15. Chapter Fifteen
Ryowoon
The rain hasn’t let up since last night.
I sit on the edge of the sleeping mat with my knees drawn up, listening to it hammer the roof tiles and pour off the gutters into the courtyard below.
Gray early morning light fills the room through the window.
My shoulders ache from yesterday’s work on the ceiling.
My lower back is stiff from the ladder, or maybe from other things.
I press my thumb into my left wrist, working at the joint that always slightly aches, the old familiar grind of bone against tendon.
I’m not used to this kind of peace. The rain and the gray light and the stillness.
I spent so many years sleeping with one ear tuned to every creak and footstep.
Even years later, safe in my own apartment alone, sometimes I’d still wake to the slightest, footsteps in the hall or the closing of a door in the building and spend twice as long trying to get back to sleep.
But this morning the only sounds are the rain on the roof and the slow, even sound of breathing beside me.
I let my gaze drop.
Seyeon lies on his stomach, naked, face turned toward the wall with one arm curled beneath the pillow.
The blanket’s been kicked off sometime in the night, bunched around his ankles, and there’s nothing to stop me from looking.
My eyes move down the line of his shoulders, over the ridge of his spine and the gentle slope where his back dips before the swell of his ass, his legs kicked out at careless angles.
His skin pale against the dark fabric of the bedding.
A faint pink mark at the base of his neck where my teeth were.
Another lower, just above his shoulder blade, the shape of my mouth.
My heart pounds.
I look at the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, parted slightly in sleep.
His hair, that neat honey brown he’s dyed it now, is messy from my hands, fanned across the pillow in every direction.
He looks younger when he sleeps. Closer to the Seyeon I remember, the one whose face I could read without trying, who wore every thought he had across his features without the careful guard he’s built since.
I wonder when he learned to do that. When he learned to wall himself off. If I taught him that.
It always felt like holding moonlight, touching Seyeon, having him under my hands.
Something luminous that shouldn’t be possible for someone like me to hold.
Skin that felt too clean, too unmarked, too good for the rough calluses of my fingers to be dragging across it.
I used to think if I touched him long enough I’d leave smudges.
Stains. Like the grease that stayed in the creases of my palms from the garage that no amount of scrubbing got out.
That some part of me would transfer to him and he’d carry it.
My hands are shaking in my lap. I curl them into fists, then flatten them against my thighs.
The urge to reach out and put my palm against the warm plane of his back is so strong it’s almost nauseating.
I want to trace the line of his spine. Want to press my mouth to that spot between his shoulder blades where the skin is thinnest and I can see the faintest blue thread of a vein.
Want to put my fingers on the small of his back where I know those freckles are.
My eyes slide lower and my throat tightens.
I can see the mess between his thighs. The slick evidence of what I did to him still smeared on the inside of his legs, drying on his skin.
My cum on his body. Staining him, dirtying a body that’s otherwise so flawless that looking at it feels like staring at something I should’ve been barred from seeing.
A museum piece behind glass. A painting with a velvet rope.
Things that people like me are supposed to admire from a distance and not put their filthy hands on.
Last night shouldn’t have happened.
I know it the same way I knew the first time we fell into bed together.
I knew it when Seyeon kissed me on the back step with rain pouring down behind us, knew it when I kissed him back, knew it when my hands stopped trying to push him away and started pulling instead.
Every alarm in my head was blaring and I grabbed him tighter.
Every lesson I’ve taught myself over the last ten years about staying away, about keeping distance, about protecting both of us from this, and it took Seyeon one evening of losing his temper and climbing on top of me to burn it all to ash.
But the first time, I could excuse. Seyeon wanted it and I was too weak and too hungry for him to say no.
He had his mind set. I’ve known this man since the day we were born, and I’ve yet to see him fail at getting what he wants once he decides on it.
I couldn’t have stopped him if I tried, and the pathetic truth is I didn’t try hard enough.
