"There's a girl at the door, Ju," said Chaerin, as every atom in my body froze.
"Did you order room service?" He replied, yawning. "Maybe she can get us a beer or something..." Juyeon appeared behind Chaerin, scrolling on his phone. He still hadn't seen me.
"You wanna order takeaway?" He said, leaning an arm against the door frame. I tried to swallow but my mouth was completely dry.
It felt like someone had reached down my throat, taken hold of my lungs, and twisted them like baker's dough.
"I don't think she's room service," said Chaerin, squinting at me. She tugged the collar of her t-shirt, and I realized with a jolt, that I had seen it before. It was Juyeon's.
"Well, if she's not room service," said Juyeon, lifting his head. "Then what's she doing in the middle of the"
And that's when his eyes met mine.
"Yoona?"
The two small quiet words fell from my mouth. "Oh, God..."
"Yoona, what the-"
My head spinning, I turned and ran down the corridor. When I got to the lift, I repeatedly pounded the button, but the light told me it was still in the lobby, eleven floors away.
I glanced down to the far end of the hallway and our across the balcony. Maybe there were steps down to a lower level?
All I knew was I couldn't see him, or tall to him, or let him touch me ever again. And so I kept running.
When I reached the balcony doors, I yanked them open and stumbled out into the night.
It was bitterly cold, the rain was whipping at my skin, and I couldn't see another exit.
Juyeon grabbed my hand from behind and I tugged for freedom, but he was too strong. Spinning around, I found him standing in front of me, bare feet on the concrete freezing raindrops clinging to his face.
"Whoa, Yoona, calm down." I wrenched my hand from his grip.
"Don't touch me."
"Will you let me explain?"
My hands were shaking, maybe from the cold, maybe from the sheer anger. I balled them into little fists.
"Explain? There's nothing to talk about?"
"You've got it wrong...the whole thing." He ran both his hands through his wet hair and looked at me intensely. He looked wired, on edge.
"Is this what you do, Juyeon?" I said, pointing back inside the hotel. Chaerin was out of sight. "Is this what happens every time I leave a concert?"
"It's not what it looks like! I promise."
"Oh, you promise? And what do you think one of your promises is worth, exactly?"
He didn't have an answer for this.
Behind him, one of the balcony doors slams shut in the wind.
"Chaerin is an old friend," he said finally. "She was in town, she had this massive row with her boyfriend... We were just having a drink. Watching TV."
I shook my head at him. Sickness rising in my chest. "Anyway, geez- Yoona, it's two o'clock in the morning. What are you doing here?"
I didn't want to say it. I didn't want him to hear it, not anymore. But the words still crawled out of my mouth.
"I came here because...I needed someone, Juyeon. I needed...you."
He hung his head, those long black strands of hair looping down over his face, dripping wet.
"But I guess I misread the signs, didn't I? So I'll just go. I mean, shouldn't you be getting back to Chaerin anyway?"
Juyeon glanced over his shoulder.
"She's a friend, nothing more. You have to believe me."
"But you and I are meant to be, right?" I replied, my voice beginning to crack.
I turned away from him, walked to the balcony edge, and waited for his reply. His words were nearly lost beneath the sound of the pounding rain.
"Yoon, I think... I think I'm falling in love with you." There was a tiny part of me that wanted to believe him. To turn around and say it back.
And as soon as I stood there on the eleventh floor looking down at the city below, and the burning street lamps and the shops and the bars and the neon signs,
I remembered the day on the cliffs, how Juyeon took me so close to the edge and we talked about music, memory, and the families we have lost, and it left like nothing could break us apart.
I could feel him standing right behind me, but I didn't move. Tears were racing down my cheeks.
"Yoon, look at me, ple-"
"You're a liar!" I yelled, spinning around.
"You think you can get away with anything because of who you are, but...not this time. Not with me."
Juyeon began to speak but his words were jumbled, broken sounds that evaporated instantly in the wind.
"I let you in, Juyeon. Don't you understand that?" His amber eyes were incandescent but this time I'm not going to fall for it.
