20. Chapter Twenty
Ryowoon
That summer is like a dream.
From the first moment Seyeon reappeared, it was like someone flipped a switch.
The sun came back out. The warm weather followed him in, and every moment since has felt like holding a bright, burning star in my hands, staring into the glow until my eyes go blind from it and I don’t care. I don’t care.
I still can’t believe it. Each time Seyeon climbs into my bed and strips off his shirt and looks at me with those soft brown eyes and lets me in, lets me have him.
To take from his body and his warmth and everything he offers up so freely, like it costs him nothing to let me devour him.
He’s an addiction. One I can’t get enough of, that I hoard in the feeling of my hands on his skin, the taste of his mouth, the salt of his throat.
Every brush of my lips against his body, every time I sink into him and lose myself in the heat of him wrapped around me.
I drown in his moans, in his sweet, helpless cries, and the way his muscles clench and pull me deeper.
The rewarding spill of his release across my stomach, the sound he makes when I fill him.
The way I pour myself into Seyeon day after day like if I put enough of myself inside him I can live in his body forever.
He falls asleep in my bed as many nights as he spends at home.
Sihyung doesn’t question it when he finds both of us in the kitchen in the morning, doesn’t blink at Seyeon’s clothes draped over the bathroom door or Seyeon camped out on our couch in the evening with a controller in his lap and his bare feet on the table.
It’s nothing new. It’s Seyeon and Ryowoon like we’ve been since birth, attached at the hip, stitched together at some invisible seam.
It doesn’t seem unusual to anyone that we fall asleep and wake up in the same bed.
It’s the same as it always was. Seyeon’s pillow beside mine.
His knee knocking against my shin at two in the morning.
His face the first thing I see when I open my eyes.
But having him available to me in this new way has made me realize I’ve never come close to anything nearly as satisfying.
I’ve been with other guys. Enough to know what I like and what I don’t, enough to scratch the itch and move on.
None of them stuck. None of them left more than a temporary mark.
I’ve never really been with anyone the way I am with Seyeon.
Never wanted to wake up beside someone and immediately want to pull them closer instead of finding my shoes.
Never wanted to press my face into someone’s hair and just breathe and keep breathing until my lungs couldn’t hold any more of them.
Never felt my hands shake just from the wanting.
No one is going to come close again. I know this like I know the roads of this town, the shape of the harbor, the pattern of my own scars.
It’s knowledge that lives in my bones. Seyeon ruined me.
Or maybe I was always ruined for anyone else.
Maybe it was decided the day we were born in the same room minutes apart.
And I know it has a time limit.
Come fall, Seyeon goes back to Seoul. Back to his last year, his internship, the future he’s been clawing toward since we were kids reading textbooks by the creek.
He’ll graduate and get a teaching position somewhere with clean hallways and bright classrooms full of kids who’ll adore him because how could they not.
He’ll build a life. Maybe find someone. A girl with a nice smile and a steady job, or a guy with a college degree who can talk about the things Seyeon talks about, who reads the same books, who doesn’t flinch at loud noises or wake up swinging in the dark.
Someone who can match him. Someone who deserves the same air as him.
And I’ll stay here. In this town with its narrow streets and its ghosts and its permanent smell of salt and diesel, where I’ll likely live and die within the same ten square kilometers I’ve known my whole life.
Fixing cars. Smoking on the corner. Getting older and harder and more worn down until there’s nothing left of me but the calluses on my hands and the scars on my skin and the fading memory of what it felt like to hold him.
It kills me if I stop to think about it.
Because it’s right. Seyeon’s path is right.
He’s going to get everything he deserves and he deserves all of it, every good thing waiting for him out there beyond these hills.
A career that fulfills him. People who respect him.
A life with meaning and purpose and warmth.
Maybe kids someday. Seyeon loves working with kids.
He lights up when he talks about his students, his eyes going bright, his hands moving, and I can picture it so clearly.
Him in a classroom. Him coming home to a house with shoes lined up by the door and noise in the kitchen and someone waiting. A normal life. A happy ending.
