Chapter Text
Winter melted into spring with a lingering chill. Most days Yeoreum’s forced to wear her winter clothes still, even though it’s starting to fall into late March.
With uni in full swing she sees her family about as often as she did during the break, perhaps less, either her shifts pulling later into the day or her timetable just generally being inconvenient. She’s starting to consider moving back home. Maybe asking Luda if she wants to take over her spot in the lease.
She sighs into the scarf bundled around her neck, focuses on the swish of Yeolmu’s tail as they walk.
“Noona,” her brother says out of the blue.
“Yeah?”
“Do you…” he trails off, as Yeoreum turns to look at him. He’s got his hands buried into his pockets with his shoulders hunched inwards, and though his odd bout from the holidays has mostly faded away, there’s a persisting strain in his shoulder, a tenseness in his jaw Yeoreum can’t help but empathise with.
Lately, she’s been the exact same.
“Do I what?” She prompts.
Her brother hesitates, twists his mouth around for a beat before asking, “Do you ever feel like you’re missing something?”
“Missing something,” she echoes, watching Yeolmu tug on the leash and pulling her away from a puddle.
“Yeah. Like, there’s a part of you that’s not quite right—” he pauses briefly, “or not that. That’s not what I mean. Just like there’s something missing inside you. Out of reach. Kind of like a puzzle piece you dropped under the bed, or something, and can’t find anymore.”
That jagged thing scrapes inside of her as she listens. Uncomfortably close. “Sometimes,” she says to distract herself. “A lot of the time. But that’s just part of life, Bom-ah. We’re always changing.”
“I get that,” he huffs. “But that’s not what—it’s not the same feeling.”
Yeoreum’s quiet after that. Yeolmu’s fur bounces as she trots along, and Yeoreum buries her head further into the cashmere of the scarf, breathes in lemon and earth. “Why are you asking?” She asks, voice rough.
“I keep thinking about dad,” he admits. “I want to know what happened. I, um. Tried looking, back over the holidays, but it kept feeling like I was doing something I shouldn’t.”
That explains it, Yeoreum thinks, crawling in her skin. Everything’s he’s talking about aches too close. Too close. Her dad’s still too close, all these years later. She licks her lips. “I’m not the person you should ask about it.”
“Why not? Mom still won’t explain anything. She keeps telling me to wait some longer.”
“So wait,” Yeoreum says, because she’s been waiting too, keeps wondering how long she’ll have to before the haunting stops.
How long until she can stand to just exist without that angry corrosion wearing at her; when the doubt will finally give up its claws.
It’s not anytime soon, Yeoreum realises quickly.
After Eunbi, it keeps happening, over and over. Dayoung prods them one day when they’re out for dinner, when Juyeon tucks herself close towards Yeoreum as she shows her something on her phone, one of her arms twined with Yeoreum’s out of sheer habit.
“What’s up with you two,” she asks, eyes suspicious. Yeoreum can’t help but feel that same spiking anxiety, the chapped lips and the heart in her throat. “Yah, is there something I should know about, Lee Yeoreum?”
Somehow, she escapes unscathed; there’s nothing exactly incriminating about the two of them. Juyeon’s like that with everyone. But maybe there’s something in how she uses words like incriminating, like she’s doing something wrong, how that guilt, each time, runs wicked through her skin until she’s burning with it.
A ghost should be colder, she thinks.
After Dayoung it’s an old lady at a food stand, who calls them cute, and then one of Juyeon’s classmates who’s in the studio when Yeoreum drops by with coffee. Luda eyeing her wearily. Her own mom raising an eyebrow at her phone when she texts.
And for every one, there’s a shadow flickering across Juyeon’s face before she corrects them.
Yeoreum doesn’t really know what it means. Only that it can’t be good, discontent, maybe. Frustration. God’s funny hands reminding her exactly of the precipice she’s walking, the trajectory she’s following and how the longer she waits the messier the fuel burns.
It doesn’t help that Juyeon continues to look at her like there’s a question poised on her tongue, more often as the days go by.
Yeoreum feels sick with it. The guilt, the doubt. Juyeon’s too good for her. She can’t keep playing around like this, not at the cost of Juyeon’s feelings.
She thinks, exhausted as she closes her bedroom door and leans against it, she should have left it at one night.
When she dreams, she’s still there. Stumbling down the maroon corridor. Beneath her shoes the carpet bends downwards, squishes against her sole. It feels like she’s running on jelly; she slips against it, won’t let her move.
More and more she dreams nowadays, and each time it sinks its teeth in harder.
She dreams of the patterns constantly morphing in and out, daisies and tulips and daisies in the corners of her eyes, until they’re indistinguishable from each other; until there’s no colour left except for a muddied brown. She dreams of the walls pressing in, in, in on her until it cuts her off from where she’s trying to go.
In her head there’s a rapid sort of desperation. Her lungs knitting tight against each other as she trips, tries to find her way to the right door. Her shoulders always hurt. Her legs, her arms. All her bones.
Sometimes it’s her in the small, locked room, water pooling around her calves and rising to her hips and sinking in past her clothes, the ones that smell like citrus and ash. Dry beer. The bite of tannin and garlic.
The wood scratches at her hands, slices into them, splinters out the door. She ignores it, the blood clotting in the seam.
She needs to get in—get out—out.
Yeoreum wakes with no air in her chest and salt pooling in her mouth.
She’s gotten good at being able to wake up without making any noise, but this time she can’t help the pained heave of her chest and the small cough as she rolls over onto her forearms and blinks away the tears. Her lungs pound like she’s been holding her breath for too long.
Tripping out the bed she barely spares a glance towards anything, except for one quick look at to make sure Juyeon’s still there, still sleeping, sprawled across the other side of the bed.
