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That’s the first thing Saebyeok wants to do, as soon as they get out, she knows. They get off the wet pavement as soon as they’re hurled out of the minivan and Jiyeong already knows what their next step is; doesn’t even dare to argue or try to bring anything else up until Saebyeok gets her way.
What else is even left for her to do, except to just go along with it?
All she does to intervene is to pull back at Saebyeok’s windbreaker when she saunters along the pavement in some unknown direction, and tries her best to not take the icy glare she throws Jiyeong’s way too close to heart.
The conversation happens wordlessly. Jiyeong stares pointedly back until Saebyeok’s stubborn determination finally fades, softened by confusion. Without the mask of aloofness, her eyes go wide and flood with something inexplicable – something that makes Jiyeong’s hollow heart crack a little. She can’t stand to look at her purple eye bags, her hazy eyes, and the painful hunch of her back. She feels like she could cry for her right at this moment, because she knows Saebyeok would refuse to, or maybe forgot how to, at this point.
She nods towards the motel across and Saebyeok’s shoulders loosen and she nods, head falling down.
“Right. I’m sorry. You must be tired.”
Jiyeong tries to suck the tears back in, because Saebyeok doesn’t get it. But if it gets her in a bed, too, it’ll have to do. They use the cursed golden card to check in, avoiding the odd stares from the receptionist. She pushes Saebyeok in the shower first, and runs off to get a first aid kit from the nearest drug store, water bottles and noodles neither of them will probably eat, but it’s worth a try.
Knocking the door shut, she finds Saebyeok frozen in the bathroom door, and Jiyeong ignores her panic, not wanting to draw too much attention to it and make her feel awkward, so she shakes the first aid kit in the general direction of her hip.
“We need to change the bandage. You don’t want your brother to see you die of sepsis in front of him, am I right?”
Saebyeok, about to contradict her, snaps her mouth shut and sits on the chair with a grunt. Jiyeong puts her gloves on and tries her best to look like she knows what she’s doing, taking the bandage off and cleaning it out with alcohol. Saebyeok hisses, and Jiyeong tuts.
“Don’t be a baby,” she scolds, but then treats her just like one. She pats the wound with more gentleness that she thought she’d ever be able to muster, rubs the skin of her hip absentmindedly, and if her skin beneath her latex clad hand erupts in goosebumps, then, well. She’ll just assume it’s the chilly air. She covers the gash with the clean bandage, gingerly pats the tape on top and takes the gloves off.
She knows Saebyeok is staring holes into her, but she drags it on, spending a little too much time on aggressively punching the old bandage inside the kit. What for? It’s stupid. Her dumb ass snaps her eyes up on an impulse, and stays frozen, looking at the odd expression on Saebyeok’s face. Just as frustratingly stony, but a different flavor of uninterpretable intensity. Now Jiyeong’s the flustered one, for a change.
She chickens out, for some reason.
Clears her voice.
“I’ll…go take a shower. Eat the noodles, so you can take the painkillers. And if I find you pacing around, I’ll have a serious word with you.”
And then promptly makes a run for the bathroom.
She half-expected to find Saebyeok collapsed from exhausted in a corner of the room, but instead she’s hunched over the table, forcefully swallowing down the food. Jiyeong’s sure she has never seen her so explicitly miserable, but she knows Saebyeok got the memo. For Cheol.
Halfway through the greasy mess, Jiyeong takes mercy on her and gives her painkillers and a water bottle. Saebyeok doesn’t contradict her, beyond exhausted. And on a roll of boldness, she extends her hand, waiting for Saebyeok to take it. And if she has to explain that to herself, she’d say she doesn’t want her to fall over.
She doesn’t have to, met with complacency and a sigh from somewhere deep in her bones. Jiyeong, to her credit, does grab onto Saebyeok’s bony body tighter than is needed. She knows perfectly well that she can hold her balance, but will still hold her with the last dregs of her strength so that she doesn’t violently flop her butt on the mattress.
Saebyeok grabs her hand the next time, wordlessly pulling Jiyeong down with her; she complies. The sheets are too thin, the air too cold, so Jiyeong can blame her audacity on the exhaustion, but she hooks a leg on top of Saebyeok’s, and intertwines their fingers. She’d snuggle closer, but she wants to spare the hip wound.
Jiyeong allows herself to actually sleep, more relaxed close to that scrawny body, and if she feels she mattress jump several times along the night because Saebyeok keeps jerking in her sleep, she only tightens her hand and hopes that it’s good enough.
