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The eye of the ocean is cold and cunning. In the evenings, the coolness of the sky is washed over by the incoming breeze whistling into my eardrums. I can stare down the moon within the crux of my irises and challenge her to a duel, beckoning her to come,
I can hear the low murmur of voices humming above my train of thought. It’s like static, rustling into my skin. I can hear almost nothing, see almost nothing, except him.
Jihyun Kim is different now that everything’s over. He’s practically starlight, his words iridescent and his smile glowing. His teal hair has grown to his shoulders, tumbling down his neck and lazily tied back. I watch him from this distance as he pans through the group, helping them start the fire.
Zen is arguing with Yoosung. Assistant Kang is sitting, cross legged on her beach chair, withdrawn from the conversation, and the twins are sharing their food – cheap Honey Buddha that Saeyoung always buys – with one another. MC places her small palm against Jihyun’s pale back, an expanse of skin I once touched back in our youth, but never again. She’s whispering something to him, something that I will never know.
“Jumin,” I hear him say, his voice registering into my mind. He offers me a strange snack, square and small, like a biscuit, and I observe him carefully. The hitches of an initial flame spark against the corners of his jaw, and the group breaks out into cheers. He’s half orange, half a deep blue. There’s a word that ruminates in my mind as I see this, but I swallow it down before it jumps out onto my tongue.
Instead, I take the biscuit to stifle it down. Examining it in my fingertips, I take a bite – it’s sweet and crumbly, bits of it breaking apart and falling onto my semi-damp lap. Jihyun laughs in that sweet, solemn way, before placing himself next to me.
“You look tired,” he says, only glancing at me once.
“I am getting a bit old,” I remark, to which he scoffs. “And so are you.”
“We’re only in our late twenties, Jumin. I’d hardly believe we’re becoming senior citizens.”
“After everything you and I have been through, my friend, we might as well be.”
My friend , I repeat to myself, as if the title is laughable. Such a word couldn’t define the grotesqueness of how I basked in him; and how relieved I was that he was with us, finally living. I admired him deeply, in a way I could never admire anyone else, not even my own father – even in his weakness, in his grittiness. Even in all his dark blemishes and countless, endless mistakes.
I still admired him. I still adored him. I still…
“MC is so glad you gave Jaehee and yourself a weekend off to join us,” he says to me, his voice low enough for me to hear. “She thought you weren’t the type to go on vacation.”
“Well, she doesn’t know me as well as you do,” I hummed.
“No,” Jihyun chuckled. “She doesn’t. But I wish she would. You’re my dearest friend, after all.”
That word, again. When it left Jihyun’s lips, it struck me like a jolt of electricity seething through my veins. I didn’t know how many of it I could take. I was being choked from the bone, and though I was a master at restraining myself, I doubted my abilities heavily from that very moment.
Can he see it on my face? I thought. My uneasiness? My doubt?
Then, I felt it. The prickle of skin against the back of my palm as it rested on the armrest of the plastic beach chair. We sat a small distance away from the others, so none of them saw this happen. None of them paid attention.
His hand, soft yet calloused, warmly clenched against my own. Just then, I could almost swear my heart gave out from the way it pounded within my chest. He had never held me like this since we were in our teens, just on the brink of graduating high school. And I thought he never would again.
But he was doing it now. Jihyun Kim, the only person on this wretched earth that could make my mind topple down from its perfectly structured blocks. The only person I could never flinch away from upon contact. My best, my fondest friend, Jihyun.
The only person I ever…
“I know I’ve said it before, Jumin, a billion times, in fact,” I hear him say, his voice effortlessly tender and low. When he says my name, there are at least ten times I repeat his own in my head, like a mantra.
“But I sincerely apologise. I’m sorry, for everything. And thank you, too.”
I release a heavy sigh. I want to chastise him for this – half of the things that leave his lips are apologies, but MC is teaching him not to. But instead I flinch, because I feel a mumble of things rising and falling down my chest, begging to be let go.
He doesn’t let go of my hand.
“Jihyun,” I breathe, and he flickers up to meet my eye. I feel like he knows exactly what I’m thinking, but I don’t care anymore. The night is so silent and he burns himself under my memory as if he’s going to leave again – he is , he will – that the others’ voices swirl out of my focus yet again.
I remember hating myself for how weak I was being. For the way I was giving into my emotions. I was able to hold them down when Jihyun spun himself around Rika, like a sun that never set. But now, he was no longer the sun when he was with MC. He was just Jihyun.
The Jihyun that I met when we were children, and never stopped reaching for, even now.
“Jumin–”
“I love you,” I say, the words sudden and erratic. I let it hang off the edge of my teeth for a moment, slurring as if I’m forcing myself to hold it back. But I can’t. Instead, I’m grinning at him, in this hopeless, pathetic way.
He opens his mouth to speak. I shake my head.
“No. I know. Let us just let itself out there, at least for a moment.”
It’s there now. The knowledge of my love for him is like ripping off a band aid – but it doesn’t feel better, even long after the silence flows between the two of us. It feels horrific, like I’ve stripped myself bare in front of him for the first time in twenty-or-so years. But the damage has already been done.
“Yes, I love you. I always have. And I always will.”
His initial surprised, airy expression falls into a knowing look. The clearness of his bright blue eyes sombers as he blinks at me, his smile small yet brimmed with a sense of sadness. His grip on my hand twists into something tighter, as if he’s reassuring me. My God, he’s already said everything that I need to know, and for a moment, I want to laugh at him.
“It’ll pass,” he breathes, swaying himself closer to me.
His gaze shifts to MC, who’s laughing about something with Yoosung. She catches his stare, and she gives him this gentle smile that could only be shared with someone you’d go to hell and heaven for.
Like the kind I could only share for him.
Eventually, as the silence lapses between the two of us, and I stare at our interlocked hands, I wonder if anything would be different if I had told him this before MC came into our lives. If I had told him the day before he met Rika at the exhibit. If I had told him back when we were teenagers, and I kissed him, and he kissed me back.
Because maybe then I would have stopped blaming myself for the way things have turned out. Me and my countless set of hesitations.
But then I realise it’s better off that I never did. Because now, in this moment, he is loving someone like he’s never loved before – no longer an Icarus, but an Achilles. Sacrificing and changing himself for the better, growing into this new form of himself that I could have never done for him in the way MC has.
So, instead, we sit and stare at our fingers, at the stars above. And I hear myself praying that yes,
Let everything about this pass, completely and wholly, until this vacation ends.
Please.