But even then she can’t help but linger, pained at the soft way the moonlight peeks through the curtains, washes Juyeon in breathless silver.
In the bathroom she forgoes turning on the light in favour of sliding down the tiled wall of the shower. She kind of wishes there was a bathtub for her to sit in, twisting her hand in her hair and holding it at the crown of her head, so the blistering skin of her neck can rest against the cold.
She shuts her eyes, licks her lips. Her pyjamas are sticking to her back. It feels like the type of gross sweat she remembers from the sports days in middle school, after sitting underneath the beating sun for hours on end with sand crawling into her socks and the crease of her knees.
There’s no sand to pick out of her skin here, at least. Just nightmares.
Yeoreum’s still curled up against the floor, arm growing tired from holding her hair, when the door slides open and the shadow of it slinks across the floor.
“Yeoreum-ah?” Juyeon says, sleep-hoarse.
She must have turned the flashlight of her phone on, because the light warps around the hazy outline of her body. Eclipses her in white. “Sorry,” Yeoreum murmurs. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“You okay?” Juyeon slips through the door quietly, leaving a slit of it open as she walks over to sit next to Yeoreum. In the dark, she’s glad she can’t really make out anything on Juyeon’s face. Nothing beyond the shape of it and the tiniest dance of light in her eyes.
Yeoreum looks away, picks at the skin around her nails.
“Yeoreum-ah,” Juyeon says again. She can hear the worry in her tired voice.
Somehow that just makes everything worse. Feels like someone pressing on all her knocks and bruises, because she can’t understand why Juyeon’s still here, sitting next to her, peeling Yeoreum’s hands away from each other and replacing one with her own.
“It’s nothing,” Yeoreum says thickly, Juyeon’s thumb dragging against her palm. Burying into her life line. “Just didn’t have a good dream.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
Yeoreum can feel her heart crack, dull, reverberating. Seizes in her chest and swaps with her stomach. The guilt hurts. The guilt hurts hard, chokes her out.
She wishes there was a bathtub here, the hard, ceramic walls of it; wishes Juyeon wasn’t so good. Wishes that she would just do the right thing, like her mom always told her she could.
Too bad she's frozen by it, that anxiety that rots inside.
Juyeon’s head tips forward in front of her, like she’s trying to search Yeoreum’s face.
“No,” Yeoreum croaks eventually. “No.”
Lately she feels like she’s hurtling towards it. That forgone conclusion she’s been trying to delay, ignored from the beginning. This can’t last, shouldn’t last, if Yeoreum were smarter, if Juyeon was. It sinks into here there in the bathroom, with a bleak sense of inevitability, that she’s balancing on the cliff’s edge, stretching the limit of what she can have thin.
Yeoreum turns to dig the crown of her head into Juyeon’s shoulder and feels her mold herself to let her. Her hand reaches around to brush away the hair at the base of her neck, and Yeoreum’s more than bruised from it, the want for it all;
The ugly truth, that like this, she can’t have it.
손주연언니
are u busy after your lab tomorrow?
sojung unnie stole some coupons from dayoung ㅋㅋ
so she wants to go out ^^
손주연언니
ill take that
as a yes ㅜㅜ
손주연언니
yeoreum-ah?
손주연언니
are you okay?
She’s being ridiculous, she knows that. Ignoring Juyeon isn’t going to solve any of her problems. She knows they need to talk properly about everything, about them, even if the idea of it makes her stomach churn violent to the point she’s had to lock herself in the bathroom, on the verge of throwing up.
She can feel the tile underneath her, bruising against her bone. Just below her ears she can feel her blood pounding—she feels stupid—keeps pulling and twisting at the skin of her hands as she pushes on her feet, shuffles herself backwards against the wall—she feels stupid. She’s overreacting to an idea.
Outside her bathroom door she can hear cutlery clinking, Luda and Dayoung, the T.V. low. She drags a hand through her hair and folds over her knees.
She needs to talk to Juyeon. She’s too terrified to talk to Juyeon.
Yeoreum doesn’t have a lot of memories from before she was around six. This is par for the course, memories upon memories building as she got older, shuffled out and replaced with brighter, more vivid, more exciting things. Remembering anything from when she was that young feels more like looking at snapshots; never the whole thing, just a vignette of the event.
Her vision blurs over as she stares at the grout in the tile, dirtying brown from the years. She can’t stop smelling the earth and lemon in the collar of the hoodie she’s wearing, doesn’t remember when she’d stolen it from Juyeon, at what point she grew so used to wearing her clothes like they’re her own.
Gently she blows out a shaky breath.
When her brother was born she would have been five, fresh in school and the big wide world. What she remembers from that time aren’t really her memories, mostly stories retold by her mom and grandma until she warped them into something that felt like hers, like something she should be able to remember.
Her brother was born in autumn, contrary to his name, the same way Yeoreum was born in winter and was named summer. Her mom the days before and during his birth had been adamant on one thing; that her dad wasn’t allowed in unless he was sober.
Before then Yeoreum can’t recall a time he wasn’t drinking. Only remembers hazy images of him with beer bottles and soju, knows how his breath smelt when the guilt hit him after stumbling home late, hovering over her while she pretended she was asleep. The ghost of his fingers pulling the duvet around her shoulders before slipping out her room.
But the day her brother was born he’d stuck to it. Her mom’s demand. Yeoreum remembers the way sunlight pooled through the windows honey gold, the weary, enamoured look on her mom’s face, the way her dad’s teeth glinted as he smiled down at her brother.
And then he kept sticking to it. Stuck and stuck and stuck, taught her how to do multiplication on the couch, slung her around his shoulders as they walked. For two years she never saw any alcohol, not in the house anyway. Never in her dad’s breath.
