Page 130 of The Way Back Home

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.

The store is done. Or close enough to done that it doesn’t feel like a construction site anymore. The shelves are in, sanded and painted clean white, standing in neat rows where Ryowoon bolted them to the floor. The freezers hum along the back wall, running cool and steady after Ryowoon performed what I can only describe as mechanical surgery on their compressors. New lighting, bright and even, replaces the flickering tubes that used to give the place the ambiance of a horror film. The ceiling is patched, sealed, weatherproofed. The windows have new frames. The register has been cleaned and calibrated and sits on the counter like it’s waiting for its first customer. Even the courtyard got attention. Ryowoon repaired the wooden platform, replaced the rotten slats, oiled the surface until it gleamed warm in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Nam’s kitchen has been scrubbed down to the tile, the old pots scoured, the pantry restocked.

It looks like a place that’s alive again. Like someone cares about it.

We haven’t talked about selling. That conversation has been sitting between us for weeks now, untouched, like a dish neither of us wants to be the first to reach for. I’ve caught Ryowoon looking at the shelves sometimes, his head tilted, thinking about something. Caught him measuring the wall behind the counter one afternoon with a tape measure, muttering numbers under his breath, and when I asked what he was doing he shrugged and said he was checking if a display rack would fit there. Not a conversation about leaving. Not a plan to pack up.

But I know it’s coming. The season’s turning. The deadline we didn’t set but both feel is pressing closer. We said we’d get it cleaned up and figure it out. The first part is finished. The second part we’ve been avoiding.

I sit on it for three more days, turning the words over in my head each night while Ryowoon sleeps beside me. Rehearsing. Scrapping what I’ve rehearsed. Starting over. Because the last time I tried something like this, the last time I showed up with a plan that involved staying, keeping us in the same place, it blew apart so catastrophically that I spent ten years picking shrapnel out of my chest. I know it’s different now. I know he’s different, that we both are. But my heart still kicks against my ribs every time I open my mouth to say it and close it again.

On the fourth night I stop being a coward about it.

Ryowoon sits cross-legged on the sleeping mat after his shower, toweling off his hair, his shirt off and the ink on his arms highlighted in the lamplight. Yuro is curled at the foot of the mat, nose tucked under his tail. I sit down across from him and pull my knees up, and something about the way I do it, or the way my face looks, makes Ryowoon slow and then stop. He lowers the towel, drapes it over his knee. Looks at me with hooded brown eyes, his brow creasing just slightly. Waiting.

“I put in my resignation at the academy,” I say.

I hold his gaze and watch for the thing I’m afraid of. The flash of panic, the shuttering, for him to go cold and hollow right before he says something designed to push me away. I’m braced for it. Every muscle in my body coiled tight, ready to absorb what comes.