Page 123 of The Way Back Home

I can see the whole thing unspooling in front of me like a film reel. Seyeon transfers to some local university, finishes his degree, gets a teaching job at some middle school in Busan or Changwon. Rents a cheap apartment. Comes to see me on the weekends, or I ride out to see him. We keep doing this. Keep falling into bed together, keep orbiting each other the way we always have. And slowly, slowly, the glow fades. He realizes the teaching jobs down here don’t pay the way they do in Seoul. Realizes the opportunities are thinner, the ladder shorter. Watches his old classmates at his university get hired by prestigious academies in the capital while he grades papers in some understaffed school in a city that smells like fish. His savings shrink. His mother keeps working. The house stays the same. The town stays the same.

And Seyeon stays. Stuck. Tethered to me like an anchor around his ankle, dragging him to the bottom.

I have to grip the edge of the desk. Because I’ve seen this story before. Lived inside it my whole life. Two men bound together by loyalty and circumstance, one dragging the other down. My father stumbling drunk through the factory gates, Seyeon’s father beside him, steady, reliable, always covering for him, always picking up the slack. Staying because that’s what you did for your friend, your brother, the person you’d known since childhood. Staying until the day the machinery malfunctioned and Seyeon’s father threw himself between the gears and my father’s worthless body and paid for his loyalty with his life.

My father survived because Seyeon’s father loved him enough to die for him.

I will not let that happen again. Not with us. Not with Seyeon giving up pieces of himself, trimming down his future, making himself smaller so he fits in the space beside me. It starts with a transfer and it ends with resentment and regret and a life half lived, and I’d sooner gut myself than watch Seyeon wake up at thirty-five in a cramped apartment wondering where his ambition went and why he let a mechanic from a nowhere fishing town talk him into throwing it away.

No.

No.

He has to go. Back to Seoul. Back to his university with its proper library and its good name and its pipeline to the kind of career that’ll use every bit of the brain he was born with. He has to graduate at the top of his class the way he was always going to and get hired by some school that’ll recognize what he is and he has to build a life that’s worth everything his parents bled for.

He has to leave me behind.

And he won’t. I know he won’t. Not if I ask. Not if I beg. Not if I lay out every rational argument in the world because Seyeon has never responded to a reasonable request when his heart was pulling him the other direction. He’ll dig in, the way he dug in when I told him I failed the entrance exam and couldn’t follow him to Seoul. He’ll argue. He’ll push. He’ll grab hold and refuse to let go because that’s what Seyeon does, what he’s always done, and I love him for it and it’s going to destroy him if I don’t stop it.

I need to make him not want to stay.

It settles in my chest like a block of ice. I know what I have to do. Know it with the same certainty I’ve known every bad decision I’ve ever made, the difference being that this one isn’t for me. This one’s for him.

I have to be the thing he walks away from. Have to turn myself into something he can’t stomach looking at, can’t bring himself to come back to. Have to take everything he thinks he knows about me and twist it until it’s ugly enough to let go of.

It’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

“Seyeon.”

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.