So fine, the first time was a loss of control, mutual destruction, an inevitability we’d been hurtling toward since the second he showed up on my doorstep.
But after that.
After that, when I turned him over and pressed his face into the bedding and drove into him from behind until he was moaning into the pillow and coming onto the blankets beneath him and I kept going.
When I gripped his hips and fucked him through it, my fingers digging into the hollows above his hipbones, pulling sounds out of him I’ve heard from no one else in ten years.
When I felt him clench around me and still didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, rode it out until my head felt light and I spilled inside him again.
And then later, the third time, slower, face to face, his legs wrapped around me, my mouth on his tasting him, his fingers gentle on the back of my neck as I moved in him.
When I came inside him again like I was trying to fill him with every year I’d been gone.
Pour myself back into the space I’d left.
That was my fault. I can’t blame Seyeon for anything past the first round because after that it was me reaching for him, me pulling him back when he tried to shift away, me burying myself in his body because once I started I couldn’t find the bottom of how much I wanted.
I run a hand through my hair and grip the back of my own neck, squeezing. My pulse thuds against my palm.
Now what?
Now that I’ve had him again, now that the muscle memory of his body is back in my hands and the taste of his skin is on my tongue and I can still feel the ghost of him clenched around me when I breathe. Now that I remember. Am I going to be able to let him go?
I spent years teaching myself to live without him, of filling the space where Seyeon used to exist with long shifts and cigarette smoke and the numb routine of waking, working, sleeping.
I built a life that was small and quiet and asked nothing of me but that I keep moving forward.
And it worked, mostly. Some nights it didn’t.
Some nights I’d lie awake staring at the ceiling of my apartment and feel the absence of him like a missing limb, phantom pain in a part of me that had been amputated.
But I survived it. I learned to survive most things.
I’m not sure I’m strong enough to survive this a second time.
To have him under me, around me, saying my name in that voice, and then walk away again.
The first time nearly killed me. It was a slow, grinding erosion of what was left inside me that still believed I deserved good things.
Leaving Seyeon took everything I had and then took a little more on top of it, a debt I’ve been paying interest on for a decade.
And again I have to wonder if I’ve got a choice in the matter either way.
Because this is Seyeon. Who’s already proved there’s nowhere I can run where he can’t find me.
The man who, when I disappeared as thoroughly as a person can disappear in a country this size, decided that wasn’t acceptable and came to collect me anyway.
I’ve spent my life running. From my father, from this town, from the violence and the hopelessness and the slow poison of watching everyone around me accept that this was all life had in store for someone with my name.
Running is the thing I’m best at. Better than fixing cars, better than fighting, better than any of the scrappy survival skills I’ve cobbled together over thirty-four years of clawing through each day.
I’ve gotten good at it. Perfected the art of vanishing.
But Seyeon’s better at finding. There’s nowhere I can go that he won’t follow. Ten years, a new city, a fake name online, blocked accounts, no paper trail, and it took one college kid with a functioning pair of eyes and a forum post to undo all of it.
I almost have to respect it.
So no, I don’t think running works anymore. Not from Seyeon, the human equivalent of a bloodhound specially honed to my scent.
And I’m tired of running.
But I don’t know what to do from here. What answers I can give him.
He wants to know why I left. Wants to hear me say it, the real reason, not the bullshit I fed him that summer.
And I owe him that. I know I owe him that.
But how do I explain that leaving was the only act of love I knew how to give him?
That I looked at my life, at my father’s blood in my veins and the violence coded into my bones and the generations of broken men stretching behind me, and decided the kindest thing I could do for the only person I’ve ever loved was to remove myself from his life before I poisoned it?
A faint buzzing pulls my attention sideways.
Seyeon’s phone lights up on the floor beside the mat, the screen glowing against the wooden boards. I can read the caller ID from here. His mother’s name, the little contact photo of her face. My hand twitches with the impulse to reach over and silence it before it wakes him. I don’t move.
The buzzing stops. Starts again.
I still don’t move.