20. Chapter Twenty #3
He stops mid sentence, talking about a professor at the Busan school who specializes in curriculum development. Tips his head, brows lifting slightly at the look he sees on my face.
“I think you’ve misunderstood something.”
He frowns, a small crease between his brows. “What do you mean?”
I swallow. My throat feels like it’s lined with glass. I smooth my face out, iron it flat. I make my voice level. Bored. I make my eyes go dead the way I learned to do at eight years old sitting across from my father at the kitchen table, the way I survived. Emptying myself out.
I look at him and I say, “You seem to think this is more serious than it is.”
His expression shifts. Not hurt yet. Confusion. He searches my face for the joke, the sarcasm. Waiting for the punchline.
“Stay?” I let the word hang. “So you can be close to me? Why would you do that?”
The crease between his brows deepens.
I lean back against the desk, fold my arms. Force the corner of my mouth up into something careless. “We’re not a couple, Seyeon. We never were. What we’ve been doing this summer doesn’t exactly justify you uprooting your life and transferring schools.”
He blinks. His lips part but nothing comes out. I can see the first stone breaking the surface of still water. The ripples spreading outward. His eyes flicker, I watch the confusion sharpen.
Keep going. Don’t stop. If you stop you’ll break.
I laugh. Make it sound light. Dismissive. Cruel. “I think you might be a little deluded here. This was a summer thing. It was only ever that. You go back to school in the fall and we go back to normal. I figured you knew that.”
His mouth closes. Opens again. “Yah, Cha Ryowoon.” His voice is careful. Testing. “Don’t you think that’s a bit much?”
I shrug. “It’s the truth. I don’t want you to stay.” The words taste like battery acid. “You know how I am. I don’t do relationships. I didn’t ask for one, and I don’t want to start.”
He goes still. Really still. Calm before a storm, pressure dropping out of the air. He sits up straighter on the bed, his back stiffening, looks at me with those eyes that have been reading me since before either of us could talk. Looking for the lie.
“You mean to tell me this all meant nothing to you?” he asks quietly. Too controlled. “This whole summer. All of it was just for fun?”
I shrug again. Each one costs more than the last. Make my face look amused. Slightly pitying, the way you’d look at someone who’s embarrassed themselves.
“It’s just sex, Seyeon.” The words leave my mouth and I feel pieces of myself crumbling away, falling into the black void in my chest. “I have sex with a lot of people. You’re not special.”
He flinches. A tiny involuntary jerk of his chin, his jaw tightening, his eyes going bright. Not with tears. With shock that’s curdling into hurt that’s sharpening into fury. I can see every stage of it pass across his face because I know this face better than my own reflection.
“Is that what you think of me?” His voice drops. Low and quiet and dangerous. “You want me to believe that? You want to stand there and pretend I’m just like everyone else to you?” He shakes his head slowly. “After all this time. Like I don’t know you.”
And that there is the thing I was afraid of. He’s not buying it. Of course he’s not buying it, because Seyeon has spent twenty-three years learning the language of me, learning every tell, every flinch and blink and micro expression. He knows when I’m lying. Instinctively. Without thinking.
He’s going to push through this if I don’t go harder.
He’ll grab on to the doubt, worry at it like a dog with a bone until it falls apart, and then he’ll look at me with forgiving eyes and say he understands and he’ll transfer anyway and he’ll stay and it’ll kill him.
Slowly. The way this town kills everyone who doesn’t get out.
So I go in harder.
“If you knew anything about me,” I say without wavering, holding steady through sheer force because I’m nothing if not a survivor, “you’d know I don’t care about anyone. Never have. Don’t have the capacity for it.”
His hands curl into fists at his sides. His teeth clench, the muscles jump in his jaw. His eyes are glittering with a fury that I’d find beautiful under any other circumstance, angry Seyeon has always been something to behold. Good, I think. Stay angry. Don’t question it. Don’t look deeper.
“Yah, Cha Ryowoon.” His voice shakes. From rage, not from tears, and I’m grateful for it. If he cried I’d collapse. “You’re being too much. You really want me to believe all that bullshit? Like this was all some game to you? That you felt nothing the whole time?”
I grin at him. The worst grin I own. The one I used to wear picking fights with older boys, the one that says nothing you do can touch me because there’s nothing left to touch. Cocky and cold and empty.
