it as best you could, biting into your lower lip and focusing on the conversation, but Hyunjin raised his head, staring at you with curiosity. “Did I say something funny?”

It had been a very long time since you had consumed this much hard liquor, especially in such a short amount of time. “No, no—sorry, I just,” you stammered. “It’s—it’s true. You’re not a very good liar. I heard you speak to Chris earlier and… yeah. Sorry.”

Hyunjin’s head returned to the pillows at the speed of light. He didn’t pretend not to understand what you were referring to. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I felt like he was questioning me. He asked me where I had spent the day, so I said fishing. He asked if I had painted anything. And where I was headed for the night. And I froze. It’s dumb.”

You put your hand in the narrow crack of the window just to feel the wind and the rain on your fingers for a few seconds. “Like I said. You’re not a very good liar.”

Hyunjin clicked his tongue softly but it was not with annoyance. He took a deep breath, facing you again. “Well, what did you tell him?”

“Nothing at all.” The difference between Hyunjin and you was that you, on the other hand, were an excellent liar. You were just tired of pretending, and the facade collapsed once in a while. “It wouldn’t make a difference. I told you—we don’t have that kind of relationship anymore.”

“It might be a language barrier but I don’t know what you mean by that.” Hyunjin was only being polite because his English was excellent.

Nobody in the entire world knew the state of your marriage. You thought your father had his doubts—your in-laws probably did as well. Same with some of the Riverside employees and your friends in common. But your acting was convincing enough, you thought, that it told a solid story.

Nobody expected a couple to remain the same amount of strong after what you two went through anyway, or just through the passage of time. So it just made sense. The honeymoon phase was over, so it was totally, completely, one hundred percent normal that Christopher spent most of his nights at the campground staff house and most of his days with a woman who was by far more fun and livelier and prettier than you. A woman who was still whole.

A heavy fatigue took over you. It was sudden but not surprising—you found yourself lying down on the makeshift couch, letting the faint breeze cool you down. “You’re changing the subject again,” you mumbled.

“And you’re dodging.”

“What do you want me to say?” No one knew. You weren’t sure that anybody was supposed to know, no matter how tempting it was to spill your sorrows.

There was a short silence followed by the sound of brushing fabric—you felt Hyunjin’s weight next to you as he moved and jumped a little when you opened your eyes to find him a lot closer than he had been seconds before.

He gulped thickly. “I know what they say about couples who lose a—” Something made him stop there. Something that wasn’t greed. You just felt it in your bones that it wasn’t.

Your heart tightened in your chest. Like every time it was mentioned, you relived it in a few seconds. All of it. From the pregnancy test to the moment they put Judith’s dead body in your arms because they thought you should hold her anyway. For grief purposes. And everything after. And everything before, too.

“A baby,” you said for him, and it surprised you that you said it. “We lost a baby. Stillbirth. I knew something was wrong before we made it to the hospital but I was hoping it could be fixed somehow. That they would save her. I didn’t even want them to save me if it came to that.” You rolled on your side to face Hyunjin. “It still doesn’t quite feel real, sometimes.”

The rain was still pattering on the tent outside the motorhome and on the tree leaves. On the roof. All over the night. That sound used to comfort you. Other things used to comfort you. But your mother was dead, and everything else reminded you of what you had lost.

Except for the man lying on the bed next to you. Because it was a bed. Even though they sort of used it as a couch, it was still a mattress. A bed. You hadn’t even been in the same bed as Chris in months. Maybe it was because he was a new element in your life but Hyunjin wasn’t a grim reminder.

He brought no somber recollections. His eyes were soft. And kind. He stared at you with them like you meant something to him even though that sounded impossible. His gaze was hazy with cognac and an entire day spent in the sun and sometimes it lingered over you in places that made your heart flutter.

Maybe you felt safe with Hyunjin because he was broken, too. It didn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, resting his hand between your faces. “I don’t think you ever get over that.”

“You don’t.” There was no point in denying it. “And it’s all my fault. I killed her.” You must have been drunker than you thought because you never thought you’d say those words out loud.

Seeing that Hyunjin was staring at you with a confused expression on his face, you went on. Your voice was weak, hushed. He came closer to hear you better, his scent entering your lungs and colonizing you.

No more dodging.

“I had an abortion when I was seventeen. I let a boy touch me for the wrong reasons,” you explained, your voice shaking with cries, tears threatening to spill from your eyes. “It never felt right to have the abortion but I was too scared to keep it. And then, later, when I was married…” You closed your eyes, a trembling breath escaping your lips. “Christopher was ready to have a baby right now but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to want it. And wanting to want something isn’t the same as just wanting it. It isn’t genuine desire. It jinxed it. I cursed it. Chris resents me, and he resents himself for resenting me. It was so hard on him. That’s why we don’t spend nights together anymore.”

Hyunjin inhaled sharply, ready to interrupt you, but you didn’t let him.

“I loved her immediately. Judith. When I found out I was pregnant, no matter how terrified I was and how unsure I had been seconds before. I can’t even explain it. It was the happiest I ever felt. I loved my body so much because it had a baby inside it. I loved Chris so much because he gave me a baby. I loved my parents for giving me life. I loved everything. And her—I loved this little thing inside of me unconditionally from the moment I knew it was there. Words can’t even describe it.”

“It’s not your fault. You talk like you were punished by higher forces for hesitating to have a baby. Fuck—be honest with me right now. Do you actually, literally believe that this all happened to you because you had an abortion when you were seventeen? Seventeen?”

You hid your face in a pillow. Or perhaps it was just to muffle the sound of your cries. Nobody else knew. You had told no one.

“Let’s think for one instant that, somehow, what we feel does influence the things that happen to us,” Hyunjin offered. “Look at me, please.” When you didn’t move, he repeated it in an even softer voice. “Please. Look at me.”

You flinched when he touched you but it was not out of fear or aversion, it was just that you weren’t used to tenderness. And there was a lot of it in the way he tucked a strand of your damp hair behind your ear before he gently nudged your head. “Please,” he said again.

You wiped your face before you faced him. But you faced him. No one else knew. About Chris. About Judith. About the crazy thoughts in your head, which weighed so heavy on your heart.

You were here tonight. With him, this man that you barely knew and who barely knew you. Who knew you better than anybody else. And it was out of greed that you were. Out of despair.

“Even if it were the case,” he went on, his voice so full of compassion it stopped your tears on the spot. “I’m sure that your other, brighter feelings and thoughts outweighed the bad ones and would have prevented that tragedy.”

Your response was instantaneous. “You don’t know that.”

“I know you enough to know you’re not a bad person. What happened isn’t on you. I’m sure you would be a great mom. And if you were my wife, I sure as fuck would give a damn where you spend the night.”

The conflicted feelings within you were starting to pile up dangerously, but whatever that last sentence had unleashed caused the wildest reaction—it made the tears reappear. It made your heart stop in your chest, and then it started again only it was way too fast this time. Uncontrollable, unsteady. You might just be having a heart attack. A wave of warmth was spilling onto you like a high tide, starting from the nape of your neck and reaching all the way to your fingertips, your belly, the small of your back, and your thighs. Between your thighs. You had no way to know for sure but you thought—and it was pathetic—that you were wet.

It was hard to pinpoint what had done it. If it was just the proximity with Hyunjin or his alluring scent, or the few seconds where you caught a glimpse of his toned stomach earlier. Or when he hinted at your abilities at motherhood just now and uttered the words my wife while talking about you. It had been too long since anybody had given the semblance of a fuck about you.

You closed your eyes again. To calm down.

The silence that followed was lengthy and not a true silence anyway. The rain was still falling and the storm was getting closer. Just like your father taught you, you counted the seconds between the lightning flashes and the thunder that ensued, dividing the result by 5 to get an approximation of the distance of the storm. It was near but it would probably not pass right over Riverside. It was difficult to concentrate on the numbers anyway because you kept being distracted by Hyunjin’s breathing. It was deep and soothing and comforting the way the wind was comforting when you were in the safety of a warm, secure home.

“Do you still love him? Christopher?” he asked out of nowhere. The storm was about two miles away to the East.

“I grew up with him. Here, in Stormhaven, at Riverside. He’s my best friend.” You thought that was obvious enough, but just in case, you added, “I’ll always love him. Like you’ll always love Dara.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing but it is,” you retorted. “Different friendship, different situation, same result. Am I wrong?”

He didn’t give you an answer but you heard him shake his head negatively. “Well, does he love you?”

“Does Dara love you?”

“We’re not talking about me.”

“We were very much talking about you, by the way.” The storm was one mile away. “It’s the same for him. He grew up with me. He’ll always love me somehow. But he’s miserable with me. He wants to fuck Summer.”

“Summer?” Then, immediately. “Ah, that girl, I bet.”

“The one he was sitting with at the diner, yes,” you explained. “I don’t blame him. She’s a great person. Like, honestly. They make a great pair. And have you seen her? She’s hot as hell.”

“The one who was wearing his hoodie the other night. I remember,” Hyunjin said in a dry, irritated tone.

You chuckled, managing to open your eyes despite your head spinning a little more than you’d want it to. “Why are you mad?”

Hyunjin stared at you blankly. “I’m not mad.”

“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever seen. Why are you mad?”

He rolled his eyes, tsking you. “Why was she wearing his hoodie? And why was he sitting with her tonight and not with you?”

“I’m literally wearing your clothes right now. And sitting with you. Horizontally. On a bed.”

“It’s a couch,” Hyunjin pointed out, motioning at the TV. “Doesn’t he realize that he’s holding you back? If he loved you—truly loved you, like a best friend would—he would let you go. A woman like you should be happy.”

The storm was here. Not here here as in it did not hover the sky directly above you but it was too close for you to count the seconds between the flashes and the thunder, which vibrated within the walls of the motorhome.

“This is a two-way thing.” You were so tired that you weren’t exactly sure any of this was happening. Maybe you were asleep. Maybe you had gone home directly after dinner and this was all a dream. Some fucked up dream. “I’m not letting him go either.”

“Why not?” Hyunjin touched you again. Your wrist this time, then your hand, squeezing it. You pressed your thighs together as blood rushed between your legs again. Stupid. Ridiculous. It was time you brought back your faithful vibrator from its retirement—this was nothing more than a physical reaction to a lack of something. “I’m not telling you to dump him,” he added. “But either you guys need to make it work or just let it go. You’re hurting yourselves. Are you sure he hasn’t fucked her already? That girl?”

“I’m sure. He would never.” He might have done what you were doing right now though. He might have spent a night with her. On a couch. Just in her presence. If it were the case, you hoped it had made him very happy. “I don’t know how to let go. I never did that before. You’d be upset if someone told you to let go of Dara, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. It’s not the same thing. We’re not married. She doesn’t want to love me. Do you think that Christopher wants to love you?”

There it was.

It all came down to that one question, didn’t it? All of it. All this time you knew what you were supposed to do but you didn’t do it because it scared you. Because you didn’t know what would happen to Riverside Campground. Because you didn’t know what you would do without it—because of course you’d let Chris have it in the divorce.

You didn’t know who you were without him by your side. He had been there the whole time. Hunting frogs as children. Sneaking out as teens and smoking weed and pretending not to like each other. Adults doing their best.

Here’s a truth so ugly no one ever wants to admit it to be real—you can do your best your whole life and it doesn’t mean it’ll work out. You can try your hardest and it doesn’t mean anything will come of it. You can love someone with your whole entire soul and it doesn’t mean you’ll be with them in the end.

And it’s just like that.

Your silence, perhaps, was the loudest response you could have given. Hyunjin squeezed your hand a little tighter before he let go of it but it was only so he could grab a lightweight but soft blanket. “Get some sleep,” he whispered as he lay the blanket over you.

Stay, you almost told him. But it felt like a dream. You thought you were dreaming because nothing felt the same as it used to. When you were searching for those anchor points within you, you knew they were there. The sorrow, the grief. But you couldn’t see them, the way you couldn’t see people’s faces or the corners of a room sometimes in a dream.

But you could say it now—the reason why you didn’t want to let go. You were afraid to let go of it because grief, truly, was all you had left of Judith. You didn’t have any memories with her except for the few months she was in your belly. She kicked at you from within. You’d sing her lullabies. She had the hiccups sometimes, usually in the middle of the night. This, your grief, and the silence in the delivery room when they pulled her out of you, was all you had of Judith.

In your dream, Hyunjin said, I’m here. The rain was tapping steadily on the roof still and it lulled you into a deeper sleep, a barren, quiet one, the kind of sleep where the world stopped existing for an instant.

You only woke once during the night, barely.

The storm had faded, cooling the air—you felt the breeze from the window on your face and expected to feel cold, only you didn’t. You realized that there were two additional blankets over you.

You opened your eyes. Barely.

It was dark but you saw him anyway, Hyunjin, asleep on the other side of the bed. You remembered the common loons. You remembered the place where the river came to a rest, slowing down just for a moment, only to gain momentum again. And depth. And strength. Maybe the strength was never really gone even if you didn’t see it. It was just dormant.

Aloneness had been forced upon you long ago but maybe, just maybe, you didn’t need to drown in it.

You fell asleep again, and your sleep was dreamless and peaceful.

... to be continued.

↬ ✉️ Hello everyone! It's been a while, hasn't it?

I hope everyone has been doing okay 🤍

I didn't think this chapter would ever see the light of day. Actually, there was a long moment during which I thought I might or probably would never write again. It's very frightening when you realize that your own melancholy has drowned the fire inside you—but I suppose there was a spark somewhere. I did what I could with the chapter—if maybe you felt like it was different, or lackluster, I am sorry. Keep in mind that it is a battlefield, and it's quite bloody. I fought to keep writing. I want to keep writing. Writing is all that I have and all that I am.

Thank you to those who have waited for me. Thank you to those who wait for the other stories too. I'm so sorry I'm like that. I wish I were like the other writers and would post often. You guys are the best readers and I want to give you more. Thank you so much for being with me. Some of you have been there for years—this is special to me. I'm grateful, so grateful. No matter what happens to me or the fire inside me, please know that I'll never forget you, and your kindness, and your love.

Thank you so much, and thank you for keeping me around. Now, you guys better take care of yourselves, and eat your meals okay? All three of them!

PS: I will be answering the asks in my inbox today & tomorrow 🤍 sorry for the delay.

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#been a while since i came back to tumblr #literally only did because i got the notification for this chapter #say it with me now: HYUNJIN BEST BOY #chan is surprisingly NOT best boy #damn #i really wanna go camping now #or maybe just glamping

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not-everything-is-so-primitive · 6 months ago

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I'm never going to look at maraschino cherries, without feeling a deep, encompassing sorrow from now onwards. Reading this shortly after having read 'just stay with me' is a kind of torture, I never knew could be experienced. Love these two idiots, and jisung is the best guy put there(as usual). Ngl, if my friend invited my ex to a gathering, without warning me, I'd be going to jail for murder, so I hope Minho is counting his days.

maraschino cherries | i only see you part one.

pairing: hyunjin x f!reader | word count: 25.8k | genre: romance, exes to lovers | warnings: angst ; breakup ; heartbreak ; jealousy and themes of cheating and overall bad relationships ; regret and guilt ; mutual pining ; forced proximity ; mentions of depression/low mental health ; hurt/comfort ; reunions | this chapter contains adult and sexual content as well as strong language but no major warnings apply. this work is a direct sequel to the one-shot just stay with me that i released two years ago~

You knew things weren’t great but you would never have imagined it would come to this. Maybe, somewhere, you still held the hope that things would work out. That Hyunjin loved you the way you loved him, which was to say, enough to try.

“I can’t believe you did this to me, Min. I know we went through a lot you and I but I thought we were friends.”

Minho let out an exasperated sigh. “We are friends!” He looked behind his shoulder as the newly arrived guests made their way in, bringing with them a cool breeze from outside. “Calm down, please. I had no intention to cause a scene. It’s just that he called, and then we had a conversation and I mentioned the cabin and it felt weird not to invite him. Besides, I just figured it was about time that you guys talked.”

You raised your eyebrows, cocking your head to the side as the shock settled in. “That’s deeply fucked up, do you even realize that? Deeply. Since when are you a couple mediator? Is that your new business idea? I see it. An office with large windows and a massive sign on the front with the name of your agency on it.” You motioned at the empty space before you as though you were showing a very real sign from a very real building. “Conci-Lee-Ation.”

Minho scowled at you, pursing his lips. “See, that’s your problem. It’s not that you can’t move on from things. It’s that you don’t want to.”

