I knew Taek was a little slow at times, but he's not mean. Had he been I would not have been as conflicted about what to do about my burgeoning feelings for Deok Sun. If I thought he was not a worthy person, I might never have taken a step back.
Dammit, Taek.
I found myself pulling a shirt out of my closet and putting it over my white T-shirt. I grabbed my keys from the side table and was about to walk out the door when I realized I was still holding on to the phone. "Omma, I have to go," I said, my voice distracted. "I'll talk to you later."
"Oh?" She asked. "Okay, then. I guess I'll talk to you so..."
I hung up the call before she could finish. In less than an hour, I was on a plane.
Deok Sun
"I swear," Jung Hwan's Omma complained, hanging up the cordless phone, "the things I do for you people." She glowered at all of us: Taek standing next to her, and Sun Woo, Dong Ryong and myself sitting on the wooden platform outside the gate. "Just so you know, I wouldn't normally lie to my own child, but since it was for the greater good, I suppose I'll let this pass."
She scrutinized each of us before disappearing behind the gate, already calling for my mother. She had been in the middle of setting up some drinks and side dishes when Sun Woo dragged her out.
"I really don't think this is going to work," I moaned, ripping the packaging off the popsicle I picked up on my way home from the bus station.
Sun Woo released a breath. "It was worth a shot anyway. Never thought I'd say this, but I miss that punk's face."
"Me, too," Taek said quietly. "How long has it been since we were all last together like this?"
"One year," I said. I gave Taek a small smile, relieved when he smiled back at me, an image of the old Taek I know and love.
"Yeah," he said, nodding. "It's already been a year."
After his confession and my response, things did get a bit awkward for both of us. I wasn't that surprised... I had expected it to. I probably would have been more baffled had they not. But within a couple of months, it was as if nothing had happened.
We didn't speak of it again, not necessarily because we were avoiding the topic, but because there was nothing else to say. My feelings weren't going to change.
The problem with having been friends for so long with people is that you know them so well. My honesty may have seemed cruel at the time Taek was telling me how he felt (God only knows my delivery could have used some help,) but there was no way around it. I was not going to let him misunderstand. That I just happened to have realized how I really felt for Jung Hwan at that moment was beside the point.
I loved Taek, like I loved all my friends. I was protective of him, and I worried about him. A friendship may be based on those two things, but a relationship based on those two things alone wouldn't survive.
Taek needed a woman who will challenge him and not want to coddle him, and I… wanted Jung Hwan.
I pouted and took a huge bite of my popsicle, wishing that the ground would swallow me whole. I wasn't sure which was worse: that I've resorted to lying just to get Jung Hwan home, or that I now trust these bozos to fix up my love life.
Although, why they would even think that telling Jung Hwan that Taek rejected me would do the trick is beyond me. Jung Hwan may have been confessing (in a joke way that hadn't been funny at all- I don't even know how I could have smiled after it), but didn't he already give me up?
"I don't think this is a good idea," I said, feeling suddenly nauseous. I glared at the iced sweet I held in my hands and gingerly put it to the side, my appetite gone. "I don't even know why I agreed to this."
"You know why you agreed," Dong Ryong chided, frowning at me, "You've been miserable for months and I can’t stand it anymore."
I looked away, mortified. For the last few months I have really tried to nurture my feelings on my own, wanting to be truly ready when he sees me again. I wanted to be in control, a more impressive woman. I wanted to be as magnanimous as he was. I wanted to be able to say "see, I could like you on my own. And I could even wait!"
I thought I was doing a great job staying positive. Apparently I was not a very good actress.
And now it has come to this. A half assed plan concocted by Dong Ryong (when he was drunk I was sure,) of how to get Jung Hwan to come back home. And I admit it, the idea that there was even a minute chance that he would take the bait made me too weak to say no.
But this... is just crazy. I'm still jetlagged from my last flight. I'm not exactly emotionally stable right now.
To them it was to see their old friend. For me it was a bit more self-serving; I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him.
I wanted him here. I wanted him with me.
My thoughts ran the gamut from very mature to elementary, all in the space of one moment. Jung Hwan has always reduced me to this.
"What makes you so sure that it's even going to work?" Sun Woo asked Dong Ryong, his eyes wandering now and again to the pager on his hip. Now that he was dating my sister openly, he was also a lot more open about his frustration at having to wait for her all the time. He was now lying down on the platform, right behind me, the picture of someone who didn't worry at all.
"Jung Hwan is much too smart for this," Taek remarked, looking unimpressed.
"You'll see," Dong Ryong said confidently. "Someone is buying me pizza if he shows up tomorrow, two if he shows up tonight."
"Is my love life only worth a pizza?" I asked, fighting the urge to smack him. "If he doesn't, you're buying me a drink."
"He'll show." Dong Ryong sounded certain. "Man... do you guys not know Jungpal at all?" Sun Woo, Taek and I looked at one another, wondering what he was about to say next. "Do you know why I came up with this strategy?" We all shook our heads no. "Because... There is only one thing that will trump our friend's misguided sense of right and wrong and his inexplicable need to be a martyr."
