13. Chapter Thirteen #3
Then Ryowoon looks down at me and his grin stretches wider and wider, until his eyes are creasing, sparkling, and he lets out a laugh of pure amazement, shoving at my shoulder hard enough to rock me sideways on the platform.
“Wah. You rascal.” He shakes his head, his voice bright with disbelief and warmth. “Our Seyeonnie really is all grown up now, huh? Really waited to drop that one on me, didn’t you?”
I’m laughing too, the relief so sweet it almost stings. I don’t know what I expected. I don’t think I was scared, exactly. It’s Ryowoon. He of all people wouldn’t bat an eye. But saying it out loud, to him, here, it’s different than anything I imagined. I feel lighter.
It’s because of him, if I’m being honest. It was finding out about Ryowoon that made me start thinking about myself.
It was shocking in the moment. But afterward, when I thought about it, it wasn’t really surprising at all.
Ryowoon was Ryowoon. The information didn’t change how I viewed him.
What it did change was me. It cracked the door open just enough that I started asking questions I’d never thought to ask before.
And when I got to Seoul, surrounded by strangers who didn’t know my name or my history, who didn’t have any pre-existing version of me to compare to, the space to be curious opened up.
So I was. I found out I liked both. Men and women.
And I didn’t panic about it. It just felt true.
Ryowoon looks down at me again, face sobering. His grin softens and his voice drops a register.
“Does anyone else know yet?”
I shake my head against the wood. “No one back here. Just the people I’ve been with.
” I pause. “I don’t see a reason to announce it.
You know better than anyone there’s no point drawing attention to it if there’s nothing to point at.
” I look up at him, his jaw is set in a way that tells me he knows exactly what I mean.
“If I find someone someday and it feels like it’s going somewhere and the topic comes up naturally, then maybe. But otherwise.”
“Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, I get it.”
A beat passes. Then his smirk creeps back onto his face, slow and wicked.
“Damn. Men and women now, huh?” He whistles through his teeth. “Save some for the rest of us.”
I snort and shove at him and he drops backward onto the platform beside me, both of us lying there now, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the sky.
Inside, we can hear Mrs. Nam humming something as she puts away the dishes, the clink of ceramic, the shuffle of her slippers. Ryowoon’s arm presses against mine.
Neither of us says anything more about it. We don’t need to.
I breathe out, feeling the last of the tension I carried down from Seoul unravel. All of it dissolving in the familiar smell of this courtyard and the sound of his breathing beside me and the stars coming out one by one over Haemok.
Now, I think. With Ryowoon beside me, now it really feels like I’m home.
I spend the first days adjusting to being home and having the luxury of having nowhere to be.
My body doesn’t seem to know what to do without a class schedule dictating its every waking hour.
I sleep in past nine for the first time in months, wake up disoriented with afternoon light slanting through the window of my old room, the sounds of the neighborhood filtering in, Mrs. Yang’s radio playing from down the street, a dog barking from up the hill.
My mother fusses non-stop. Every time I emerge from my room she appears with food, appearing from the kitchen doorway with a plate or a bowl or a foil-wrapped something pressed into my hands before I’ve gotten both eyes open.
I gain what feels like five kilos in three days and she still looks at me like I’m wasting away.
I take walks. Down to the harbor and back, relearning the streets with my adult legs, the distances that used to feel enormous now compressed into quick strolls.
The covered market. The breakwater wall.
The playground Ryowoon and I used to haunt as kids, smaller than I remembered, the slide rusted at the bolts, the tunnel beneath it barely big enough to fit a six-year-old anymore.
I stand there for a minute looking at it with my hands in my pockets and a tightness in my lungs.
Four nights in I get a text from Jinwon.
Harbor. 9pm. Sihyung’s bringing soju. Don’t make us come get you.
So I go.
They’re already down there when I arrive, clustered on the rocks beneath the pier.
The tide’s out and the rocks are dry, slick only where the spray reaches.
Jinwon settles on a flat boulder with his legs stretched out in front of him, calm-faced as ever, Sihyung beside him already cracking open a bottle.
Yoohan perches higher up, tossing pebbles at a can set on a rock ten feet out.