I can’t imagine anything like that for me.
The thought of having kids makes my stomach turn.
Not because I don’t like them but because the idea of passing on what’s inside me, of putting a child in the path of whatever poison runs through my bloodline, is the most horrifying thing I can conceive of.
I can feel it sometimes, sitting in the base of my skull like a coiled wire, humming.
I’d rather cut my own hands off than risk laying them on a child the way they were laid on me.
So no. No family, no legacy, no neat little house with someone waiting.
But Seyeon has never asked me for more than what we are right now.
Hasn’t pushed, hasn’t pressed, hasn’t tried to put a label on whatever this is between us.
He crawls into my bed and puts his mouth on mine and tangles his legs with mine under the covers and doesn’t ask me what it means or where it’s going.
And so for now I take whatever he gives me.
Selfishly. Greedily. Gorging myself on the affection he hands over so easily like a man who’s been starving his whole life and has finally been let loose at a table.
I soak up every bit of his sunlight. I memorize the sounds he makes.
The pitch of his laugh when I say something stupid.
The way his nose scrunches when he’s half asleep.
How his fingers curl against my chest in the middle of the night, absent, unconscious, reaching for me in his sleep the way they say we reached for each other as newborns.
Every morning I hold him close and breathe him in and feel the warmth of his body against mine and tell myself to remember this.
This temperature. This weight. The pattern of his breathing against my collarbone.
Because it’s going to end with the calendar pages turning and September creeping closer and Seyeon packing his bag and getting on a bus and going back to the life he’s building, the one I can’t follow him into.
I go to work with my clothes smelling of him, his scent clinging to the collar of my jacket, my undershirt.
My hands tingle all day with the feeling of Seyeon’s skin beneath them.
The dip of his waist. The soft give of his inner thighs.
The smooth plane of his back where that little cluster of freckles sits, the constellation I’ve traced with my fingertip a hundred times because I can’t stop touching it.
Every evening I watch the sunset out over the harbor from the corner of town I end up in, and I count. Count the days. Count the sunsets. How many we have left, how many mornings, how many nights. July turns to August and the days shorten by minutes. Seyeon doesn’t seem to count.
He lives like there’s no end coming. And I let myself pretend right alongside him so I don’t feel the knife twist, and I’d rather go numb from the sweetness than sober up and face what’s waiting on the other side of summer.
The afternoon shift at the garage ran long, Mr. Lee asking me to stay and finish up the transmission job on a Kia that needed to go out by morning.
My shoulders ache and my hands still smell like motor oil even after scrubbing them raw in the bathroom sink.
I’m sprawled on my bed in boxers and a tank top, one arm behind my head, staring at the ceiling and thinking about nothing in particular when the front door opens and his voice carries down the hall.
“Ryo, you home?”
“Bedroom,” I call back.
I hear him kick his shoes off in the entryway, the rustle of a bag being set down, his footsteps on the floor.
When he appears in the doorway I feel the smile on my face.
He looks a little windswept, hair messy from the bus, cheeks still holding the last of the day’s warmth.
He’s in a white button down with the sleeves rolled and dark jeans, nice enough that I figure whatever he was doing today required looking presentable.
He drops a stack of something on my desk without explanation and crosses the room. The mattress dips as he climbs on, fitting himself against me, one knee between mine, his chin tipping up.
“Miss me?”
I answer by curling a hand around the back of his neck and pulling him down.
His mouth is warm and tastes faintly of the candy he ate on the bus ride back, sweet and artificial.
He hums against my lips, his fingers finding the hem of my tank top and slipping beneath it, palms flat against my stomach.
The casual touch sends heat pooling low in my gut instantly the way it always does when Seyeon puts his hands on me.
He was gone since yesterday. Some kind of school related appointment he mentioned.
I didn’t ask for details because Seyeon always gives them whether I want them or not.
So I spent the day at the garage and the evening on the couch watching a movie I’d already seen twice and smoking on the balcony and pretending the apartment didn’t feel cavernous without him in it.