50. Jae
Chapter fifty
Jae
Something in the quality of the dark changes before I’m fully awake.
The ceiling above the bed holds a shade of gray that means dawn is coming, and not the kind that ambushes you—the slow, deliberate kind that gives you time to remember who and where you are.
I turn my head a fraction, and the movement is answered by Amiyah’s weight across my chest, her hair spread in dark waves against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open against my skin, and—this is the part that would make her murder me if she were awake to notice—a thin trail of drool pooled in the hollow of my collarbone.
I don’t wipe it away.
My hand rests at the small of her back, fingers splayed against the warm skin where her sleep shirt has ridden up.
The sheets are a tangled mess around our legs, my hipbone pressed against the cool outer edge of the mattress, her knee tucked between mine with the particular insistence of someone who colonizes space even in sleep.
I am, for once, completely still. Not the practiced stillness I use in lecture halls or the deliberate stillness I retreat into when my father is speaking.
The real kind. The kind where your body has nothing to prove because it has everything it wants right here, and proving things would require moving, and moving is not currently on the agenda.
My eyes catalog every detail with the focused attention of someone burning a photograph into memory.
The flutter of her lashes against her cheek.
The way one strand of dark hair catches at the corner of her mouth with each exhale.
The exact rhythm of her breathing—four counts in, six counts out, the pattern of someone who has trained her lungs the way other people train their legs.
The temperature of her skin where it presses against mine, warmer than the air, holding the particular heat that bodies generate when they’ve been pressed together for hours.
The small scar on her left shoulder, pale against her skin, which she told me once was from a childhood fall and which I know, now, is from something else entirely.
I memorize it all. The drool. The hair. The scar.
The way her pinky finger curls against my ribs like it’s anchoring itself.
Two days from now I will walk across a stage in a cap and gown I paid too much for, and everything after that is an equation I have already solved, and the solution lives in a drawer in my father’s office in Seoul, written in ink that does not erase.
But this—this warm weight, this quiet room, this woman drooling on my collarbone with the absolute trust of someone who has never once been caught—this is what I am keeping. This is the photograph.
The apartment holds its pre-dawn hush. The HVAC clicks off, leaving the room in a silence that feels deliberate, like the building itself is giving us this moment.
Outside, the city hums at its lowest setting—the particular white noise of Los Angeles between four and five, when the traffic is still mostly parked and the delivery trucks haven’t started their routes and the only people awake are the ones who have to be.
The sound filters through the half-drawn blinds in a flat, distant murmur, the kind of noise that makes a room feel smaller rather than larger.
Graduation day looms in two days. The phrase lands in my head with the weight of something that has been sitting there for weeks, waiting its turn.
Two days. Forty-eight hours. One thousand, one hundred and fifty-two minutes, if I’m being precise, and I am always being precise, it’s one of the few things my father and I have in common.
Amiyah stirs.
It starts as a shift of her hips—a small, unconscious adjustment, her knee pressing deeper into the space between mine. Then a murmur against my chest, half-formed, the particular vowel-heavy sound of someone surfacing from a dream. Her lashes flutter. Once, twice. Her eyes open.
The horror is instantaneous.
She sits up so fast the sheets tangle around her waist, one hand flying to her mouth, the other gesturing at the wet spot on my collarbone with the full-body mortification of someone who has just discovered they’ve committed a crime against international law.
“Oh my god.” Her voice is sleep-rough, pitched higher than normal, the particular register of genuine panic.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I—that’s—I don’t—” She swipes at her mouth with the back of her hand, then reaches for the drool on my collarbone like she can somehow erase it through sheer force of will.
“I have never done that before, I swear to god, that is not a thing I do, I don’t know what happened—”
She is reassembling herself at breakneck speed.
Her hair gets shoved back from her face, both hands this time.
Her sleep shirt gets tugged down over her hips with a sharp, decisive motion that suggests she’s already rewriting the entire narrative of the last eight hours.
