Work Text:
It’s odd, sitting in the front seat of the car next to him. Next to Ki-ho, the boy she spent years conjuring the image of as she swam in the ocean and talked to seagulls and lashed sticks together into shelter. The man she spent the last few months desperately trying to get in contact with.
He’s been beside her all this time, really. Except now, he’s actually right beside her, only the gearshift and the edges of their respective seats in the way. And she knows now, for certain. No more self-sabotaging doubts, no more deflection. It’s him. It’s him.
Mok-ha watches his hands on the steering wheel so she doesn’t have to look at his face. His hands are large. The skin around his thumbnail looks rough, like it’s been worn down from years of work or worrying.
A muscle in his right hand ticks. She glances up at his face. He’s looking at her, watching her watch him. She whips her head away, staring blindly out the window.
They sit in silence. You wanna ride back in my car? he’d said. Quiet and sure.
“We did a good job with the lights,” she says, voice high. “They looked nice when we were all around the campfire.”
“We did,” he agrees easily. “I guess we’ve always made a pretty good team.”
A boy with glasses and an earnest face. A bike and a guitar and a video camera. Mok-ha fixes her gaze on the dashboard to remind herself where she is. She counts the grooves in the air vent.
It had been easy to hang the lights together. They’d laughed a lot. He’d smiled more than she’d ever seen him—at least this him, the grown him. She’s known this face as Kang Bo-geol for far longer than she’s known it as Jung Ki-ho, but she can’t look at him now and not see it. He just is. And now they’re alone and she can’t find the proper words.
“The assistant director told me you made a club,” she says finally. “To do clean-ups on islands.”
Ki-ho hums an acknowledgement.
“Was that to look for me?”
“Yes,” he says.
It kind of knocks the air out of her, even though she knew. She’d known, really, from the moment Dong-min told her by the elevators like it was casual information and not the final, life-changing puzzle piece she’d been waiting for. “Oh,” she breathes. “Thank you.”
“I knew it was a long shot, but with every island we ticked off, I could tell myself that I was closer to being certain,” he says. “I wasn’t going to give up until there were no islands left to check. Just in case.”
“That’s a lot of work.”
“The time was going to pass anyway.” And you were worth it. She can feel the weight of those unspoken words sitting between them. She gets a flash of his arms, wrapped in plastic and half-submerged in soapy water, only a few hours ago, with other words taking up space in the silence between their shoulders. She remembers getting stuck on the pull of the cords in his wrist as his fingers moved, smoothing away dirt with sure circles.
“There was something I wanted to ask you,” Ki-ho says, pulling her back into the car.
A shapeless dread is rising in the distance. Storm clouds coming for her brittle, barely-there shelter. “Yes?” Mok-ha makes out.
“Would you tell me about it?”
“About?”
“The island,” Ki-ho says.
The clouds flick away to the horizon. She stares at him.
“You want to hear about the island?”
“I spent years wondering where you were,” he says. “Imagining what you might be doing if you were still alive. Sometimes I pictured you with amnesia, living a happy life somewhere in Seoul, just out of reach.” He laughs a little. “Sounds far-fetched, but hey, I lived with an example of it.”
The absurdity—along with the relief—makes Mok-ha laugh too.
“It is kind of crazy that your childhood friend is a castaway and your brother had amnesia,” she says. “What are you, the star of a drama?”
For a split second she runs the next couple lines of dialogue in her head—he’ll joke about not being leading man material, she’ll imply that he is, not thinking about her words, and then they’ll sit there in silence again. But Ki-ho doesn’t follow the thought. He just smiles, a quick flash of his upper teeth and pink gums at one corner of his mouth, and then says,
“Most of the time, though, I imagined you on an island. Using that endless optimism of yours to survive anyway.”
The road curves, bringing the car in a wide arc. Their bodies sway with the movement, her shoulder drawing nearer to his arm for a brief moment.
“No one seems to ever ask you about what it was actually like, living alone on the island,” Ki-ho continues. “You haven’t really talked about it. It seemed like overstepping to bring it up as Kang Bo-geol. But I was hoping you’d tell me about it. If you wanted to.”
“I do,” Mok-ha says quickly. Then, again, surprised by how true it is: “I do want to tell you.”
She stares blindly out the windshield. How do you start unfolding fifteen years? Does she start with the fall from the ferry? Her father on the beach? Gully?
