Chapter 32 #3
We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the ambient noise of Glastonbury filter in through the thin walls. Even here, in the most exclusive area of the site, it was never really quiet.
“Go on then,” he said suddenly, before finishing off his bottle. “You owe me a sob story. Tit for tat, Pom.”
I rolled my eyes, but he was right. That was the deal. I took a few moments to get the story into the right order, shuffling around the details to bridge the gaps for the details I would omit.
“It’s actually way less dramatic than yours,” I warned, but his only response was to get up and grab us another couple of beers, and some snacks. I made a mental note to pace myself, and then a sub-note to remember that I’d already paced myself.
I leaned back against the sofa, pulling off one of the cushions to hug against my chest.
“Basically, he told me he was sick of long distance, and that he didn’t want to do it anymore.” I shrugged. “That’s it.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the part where we’d argued about him. Just the thought made me want to lie down and close my eyes.
Tae stared at me.
“That’s it?”
“Uh huh. Told you it wasn’t dramatic.”
“No fucking way, I don’t buy it.”
“Well, I’m sorry but you don’t really have a choice. That’s how it went down.”
“Bullshit.”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
“Bullshit,” he enunciated. “There’s no way that guy gives you up that easily.”
I scoffed. “As if I’m some great prize.”
“I’m not trying to plump your ego, Pom,” he clarified, “I’m saying that guy was so into you that he got all up in my face just for talking to you. Possessive issues aside, that doesn’t sound like the kind of guy that would give up just because of a bit of distance.”
“It wasn’t easy. We had no idea when we’d see each other again. I just left, and-”
“What do you mean you ‘just left’?” He frowned.
“When my mum got sick. I chose to leave Korea.”
“Ky, that’s not a choice. You didn’t ‘choose’ shit.”
I didn’t know why I was feeling the need to defend him, but it kept rising until I had to push it down.
“Whatever,” I conceded, “the point is that we hadn’t seen each other in months, he was under a lot of stress, and there was no end in sight. It got to be more than he wanted to deal with, I guess.”
“So you were the collateral? Yeah, nah, I don’t buy it.”
Temper rising, I bit out, “Did I ask you to? I’m just telling you what happened.”
To my surprise, Tae laughed.
“Damn, Ky. You’re a spicy little tomato, aren’t you?”
Though I tried, my face cracked under the weight of him smiling at me, until we were both giggling like idiots.
“I take it back,” I said, “you are an arsehole.”
“Yeah, yeah, so I’ve been told.”
We fell silent, the laughter subsiding in ever decreasing ebbs until the air stilled.
“You didn’t text me back,” I said quietly. “I kept expecting you to, but you never did.”
I tried to keep my tone light, because what I didn’t say was that after the breakup, I’d felt cast out. Disconnected from a life I’d always expected to pick back up.
The group chat with GVibes had been deleted by the time I’d turned my phone back on and that hadn’t been a surprise, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d always expected Tae would pick up the threads. But he hadn’t.
He was silent for so long I almost expected him to change the subject. I would have allowed it.
But, then-
“He asked me not to.”
Nothing he said could have prepared me for that.
“I don’t know how soon after he ended it with you,” he said, and I tried to pretend like I wasn’t crumbling like a sandcastle.
“He came up to me one day. Said he knew we were friends. He told me it was over between you two, and asked me to not reach out. It sounds shitty now, Ky, I get it,” he said.
His eyes reached out to mine, holding on like he was desperately trying to impart information.
“But he told me it would hurt you less, and I believed him because he looked like shit. He practically begged me. This was the same dude that bodied me out of a lift just for being your friend, and he’s begging me for help? I believed him.”
It hurt to swallow past the lump in my throat, and when I spoke, my voice cracked. “He thought it would help me to have one less friend?”
Tae growled, and started tapping a staccato beat on his knee.
“I’m not explaining this well.”
He hung his head for a moment before looking up. His eyes seemed to shine in the soft lighting.
“He said it would be better for you to have a clean break from us – from our world. From everything. Mate, I believed him.”
My fingers dug into my thighs. I was so sick of being the collateral damage.
First him, then all of the other members – although honestly, their removal from my life made sense.
He was their friend, their group-member.
I’d only ever been the girlfriend. But Tae?
I though that he’d been a friend I’d made for myself, independent of my other relationships.
“You had no right to make that decision for me.” My voice trembled.
He nodded. “I know, but at the time I really thought he was right.”
