The One Who (Almost) Got Away [2/2]
Part I here.
The one you’ve been looking at (for quite a while)
“Do you even know how to do this?” He asks her, as she squeezes a generous dollop of cream onto her hands.
Her only response is to smear it all over the lower half of his face, over his mouth, effectively silencing him and he splutters through the foam, half-indignant, half-teasing. “I really don’t feel safe with you doing this.”
Joo-hyun holds up the razor threateningly. “If you don’t keep quiet and let me finish, I promise you won’t be safe.”
“Never argue with the lady holding the sharp object.” He jokes, settling back in place as he adjusts his right arm, which is currently wrapped in a sling and resting safely on his stomach. He winces slightly, as a twinge shoots through it and it must show on his face because Joo-hyun jumps on it. “See? What did I say about not moving around?”
“Alright, alright.” He grumbles. He tilts his face out towards her. “You missed a spot. Left side, right there.” Her hand comes up, dabbing at the spot, and for a moment, Yong-hwa just lets himself drink in this sight- Joo-hyun sitting comfortably on the balls of her feet, hair down, shaving cream up to her elbows and that smile.
He swears it’s that smile that would get him to do anything. Even letting her help him shave. Which he could do perfectly well on his own…. except that it was his right hand that got injured while he was attempting to learn longboarding from Min-hyuk, which makes it really difficult for him to do everything that he’s done before, only with his left hand.
The boys have helped some, but it is Joo-hyun who helps the most. This is especially so because they live in the same building.
So when she saw him with nicks and bits of toilet paper stuck to his face last week, she told him that she would help him with his next shave. “Like your butler,” she’d teased. “Don’t you feel honored?”
Only now… he’s not so sure if this was the right thing for him to agree to.
But the jokes help some. (They help hide how much he wants to kiss her.)
“Lean forward.” Joo-hyun tells him, balancing on her heels. She takes his hand, placing it on her shoulder to help him balance. Her cardigan is soft under his fingers and he leans forward, realizing belatedly how close their faces are right now, but she smiles softly, lifting the razor in her hand. “There, that’s better.”
Okay, this was definitely not the right thing to agree to.
He tries to look at anything but her, tries to talk, but she shushes him. “If you move your mouth,” she explains, eyes focused on the task at hand. “I’ll nick you. Then it might as well be that you do it for yourself, right?”
He tries to laugh, tries to make a joke but his throat is suddenly deathly dry.
He’s always been a little bit in love with Seo Joo-hyun. Everyone knows it. Since he moved to Seoul in junior high, all the way past university till now, as working adults. He’s tried to get over it, see other people, try to see her as a friend, but it’s never gone away. (How could it, he asks himself, just look at her, look at her.) He’s come to accept it as part of his heart, which it is. It’s as natural and as simple as that.
Aside from that, she is one of his oldest friends, which is both why he loves her and hates to love her, because that’s all they are to her at least. Best friends. The kind of best friends that take care of each other. Especially when one said best friend has sprained his arm and can’t shave for himself.
The razor is cold and sharp against his skin and he tries to look over her, but it’s so hard. It really is. It takes a stronger man than him to not physically look at Seo Joo-hyun.
There is a little crease mark right there between her eyebrows even as she focuses on trying not to cut him with the razor, that he finds so damned adorable. There are the soft fall of her cheeks, the way she’s biting on the inside of her cheek, the way her eyes are narrowed in concentration, and for a moment, all Yong-hwa can hear is her breathing, soft, even and slow.
“Yong-hwa?”
He opens his eyes, which he didn’t even know were closed, and she is staring at him with bewilderment in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
For a moment he doesn’t understand at all.
But then he realizes, his good hand, his free hand has come up from her shoulder and is now holding onto her wrist, keeping her from doing any more with the razor. He closes his eyes and it is a physical shudder within him because Jung Yong-hwa is this close to screwing it all and kissing Seo Joo-hyun.
Some part of him tells him not to, screams at him not to, because this is years of friendship on the line here and all for the want of a kiss that may not happen. He tries to listen to these voices. He wants to. He doesn’t want to screw this up.
But when Yong-hwa opens his eyes, he knows what he sees in Joo-hyun’s eyes.
He sees puzzlement, bewilderment first. But like a kaleidoscope, he sees something else, some other emotion take shape, shift into place in those large eyes of Joo-hyun. He sees her look at him like he’s no longer Jung Yong-hwa, budding songwriter and guitar extraordinaire, class clown, best friend. He sees her see him for the first time, finally, as Jung Yong-hwa, a man, and for a brief fleeting moment, he imagines that she sees the past 10 years reflected in his own eyes.
He doesn’t even realize he’s leaned in until he feels her hands resting on his shoulder blades. She’s not pushing him away, but neither is she bringing him closer.
“Yong-hwa.” She whispers and her words raise goosebumps on his arms. Her nose bumps against his. “What are we doing?”
He leans even more forward but this time she pulls away slightly, shaking her head, but her forehead is pressed against his and now, he is certain that her hands are at the base of his neck, cool and soft to the touch.