***
Jiyeong can’t bet that Saebyeok has slept for more than 2 hours when they get on the train, and she’s probably generous with that assumption too. Her eye bags are somehow even deeper, and yet her eyes are frantic and alight, body taut with anxiety. Her right leg somehow finding it in itself to shake, hands wringing and her pulse point jumping wildly to the point where Jiyeong can see it from her opposite seat on the train.
She briefly entertains the idea that she might drive herself to a heart attack at the tender age of, what, 21? She should ask her someday. But still, it’s the most alive Saebyeok has looked ever since Jiyeong first laid eyes on her.
This is everything that Saebyeok has almost died for every day in those hellish games, and it paid off. She can’t quite believe it herself, somehow present and completely out of her body. Jiyeong has accepted that she will be on the back burner, which is fine. There’s nothing out of the ordinary for her. She’s happy to look at the rollercoaster on Saebyeok’s face, full on new emotions she hasn’t seen on her face; the uncharacteristic wide and incredulous eyes that make Jiyeong’s heart do a funny leap.
She’d cry for Saebyeok again, if it wouldn’t draw too much attention to her. Her nervousness is contagious and Jiyeong finds herself mirroring her emotions, getting curious. She can’t help but wonder what Cheol looks like. How much of Saebyeok’s beautiful face he’s borrowed. What he’s like – the little man wormed deep inside her heart who she’s risked herself for.
Saebyeok, for all her stone-faced stoicism and firm statements about not caring, can’t fit inside her own skin out of love for this kid. She didn’t say a word, but Jiyeong figures only a blind man wouldn’t see the lengths she’s gone for him.
The moment they step off the train, Saebyeok walks with hurried steps, and Jiyeong curses to herself and gasping, struggling to keep up with those long legs, and then barely avoiding crashing face first into her back. Saebyeok stares at the gate for maybe several minutes, takes a moment to put on a brave face, and then looks at Jiyeong at last.
Jiyeong, for all her talent at bullshitting and spewing lines and sarcastic quips left and right, stares back, speechless. She has no idea what Saebyeok feels, has no right to butt in or pretend she knows what any of this means. She nods and smiles, trying not to cry for the millionth time in the past few days.
“I’ll wait here.”
Saebyeok falters.
“I want you to come with me,” she decides, and then hesitates. “If you want to. You can sit on a bench in there,” she compromises, pointing to the benches with chipped paint near the playground.
Jiyeong can’t refuse her, and nods.
She sits on the bench and can only watch Saebyeok approach a nun and start talking, brave and stoic again. From the sidelines, Jiyeong can only watch her as she pushes a fat stack of cash into her hand, after which the woman leaves. She can see Saebyeok worry her lip and run her hands through her hair, staring at the orphanage door, both frozen and restless.
After a while, she maybe realizes it’ll take a while for his bag to be packed up, so she walks back to Jiyeong, sitting down, rubbing her hands on her knees and breathing heavily. “What do we do next?” She asks, unexpectedly curt.
“You-“, Jiyeong stutters, scrambling for an answer, “You get Cheol out, find a place to live and find your mom.”
“I asked about us.”
Saebyeok tries her best to reign her face in, since her voice wavers a little. Again, Jiyeong stares into empty space, at a complete, uncharacteristic loss for words.
“You made me a promise, I didn’t forget. We won those games with a purpose,” Saebyeok continues, her sincerity feeling like a punch to the gut with every single word.
“You can’t be serious,” Jiyeong laughs, and immediately regrets it, looking at Saebyeok’s kicked face, unguarded and unbridled. She retreats back into herself. “I didn’t think this would actually matter to you,” she confesses.
Saebyeok only stares at her feet, hands wringing. “You do,” she admits, and all Jiyeong can do is swallow, mouth dry all of a sudden. “What were you thinking of, then?” she asks, gathering up the courage to entertain the idea.
“All of us, on Jeju island. I want to take Cheol there, while I try to find mom. Mojitos, maybe. Show me how the southerners splurge,” she says, unable to suppress a huff. Jiyeong just stares, not quite believing what’s going on. “And stay with me as long as you want to.”
“I might want to stay forever,” Jiyeong counters.
“Fine by me,” Saebyeok dares to finish, looking down at her boots and sneaking glances to her side.