Then:
“There were potatoes growing on the island,” she says. “I found them because of you.”
“Really?”
“I remembered when you told me what the flowers looked like.” She points to her ear, where she had tucked a potato blossom all those years ago, convinced it was a daffodil.
“It’s the main thing I ate,” she says. “Which, believe me, got old fast.”
And suddenly, it’s easy, the words flowing out of her.
“When you and Woo-hak found me, we left without going back to my house, so you never saw it, but I had built a whole shelter, all by myself,” she says. “For the first few years, I lived a little closer to the beach, in this sort of lean-to, but when I started cultivating the potatoes, I thought I should build a more permanent place near them. You know, somewhere safer.”
She sketches the shape out in the air. Ki-ho’s gaze flicks between the road and her hands, his eyes bright.
“There was always trash and all sorts of things washing up on the island—I guess I don’t need to tell you that, since you’ve cleaned up hundreds of them—and so there was plenty of materials,” she says. “You would have been so impressed. It was a big undertaking to put it all together, but I had the time.”
Mok-ha tells him about the process of drying burlap and blankets and sails and other fabrics that washed up onshore, selecting the best, cleanest ones to make into bedding, and fastening the others into tents and shade for her to sit under in the daytime. She tells him about the trial and error of learning which grasses would deign to be used as string for her to bind sticks together, and which ones slid out of a knot at the slightest hint of pressure. She tells him about lining up plastic jugs every time it rained to collect rain water, and the time that she knocked her last one over by accident and got so thirsty she resorted to licking dew off of the grass before another big rain came.
She talks, and Ki-ho listens. He listens and he asks questions easily, like he actually wants to know the nitty-gritty of her day to day, not just the broad strokes that painted a neat, inspiring picture.
“The first time a bunch of cans washed up, I was so excited that I spent the whole afternoon smashing them open on rocks,” she tells him. “Four cans of cold beans. I ate them by the fistful.”
“That must have been nice, to finally have something different.”
“It was. Except it was harder to go back to just potatoes and fruit the next day. It felt like I’d been given a gift, and I’d squandered it.”
She can remember it like she’s there again, preparing the potatoes by the fire at the edge of the beach the day after the tide brought her the cans. When she sunk her teeth into the first potato, barely cooled enough to hold, the warmth had come with an emptiness. The beans hurt her stomach, it was true—too heavy after years of nothing quite like them—but they had contained within them a hint of a world beyond the island. They tasted as though other hands had prepared them.
After them, the potatoes tasted of ash and loneliness.
“It hurt more to have less once you knew that more was possible,” Ki-ho says.
“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath. “But next time, I remembered to save a can or two for at least a few days.”
She goes on. Tells him about befriending Gully, luring her over to share her meals.
She tells him about learning to swim.
And about the icebox.
And as she talks and the car carries them down the road, it’s as though the years fall away. The awkwardness of the dishes and the start of the car ride are left behind under the wheels, and it’s just Mok-ha and Ki-ho, and she can tell him anything and know how he’s going to respond, know that he knows her in a way no one else ever will. As if no time had passed since they were teenagers. As if he made it onto that ferry with her.
“Oh, my sun catcher!” she gasps, the thought interrupting her halfway through a diatribe about the summer she spent rebuilding her home after a catastrophic storm. “I forgot, I made this mobile out of beach glass, it was darn pretty. I hung it outside my window so that when the sun rose, it would catch the light. I kind of wish I didn’t leave it behind.”
When she catches a glimpse of his face, he’s smiling big enough to make her falter.
“What?” she says, feeling slightly self-conscious.
“Nothing, just—that’s the Mok-ha I remember,” he says. “Making the best out of things. Finding the beautiful. Or making it, I suppose.”
He’s still grinning at her. It’s kind of mesmerizing—the grown-up version of the shy smile Ki-ho used to reluctantly flash whenever she surprised him back on Chunsam island.
The words are out of her mouth before she can think about it.
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were right away?”
Ki-ho’s smile fades. He fixes his eyes back on the road, shifting in his seat.
“I would have kept your secret,” Mok-ha says. "I know more than anyone how important it is to keep you safe from your father. ”
He’s quiet for a long moment, long enough that she should look away, give him privacy with his thoughts. Except, for some reason, she can’t. She studies his profile; the flop of his hair over his forehead, the barely-there wrinkle between his eyebrows, the dimple in his chin when his mouth pulls up into that flat line of concentration. She’s been in the passenger seat of Producer Kang’s car many times. But she hasn’t looked properly before.