Minho’s words reached you much like a blade would cut you open. You stood before him with your mouth agape, silenced, wordless, the sour taste of betrayal invading your throat. His expression softened as soon as he saw the tears pricking at your eyes—he clicked his tongue, letting out a long, tired exhale. “I’m sorry—” he started, but you cut him off.

“Don’t,” you managed, your bottom lip quivering. But you would rather lie down in the huge living room fireplace than let Minho or anybody else see you cry. “I should be the one apologizing, right? So let me. I am so, so, so sorry Minho for being irrational like this during a situation that is totally normal and not unpleasant at all. I apologize for being upset that you invited my ex to spend the weekend with us without giving me a heads-up.”

You were doing your best to keep your voice as low as possible so as not to be heard but you were becoming aware of a few heads turning in your direction. In the other room, near the front door, Changbin and Jisung were welcoming Hyunjin and Felix inside, and Hyunjin was pretending very hard that he hadn’t noticed you. You figured that the others might even believe his acting but you knew him better than they did.

“Look—” Minho started, reaching for you.

You recoiled, avoiding the hand that was trying to squeeze your shoulder. “Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me, Lee Minho. I’m gonna go get this brain fog out of my head and then I’m leaving.”

You walked away before Minho could even say anything. To avoid the crowd, you went out by the small hallway at the back. There was a door at the end of it, leading to some sort of patio furnished with snowed-in chairs and a functional hot tub.

You didn’t like speaking in absolutes so you wouldn’t say that being here tonight was the worst idea you ever had but it was certainly somewhere in the top three.

It seemed almost like a genuine Christmas tradition by now—you, standing somewhere outside in the dark, freezing your ass off there instead of letting anyone see you cry.

The first occurrence of this lovely festive activity had been on that Christmas escapade organized, that time also, by Minho—just a weekend at a cabin in the mountains for the employees of his restaurant. Oh, and you had cried quite a lot that first night. As though something about the holidays made your heart a little bit more vulnerable.

You hadn’t fully processed your breakup with Minho before that night, causing your emotions to go overboard. It wasn’t even that you had still been in love with him because you weren’t. It was just that he had moved on so easily and you were still at the same place in your life. It was just that he had recently gotten engaged to his very pretty girlfriend and you were still very much alone.

Last year had been even worse. It had been, really, the beginning of the end. Stupid arguments over insignificant things. And then it was about significant things. You told Hyunjin he was being unfair, that it was selfish of him not to let you help him. He did not like that. It made him cry. You spent an entire hour crying on your own, sitting on the stairs of the building, outside in the cold. It took two days before he spoke to you again, and what he said was, You don’t understand how I feel so you can’t help me. You’re there for me and I love you.

It was the last time he said it. I love you. Ironically, the breakup had been on Valentine’s Day.

The pain had followed you through the year. A year of ups and downs, emphasis on the downs. You earned your life well, your apartment was decent. You even had a social life. Or rather, you forced yourself to have one. Maybe so as not to worry anybody. Maybe because you wanted to remember what it was like to feel whole.

But it just felt as though nothing really mattered anymore. Nothing had been the same since.

Well. Except for the fact that one whole year later, you were once again hiding outside, the frigid winds covering the sound of your cries.

It started so well. Hyunjin and you. It had been on a night much like this one that you had come to realize you had special feelings for him. Feelings that had crossed the friendship line a while back, only, you couldn’t see it until Hyunjin announced his departure from the restaurant. It had seemed like the end of the world at the time. You couldn’t imagine your daily life without him—who would stay late with you and sweep the floors while listening to soothing music and discussing various topics? Who would come up with stupid jokes to lighten the mood on your bad days? Who would have your back when the restaurant was too busy and your section was more than you could handle?

Who would put extra maraschino cherries in your drinks just to make you smile?

It started so well. Perhaps too well. You skipped the ‘going on dates’ stage, jumping headfirst into this relationship because both of you believed in it and had strong feelings for the other. You didn’t doubt that. But, turns out, feelings are in no way a guarantee of success in a relationship.

Hyunjin did leave his bartender position at Minho’s restaurant to open his own bar. A small, intimate establishment where great drinks were served. It was an instant success, mostly due to the warm, welcoming ambiance of the bar. The crowd was as diversified as it could be—on any given evening, the bar—called Nightcap—could be filled with people in work meetings, groups of friends playing board games, dates, family reunions, birthdays… Anyone, really. Hyunjin was proud of his bar and you were proud of him.

You helped him as much as he’d let you, which wasn’t that much. He said he didn’t want it to become your burden and you respected that. You could tell he needed to achieve certain things on his own so that he could be at peace with it. And it was fine.

Somewhere between that first night with him and just a few weeks later when you woke up one morning with your heart particularly full, you fell in love with Hyunjin. You woke him up to tell him so, even, leading to an entire day of passionate lovemaking with food deliveries in between rounds.

Things were good for a while. Until they weren’t. You also left your job at the restaurant to work full-time at Nightcap and working with Hyunjin was amazing. Until it wasn’t.

The worst part is that it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t even yours. It just happened. He dedicated himself day and night to start his business and even if his plan was solid and he got help from Minho and a few other friends, a new business was a new business. At the end of his first financial trimester, Hyunjin was so shocked by the bar’s losses that he was unable to keep food down for an entire week. His anxiety levels were so high during that period that you didn’t recognize him—he was cold, distant, and even inconsiderate.

But of course you could understand that, and it didn’t make you love him any less.

You made Hyunjin lower your salary in the hopes that his losses would be less disastrous a few months later. To compensate, you decided to use your baking skills to make some money on the side. You found a bakery that hired—the two owners, a married couple, were close to retirement and they were looking to find good employees for when it would be time to pass the bakery along to a buyer who wished to run it. They liked you a lot and it was reciprocated, so they trusted you quickly and a lot. In the end, you became responsible for the bakery several days a week.

You loved it but it was a lot. You’d finish your shift at Nightcap sometimes well past three to help Hyunjin close up and you would take an hour-long nap in the backroom before making your way to the bakery where you often worked until two or three in the afternoon.

Anybody with a drop of insight would have seen it coming. But, maybe, love blinded you. Or maybe you were just too foolish.

It was lovely. Being Hyunjin’s girlfriend. Test-tasting his signature drinks. Having him come up behind you and embrace you just so he could whisper sweet nothings into your ear. He bought you flowers. He test-tasted your cakes. He put extra maraschino cherries in your drinks, even if it was just a soda. He tried to make it all work—the crazy hours, the stress, the pressure, your relationship.

It was amazing. Being Hyunjin’s girlfriend. Until it wasn’t.

And, months later, you found yourself hiding outside to cry in the cold. You didn’t want anybody to see your pain, your shame. You didn’t want anybody to see all of the space Hyunjin used to occupy within you because then they would know where all of your emptiness came from.

You didn’t like speaking in absolutes but maybe, after all, coming here this weekend was the worst idea you ever had.

You swallowed your sobs when you heard a door open and close nearby. Oh no. Someone had noticed your absence—you quickly wiped your tears as well as you could, hoping the cold wind would reduce the flush on your face.

It was Jisung. You sighed in relief, glad it wasn’t Minho—how could he do this to you? It was one thing for two exes to have the same friend group, but it was another to invite Hyunjin without letting you know about it.

Jisung made his way to you, carrying an extra hoodie. “Hey.” He handed the hoodie to you, pulling the hood over his head to protect himself from the wind. “Come back, yeah?”

You took a deep breath, looking away, staring at the scenery. The cabin Minho had rented this time around was even bigger than the first had been. Located deep in the mountains and surrounded by them, it offered a stunning view no matter where you looked. It was snowing heavily, hindering your sight, but even in the night, you could see the snow-covered evergreens and the white mountaintops. You had loved it just earlier. And now all that you wanted to do was to run away.

“I just need a minute,” you told Jisung, wrapping yourself into the hoodie he brought. It smelled like Changbin and you could only assume it was his. “You can go back inside, Ji.”

Jisung shook his head. “Nah, I think I’ll stay if that’s alright.” He mirrored you, leaning on the fence surrounding the patio. “I didn’t know he was going to be there. I would have told you.”

“I know you would have.” Out of everyone here, Jisung was the one who probably understood you the most. He, too, would have bitter memories of the other winter reunion, because it was then that he and Min-seo started dating. She left him after admitting she had cheated on him. Safe to say she was no longer a part of this friend group, but you could tell Jisung was still hurt. “I’m gonna leave. I’ll come back on Sunday to get you.” You two drove here together.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Jisung admitted, clicking his tongue. “Felix and Hyu—” He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “They said they barely made it here and that they were closing the roads behind them due to a blizzard. You would probably not make it very far. It took them almost two hours just to get from the village down the mountain to here.”

You didn’t take that news well—it brought more tears to your eyes. You took a deep breath but exhaled it as a shaky sob. Despite the wind, Jisung caught it. He opened his arms and hugged you, holding you tight. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay. I’m sure you’ll be alright. Look at the place Minho rented!” He spun on his heels so that you faced the cabin despite hugging. “It’s huge! There’s gotta be enough space for both of you in there.”

You figured you could just spend the entire weekend locked in your room and sneak out at night to get food or something. This way you wouldn’t see Hyunjin. At most you would hear his voice, and that would be painful enough.

You wished, so badly, that you didn’t care—everything would be easier. Because if you did that. If you hid away, if you avoided Hyunjin, he would know how affected you still were. And you were ashamed of that. You didn’t want him to know. You didn’t want him to know the impact his absence had on you, the toll it had taken on you.

As much as you wanted to run away, you couldn’t. Right?

You didn’t want to hurt him.

But you wanted him to think you did not give a single fuck about the breakup.

So you took a deep breath and nodded gently, prompting Jisung to pull away from you. “Let’s go back inside please, I’m freezing.”

He dragged you back toward the door without waiting, talking about dinner plans. It had been decided that tomorrow, Minho and you were supposed to cook the Christmas dinner, so naturally Jisung had a few requests of his personal favorites. You were almost certain he was making a point of being dramatic about it to distract you and you appreciated him even more for it.

You stopped him before he could turn the door handle. “Ji, is it really obvious that I cried?” For some reason, asking this question gave you a sense of deja vu.

He looked at you using the light filtering from inside to make his judgment. “Not too much. Hey, listen. It’s not by avoiding him forever that you’ll heal from it. Maybe facing that heartbreak is what you need.”

The deja vu hit you even harder, making you lightheaded for a few seconds.

He was right and you hated that he was right. You said nothing, choosing to just follow him inside, immediately relieved from the cold by the ambient warmth of the cabin. You took a deep breath. Then another.

The truth was that you just hadn’t seen Hyunjin at all since the breakup and you had no idea how you would react when you found yourself face to face with him. Maybe you would become enraged. Maybe you would freeze and lose your words. Maybe you would break down in tears like an idiot.

Jisung was right. Avoiding Hyunjin would not heal the wound he left behind. But what he didn’t know—and what you were too ashamed to admit to Jisung—was that nothing ever would. You had let Hyunjin take all of this space inside you and now he was gone and you were empty. And it was not the kind of empty that could be replaced. It was not the kind of hollow that could be replenished. It would stay like that, preserved, unchanged.

You took off the hoodie—after just a few instants in the snowfall outside, it was completely drenched. You returned to the living room, your gaze fixated somewhere between the ground and one meter above it, no higher, avoiding any eye contact. The main floor consisted of one big room—the kitchen and living room were only separated by a half wall.

You weren’t stupid. You noticed the voices quieting down as you entered but paid them no mind. Or rather you tried to look like you didn’t care and made your way near the fireplace where a few pieces of clothing and boots were already drying on the wall beside it. The cabin was completely quiet by the time you were done executing that simple motion and you could feel people’s eyes burning the back of your head.

Felix called out your name first. You heard genuine joy in his voice but something else too—it was obvious he was trying to diffuse the tension. “It’s been too long!”

You spun on your heels to face him. He hadn’t changed really—Felix was always Felix. Radiant and kind. He pulled you into a friendly hug which forced a faint smile on your lips despite how troubled you were. “Hey, Felix.” You tried very hard not to look behind him. “Didn’t think I’d see you here. How have you been?”

“Ah, pretty much the same.” He shrugged. “I sell office spaces and commercial buildings, exactly like I used to.” Felix had a chuckle. “Business is good though so I don’t complain. What about you?”

You opened your mouth to respond but the words got stuck somewhere along the way, gnawing at your throat like disembodied hands. In a moment of weakness, you allowed your eyes to scan the room, and you saw him.

He’d been wearing a beanie and his thick winter jacket when they first came in and you did run away in literally less than a second, but Hyunjin, unlike Felix, had changed. Considerably. For a few seconds you couldn’t even breathe, stupefied by the mere fact that you were in the same room as him once again. You couldn’t look away from him.

And it seemed that he, too, couldn’t look away from you.

He sported much longer hair than he did the last time you saw him. It fell loosely, framing his face in a messy yet ravishing and controlled manner. He was just as handsome as he had always been. His big, brown eyes observed you from head to toe, his front teeth sinking into his plush bottom lip, showing his evident hesitation. He seemed skinnier than you remembered him and yet his sweater hugged his body at just the right places, displaying newly acquired muscle mass. You could only guess that he had become gym buddies with Changbin—you wouldn’t know. Apart from Ji and Minho, you didn’t really keep up super well with the guys from the restaurant.

But he had deep dark circles under his eyes and his energy was different than it had been. His lips bore the marks of his constant chewing at them, much like his nails and the skin around them.

You had wondered, all this time, how it would feel when you would see Hyunjin again. Now you had your response.

It felt exactly like the day he broke up with you. Time had not soothed the pain—the sharp pieces of your broken heart pierced you from within as your forces abandoned you. You were bleeding out again.

You gulped, your breathing suddenly shallow. Seeing Hyunjin again felt much like standing outside in a blizzard.

Felix’s facial expression became concerned and you wondered what you looked like exactly. Your pulse quickened dangerously when Hyunjin pushed himself up to come your way, followed by everyone’s gaze. Once again, the room became quiet.

When Felix noticed Hyunjin, he offered you a flat smile, squeezed your shoulder, and walked away to return with the others, making sure to speak in an unnaturally loud voice. You panicked internally, watching, unable to move as Hyunjin approached. Was your vision blurry because of tears or because of sheer terror? God, you couldn’t let him see you cry. You just couldn’t. Not after all that had happened.

You heard his voice when you turned away. Much like Felix, he simply called out your name, but his voice was quiet, soft, brittle. “Wait, please,” he added when he noticed you were still looking away but weren’t moving. “Can we like… talk?”

He was standing next to you now, you could tell. You didn’t need to see to know—you could smell him, his complex cologne, his personal scent, the musky, unique smell of his shampoo. You knew he was right there because you could feel warmth emanating from his body. He had always been a walking furnace, after all.

You inhaled shakily and, finally, you faced him.

You could have collapsed from it alone but somehow managed to stay on your feet. You wanted to look everywhere at once. You wanted to try and read his eyes. You wanted to look at the beauty marks adorning his skin. You wanted to get hypnotized by the texture of his lips, just like you used to.

He flinched too, almost dropping the beer he was holding. When he came to his senses, he glanced around the room, motioning at the hallway from which you came. “Can we? Talk?”

With a nod, you walked into the private space, your heart beating at an uneven pace, making you feel as though you were on the verge of a heart attack. Your insides were cold, turned to ice, but your skin was hot, feverish, your cheeks burning. You made a point of only stopping at the far end of the hallway where the lighting was as dim as it could be. He couldn’t see you cry. He couldn’t see you blush. He couldn’t know. You did not want him to see the wounds he inflicted upon you.

But when you two came to a stop, only silence reigned. You looked through the window in the door—in just a few minutes, the snow had erased your and Jisung’s footprints. You could barely see a few meters away from how thick the blizzard was.

He couldn’t know.

So you tried your best to look like you had your shit together. “What did you want to tell me?”

Hyunjin jumped, almost like he was surprised that you asked him a question. “What?” The shadows from the curtains covered half of his face, making it difficult to read him.

“You said you wanted to talk,” you reminded him impatiently. This conversation needed to be as succinct as it could be. You estimated at about two, perhaps three minutes the time you had left before tears would inevitably roll down your cheeks. “So what did you want to talk about?”

You had your guesses, all of them worse than the last. Maybe he wanted to flex some accomplishment to prove something to you. Maybe he wanted to tell you about a forgotten item at his apartment. Maybe he wanted to tell you he was getting engaged to Haley.