Jiyeong stays frozen and unable to find the words, stuck between utter confusion and a cloud of warmth that spreads inside her chest and spools around a little corner in her soul. She’s getting pulled in Saebyeok’s reality, moored in her life. It feels huge, to the point where it feels hard to breathe. So Jiyeong narrows it down to the little gravity that pulls her lips down to Saebyeok's.
It sends her head reeling – only registering the feeling of the kiss by the time Saebyeok pulls back, shocked, and having barely kissed back. Jiyeong would say sorry for her brashness, but Saebyeok leans back in for a peck, and then a longer kiss, breathing hard but moving timidly. Jiyeong wonders if that’s her first kiss. This is her first, and between the cold October breeze blowing in the shade of a plum tree, her hand fisted in a windbreaker and the feel of cracked, plush lips, it’s nothing short of perfect. As perfect as they come, for someone like them.
And then Jiyeong remembers that someone might see them, red in the face, but comforted that Saebyeok seems to be the same. She smiles a rare smile that might as well make her insides flail, even if now is not the time. Not when Saebyeok’s head snaps to her side so fast Jiyeong thinks she might get whiplash, remembering that Cheol should come out any second now.
She stares, curious and hyperventilating, as Saebyeok already twitches after peeping something in the window, according to her line of sight. She thinks she might actually explode on the spot as a little mop of hair peeks out from behind the wall, hand in hand with another nun.
Cheol is too far for Jiyeong not to squint, but he steps closer to his sister, both radiating and hesitating. She can already read a bitterness on his face, an anticipation that this visit might also end in a shallow promise. As if the blind, youthful faith that he might leave, this time, for sure, had slowly dwindled down until that point.
His face is already heavy with sadness, but he walks to Saebyeok with fast steps and not faltering at his last steps for him to smash his little body into her arms, making himself smaller and smaller. She picks him up by his shoulders as she stands up and just rocks their bodies from side to side. It takes forever for the bony mess of limbs to untangle and Saebyeok kneels down to take his face in her hands and look him over, to make sure he’s real and okay, save for his dinged up chin.
Jiyeong watches them both red-faced and contorted with both sobs and laughter, hugs painfully tight, and has no idea what to do with herself. Cheol stares straight at her all of a sudden, because of course she stands out like a sore thumb: disheveled hair, bruised skin here and there.
The eye contact is unexpected and she flinches away from it.
Saebyeok notices and quickly explains, “This is Jiyeong. She’s a friend.”
Cheol stares so incredulously, it’d be hilarious, if it wasn’t really so sad.
“Friend?”
“If I trust her, you can trust her, too,” Saebyeok says, confident, and Jiyeong forgets what to do with her hands.
Cheol climbs off his sister’s lap and stares closer at Jiyeong, taking everything in. Whatever it is he’s doing, she’s sure it makes sense to him, so she tries to be patient until he’s done. At last, he bows down, and says, wary, but polite, “Hi, Jiyeong, I’m Cheol.”
She bows in return, half-detached from herself.
“Do those hurt?” he asks, pointing to the bruises on her face. Jiyeong touches them dumbly, and grimaces a little.
“A little, but they’ll pass.”
He nods intelligently, and then, “I like your hair spots.”
Jiyeong laughs. “They’re called highlights.”
“Oh. How did you become friends?”
Both Saebyeok and Jiyeong’s smiles falter, awkwardly being reminded of where they were just a little over 2 days ago. “Work,” she says simply.
Saebyeok pulls up the bag that the nun had quietly left on the dried out grass, letting him put it all together. She can see his eyes begin to light up and tries not to let her face crumple again.
“You’re taking me with you?”
“Yes,” Saebyeok whispers. “And you’re never gonna have to see this place again. You can ask me anything right now, and you can get it.”
“Like…ice cream?” Cheol tries.
“Ice cream, if you want to. But Jiyeong and I were also thinking Jeju-do.”
Cheol can’t believe his eyes and ears and only quietly nods and whispers, “Jeju-do...”
***
On the train to somewhere nicer and farther from that orphanage, Saebyeok is positively knocked out within seconds, with Cheol tightly tucked to her chest. He's wrapped under her hoodie and locked under her arms, and Jiyeong’s exhaustion is catching up with her, and a slow whisper startles her.
Her eyes meet Saebyeok’s low lids, who nods to her left, and Jiyeong is past arguing since a few days ago, so she empties her head and dares to sit across and flop her head gracelessly on the offered shoulder. Jiyeong thinks that they might move too fast, but who else would she share her life with? Who the hell would understand the things they’ve seen, if not the other?
Jeju-do, it is.