Haeil sits cross-legged near the water’s edge, hunched over his phone, the bluish glow lighting up his face.
And Ryowoon leans back against a boulder off to the side with his legs kicked out, a cigarette already lit, the cherry bobbing in the dark when he tilts his chin up at me.
The second I’m within arm’s reach Jinwon pulls me down onto the rock next to him, and Sihyung thrusts a cup into my hand so fast I nearly fumble it.
They crowd me like I’ve just come back from war.
Questions pile on top of questions. Jinwon asks about my thesis and when I start explaining the theoretical framework his eyes glaze beautifully but he keeps nodding.
Yoohan wants to know if Seoul girls are really as pretty as they say.
Haeil hooks an arm around my neck and demands I tell them all about the wildest thing I’ve witnessed at college, his grin sharp and expectant, and when I tell them about the time my hallmate got caught running naked through the library during finals week all five of them howl so loud a fisherman on the pier above us shouts down at us to keep it down.
The soju flows. Sihyung keeps pouring, refilling cups with a generous hand, topping mine off before it’s half empty. I try to pace myself for about twenty minutes and then give up. The burn of the alcohol loosens my shoulders. I feel the flush creep up my neck and settle in my cheeks.
By the time the second bottle’s gone Jinwon and Sihyung are on their feet, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, belting out an old trot song so mangled in pitch and tempo that it takes me a solid thirty seconds to even identify what they’re attempting.
Sihyung’s voice cracks on the high note and Jinwon compensates by going louder, which only makes it worse, the two of them swaying together on unsteady legs like a pair of sailors in a typhoon.
I sit on the rocks with my cup in both hands, hiccupping, my face burning, my ribs aching from laughing.
Haeil stands, one arm raised, his index finger tracing patterns in the air like a conductor coaxing an orchestra through its paces. His face is dead serious, brow furrowed in concentration, which makes it so much funnier that I nearly choke on the soju still sitting in my mouth.
I catch movement and turn my head. Ryowoon still sits in his spot against the boulder, lit cigarette held loosely between his fingers, his other hand wrapped around a can of cola.
He watches the chaos unfold in front of him with the air of a man observing wildlife from behind a fence.
When Sihyung’s voice pitches up into a shriek on the chorus, Ryowoon closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly, exhaling smoke through his nose.
He catches me looking and raises one eyebrow as if to say, you see what I put up with?
I hiccup and grin at him and he rolls his eyes, fighting a smirk.
The third bottle opens. Yoohan and I get into a very passionate and very slurred debate about whether the ‘98 World Cup squad or the ‘02 squad was better. He’s wrong. I tell him he’s wrong.
He tells me I’m too young to remember ‘98 properly and I tell him we’re the same age, you idiot, and then we’re both laughing too hard to finish the argument.
Jinwon and Sihyung have graduated from trot to what I think is supposed to be a ballad but sounds like cats being strangled in a dryer, and Haeil is now conducting with both hands, swaying in place with the solemnity of a man leading a symphony at the national concert hall.
Ryowoon doesn’t touch any of it. He sits and smokes and sips his cola and watches us all make fools of ourselves with near saint-like patience.
When Sihyung nearly topples off his rock mid-verse and Jinwon grabs him by the collar to steady him, both of them collapsing into each other in a heap of wheezing laughter, Ryowoon tips his head back and lets out a long, suffering sigh toward the sky.
“Animals,” he mutters around his cigarette, his eyes warm with affection.
At some point past midnight the party starts to wind down.
Yoohan passes out on a flat rock and Haeil throws his jacket over him.
Jinwon sits back down heavily, his face pink, his smile dreamy and unfocused.
Sihyung lies on the rocks staring up at the stars and announces with great conviction that he loves every single one of us, and Ryowoon flicks a pebble at his forehead and tells him to shut up.
I sway when I stand. The world tilts at a gentle angle and my legs have the consistency of overcooked noodles. I take a step toward the path up from the rocks and the ground lurches sideways.
Ryowoon’s arm catches me around the waist before I eat gravel.
“Alright,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette against a rock and flicking the butt into his empty cola can. “Let’s go, lightweight.”