The thought of that alone pulled all the air from your lungs—you pretended to clear your throat to help it pass.

Hyunjin gulped. “It’s been so long. I just wanted to know how you’re doing.”

He couldn’t know.

Everybody has a weakness, right? You hadn’t been certain about yours before meeting Hyunjin and especially before dating him. Because then you had found out it was almost impossible for you to lie to him. He said it had always been the case, even revealing that he had been able to read your mood swings long before he confessed.

So he would definitely see right through you when you would force a smile on your face and tell him things were good and what about him, how’s the bar, everything?

“You still at the bakery?” he went on when the only response he got was silence.

You nodded. “Yeah. Were you able to secure the loan you wanted? For the renovations?” For months, Hyunjin had worked very hard to get a start-up loan for new businesses granted by the government. There was some work to be done in the building and he needed it.

A dark veil clouded his gaze. He drank from his beer as though to let a few seconds pass. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.” He drank again.

You let out a non-committal hm hm, unable to find an appropriate reaction. You were happy for him in a way. In a way, you didn’t wish him any harm. His well-being took nothing away from you.

He looked tired, sure—but you remembered Minho’s first two years with the restaurant and he had that same look. A new business was much like a newborn baby, after all. Hyunjin seemed fatigued but you couldn’t see traces of sorrow on him. Maybe it was because it was dark, but he looked like he was just fine. Like he was over it.

Over you.

He could not know. That you were nowhere near over him. ‘Over him’ wasn’t even a different country—it was a whole other continent across the globe.

“Good for you man,” you heard yourself say and it sounded wrong. Good for you man. What kind of response was that?

“Yeah.” He stood there in the darkness, facing you, sometimes looking at the snow outside and other times letting his gaze linger on you.

He used to tell you that you were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He used to tell you that you were his favorite person. He used to tell you that he loved your scent. Your taste. He used to tell you that he loved you.

“Has construction begun?” you inquired but you didn’t really want to know. You were looking for a way to end this conversation politely. “Are you adding a new section?”

Again. “Yeah.” It was a flat yeah. It told you everything you needed to know, really. He wanted to talk to you because he, maybe, felt bad or something. He hadn’t been a great boyfriend at the end but he wasn’t a monster. It must be obvious how miserable you were and he felt bad that he, on the contrary, was just fine. You could only imagine he felt some sort of guilt.

“Where were those?” you asked, motioning at his beer, unable to bear it any longer. You would collapse under the weight of this conversation. “I could use a beer too.”

“Oh, Felix and I brought them. They’re in the fridge. Help yourself, ange—” He stopped before the end of his sentence, frozen in place, his mouth still agape, only able to stop the word from spilling out too late. He covered his lips like he couldn’t believe it.

Meanwhile, you battled the storm within you. Tears pricked at your eyes while waves—no, a tsunami—of memories washed over you. You wished, almost, that it was the bad memories that came back. It would make it so much easier. But it wasn’t. It was all of the good ones. It was the first time he kissed you. It was the first time he bought you flowers. It was the time he took you on an impromptu trip to the beach.

It was all of the times he called you his angel.

Hyunjin tried to apologize, becoming a stuttering mess, but you heard none of it—you were far away already, dashing up the stairs to your left before he could see your tears.

He couldn’t know. You didn’t want him to know. That he had made a barren place out of your heart. That you still dreamed about him sometimes and that it didn’t matter if it was a good dream or not. Either it was a nightmare in which you relived the breakup or sometimes even where he was dead, or it was a lovely dream in which he still loved you. The latter made waking up one of the most painful things you ever did.

He couldn’t know how much you missed him.

Ten months ago

You groaned when you heard your ringtone from the other room, trying not to lose focus as you put the finishing touches on the bottom part of the two-tiered cake you were working on.

“Want me to get it for you?” Eric asked as he was busy with paperwork at the moment, sitting on a stool not far from yours. The cake-decorating apparatus took up almost all of the space on the work table, leaving him just a tiny corner.

You completed the fine tracing of the flower you were drawing in pink icing before looking up. “It’s fine, I’ll check it out later. I’m almost done anyway.”

“I knew it was a good idea to put you in charge of the decoration. That cake is gorgeous,” Eric pointed out with a smile. “I bet that woman will have the best Valentine’s Day.”

Eric was the son of the bakery’s owners—while they had decided it was time for them to retire, they didn’t want to sell the bakery to just about anybody. Eric, a self-employed accountant, had taken over most of the management to allow his parents some rest without having to give away the business they had worked so hard for all of their lives. You liked him—Eric was pragmatic and understanding, which he got from his parents who were two lovely people. He knew you worked hard at Nightcap too, and often forced you to take naps in the breakroom if he noticed you were tired.

“Bet she will,” you responded, finding nothing else to say. You remembered her boyfriend who came in last week to order the cake. He had admitted to you he would propose to her on Valentine’s Day.

Your plans for Valentine’s Day? Work, work, and more work. Most definitely not getting engaged.

Life used to be so much easier. It hadn’t always been simple at the restaurant but it had been somewhere you were comfortable at. You worked crazy hours and it never really mattered, it never took a toll on you. You could be exhausted and functional at once. Maybe, because you were never as exhausted as you were now.

You sighed, grabbing a few more leaf-shaped pieces of fondant to adorn the roses you had applied earlier. Life used to be much easier but you wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, would you? Because it meant you had Hyunjin. It meant you were with him, that the both of you formed a team. You believed in his project and his vision and you wanted to do everything possible to help him make it last. There was nothing you wanted more than his success.

But, by god, you were so fucking tired. Your only plans after this cake, which was the last of your Valentine’s Day orders, was to go home, take a boiling hot bubble bath and then pass out in bed for as long as possible. Eric had given you tomorrow off—while the bakery would be busy, his mom had come in today exceptionally to do some prep for tomorrow, allowing you some time to rest. That wouldn’t last very long though—there was a Valentine’s event organized at Nightcap, and naturally, you’d go help out over there.

At least it meant you would spend the evening with your boyfriend.

It wasn’t what it used to be. You were afraid to admit it even to yourself but it was true. You couldn’t even remember the last time both of you had enough energy—or will—to fuck.

It wasn’t easy for Hyunjin. He had high standards for himself, which meant he perceived any setback, minor or major, as an absolute failure. He was tense and often depressed. It put a lot of pressure on his shoulders and he did not share any of it with you. He seemed resolute to carry that burden all on his own.

At that thought, your eyes filled up with tears. You grabbed a few random utensils on the table and went to the sink to rinse them just to make sure Eric wouldn’t see.

Only, it was too late.

“Leave that, I’ll do the dishes…” Eric appeared behind you, his soothing voice accompanied by an equally soothing hand on the small of your back. He tried nudging you away but you didn’t let him. “Go home. You need sleep.”

You held the batter-covered spatulas under the warm water, your gaze fixed on them, working very hard on zoning out. On purpose. These days, pretending that the outside world didn’t exist was the only way you could feel peace or at least a semblance of it. Your phone went off again but you ignored it.

There were too many thoughts in your head—it was impossible to make sense of them, but all of them revolved around the same thing.

Hyunjin. And how he was pushing you away, slowly but decidedly. A little more every day. Like he was actively trying to find ways to keep you at a distance. You knew him. You knew when he was worried or when he was sad or when he was angry. Sometimes he was all of those at the same time, but he wouldn’t let you comfort him. On his bad days, you barely recognized him. He was short-tempered and barely spoke to you, choosing to quarantine himself some place you were not.

At first, you just told yourself he wasn’t perfectly comfortable with you, maybe. You could understand that—the relationship had moved quickly, perhaps a little too fast. Not everyone is used to just displaying their deepest emotions to others, not when it was about something as significant as Hyunjin’s projects. You gave him space so that he could learn how to process these big emotions on his own, figuring that you would simply dive in when the right moment came.

But the right moment never came.

What made it so hard was the fact that Hyunjin used to be an excellent partner when it wasn’t about Nightcap. He was romantic and showered you with kind gestures. He was vocal about his love for you and supported you in your own endeavors as well as he could. So you tried to keep the relationship working—a storm did not mean the sun would never be out again. You loved him and you wanted to be with him. At any cost.

The wall he was building between the two of you was getting higher and higher. Your calloused hands were sore from climbing and your arms could barely support you anymore. Sooner rather than later, you would fall back before you could even have a peek at the other side of it.

Eric’s voice brought you back to the present moment. “That’s enough now,” he simply said, reaching for the utensils you were holding. They weren’t even under the water anymore—it was your hand that had been there instead. It took a few seconds for the pain to reach you, your skin darkening where the water had burned you.

He did not give you a choice—Eric wrapped his arm around your shoulders and brought you back to the worktable, forcing you to sit down while he searched a freezer for some ice. Once it was applied to your hand, he took care of carefully packaging the cake and storing it in the walk-in as you stared through the large windows at the front. Life was happening out there, as normal. You just felt like you were outside of it.

“You’re taking the week off,” Eric said with an accusatory tone when he came back. “And do not argue. I’m not hearing it,” he added when you turned to him to protest. “If you come back here before your time off is over, I’ll fire you on the spot.”

You wanted to cry then, not minding that he would witness it, only the tears didn’t come. You absorbed the sorrow back and a little more of it just became a part of your DNA.

“Eric—” you started, your voice foreign.

“You gotta talk to him,” Eric cut you off. “You have to. You’re not seeing it through my eyes—if you did, you would be appalled.”

Something ugly emerged in your belly—heavy and hard like lead but colder than the ice that was melting on your hand. “You’re right,” you replied, pushing yourself up. “I’m not seeing it through your eyes. I’m seeing it through mine. Because it’s my fucking life, not yours.”

You regretted it as soon as you spoke—it was then that the tears made their appearance. In less than two seconds, Eric’s arms were wrapped around you and he was pulling you into a tight hug, patting you gently. Your attempt at resisting him was weak and you found your face buried in the crook of his neck, embracing him back, holding onto him like you were afraid to fall.

“I’m s—sorry,” you stuttered between sobs. “Eric, I’m so sorry, I’m just…”

He shushed you. “You’re fine. Just breathe for me, okay? Deep breaths. Yes, like that.” He sighed, resting his chin on the top of your head. “Sweetheart,” he whispered into your ear. “He’s hurting you. Can’t you tell?”

The sob that spilled from your lips was heart-wrenching—you closed your fists tighter around his shirt, more of your warm tears rolling down his neck.

“It’s just that I’m useless, Eric.” You tried to breathe deeply as he advised, but only a little oxygen made it to your lungs. “There’s nothing I can do to help him. I love him. I love him so much. I think—no, I know—he’s the love of my life. But all I do is make things worse.”

Eric clicked his tongue, pulling away to look you in the eyes. “That isn’t true. And if it’s true, it isn’t on you. It’s not your fault he’s shutting himself off.”

“But it is,” you insisted, wiping your face with the back of your hand. “If I were a better girlfriend, I could do more, you know? I would know what to do, I would make him happy again.”

Eric’s silence hurt you more than anything he could have told you. He just stared at you with a saddened expression, finding no words to comfort you, or perhaps knowing you weren’t ready to hear the truth.

What you said was also the truth, though. Hyunjin hated it when you were trying to comfort him. He would say that he felt like a burden, like a responsibility. You didn’t see the problem with that. He wasn’t a burden per se—but you had no problem with feeling a sense of responsibility when it came to his happiness. You wanted to do things to make his life better. It wasn’t a chore. It was just… love.

But he hated it. So you had learned how to conceal those attempts at comfort. You had to pretend and give him a succinct response if he told you about something that worried him. Then you had to wait. Sometimes you’d surprise him with some of his favorite foods, other times you called a few friends so that they would come over. It didn’t matter. It just needed to look like you weren’t actively trying to help him.

And now you couldn’t help but feel like he was also resenting you for not helping him.

Maybe you were falling already. Maybe you had been falling for a long time and you just couldn’t see.

“I’ll drive you home,” Eric decided. And the truth was that you had no energy left in you to resist him, so you let him grab your bag, your jacket, and your phone and you let him drag you to his car after he carefully closed the shop.

The car ride was completely silent—he turned off the radio as soon as he started the car. The night was cold but not windy and you rested your head against the cool glass of the window just to feel something.

“I have a few colleagues that could help,” Eric said out of nowhere. He was a few years older than you and you knew he had a large network of acquaintances. “There’s Jake, I told you about Jake. His uncle owns a bar, you know?” You remembered vaguely. “He works for his uncle, but I’m sure he’d be more than happy to step in for a couple of days. You could go somewhere. Just you and Hyunjin.”

The idea was pleasant in theory but you knew better. You wouldn’t become a better girlfriend just because you were in another place. If anything, it would all make it worse. He would be upset that you’d even suggest such a thing. He would never leave his bar to someone he didn’t know, not for a weekend, not even for an hour.

You used to think he was ashamed. But you knew better.

It was just that you failed him.

Eric stopped his car in front of your building. You were still trying to find something to tell him but nothing came to mind. Instead, you gave him a nod and you got out of the car, not even looking back as you made your way toward the entrance, searching your bag for your keys while you waited for the elevator. As you did so, the screen of your phone lit up when you accidentally brushed it.

The wallpaper was a picture of Hyunjin and you. A selfie that he took some time last year when things were still good. You couldn’t recognize the girl in the picture. She was you only you weren’t her. Not anymore.

You had two missed calls—the time matched the ringtones you heard while at the bakery. Both calls were from Hyunjin, but he didn’t leave a voicemail.

The apartment was quiet when you entered. You moved in with him soon after you began dating him, head over heels happy to spend as much time as possible with the man you loved. His apartment was more spacious so it just made sense for you to move in here.

It took a few seconds for you to realize the shower was running. So Hyunjin was home, only he hadn’t turned any of the lights on when he came in. Everything was dark and still.

Exhausted from your day and from crying, you went to the bedroom, waiting for him to get out of the shower so that you could shower too—

—and you woke up later. It took you a few seconds to understand that you had fallen asleep in the first place, most likely due to your extreme fatigue.

It was still dark outside and everything was as quiet as it had been when you came home. The same knot was still in your throat too. You closed your eyes again, taking a deep breath, extending your arm to reach the other side of the bed, fully expecting Hyunjin to be asleep next to you.

But your hand touched nothing except the cool blanket.

You sat upright, looking around the bedroom, looking for him. He had been home after all—you had just fallen asleep while he was in the shower. About a million voices in your head started to whisper things you didn’t want to hear but you couldn’t tune them out. Maybe he came back home to shower just so he could go out again after and go fuck that waitress he hired some time ago. The one who was always after him. The one who was openly flirting with him. He kept denying it, he kept saying you were projecting.

Not really knowing what to do, you left the bedroom to check the bathroom just in case, but it was empty. So you made your way to the living room instead. And it was where you found him.

The TV was playing at a low volume, displaying the anime that Hyunjin was watching to fall asleep these days. He was laying on the couch, motionless, his chest rising and sinking slowly to the rhythm of his breathing. You felt relief and pain at once. He wasn’t out fucking that girl. But he had chosen to sleep here instead of by your side.

You swallowed your pride and lowered yourself next to the couch, giving his face a gentle caress. Hyunjin hummed in his sleep, frowning but not waking up. This time, you cupped his cheek and tugged a strand of his silky hair behind his ear. God, he was stunning. It seemed like it had been so long since you could observe him like that. He didn’t seem quite at peace, not even in his sleep, but it was better than nothing.

You pulled yourself closer to Hyunjin and kissed his sleepy lips, just pressing your mouth onto his. He let out the familiar groan he usually did when he woke up.

“You’ll rest better if you sleep in the bed,” you whispered, but he didn’t move.

A scowl appeared on your brows. “Baby?”

He shifted in his ‘sleep’, rolling with his back facing you. Only you could swear he was just pretending to sleep. It sounded crazy, it sounded insane, and it was very much unlike him, and yet you couldn’t see it any other way.

That reality was just too painful to process so you walked away, giving Hyunjin the space that he wanted but was too embarrassed to ask for with words. You didn’t cry, even if you wanted to. You went to take a shower, washing the day away, scrubbing your body vigorously as though it would make you into a new person. But it didn’t. When you turned the water off, you were still you. Just you. You were still the girl Hyunjin was avoiding.