"What's that?" Sun Woo asked.
Dong Ryong suddenly sat up and gave us a beatific smile. "His instinct to protect."
By the time the night fell, it was just me and Taek outside on the same platform. He sat next to me, as quiet as he always was, his expression calm as he perused the night sky.
"Taek-ah," I said softly.
He turned his head around and looked at me. "Hmm?"
"Thank you for being my friend." I smiled. "Especially after that time."
"What time?" He asked, smiling back, before looking away. “You were one of the first people who made me feel like it's okay to be myself. I think with you, and Jung Hwan and Sun Woo and Dong Ryong... if it wasn't for all you, I still would be alone. I was your friend before I liked you... I was still going to be your friend even if you didn't like me back." He nudged my shoulder with his side. "Just don't be saying stuff to me like, 'you're going to find a good woman. It's not you, it's me.""
I wrinkled my nose. "Who has been telling you this stuff?"
He cocked his head towards his house. "Sun Woo." He chuckled. "He says those are the worst things a man can ever hear from the woman he likes, short of 'let's break up.' He wants to go on double dates with me."
I nodded, impressed. I suppose I always knew that Sun Woo was the best big brother, having seen the way he treated Jin Joo, but seeing that he was the same exact way with Taek only reinforced that thought. "He wants you to learn about dating from him and Unnie?"
Taek began to laugh. "Yeah... He says I'm terrible at this whole dating thing, and that I need to learn to walk before I could run, whatever that means. Though I'm not really sure what I would learn between him and Noona. She likes to order him around."
"He shouldn't take it too personally... Unnie likes to boss everyone around."
"Maybe I need someone like that," he joked. "Someone who will fight with me and stuff."
I raised my eyebrows. "You think so?"
"Yeah," he said with a bashful smile. To this day it still amazes me that Taek looked like an angel, and marveled that though I loved him so much, that it never went beyond friendship. "You always treated me like a baby."
What he said shut me up for a minute, realizing that he was right. "Taek-ah..."
Jung Hwan
I flagged the first cab I saw out of Gimpo International Airport and entered it in a hurry. I gave breathless instructions to the driver to get me directly to our neighborhood in Ssangmundong. When he pulled off the curb, I was beset with a sensation of having done this before.
Not exactly all of this, with the mad dash to the airport, to the hour plane ride to the now fifteen minute cab ride just to check up on Deok Sun. But something like this.
I don't even know what I was thinking when I hopped on that flight... Omma didn't even say that Deok Sun was even home. What, exactly, was my plan if she was not there? For all I knew she was flying out this weekend.
Christ... I ran my fingers through my hair. I once thought myself the most careful of people, but it seems there was still a bit of fight in me left.
I leaned back against the backseat of the cab and watched as the cab driver passed one green stop light after another. The sense of deja vu came back, as if I was back in 1994, right before I confessed. Except a year ago, all the lights had been red. I was caught at every stop, seemingly almost destined not to get to where I needed to be when I needed to be there. At the time I had blamed fate and timing, only to realize that it hadn't been that, but my own hesitations and fears, that had kept me back all this time.
It was so much easier to blame Taek. It was much simpler to say it was because of him.
Except it wasn't the whole truth. Not then, and not now.
My only sin was caring a little too much about my friends, but where was the fault in that? I hesitated all the time because I learned from growing up with my brother that life takes away just as it gives, and that we have to protect ourselves from the inevitability of failure, death and loss. How many times did I think that I would lose Hyung?
Maybe that had been my mistake... that inasmuch as I allowed myself to fully care, I never let those around me do the same for me. And I had paid the price for it. Deok Sun was forever out of my reach.
For the past year I had allowed myself to stew in regret and guilt, and I was tired of it.
If there was something that I realized while I sat on that plane, restless and nervous, wondering how Deok Sun would be when I see her, it was that though I had done a fine job of convincing myself that I was past all this, I, in fact, wasn't. And more importantly, even after a year, I still wasn't ready to let her go. Maybe I will never be able to let her go.
But I could be in her life. In whatever capacity she will allow me to be in it. In whatever role she wanted me to play.
I just needed to know that she was okay.
I just needed to see, with my own eyes, that she was doing fine.
The cab screeched to a stop and I handed the driver a wadful of cash, not even bothering to count it out. With a hasty 'keep the change,' I practically jumped out and made my way towards my parents' and Deok Sun's parents' houses, unsure of who I would find and what I would say. From this distance I could see that someone just closed the door to Sun Woo's Omma's house, but I could see nothing else or no one else.
It wasn't until I was almost in front of the gate that I saw someone standing by the wooden platform, her eyes barely hiding her shock and I slowed down my pace. Her hair, always short in my adolescence, was even longer now than it was even a year ago. Almond shaped dark brown irises blinked under a line of bangs, a delicate hand coming up to touch her neck.
