if you keep pushing,
you’ll get hurt, get higher
It was hard being in the same car as him, it was hard just being with him. After everything that had happened between us, you'd expect the result to be the two of us getting closer, but I couldn't even look at him.
“Look, about yesterday—” Taeyong began.
“I—no. It's okay,” I said, putting up a hand and looking away from him. “I understand. I'm sorry you had to…”
We both knew why I left the sentence hanging.
He had to what? I still wasn't sure. The whole scenario was crystal clear inside my head, everything including the reason behind it and the response it got. Neither of us hadn't been in the best physical state, but we'd still—we’d still had sex, and it changed so much inside me, but all that came to the surface was shame.
“That's not what I mean,” he mumbled, as if he was just as bashful about the situation, even though I knew it wouldn't be the correct way to see it. He was the one who's made the first move, and the only thing that truly bothered me about it was what it meant. Not the sex. The emotion. “I just...I wanted you to know it does have to mean anything.”
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the window, the glass feeling cold when it came into contact with my warm skin. There was no way I could see it any other way, Taeyong had known that the moment he had decided that sensual contact was the only way to pull me out of my stupor. I knew. I knew everything it implied, everything that he had tried to tell me through touch instead of words, everything it meant, everything that could never become reality.
A relationship wasn't possible. Not in this hellhole, and definitely not wherever I was going, alone. Verbal confession was only going to make worse for both of us.
And anyway, I had no idea what I felt in response. Yes, there was a stirring in my senses whenever he looked at me, but for how many? It only served to make me feel like a cruel bitch, but that was it. I couldn't help it, I couldn't help who I wanted.
“How can you just say that?” My voice cracked through the sentence, making my question sound even more pathetic. “When you know it's only going to make it harder?”
He remained silent, the soft vibration of the car around me failing to give me the familiar sense of placidity it always did. I was going to the safe house, again, under the supervision of Baekhyun, again, simply because there was no way I could live with Vernon after what we had done. I couldn't do that to Taeyong. I couldn't do that to Vernon.
“I must come off as secretive and suspicious,” he said instead, taking on a lighter and more conversational tone. “You had to spill everything about your past with the bikers in front of me, and here I am, talking in dumb riddles.”
I ignored the bitterness that caught the tail of the last word. He was right, but I just didn't see how it was either relevant or helpful. Making small talk wasn't going to make it easier to digest. I might as well have tried to ask him about the weather.
Which, I noticed, wasn't too great. The sky was a cool gray, pouring like a waterfall over the ground. My breath was humid, every inhale like suffocation. The raindrops hit the window slowly and all at once, reminding me of the first night in the clearing.
I had assumed he would simply continue talking, but he hadn't spoken a single word in the long, slightly uncomfortable span of time that had intervened after his latest attempt at casualness. It was getting silent and stuffy, and I wanted it to end, not with him talking but with the destination being reached already.
“I killed my father.”
For a few seconds, the words didn't make sense. I opened my eyes and tore my forehead away from the sticky surface of the window, making a tiny sound like sellotape being ripped off of paper, and turned my face in his direction. “You what?”
“The Lee's. They're a clan, much bigger than us or the bikers or anything remotely dangerous you can get in groups like these.” The bridge of his nose crinkled as he squinted painfully at the road in front of him. “My immediate family was part of the main branch, and someone had married into a rivalling family, I think,” he continued. “I was scared—just, something happened. I killed him.”
The last two lines were hurried and pulled tight, like stretched elastic holding a lot of tension. It wouldn't take a genius to figure out that he was uncomfortable about the topic, skirting around the details and delivering the news to me in a factual, new-kid voice. It was unlike him, and I didn't know how to respond.
“Something happened, wow, that sounds ridiculous in retrospect.” Taeyong's free hand reached up to pinch the scrunched-up bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, it's just weird to talk about it, I don't know how to say it.” His cheek caved in a bit as he bit into the inside of it, touching the steering wheel like it was some sort of lucky charm. “After all you had to go through talking about your crap, I felt like I had to say something too.”
His voice softened somewhat, taking on an almost caring aspect. Normally, I would've been happier about the change in subject, but when the only two things you could talk about with a guy was sex or murder, it was hard to choose.
I guess it was insensitive of me to remain so unresponsive to his presumably sad past, but I knew that once I opened my mouth, the words that might tumble out of it wouldn't be of any assurance. So I stayed quiet, staring at the side of his face, tonguing the inside of my cheek awkwardly.
“So, yeah, that's it.” He forced on a smile, barely trying to make it look light-hearted. “It's been a long time since then, though, so they probably won't come looking after me, but—”
“Why not?” I blurted before I could stop myself. Annoyed at my own curiosity, I turned my face aside and pressed my fist against my firmly closed mouth. As if that could stop me.