"I told you secrets. I told you things, almost no one knows, and you...you do this to me."
"This isn't over."
"You don't get to decide that." He reached out to me again.
"Leave me alone," I snapped.
"You don't mean that."
"Aren't you listening? I never want to see you again." I turned away from him again, sobbing, choking on my tears.
"Yoona..." He grabbed me and dragged me back around, pinning me against the railing. In his eyes, there was almost the hint of regret. Almost.
"Don't you see, Yoona? We're connected."
"Let go of me."
"We're connected." I pushed hard, but he wouldn't let go, and I let myself fall into him.
"You're saying that but you're not connected to anyone. You don't care about anyone except yourself."
I didn't know what was rain or tear anymore but Juyeon was just a blur in my mind, a shapeless figure in the night.
"Listen to me," he said, pulling me close. "This picture you have of me, in your head...it isn't the person I want to be."
"Maybe not," I replied, staring at him through the rain.
And it was then in that single dark and hopeless moment, that my heart finally broke. "...but this is who you are."
"What the hell is going on?" A new voice, coming from behind us. It was Hyunjae standing in the doorway, rainfall blotting his clothes.
"Are you alright, Yoona?" He said, walking towards us. Juyeon stepped into his path. "She's fine, mate. Go to bed. This has nothing to do with you."
Hyunjae glared at him, and a look of realization spread across his face.
"You slept with Chaerin, didn't you?"
"I said leave it."
"You're drunk, Juyeon. You need to leave Yoona alone."
Juyeon straightened up and leaned into Hyunjae. "You've never liked me, have you?" They were eye to eye now, their breathing oddly synchronized. Down below, a police siren wailed.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Come on, don't screw me about. You've never wanted me in Crescent. And now you don't want me with Yoona."
Hyunjae's eyes lingered on mine, and I shivered in the cold.
"She deserves better."
Juyeon seized him by the collar of his T-shirt. "Don't you think I know that?"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" seethed Hyunjae, struggling against Juyeon's grip, rainwater cascading down his face. "Why can't you let her go?"
"What are you going to do, Jaehyun, huh?" Are you gonna fire me? You gonna throw me out of the group?" Juyeon's fists clenched, and his eyes hardened.
And with the sky rumbling and the sirens wailing, he pressed his face into Hyunjae's and spoke in a low, ragged voice. "I am the group."
Finally, Hyunjae broke. In one swift movement, he drew back his arm, leaned into his back foot, and threw a punch at Juyeon that sent him spinning like a rag doll into a nearby table and chairs.
Furniture toppled over and clattered to the ground, and for a few seconds, Juyeon lay still on the ground. Then he groaned and rolled over.
"Let's go inside," said Hyunjae, slipping off his jacket, and wrapping it around my shoulders. He guided me toward the doors and, as we walked through, I told myself not to look back.
But I had to. Juyeon was spread out on the ground, limbs twisted from the fall, eyes all but lost in shadow.
***
"How did you know we were up here?" I asked, shivering as we traveled down the lift. Hyunjae laughed, softly.
"My room is below the balcony. I think half the hotel heard." I closed my eyes, and they stung from salty tears.
"I don't know what to do. I can't go home. I haven't got any money but I've got nowhere to go-"
"Yoona, it's fine. You can stay in my room." I began to protest. "Relax, I mean as friends. You take the bed, I'll sleep on the sofa."
I allowed a fragile smile onto my face.
"I just wanted to make sure you're okay." "Thanks," I said and the lift dinged.
In Hyunjae's marble bathroom I dragged myself out of my wet clothes, took a hot shower, and slipped into the baggy t-shirt he had to lend me.
My reflection on the mirror was worn, tired, almost ghostly, but at least I was warm, dry, and had a soft place to sleep.
It was approaching three a.m. I would have to get up again in a few hours; otherwise, my dad would arrive home and find me gone.
"Do you need anything?" said Hyunjae as he lay down on the sofa, his shoulders blue in the moonlight.
