30. Fun
Fun
Natalia
Ilook at my screen before I swipe to pick up the call.
He's simply K in my phone. Obvious, sure, but no one should be rummaging through my phone anyway. I added his number in Nagoya right before I left, once he’d finally stopped being ridiculous and handed me his phone.
He watched me type my name into his contacts, only to take the phone back and change it to something in Khmer he refused to translate.
“Hey,” I say, nerves taking over out of nowhere. “I’m home.”
“That's good.”
Two words and that’s all it takes for every warm, stupid feeling inside me to disappear.
I wait but nothing follows. No joke about my family smothering me the second I walked through the door.
No question about whether Mama had already tried to feed me.
No soft, private version of my name that he only uses when no one else can hear.
No Kroppy this or that. Just that's good.
“That’s it?”
“I said that’s good.”
His voice is wrong. Flat and measured. Careful in a way he hasn’t been with me since Seoul. I pick at some fuzz on my comforter along the edge of my bed.
“Why do you sound weird?”
“I’m tired.”
“No.” My fingers tighten around the phone. “You’re doing that thing again. The first-day thing. Where every word has to get past six armed guards before you let it out.”
He exhales quietly. There it is, that sigh. The one men use when they’ve already decided you’re being difficult for noticing what they’re doing.
“You’re just used to hearing me in person,” he says.
I actually pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it, then put it back resentfully.
“I know weird. You’re being weird.”
Silence, but not the comfortable kind we’ve developed, when we could lie together in the dark without needing to fill it. This silence has edges. It’s waiting to hurt me, and I can already feel the fear crawling across my skin. My stomach begins to sink.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Then stop talking to me like I’m some girl you barely know.”
His silence answers. I stand because sitting suddenly feels like suffocating.
“Look.” The word is quiet, controlled. I close my eyes as he continues. “It was fun and all.” At first, I genuinely think I’ve misunderstood him. “I had a good time with you. You had a good time with me.”
His voice sounds distant now, like he’s reading something he wrote down or from a teleprompter for some interview. He interrupts my thoughts before they can continue to spiral into oblivion.
“But that’s all it was.”
The room spins and I grip the edge of my dresser.
“That’s all it was?"
“I don’t want you turning it into something else.”
A laugh breaks out of me.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“No, you’re trying to rewrite the last three days because I’m not standing in front of you anymore. You said we’d figure it out.”
My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate him for hearing it. I hate myself more. He goes quiet and I can feel every conversation we had crowding into the silence. How warm his eyes were when he told me this deserved time, privacy, a chance to exist outside hotel rooms and tour schedules.
“You said you didn’t want our first time to happen like that,” I whisper. “You acted like this had a future.”
“Yeah. And then I thought about it.”
I stare across my bedroom at the clothes I left on the chair before the trip. A sweatshirt. Jeans. A life that belonged to a version of me who hadn’t learned what his hands felt like.
“And?”
“And I think it’s better if we don’t start something.”
I can’t breathe. Then I laugh again, louder this time.
“Wow. No, that’s actually incredible. I didn't think it was possible to hurt me more, but congratulations.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Then you’re fucking terrible at it.”
He says nothing. I pace toward the window, then turn back because there's nowhere to go. My bedroom feels too small for the rage pushing into my chest.
“You think we haven't started anything yet?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s exactly what you said. You think you get to decide now, from a safe distance, that it would be better to pretend this hasn't already started?”
“I’m saying it can't become more.”
Silence. My eyes burn as I press my knuckles against my mouth, fighting the humiliating sound trying to get out. When he speaks again, his voice has softened. That makes it so much worse.
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you.” I wipe angrily beneath one eye. “You don’t get to hold me all night and talk about figuring shit out and not holding back, then call it fun like we made out behind a club once.”
“I shouldn’t have said those things.”
“Did you mean any of it?” He doesn’t answer. I stop pacing. "Did you?" Another pause. I want to scream but I hold it in.
Then, quietly, “Maybe I wanted to mean it.”
The pain of that is so intense it almost makes me double over.
“What changed?” I stare at the ceiling to stop the tears. Its little peaks and valleys look like snowy hills, and I try to imagine myself disappearing between them.
He draws in a breath. “Nothing changed,” he says. “I just thought about it clearly. I finally got some blood back to my brain since you left.”
“So you weren’t thinking clearly when your face was between my legs?”
“Nat—”
“No, don’t you dare get uncomfortable now. You were perfectly comfortable touching me. You were totally okay with letting me believe there'd be more between us.”
“I shouldn’t have let it go that far. I’m trying to do the right thing—”
Every part of me freezes. I look at my reflection in the window. Pale face, all the color draining from it, my mouth trembling. A woman who thought restraint meant care. An idiot who thought stopping meant he respected what this could become.
“For who?”
He has no answer, not for me. This isn’t for me. This is for Rafe, or the band or whatever fear Kiri carries around and worships like it’s wisdom. I swipe another tear away, furious that they keep coming.
“You better think really hard about this.” The words shake, but I force every one of them out.
“Because this is it, Kiri. This is the last time I put up with your bullshit. You don’t get to pull me close when you want me and shove me away when you get scared.
You don’t get to come back in a month, or six months, or the next time you see me and decide you miss the way I watched you or the way I make you feel.
” He doesn’t interrupt, not once. I take a deep breath and my voice snaps. “Do you understand?”
The silence stretches. I can almost picture him, his jaw tight and eyes closed. One hand gripping the back of his neck while he convinces himself cruelty is kindness. Finally, he answers.
“I understand.”
My heart pounds so hard it hurts. Another pause. It lasts so long that some stupid, desperate part of me thinks he might stop this. That he might swear, tell me he’s being an idiot and ask if he can come get me as soon as he's back in Seattle. Instead, his voice turns quiet and final.
“Do what you gotta do.”
Something inside me breaks. I stand there with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing.
Then I hang up.
The phone slips from my hand and hits the floor with a clatter.
My screen might be broken, but I don’t even care.
I barely make it to the bed before the first sob rips out of me.
I grab the pillow and crush it over my face, trying to smother the sound because Mama is downstairs waiting on me to cut onions and I wouldn't survive her coming in here. I can’t explain why I’m falling apart over a man I wasn’t even officially with.
A man I was never supposed to let close.
A man everyone warned me about, even though my stupid heart refused to believe them.
A man who asked me to wait and made waiting sound like a promise. Like a future.
I curl around the pillow and let myself cry until my chest aches and my throat burns. Mama calls for me again and I manage to push it all down enough to yell back that I'm coming.
I leave the phone where it fell.
He doesn’t call back.