Eighteen degrees.
That was how high his glass of alcohol rose.
A transparent glass with a grotesque design. The bottom filled with a liqueur made of rum and coconut, from the West Indies.
Sip that he liked to savor with slowness. They reminded him of his summer vacations.
Vacations spent exploring fields of sugar canes, getting his floral shirt wet with the splashes of the turquoise waves or that wild dance he had led with a stranger in the beach bar.
A foreigner too.
A few drinks too many had vulgarly possessed them and yet it had hardly been enough for Wooyoung to forget the paradisiacal horizons of his honeyed skin.
A little later in the evening, after having removed the used condom, they had whispered their first words.
In English.
But it was soon a mess.
Then, the dark-haired man let out a swear word in his native language.
How surprised and at the same time pleased he was to hear the blond retort in the same language while bantering.
They had laughed and chatted until dawn.
But the alcohol had made them forget a detail, as important as the ice cube that was currently missing from Wooyoung's glass.
Their first name.
They didn't know their first names.
Everything.
The boys had chatted about everything. Fears. Loves. The family. The country. School memories. Teenage mischief, without putting a name to it.
It was painful.
Fracturing, like waking up the next day, strewn with cold, empty sheets.
He had fled.
No words.
No clothes.
No trace of him on the rest of the archipelago.
Just the silhouette of the brown man, sitting on his bed, bitterly staring at the rolls of the waves coming to break in front of his lodge while his arms embraced the white pillow where a cloud of perfume was floating.
For two years, he had been coming back every weekend to this bar in Busan.
The Wave.
It was his favorite.
But he had never been back there.
The owners also held zero news to the storyteller.
The latter were deeply saddened to see the young man's excessive attachment to him.
Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do about it.
Midnight fifty nine.
The sign was about to close its doors when, with a breathless shout, the face of a stranger with jet hair appeared.
Excuse me!
Sorry we're going to c- San?! exclaimed the old man.