You lay awake in bed for several hours that night, waiting to see if Hyunjin would get up any time soon, even just to get a glass of water in the kitchen. You stared at your ceiling, your heart heavy with the memory of the sweet taste of maraschino cherries. To you, today, they just tasted like Hyunjin’s love, and you craved it more than you could say.

You dozed off without realizing you did but when you woke up, Hyunjin was gone.

You spent your entire Valentine’s Day worrying. Under normal circumstances, you would have picked up your phone to text Hyunjin and ask where he was. You even knew which response to expect—he would tell you that he was at the bar, getting everything ready for tonight’s event. But you didn’t. Not immediately at least. There was a wound on your heart and it was a little too raw to poke at it just yet.

Instead you kept yourself busy for a few hours by deep cleaning the entire apartment. The washing machine ran non-stop until sometime around two in the afternoon. By then, your entire body was sore from all the housework done but you had finally figured out what you were going to text Hyunjin.

You: hey! ♥ happy valentine’s day baby. are you at the bar?

Hyunjin: you too angel. yes setting everything up for later

The response was a little dry but you swallowed your tears and your pride, determined to make things right somehow. If he ever let you.

You: I figured! I’ll be right there. want me to pick up some takeout on the way there? anything you want, it’s on me!

Hyunjin: you don’t need to come. felix is here and most of the staff

He literally did not want you there. He did not want you anywhere near him. No matter how obvious it was—and for how long it had been—you just couldn’t make sense of it, not really. Or maybe some part of your brain refused to process it to spare you, only it did not feel like being spared. It did not matter if you realized it in small increments or all at once. The end result was the same.

He did not love you anymore.

And you didn’t know what to do about that. You hadn’t thought it was possible. You hadn’t imagined it would ever happen. If you were honest—and admitting this even just to yourself was difficult—when Hyunjin and you became a thing, you never imagined how it would end. You never envisioned the termination of it because it did not feel like there would be one. And that had been absurd, obviously. You could see that now. It had even been borderline cocky—that was not the kind of confidence you ever displayed before. To assume someone would love you until the end of times or whatever. Not that every day would be sunshine and unicorns and rainbows, but that it was the kind of love that would overcome the dark days.

How conceited, presumptuous of you.

Now that the truth was catching up with you though, you found yourself humbled the fuck down.

You did something stupid but it was the only thing you could think to do at the moment—you searched your nightstand to find the leftover painkillers they had prescribed you last year when you sprained your ankle and struggled with physical therapy. You had one left, which you kept in case you injured yourself or something. Today seemed like a perfect occasion to put yourself into a coma of sorts. You washed down the pill with a shot of your favorite whiskey and buried yourself under your covers, staining the pillow with your tears, crying yourself to sleep.

It was dark when you woke up. You were getting tired of waking up at night with your heart broken in more and more pieces but you pushed yourself up and made yourself shower. Then you did your hair and even put on a little bit of mascara. The truth was that you just wanted to see him. You wanted him to kiss you. You never wanted to forget what it felt like. To be kissed by him. To be loved by Hyunjin.

The party was going strong at Nightcap. Hyunjin had organized a few games—you had even helped come up with them. The one you worked on the most was the free drink game. Single people could sign up and a number was assigned to them, as well as one free drink ticket. An entire section of the bar was reserved for them where they could meet new people. When someone was interested in another, they could go to the bar and use their free drink ticket to give to that other person. The thing is—the free drink would only be given if two people submitted each other for it. Of course, people could cheat if they wanted but it was their loss. The drink was one glass of Love Potion, a drink designed by Hyunjin several months ago, especially for tonight. Prosecco and cherry vodka on the rocks with a lime-flavored sweet and salty rim. Served with maraschino cherries.

Because he said that it was with those that he made you fall in love with him.

You remembered his smile as he told you that. You remembered his lips too, stained with the cherry juice from testing different versions of his drink.

Life used to be so good.

Jay—the apprentice bartender—was mixing up a few drinks, on his own behind the bar. You found it unusual for Hyunjin to leave the young man alone on such a busy night, but he didn’t show up, not even after waiting a few minutes. Yet you had seen his car in the parking lot so you knew he was here. Somewhere.

Felix was in the bar’s tiny kitchen, doing some preparations. Nightcap didn’t serve meals per se but did offer appetizers and other snacks. He saluted you warmly, as he always did, but he couldn’t tell you where Hyunjin was. “I mean he said he was gonna get more limes at the back to slice but that was a while ago,” he said. “Is he not here?”

No, he was not.

In hindsight, you probably should have gone home at that moment. Or maybe not, depending on how you looked at it. But instead you thanked Felix and, ignoring the lump in your throat, crossed the kitchen to make your way toward the back. A short hallway separated the kitchen and the storage room, where an emergency exit was also located. You shivered when you passed the old door, feeling the cold breeze from outside through it.

You were rehearsing in your head what you thought you would tell Hyunjin when you heard a familiar voice coming from the storage room.

“You can tell me what’s wrong, I’m here for you, Hyune.” It was Haley speaking to him, a waitress. A really pretty waitress who seemed to really really really enjoy working for your boyfriend. “You’re an amazing man. You deserve better than a cheater.”

Your heart halted but so did your feet—you came to an abrupt stop just before you entered the room, a hand over your mouth to cover the sound of the gasp you just let out. A cheater? Was she talking about you?

A cheater?

HYUNE?

You knew what was happening and yet you couldn’t believe it. You stretched your neck—just a little—to get a peek inside of the room. Hyunjin was right next to the large commercial fridge where you knew he kept the limes. Haley stood before him, very close to him. She was touching him, too, squeezing his shoulder and then letting her hand travel down to his arm, caressing him. Feeling him up.

Just about a million thoughts hit your brain at the same time but it was only a few that you could hear clearly. You knew Hyunjin had no enjoyment in his relationship with you anymore. That was one thing. But to call you a cheater and then hide with his waitress to let her coddle him? Seduce him, even? What kind of nerve did he have?

Was he this unhappy with you? That he would make up stories about cheating, perhaps to alleviate his own guilt? That had to be it, right? He was projecting. He was projecting because he wanted to fuck Haley—if he hadn’t already. He would sometimes tell you that you were the one projecting but now you could tell this whole thing was just a big, messy projecting inception.

The hit was violent. It felt a lot like you had been kicked in the chest. Or like Hyunjin himself had cut you open to crush your heart with his bare hands.

What happened next was even worse. You bit into the hand still covering your mouth so as not to be heard when Haley pulled Hyunjin by the collar of his shirt to kiss him.

You looked away because the sight was too much. Because it felt like you would die if you saw more of it. You took a feeble step toward the emergency exit, your legs trembling just as much as the rest of your body.

You heard Hyunjin’s voice coming from inside the room. “What the fuck?” There were a few noises, like fabrics brushing and footsteps. You couldn’t comprehend his intonation. You couldn’t tell if he was shocked or if he was, perhaps, denying how badly he wanted it. He said something else but you couldn’t hear it over the sound of your pulse and the high-pitched ringing that echoed in your ear.

Haley sounded displeased when she replied to him, and yet honey coated her voice. “You can pretend all you want but I see the way you look at me,” she said with a joyless chuckle. “Don’t you think about me when you touch yourself? My body, my tits? I saw you checking me out.” There was a pause during which you leaned against the wall behind you or else you might just collapse. “Tell me, Hyune, do you think about me when you fuck her?”

You had heard enough and yet you barely controlled your body when you ran away, pushing the emergency door to put as much distance as you could between you and this fucking place and Hyunjin and that girl. You couldn’t breathe, no matter how hard you tried to force oxygen into your lungs. The February air was cold and ruthless but you recognized the signs of a panic attack, knowing what was to come if you didn’t snap out of it.

You found your phone in your purse but you didn’t even know who to call. The only person you really wanted to be with was Hyunjin. But he wanted otherwise. You had failed him so spectacularly that he… that he…

As you scrolled through your contacts, you realized how alone you were without him. Ironically, it was Minho’s name that popped into your mind. But it was Valentine’s Day after all and he would either be with his wife or at the restaurant, or perhaps both. In any case, there was no way a call from his ex would be welcome. Eric would be busy too, but maybe you could call Jisung. But to tell him what? What was there even to say?

You heard the door you had just come out from open again and it was closed just a few seconds after. You were on the other corner of the building, hiding there while you regained your senses if you ever would.

“Baby? Angel? Is that you?”

Hyunjin.

You realized he must have heard the door. In your urgency to get the fuck away from this place, you hadn’t really bothered with being quiet.

Angel. How could he allow this word on his tongue after what he did? After he kissed that girl with it?

It took a few seconds for your feet to obey your brain but you didn’t make it very far before Hyunjin caught up with you. Neither of you was wearing even a jacket—you had left your winter coat on a hook in the kitchen with everyone else’s, but you couldn’t even process the cold. Not the one outside, anyway.

He looked like he didn’t know why you were here. Not really here at the bar but here, behind it, running away, wildly underdressed. He also looked like he knew very well what was going on.

“Oh my god,” he sighed when he made it to you. “Come inside, you’ll freeze. Are you okay?”

He tried to grab your hand but you dodged him. Hyunjin’s facial expression darkened—he opened his mouth to say something but no words came out.

Part of you wanted to leave now, digest it all, and have a talk tomorrow, or even later tonight. But another, stronger part of you couldn’t bear keeping it inside for even one more second. It felt like trying to swallow a knife.

“I saw you,” was all you said. “I just want you to know that I saw you and I heard you.”

The little color he had drained from his face. “W—What?” His bottom lip was trembling—a telltale sign that he was going to cry. “No, no, I—I pushed her away, angel, listen—”

You tsked him, shaking your head in disbelief. You could believe that. That he had pushed her away. Because they were in a public place and he was very notably in a relationship, and people would talk. “It’s fine,” you shrugged. It was not fine but you went on. “She’s hot, I get it.”

“I fired her,” Hyunjin responded without a pause, his voice flat.

You looked into his eyes, realizing you had no idea what was going on in his head. Realizing you didn’t know who you could trust more. Him, or yourself. Perhaps the correct answer was neither.

“So? Do you?” you replied. “Do you think about her when you touch yourself? When you fuck me?”

You hadn’t seen anger in Hyunjin very often and certainly never to the level he was getting at, so it took you a few seconds to recognize that he was enraged. Something flicked in his eyes, like a warning, but you ignored it. “Are we going to pretend you’re not fooling around with your boss?”

The question left you speechless. You took a step back, your shoulder blades meeting the brick wall behind you. “What?” You weren’t even surprised—you were properly dumbfounded, as though Hyunjin had spoken in a language you weren’t fluent in.

Hyunjin was getting impatient. A breeze blew over the both of you and a few strands of hair fell over his forehead, obstructing his eyes. “Can we skip the part where you pretend you don’t understand what I’m talking about?” he snickered, looking disgusted. “No, I’m not fucking fantasizing about Haley. But I did call you last night. Twice. To tell you I was on my way to pick you up from the bakery so we could go home. Got no answer—I figured, fine, you’re busy.”

You thought you knew where this was going but you couldn’t even believe that you were here, right now, having this conversation.

“I saw you through the front windows,” Hyunjin went on. “It was kinda dark, but I saw enough to draw my own conclusions.”

This explained everything about the awful feeling gnawing at you from the inside. It hadn’t left you since Hyunjin had ignored you last night.

“He just hugged me,” you retorted with a small voice. You didn’t know if you were shaking because it was cold or because you had never felt as broken as you felt now. “I was crying.”

“Sure. A hug. That lasted at least one minute, probably more,” Hyunjin commented. “I wouldn’t know, I walked away. Tell me, does he “““hug””” you like that often?” He emphasized his point by dramatically air quoting the word. How does he like to “““hug””” you? Rough? From behind? Missionary? Does he—”

Your hand left the side of your body before you even realized it—you slapped Hyunjin in the face, shocked at what you were doing just as much as what he was saying and the disdain with which he was speaking to you. Tonight was too much. All of it was entirely too much—barely two minutes ago you witnessed a kiss between him and another woman and yet it was you who was being accused of cheating?

Hyunjin stood before you, speechless, feeling the reddened skin of his cheek like he couldn’t believe it.

“Yes, a hug.” Your voice was shaking.

He cocked his head to the side. “A hug. And then he’ll try to hit that,” he retorted, pressing his lips together.

It felt like it would help you so much if you could figure out exactly what it was that you were feeling. You were furious. You were hurt. You felt sad and betrayed and hopeless.

You were scared.

Maybe you had known deep inside you, for a while now, that it would come to this.

“He’s gay. He has a boyfriend. He’s not trying to ‘hit that’. I’m not trying to ‘hit that’. He’s worried about me.” You took a deep breath but only managed to exhale pathetic sobs. “I’m so alone. I’m just so fucking alone, Hyunjin. You don’t even look at me anymore. You just sulk and when I try to pull you back up, when I try to be there for you, you push me away. It hurts, by the way. It hurts when you do that.”

Hyunjin blinked slowly, his gaze becoming unfocused as though he was reviewing the veracity of your words. It felt terrible to have finally said it. It felt wonderful. Like throwing up after drinking too much. Tasted just as nasty, too.

“So I hurt you,” Hyunjin replied flatly. “I hurt you.”

“I know you don’t mean to,” you added. “I just—”

He cut you off. “It was about time you told me,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Why the hell are you wasting your time with me, then?”

Your heart dropped—it was so violent that you had to press a hand over your chest. It felt like you were going to have a heart attack. “I’m not wasting my time, I’m just saying—”

“No, I got it. I hurt you. Have you ever stopped and wondered if maybe you hurt me, too?” It would have been better if Hyunjin hit you in the face. Anything would have been better than that. “You don’t know how alone I feel too. It’s fine that you don’t want to make me a priority, but it would have been nice to feel like you have my back.”

You buried your face in your hands, hiding your tears away. It couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t be telling you that. It couldn’t end.

Not like this.

“But I do have your back,” you mumbled, the pieces of your heart stabbing you from the inside. “I love you—you know that, right?”

The expression on Hyunjin’s face gave you the response he didn’t speak.

“Are you breaking up with me?” you asked, your eyes wide.

“I don’t see what the point of staying together is. If all I do is hurt you and sulk. It’s quite obvious that you’ll be happier without me.”

He walked away. He just walked away.

It was Felix who found you outside some time later, alerted by Hyunjin’s awful mood, or so he said. He was nice. He brought you your coat and offered to go home with you but he was Hyunjin’s friend and he should stay with him. He insisted on calling a cab for you, but when the driver asked you where you were going, you did not give him the address of Hyunjin’s apartment—your apartment. You asked him to take you to the restaurant.

It was the end of the evening there—the dining room was crowded mostly by couples who were now eating dessert and drinking champagne. When you inquired to some of the new employees about Jisung, they all told you he was upstairs with the boss.

It used to feel like home. This place. The smells, the sounds. It was in this place that maraschino cherries took the taste of love. You crossed the restaurant, keeping your eyes on the floor so as not to see the bar section on the other side. You went directly to the staircase, hoping to find Jisung in his office, but only he was in Minho’s.

It was the two of them who comforted you that night—or tried, at least. You would never forget the look on their faces when you pushed the door open. It was like they had seen a ghost. Or worse. It made you wonder what you looked like.

You figured you most likely looked like a woman who had lost everything.

Because you sure as hell felt like it.

Now

Imagine holding the best, most beautiful gift life could ever give you. Imagine feeling its weight in the palm of your hand, the texture of it too, and its warmth. Imagine it scurrying along your arm to bury itself in your chest, making a home out of your heart. Imagine taking care of it, this light inside of you, to make sure it never goes out.

Imagine a downpour. A monsoon. Imagine not building a roof over the light. Imagine letting the light burn itself out in order to keep yourself warm. And letting it. Because maybe your brain felt like you ought to be punished for something, and what better punishment than to take away from you that one thing, that warmth that you love so much, even if it meant to hurt it all the while?

After all, there could be only one way to separate that light from your heart, so imagine drinking poison in the hopes it would poison it, too.

Imagine the light drowning right before your eyes.

What you would see is the state of Hyunjin’s heart.

He had it all. He had it all because he had you. Maybe it was from missing you too much but he would say that he fell in love with you at first sight and he has only loved you more and more since.

Maybe it was just because of the way he longed for you. Maybe it was because it was all that he had left. The longing, the yearning. The memory of you.

Hyunjin was aware of his mistakes. He knew them a little too well—he played them in his head almost at all times.

He had it all but he didn’t know that he did while it was happening. He was greedy. He had the bar and it was great, it was like a dream come true. Only he was too proud, and too ashamed, too. He really believed he could make it on his own. He didn’t want his problems to become yours.