There’s sweat prickling at the base of her neck, she can feel it’s uncomfortable touch. Her heart’s out of her ears, at least, and the knot in her throat has disappeared enough it doesn’t hurt so much to swallow. Despite the sweat she just feels cold. Like the fall of a fever.
Slowly she pushes herself up so she’s standing, presses her forehead against the cool mirror of the medicine cabinet as she turns the tap and runs her hands underneath the water, rubs them against the sides of her neck, skin desperately hot beneath her palm.
Before then Yeoreum was a child with a deadbeat father, a child with a ghost that knew it was dead, blurred pictures in her mind of a resignation in his shoulders and a faraway look in his eyes.
“Yeoreum-ah?” Luda calls to her through the door, muffled. It gets her brain turning a little, staring at her reflection in the mirror. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she croaks. Clears her voice. Her eyes are red around the edges from crying. “I’m fine. Tell Dayoung not to burn the apartment down.”
Luda does, and then a moment later she hears, distant, “It was one time!”
Yeoreum smiles, laughs under her breath.
“Twice,” she hears after. The shutting of a door down a corridor, Yeonjung grumbling into the living room. “Stop letting her use microwaves unsuper—Luda-unnie! Oh my god.”
Yeoreum knows how it feels to be loved; prefers her friends like this. An arm’s reach away, constant, steady. She knows how it feels to love, too, the worry that enjoys eating away at her, the stars in her chest at their bickering, the indignant screeches and squawks and cider-laughs.
Loving Juyeon is a different sort of monster to loving the people in her living room. A sharper beast that reminds her of all the things she never wants to feel again. A love she still doesn’t know how to trust.
She wants to trust it, she really does. There’s something so good here, with Juyeon, who’s patient with her to a fault, made her forget about the things she was running from to the point it went full circle because she was too scared to love in whole.
A hopeless thing, now. There are countless pieces of her in Juyeon’s palms she’ll never be able to get back, of course she had to go and mess everything up.
손주연언니
yeoreum
손주연언니
please just talk to me?
Every minute of the week she continues to dodge Juyeon weighs on her.
Weighs heavy. Cinderblocks her to the floor. She goes to work everyday half out of it, struggles to remember orders amongst all the sludge turning in her mind, her limbs and muscles so fatigued the effort of moving each one only tires her out more.
There’s a low-grade headache thrumming below her eyes, she hasn’t slept properly in days. Most of the sleep she has gotten has been accidental in the library on top of report write ups and notebooks full of colour-coded revision notes. It feels like she’s walking through quicksand and fog, like she needs to remember to keep herself upright or else she’d just sink to the floor and never get up.
For a day she just—doesn’t. She wasn’t scheduled on Saturday, and she can’t bring herself to study anymore, so when she wakes up it’s to the sun poking bright through the edges of her curtains in beams, midday, and she just looks at it before rolling over and curling into her pillow. Her phone is silenced on the side table. Lights off, her headache only pounds against her skull. Exhaustion splits it. She’s been tired for so long.
Her tongue sticks to every part of her mouth, the roof, the corners, and it chafes when she tries to swallow. She can’t be bothered going through the effort of getting up to drink water so all she does is burrow further into her sheets, cocoons herself there.
She doesn’t go back to sleep; can’t, really. If she thought too much before then she’s running on overdrive now.
At some point later in the day her door cracks open, strip of yellow light poking through alongside Dayoung’s head, asking if she’s okay.
“Yes,” she rasps, “no. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
She can’t see Dayoung so she only imagines her rolling her eyes, hears a weary, kind sigh as the yellow light grows and melts away and her sheets rustle with the movement of Dayoung crawling in beside her.
“I would ask if you wanna talk about it,” Dayoung says, nudging her to turn over, “but if you’re this bad the answer’s just gonna be no, so I won’t. Aren’t I so nice?”
Yeoreum snorts. “The best,” she intones, tucking her head against Dayoung’s neck. “Tell me about Luda-unnie,” she says a moment later. “Are you two really…”
“Luda-unnie is good,” Dayoung smiles. “Surprising, right? Us. I’ve been confessing my deep, all -consuming undying love for years and she was so dense about it.”
“I don’t know how saving her as Loser-unnie in your phone is confessing your deep, all-consuming love, but Congratulations, Im Dayoung,” Yeoreum laughs softly. At least one of them is doing something the right way. “I’m happy for you.”
Dayoung runs her hands through Yeoreum’s hair, rhythmic and dependable, for all her antics. “You know,” she tells her quietly, “you’re allowed to be happy as well, Reum-ah. I’m not gonna interrogate you about Juyeon-unnie but it’s not fun for the rest of us either, seeing you two like this.”
Out of instinct Yeoreum sniffles, “Sorry.”
Dayoung huffs and flicks her in the back of the head. “It’s not something you have to be sorry about, idiot. We’re your friends. You’re not the only one around here that gets to worry about everyone. All I’m saying is that there’s a very easy solution, and it’s called talking and getting your shit together.”
That’s a very easy way of putting it. Yeoreum’s been trying to talk herself into doing it for the past week, and can only play out the scenario an uncountable amount of times; never sees it going well.
“What if she doesn’t—” she hesitates, stumbles over the words. There’s too many of them, always. “I messed everything up. I keep messing things up. I don’t—why would she want to come back?”
“I don’t know, Yeoreum-ah,” Dayoung hums. “Have you ever considered that maybe she just wants to?”
“I think she needs to learn to be less nice,” Yeoreum says dryly. She can feel her throat lodging, the tears prickling in the corners.
