18. Chapter Eighteen #4
I breathe out. It hurts, everything hurts, but this particular breath feels fuller.
The weight I’ve been carrying since I was old enough to understand what I was, since the first time I looked at a boy and felt my stomach flip and immediately wanted to claw the feeling out of myself, the weight shifts.
I can sit up a little straighter without wanting to fold in on myself.
But Seyeon’s expression changes. Seyeon’s relief, his acceptance, burns off like morning fog and the anger comes back.
He’s been saving it up. He just needed to understand the cause before he could aim it properly.
Now he has a target and his fists ball up on his thighs and he’s on his feet, pacing.
“What a piece of shit.”
I sigh. “Seyeon—”
“You should’ve pressed charges. You still should.”
“And pressing charges does what, exactly?” I say, keeping my voice level even as the ache flares from turning my body to follow his pacing. “Gets me a court date where I have to stand up and tell a room full of strangers from this town that my dad beat me for kissing a boy? In front of what judge?”
Seyeon’s jaw works, the muscles straining. He knows I’m not wrong.
“It would’ve just made it into something worse,” I say.
“Dragged it out. Made a whole production for everyone to gawk at.” I look down at the cast on my arm, at the grubby smudged surface of it, and I feel nothing.
Not anger, not sadness. Just a flat, tired emptiness.
“Besides, I don’t care anymore. Maybe this is the best way to be rid of him for good. ”
Seyeon stops pacing. He looks at me sharply.
“He told me not to come back,” I say. “Said if I showed up he’d kill me.
And I believe him on that one.” I shift on the platform, grimacing as my ribs punish me for moving.
“I’ll need someone to go get the rest of my stuff, though.
Whatever’s left worth taking. I’m fairly sure he meant what he said and I’m not interested in testing it. ”
“I’ll go,” Seyeon says instantly.
The way he says it makes the hair on my arms prickle. The look in his eyes would make smarter men back up a step. Mrs. Nam peers over from the kitchen doorway, her lips pursing.
“Seyeon, you’re supposed to be going to college in a few weeks. You can’t risk going to jail for murder.”
“I won’t kill him,” Seyeon says, but there’s a glint in his eyes that makes me mildly suspicious.
I let him go. I don’t have much choice, honestly.
Mrs. Nam can’t do it, and I’m in no shape to send anyone else.
So Seyeon goes the next morning, and I sit in the courtyard with my ribs aching and my cast itching and I stare at the wall and try not to think about what’s happening on the other side of town.
He comes back two hours later with my gym bag packed full and a set to his shoulders I’ve never seen before.
His knuckles aren’t busted, which means he didn’t swing, but there’s something in the air around him, a crackling energy, a satisfaction that sits in the corners of his mouth and the way he carries himself as he sets the bag down at my feet.
“Got everything I could find.”
I look up at him. “What did you say to him?”
“What needed to be said.”
He doesn’t elaborate. I don’t push. Whatever words passed between Seyeon and my father in that house are sealed behind Seyeon’s teeth and he doesn’t offer them and I decide I don’t need to hear them.
The oddly settled air about him, the way the tension in his frame has released like a bowstring finally undrawn, tells me enough.
He said something that gave him peace. Maybe something that needed saying long before now. I leave it.
The summer settles after that. The way the sea calms after a storm.
My body heals on its own stubborn schedule.
The cast comes off after six weeks and my wrist feels wrong again, stiff and uncooperative, the tendons remembering their old injury.
Some mornings I wake up and my fingers wouldn’t close right, my grip shot, and I spend ten minutes just opening and closing my hand until the joints loosen enough to hold a wrench.
My ribs knit themselves back together under the bandages and the bruises on my face cycle through their colors and fade, leaving behind the same skin, the same scar below my mouth, the same face that looked enough like my father’s to make my stomach turn when I caught my reflection unexpectedly.
I live at Mrs. Nam’s. Sleep in the back room and work shifts at the counter and fix things around the store that need fixing and eat what she puts in front of me without arguing.
She never mentions the conversation in the courtyard again.
Not once. She treats me the same as she always has, with her brand of gruff affection and exasperated head shaking, and I understand that’s its own kind of gift.
She’s known for god knows how long, maybe always, and it hasn’t mattered to her then and it doesn’t matter now and that’s that.
Seyeon is the same. Just Seyeon. Annoying and stubborn and relentless, coming by the store after helping his mom, dragging me out to the harbor when I try to sulk, stealing the last dumpling off my plate at dinner and grinning when I curse at him.
Not a single thing about how he looks at me or speaks to me or occupies space next to me changes.
He doesn’t treat me like glass. Doesn’t get weird about proximity or touching or the casual physicality that we’ve had since we were kids.
When he throws his arm around my shoulders walking home from the docks it feels the same as it always had.
When he shoves me for talking shit it feels the same. Nothing changes.
I’d been so afraid. For so long. And it turned out the thing I feared most was a door that had been open the whole time.
I see my father in passing every now and then over the next few years.
We never speak. I see him sometimes coming the opposite way down the street and I look past him the same way I’d look past a telephone pole or a fire hydrant and keep walking.
My pulse doesn’t even spike. He’s nothing.
A stranger who shared my blood and my last name and nothing else.
The weeks run out too quickly. Seyeon and I spend them the way we spent every summer, running the streets, sitting at the harbor with our feet dangling over the edge of the pier, helping Mrs. Nam in the store, eating her food and bickering over the TV remote in her kitchen.
I watch him study in the courtyard, his brow creased, mouthing words from his textbooks, and I throw peanut shells at him until he threatens to throw the textbook at my head.
We’re just us. Ryowoon and Seyeon, the same as we’ve been since the beginning. And for those few precious weeks, with the worst of my father’s damage fading from my skin and the best friend I’d ever have at my side, it’s the closest thing to freedom I’ve ever felt. The closest thing to peace.
It wouldn’t last. I knew that. Seoul was coming, and with it the beginning of Seyeon’s life and the end of something between us.
But I had those weeks. Warm late summer days with salt in the air and cicadas screaming from the trees and Seyeon’s laugh ringing off the harbor walls and Mrs. Nam’s voice from the store yelling at us to come in and eat.
I had those weeks and they were mine and no one, not my father, not fate, not the cursed bloodline that produced me, could take them from me.
I held on to every single one.