He didn’t want you to see him fail.

He had it all but none of it was worth anything if you weren’t there with him.

Hyunjin had come to understand that a little too late—that he couldn’t just share the good things with you. That true love meant, also, sharing the burdens, the ugly stuff. Really sharing, not just pretending to.

By the time that information settled in, you were long gone.

Those were the worst months of his life.

Those were months of sleepless nights, of regret, of shame. Big decisions brewing at the back of his mind and at the very front of it too, crushing him under their weight. Months and months and months of missing you and knowing you deserved better than a guy like him, whose first instincts had been to sabotage the relationship instead of dealing with his issues. You deserved better than a coward.

The colder it got outside, the more vividly he remembered you.

Hyunjin called Minho one evening in early December, only a few weeks ago. He made it look like he wanted to catch up on him—Hey, it’s been a long time man, how are things?—but really Hyunjin wanted to ask about Minho’s contacts in the food and beverage industry.

And maybe, also, he wanted to ask about you.

“Oh, business has been as good as it can be,” Minho told him after Hyunjin inquired. “Just super grateful for the staff, everyone’s working hard during the holidays.” He paused then. “Hey, Hwang. Are you free some time around the 20th?”

Hyunjin thought about it, looking at the calendar hanging in Nightcap’s break room. “That’s a Friday. Those are busy,” he replied. Naturally, as a bar owner, he did not have the luxury to take Fridays off. “Why?”

“Ah, of course,” Minho replied politely, clearing his throat. “I rented a cabin in the mountains again since it was such a success the first time. Too bad you can’t make it, you’d be welcome, Felix too—”

Hyunjin almost dropped his phone, his heart racing. “I can make time,” he said without waiting. “I mean, I could ask someone to take over for a couple of days, I—” He wondered if he sounded as desperate as he was.

Minho let out a non-committal sound, clicking his tongue. “Are you only saying that because you think she’ll be there?” He didn’t need to specify who he was talking about—Hyunjin knew.

He was right. Minho was right. Hyunjin had vowed himself he would stay away from you—he had caused you enough pain anyway. He had to pay for the terrible mistakes he made. But the temptation was just too much.

“Before you ask, yes she RSVP’d,” Minho went on. “You should come too. I think it’s about time the two of you get some closure. Fair warning though—I will beat you up if you make her cry. Don’t bring your girlfriend, only Felix.” Hyunjin tried to stop him to at least let him know he sure as hell didn’t have a girlfriend, but Minho didn’t let him. “I’ll text you the address and directions when I hang up. We’re also having a Secret Santa gift exchange. To keep it simple, I’ll pair everyone in an online randomizer. So I’ll text you about that in a couple of days too. I’ll see you on the 20th, Hwang. Good talk.”

He just hung up. One minute later, Hyunjin was sent a Maps link with an address located in a remote village up in the mountains.

Two days later, Minho was texting him again to let him know that he would be your Secret Santa.

Minho: Better not fuck this up, Hwang.

Hyunjin knew he ought to call Minho and ask him to redraw the names because it just wasn’t appropriate. In all honesty, Minho might have tweaked the results. He knew he ought to call him to cancel the whole thing. Hyunjin shouldn’t go. Perhaps he would be tempted. By you.

He shouldn’t go. But he was not strong enough to resist.

He only wanted you to know what had really happened. He wanted you to know that he was sorry, that he never fucked Haley and never even wanted to, that he never actually thought you and Eric had slept together. He was just upset. And tired. And inadequate.

He hadn’t apologized for what he had done—you hadn’t given him the occasion to do so. The day after the breakup, you came into the apartment with Minho, Jisung, and Chan. Chan kept him company—as in, making sure he was never in the same room as you were—while the other two helped you pack up your things. You did not look at him but he heard you cry from the other room. You left the apartment. When he went to the bedroom, your keys were on the unmade bed, and his heart was in his throat.

He did not deserve to apologize, but it was his one shot at telling you the truth and admitting his faults. He wouldn’t miss it.

Imagine holding the best, most beautiful gift life could ever give you. Imagine fucking up so bad that your entire life is ruined.

“Dinner is ready,” Jisung’s voice said through the door. He knocked again. “We made pasta with the sauce Chan brought. The one you like so much,” he added. “Min just opened a bottle of wine. Come on.”

You sighed, burying your face into your pillow. He didn’t understand. You had tried staying—you had tried having a normal conversation with your ex, but it couldn’t work out. It meant that you couldn’t stay. You had been devising a plan for the past hour or so. While Christmas music was playing downstairs and smells from Chan’s delicious pasta sauce started floating in the air, you were checking if the motel you had seen in the village on your way here was open and if there was a room for rent. A little snow didn’t worry you.

Good thing you hadn’t really taken the time to unpack your bag.

“Are you there?” Jisung asked, wiggling the door handle to see if you had locked it. You had not, perhaps in your hurry to run away from Hyunjin or because you didn’t imagine anyone would come after you.

He cracked open the door, just barely, staring at you from the shadows of the hallway. Your room was dark too as you had not bothered turning on any lights during your crying fit. It was a small room but it had a nice view—like most of the bedrooms in the cabin, it even had a balcony. It had a cozy, rustic vibe to it with three of the four walls made of distressed wood paneling, the one facing your bed was built with warm-red bricks. It was such a shame. You had loved the room upon seeing it and had been actually looking forward to your weekend here, as much as you could anyway.

It was hard for you to look forward to things these days. But this weekend was supposed to be good. You were supposed to cook the Christmas dinner tomorrow with Min and you would bake some cookies and a cake, too. You had been assigned as Seungmin’s Secret Santa and you had found a bomb-ass gift for him which was a baseball shirt autographed by his favorite player. He would owe you his life after this. Okay, maybe not literally, but still. You couldn’t wait to see the look on your friend’s face when he would unwrap it.

Not anymore though. You wouldn’t be here tomorrow night. Hell, if there was a god and if that god was good, you wouldn’t even be here in an hour.

“I decided to leave,” you told Jisung, sitting up. “You can’t stop me.”

Jisung fully opened the door. “You can’t though,” he pointed out. “You saw the snow.”

“It’s snow, not a horde of dragons attacking the mountain. I’ll manage.” You stood, putting on a denim jacket over your t-shirt and grabbing your bag.

“A horde of dragons? You watch too much TV, friend.” Jisung shook his head. “Please don’t leave tonight. We talked about this just earlier.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to be brave anymore.”

Jisung tried—and failed—to stop you from getting out of the room. He followed you downstairs. Everyone seemed to be in the kitchen. It smelled delicious and you heard their conversations and the clinking of cutlery, but you did not look that way. Instead, you went directly to where you had left your winter jacket and changed into your snow boots.

“We came in my car though,” Jisung muttered, clearly trying not to be heard by the others whose conversations had visibly lowered in volume. “You need my keys.”

“Yup.” You reached into the pocket of Jisung’s jacket which hung right next to yours and retrieved the aforementioned keys. “There. All good. I promise I’ll be careful with it. I’ll go down to the village at that motel we saw. I’ll come get you on Sunday. Okay?”

Jisung gave up, a saddened look on his face. He nodded slowly, raising his hands in surrender. “What happened to facing your heartbreak and healing from it?”

You glanced towards the other side of the large open space room. All of your friends sat around a huge wooden table overflowing with food and wine. All that you could see were smiles. Hyunjin was facing the other way so you could not see his face but he was eating his pasta and having a conversation with Changbin who sat next to him.

“You’re right about that,” you conceded, your throat tight. “But I don’t think any amount of facing it and looking it in the eyes will heal me. I’m hopeless, Ji. You’re gonna have to wrap your head around that at some point.”

“Nobody is hopeless,” he insisted, but you had walked away already.

You would at least be an adult about it. While you were elaborating your plan, you had considered faking an emergency, something giving you an excuse to leave. But it would be too obvious and too childish. Hyunjin always saw right through your lies anyway.

“Hey guys,” you managed as you approached the table. “I just came to say goodbye. I decided to leave.”

A heavy silence fell onto the room. Hyunjin spun in his chair to see you but you did not look at him.

Minho stood. “Don’t leave, it isn’t safe,” he said. “Look—”

“I’m leaving,” you repeated. “Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room, yeah? We’re all adults, after all, guys. I know it’s been a while since many of you have seen Hyunjin—and Felix—and I’m really happy y’all get this little reunion. But I’m just gonna go. Okay? No hard feelings. Not even for you, Min.”

You saw Hyunin lowering his head from the corner of your eye. “I’ll go,” he muttered. You barely heard him. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No, it’s totally fine!” You could hardly believe how easy it was for you to say all of those things in front of everyone. You imagined it must be caused by some sort of adrenaline rush. “I mean it. You should stay.” You made your way toward the door before anyone could stop you.

Minho did follow, putting himself in between the door and you. “Wait, okay?”

“Min, just, no,” you began. “You and I dated for nine months. We were friends before. One night you kissed me. Nine months later, you were barely looking at me, barely speaking to me. In the end you broke up with me because it didn’t feel right, because you had too much work, all that.” You didn’t care that Minho’s wife was right there. You didn’t care that literally everyone in the room was listening to you. “I got over you. Then I fell in love with him,” you added, motioning towards Hyunjin who was still looking at the floor. “It was great. Until it was not. Until he, too, stopped looking at me. Until he stopped speaking to me. Until he kissed that waitress in the back room. And then he broke up with me too. So you’re gonna step the fuck away and let me leave this place. And everything will keep going as it was before and I’m not gonna be mad at anyone here. I’m just gonna go. Okay?”

Minho swallowed thickly, sliding to the left, freeing the door. “Okay.” He opened his mouth to speak and you knew him well enough to know he wanted to say I’m sorry, only you didn’t want to hear any more of that—you just pushed the door open and walked out.

You did manage to close the door behind you but that in itself was a miracle for you had barely made it outside. The snow was reaching somewhere just below your knees—it was heavier than you had imagined, too, and you sank into it with each step you took. It infiltrated your boots, freezing your toes almost instantly.

The wind was relentless. You swallowed snow on many occasions on your way to the parking lot, located on the left side of the cabin. But you remained resolute, fueled by anger, by disappointment. You could barely make out the cars—snow must have accumulated on the spot illuminating the area and it had also covered a lot of the cars, so it was difficult to see which was which.

It was cold but you didn’t care. Once you found Jisung’s car, you began removing the several inches of snow that covered it. You thought about Minho’s words as you angrily pushed the wet snow off the roof and windows. It’s not that you can’t move on from things. It’s that you don’t want to. Maybe he wasn’t entirely wrong—it wasn’t true for every aspect of your life, except, perhaps, this one thing. Hyunjin.

Moving on from him seemed impossible. You had seen, so vividly, your life intertwined with his in the future. You had felt a love deeper than you thought love could ever be.

And now it was all that you had left. The memories of it, no matter how painful they were. It was all that you had of Hyunjin—the empty space he left behind.

It kept snowing.

Hyunjin wished you had slammed the door.

Many things happened right after you left—the group separated itself into thirds. One third tried to diffuse the obvious tension immediately by saying that by now, snow plows or something must have cleared the roads at least a little and that you would be okay. Then they continued the conversation almost as though nothing had occurred. Hyunjin couldn’t even be mad at them because he could tell it was out of good intentions. They were trying to preserve some kind of peace.

The second group seemed genuinely worried for your well-being. Should he have been able to speak right now, he would have been one of them, voicing his own concerns about the weather and your lack of winter clothing. Felix was asking Jisung if he should go get you. Jisung shrugged. “Maybe someone could follow her just to make sure she makes it safely.”

The third group, however, had other preoccupations. Si-yeon, Minho’s wife, Ha-ri, Changbin’s girlfriend, Soren, Chan’s girlfriend, Chan himself, and Seungmin were discussing under their breaths but he could hear them very well.

“Is it true what she said?” Si-yeon asked after clearing her throat. By the sound of it, it seemed like she was directing her question towards Minho, but when she did not get a response, she turned to Hyunjin. “Is it true? Did you cheat on her?”

Heat burned his ears. God, he wanted to disappear. He barely managed to raise his eyes. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “It’s not how it happened.”

“Did you kiss a waitress? That’s what she said,” Soren pointed out.

“She kissed me,” Hyunjin specified. “I rejected her.” That night was the worst night of his life. He remembered everything in detail.

“Did you not tell her that you invited her ex?” Chan asked Minho. “That’s fucked up, dude.”

A cacophony followed—everyone talked over the other, trying to make themselves heard, exposing their point. He really shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t fair to you. He didn’t imagine that Minho would have kept it from you, of course not. But he had, and now you were upset.

And Hyunjin’s heart was heavy.

He missed you. He missed you more than he could say—it didn’t matter if he locked himself in a room all weekend, making sure you never saw him. Because it would mean to be under the same roof as you once again. Even just a few hours. Maybe, if he was lucky, he would smell your perfume as you walked past his door, or maybe he would hear your voice.

One thing was sure, he wasn’t going to let you leave. Not tonight. He’d barely managed to reach this place, after all.

Without a word or a glance to anybody, Hyunjin pushed himself up, making his way toward the door. He ignored all the questions and comments. What are you doing? Where are you going? Are you sure it’s a good idea? Maybe someone else should go.

In two seconds, he was in his boots again, leaving his slippers behind.

Maybe, selfishly, he wanted you to know that he still loved you.

Going outside felt like running into a wall, only, the wall was made of wind, ice, and snow. He coughed as snowflakes entered his mouth and even his nostrils. He was only wearing a light sweater but he hid his hands into the sleeves, also protecting his face as best he could with his arms. He called out your name but the wind was louder, so he waited a few seconds to try again.

He could see some people looking through the windows and that did not please Hyunjin, so he quickly made his way toward the small parking lot. Snow entered his boots but he kept going, squinting as he tried to catch sight of you. He could see that some snow had been removed from a car but that wouldn’t be enough for you to be able to drive with it. There was a lot of snow on the ground and he didn’t think that a simple sedan would be able to go through it.

He could see the car. He could also see your bag, left on the trunk.

But he couldn’t see you.

He called your name again, his heart dropping. It was totally understandable that you were angry but you couldn’t possibly have run off into the woods in this weather, right?

What he saw once he reached the car was perhaps worse. You were sitting right next to it, one leg stretched and the other bent so that your foot was towards you. You were completely leaning over it, your shoulders shaking with cries. You had cried earlier too—he had seen it in your eyes. It hurt him to see you like this.

He approached you carefully, almost as though you were a feral animal. “Hey,” he said in a low voice.

You jumped, looking up, recoiling when you saw him—that motion caused you to wince and wrap your hands around your ankle.

Hyunjin got on his knees, not minding one bit the cold snow dampening his pants and freezing him. “Did you hurt yourself?” He tried to look you in the eyes but you wouldn’t let him. “Did you fall? Did you hit your head?”

“I’m fine,” you replied. “It’s just my ankle.”

“You don’t look fine to me.”

You sighed, wiping tears off your face. Your bare fingers were red and stiff. Instinctively, Hyunjin reached for your hand to warm it up, but you pulled away. “It’s fine. I’ll be okay. Go back inside.”

He looked around, searching for his words. “I don’t think you can leave,” he started, leaning closer to you. “Look. We can’t even see the path. We’re snowed in. And you hurt yourself. Isn’t this the ankle you sprained before?”

You gave him a slow nod after a few seconds. “There was ice over there,” you explained, motioning vaguely behind you. “Under the snow. I slipped, and…”

“We’ll get you back inside now,” Hyunjin said. “Wait here, I’ll go get someone and we’ll—”

“No, please.” This time, you did touch him—when he went to stand up, you caught his wrist, pulling him back. Your touch went through his body like a shockwave, making him lightheaded. “I can’t go back in there. Not after I made a scene.”

There it was. There you were. He recognized you more than ever now as you softened, as your anger dissipated. Not two seconds ago, you were still enraged. Now you looked at him with teary, pleading eyes.

“Everyone in there is your friend,” Hyunjin pointed out. “No one will judge you.”

“Of course they’ll judge me.” You let go of his wrist, taking a deep breath. “Help me up. I can still drive.”

Unfortunately for you, he had seen in which pocket of your coat you had put Jisung’s keys—he was easily able to reach into it to retrieve them, effectively stealing them from you.

You stared at him with your mouth wide open, shocked. “Fuck you!”

