Jennie, who is enjoying the comfortable bed, watches as the daylight fade over Seoul.
Out in the kitchen, pots are banging, cabinets are opening and closing, and the scent of instant noodles drifts back down the hallway into the guest room with a smell that strikes Jennie as suspiciously familiar.
She climbs out of bed, stable on her feet for the first time all day, and heads for the kitchen. Tori Kelly is playing on Spotify and Lisa stands at the island, waiting for the noodles to cook.
Jennie announced her presence with, "Smells amazing."
"How are you feeling?" Lisa asks.
"Like a different person."
"So...better?"
"Much."
It's a traditional Lisa dish—an instant noodles with chopped veggies. Lisa cooks it rarely, usually on days where Jennie is sick and too tired to cook for them or when they're both craving for instant noodles.
Lisa stirs the noodles, "It's my—"
It slips out before Jennie thinks to stop herself: "Your secret recipe. Well, to be specific—the only recipe you ever known."
Lisa stops stirring and looks back at Jennie.
"What else do you know about me?"
"Look, from my perspective, we've been together years. So I know almost everything."
"And from mine, it was only two and a half months, and that was a lifetime ago. And yet you know about my secret recipe joke that I just made up when I was in junior high school"
For a moment, it becomes uncannily quiet in the kitchen. Like the air between them carries a positive charge, humming on some frequency right at the edge of their perception.
Lisa finally breaks the silence, "If you want to help, You could prepare drinks for us, my drink is-"
"Instant coffee with three tablespoons of powdered milk and two teaspoon of sugar?"
Lisa gives the faintest smile and raises an eyebrow. "Wow"
Time passed and then, they have dinner at the table beside the huge window with the candlelight reflecting in the glass and the city lights burning beyond—their own local constellation.
The food taste normal but that Jennie ever wanted since she woke up from that damn cold flood.
Lisa is beautiful in the firelight and it made Jennie feel some type of way.
At the end of dinner—their bowls and coffee mugs emptied—Lisa reaches across the glass table and touches Jennie's small hand.
"I don't know what's happening to you, Jennie, but I'm glad you found your way to me."
Jennie wanted so badly to kiss her.
She took her in when Jennis was lost. When the world stopped making sense. But she didn't kiss Lisa.
She just squeeze Lisa's hand and say, "You have no idea what you've done for me."
They clear the table, load the dishwasher, and tackle the remaining sink full of dishes. Jennie washes the plates while Lisa dries and puts them away. You know, like an old married couple.
In the dead silence, Jennie chose to spoke up, "Rosé, huh?"
Lisa stops wiping down the interior of the stockpot and looks at Jennie. "Do you have an opinion about that you'd like to share?"
"No, it's just—"
"What? She was your roommate, your friend. You don't approve?"
"She always had a thing for you."
"Are you jealous?" Lisa asked with amusement on her tone.
Jennie pouts. "Of course."
"Oh, grow up." She goes back to her drying.
Jennie couldn't let it go, "So how serious is it?"
"We've been out a few times. Nobody's leaving their toothbrushes at anyone's house yet."
"Well, I think she'd like to. She seems pretty smitten."
Lisa smirks. "How could she not be? I'm amazing."
Jennie internally agrees.
___________________________________
Jennie lies in bed in the guest room with the window cracked so the city noise can put her to sleep like a sound machine.
Staring out the tall window, she watches the sleeping city.
Last night, she sets out to answer a simple question: Where is Lisa? And then Jennie found her—a successful dancer, living alone. They've never been married, never had a life together.
Unless Jennie is the victim of the most elaborate prank of all time, the nature of Lisa's existence appears to support the revelation the last forty-eight hours have been building towards a conclusion:
This is not my world. Jennie thoughts.
Even as those five words cross her mind, she's not exactly certain what they mean, or how to begin to consider their full weight.
So she tries to say it out loud.
See how it fits.
"This is not my world."
A soft knock at the door startles Jennie.
"Come in."
Lisa enters, climbing into bed beside Jennie. The latter chose to sit up and asks, "Everything okay?"
"I can't sleep."
"What's wrong?"
Lisa kisses Jennie, and it isn't like kissing her wife, it's like kissing Lisa for the first time.
Pure energy and collision.
As Jennie's on top of her, her hands running up the inside of Lisa's thighs, driving the satin chemise over her bare hips, she stops.
Lisa asks, breathless, "Why are you stopping?"
Jennie almost says, "I can't do this, you're not my wife", but that isn't even true.
This is Lisa, the only human being in this insane world who has helped Jennie and yes, maybe she's trying to justify it, but Jennie is so turned around, upside down, terrified, desperate, that she doesn't just want it, she needs it.
Jennie stares down into Lisa's eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.
Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.
But this Lisa isn't her wife, they haven't made a life together. It's true, Jennie loves her all the same, and not just the version of Lisa that exists in her head, in her history. Jennie loves the physical woman underneath her, in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of matter—same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste....
But she didn't do it.
"I can't" Jennie says, standing up away from Lisa.
She remembers her wife, waiting for her at home. Waiting for Jennie bearing a gamjatang and ice cream for their lover's night. Jennie couldn't handle the sick feeling of leaving her wife like that and making love to someone who looks exactly like her. Who's staring at Jennie with the same look that she have received from her own wife.