Deok Sun
"Taek-ah..." I was just about to apologize when he interrupted me.
"You shouldn't worry so much about what Jung Hwan will say when he gets here," he reassured me. "I am sure it will be fine. You've liked him for a long time, right?"
I looked down at my feet, covered in slippers, and took hold of the ring under my sweater. I nodded slowly.
"Thank you for not making this between me and him," he said softly. "Though I think I might have had a role in that, though he never called me out on it." He paused and looked at anywhere but me. "He liked you too, you know."
"When?"
"Right around the time you liked him," he answered. "I knew it then but chose to ignore it. I thought that as long as he didn't say the words out loud, then it wasn't real. As long as he didn't ask me to give you up, then I wasn't hurting him." He breathed a heavy sigh. "I made some mistakes, too. I guess this was my way of making it up to him."
I shook my head in disbelief. "By pissing him off?"
"By getting him home.'
The sound of a fast approaching car had us both turning around, and before I knew it, the sound of a car door slamming followed. Taek stood up, his face brightening, before he wrapped an arm around me and engulfed me in an embrace before I could ask what was going on.
"Deok Sun-ah," he said, his voice rich with laughter and relief. "We owe Dong Ryong two pizzas."
Before I knew it, Taek had disappeared around the gate that would lead to his and Sun Woo's house, and I was left standing on my own. I turned around, not quite getting what he had been talking about, until I lifted my gaze and a pair of brown eyes caught mine. I felt the tears form behind my lids and I closed them, wondering if this was just a dream. If I had dreamt him back into my life. If he really wasn't standing in front of me. I grabbed hold of the heavy ring that anchored my necklace, the weight bringing me back to the present and to what was real.
Afraid to find out that I was once again only daydreaming, I opened my eyes slowly, only to see Jung Hwan walking towards me, his hair standing on all ends, as if all he's been running his fingers through it many times. And then something that made me even more confused... this supposedly real version of Jung Hwan was wearing a pink shirt, one that looked remarkably like the shirt I had given him almost six years ago. Except it was wrinkled. As if he wore it all the time. As if it was the first thing he had grabbed.
But how is he here? I thought. He was in Sacheon.
Unless Dong Ryong was right. If I hadn't been in such shock I might have laughed. Maybe Dong Ryong really was a genius.
Almost afraid to break the moment, I stayed silent, just letting myself watch Jung Hwan as he came slowly towards me, his normally even expression fraught with concern. His eyebrows narrowed, his pretty eyes zeroed in on my face once he was almost close enough for me to touch. I had to put my hands in my pockets just to keep them from reaching for him, reducing me back to my teenage years when I thought up of every excuse to touch him, and before he could even utter one word. I studied his face once he was standing over me, his eyes searching mine. A perfectly sized nose sat in between high cheekbones, his strong jaw tense. His upper teeth latched onto a generous lower lip, as if he was unsure of what to say.
"Deok Sun-ah." My name fell out of his lips slowly, almost reverently. Was this always how he said my name? How could I not have known?
"Mmm?" I answered, trying to muster up a smile.
"Are you okay?" he asked hesitantly, his eyes never leaving mine. "I'm sorry I haven't been around much. I didn't even come for your birthday this
year, but..." He cleared his throat. "You are, right?"
"I'm what?" I could barely ask. All I wanted to do was fling myself into his arms and ask him to speak later.
"Okay?" It seemed as if the answer really mattered and I nodded.
"Yeah, Jung Hwan-ah," I said. "I'm good."
He nodded too, almost sheepishly, as if just now realizing that after all the time he had stayed away, he came back for some reason that apparently didn't pass muster to himself, and looking less put together than the Jung Hwan I always knew.
"Okay," he said quietly and walked towards the gate that housed both of our parents' homes. "Are you coming in?"
It was so reminiscent of how Jung Hwan used to always be... always retreating, always walking away. Almost instantly, the sight of his back made me angrier than I have been all year. It was almost as if all my tears and all the waiting and all the frustration melded together and all I could think about was hell, no. He is not going to do this again.
"Wait," I called out. "Was that it?"
I crossed my arms over my chest defensively and stood in place until he turned around. As if just now realizing that I must still be talking to him, he turned back around and looked at me, a question in his eyes.
"Was that what?" he asked. He was back to sounding like the Jung Hwan that I always knew and I gasped, incredulous.
"You..." I started, trying to lower my voice, aware that all of our families and friends lived on this one block. "You stay away for a whole year, and that's all you have to say? One year without me, and that's really all you've got. Wow, Jung Hwan-ah. I didn't expect much and maybe I still expected too much."
I didn't really mean what I was saying. I knew this even as the words flew out of my lips, just like they always used to do whenever I argued with my older sister. It's almost as if once a switch has been turned on, it would take almost an act of God to shut me up before I start saying things I knew I would regret.
Goodbye, Hello Page 7