“Why?” He says softly, the word ghosting across their faces. Why won’t you let me kiss you? Why won’t you let me in all the way? Why can’t you let yourself like me?
He can feel her swallow; he imagines the motion travelling up from her neck, up to her forehead, into his forehead, vibrating through his head and he presses his forehead closer to her, because for the first time, they are connecting in a way Yong-hwa could only have dreamed about.
“I can’t.” She whispers, shaking her head. “I’m scared.”
Those words feel like the counter curse to a spell; just like that, she stands so abruptly that he almost loses his balance and he has to steady himself, rising from the chair. The way she backs away from him could almost be comical; she looks like a hunted animal, all large, frightened eyes.
It’s only the smears of shaving cream on her cheeks, her mouth, her nose that remind him that they were right there together, that she knows that he likes her, and for the first time in years that thought doesn’t terrify Jung Yong-hwa like it would. He could have sworn too, in that brief moment, that he got a glimpse of the fact that Joo-hyun might actually return his feelings.
“Joo-hyun.” He says softly, as if raising his voice will spook her.
Her only response is to shake her head over and over again, even as she backs out of the room. The razor falls from her hand, hitting the bathroom tiles with a click.
“I’m sorry,” She rasps one last time, as if that word will help her take back everything that just transpired between them, but it can’t and it won’t and so Yong-hwa watches helplessly, as she exits, taking everything between them with her out the door.
The one who stays (past the clock at midnight)
Yong-hwa always has a way with the ladies. It never fails him.
It doesn't fail him now.
"Hi." He begins in his native tongue, winningly, with a smile. "I hope I'm not disturbing your night, but my friend over there," here, he points to Min-hyuk, perched with the rest of the boys at the bar. "He's getting married next week, that punk. And we’re seeing as we’re all pretty much strangers here in the City of Lights, so I just wondered if you ladies would like to see the city together for tonight?”
He picks out the bride easily - fair, with long locks of dark hair that tumble over her shoulder and a cute eye-smile, wearing a lopsided tiara on her head and a pink sash that proclaims, “Bride to Be”. His eye falls on a petite member of their party, with dyed white-blonde hair and a cheeky grin. She winks at him.
The night is looking up, indeed.
There are 8 of the girls in total, and they are pleasant company. Yong-hwa admits that after two days of being surrounded by foreign English words and American accents, the familiar lilt of the Seoul accent is like a drink of cold water after stumbling a long while in the desert. Already, the girls are pairing themselves up with his boys: Tiffany speaks sedately to Min-hyuk, the other to-be-married member of their party, along with a tall, quiet girl, Seo-hyun, who is the maknae of the group. Jung-shin and Jong-hyun are already bantering with Yuri, Yoona and Hyo-yeon easily, making the girls burst into giggles from moment to moment. And he too finds himself enjoying the company of Tae-yeon and Sunny, who appear to be two of the livelier ones in the group. All in all, not a bad decision, asking girls in to join the party, he thinks.
Tae-yeon, the petite blonde girl he’d noticed at first, is just as he expects. She is playful like him, throwing her head back and laughing in pure abandon at his jokes. She is bubbly and bright, sharing freely about her job back in Seoul as a backup singer for SM Entertainment, and the fact that she is a vocalist piques Yong-hwa’s interest- because who better to be with than a girl who enjoys music so much as to make it her career?
The creme de la creme? She is single, having just broken up with a younger trainee from SM. (“I’m so over it,” Tae-yeon tells him. “I’m done with younger boys. Someone’s going to have to take care of me now instead of the other way round.”)
It feels like a major opportunity for Yong-hwa. Sure, there are girls back home, friends, acquaintances, work mates, who have expressed a romantic interest, but nothing has ever been mutual. It feels like a bad cliche for him to find someone who seems perfect for him while on a weekend getaway to the City of Sin while celebrating Min-hyuk’s last few days of bachelordom, but at the same time he can’t deny that it also feels a little like kismet.
Yet, as the night wears on, Yong-hwa finds himself unexpectedly spending less time with Tae-yeon. This is the boys’ first time in Las Vegas, himself included. Yet as their defacto leader ever since high school, he feels responsible for them. While he wants them to enjoy themselves wholeheartedly, he’s also aware that they are very much strangers in a foreign land, and with that thought in mind, he curbs his own drinking so that he can keep an eye on their now expanded group. There will be other times for drunken revelry, he thinks semi-ruefully.
That action alone places him in an unspoken alliance with one of the most unexpected members of the girls’ group- their maknae, Seo-hyun.
She may be the youngest of them all, but she seems to have the same thought as Yong-hwa- that is, to watch out for all the girls. In fact, Yong-hwa barely remembers her drinking anything throughout the night. (He can remember though in detail, Sunny’s pounding of 8 shots of vodka in one shot.) They work together quietly; Yong-hwa holding back Jung-shin’s hair (he’s growing it out for some upcoming shoot) even as his maknae pukes his guts out in an alley, and Seo-hyun keeps an eye on their unruly, sloppily drunk group in the meanwhile. He’s there, gently wrestling the gin and tonic from Yuri’s hand even as Seo-hyun holds down her unnie’s shirt from where she’s trying to flash her abs to everyone at the bar. She’s there, sliding a glass of water to Jong-hyun, whose face is buried in his hands, obviously way past his drinking limit.