“Yup, fuck me,” Hyunjin retorted, this time standing up for good. “Hold on!” he quickly added when you, too, tried to stand, but it was obvious you couldn’t put much weight on your ankle.

“This is the second most humiliating day of my life,” you muttered as Hyunjin went to help you up. “The first on the list is when my boyfriend dumped me on Valentine’s Day.” You shot him a venomous gaze.

He sighed, the pang in his heart undeniable. He had never really been confronted with it before. The pain he had caused you. It had all been abstract up until this point. He had thought about it a lot, of course, but to see it with his own two eyes was a whole other thing. Your damp cheeks, the redness in your eyes. The expression on your face when you looked at him—it wasn’t even anger, or disgust. It was worse. It was disappointment.

And yet. You were there. You were right there. It was the first time in so long that Hyunjin saw you, that he spoke with you. And it wasn’t an easy thing to admit, not even to himself, but it still felt so normal to be by your side, to just speak with you. Sure, there was an awkwardness that could not be denied. But there was so much more beneath it. All the memories, all the time spent with you, all the love, the intimacy. It seemed like that bond hadn’t been severed.

“What a fucking loser,” Hyunjin said with an exaggerated snort. “Good riddance, yeah? Nobody needs a boyfriend like that.”

You stared at him, speechless, blinking slowly. Maybe it was the stress or the pain, but you burst into laughter that you had to control in order not to hurt your ankle even more. It was music to his ears. It almost felt like being revived after cardiac arrest. “Come on, help me up instead of working your stand-up comic routine.”

Hyunjin positioned himself behind you, not hesitating before wrapping one arm around your waist and another under your arms. “I got you, just don’t use that foot.” You smelled good. Your perfume was the same—its delicate yet bold notes hit his nostrils like a warm spring day.

Much like ripping a band-aid off a wound, Hyunjin pulled you up right away—you helped by standing on your good foot and by holding onto the car next to you, but you had to lean against it as soon as you stood, wincing in pain. “Wow,” you said nonetheless. “You’ve been working out, haven’t you?”

He shrugged. “Helps me keep my head clear.” He grabbed your bag and returned to you, wrapping his arm around your waist again. You held onto him and hopped as best you could toward the cabin as he let you put all your weight onto him. “Careful, you’ll slip again,” he warned. “I’ll carry you—”

“Not a fucking chance. I’d rather die frozen in the snow than go back in there carried princess-style by the guy who dumped me on Valentine’s Day.”

“Really gotta rub it in, don’t you?” Despite the gloomy essence of the conversation, the tone was light-hearted. “Not that I don’t deserve it…”

It didn’t matter that it took several minutes to make it back to the porch—Hyunjin was not cold. Not when he was so close to you. Not when he was touching you, holding you.

“Don’t let them make fun of me,” you warned.

He glanced inside—pretty much everyone was back around the table. “I won’t,” he promised, grabbing the door handle, but he didn’t push it open. “I really want you to know that I didn’t cheat on you. I didn’t want to cheat on you,” he said, turning to you. “I know that you saw what you saw and I’m not asking you to forgive me or anything like that. Haley kissed me and I pushed her away. I just want you to believe me. Please.”

You frowned. “You literally broke up with me five minutes later, though.”

“I had my reasons. But nowhere among them was Haley. I promise you.” His heart felt lighter now that he had told you.

“She had been flirting with you for months,” you reminded him. “Very openly. Often right in front of me.”

“I should have fired her way before,” he conceded. That was one of the many mistakes he made—obviously, Hyunjin wasn’t worth much when put under stress, like he lost any ability to think clearly. “But I don’t want you going around thinking that you got cheated on. Because you didn’t. I would never have done this to you.”

You remained quiet—Hyunjin could sense that you needed to think it over, so instead of insisting on the topic, he opened the door.

You were obviously uncomfortable when you followed him inside. “You have no idea how humiliating this is for me,” you muttered under your breath. “All of it.”

It was his fault, after all, so there was no way in hell Hyunjin would let you be uneasy because of him.

The guests around the table became quiet when they noticed that you were with him. Jisung immediately got up, followed closely by Si-yeon and Soren.

Jisung gasped when he saw the state you were in. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“It’s my fault,” Hyunjin said immediately. “I insisted that she should stay and I chased after her.” He found it rather simple to lie when it was to make your life easier. “She tripped and twisted her ankle trying to run away from me.”

“I’m fine,” you said but nobody believed you.

Hyunjin was gently pushed away as everyone came to take care of you—Chan and Soren helped you to the couch while Jisung was preparing a bag of ice for your ankle. Minho inquired about the amount of parm you wanted on your pasta as he filled a plate with food for you. Felix stood with Hyunjin and, together, they observed the scene quietly. You were given a hot pack to warm up your fingers and a thick blanket to wrap around you.

In no more than five minutes, you were comfortably lying on one of the sectional couches of the living room, eating a generous plate of pasta with your foot elevated on two cushions. Jisung, Soren, and Chan were sitting with you, eating and drinking, while others had returned to the table and a few people were standing near the kitchen island, chatting and putting leftovers in containers.

Hyunjin stayed in a corner after sending Felix away—he didn’t want his friend to miss out on a good evening on his behalf. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He was just troubled. He hadn’t been able to predict how he would feel once he saw you again, but even if his guess had turned out scarily accurate, the real thing was a million times more intense.

Hyunjin had known from the start. He had known from the moment you walked away from him that Valentine’s Day that he still loved you and that he wouldn’t stop loving you. But to know one thing and to experience it were two very different events.

His eyes met yours when you looked up from your plate. This time you didn’t avert your gaze.

Yup. He was fucked.

He was still head-over-heels in love with you.

“I think it’s sprained and that we have to wrap it tightly,” Jisung said, his eyes on his screen after looking up first aid advice.

“We’ll get you to a doctor as soon as the snow allows it,” Chan assured. “Do you want another glass of wine?”

The ambiance was much quieter than it had been—everyone was dispersed around the cabin, just enjoying the overall coziness of the place. You were still in the living room with Chan, Soren, and Jisung but you could see Minho in the kitchen, chatting with Felix and Hyunjin while he did some prep for tomorrow’s Christmas meal. You knew a few people were watching horror movies in the basement—and you were especially grateful to be anywhere but there.

“No, thank you,” you told Chan, forcing a smile on your face. “You guys don’t have to stay with me you know? I’ll be fine. Didn’t you want to play board games?”

“Won’t you play with us?” Jisung asked.

“I’m tired.” And it wasn’t even a lie. Your entire day had been a roller coaster of emotions and you felt drained, empty, and your ankle was still excessively painful. “If someone would be kind enough to fetch me some elastic bandages from the first aid kit, that’s all I need. I’m used to it, I can wrap it myself.”

Chan tried to insist but in the end, Soren dragged him away so he would help her choose a board game—maybe she understood you a little better than the guys. Maybe she knew that you just needed to be alone for a little while.

It was Jisung who brought you the bandages. “Are you okay?” He squeezed your shoulder, taking a deep breath.

You stared at the rolls of bandage in your hand, thinking it over. Today felt much like a fever dream, like nothing about it was real. Like it could not be possible that you were currently in the same building as Hyunjin. Like it could not be possible that he had spoken to you softly, that he had held you, touched you, and that it made your heart flutter.

“I don’t know,” you admitted to Jisung. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling,” you added, keeping your voice low.

“I don’t think there’s any way you’re ‘supposed’ to feel right now,” he told you.

You nodded, sending him away so that he could join the game. Felix and Hyunjin also voiced their desire to play. “I’ll make us a round of drinks before,” Hyunjin decided. “Anyone interested?”

You heard responses coming from the dining area and then silence fell over the room. From the corner of your eye, you noticed that several heads were turned your way. Hyunjin called your name, his voice cracking as he did so. “Do you want a drink?”

“Sure,” you replied out of habit, mostly to make everyone look away.

You focused on unwrapping your supplies, doing your best to chase the thoughts swirling in your head. God, why were you a little glad to see him all of a sudden? You had been so upset about it earlier—with good reason!—and while you were very much still pissed off, you couldn’t help but feel a certain relief after his revelation.

You didn’t want to believe him. That he didn’t cheat on you, that he never even wanted to. So why was your heart… like that? Why wasn’t it raising its defenses, why was it leaving you exposed and vulnerable? Had it not learned from the betrayal it suffered? Why had it been so easy for Hyunjin to sneak his way back inside of it?

For months, the simple idea of meeting Hyunjin again had haunted you as you had no idea how you would react. But sometimes—usually after a few drinks—you started to imagine crazy scenarios. Like him calling you out of nowhere and asking to see you or even him showing up unannounced at your job to beg you to take him back. You were usually quick to banish these thoughts, trying to drown them in the most painful memories you held. Like all the times he kept you at a distance when all that you wanted was to be there with him, just so he wouldn’t be alone with his dark thoughts.

When that didn’t suffice, you had to bring out the big guns. Like replaying in your mind the kiss with Haley. Or the subsequent breakup, and the tone with which he spoke to you, making it very clear that while you had good intentions, you did not have the means to help him—no matter how hard you’d try, you would never be enough to soothe his heart.

Except he was here tonight, whether you liked it or not. And you could still feel the ghost of his hand around your waist. You had never known addiction before and would a drug addict had told you about their experience, you would have empathized with them of course, but not understood. If it’s an addiction and if it’s dangerous, then why keep doing it, even if it feels good?

Because. Because it felt so fucking good.

You were so lost in your thoughts, barely paying attention to wrapping your ankle, that you didn’t notice Hyunjin when he approached, holding two glasses. You jumped when you saw him, immediately telling yourself that your heart rate was increasing because he had surprised you and not because he looked exceptionally handsome in the warm lighting of the fireplace.

And certainly not because he was handing you a glass with a very familiar drink in it—you recognized it instantly as one of his signature drinks. He called it, simply, Merry Christmas. You had participated in its creation in the form of drinking many versions of it to review them. Sugar around the rim, some limoncello, a little bit (or a lot) of vodka, and a drop of vanilla syrup in some seltzer. But the best part was the maraschino cherry juice, which gave the cocktail its festive look along with a piece of rosemary resembling a little evergreen tree in the glass.

“There,” Hyunjin said, waiting for you to pick up your drink. He seemed to hesitate but ultimately went on, “I added some extra cherries in yours. I hear they’re very good at promoting the healing of ankles specifically.”

You stared at your glass and then at his own drink, which only had one maraschino cherry in it. As though you needed to make sure, you glanced around the room, trying to see how many the others had gotten. Because Hyunjin had put an entire mini-skewer of cherries in yours.

He used to do that all the time back at the restaurant. His special drinks. Just for you. They didn’t always contain alcohol but he always made up some scientific facts to justify them—to boost serotonin, to clear headaches, to ease a sore neck, to heal a cold. And you’d always accept the drinks with a witty remark and it forced a smile on your face, no matter what.

In hindsight, you couldn’t believe that you hadn’t noticed his feelings for you before it was almost too late. He hadn’t even been subtle about it, had he?

And there he was, doing it again. This time, though, your brain came to your defense—this wasn’t him flirting with you like it had been at the restaurant. This was simply Hyunjin trying to be nice after daring to show up here.

And yet, almost like muscle memory, your lips curved into a faint smile.

“I’d really love to see all these medical articles you read,” you retorted, accepting the drink from him. “It’s crazy all the things I learn with you. At this rate, you’re basically some sort of healer.”

Hyunjin seemed just as surprised as you to hear your response, but once the shock set in, he chuckled, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you my secrets,” he replied, sitting on the couch next to the cushions on which your ankle rested not long ago. “The more I tell you, the more dangerous it is for you. It’s best if you stay in the dark.”

“Sure thing.” You took a sip from the drink—it was ice cold and just as delicious as you remembered it. Or maybe even more. It had been so long. “I didn’t know there was a cocktail mafia out there. I got it—I won’t tell a soul.”

“I knew I could trust you.” Hyunjin winked at you, also tasting his drink, glancing at the others who were now preparing their board game on the table. “Seriously though, are you okay?” He motioned at your foot.

You rested it on the cushions again, lifting the leg of your pants to display it. It was definitely very swollen and a little bruising had started to appear in places. You winced, sucking air between your teeth, quickly drinking more in the hopes that the alcohol would help. “It could have been worse,” you said nonetheless. “I don’t think it’s broken.”

“Yeah, it looks exactly like the time you sprained it,” Hyunjin confirmed with a nod, observing it closely. “Give that to me. It needs to be wrapped quickly to control the swelling.” He showed you the bandages left on the couch next to you. “I think it’s better if someone does it for you.” He stopped then, averting his gaze. “I can get someone else if you want.”

Gun to your head, you would not have been able to understand addiction before tonight.

“It’s fine. Thank you.” You handed him the bandages, sitting more comfortably now. “You’re the healer, after all. Makes me wonder why you settled for bartending when you could be rich—like, a literal millionaire—performing miracles on the daily. You could have it all. A palace to live in, all the riches you can imagine, all the girls, too—”

You stopped mid-sentence, biting into a maraschino cherry, releasing its sweet juice on your tongue. It hadn’t really occurred to you that Hyunjin could very well be in a relationship right now. If it wasn’t Haley then it was someone else. Surely. A man like him—kind, funny, handsome, with a huge cock and the talent to use it. There was no way in hell he wasn’t seeing someone.

Hyunjin put his drink away, choosing to begin his task instead of responding. He gulped, reaching for your ankle, pausing just a few millimeters away from it almost like he was asking permission. He used to do that a lot. Except it was with his mouth on your pussy, and he did it to tease you just as much as to ask for your consent—because it turned him on a lot.

Just how much alcohol was in this damn drink?

You took another sip anyway, hoping that holding the glass in front of your face for a few seconds would allow for the dramatic flush that had appeared on it to fade away a little.

Slowly, carefully, Hyunjin lifted your foot to lay the bandage underneath your ankle. It quickly returned on the cushions, and if you were honest, it had caused you a lot of pain to move it and yet you found yourself wishing he would do it again. The sensation of his fingers on your skin was as frightening as it was intoxicating. It reminded you of when he would caress your leg, your calf, your ankle with the back of his fingers while the two of you lounged on the couch. Sometimes naked, sometimes not, just existing alongside one another, watching TV.

It reminded you of all the times he would wrap his fingers around your ankles, pulling them up, resting them on his shoulders so he could fuck you deeper.

Oh no. No no no. You couldn’t feel like this. You couldn’t even let those thoughts wander in your mind—it was too dangerous. The fact that he was here tonight was a coincidence, albeit a sinister one. It didn’t mean anything. He was nice to you because of his guilt and maybe because he had gotten over that dark episode in his life and he wanted some closure. It was hard to tell. In any case, none of this meant anything. Him being sweet. The maraschino cherries.

You couldn’t let it mean anything—because in less than forty-eight hours you would both leave this place and go on your separate ways. And you did not think you could go through it another time. You did not think you could lose him again. It might kill you this time. It really might.

Fortunately for you, however, a strong gust of wind blew over the mountain as you took a few more nervous sips of your drink, and the power went out.

There was only one second of complete silence before an uproar of terrified screams echoed from downstairs, where a bunch of people had been watching horror movies. Ultimately, Seungmin’s voice could be heard louder than the others as he urged people to ‘chill the fuck out’ because ‘it’s just a power outage’.

Minho cursed from the kitchen. “I can’t see shit.”

The cabin was very dark with the exception of the large fireplace in the living room and a few dim security lights here and there. Being so close to the fire, you could see Hyunjin very well—he did not seem bothered by the sudden turn of events, continuing his careful wrapping of your ankle, making sure to be as meticulous as he could be.

People downstairs quickly came back up, telling a tale of the power going out at the exact moment some disturbing scene happened in the movie, scaring all of them to death. Minho reminded everyone that an electrical generator would continue to give them power for the two fridges as well as one tank of hot water and that he did not want anybody arguing over that.

“We’ll still have food and be able to wash up,” he said while Felix was holding the flashlight on his phone over his shoulder to light up the counter where he was cutting up vegetables. “Nobody is allowed to take extensive showers like some people like to do. Okay?”

“This felt targeted, Lee,” Hyunjin chuckled, shaking his head.

Hyunjin was known for his very long and very warm showers—it had become a running joke among the employees. You giggled too, remembering the friendly bicker between these two back when you worked at the restaurant. But your amusement was cut short by the memory of Hyunjin’s bathroom after he exited his shower in the apartment you shared with him—he usually doodled something in the condensation that was covering the mirror. For you. A heart, a smiley face, or he’d just write I love you. You even made it a habit of going to see what the surprise was after his shower, even if you didn’t need to be in the bathroom.