That’s been the trouble from the start, hasn’t it, that Juyeon’s always been too kind and too sweet and too good to ever push Yeoreum for any more than she’s willing to give.
Would it have been easier if she did? Maybe. Maybe. It’s hindsight that always hits the hardest. Yeoreum can wish she did everything better, differently—the right way, but it’ll never change the fact that she didn’t.
Dayoung only squeezes her arm gently. “Sure, but that’s Juyeon-unnie’s decision. You should let her make some instead of just deciding everything yourself.”
“How do you know I’m doing that?”
“Because I know you, Lee Yeoreum.” Dayoung pinches her skin. “Talk to her properly,” she says around Yeoreum’s pained yelp. “So I don’t have to see you mope anymore. Or at least mope with some closure.”
“Why are you all weird and wise,” Yeoreum sulks. “It’s gross on you. Stop it.”
“Because I’m in love Yeoreum-ah,” Dayoung exclaims, coiling around Yeoreum’s entire body and rolling them side to side.
“Stop—Dayoung-ah—” Yeoreum whines, smacking her multiple times, trying to free herself. Her head spins and her mouth still feels like cotton and even blinking is draining, but the warm rumble of gratefulness, for Dayoung, for this, is enough she can ignore everything, for a moment, at least. Until the point she can’t anymore.
“Promise you’ll talk to Juyeon-unnie soon,” Dayoung says once her outburst is over and Yeoreum’s a safe distance away on the other side of the bed. “If you don’t I’ll do worse than put rocks in your pillow. I’ll force you to talk about your feelings every day. Without fail. I’m dedicated.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me,” Yeoreum replies truthfully. “I will, Yomi. I’m trying.”
“Good.” Dayoung reaches over to squeeze her hand. “Now get up. Let’s go eat something, I’m so hungry.”
Truthfully, Yeoreum’s a coward.
Juyeon’s everywhere now that she’s not constantly by Yeoreum’s side. She’s in the advertisements for the drama club’s performance, the sleek poster designs and beige coloured stage; she’s in the necklace always, always dangling around Yeoreum’s neck. The ads on her instagram for art exhibitions a month ago Yeoreum would have sent to her, asking if she was going to go.
She’s in the muted tapping of rain against the bus windows, the citrus smell of lemon in the ahjumma behind her’s grocery bag, all the way into the muffled steps of her shoes against the park walkways and Yeolmu’s clothes.
Juyeon’s made herself a part of Yeoreum. That’s the jagged shape of love in her chest.
Truthfully, Yeoreum’s a coward; she’s still scared of being left alone.
Being in her old bedroom is somehow a strange feeling. She’s left it mostly untouched since she moved out, and before she moved out she’d barely changed it from when she was a child. Not beyond moving things around on her desk and on her bookshelf. There are old B2ST posters on one of her walls and CSAT textbooks still leaning against each other on top of her cupboard, and it smells like the ageing dust of high school.
Yeoreum seats herself on the edge of her grey sheets, feels her mattress sink below her, and stares at her brother.
“I want to know,” he says sharply. By this point he’s completely dropped pretense. Yeoreum can tell, anyway, by the rigid hold of his jaw and the fury of his hair, like he’s repeatedly ran his hands through it.
“I already said,” Yeoreum replies tiredly, “that I’m not the person to ask about it.”
“Well if mom won’t explain, and grandma won’t—”
“You asked grandma?” Yeoreum hisses, her head already pounding.
Her brother clicks his jaw briefly, in and out. “Yeah, because I had to try, at least. I hoped that maybe someone would finally just tell me.”
“And it’s not going to be me.” Yeoreum cards a hand through her hair, closes her eyes briefly as she breathes. She can hear her brother pacing in front of her, his padded footsteps on the hardwood like a caged animal.
Yeoreum’s home because it’s Sunday and she’s a coward. She still can’t bring herself to message Juyeon, and it’s made worse by the sting of realising that Juyeon’s stopped trying, that she hasn’t had a message in the last few days. Every bit of her is already running taut and she’s short out of patience.
“Why not?” Her brother grinds out. “I know you know.”
“Of course I know, Bom-ah. I was there,” Yeoreum sighs. “But I was only a child, same as you. I barely remember anything. You don’t remember anything at all. It’s not something you need to be so concerned about.”
That’s the wrong thing to say, Yeoreum realises quickly, her brother groaning into his hands before dragging them through his own hair. “But I am. Don’t you get it? You guys keep—keep holding this from me, pretending like it’s not bothering you, but I can tell that it does, and I know it has something to do with me and you and I all want is to know, noona.”
Yeoreum twists at her skin and winces when she pulls just too hard. Bounces her knee up and down, trying to think of what to say. She hasn’t vocalised anything about her dad in a long time. Tried not to think about him for a long time, too, and what a load of good that did for her.
“It’s just—why won’t anybody tell me?” Her brother presses on, eyes wild and jaw clenched. His voice keeps raising and Yeoreum’s hyper aware of her mom in the living room. She’s not sure if she can salvage it this time.
“Look,” she tries, waving her hands in a calm down motion. “It’s not—”
“Not what?” He cuts in. Voice thick with a frustration months long. “Not fucking important? It doesn’t matter anymore? Can you just drop the bullshit, noona. Of course it fucking matters.”
Yeoreum eyes the doorway to her room in a panic. He’s loose now, cage door felled. “Bom-ah.”
“Don’t I deserve to know? Don’t I? You and mom keep acting like not knowing is going to protect me somehow, but it won’t. It’s only going to drive me insane for the rest of my life, that there’s this big fucking secret the rest of my family won’t tell me—”
“Bom-ah.” Yeoreum tries again, colder, tightness winding around her chest. She doesn’t want to think about any of this, about that night. Everything down to her bones hurts and her headache keeps building and the walls of her childhood bedroom suddenly feel like they’re pressing in on her.