“A hole’s a hole, Seyeon.” Each syllable is a nail I’m hammering into my own coffin. “Taking what’s so freely offered doesn’t mean yours is any different from the rest.”
I don’t see his fist coming.
One second I’m leaning against the desk with that poisonous grin on my face and the next my head snaps sideways and pain detonates across my jaw and I’m stumbling back, my hip catching the edge of the desk, pamphlets scattering to the floor. Stars burst behind my eyes.
Good swing, I think distantly, through the ringing. Clean rotation from the shoulder. I taught him that.
I straighten up. Wipe at my mouth with the back of my hand. Blood smears across my knuckles. I look at it. Look at Seyeon.
He’s breathing hard, his chest heaving, his fist still clenched at his side.
His eyes are blazing, wet, his nostrils flared.
Every line of his body is pulled tight with fury and underneath it, underneath the rage I can see the hurt.
The wound I just opened, fresh and gaping, and I think this is the cruelest thing I’ve ever done.
“You’re such an asshole,” he says. His voice breaks just enough for me to hear.
He grabs his jeans off the floor. Yanks them on. Pulls his shirt over his head inside out and doesn’t fix it. I stand by the desk and watch him. Every movement fast and jerky with anger. Don’t stop, I think. Don’t look at me again. Just go. Please just go.
He stops in the doorway.
He looks back over his shoulder and his face.
God, his face. The wetness gathered at his lashes, his jaw set, his lips pressed together hard enough to drain them white.
The look in his eyes is the one I never wanted to see directed at me.
Worse than anger or rage. The look of someone who opened themselves up completely and got gutted for it.
“You can throw those away,” he says, tipping his chin at the pamphlets scattered on the floor. His voice flat. “Along with anything else I’ve left here. I don’t fucking need it anymore.”
He turns and walks out. I hear his footsteps down the hall, fast, uneven. The front door opens. Slams shut hard enough to rattle the wall.
And then silence.
My knees give out. I hit the floor with both hands, bracing against the floor, and spit blood onto the ground between them.
Red droplets on white linoleum. I stare at them.
The inside of my cheek is split where my teeth cut against it from the force of his punch and I can feel my jaw already swelling.
I press my forehead to the cold floor and curl my hands into fists and hold myself there, just breathing, just trying to breathe, as the silence of the apartment fills the space where his voice used to be.
Where his laughter used to be. Where the smell of his shampoo and the warmth of his body and the sound of his breathing beside me used to be.
I stay there for a long time. On my knees on the floor of my bedroom with blood dripping from my mouth and the scattered evidence of every dream Seyeon was willing to give up for me spread out beneath my hands.
I don’t see him again.
I keep expecting to. Keep bracing every time I round a corner or step out the front door of the apartment, my whole body wired and tense, waiting for the collision.
For Seyeon to materialize on the street, jaw set, eyes blazing, fists ready.
To grab me by the shirt and slam me against a wall and demand I take it back.
To see right through every poisonous word I forced out and call me what I am.
He doesn’t come.
Days pass. I go to the garage. I work on engines and crawl under trucks and let Mr. Lee talk at me about his daughter’s wedding plans and I smoke on the corner after my shift and I walk home and Seyeon is not there.
His absence is an emptiness pressing against the walls of the apartment, filling the rooms with a silence so loud it makes my ears ring.
Sihyung notices but he doesn’t push, gives me careful sideways looks and leaves food on the counter for me and stays out of my way when I disappear into my room after work.
Seyeon’s stuff is still scattered around the apartment.
A spare toothbrush in the bathroom cup. A pair of his socks balled up behind the couch.
One of his textbooks on the kitchen table, a receipt tucked between the pages as a bookmark.
I don’t touch any of it. Can’t bring myself to move it.
Can’t bring myself to look at it either, so I just stop going into the kitchen unless Sihyung’s there and I brush my teeth with my eyes on the sink basin and not the shelf.
Two weeks after that night, I hear from Jinwon that Seyeon’s going back to Seoul. End of summer, just like planned. Says Seyeon’s mom organized a send off at the bus station, that everyone’s going. Jinwon gives me a pointed look and says you’re coming, right?
I tell him I have a shift.
Jinwon opens his mouth, closes it. Says nothing.