[Chapter 5]
~Mesmeeized~
Yikyung told himself he was just going to watch the sunset. That was all.
The same thing he'd been doing every evening since he arrived in Naeun-ri, sitting on the east wall, watching the light die over the water, letting the village settle around him like something he was slowly learning the weight of.
That was all.
He brought his notebook anyway.
Riwoo was already there when I arrived.
He was sitting in the same spot as the evening before, legs loosely crossed on the wall, face turned toward the horizon.
Two paper cups beside him.
He picked one up without looking at me when I sat down and held it out.
I took it.
It was warm. Tea, from the pojangmacha cart near the lane. Steam curled from it in the cool evening air.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"I was already getting one,"
he said simply.
He said it the way he did most things, like it was nothing.
I looked at the horizon.
I took a sip.
It was good tea.
~~~~~~~~~~
We didn't talk immediately.
We'd gotten good at that. The not talking. It had stopped feeling like the absence of something and started feeling like its own kind of presence.
Easy and unhurried, the silence of two people who didn't need to fill the air between them to justify being in it together.
The sky was doing something quieter tonight. Softer pinks bleeding into grey, the sun going down without drama.
The sea below us a deep and shifting slate.
Riwoo had both hands loose around his cup.
I had my notebook on my knee.
I wasn't going to open it.
We talked sometimes.
He told me about a cat that had been stealing from the market stalls for three years, that everyone pretended not to know about because old Jungsik-ssi had started leaving food out for it.
I laughed.
Actually laughed — not the polite social kind but the real kind, surprised out of me before I could think to contain it.
Riwoo looked at me when it happened.
Like he hadn't been expecting it either.
Like he was filing it away somewhere.
Then the light changed.
It did that here — shifted without warning, the way coastal light did, moving from one direction to another between one breath and the next.
The soft grey of earlier deepened suddenly into something warmer.
Gold and amber bleeding low across the water, and the last of it catching Riwoo full in the face as he turned back toward the horizon.
I'd stopped talking mid sentence.
don't remember what I was saying.
The light had found the curve of his cheekbone and was sitting there like it had always meant to.
The line of his jaw. The way his lashes cast the faintest shadow when he looked down at his cup. The column of his throat. The way his hair moved slightly in the evening breeze and he didn't bother pushing it away.
I had sketched him in my mind a hundred times since the market.
But this—
This was something else.
This was the kind of beauty that kings went to war for in stories. The kind that simply existed, quiet and non dramatic and entirely unaware of itself, the way the sea existed or the light existed — not for anyone, not performing, just present.
I didn't know when my hand tightened around my cup.
I couldn't look away.
I knew I should.
I just couldn't.
Riwoo turned.
Our eyes met.
Neither of us moved.
The world kept going. The sea below, the village behind us, somewhere a fishing boat making its slow way home — but right here, in this specific pocket of evening air, everything had gone completely still.
He was looking at me the way I'd been looking at him.
Not quite the same. But not entirely different either.
His lips parted slightly, like he was going to say something.
He didn't say anything.
I didn't say anything.
The moment stretched, thin and charged and neither of us willing to be the one to break it — until Riwoo blinked and looked away first, back at the water.
He lifted his cup to his mouth and took a long slow sip like he'd been thirsty and finally found water.
I looked back at the horizon.
My heart doing something very inconvenient.
~~~~~~~~~
We walked back through the village without talking much.
Not the comfortable quiet of before.
Something slightly different — aware of itself in a way it hadn't been, the air between us carrying something unnamed that neither of us was ready to look at directly.
At the market lane we stopped.
The usual place. The usual parting.
"Goodnight, Yikyung,"
Riwoo said.
First time he'd used my name without me offering it first.
"Goodnight Daun-na," I said.
He smiled, then turned to go. But then paused, and tuned to face me.
"Same time tomorrow?"
He said it like it was a casual doctors appointment. Easy. Normal.
As if the evening hadn't just cracked something open between us that neither of us knew what to do with yet.
"Same time tomorrow," I replied.
He turned again and walked away, this time he didn't look back.
I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to.
Then I took a deep breath, and went home.