“I was scared,” Ki-ho says softly. “If you had recognized me right away, I think I wouldn’t have been able to hide it. But you didn’t, and I thought—I thought if I could keep you at arm’s length, you would get to pursue your dream still, and we would all be safer.”
“Well, you weren’t very good at it.”
“No,” he acknowledges. His mouth wobbles, then splits into a wide, rueful smile. “Even without Woo-hak meddling to try and find out who Ki-ho was, I think we would’ve still ended up here.”
“I was so mad at you when you insulted Ki-ho,” Mok-ha admits, looking down at her lap. “Implying that he might be—that you might be!—a criminal or something. But then you would be kind to me and I would get confused all over again.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him nodding slowly.
“It was hard to stay away from you,” he says, his voice rough. “I knew I should. But it was the last thing I really wanted.”
It’s dangerously close to what he said earlier that morning. She’s there again, for a second. Rubber gloves clammy around her hands. A calm, certain expression on his face.
Silence takes over the car again. Mok-ha wishes desperately that they were still talking about the island, where every hurdle, no matter how difficult, had at least been simple to understand.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “If it made you uncomfortable.”
A prickling feeling sweeps over her scalp and down her back. She plays dumb. It’s her greatest weapon since returning from the island. “If what did?”
He keeps his eyes on the road. “When I said I still have feelings for you.”
The feeling repeats, hotter this time, like a wave of sunburn from sitting out too long with Gully at the beach. She doesn’t know what to say. The car threatens to buckle around her. She needs open sky. She needs something that makes sense, something other than the thick, painful pressure in her chest.
After a long moment, in which she looks out the window and he looks at her, or the road or his hands or something else, Ki-ho speaks again.
“It’s not something you need to worry about.” He sounds so certain of it. His voice is low, purposeful. He sounded just like that when they were teenagers. “I won’t cause you any problems. You were gone for fifteen years. You should get to live your life now without anything holding you back.”
He looks over at her for a split second, and tries a smile. It doesn’t quite work.
“You do you, and I’ll do me,” he says.
It’s what she told him before they got in the car. When she’d realized that they would be alone, and he tried to help her pack the guitar, and she felt a blaze of sudden fear that he had demands, expectations—that he needed her to assemble the beach wreckage of her mind into a clear yes or no in the span of a single car ride. She can still see the fade in his expression after she said it, that slight shuttering.
“How can I not worry about it?” she blurts. “You’re the only thing I thought about for all of those years.”
Ki-ho blinks, seeming suddenly thrown. His right hand tightens on the steering wheel and then relaxes.
“Well,” a pause; his tongue wets his bottom lip, “just don’t.”
Light floods into the car—they’ve turned a bend, the road rising above the tree line so they can see the coast all at once, spread out in front of them. There’s a gravel lip so that cars can pull over and their occupants can get out to lean on the fence and take photos, admire the landscape unfurled out below them.
A scene starts to unroll in her mind: she tells Ki-ho to pull over. After the car grinds to a halt, she gives him an answer, a real one.
She can see it. How his face would change.
He says her name—not Seo Mok-ha-ssi, but Mok-ha-yah—in this aching voice. He twists in his seat, takes her face in his hands, and leans across the space between them. She barely has time to close her eyes before he’s kissing her.
His mouth is soft, hot. He kisses her like he’s been waiting his whole life for it. When she moves her mouth against his, trying clumsily to catch up, to tell him everything she’s been wanting to say in this new language of touch, he makes this sound deep in his throat, this answering hum like he’s saying yes. Yes. Like he knows. Like his chest is painfully full of light as well.
She’s trembling, but it’s okay. He’s holding her together, her jaw cradled carefully in his hands, his thumb braced at her cheekbone.
They draw apart, just barely, lips still clinging. Ki-ho’s eyes sweep over her face.
“I love you,” she tells him. “I always have.”
He kisses her again. And again. And again.
Her mouth feels thick with the very idea of it. She can feel the phantom trace of his lips dragging across hers, the hint of his tongue on her bottom lip, so real that it empties her body of anything but heat.