They don’t speak much or deeply throughout the night, but there are exchanged glances, silently asking for help, or flashes of grateful smiles and for reasons unknown, Yong-hwa finds himself trusting this girl, quiet and reserved though she may be, but steady and reliable.
Seo-hyun is lovely in her own way too; Yong-hwa is not immune to her long wavy hair, or the way her eyes sparkle in exasperated laughter when Soo-young throws her arms around her neck and proclaims to all and sundry on the street at a little past 2 am, in broken English that “This my sister, she beautiful, who wants to be boyfriend?”
So, at 5.30 am, when the party has officially ended and the two of them have just helped a practically comatose Hyo-yeon into her room, Yong-hwa turns to her in the hotel room corridor. He is exhausted and a tad dehydrated and must probably look like a wreck, but he still manages to muster up his most charming smile. “So. Breakfast?”
To his surprise, she agrees, and that’s how the two of them find themselves seated at a dingy little diner, just a ways from the girls’ hotel. Even as he puts down his menu, Yong-hwa finds himself wondering: what the hell am I doing? In the middle of the night, when everyone was buzzed and happy, this seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do. But now, in the light of day, he’s not sure. It feels too much like a date. Between wrangling all of his guys and her girls, sure, the two of them bonded. But that doesn’t translate to good conversation. What if she thinks its a date? (Which, it kind of might be. Yong-hwa isn’t sure.)
He looks at her, seated from across the table. The side of her hair is a little mussed from where Yoona leaned on her in the limo on the way home, her left eyeliner is slightly smudged and she too, looks exhausted as can be expected. She still looks beautiful, though.
She puts down her menu too, and Yong-hwa can see his bone-deep exhaustion, his sudden onset of insecurities reflected in her own eyes.
But then, she smiles, a genuine one and Yong-hwa can’t help but grin back at her too. And that’s where it all takes off.
She orders in fluent, non-accented English for the both of them, slipping easily back into their native tongue in the next minute when she asks him if he lives in Seoul. He finds out that she works at the embassy, hence her strong English and Japanese abilities among others. He attempts to banter with her in Japanese, making her laugh into her tea, but praises his attempts sincerely nonetheless. He shares with her about his job as an accounts manager in sales and marketing, but how he’s been thinking about leaving his job to pursue something in music and she listens intently. She promises to listen to his Youtube channel, which in turn, leads to a spirited discussion on some of the music they love- he loves his old school rockers like Bon Jovi, and she admits with some embarrassment that she plays nature music at home to help her relax. She asks about his parents in Busan and breathes that she has always wanted to go to Gwangalli Beach to see the lights and eat seafood. Yong-hwa is one breath away from promising to take her there, but he does ask her to look him up if she’s ever in the area.
All in all, Yong-hwa has never enjoyed a conversation this much with someone he’s never met before. He barely tastes the food, and is almost sad when the waitress brings over their check in a bid to get them to leave.
He walks her back to the hotel, to the room she shares with Hyo-yeon, and just like that, Yong-hwa is faced with the awful, heart-thumping decision: should he make this something more than just one drunken (well, semi-sober) night in Las Vegas, or should he just leave it as that, a pleasant, fleeting encounter with a stranger in a foreign land, a single memory to be smiled at in a chain of memories?
But then, she smiles again at him and it’s tinged with slight shyness and sweetness and Yong-hwa closes his eyes briefly. The two of them in Busan together, sitting on the beach at night and setting off fireworks. Picking her up from work at Gwanghwamun and taking her on long walks at the palace, braving the tourists, just because. But most of all, just spending time with her in cafes, wrapped up in scarves during winter, watching the stars on a hot summer’s night in Gangwon-do. All the places they’ll go, all the things they’ll do and all the memories they could have.
Yong-hwa’s decision is made.
She is rooting in her bag for her key card, but when he clears his throat, she looks up at him. “Uh.” He scratches the back of his neck. His charm has seemed to desert him completely, and mentally, he curses himself. “I know this is strange, but… if you wouldn’t mind…”
He looks back up at her and it just comes to him, easily, this time.
“I’d really like to see you again. When we’re back in Korea.” He says softly. “So if you’d like that too, maybe we can exchange numbers?”
There is a moment of silence, just the two of them looking at each other.
And then, there it is, Seo-hyun’s shy smile, even as she looks right at him and Yong-hwa feels immense relief, blooming like a flower in his chest. “Sure.”
She takes out her phone and the two of them exchange numbers, and when she gets her key card out to enter the room, Yong-hwa doesn’t feel scared anymore. Just strangely happy and certain, that this isn’t some adventure that will end at the stroke of midnight, with his Cinderella lost to him forever. The story goes on. I hope it’s a good one.
“See you back in Seoul.” is Seo-hyun’s last words to him, even as the door closes. He can still see a glimmer of her smile, pleased and embarrassed and it warms his heart.
“See you in Seoul.” He returns with a grin of his own. He breathes in, out, closing his eyes. “I can’t wait.”