"Do you remember her?" Lisa asks.
Jennie nods. "S-she's my wife." She said as tears fell on her eyes. She immediately knelt down and cried her eyes out.
She misses her wife. The one who sings Disney songs to her, the one who insisted to play I See The Light on their wedding day, the one she made love with on their honeymoon and on their bedroom. The wife, The Lisa that embraced Jennie when she lost her funding on research, the one who held her broken pieces together when she became depressed.
That's her Lisa.
She can't wait to come back to that Lisa.
Her home.
___________________________________
Moments after, Lisa's heart is banging away and Jennie can feel the bump-bump sound of it against her left ear.
Lisa embraced her to calm her down.
"Everything okay?" she whispers. "I can hear the wheels turning up there."
Jennie pulls away, "I don't know what I would've done if I hadn't found you. I would've turn completely insane."
"Well, you did. And whatever's happening, I'm here for you. You know that, right?"
Lisa runs her fingers across Jennie's hands.They stop at the piece of thread tied around Jennie's ring finger.
"What's this?" she asks.
"Proof," Jennie answers.
"Proof?"
"That I'm not crazy."
It becomes quiet again.
They're not sure of the time, but it's definitely past two in the morning.
The bars will be closed now.
The streets as quiet and subdued as they get with the exception of snowstorm nights.
The air creeping through the crack in the window is the coldest of the season.
"I need to get back to my house," Jennie announced.
"Your place?"
"Yeah."
"What for?"
"I apparently have a home office. I want to get on the computer, see exactlywhat I've been working on. Maybe I'll find papers, notes, something that willshed some light on what's happening to me." Jennie explained.
Lisa, like the good person she is, offers "I can drive you over first thing in the morning."
"You probably shouldn't."
"Why?"
"Might not be safe."
"Why wouldn't it—"
Out in the living room, a loud bang rattles the door, like someone poundingon it with their fist. The way Jennie imagine cops knock.
"Who the hell is that at this hour?" Jennie thought out loud.
Lisa climbs out of bed and walks out of the room. Jennie follows her and they head out into the living room.
The pounding on the door continues as they approaches.
"Don't open it," Jennie whispers.
"Obviously."
As Lisa leans into the peephole, the phone rings.
Both of them startle.
Lisa crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.
Jennie glance through the peephole, sees a man standing in the hallway, his back to the door.He's on a cell phone.
Lisa answers, "Hello?"
The man is dressed in black—A polo, jeans, a leather jacket.
Lisa says into the phone, "Who is this?"
Jennie moves toward Lisa and points to the door, mouthing, It's him?
She nods.
"What does he want?"
Lisa points at her.
Now Jennie can hear the man's voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker of the phone.
Lisa calmly talks into the phone, "I don't know what you're talking about. It's justme here, and I live alone, and I'm not letting a strange man into my home attwo in the—"
The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.
He aims the gun at both of Jennie and Lisa, and as he kicks the door closed, Jennie smells an old and recent cigarette smoke wafting into the loft.
"You're here for me," Jennie says, trembling. "She has nothing to do with any of this."
The man is just an inch or two taller than Jennie, but he's sturdier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don't see Jennie as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way a machine might.
Jennie's mouth has gone dry.
There's a strange distance between what's happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but she feels paralyzed by the suddenness of the man's presence.
"I'll go with you," Jennie says. "Just—"
His aim shifts slightly away from me and up.
"Wait, no—"
Lisa is cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.
A fine, red mist blinds Jennie for half a second, and Lisa sits on the sofa, a hole dead center between her big, dark eyes.
Jennie ran towards her, screaming, but every molecule in her body seizes, muscles clenching uncontrollably with stunning agony, and Jennie crashed down through the coffee table, shaking and grunting in broken glass and telling herself this isn't happening.
The man lifts Jennie;s useless arms behind her back and binds her wrists together cruciform with a zip tie.
Then Jennie hears a tearing sound.
He pats a piece of duct tape over her mouth and sits behind her in the leather chair.
Jennie is screaming through the tape, pleading for it not to be happening, but it is, and there's nothing she can do to change it.
She hears the man's voice behind her—calm and occupying a higher register than she would've imagined. "Hey, I'm here...No, why don't you come around back...Exactly. Where the recycling and Dumpsters are. The back gate and rear door to the building are both open...Two should be fine. We're in pretty good shape up here, but you know, let's not linger...Yep...Yep...Okay, sounds good."
The excruciating effect of what Jennie assume was a Taser is finally relenting, but she's too weak to move.
From her vantage point, all she can see are the lower half of Lisa's legs. She watches a line of blood run down her right ankle, across the top of her foot, between her toes, and begin to puddle on the floor.
The man's phone buzz.
He answers, "Hey, baby...I know, I just didn't want to wake you...Yeah, something came up...I don't know, might be morning. How about I take you to breakfast at the Golden Apple whenever I wrap up?" He laughs. "Okay. Love you too. Sweet dreams."
Jennie's eyes sheet over with tears.
She shouts through the tape, shout until her throat burns, thinking maybe he'll shoot her or knock her unconscious, anything to stop the exquisite pain that Jennie is feeling at the moment.
But it doesn't seem to bother him at all.
He just sits there quietly, letting Jennie rage and scream.