Her jaw sets. Her eyes are bright, alert, already scanning the room for escape routes or tactical advantages or whatever other professional courtesy her brain defaults to when composure is threatened.
I laugh.
It comes out of me before I can stop it—a real one, startled out of my chest, the kind that makes my shoulders shake and my ribs hurt and the drool spot on my collarbone feel warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
The sound bounces off the walls of the bedroom, louder than anything has been in hours, and Amiyah stops mid-sentence, her mouth still open around whatever apology she was constructing, and stares at me with an expression that suggests I have just declared war on a small, defenseless nation.
“You’re laughing.” Her voice is flat. Disbelieving. “I just drooled on you. In your sleep. Like a—like a Labrador with a neurological condition, and you’re laughing.”
“I’m laughing,” I agree, and it’s still happening, my chest shaking with it, my hand coming up to cover my mouth because the look on her face is making it worse. “I’m sorry. I’m—” Another laugh escapes. “I’m really not sorry. That was the most human thing I’ve ever seen you do.”
“I am extremely human all the time,” she says, and the indignation in it is so perfectly calibrated, so precisely the tone she uses when she’s been caught off-guard and is determined to pretend otherwise, that I laugh harder.
She swats my shoulder. “Stop it. Stop laughing. This is a serious violation of—of morning protocol, or something, I don’t know, I’m still waking up—”
I catch her wrist before she can retreat.
My fingers close around the warm skin, thumb finding the pulse point, and I pull.
Not hard. Just enough to bring her back down to the mattress, back into the tangle of sheets, back to where her weight belongs against my side.
She goes, but not without a sound of protest that dissolves into something softer when her head finds my shoulder again.
“You’re ridiculous,” she mumbles into my skin.
“You drooled on me and then tried to blame morning protocol. I think we both know who’s ridiculous here.”
“I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
“You’re welcome to try.” I press a kiss to the top of her head.
Her hair smells like my shampoo and something underneath it that’s just her, warm and specific and impossible to describe without sounding like a person who has lost their mind.
“I’ve been informed I’m a very deep sleeper. Drool-proof, apparently.”
She groans. The sound vibrates against my chest, and I feel her fingers curl into my side, not quite a pinch, more like she’s anchoring herself against the mortification.
“I had a dream,” she says, and the subject change is so abrupt, so transparently tactical, that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.
“Tell me.”
“It involved a pink convertible.” She’s looking at the ceiling now, her head still on my shoulder, her voice taking on the particular measured cadence she uses when she’s recounting something with more precision than it deserves.
“Not like, a normal pink. The kind of pink that makes you question whether the manufacturer was having some kind of episode. And a llama. The llama was driving.”
“The llama was driving the pink convertible.”
“Yes.”
“Was the llama also pink?”
She turns her head to look at me. The expression on her face is so genuinely offended by the question that I have to close my eyes for a second. “No. The llama was beige. Very dignified beige. It had a little hat.”
“A hat.”
“A sombrero. Don’t ask me why, I don’t make the rules in there.
” She gestures vaguely at her own skull.
“We were on the Pacific Coast Highway and the llama kept trying to merge into traffic and I was in the passenger seat trying to explain that llamas don’t have driver’s licenses, and also the convertible had no doors, which seemed like the bigger problem at the time, but the llama was very committed to the bit. ”
I am staring at the ceiling with my mouth slightly open.
The laughter is building again, a warm pressure behind my sternum, and I can feel her shoulder shaking against mine, which means she’s fighting it too, and the whole thing is so stupid and so perfect that for a second I forget about everything except this bed and this woman and this absolutely deranged dream about a beige llama in a sombrero driving a doorless pink convertible down the PCH.
My heads drops to the side and my eyes find hers. "Do you wat to know one of my darkest secrets? You know, before you kill me in my sleep or whatever?
Her brows raise high, her breath hitching in her chest. I hit a nerve I didn't mean to. She recovers quickly though.
"Sure." she shrugs.
“I have never successfully folded a fitted sheet in my life,” I say.