21. Chapter Twenty-One #2
We take Yuro down to the harbor in the evenings when the heat breaks, let him off the leash to bolt across the sand and splash into the surf.
Ryowoon follows a few steps behind, hands in his pockets but his eyes locked on the dog, watching every movement.
The first time Yuro waded too far out and a wave knocked him sideways Ryowoon was in the water before I could blink, shoes and all, scooping the dog up and hauling him back to shore, cursing under his breath about how the mutt has zero survival instincts.
Yuro licked salt water across his entire face and Ryowoon sputtered and held him at arm’s length, scowling, and then pulled him back in and pressed his forehead against the dog’s wet fur for just a second before putting him down.
He thinks I don’t notice these things. Or maybe he knows I do and has stopped trying to pretend otherwise.
Either way, I see it. The smile that breaks across his face, full and unguarded, when Yuro catches a piece of chicken from the air and perks his ears begging for more.
The way Ryowoon’s hand drops to the dog’s head without thinking whenever they’re sitting close, fingers scratching absently behind his ears.
The way Yuro gravitates to him now as much as he gravitates to me, sprawling at Ryowoon’s feet while he works, following him from room to room, pressing his nose against Ryowoon’s palm when he reaches down.
Something about it makes my chest ache in the best possible way.
Because I can see it happening. The hollow look that’s lived behind Ryowoon’s eyes since that night we drove to the vet clinic, since he pressed his face into Nuri’s fur and said goodbye to the only living thing in that house that ever loved him without conditions.
It eases. A little more each day. Not gone or forgotten, it never will be.
But loosening its grip, making room for something new that brings him that same uncomplicated joy.
I sit on the kitchen step one afternoon and just watch.
Ryowoon is crouched in the courtyard with Yuro, wrestling for a stick, laughing as the dog growls playfully and yanks it from his grip and then immediately brings it back and drops it, wagging, wanting to play again.
Ryowoon grabs it and holds it above his head, Yuro jumps, paws on Ryowoon’s chest, and Ryowoon stumbles back, catches himself, throws the stick and watches Yuro tear after it with his tongue lolling.
The look on his face when he turns back. Open, warm, alive. I burn it into my memory and keep it there.
My mom comes by every few days. She brings food in containers that multiply like they’re breeding, side dishes and rice and soups she made the night before, enough to feed a small platoon.
She stays to help sometimes, painting a window frame while Ryowoon holds it in place, folding the laundry she found in the basket by the bathroom door without being asked, tidying the kitchen while we work out front.
Ryowoon protests mildly, tells her she doesn’t need to clean up after us, and my mom waves him off with the same motion she uses to swat flies and tells him to eat more, he looks thin.
I take Ryowoon to see her house one afternoon.
He’s never been, and my mom’s been asking.
We walk up the hill together, Yuro between us, Ryowoon quiet as he takes in the neighborhood, eyes sweeping the streets, looking for what’s changed and what hasn’t.
Inside, my mom gives him the tour, showing off the small yard, the kitchen she’s proud of because it’s twice the size of the one we had in the Parks’ basement.
Ryowoon nods along, complimenting things, his hands shoved in his pockets and his posture a little stiff.
I’m in the kitchen getting water and I hear him get quiet. Come back out and find him standing by the TV stand, looking down at the framed photograph. The two of us at eighteen, caps and gowns, his arm slung around my shoulders and that huge grin splitting his face.
He picks it up, turns it in his hands. Glances over at me with a wry curl to his mouth.
“This the picture you used to find me?”
I lean against the wall, crossing my arms. “My mom sent me a photo of it, yeah.”
He looks at it again. That grin, the one in the photo, ghosts across his real face for a second.
“Was a handsome devil, wasn’t I?”
I roll my eyes.
He sets it back carefully, though. Lines it up with the dust marks on the shelf so it sits in the same spot it’s been sitting for years.
One evening after my mom leaves, having stuffed us both to the point of physical discomfort, Ryowoon and I lie sprawled on the platform with the empty dishes between us and the sky turning purple over the harbor.
Yuro is asleep beneath us, his paws twitching.
The cicadas are out in force, their droning filling the warm air.
I stare at the sky for a while, then turn my head to look at Ryowoon’s profile against the fading light.
“Did you ever try to find your mom?”