A shadow rolls up the front of the car and sweeps over their heads: the road has dipped down into the trees again, the gravel opening left behind as the fence pulls in close to the shoulder. She doesn’t ask him to pull over. She doesn’t say anything.
They just drive.
She wonders if he can feel it. How much heavier the car is with her own want expanding inside it, spilling out greedily, unlocked by the reminder of those terrifying words this morning.
What kind of lunatic searches fifteen years for someone they’re not interested in?
She’s never been kissed. God, she’s thirty-one and she’s never experienced any of the milestones that most people have by this age. The only time anyone has held her hand, it’s been to lead her somewhere during an escape; Ki-ho when they were kids, making their way through the rain to the ferry docks; Ki-ho a few weeks ago, pulling her away from his father, his big hand swallowing hers up. The closest thing she has ever gotten to a kiss was yesterday, when he took her face in his hands, the touch so light and careful it felt as though the skin of his palm hovered over her cheek instead of actually touching it, a line of heat buzzing in that microscopic, imagined gap between them. There are so many ways she hasn’t been touched that she can’t even take it in when she is.
Maybe that’s what the island did to her. Scabbed her over. Left her trapped inside a sixteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know how to be the woman she suddenly wants to be.
What would she have to offer anyone in the realm of romance? Is she even capable of it? She’d told Woo-hak that her time on the island had taught her not to look ahead. To act on what she wants now. But what if what she wants is too big for her to handle?
“So how did you fix the roof?” Ki-ho says calmly, cutting across her thoughts.
“Hmm?”
“After that big storm on the island,” he says. He’s looking evenly out the windshield, no hint that he’s aware of the scrambled spiral her brain is going through. “You never finished the story.”
You do you and I’ll do me.
“It was a real pain, I’ll tell you that,” Mok-ha says. She launches back into the story, Ki-ho nodding along. The furious ache in her chest smooths away with each minute. Like the tide making the beach fresh every morning.
-
When they pull up in front of the salon behind the other car, Mok-ha doesn’t get out right away. Through the windshield, she watches the Kangs tumble out of the vehicle, continuing some animated discussion that has Woo-hak and his Dad waving their arms, and his Mom shaking her head. Beside her, she can hear Ki-ho taking the key out, putting the parking brake on.
They’re home.
“Thank you,” she says.
“What for?” Ki-ho asks, unbuckling his seatbelt.
“For asking,” she says. “You’re right. No one ever does. I get that they probably don’t want to make me upset by reminding me of the island, but it was fifteen years of my life. I don’t want to just pretend it didn’t happen.”
Something peculiar happens to her voice halfway through. She has to squeeze the last few words out.
“It was my home,” she explains. “I didn’t want to be there, but I was. And it means a lot that you wanted to know about my life there.”
“I want to know everything you’re willing to tell me,” he says. He hasn’t moved since she started talking again, his hand frozen on the door.
“It wasn’t the island that was hard to survive,” Mok-ha says quietly. “It was being alone. I was alone for so long.”
She’s tearing up now, a furious heat in the corners of her eyes.
"I missed you, all those years. Having you back in my life—having all of you in my life, it’s more than I thought I’d ever get,” she manages. “I don’t think I’d be able to handle going back to being alone.”
She sees an empty tin can. A sour, disappointing bite of potato. And then her vision clears, and his face is there, looking intently at her.
“That’s not going to happen,” he says. “We’ll be here no matter what. I’ll be here.”
They’ve been in the car for hours. And yet both of them linger for a moment longer, smiling at each other.
Here they are: the boy who had to lock himself away to be safe, and the girl who was locked away from the world too long to know how to properly reenter it.
But she’s trying. Both of them are.
For the second time that day, her mind spools ahead to the future—but this time she looks further. She imagines a day when she’s not waist deep in fear and island detritus. When they both have made more steps to put the past behind them. A day full of sun. Where she throws herself into his arms without guilt or hesitation, and he sweeps her off of her feet and spins her around, smiling in a way that Ki-ho of sixteen years old could never have dreamed he would be able to smile one day.
In this vision, she’s the one who kisses him. She takes his face in her hands and he waits for her to move first. Leans down to meet her when she does.
And it’s sweet, that first kiss. It’s more than a can of beans. It’s the wind on her face the day a boat finally carried her away from the island. It’s new shoes, tied by someone who loves her.
It’s freedom.