You drank more, remaining quiet as everyone took place on the couch or on big cushions on the floor. By the time most were comfortably installed, your ankle was tightly wrapped and Hyunjin had even pressed more ice onto it.

He stayed there when he was done, sitting, and drinking in silence. You tried to ignore the curious glances, eyes fixated on the flames in the fireplace.

“It’s running late, we could just go to bed and hope the power is back by tomorrow,” Seungmin suggested.

“The heating system relies on electricity though,” Minho explained. “There are loads of blankets, but maybe it would be safer for some of us to sleep here in the living room by the fire?” He gulped nervously. “Especially those who, huh, aren’t sharing a bed with someone else. I’d hate for someone to freeze in their sleep.”

“Wow,” Jisung scoffed with a playful smile. “Looking out for your single-as-fuck friends. Truly heartwarming.”

“I’m just saying,” Minho responded, shrugging, but he was smiling too. “Those who want, we could go grab the mattresses upstairs?”

“OH MY GOD, A SLEEPOVER! YES!” Jisung exclaimed, pushing himself up even though it had not been a minute since he sat down. “Singles only. All of you who are fulfilled and content and happy can go freeze your asses upstairs.”

As usual, Jisung’s comment brought laughter to the group. Most of the guys were on mattress duty while others were trying to find all the extra blankets, or exchanging woolen socks to make sure everyone’s toes would be safe from the cold. Naturally, you were forbidden to move, so you just drank, each maraschino cherry reminding you of how alone you were.

And yet you were surrounded with all of your friends. People you cared about and who cared about you. People who called you on your birthday, who sent you memes in the middle of the night as a love language, who brought you soup when you had the flu. It wasn’t fair to them. This loneliness that you felt. And you didn’t want any of it, but it was stuck somewhere in your throat, slowly but surely preventing your lungs from getting the oxygen they needed.

And here they were, devising architectural plans for a pillow fort while you were holding your tears. You wouldn’t have called yourself a bad person or a bad friend before but it was tonight that you realized that you were one. Because it felt like so little mattered since the breakup. Months. Months of just watching life happen around you—as the audience, not the actor.

It just seemed like your existence itself was lackluster now that you had tasted life with your soulmate. Everything you did, you did it without Hyunjin. Without Hyunjin as a qualitative, descriptive way to describe the state you were in. You woke up without Hyunjin. You celebrated your birthday without Hyunjin. You went to the grocery store without Hyunjin. You went to work. You visited your mother for dinner. You went out for drinks with friends. You watched the new season of your favorite TV show.

You existed without Hyunjin.

But it just wasn’t the same.

It soon became clear that Hyunjin intended to be present for Jisung’s sleepover, which made you panic on the inside. On one hand was your ankle and you weren’t sure how well you’d do in the stairs. On the other hand was the dreadful notion of sleeping in the same room as him. It wouldn’t matter how many people would be there also—you would be able to recognize his breathing patterns, his soft, sleepy sighs when he rolled over.

You had never been one to sleep easily before him. You’d spend hours just waiting for sleep to come. And then there had been Hyunjin and it used to feel like you didn’t have enough hours in a day to be with him. Like you didn’t even want to sleep at night. You’d lay in bed, sleepy, often a little sore between your legs but full of cum, just existing alongside him. Listening to him fall asleep. His arms around you. It was impossible not to drift to sleep then, because you had never felt safer than in these moments.

Needless to say—now that you slept without Hyunjin, you did not sleep very much at all.

Carefully, you removed your ankle from the cushions, preparing to get up—Hyunjin spotted you, quickly dropping the pillows he was holding. “Wait! You can’t do that!”

You rolled your eyes—it seemed easier to act annoyed at him than you let him show the true state of your heart. “I sure as hell can. I can’t spend the next week sitting on that couch. I need to pee.”

He grunted something under his breath. “Alright. Let’s go. You always have to pee.”

“Oh shut up,” you retorted, nudging him and yet still allowing him to wrap his arm around you once again, helping you up. He quickly pulled away, letting you lean against the wall. “I’ll manage. Thank you very much.”

You pathetically limped your way to one of the downstairs bathrooms, locking yourself in there using your phone for light, quickly splashing cool water all over your face. You should have tried to leave. By now, you might have been in a motel somewhere, all alone, away from Hyunjin and all the memories he brought back.

You were walking around the bathroom, testing whether you could make it upstairs or not, when someone knocked at the door.

“Coming!”

“It’s me.” Hyunjin. “I just figured, like, do you want me to go get your toothbrush and stuff from upstairs? Maybe?”

What the fuck was going on? Was that going to happen? Being… friends? With him? After everything that had happened? Despite all the complicated feelings you had?

You opened the door. “It’s fine, I’ll sleep upstairs,” you assured.

He raised an eyebrow, looking at you and then down at your ankle. “Not a good idea.”

“It’s fine,” you repeated, going past him, making your way slowly and painfully toward the stairs. He followed you closely—you could feel his hands ghosting you as he prepared to hold you if you collapsed.

Maybe it made you want to collapse.

“Hey, are you not coming to my sleepover?” Jisung called. He was busy making the beds with Felix. You counted five of them which could only mean one thing. “I told them to bring a mattress for you. Thought it would be best for your foot.”

You stood there, basking in the warmth of the fireplace. Sure. Sure, it all looked super cozy. Part of you wanted to sleep on the cold hard floor upstairs. Another part of you wanted the exact opposite.

“Listen to your friend,” Hyunjin advised. This time, he pressed his hand on your lower back, sending your mind spinning and your heart racing. His hand was so big and so warm. Just above your ass. “I’ll go get your stuff upstairs. You really need to be careful, there was a lot of swelling.”

You almost asked Jisung to go instead but if you had to be totally honest with yourself, if someone was going to look into your luggage and see your underwear, you’d rather it was somebody who had once been intimate with it. So you just nodded. “Call me when you’re up there, I’ll guide you.”

“Does that mean you packed at the last minute and everything is chaos in your bag?” Hyunjin playfully asked. “When will you learn?”

You pushed him, limping towards a couch in a quiet corner. It was a little farther away from the fireplace and all the action, but you could use the peace, even if it was a little cool. “I don’t think you have any lessons to give me, Hwang. Just how many airpods have you lost by now? We must be at five or six pairs, right? More? When will you learn?”

Hyunjin stuck out his tongue at you, choosing to climb upstairs instead of responding to you. You sat down, breathing deeply. You couldn’t let this go any further. You couldn’t even be his friend, not even if it somehow turned out to be true that he had never cheated on you. You couldn’t watch him fall in love with another. Certain things are just too heavy to bear.

Jisung pretended to need something on the table to have an excuse to stand closer to you. “Looks like things are good between you t—”

“Don’t,” you cut him off. “There are no ‘things’ between us. I just decided to be civil, same as him. It’d be a shame to waste Minho’s weekend. He spent a lot of money on this.”

“Hm-hm.” You heard Jisung suppress his laughter. “Sure thing.” He turned to you. “Look—I really think you two need to talk. Let me finish,” he added when he saw that you were going to interrupt him again. “I get it, he hurt you. But you don’t see the way he looks at you, do you?”

Your phone rang in your pocket—you pulled it out only to see Hyunjin’s number appear on the screen. It had been months since you had seen it there and it made your heart flutter.

“He doesn’t look at me in any special way,” you replied, suddenly very aware of the taste of maraschino cherries lingering on your tongue.

But Jisung was gone already, returned with the others in their quest to create the most comfortable sleeping nook known to mankind. You allowed yourself a few seconds to pretend Jisung hadn’t said anything and took the call.

“I’m with your bag,” Hyunjin said immediately. “Where’s your toothbrush?”

You tried to remember the moment when you threw everything in your luggage. “Probably at the bottom. I have a small toiletries bag. Bring the whole bag.”

You heard shuffling and brushing noises—it became obvious Hyunjin had put you on speaker, probably using the light from his phone to see inside your bag as he searched it. “Got it! What do your PJs look like?”

“It’s just a pair of dark blue shorts and a black tank top. It has a jellyfish on it.” You definitely had not planned on being seen by Hyunjin in your pajamas. You might have picked something a little more… a little less… simple.

Or not. Because none of this mattered. He probably definitely had a girlfriend and nothing was happening.

“Found them,” Hyunjin replied. “Love the tank top, it’s really cool. Do you want socks?”

“Yes, the fuzzy ones. Bring my underwear too.” You sighed, burying your face in your hand.

There was a silence on the other end. Just a few seconds. “Which one? Oh, this one’s cute. With the sheep.”

Yes of course. Out of all the panties you brought today, he had to come across the ones with a sleeping sheep pattern on them. “Sure, whichever.” You sighed. “That’s all, thanks. Oh—wait, I have a power bank too. We could charge our phones. In the left pocket I think?”

You really had thrown everything in there at the last minute. You tried to remember a little better but Hyunjin let out a strange sound—a gasp of sorts—and it snapped you back to reality, putting all of your memories exactly where they belonged.

No. No, your power bank was not in the left pocket.

“You still have that thing?” Hyunjin asked with an intonation that was impossible to decode.

That thing as in the bullet vibrator he gifted you for your two-month anniversary. That thing as in, that bullet vibrator that you had put in the left pocket of your bag just in case things were a little boring up here.

Flames engulfed your head whole—you sat there, speechless, trying to find something to say. But really you were remembering the evening he gave it to you. And the things he had done to you with it that very night. Edging you and teasing you until there were tears in your eyes, until you begged him to let you cum. Playing with you using that toy and his mouth and his fingers and the tip of his cock. Sinking into you only when you were on the brink of insanity, finally giving you what you needed, fucking you into a delightful bliss.

“Well, it still works,” you heard yourself say. “Would be a waste to throw it away.” That wasn’t even a lie—that little thing packed a punch.

Hyunjin chuckled. “Want me to bring it to you?”

You clicked your tongue. “You’re hilarious. Maybe you want some alone time with it? If I recall well, you probably wouldn’t be against it.” And you knew that your memories were accurate—how could you forget brushing the vibrating toy up and down Hyunjin’s straining cock, slowly, languidly, just so you could collect his precum and lick it off him?

“So funny, ha-ha-ha. Alright, be right there.” Hyunjin hung up. You stared at the dark kitchen in front of you, unable to grasp onto the thoughts that visited your mind. And yet it was all that you wanted. It was all that you needed—to figure out what was going on in your head and in your heart.

Hyunjin came back wearing his own lounging outfit—just sweatpants and a graphic t-shirt with a hoodie, nothing unlike him. He also gave you a small, battery-powered camping light which he had found upstairs, but he barely looked at you as he handed you the pile of clothes he went to fetch. To be fair, you barely looked at him, too—it was already a lot to find yourself stuck on a snowed-in mountain with your ex, after all, and the fact that he had just gone through your stuff, panties and vibrator included, did not help, and you eagerly locked yourself in the bathroom, glad to be away from the others for a few minutes.

As you changed, it became obvious that the sleepover had already started in the living room. Jisung had apparently officially closed the door upstairs, ‘blocking’ the access to his Singles-Only night. Felix and Seungmin were arguing playfully about video games. You listened to their conversation with a smile on your lips, choosing products at random from your toiletries bag, just whatever you needed to freshen up a little.

In truth, you knew that this uncertainty was no better than whatever had been occurring in your mind before. A discussion had been launched—only it wasn’t even a discussion. It was just Hyunjin dropping information on you without you having any chance to respond. But you had questions. You had many of them. And either you were getting answers tonight or you weren’t going to sleep at all.

As soon as you were cleaned up and cozy in your pajamas, you returned to the main room only to find Hyunjin alone in the dim kitchen, adding slices of orange into a pot on the gas stove. You looked on the other side of the cabin where both Jisung and Seungmin were sitting around Felix, who was playing on his Switch. The three of them paid no attention to you whatsoever.

With a deep breath, you painfully made your way to the counter and sat on the nearest stool. Hyunjin glanced behind his shoulder as he stirred whatever was in the saucepan—but from here, you could smell his mulled wine. His recipe was the best you ever tasted.

You sat in silence for a minute, trying to find the right words, realizing there were no right words.

“It smells good,” you said in a low voice.

“Thank you. I put loads of oranges, just the way you like it,” Hyunjin replied, turning to you. There were only a couple of candles lighting up the entire kitchen and you watched as the flames danced on his skin. “And extra honey, too.”

It was strange. It was a little messed up. To act like this when he hadn’t seen you in months. When he had dumped you on a cold February night.

“What you said earlier…” You averted your gaze, reliving the memory. “Was it true? Was it really really true?”

Hyunjin frowned as he tried to understand exactly what you were referring to. “What do you mean?”

“That you didn’t cheat on me.” Your voice was barely more than a whisper. “That you didn’t want to.”

He did not speak just yet—instead, Hyunjin grabbed two mugs and carefully filled them with warm wine using a ladle. He slid one over to you. “Careful, it’s hot.”

You wrapped the mug with your hands to warm them up, inhaling the familiar scent. It smelled like winter nights and sitting on the balcony, dressed up from head to toe, just to drink mulled wine and kiss under the snow.

“I swear,” Hyunjin responded, leaning on the counter on the other side of it, looking right into your eyes. “I promise you. I made mistakes—I made all the mistakes, actually, except that one.”

You didn’t want to believe him. But you believed him.

“I… I was so upset after what I had seen at the bakery,” Hyunjin explained. “I couldn’t believe you would cheat on me. I didn’t really believe it. I was just hurt. My mind was dark. Which is not an excuse, by the way. I’m just explaining.”

You took the smallest sip of wine, careful not to burn your tongue. It was warm but it wasn’t hot—suddenly, you remembered Hyunjin’s ability to always serve a beverage at the right temperature.

You did believe him—but there was another, darker question on your mind.

“Can I ask you something else?” You bravely found Hyunjin’s eyes—he tilted his head to the side, nodding as an invitation for you to go on. “What was it, then? Is it something I said, something I did? Something I didn’t do? What is it that made you fall out of love with me?”

Hyunjin recoiled, straightening up, looking away, obviously troubled. Maybe he wasn’t ready to tell you about that yet but selfishly you didn’t care very much. You just needed to hear it from him. He would, of course, word it kindly. But you needed him to tell you about the ways you had failed him.

“Guys,” he called out, turning away and grabbing more mugs. “I made mulled wine. Who wants some?”

“I’ll have some, thanks, man.” Seungmin pushed himself up, making his way to the kitchen to get his wine.

As though they were waiting for someone to get up for them, Felix and Jisung asked him to bring them a cup too, causing more friendly banter.

“How’s your ankle?” Seungmin asked you while he was waiting for Hyunjin to fill the mugs—and he was really taking his time, stopping after each mug to gulp down a lot of wine as though he needed to make sure he wouldn’t remember tonight.

“Not too bad,” you replied, your voice weak. “It could be worse.”

“Good. Thanks a lot,” Seungmin added when Hyunjin slid a small, Santa-themed platter before him. He had placed the mugs of wine on it as well as a few chocolates. “It’s good to have you back, and I’m not saying that just because of the drinks.”

“Yeah he is saying it just because of the drinks,” Jisung said from the living room, causing more chuckles.

Seungmin walked away, calling Jisung a few names. You focused on your own wine, drinking some more of it, but it did not have the effect you were hoping it would have. You shivered, suddenly becoming a little too aware of the lack of proper heating in the place. Everything—save for the bickering—was quiet, allowing you to hear the howling wind outside. You drank more to warm up. While you were definitely starting to feel the buzz from the drinks, you were still way too sober for this.

“You should have brought winter clothes,” Hyunjin reprimanded but his voice was gentle. He shook his hoodie off himself, removing it and quickly resting it on your shoulders before you could say anything. “And, by the way, nothing.”

You frowned, confused and shocked. The hoodie’s soft fabric caressed your skin, warm and comforting. It smelled like him. Like Hyunjin. You slid one arm into it, then another, unable to resist it. “Nothing what?”

“You asked what made me fall out of love. My answer is nothing did.” Hyunjin kept himself busy by cleaning up the saucepan and stove.

Nothing.

Nothing as in it happened without a reason? Or nothing as in he didn’t fall out of love? Those were two very different things.

“But you broke up,” you managed, your hands trembling.