His face doesn’t change. His eyes stay fixed above the roofline, on the first stars appearing.
“No.”
I tell him about the gravesite I found in the hills outside Gwangju. His mother’s family, generations of them resting in that quiet place. How I wondered about her when I was standing there, wondered if she’d made it somewhere.
Ryowoon is quiet for a long time. The cicadas fill the silence, droning and relentless, and I almost think he’s not going to answer.
“No,” he says flatly. “Never looked.”
I wait.
“All her stuff was still there.” He doesn’t turn his head. Still watching the sky. “Her clothes in the drawers. Her shoes by the door. She didn’t pack anything. Didn’t take anything with her.” A pause. “People who run away take things.”
The cicadas drone. Yuro shifts beneath the platform, sighs in his sleep.
“She had nowhere to go,” he says. “No family who’d take her back. No money. No life outside those walls.” His jaw works. “She didn’t know how to do anything except survive that house and one day she couldn’t do that anymore.”
I don’t speak. Don’t move.
“She didn’t run off,” he says with certainty. “It’s more likely she just walked into the ocean.”
I look at his profile against the fading light, the set of his jaw, the stillness of him. The conclusion of a boy who grew up knowing despair too well to mistake it for anything else.
I don’t ask again. We lie there and watch the stars come out and don’t speak of it anymore.
One night we lie awake on the sleeping mats, the room blue with moonlight through the window. Ryowoon is on his back, one arm behind his head, the other resting between us. I lie on my side, propped on an elbow, tracing the lines of ink on his arm with my fingertip.
I follow the designs slowly, each image pulling a thread of memory loose.
The Rose of Sharon near his shoulder, its petals dark and detailed.
I touch it and think of a twelve-year-old boy tucking a bright pink flower behind his ear without a scrap of self-consciousness, strutting down the hill ahead of me.
Think of finding one pressed between the pages of my textbooks every morning until winter killed the blooms. The goblin masks scattered through the design, their twisted grins, and I’m back in the creek bed listening to Ryowoon groan as I lectured him about traditional folklore for the hundredth time, his eyes rolling even as he sat there and listened to every word.
The Jindo standing proud over his bicep.
Nuri. I let my finger rest there a moment longer.
My hand moves down to the fishing boat rendered in fine linework near the crease of his elbow. I look up at Ryowoon, a question in my eyes.
“For Jinwon,” he says simply, softly. The name of our gentlest friend hanging in the dark between us.
He turns his wrist, showing me the inside of his forearm, an image I haven’t noticed before. A mirror, small and detailed, its surface catching reflected light in the design.
“For Haeil,” he says.
I study it, don’t understand the reference. Some shared thing between the two of them I wasn’t part of. I press my thumb against the ink and Ryowoon’s pulse beats steadily beneath my touch.
Then I reach across, take his other hand. Turn it so I can see the inside of his wrist. The constellation. Black points connected by thin parallel lines, a pattern I know by heart even though I’ve never been able to see the original on my own skin.
Ryowoon’s mouth curves, his eyes crinkling. “My favorite,” he says. “The cutest damn freckles I’ve ever seen.”
I kiss him. Push forward and press my mouth to his, feel him grin against my lips, his hand coming up to cup the back of my neck.
He kisses me back slowly and thoroughly, tasting like toothpaste and the cold barley tea we drank before bed.
I pull him against me, chest to chest, his heartbeat thumping against mine, and kiss him until neither of us is smiling anymore because we’ve gone somewhere deeper, somewhere hungrier, his tongue sliding against mine and his fingers tightening in my hair.
Later, after the clothes come off and the blankets get kicked away and I’m boneless and half-conscious with my face in the pillow, I feel his mouth on my lower back.
His warm lips brush against the skin there, pressing against each freckle in turn.
One, two, three, four, five. Connecting them with his mouth the way he once connected them with lines in the dirt.
I exhale, my skin jumping beneath his lips, and let my eyes close.
His hand rests on my hip. His breath warms the small of my back.
The leaves on the hills above the harbor start to turn gold before we know it.
One morning I walk out to unlock the roll-up doors and the air has that bite to it, that crisp clean smell of autumn shouldering summer aside.
I stand there for a minute with my hands in my pockets, watching the mist curl off the water below, and think about how fast the weeks have gone.