I exhaled heavily, and the breath I took to replace it juddered, filling my lungs unevenly.
The words hung in the air between us, little echoes reverberating through the stillness, even as in the distance, people cheered, and laughed. Two very different worlds. The one out there, the one in here, and the chasm between us.
“Y’know,” he said after several minutes had gone by, “it took my mum getting cancer for me to quit smoking.”
I looked up sharply.
“Yeah, I know,” he sighed. “I just compared this situation to that one.” One corner of his lips quirked ruefully.
I opened my mouth, then shut it. Opened it again. Then shut it again.
“Yeah, I’m gonna need an on-ramp for that to make sense,” I admitted, rubbing a hand down my face.
Tae huffed a laugh before he took a sip from his bottle. He uncrossed his legs and splayed them in front of him. For someone who moved with such graceful precision on stage, he was remarkably gangly in real life.
“My mum was diagnosed with cancer last year.” He began picked at a hole in his jeans, plucking the frayed threads like guitar strings.
“That sucks.” I said nodding slowly as visions of my mum started playing in a carousel in my mind. Watching her get out of the car that first day, bandaged so stiffly she could barely walk. I shuddered.
“Yeah. Anyway,” he carried on. “I went home last year as soon as the travel restrictions were lifted. I was fully vaccinated, but I had to isolate when I got there. I sat in a hotel for weeks, waiting until it was safe to go home.”
I nodded, remembering the way we had lived for so long that it had stopped feeling strange.
“And when I got home, my aunt was there, taking care of my mum after her surgery. You know the first thing she says to me?”
He glanced up, and while there was a smile on his face, it didnn’t reach his eyes.
“What did she say?” I had to ask, when he didn’t automatically continue.
“Get out.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s what she said. My auntie. I’d barely taken one step in the door when she stopped dead in her tracks, looked me up and down and said, ‘get out, right now’.”
I made a spluttering sort of noise, half way between a laugh, and indignation on his behalf.
“Why?”
He shrugged, going back to picking at those frayed threads. “Probably because I stank like I’d just smoked a pack of twenty in a sealed car.”
“Had you?”
He flashed me a quick grin.
“Maybe ten on the way from the hotel.”
I wrinkled my nose. “So, you smelt bad.”
He nodded, gamely. “I did. But that’s not the reason she kicked me out. It turns out that smoke, even second hand smoke can bugger the effectiveness of chemo, did you know that?”
I thought back to those first days, where Dad and I had torn through all the pamphlets, all the articles on how to best care for Mum. The do’s, and don’ts.
“Vaguely,” I said.
“I didn’t have any idea that I could have made my mum sick.” Tae’s eyes slid closed, and I watched the bob of his throat as he swallowed.
“What did you do?” I asked quietly.
He was silent for a moment, before, “I left. I went back to my hotel, binned all the smokes and had the hotel launder every item of clothing I’d brought with me, and changed rooms. Then I isolated for another couple of days, just to make sure.”
“Blimey.” I nodded. “And you quit? Just like that?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I pictured my mum. Sitting in the early morning sun, watching the crows attack the bird feeder.
“Yes.”
Tae nodded. “That how I reckon Jihoon might have thought about it.”
I barely flinched at the small but noticeable pinch in my gut.
“Again, very poetic, Tae, but it doesn’t really answer why you thought it would be a good idea to cut me off. I thought we were friends. Or, at least, you kept insisting we were.”
I absently rubbed a hand over my chest, trying to banish the old ache that I’d become accustomed to. There were days when I wondered if it was just in my head, after all this time.
“Christ, Pom, I’m trying my best,” he grimaced before exhaling loudly.
“I think… and I’m only saying this because I can see it from his point of view, alright?
” He said hurriedly. “I think to him, it felt like the right thing to do. To protect you – hang on, I’m not done – I don’t think he considered that it might have been a mistake.
Fuck – maybe I shouldn’t even be saying this.
” He dragged a hand down his face as he slumped back against the sofa behind him.
“He said something that’s stayed with me. It’s what made me remember that thing with my aunt. I don’t know if you wanna hear this.” He tilted his bottle gently from side to side, like he was silently assigning it blame.
I watched him, trying to decide if I wanted to hear what–what he’d said. In the next instant I knew I did, because I was so very tired of being kept in the dark for ‘my own good’.
“Spit it out, Tae.”
He raised his eyes to mine.