“I’m not a kid anymore, I’m fifteen, I deserve to know,” he continues, bordering furious. His eyebrows knitted together in a way Yeoreum hasn’t seen before, fists clenched tight by his sides.
“It’s not about whether you’re a child or not, it’s just—” Yeoreum clambers. She hates arguing with anyone let alone her brother, the yelling and the violent hot currents swirling through the air makes her tongue stick, her skin run torrid.
“Just what. Just me? Just me that can’t know because I was a baby?”
“Lee Bom—”
“He was my father too!” He finally explodes, panting heavily. “He was my father too,” he repeats quieter. “I want to know what happened. I deserve to know.”
Yeoreum curls her fingernails into her upper arms. Feels the sting as she takes a shaky breath and croaks, “I can’t tell you Bom-ah. I can’t. Please believe me.”
When her brother only stares at her, layers of disbelief and upset written all over his face, all Yeoreum can do is stumble to her feet and brush through the threshold of her bedroom, past her mom and the umbrellas and out the doorway where it’d all started.
The next twenty minutes feel awful, full of that same crippling quicksand feeling. On the bus everything moves in half-time, or no time, really; Yeoreum feels stuck in limbo. She spends the trip pressed against the window and feeling every thud rattle around her skull.
She doesn’t exactly know where she’s going, only that she wants away. Her skin still prickles from the heat of the argument, and there’s so much guilt roiling inside her it’s all she can feel, all she can think about.
She digs her palms into her eyes and leaves them there until she sees shapes in the void.
As if she’s moving on instinct alone, Yeoreum drags herself off the bus and onto a road near her university’s campus. Her phone tells her it’s almost ten and this late the air bites at the skin beneath her thin cardigan. It’s both unpleasant and exactly what she needed, sobering. The street is dead quiet except for the rustle of the bushes next to her as she walks, the occasional, distant noise of a car trundling along.
And it’s all she does. Walks. Curls into herself as she shivers and walks, because it’s easier than sitting or trying not to throw up or having to deal with a vicious cycle of self-pity, distracts her enough from the ache in all her bones, spider webbing out from beneath her ribs.
The air in Seoul isn’t clean, far from it, writhes with smog you can sometimes see in the blazing horizon of sunrise if you time it right. But it is crisp right then, and Yeoreum’s glad for it. Her nose and ears are going red and there are half moons cratered in the skin of her arm. But at least the cold is keeping her from crying.
So she keeps going.
Down the sleepy street and past the bushes that stick out and brush across her face, around the corner onto a bigger street where more cars rumble past her, down and down until she reaches one of the entrances to campus and turns into that.
It’s silent there, too. Occasionally there’s a cricket but it’s not close enough to summer yet for them to be out in force. The streetlights are on with their hazy yellows, and Yeoreum passes through them, in and out, directionless.
The campus CU tucked into the bottom floor of one of the buildings is a blinding mass of neon among the dark, jarring enough that Yeoreum has to tear her eyes away and blink the imprint of it out of her vision. She hasn’t been there since she went with Juyeon, and it’s a thought enough to make the lump in her throat return.
How long has it been? A while, at least. It’s April.
She hasn’t seen Juyeon in almost two weeks.
Juyeon’s everywhere now; everything reminds Yeoreum of her. She misses her so hideously it hurts. She doesn’t even know if she has the right to miss Juyeon, but she does, misses the way she smiled and laughed and the mornings where she’d roll over in bed and snuffle sleep-bleary into the back of Yeoreum’s neck before she had to go.
She trips to a stop outside the art building, dabs at the tear rolling out the bottom of her eye with the heel of her palm.
She has so much fixing to do. Juyeon and her brother.
Herself, maybe. Probably.
Yeoreum gazes at the concrete bottom floor through the glass doors, dark and unlit, the only shadow the grotesque wire statue situated in the middle of the floor, right in perfect view of the entry. This far away and without the light she can’t make out any detail, nothing except for twisting and coiling and the thin spaces between.
“Yeoreum?”
For a brief skip of her heart she wonders if she’s so far into her head, or simply that exhausted, she’s started hallucinating. Except when she whips roughly around on her heel to face the other side of the brick path, it really is Juyeon standing there. Paused at the edge of one of the lamps, the light spilling down and around the silhouette of her body, haloed in gold. Nighttime messiah.
“Unnie,” Yeoreum chokes out. There are more tears slipping out her eyes she scrambles to wipe away. This isn’t how she wanted to do this, on edge and wound tight.
Juyeon’s hair is pulled half-up half down, wavy and messy and she’s clearly given up on her bangs with the way they’re resting flat against her forehead. Untrimmed and ghosting over her eyelashes. Unbidden Yeoreum recalls the way Dayoung had said you two, sees the rundown look in Juyeon’s face, the bags beneath the thin look in her eyes, the way her shoulders aren’t held the confident way Yeoreum’s used to.
“Yeoreum-ah,” Juyeon says, quietly, tentatively. “Why are you…? Are you okay?”
Yeoreum only shrugs a single shoulder because it’s easier than admitting that she isn’t. Any words she has are stuck in her throat, underneath everything else scratching along its walls. Yeoreum opens her mouth, hesitates. Settles for roughly asking, “How come you’re still here?”
“I was helping set up the stage for the play,” Juyeon replies, almost just as rough. She sounds as on edge as Yeoreum, and in the almost liminal space of the campus late at night—as if they’re in the reaching space between, not quite real, not quite nothing—Yeoreum suddenly feels locked up and chained down to the floor by the burden that this might be her last chance.
