45. Jae #2
“Alright,” he says. The word costs him something.
I can hear it in the way his voice thins at the edges.
“Three weeks. You lay low. No public appearances. No interviews, obviously. Change your routine. Different routes to campus. Different coffee shops. You watch your back, Jae. Every minute. You understand me?”
“I understand.”
“I love you.” His words come out rough, unpracticed.
My father is not a man who says I love you easily.
He shows it in the bookings, in the security detail he’s probably already activating without telling me, in the way he’s letting me finish a degree he never wanted me to pursue in the first place.
The verbal admission is rare enough that it lands like a hand on my shoulder.
“I love you too.” I say it back without hesitation. Then, because I need something normal to hold onto: “Give Sheba some scratches for me? The spot behind her ears, you know the one. She likes it when you use your thumbnail.”
“I will.” A hint of warmth, finally. The old tortoiseshell cat who sits in the sunlit window of my parents’ apartment, waiting for an owner who is currently six thousand miles away making catastrophically poor life choices. “She misses you. Sits by the door some evenings.”
“That’s because she knows I hide the good treats in the cabinet by the fridge.”
A low sound that might be a laugh. Might be a sigh. On my father, the difference is academic.
“Three weeks, Jae.”
“Three weeks. I promise.”
The call ends.
I set the phone in the cupholder and sit with the engine off and the security lights painting the interior of my car the color of cheap whiskey.
I signal. Pull out. Merge back onto surface streets heading downtown because forward is the only option I have, and the ice cream is still waiting, and somewhere in this mess there has to be at least one thing that doesn’t require me to hold my breath.
Scoops a law student whose name I should know but don’t because she only speaks in constitutional amendments; two business school guys who are debating cryptocurrency with the particular fervor of men who have recently lost money.
Amiyah is pink—pink top, pink nails, pink phone case—and she’s laughing at something Logan has said, her head tipped back, the sound cutting through the music like a blade.
She looks up. Clocks me across the room.
Something shifts in her face—a warmth that arrives fast and genuine, her eyes finding mine with a focus that makes the knot in my chest loosen by one turn.
She raises a hand, waves me over. Not the performative wave of someone being polite.
The specific, eager motion of a woman who has been waiting for you to arrive.
I don’t tell her about the call. I don’t tell any of them. The words sit behind my teeth, heavy and hot, and I swallow them down with the particular discipline of someone who has spent his life learning which weights are his to carry alone.
I order something involving mint and chocolate that the teenager behind the counter assures me is “literally so fire bro” and carry it to the high-top where Amiyah has already shifted to make room.
Our arms brush when I sit. She doesn’t pull away.
Her shoulder presses against mine, warm through the thin cotton of my shirt, and the contact is so normal, so stupidly mundane, that for a second I forget about Baek entirely.
The group’s energy carries the hour. Logan is recounting a clinic horror story involving a Labrador and a tennis ball that has the table howling.
The law student—Eliza, her name is Eliza, I’m ninety percent sure—is doing a pitch-perfect impression of our property professor that involves a lot of dramatic pen-waving.
The crypto bros have moved on to arguing about whether AI will replace lawyers before it replaces traders, which is objectively the most Blackthorn conversation possible and exactly the kind of meaningless noise I need right now.
I laugh when something lands. Talk when I’m spoken to.
Keep the weight locked somewhere behind my sternum where it doesn’t show on my face.
Amiyah’s knee finds mine under the table and stays there, and when she looks at me—really looks, the way she does when she’s trying to read the lines around my eyes—I give her the version of my smile that’s practiced enough to pass for real.
The trip to the beach was always the plan for after the sugar run, a collective consensus formed over group chat hours ago. We load back into our cars, leaving downtown behind for the coastal stretch where the air turns salty and bright.
The sand is already baking under the midday heat, scorching under my bare feet, gritty between my toes.
The water is the particular shade of blue-black where the sun hits the chop, and when the first wave hits my ankles the cold is sharp enough to make me hiss.
Someone shrieks. Someone else shrieks louder.
The sound dissolves into laughter, carried off by the ocean wind.
The volleyball materializes from someone’s trunk—deflated slightly, the kind of ball that has seen better decades and several regrettable parties—and the game that follows has no rules, no teams, and no respect for the concept of personal space.
It’s just bodies in motion, sand flying, the ball arcing through the air in trajectories that defy both physics and intention.
Logan spikes it directly into the face of one of the crypto bros.
The crypto bro takes it personally. Chaos ensues.
Amiyah is in a tiny black bikini that she produced from her bag like she’d been planning this all along, and she’s laughing—really laughing, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and unguarded, her head thrown back, her blonde hair coming loose from its clip in waves that catch the sun.
She dives for a save, comes up covered in sand, and the sound she makes—half triumph, half outrage—carries across the beach and lands in my chest like a hand on a doorknob, turning something I’d locked tight.
I watch her for a beat too long. Long enough that she catches me looking, and instead of the sharp eyebrow raise I expect, she holds my gaze for one second, two, her smile softening at the edges into something quieter.
Something that looks almost like worry, though I might be projecting.
Might be seeing my own fear reflected back at me in the glare.
I am not going to let today be ruined by some rich piece of shit in Seoul I cannot control right now.
I have a few weeks left. I am going to finish them.
I am going to walk across that stage in a cap and gown I paid too much for and accept a degree I worked too hard for, and then I am going to deal with whatever comes next with both eyes open and my shoulders square.