Chapter 24 #4
“You think I don’t understand what it’s like to be reduced to a headline?” The words were a whisper, I couldn’t seem to force any power behind them with the lump that had formed in my throat.
“I think you can walk away from it,” he said, and the words had an accusatory edge that felt like they might cut me if I got too close. “I can’t.”
“You’re not being fair.” My voice trembled, or maybe that was my chin, I couldn’t tell.
“What is not fair is not being in control of my own image, and now, apparently, having to hear my own yeochin tell me I’m being unfair.”
“I’m not telling you-”
“Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not defending him! I just don’t think he deserves to be called an a-”
“You don’t even know him!”
“Actually, I do!” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could catch them. They detonated on impact like little firecrackers.
The following silence was so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
“How? How do you know him?” Jihoon’s voice was so low it didn’t sound right.
“It’s just… we spoke occasionally at ENT, you know that.”
“And?” He prompted, hearing what I hadn’t said.
My eyes slid closed, and I gave myself a moment to remember that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Except, maybe I should have told him.
“He’s called me. Just a couple of times. We’ve… talked.”
Jihoon was quiet, and I could almost hear the words rotating in his mind.
“Were you ever going to tell me that?”
I took a breath, steeling myself. “Joon, it wasn’t a secret, it just never came up.”
I hadn’t told him because I hadn’t wanted to pile another thing on his plate.
It was a weak argument, and I knew it. I shouldn’t have kept it from him.
I should have trusted him to trust me, and, if I was really honest with myself, I hadn’t wanted to argue about it, because I’d known how he would react.
I’d made it worse, but it was too late to fix it.
“Never came up?” He laughed incredulously.
“Jihoon, it’s not a big deal-”
“Not a big deal? That gaesaeggi is calling my yeochin and it’s ‘not a big deal’?”
My mind whirled a mile a minute, stuttering over the words. Something about a dog? Girlfriend was the only word I was sure about.
“Jihoon, don’t twist it,” I pleaded. I almost blurted out that I’d thought he’d only called me because he was lonely, but this time I stopped the words before they could escape. It felt wrong to admit something like that to someone who clearly hated Tae so much.
“It’s not how you think,” I said instead, “he actually wanted to help. He thought I should tell you about what’s been going on with me, that it would take your mind off every-”
He interrupted me again, too far gone to let me get the words out.
“So now you’re telling him things about me?”
I felt my patience slip from being backed into a corner.
“Why are you twisting this into something it’s not?”
My fingers dug into my leg, and I forced my hand to open as it cramped.
“It is something,” he insisted. His voice had an odd-sounding whine to it, like he was straining to get the words out. “You’re defending him. You’re talking to him behind my back. Do you know how this feels? Why do you put everyone first except me?”
I was stunned into silence. My mouth opened and closed half a dozen times, but for all the words I’d accidentally said during the course of this argument, I had nothing now, because how could he think that?
Jihoon growled, an unintelligible sound that was half-frustration and half-anguish before hurling a stream of Korean into the air that I had no chance of catching.
I sniffed, running the back of my hand across my cheeks.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My voice shook, and it was an effort to push the words past my lips.
He cursed, and though it was in Korean, I understood it just fine. Then he said something I didn’t understand, even though it was in perfect English.
“That’s because only one of us is actually trying to speak the same language.”
It felt like a slap. All the feelings of inadequacy came flooding in, despite all my early morning Korean lessons.
I was trying. I was trying so hard to remember that he was hurting – had been hurting for months, but at what point did that stop being an excuse?
I closed my eyes, tried to breathe, tried to remember I had hurt him, too.
The silence seemed to stretch between us, growing thinner and thinner with each passing second until it began to feel like a elastic band. Ready to snap.
He sighed.
“Kaiya, I’m sorry, I should not-”
“Don’t.” I surprised myself when the word seemed to say itself, more so when they kept going. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can do this.”
I was so exhausted I could barely think past the way my heart thumped, trapped in a cage of bones, the only thing holding it in my body.
He was silent again, until he wasn’t.
“This fight? Or us?”
“I don’t know.” I regretted the words the second they were out, because that wasn’t at all what I meant. I didn’t think.
I heard him inhale sharply, and gasp, like he couldn’t breathe.
When he next spoke though, the words were clear.
“If you don’t know, then the answer is no. Let’s end this.”
The world spun on its axis.
“What?” The word caught in my throat and choked me.
“This.” I heard him swallow. “Us. We’re not working anymore.”
I hunched over, the weight in my chest pulling me down.
“You want to break up?” Had I said that? I couldn’t tell.
“Yes.”
“No. Joon, no. We’re… we’re just mad,” I stuttered, just as my heart seemed to stutter, an erratic staccato beat that was in real danger of faltering until it stopped. “Let’s just-”
“I’m sick of being mad, and you’re not here-”
We couldn’t seem to stop talking over each other, a constant struggle for words and meaning.
“It won’t be forever,” I pleaded, “they say in the new year-”
“I don’t want to wait anymore. I didn’t want to be apart. I never wanted this. I don’t want to wait anymore. I don’t want to live under the constant threat of exposure.”
His words hit so viscerally, the detonation threw up questions, denials, expulsions of words like the ash that smothered the air after a volcanic eruption.
“I had to leave!” Desperation tasted bitter in my mouth.
“I know.” He sounded gentle, like he wanted to comfort me with his tone, like he knew his words hurt. “You made a choice.”
“Not to leave you!” The words clawed their way up my throat, racing to meet him, to make him understand.
“It was the same thing.”
I slid to the floor, grasping at the duvet, but it wouldn’t hold me.
“Joon-”
“No, Kaiya. We’re just making this harder than it should be. It’s too much. I don’t want this anymore. I’m sorry.”
The line dropped.
I tried to call back, my heart pounding in my ears as it rang, begging him to pick up. He didn’t.
I tried again, and again, until eventually the call wouldn’t connect.
I sent him a desperate message, begging to talk it through.
I waited for minutes that felt like hours. He never replied.
I felt it then, the switch, a train changing track, or the definitive click like the lid closing on a box that had contained the narrative of the future I had mapped out for us. A future that never would be.
I broke apart, shattering as effectively as a smashed mirror, the broken pieces of myself reflecting back like millions of tiny could-have-beens.