The silence stretches long and slips through her fingers like sludge. Limbo space, the unreal inbetween.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she confesses eventually. “Not—now. I wasn’t looking for you. I was just walking. But I did. I just—I was scared.”
Juyeon only looks at her. Those same eyes, always so heavy against Yeoreum’s, like she’s trying to bore all the way into her soul. “I don’t know what you want from me,” Juyeon tells her. “I really like you. I do. But I can’t wait forever.”
“I know.” Yeoreum nods shakily. “I know. You have every right to walk away. I was surprised you never did. But I want to explain, at least. Try to.”
Back in her mom’s apartment she couldn’t even begin to string together what happened to her brother. In her head it’s a mess of things, and she’s always been bad with her words. Talks too little, talks too much, never really gets to the point. In front of her Juyeon’s unmoving, expression careful and guarded and again, again even the idea of ripping out the poorly done stitches of that seam makes vile course through her.
Yeoreum flutters her eyes shut, curls her fingers into the side of her stomach until she’s gripping skin, and starts with the simplest fact: “My dad died when I was seven.”
She hears the rustle of Juyeon’s jacket, like she’s shifting on her feet or moving forward, but she ignores it in favour of letting everything tumble out of her mouth.
“It was-um. He overdosed. In a motel. I didn’t—no one knew back then that he was depressed. We probably should have. Before my brother was born he drank a lot, and wasn’t very good at being a dad. At being anything, really. I don’t remember much but it was so hard on my mom. On me, too. I kept thinking that I must have done something.”
Yeoreum pauses to take a breath, picking through the words, hears Juyeon say to her, “You don’t have to tell me everything, if it’s too much. It’s okay.”
“I have to.” Yeoreum swallows painfully. Digs into her skin. “Sorry. I’m—I’ll try to be quicker. He sobered up after my brother, and for a while it was so good,” Yeoreum barks out a laugh, opens her eyes to stare up at the starless sky. “I thought it was going to be okay. And then he— and then he left, unnie. Just left us alone. We didn’t even know anything was wrong. But then there was a storm, and he was coming back from a work meeting and couldn’t make it home, and I don’t— I don’t know why he chose then, but there was a letter and pills and—”
All at once everything being held taut in her body snaps. Every inch and seam of her body that had felt like they were being stretched long past their limits suddenly cut loose, rebounding back to her like rubber bands. She’s crumpling half to the floor, the blood pounding in her ears too loud to hear anything Juyeon’s trying to say to her. A desperation so violent trying to claw and scratch its way upwards out her throat.
A pair of forearms dig in below her underarms to keep her steady. Before she can realise, before she can stop herself, she’s crying into Juyeon’s chest. And Yeoreum’s a crybaby but she hasn’t cried like this in a long time, these wracking, ferocious tears; sobs that heave so hard in her lungs it hurts to breathe as she curls her hands into the back of Juyeon’s jacket tight enough she can almost feel her nails in her palm.
“I never wanted to feel like that again,” she rips out, ragged and raw. “Like I wasn’t good enough. Like I wasn’t worth being around. So I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for making you deal with it. I wish I did everything better. You deserved better.”
“Hey, hey,” Juyeon’s murmuring into her hair. Softly, because Juyeon’s always soft with her. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Yeoreum only shakes her head. Buries her forehead against Juyeon as far as it can go, trembling. Between one heavy sob and the next she admits, “I love you. So much. I’m so sorry for screwing everything up.”
If Juyeon reacts she can’t see it, can only feel her lifting Yeoreum so they’re standing straight again, one of her hands coming to hold the back of her head. “You were just a kid,” Juyeon whispers to her hoarsely. “You couldn’t have done anything. Nothing was your fault.”
“I know. I know,” Yeoreum laughs bitterly. “Isn’t it stupid. That I know. And I still get so scared about it.”
“It’s a hard thing to live with,” Juyeon says, brushing her cheek against Yeoreum’s hair. Pressing her closer. Yeoreum can’t stop crying. “More than that. No one should have to live with something that difficult, Yeoreum-ah.”
“Maybe,” Yeoreum rasps. She feels hollow, sucked dry. Can taste the salt dripping into her mouth. “Maybe. But that doesn’t justify anything. You don’t—you have every reason to go.”
She can feel Juyeon huff, warm breath on her scalp. Juyeon’s warm everywhere, solid where she’s not, and she feels so weightless she can only cling to Juyeon in hopes it keeps her from disappearing.
“You’re stuck with me now, actually,” Juyeon tells her firmly, like there’s not even a molecule of space to argue against it. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Strangely there’s a laugh bubbling out of her, a proper one, light and airy as she uncurls her fingers and wraps further around Juyeon. “I missed you,” she says softly like a prayer. “I’m sorry for taking so long.”
Juyeon turns her head, presses a kiss into her hair. And then another, before she declares, “Those were the worst two weeks of my life. I missed you too. So much. Let’s go home, yeah?”
“Unnie,” Yeoreum says quietly into the dark that night. Rolls over in Juyeon’s arms so she’s a hair’s breadth away from her face, level with her lazy, sleepy eyes. She’s shower fresh and her bangs are hanging messy and Yeoreum doesn’t feel like she’s real. “What happens now?”
Juyeon hums, low and considering. “We have to talk properly some more,” she replies, using the hand lying across Yeoreum’s waist to reach up and tuck a strand of her behind her ears. “But we can just take it slow. Take our time with everything.”
Yeoreum’s sufficiently cried out, at that point. Only feels raw and vulnerable, barren, like she’s not sure what to do without the pressure that had made its home around her shoulders.
“I’m still scared,” she tells Juyeon a beat later, toying with the hem of her shirt. “I don’t think I know how to not be scared.”