The sofa was way too short for him, and his feet hung over the edge. "I'm fine," I said as he pulled a scratchy-looking blanket over his body.
My bed was enormous, big enough for three people, but I was curled up in one corner, coiled into a ball.
We listened to each other breathe for a while. "Hey," Hyunjae said after a few minutes, talking to the ceiling. "Do you remember Magic mickey?"
I rolled over onto my back. "What?"
"Magic mickey. He worked at the corner store opposite the school years back."
I thought about everyone who had worked at the little store across from the school gates. The staff seemed to change every few weeks,
but I did have a vague memory of a stopped, blad guy with big eyes who, if I'm remembering right, everyone called Magic mickey.
"I think so."
"He just...he really loved candy, and whenever you went in there to buy something, whatever you picked, you'd put the candy on the counter
and he'd say "Ooh I love those," with everything. And the more stuff you put on the corner, the more excited he'd get.
"Oooh, you're buying these? I LOVE THOSE!"
Hyunjae tried to keep his composure, but a warm infectious laugh bubbled out of him. "Remember that?"
His laughter tickled me, And I began to giggle. "Yeah...yeah, I do."
"Magic mickey," Hyunjae said again, chuckling to himself. "I love those."
The clock by the bedside was blinking furiously, and I could hardly believe how late it was. Outside in the street, car engines still grumbled, music blared from nightclubs.
"Night," said Hyunjae, and I heard the swish of the blanket as he rolled over onto his side.
"Night," I said, warm and numbed beneath the duvet.
For a little while longer I lay awake, listening to the sound of the rain on the window, wondering what Juyeon had done next.
Had he gone back to Chaerin? Had he asked her to leave? Maybe he'd gone out on the streets in search of another drink, or another girl.
The minutes ticked by and, though I fought them with the little strength I had left, flashes of his face, his hands, his eyes dominated my thoughts until I fell, finally, to sleep.
When my alarm woke me, the sun was about to rise.
On the other side of the curtains, Gangnam was already alive, drivers shouting from the windows, buses honking.
Yanking, I reached for the glass of water beside the bed and found a white envelope next to it, with something written on the front.
Inside it was a 50,000 won in crisp, new banknotes, and the message read: "For the train. Hyunjae xx."
I picked up a pen from a nearby desk. "Thanks, Hyunjae." I wrote beneath his note. "For everything, I promise, I'll pay you back."
But as I slid the cash into my wallet, I paused. Did Hyunjae have this money lying around in his hotel room, or had he waited for me to fall asleep and gone out in the rain to fetch it?
I looked over at him, laid out on the sofa in last night's shirt, his chest gently rising and falling.
From the gap in the curtains, a beam of light from the slowly walking sin lay across him, illuminating dancing dust motes.
As if from the tail end of a dream, I heard Juyeon's voice in my head. My mind has already pictured him, soaking wet, lightning behind him at the balcony.
All this time, had I been with the wrong person...? Banishing the thought, I pulled on my still-damp clothes from the night before and slipped quietly away.
***
My road was peaceful, mostly silent when I got back to Songdo. It was about twenty to eleven in the morning and, as I walked up the garden path, I prayed that dad hadn't decided to come home early.
Nudging the door open, I glanced up at Changmin's bedroom. I could see his Crescent posters on the far wall, and his hamster plushie on the window still.
Staring at the familiar fragments of my best friend, I felt the memory of his betrayal burning again in my chest and stepped inside the house.
I couldn't imagine forgiving him.
Upstairs, I opened the desk drawer to stash away my keys and was confronted with endless reminders of him.
A packet of candy from the tour bus, the note he had left in my camera case, my VIP wristbands.
After I'd rested, I would get rid of these things. Burn them, throw them out, whatever I needed to do. They were pieces of Juyeon, and they no longer belonged in my world.
I slipped into bed, dragged the duvet right up to my chin, and closed my aching eyes. Within seconds, a dad's key turned in the lock downstairs, I drifted away into the deepest of sleep.
+×+
This chapter is shorter than usual, but I believe this is where I'm supposed to stop.
#Peaceout