Life Afterlife

21) I have never met any really wicked person before.

"She, too, let me win," Sunghoon was first to speak, and his eyes worked their way to where Jake caressed his white knuckles, "times and times over; she let me beat my own miseries and pain."

"She was quite rigid, at first," Taehyun nodded, and he giggled upon the sound of his own words when they echoed in his ears, "she was hard to understand-"

"And still."

"-and still," Taehyun laughed, and he rested his head above Sunghoon's, "but she is our anchor all the same."

Sunghoon's smile grew when the warmth Jake's hold on his hand emitted spread through him alongside the memory of his first meeting with Sihyeon, "noona," he closed his eyes, contentment manifest on his features as contentment could ever do, "her edges are so sharp, yet she melts them away the second her eyes meet ours."

It was true. Sihyeon never let her sharp edges scratch her own kids, and it was the cleanest parts of her existence that she held them in, safe and right as safe and right could ever be, and she never trembled once in their wake, never shivered away from their colds.

Instead, there was another part of her world that trembled.

Naeun's hand was one to tremble.

Her sight was blurred with the tears that went against her will no matter how many times she swallowed them, and she had the frustrating task of packing Jaewook's bag herself.

They were reluctant, but they trembled as she went, and she did not dare raise an eye to where her husband sat, her swollen features an extra weight to what she already felt difficult. She, however, did not want to meet his eyes. His stay on the bed remained the second she had taken a step back inside their house, and he asked her to start packing right away.

Naeun did not look at him, afraid she would find anything to further her agony and terror. Although not focused, Naeun put her heart into packing, doing a terrible job at waving off all the other thoughts and warm touches that had threatened to take over her cold state. She realised, somewhere among the hassle of clothing, that it was not that cold after all. The trembling was not the cold's doing, because she was sweating, although that, too, might have not been the cold's doing.

"It's saddening, you know?" She still paid him no heed, and she wandered her eyes among the fabrics to sway them far from where Jaewook's words were. "The way you look for a man but me."

Her fist clenched against one of the shirts, and her teeth touched with a blaze. She coughed when the rage rose far beyond her chest, and she looked away to where the wardrobe was. "Do you need the-"

"What is so special about him?" He did not cease his attempts to break her out of the faulty shield she had created. As foul as it was, it still did enough job to keep her until they boarded, but Jaewook was insistent on stripping her off that protection and watch her bear, sad. "What has he done so well to make you despise me?"

Naeun sighed, the pain inside her chest turning times and times over with all that is there of emotions it could bear. She looked up at her husband, and she watched cautiously as his lips lifted slowly into an unfathomable smile, one that he grew while looking back at her, and Jaewook pushed himself to the edge of the bed. "Why are you doing this?" She finally asked, and it made Jaewook finally loosen his grip on her stare.

Naeun's voice was quivering, but Jaewook's was still, calm, and content, "can't exactly say I find joy in your agony," he shook his head, and had Naeun known him for a cowardly liar, she would have excused his words as an aimless ramble, "but I do feel thrilled when I think about it.

"You," he started, and Naeun's nausea escalated. She put her hands over the pieces of cloth inside the bag, and she breathed deeply to replace the sickening feeling with some of the air inside the room, be it suffocating or not, "your past life," Jaewook intended a smirk, at which Naeun refused to snap her head even in her state of fear and worry, "your choices." He said, and Naeun picked randomly at the clothes. She rearranged some of them again, her touch on the fabric cold and shivering.