it's always ourselves that we find in the sea || jensoo

Chapter 31

   It was somewhat ironic that things happened the way they did, and if Jennie had time to pause and think, she might've found herself having come a full circle, albeit in a roundabout way. Still, so many things parallelled that first day, and if things had started differently, perhaps they would've ended differently too. If she hadn't written that article, she wouldn't have been fired on that first day. If Taehyung hadn't kicked her out on that first day, she would never have caught a bus back to Auckland. She would never have gone for a walk along the beach and climbed the gentle incline to the lip of the cliffs reaching out over the heaving sea. The first story she told Jisoo might not have been about the two lovers who jumped off the edge together when everything had seemed impossible. She might not have fallen in love. If it hadn't been for that first day, she might never have found herself in the sea that night.

            As it was, that first day had happened. She'd been fired, she'd been dumped, and she'd met Jisoo. And Jennie knew that if it hadn't been for Jisoo, so many things would've been different. When it was all said and done, she wouldn't have been standing on the edge of that cliff if it wasn't for Jisoo. Her mind wouldn't have been frozen in shock while her body was three steps ahead, and she wouldn't have thrown herself off it in a desperate attempt to save the person she loved. Yet she had done just that.

            The drop seemed even further than it had looked, the night a suffocating darkness around her as the roaring sound of the sea rushed up to meet her. The wind screamed as Jennie dropped like a stone, tugging at her hair and clothes and the rain smarted as it struck her numb skin, chilling her to her core as she fell. The sea was a glistening inky blackness, the surface shimmering slightly even in the pitch black of night, the heavy storm clouds blocking even the faintest glimpse of the moon or stars. She didn't even know to what end she fell, only that if she didn't jump, it would end in Jisoo's death. If there was the slightest chance that Jennie could save her, she would take it every time.

            And then she hit the water, and it was like hitting concrete, and the shock of the freezing cold water made her gasp, bubble trailing out of her mouth as the air was stolen from her lungs and salty seawater rushed in. The thing about water is that stepping into it is a tentative thing, letting the waves rush up to meet you, or dipping in one toe, before slowly easing the rest of oneself into the embrace of it, but jumping into it is an entirely different thing, and from the height of the top of the cliff, it was numbingly painful. And the cold was something else entirely. It seemed to seep into every inch of Jennie, burrowing straight down into her bones as she sank beneath the surface of the water, forced down and down by the pressure of the sea, until she thought she would never come back up. Her lungs were already aching, the wind having been knocked out of her the moment she struck the water with a painful smack.

            She had never been afraid of the water. Summer days were spent at the beach, swimming out as far as Minzy would let her go while Chaeyoung tried to teach her to surf, and Jennie was confident in her ability to swim. It had been something of an escape for her when she'd come to Auckland, having lost both of her parents in a fire. Water was the opposite of fire. It couldn't burn, no matter how much you tried to set it on fire, and it eased Jennie's anxious thoughts about flickering flames licking up the bedroom wall and the thick, choking black smoke finding its way into her lungs. The ocean wasn't hot and it didn't eat up houses and destroy everything in a blazing inferno. To her, it had always been a restless creature that soothed and healed, the small cuts on her hands and feet from clambering over the sharp rocks stinging as the salt water washed them out, and the gentle ebbing and flowing of the shallow waves gently rocking her back and forth as she lay on her back, basking in the sunlight. It had never frightened her - not until she felt the crushing weight of the whole ocean bearing down on her, pushing her down and tossing her around in the current, until she didn't know which way was up and which way was down.