“Because I thought it was the best thing for you.” Hyunjin left the stove, standing right next to your stool, his hair falling over his face a little. “Do you understand? It’s not something you did. You were perfect. You were… You were too good for me. Can’t you see that? It wasn’t because I didn’t love you anymore. It was because I loved you that I let you go.”

A strange mix of rage and anguish rose within you. You stared at the bottom of your mug where only a little wine was left—you emptied it, still deep in your thoughts. This couldn’t possibly be happening.

“So you’re telling me,” you started, your voice low, “that you were still in love with me on that Valentine’s Day? And you broke up with me for my own good?”

He gulped and bit his lip. It was dark but you could still see the flush on his cheeks. “Yeah.”

You stood up, unable to stay still any longer. You went to the sink to let your empty mug soak and limped back towards the nearest window just to watch the blizzard. Hyunjin followed you quietly.

“That decision wasn’t up to you, Hyunjin,” you whispered. “You made it, but it wasn’t yours to make. I was and still am more than capable of deciding what’s good or what’s bad for me.” You looked behind you, at this handsome man hiding behind his hair. “We were so good together and you ruined it.”

He let out a shaky breath. “I know,” he muttered. He hesitated but not for long. “You’re the best thing that happened to me.” You turned to him, trying to see the expression on his face better. “It broke me. It took me months of therapy to feel almost like a person again. Months to realize the fact that I broke up because I felt inadequate and that instead of trying to be better, I went the cowardly way.”

Therapy? “Hyunjin—”

He shook his head, his long hair moving with him. “I know I have no right to but I want to apologize. I’m so sorry. I’m not asking for forgiveness. Just saying sorry.”

You listened to the room around you. There was laughter coming from the living room and the crackling of the fireplace and the wind outside. But your heartbeat was louder. He had gone to therapy? Hyunjin?

Inadequate?

“Hyunjin,” you breathed, reaching for his face. He flinched—barely, but he flinched, undoubtedly remembering the slap he had earned himself on that awful night. Still, you pushed a strand of his hair away, displaying his big, sad eyes. The flames of the candles flickered in the tears collecting there. You did not know what to say. “It broke me, too.”

He pressed his lips together, holding his tears. You cupped his face briefly, just to feel him under your fingertips. When your hand retreated, he touched his cheek as though he couldn’t believe it. “I’m so sorry. It’s such a waste. It was all for nothing.”

Any animosity you might have felt for him had melted a while ago. Your heart felt like the first day of spring with remnants of snow and puddles of water on the ground, but with a bright blue sky and the sun warming up the world again. Hyunjin had not cheated on you. He had been a little bit stupid because he did not respond well to pressure.

He had hurt himself hurting you.

“It wasn’t for nothing,” you replied. “I know you were so stressed because of the bar and I should have helped you more, I just didn’t know how, I should have known how. But don’t say it was for nothing. Nightcap is your baby, and—”

“No,” Hyunjin interrupted you. When you tried to insist, he shushed you more insistently and this time it was him who framed your face with his large hand, cupping your cheek, resting his thumb on your trembling lips.

A jolt of electricity went through your body. How many times had he held you like this? Exactly like this? Seconds before he would pull you into a kiss and say something sweet or something nasty to you. Time stopped for a while—not for the rest of the world, no. The snowstorm was still raging outside and the guys were still playing in the living room and the flames were still flickering on the candles and in the fireplace. Time stopped for you and for Hyunjin only—time stopped being linear. Instead, it brought you back, just for a few instants, to the past. To the way things used to be when you were still whole.

Hyunjin looked into your eyes as though they were a work of art in a museum that he wanted to study. His gaze trailed down to your lips, lingering there much longer than it should, before returning where it was.

“Yes,” you insisted but your face was so warm you could feel it. “You worked so hard for it and none of what you sacrificed for it was for nothing.”

“I put it up for sale some time ago,” Hyunjin revealed, struggling to get the words out. “I don’t want it anymore.”

It would have felt the same if he had been the one to slap you in the face right then and there. You pulled away, the intimate bubble you two were in breaking instantly. You whispered an outraged cry at him. “LIKE HELL YOU’RE SELLING IT!” You pushed him away almost like he had attacked you. And he sort of had. “There’s your blood, sweat, and tears in this place, you’re not giving up on it. I forbid it.” You became aware that the living room was eerily quiet all of a sudden.

“It’s already on the market. Besides, I’m not changing my mind.” Hyunjin shrugged, looking over your shoulder to stare at the snow. “You’re wrong. What I sacrificed for it was too high a price.”

“But it was your dream.” You could not believe you were having this conversation.

“A dream can become pointless,” Hyunjin replied. “Mine did. That’s why I called Minho. I wanted to ask if he knew anyone who might be interested in buying. And if he’d have me back at the restaurant.”

“This is not happening.” You shook your head, crossing your arms over your chest. “Is Felix in charge of selling it? FELIX?”

“There’s people in bed upstairs,” Hyunjin urged you but you were already gone—you did your best to get to the living room as quickly as possible.

Felix had paused the game, leaving his Switch on the coffee table. “What’s going on?”

“Are you selling his bar?” Felix’s facial expression turned suspiciously contrite—he did not need to say anything, you already had your answer. “What the fuck? Isn’t he your best friend or something? How can you let him do that? Don’t you remember all the hard work he put into it? All the love? You were there, same as me!”

Felix looked somewhere next to you where you could only suppose Hyunjin was standing. All the while, you noticed Jisung’s concerned look as he observed the scene.

Still, it was Seungmin who spoke first. “People change their minds sometimes.”

“But not about this,” you insisted. “This is the equivalent of a mother selling her child.”

“Hyunjin thought long and hard about this,” Felix explained. “He tried many things, but…”

“But at the end of the day, no matter what I tried or even what my damn therapist would tell me,” Hyunjin finished for him, “the fire was gone, and it was all meaningless.”

You found nothing to say about that. In fact you found nothing to say about anything. After letting the silence grow heavy the more time passed, Jisung tried to break the uneasiness that had infiltrated the room. “My laptop’s got a full battery,” he said. “How about we put on a movie and try to get some sleep? I bet Minho’s gonna be working in that kitchen at 5 AM tomorrow.”

Everybody agreed a little too eagerly, however your voice still hadn’t returned. You left the guys while they were setting up the laptop and choosing a movie to retrieve your power bank in order to charge your phone overnight. Nightcap. It simply could not be gone. It made no sense—the more you thought about it the less sense it made, in fact. Hyunjin had invested a lot of money in it. Who in their right mind would waste this away?

“Dude, I’m not sleeping next to him, sorry,” you heard Seungmin. “We all know he basically runs a marathon in his sleep every night.”

Hyunjin clicked his tongue. “I just move around a little bit, you’re being dramatic. Fine, take this bed then.”

The exchange brought a little bit of warmth back into you as you recalled Hyunjin’s insane sleeping habits. It’s not that he talked in his sleep or that he sleepwalked, but he would go to bed wearing something with a certain amount of blankets and wake up the next morning butt naked with only a quarter of one blanket left on the bed, covering nothing at all. It was funny but it still resulted in you being rather cold, especially during the winter months, so you had to sleep in separate blankets than him.

God, you missed him.

You still missed him even though he was right there, just a few meters away.

Most of the kerfuffle was over by the time you joined the living room again where the five mattresses had been laid down next to one another. Felix slept on the far left, then Seungmin, then Jisung. The next bed was empty, and the one on the far right was occupied by Hyunjin who was scrolling his phone. He looked around as you approached, realizing that nobody had taken the space beside him.

There were three awkward seconds before he came to help you sit down to make sure you didn’t strain your ankle too much. “I’m sure Ji would trade places with you,” he told you as you sat down on the mattress. It was soft but not too much, and comfy. The blankets were smooth.

You probably should trade places with Jisung. For your own sake. “I’m good if you are,” you said nonetheless. It must be the wine. “Besides, I’m far more used to your antics than any of these guys.”

Hyunjin let out a faint chuckle. “Do any of them know you snore?”

Your mouth fell open in utter shock. “I do not!”

“Sometimes you do when you’re really tired,” Hyunjin recalled, lying down in his own bed. He spoke to Jisung behind you. “If it gets too annoying, you’ll have to tickle her until she wakes up and stops.”

“How is that fair? I don’t go around and reveal all your secrets?!” You lay down too, pulling the blankets over you, immediately reaching a level of snugness not yet known to mankind. The fire was keeping the entire room warm. “I didn’t tell anybody when you cried at the movie theater watching Inside Out!”

Felix actually spat out the water he was drinking. Seungmin begged for details but you decided to leave it there because it was funnier this way. Jisung started the movie and everyone settled in. You had already seen this movie but it was one that you liked so you paid attention, watching as well as you could from your mattress on Jisung’s laptop screen.

It was unfortunately Jisung who fell asleep first—so much for his big sleepover. By then, your comfort levels had gone down significantly due to your sore ankle. You winced in pain, trying to stuff some of the thick blankets underneath your foot to elevate it a little.

Hyunjin rested himself on one elbow, leaning next to you. “Are you alright?” he whispered. His breath smelled like sweet mint—he was still using the same toothpaste as he used to. “Does it hurt?”

He was very close. Close enough that you could see the texture of his lips. “A little. It’s okay.”

He wasted no time. “Hold on.” In less than two seconds, Hyunjin was up again and going to the freezer to fill a plastic bag with ice.

When he returned, he kneeled down at the foot of your bed to apply the ice under your covers—he also used one of the pillows from the couch to elevate your ankle. Your heart skipped a beat every time he touched you. “Better?”

“So much better. Thanks.”

Hyunjin nodded and looked at the other guys. With a playful roll of the eyes, he simply closed the laptop’s lid.

“They’re all asleep. Children,” he giggled under his breath, returning to his bed. And you would not admit this to anybody but you could swear he was much closer to you than he had been before. “Goodnight. And wake me up if you need to get up. I know you’ll have to pee like a million times.”

You elbowed him gently yet firmly. “Goodnight.” Without the laptop screen lighting up the room, the whole place seemed warmer, like amber was coating everything.

You closed your eyes and yet you knew sleep would not find you. You were still thinking about Nightcap and what it meant for Hyunjin.

And his arm was dangerously close to yours. If you moved even just one inch, your hand would brush his.

After it had been agreed it was best for everybody if you two slept under separate blankets, Hyunjin had gotten into the habit of finding your hand under all of those layers separating you and holding it as the two of you drifted to sleep.

You missed him.

You missed being loved by him.

“Hyunjin,” you mouthed, your mind haunted by visions of Hyunjin behind the bar at Nightcap, mixing his kick ass drinks, chatting with his favorite regulars.

“What? Already?” He rolled on his side with a puzzled expression on his face. You had been right—his hand ghosted yours as he did so but he made sure to keep it away. “You need to get your kidneys looked at.”

“Oh shut up, I don’t need to pee.” You rolled on your side too so you would face him. “You can’t sell Nightcap.”

His eyes darkened. He licked his teeth, sighing. “I’m selling Nightcap. Case closed. Now, sleep.” He closed his eyelids, almost like a child would when they pretended to sleep.

You tugged at the sleeve of his t-shirt. “Don’t play with me. Look at me in the eyes, Hyunjin, and tell me you no longer want to have your own bar.”

It took a while but Hyunjin yielded, opening his eyes, his gaze finding yours. He stared at you then slid even closer—he was on the very edge of his mattress. “I no longer want to have my own bar.”

“But why? Everything you did… It’s the best damn bar in town.” The conversation was barely audible and yet you two understood each other perfectly. “I know it isn’t easy, but you can do this.”

Hyunjin held his breath for a few seconds. “Nobody ever believed in me as much as you did,” he muttered, dejected.

You clicked your tongue. “Bullshit. That isn’t true. Everyone believed and still believe in you. Felix! And Minho, Chan, Changb—”

He shook his head, disagreeing. “No. I mean. Yes, but it’s not the same. They believed in my business, in my drinks and in my chances at building something good. But you, you believed in me.”

It pulled the air out of your lungs—you stayed there, motionless, your gaze slowly blurring as tears pricked at your eyes. You hated this. You hated all of this.

You hated speaking in the past tense with Hyunjin.

“I still do,” you managed, exhaling shakily. You closed your eyes in the hopes it would stop you from crying.

It did not. You tried burying your face into your pillow but Hyunjin was quicker—you jumped a little when he touched you, wiping your tears with the back of his fingers before caressing your cheek with his thumb. A strong chill went through your spine, tickling you all over your body. Especially between your legs.

Oh fuck.

“See? It’s just how I said. Nobody believes in me the way you do,” Hyunjin whispered. He must have gotten closer because you could feel his breath on the damp skin of your face. “I’m selling Nightcap because it lost its meaning. I was not quite enough for it back when I had you by my side. Now that I’m alone, I’m properly inadequate.”

You opened your eyes not minding the tears anymore. You couldn’t shake this anger inside you. “You gave up on me,” you said. “And now you’re going to give up on your dream, too?”

Hyunjin remained quiet for an instant, his gaze dancing from your eyes to your lips to his hand, still very close to yours. “I had the idea for Nightcap when I realized I was in love with you and I didn’t think you would ever return my feelings,” Hyunjin explained. “I couldn’t stand the idea of working at the same place as you. It was torture. But by some miracle, you did fall in love with me. Nightcap—that dream—and you became intertwined in my head. Don’t you get it? The tables have turned now—I can’t stand being in a place where you are not.”

He wiped your tears again, taking his time, caressing your lips. The tingling came back in your extremities while a distracting pressure pulled at your loins. You had to resist the urge to kiss his hand. You had to resist the urge to forget all the pain you had been through and kiss him.

“Can I please ask you something? Just one thing,” Hyunjin went on, tucking your hair behind your ear like he used to. “But only tell me the truth. If you’re going to say anything but the truth I don’t want to hear it.”

You nodded, wondering if he could feel your pulse through your skin.

“Have you been happy? Have you been living a good life, falling in love, making friends, enjoying each day?”

This hurt a whole lot more than your sprained ankle. This hurt more than a blade through the heart. A blade through the heart was swift, merciful. This was more like a serrated knife wielded by some psychopath. Your reflex was to retreat both of your arms underneath your blankets as though it would protect you.

The truth. “I’ll tell you if you tell me,” you chose to say.

He thought about it. “No. I haven’t been happy, but it’s a bit better with the meds that the psychiatrist prescribed.” He licked his lips, a slight frown appearing between his brows. “There hasn’t been anybody else. Your turn now.”

He was single? Not just single—he hadn’t seen anyone else since last Valentine’s Day? Hyunjin? This young god? Business owner? Handsome as hell? Charming without even trying to be? How could it even be?

You took some time to ponder over it. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what it felt like to be happy. I remember moments of it, but it’s like they happened to somebody else, or like I saw it in a movie. My heart forgot how to be anything but heavy.”

This seemed to make him sad. “Have you fallen in love?”

Your body was warm under the blankets but you refused to take off Hyunjin’s hoodie. You let his scent invade you. You let it remind you of the first time he kissed you.

“No. My heart forgot how to do that, too.”

Hyunjin said nothing but his eyes did not leave you. You felt his hand sneak underneath your covers, searching for yours—he held it when he found it, squeezing it gently. “Sleep,” he whispered.

Muscle memory is one hell of a thing. Despite the turmoil within you and despite the unexpected fire between your legs, the familiar feeling of your hand in Hyunjin’s, joined together under a separate layer of blankets, appeased you. Or maybe it was the wine. And the drink before that. But your eyelids became heavy and your chest a little lighter.

Maybe it was just a dream, but you felt Hyunjin press his lips on your forehead, whispering inaudible things as you surrendered to sleep.

Maybe it was just a dream.

to be continued...

Note: Happy holidays everyone! I have been working on this for a while and as I mentioned in the masterlist, I truly intended on releasing everything as a one-shot for Christmas. Unfortunately there have been complications at work and I had to pick up a few additional shifts... So instead of rushing or not finishing it on time, I've separated the story in two parts!

It was great to revisit bartender hyun<3 it made me very nostalgic from the period of time when I originally wrote Just stay with me. I'd like to say thank you to all of my readers, of course, but especially those who have been sticking around with me since then or even before! But thank you to everyone and to those who give me and my stories some love. Thank you for your kind words and for supporting me. I appreciate it <3

I will try to release part two asap!! Let's pray that things settle down at work.. You guys take care!

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#my lawyer WILL be in touch #miscommunication #she's such a bitch #im supposed to be studying rn #but unfortunately angst is far more interesting than sensory receptors

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