Page 128 of The Way Back Home

I have to go. I know I have to go. Because if I stay he’ll come back for me. Because the poison in my blood will seep into his life the way it seeps into everything I touch and I would rather bleed out alone on the side of this road than watch Heo Seyeon dim.

The wind picks up as the road straightens and the town vanishes from the mirror entirely. Just open road and open sky and the flat grey line of the sea to my left. I twist the throttle and the engine screams beneath me and the coast blurs and I ride.

But I feel it. The pull.

Haemok. That miserable beautiful suffocating town. The salt-stained streets and the screaming gulls and the foghorns at dawn and the smell of frying food at the pojangmacha and the sound of Mrs. Nam’s TV and the harbor at sunset turning copper and the view from the hill where Seyeon drew the Rose of Sharon and the creek where the dragonflies lived and the crossroads where I waited for him every morning of my life.

I hated it. I loved it. I survived it by the skin of my teeth and I’m tearing myself out of it now like ripping a tooth from a living jaw and it’s going to bleed for a long, long time.

The road stretches north. The mirror is empty. I ride until the sun touches the water and the sky goes red and gold and then dark, and I don’t look back again.

Seyeon

34 Years Old

Healing isn’t some clean line from one state to another. It’s not a door you walk through and close behind you. It’s slow, messy, full of setbacks and silences that feel too long and mornings where the bruise on my jaw has faded but the haunted look in Ryowoon’s eyes hasn’t. But each day I see the changes, one by one, small and stubborn like weeds pushing through cracks in pavement. And I hold onto them.

Understanding comes first, piece by piece as I put together the full image of what happened from both sides. Each piece slots in and the anger loosens, it becomes less of a burning flame, cools and recedes. What replaces it is need. The need to erase the years we lost. The need to fill the space that was hollowed out between us.

Each night when I reach for Ryowoon and he comes to me, I feel it knitting together. When he lets me pull him close, when his hands find my skin and his mouth finds mine and I can feel his heartbeat against my chest, I think maybe this is how you undo a decade of silence. Not with words. Words failed us plenty. But with this. His body against mine, my arms wound around him, the quiet sounds he makes against my throat when he’s inside me that tell me more than any apology ever could. I let him take what he lost from me. Give it willingly, openly, arch into his hands and his hips and hold him there, hold him in, like I can stitch the wound closed with nothing but the warmth of my body pressed to his.

I stop going home.

After that night I can’t bring myself to leave him here alone. I tell my mom I’m staying at the store full time now, that it’s easier for the work we’re doing, and she accepts it with a knowing nod and a packed lunch box the next morning without a single question. She’s always been smarter than I give her credit for. So my things migrate over. A bag of clothes, my phone charger, toiletries, Yuro’s food and bowls. The single room in the back of Mrs. Nam’s store becomes ours by default, the sleeping mats pushed together, my shirts mixed in with Ryowoon’s in the old dresser, Yuro’s leash hung on the hook beside Ryowoon’s jacket by the door.

The next time I wake to find Ryowoon thrashing in his sleep I’m ready. I’m woken by those gutted, wretched noises that twist my stomach into knots, and then his limbs fighting invisible hands, his face contorted. I shake him, gently but firmly, and the second I feel his muscles coil I throw myself back, putting distance between us. Smart this time. His fist swings through empty air and his eyes snap open, wild and unfocused, chest heaving. I wait. Count the seconds until I see the recognition flood back, until his pupils find me in the dark and his breathing stutters from panic into shaky awareness.

“Hey,” I say quietly. “You’re here. It’s me.”

His face crumples for just a second before he gets it under control. I move in then. Pull him against me, wrap myself around him, his back to my chest, my arms locked across his ribs. I can feel the tremors running through him like current through a wire. I hold him through it, my chin tucked over his shoulder, my lips against his ear, breathing with him until his body remembers it’s safe, until the shaking subsides into small involuntary shivers and then into stillness.

I kiss the back of his neck. The knob of his spine. The ridge of his shoulder. Keep going until I feel him turn in my arms, until his mouth finds mine and the desperation in it tastes different from fear. I pull him closer, into me, against me, like I can chase the cold out with the heat between us, and when he pushes me onto my back and buries himself inside me I let the pain of the stretch burn the ghosts out of both of us. He presses his face into the crook of my neck and I hold the back of his head, fingers threaded in his hair, and we move together in the dark until there’s nothing left but sweat and breath and the steady thud of his heart against mine.

It’s not a cure. I know that. But it seems to work in its own way.

We work through the mornings and afternoons, the shop slowly transforming under our hands. I spread Mrs. Nam’s books across the counter and start building from the bones of her numbers. What sold, what didn’t, what the neighborhood might need now versus ten years ago. I make calls, reach out to distributors, compare prices for inventory. Ryowoon fixes and replaces, his hands never still. He patches the roof properly this time with materials that won’t cave in the next monsoon. Rewires half the store’s lighting. Pulls out the old busted freezer compressor and somehow rigs a replacement from parts he found at a salvage yard two towns over. The cash register gets cleaned and oiled until it clicks and rings brightly again. He replaces rotting window frames, sands and repaints shelving units, patches holes in the walls where mice chewed through.

The store undergoes a rebirth. What was dusty and neglected starts to breathe again, starts to look like a place where someone might actually walk in and buy something.

Sometimes I glance up from the ledgers and catch Ryowoon paused in whatever he’s doing, his hand resting on a ladder rung or holding a screwdriver loosely at his side, gazing out through the open roll-up doors toward the harbor. Still and quiet, the air around him feeling heavy. I don’t interrupt those moments. Just watch the line of his profile, the way the light reflects the silver in his ear piercings, and wait until he comes back on his own.

Sihyung and Yoohan fill the gaps with noise. They show up unannounced at least twice a week now, sometimes with food, sometimes with beer that Ryowoon refuses and I drink sparingly, sometimes with nothing but their own loud mouths and the inability to sit still for more than thirty seconds.

“You’re cheating,” Yoohan says flatly, staring at Ryowoon across the wooden platform where they’ve spread out a game of seotda. “There’s no way you pulled that naturally.”

Ryowoon doesn’t look up as he lays down his next card. “Prove it.”

“I don’t have to prove it. I can see it in your face.”

“My face looks like this all the time.”

“Exactly! That’s suspicious!”

Sihyung and I exchange a glance across the platform as Yoohan jabs a finger at Ryowoon and Ryowoon continues to ignore him with the calm of someone who has definitely been cheating since at least the third hand. The pile between them is an absurd collection of IOUs scrawled on napkins, a lighter, two pens, Yoohan’s left shoe for some reason, and a crumpled snack wrapper that Sihyung bet when he ran out of anything else.

“Double or nothing,” Yoohan demands, pulling his remaining shoe off.

Ryowoon arches a brow. “You want to walk home barefoot? Be my guest.”