Quietly Juyeon only smiles gently, brushing her thumb along the skin behind Yeoreum’s ear. “You know,” she admits, “you’re technically my first proper girlfriend.”
Yeoreum blinks. “What?”
“I’ve only ever had flings in the past,” Juyeon explains sheepishly. “Nothing serious. I just.. I don’t know. I guess I find everyone so interesting it went full circle and I ended up never feeling the same way as them.”
Dryly, Yeoreum stares at her and asks, “Where are you going with this.”
“Stop, that doesn’t apply to you obviously,” Juyeon huffs, knocking against Yeoreum’s forehead with her own. Nudges forward to press her lips to Yeoreum’s, feather light, before saying softly, “You said earlier, that you were surprised I never walked away. But the whole time I was just trying to be good, y’know? I didn’t care about whatever label you wanted. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, leaving was the last thing on my mind.”
Yeoreum stares and stares and stares. Says, “Oh.” Says, “We were really stupid, weren’t we.”
Juyeon laughs, rumbles all the way into Yeoreum’s heart. “Yeah. Yeah, we were. But my point is,” Juyeon continues, “that you’re not the only one who’s scared here. I’m terrified, Yeoreum-ah, but not more than the amount I love you. And if it takes being scared and stupid to be with you, then fuck it, I’ll do it a million times over.”
“Shut up,” Yeoreum says, sniffling. Punches Juyeon lightly in her chest. “Shut up. I don’t wanna cry again.”
One night isn’t going to fix anything, Yeoreum knows that. She still has apologies to make. But Juyeon’s here, with her legs tangled with Yeoreum’s and the soft touch of her fingers on the nape of her neck.
Juyeon’s here, steady and warm and reliable.
“Okay,” she says, ducking down to kiss Yeoreum again. And again. And again, until there’s sleep tugging at her eyelids and she lets herself give in, falls away into the warmth wrapped around her.
주연언니 ♡
dont chicken out ^^
이여름
im not…..
ㅜㅜ
For a week Yeoreum stalls in seeing her brother, partly due to the fact she had lab reports due and needed to cram to finish them after her weekend full of doing nothing except crying a lot, and partly because she doesn’t know what to say.
Her explanation to Juyeon was sloppy and came purely from the adrenaline of everything, a last-ditch effort to try and contextualise everything for the both of them.
To her brother, she’s back to the beginning. Not knowing what to say. She knows she has to tread carefully, knows that just because he can’t remember anything from back then she doesn’t want him to wear the same burden she did, to be consumed by the same guilt and ghosts.
So she keeps stalling, takes the long route to the apartment, checks the mail. Walks up the stairs. Clenches her fists, in and out, before hovering a hand above the keypad and keying in the passcode tortuously slow.
Inside it’s quiet, and for a moment she wonders if her mom and brother went out, until she’s poking her head around the corner and spots her mom on the couch.
“Is Bom here?” She asks, padding fully inside.
“Napping,” her mom replies softly. “Don’t wake him, come here. Sit down.”
The T.V. is switched onto some music channel, playing low in the background as Yeoreum walks around the edge of the couch, her mom placing the book she was reading on the coffee table and patting the cushion next to her.
“I know you two fought,” she tells Yeoreum, “and before you say anything, I already talked to him and told him everything.”
Yeoreum breathes out a sigh of relief at that, and flops backwards in an ungracious thump. “Oh, good. Good. How did he—was it okay?”
“He was fine. You need to stop worrying so much.” Her mom clucks behind her teeth and rests a palm on Yeoreum’s knee. “He’s a strong kid. I wish I could have waited until he was a bit more mature to explain, but he was right about deserving to know.”
Yeoreum picks at a thread on her sweatpants as her mom talks.
“What happened will always be hard to think about,” she says, squeezing her hand. “And he’ll never really go away. But you know what everyone says, all we need to do is remember the good parts. Let his ghost rest a little lighter, hm?”
“I don’t know how to,” Yeoreum admits. “It’s hard to remember the good things. Just that they were there and we were happy and then he left us.”
Her mom nods. Sighs, into this yawning space between them, the rawness still clinging to Yeoreum’s edges and the bleeding, open seam. One night isn’t going to fix anything.
“I suppose it’s harder for you. He was a good man, and there’s a lot of memories I still have left to love. You were a child and most of it wasn’t pretty for you.”
It wasn’t, Yeoreum thinks with a brutal sort of honesty. She’s still hurt from it over a decade later. Still shrinks into herself when people raise their voice at her, around her, hates the smell of alcohol in someone’s breath, and everything that happened with Juyeon speaks for itself.
But she wonders what it was like before then, even. What he must have been like when he was younger, before Yeoreum was born and before he started drinking to drown out whatever shadows he’d had himself.
So she shuffles her knees against her chest, tilts her head so it’s resting on her mom’s shoulders. Says, “Tell me how you two met,” and feels the brush of her mom’s cheek against her hair, the pull of her smile.
Her brother shuffles into the room long after, when the sunlight has moved to shine through the window in a slat of evening yellow across the center of the room. It lights up the dust drifting through the air, dancing around each other, glittering.
“Noona,” he says tiredly, rubbing at his eyes. Yeoreum’s pillowed in her mom’s lap. Curls her knees up in a silent invitation, watches her brother slump into the space. Quietly he chews on his lips, before bleating out, “I’m sorry. For um, yelling at you. You didn’t deserve that. And I’m sorry for pushing so much.”
Yeoreum only smiles and nudges his thigh with her foot. “It’s okay. I’m sorry for making you feel like we were hiding something from you.”
“Well you were,” he grunts. “But I guess you had a reason to.”