“It's all right,” he said, shrugging. “Clans work in messier ways than gangs, and even though I was too young to know too much back then, I always knew my father didn't have a lot of people who were loyal to him.” One, two, three beats. “If anything, the only reason they'll probably look for me would be to have me take over as head of the family, but my brother's still there so they've left me alone so far.” He smiled, a weak, watery smile. “The others don't know.”
Taking me hand away from my face, I nodded, even if I hadn't properly understood everything. I didn't know much about clans, but I did know that the central family was barely a family. Too much bad blood. And there were too many generations for them to be closely related anyway, so I wondered whether this brother of his was truly his brother or just a Lee.
“Minhyuk?”
“Nah.” Taeyong's eyes flitted side-to-side across the street as he drove. “A huge part of the population is named Lee, doesn't mean they're all killers.”
Killers. So that was what they were.
“What if they decided to come after you anyway, huh?” I asked, my voice lowering a harsh octave. I'd had my daily dose of batshit crazy, and diverted the conversation towards the emotional, readying myself to bear the consequences of dissecting feelings instead. “That would be just another chase,” I deadpanned.
“More of a hunt, princess,” he said, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. The atmosphere was definitely different now, a change from the earlier distance. It was our normal day-to-day life, charged high with electricity.
And it almost always led to something else.
“Stop that,” I ground out, feeling the inside of my chest freezer over again.
“Stop what?” His tone was ignorant, but the look on his face wasn't.
“Acting like that,” I said softly. “Seriously, Taeyong. I'm leaving. I'm not ever coming back. This will only end in flames.”
“It doesn't have to,” he said, too eager, hands too tight clasped over the wheel, with no leather gloves to hide their clamminess. “Even if we burn short, we could burn bright—”
“This isn't a fairy tale, Taeyong!” I yelled, cutting his sentence short. “You're only slowing this—” I gestured between us violently— “the death of this. It's not poetry, this is cold, hard facts.” My voice was bitter and raised as I remembered the earlier conversation between me and Baekhyun. “Move on. You'll have to one day, anyway.”
He was barely holding himself back, I could see it, in the muscle that jumped in his jaw, in the pulsing of the vein in his neck, in the sheen of sweat shining on his cheekbone. But he focused on the car, which wasn't his Stingray, because we were out in the open and those were illegal. His jawbone squared defaintly. “I won't.”
And there we were again, on the merry-go-round, yelling and fighting and kissing and then yelling and fighting and kissing again. This was toxic. This was hurtful for both of us. This was going to end. It had to.
“Taeyong, please.” I was begging now, pleading and trying my best to soothe him into compliance. We were much too similar in the stubbornness department, which wasn't the best match for two people involved both romantically and against it. “This isn't helping.”
“To hell with help,” he breathed, chuckling sardonically. “It’s not like I'm asking you to reciprocate it, anyway, it's just me who's throwing in the lot with this,” he said. “So, no. I won't stop.”
“Are you—” I was too infuriated to think straight, my nails digging into the leather of the seat as if to anchor myself to my place instead of lunging. “It's not just about you.”
“What I feel is just about me.” He was driving more rashly now, the scale teetering dangerously towards anger instead of care. “Why are you even bothering with this anymore? You're free to go ahead and forget about me, build yourself a new life or fuck around with Chwe, I don't care. But it doesn't change how I feel.”
“Of course I'm going to bother about it, how could—”
“Give me one reason—”
“It's because I care about you!” I'd had enough. Enough of everything. “It's because I care about you and don't want you to suffer, much less alone.” Earlier, all I had wanted was to stay somehow, manage to escape and continue living in Seoul. But there was no other way out, and I saw now that it wasn't related solely to the bikers. “Look—you know what? Stop the car.”
He didn't even hesitate before slamming down on the brakes, the car coming to a screeching halt, skidding more because of the rain. “Okay. Get out.”
“Gladly.” I got out of the car with my teeth gritted hard enough to send bits of pain shooting through my jaw. Making sure to slam the door on the way out, wishing that it had been a Corvette instead of a Ford in the heat of the moment.
Taeyong didn't look at me once before dirving off, something I had expected anyway. We were similar in that aspect, similar enough for me to be able to predict some of his actions without being able to prevent them, or even want to.
In my wild attempts to stop him from carrying on with this show any longer, I had ended up saying the wrong things. The regret seeped in later, having been forgotten earlier, dissolving in the wave of my anger like it was acid. I cared, and I needed to stop doing it.
I cared.
I cared about the raindrops on my jacket, my face and my hands, I cared about the asshole with the red hair, I cared about the boy with the feline smile. I cared. I cared too much.
But for now, Taeyong was gone.
And I was left alone, standing in the rain—not caring about it anyway, because I'd left my heart in the shotgun seat.