“Don’t be a brat,” her mom chides, pushing on Yeoreum’s shoulders so she can stand up while utilising the motherly skill of select deafness to ignore her whine. “Stay for dinner, Yeoreum,” she says, before muttering into the kitchen, “you’re so skinny, my god. Do you even eat? Is uni that busy?”
Yeoreum grins, lets herself drop backwards onto the upholstery.
A moment later Yeoreum hears Yeolmu snuffle her way into the room, trotting around the side of the couch to jump onto her brother’s lap and stand on her hind paws, resting her front paws on his chest as she assaults him with a barrage of licks.
And it’s there, watching her brother yell and squawk, lifting the tiny dog away from his face with a disgruntled expression while her mom patters around in the kitchen, that Yeoreum feels a little breathless, weightless, with the happiness of it all.
The apartment smells strong of onions and garlic when Yeoreum keys in the passcode and shoves the door open with her shoulder. The door seems to stick more and more lately, and there’s a memo in her handwriting stuck up on the fridge to remind Juyeon to call someone to check it out. Or to oil it. Something. Before her shoulder starts to bruise from banging against it.
“You need to call someone about that,” she huffs, for the nth time, peeling her shoes off with her toes and nudging them so they’re in line with the rest.
Around the corner Juyeon appears, glasses perched in the middle of her nose. “I can’t be bothered,” she says, leaning against the wall, eyes twinkling behind the round curve of the frames. “I’m leaving it for the next tenant to deal with.”
“Don’t,” Yeoreum grumbles. “We still haven’t found an apartment, and the door annoys me.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll find someone to fix it soon.” Juyeon waves out her hand a few times until Yeoreum stops in front of her.
She cut her hair recently so it hangs around the top of her shoulders, and out of habit Yeoreum fixes where her bangs have crossed over in the center, constantly a little messy, before winding her arms around Juyeon’s lower waist.
Juyeon hums, swaying into the contact. “How was class?”
Yeoreum scrunches her nose. “It was infectious diseases, so weird. Like always.”
“All your classes are weird. You always cry about the dead animals you have to watch get dissected.”
“That doesn’t happen that often,” Yeoreum pouts. Juyeon only grins, a little wide, a little more suspicious than normal. Yeoreum squints at her. “What are you cooking?”
“Pasta. But I kinda,” Juyeon pauses sheepishly, scratching her neck. “It’s a good thing!” She exclaims when Yeoreum squints harder. “Promise. It was just impromptu.”
The impromptu thing, when Yeoreum unwraps herself to step forward and peer around the corner, is just dinner. Dinner with wine and a couple candles and a bouquet of tulips in varying bright colours in a thin vase center of the table, so fresh it looks like they’ve been pulled from an image on Naver. But better, because it’s real and vibrant beneath the amber lamp.
Juyeon plants her head on top of her shoulder, arms cobra coiling around her waist. “I wanted to do something nice. I know we always go on dates, but you’ve been swamped with everything, so. And it’s kinda basic, but…” Juyeon trails off, losing steam. Settles for just pressing a kiss to the corner of Yeoreum’s jaw and tucking her nose into her neck.
Yeoreum can only lean back against her, staring at the table like if she looked away it would slip out of existence. For a year she’s been getting used to everything, to coming back at the end of every day to Juyeon and the sound of a knife against a chopping board, to falling asleep and waking up and jostling elbows in the bathroom. Longer than a year. Almost two if she goes right down to the date.
“Did you steal the wine from Soobin-unnie?” She chooses to ask, spinning around and wrapping her arms around Juyeon’s neck.
“No stealing,” Juyeon replies. “I asked for it. She gave me it after I promised to babysit Sojung-unnie for a day so she can, quote unquote, go on a sabbatical from being Sojung’s girlfriend.”
“Only for a day?”
“Apparently,” Juyeon shrugs. Yeoreum smiles, reaches up to pull Juyeon’s glasses off her face, folds them into the pocket on the front of her shirt. Two years she’s been getting used to everything. Stumbling around in the dark is hard, is terrifying, but it’s easier to do it with someone next to her.
There’s tulips and wine and hot pasta on the table behind her, flickering candles, and Yeoreum stands on her tiptoes to kiss every drop of gratitude she has into her lips. Curls her hand around Juyeon’s jaw and tilts her head, until Juyeon’s hand is burning into her lower back and her lips are swollen and Yeoreum wants a lot to crawl inside Juyeon and never leave.
“As much,” Juyeon starts, pulling away, a little breathless, “as much, as I would love to keep going down that route—”
Yeoreum pouts, tries to wriggle her way closer. Slides her hands under the hem of Juyeon’s shirt.
“—nuh-uh, handsy,” she shuts down, holding onto Yeoreum’s wrists. “We have all the time in the world for that. I however, made pasta.”
The tulip pendant has made a home against the front of Juyeon’s chest, and this long later paint is mostly chipped off now, scratches along the aluminium. Yeoreum comes down from her toes and frees a hand to hold it in her fingers.
“We should repaint them,” Yeoreum decides.
“You didn’t even want them.”
Yeoreum sticks her tongue out. Juyeon’s hand is still solid around one of her wrists, thumb pressing into where her veins meet her palm, brushing against her skin, keeping her there. Grounding her.
“Let’s do it later, then,” Juyeon smiles, wide and bright under the sunset lights, her eyes still so kind. Yeoreum is never getting used to them. She presses a chaste kiss to Yeoreum’s lips before untangling herself and saying, “Come on, let’s eat. Before the pasta gets cold.”
주연언니 ♡
home soon!!!!!!
the interview ran over ㅜㅜ
이여름
ㅎㅎ
take your time
ill be here when you get back ^__^