Page 145 of Lethal in Pink

Inside, the light is the color of bruised amber, swimming in a haze of smoke and sizzling grease. Stone bowls crackle on adjacent tables, vomiting white plumes of steam toward the low ceiling. Water glasses sweat rings onto the scarred dark wood, and the menu—scrawled in Korean and English on laminated cardstock—sits between us with the filthy, glorious patina of something handled by ten thousand desperate hands.

“You’re staring at the bulgogi like it personally offended your bloodline,” Jae murmurs, not looking up from his menu. He doesn’t need it. He has it memorized from a lifetime of family dinners, holding it now only to give me a shield while I pretend I know what I’m looking at.

“I’m contemplating its structural integrity,” I snap back, tapping the laminated edge with a chopstick. “Is this meat going to respect the boundaries of my plate, or are we dealing with a cross-border disaster?”

“The bulgogi recognizes no borders.” His eyes flick up, trapping mine in the amber dark. The half-smile at the corner of his mouth is a loaded weapon—the exact look that makes me want to either straddle him across this sticky table or shove a blade through his ribs just to see if he bleeds real blood. “It’s a citizen of the world. Unlike you, apparently, who has already scavenged two pieces of my galbi before your own silverware has even touched the tray.”

I hadn't thought he was watching. He’d been staring down with the performative discipline of a monk. Yet the galbi has migrated—one piece, then a second, and now a third that he has deliberately halved and nudged across the scarred wood toward my side.

The food arrives like a toxic offering. Galbi charred black at the edges, cracking under my teeth to yield fat so hot and tender it melts down my chin. Mandu dumplings bursting with scalding pork broth and raw garlic. A clay pot of doenjang jjigae that hits the table still violently boiling, churning with fermented soybean paste and tofu cubes like a tiny, toxic sea.

Jae watches me take my first spoonful. He has the psychotic intensity of a man waiting to see if his poison works.

“It’s good,” I say.

His face drops. The disappointment is so raw, so entirely naked, that I have to drop my spoon and slam a hand over my mouth to swallow the jagged laugh clawing its way up my throat.

“It’s good,” he repeats, flat and lethal. “The national dish of my father’s province, simmered by a woman who has been perfecting this broth since before either of us was drawing breath, and your elite tactical assessment is it’s good.”

“It’s fucking good.”

“Revolutionary praise, Amiyah. Let’s carve it into stone.”

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, Jae, Jesus Christ, will you—shut up—”

“That’s not what you said last night when you were crying out my name against the headboard.”

The air vanishes from the booth. The ambient roar of the restaurant—the clatter of metal, the shouting from the kitchen—snaps and goes dead. For half a second, the universe contracts until it’s just the two of us, suffocating in our own private war. Then I snatch a strip of kimchi and whip it across the table. He catches it in his mouth with the arrogant, terrifying precision of a man who knew I’d throw it before I even lifted my arm.

We argue about the Han River. Not the actual body of water four thousand miles away, but whether a river can legally, spiritually, or sadistically be classified as a "vibe."

“It’s seventeen kilometers long and spanned by seventeen bridges,” Jae says, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register he uses when he knows he’s backed me into a corner. “It contains actual fish. With fins. That is the biological definition of a river, sweetheart.”

“Fish can be vibes, Jae.”

“Fish are not vibes.”

“Everything is a vibe if you’re brave enough to drown in it.”

He stares at me. His mouth parts, closes, parts again. Whatever sterile, logical counter-argument was forming in his brain shatters behind his teeth, and he barks out a laugh—real, dark, shaking his broad shoulders. Across the steam of the jjigae, his eyes crinkle at the corners, dark and manic and entirely unguarded.

I file it away. The sick, compulsive architecture of a woman collecting evidence for a trial that will never happen. Exhibit A: the friction of his thumb grinding against mine as he reaches for the water pitcher. Exhibit B: the vertical crease between his brows when he’s trying not to worship the ground I walk on. Exhibit C: the low, broken sound he makes when I push him too far.

I’m wearing a pink satin dress, my hair down in the soft waves I spent twenty minutes on in front of my bathroom mirror, telling myself it was for the graduation and not for him, which was a lie so transparent I didn’t even bother committing to it. It catches the amber light and turns it something warmer, and when I catch my reflection in the dark window beside our table, what I see is exactly what I wanted to see: a girl on a date. Nothing more complicated than that. No law degree, no double life, no contract with a twenty-four-hour window ticking down behind my ribs. Just a woman in a pink dress eating someone else’s galbi and winning arguments about rivers that are actually vibes.

We take our time. Neither of us reaches for the check. The server comes twice, then a third time, and each time Jae waves her away with the particular easy confidence of a man who has decided that this meal will end when he says it ends and not a moment before. We order dessert we don’t need. We split it down the middle with a precision that would make a surveyor proud. We talk over each other twice—once about whether bingsu counts as ice cream (it doesn’t, and I will die on this hill) and once about whether the actor in the drama he’s been watching is the same person as the actor in the drama I’ve been watching (he isn’t, and the particular offended certainty with which Jae delivers this correction makes me want to put my hand over his mouth and keep it there forever).

Nobody apologizes. The overlapping sentences just find their own rhythm, folding into each other the way our bodies do in his bed at two in the morning when the city is quiet and the only sound is the particular syncopation of two people who have stopped performing and are just talking.

Outside, the rain has started. Not the dramatic kind—the fine, misting kind that turns asphalt dark and hazy and makes the neon signs of the surrounding Koreatown storefronts bleed into soft smears of red and yellow against the night. We stand between our cars—my dark-tinted sedan, his Audi, neither of us moving toward the driver’s side door.

The rain settles on my shoulders in tiny beads that catch the neon and hold it, turning the satin into something that glows. Jae’s hair is starting to darken at the temples, water tracing the line of his jaw in thin, slow tracks. He looks at me the way he does when he thinks I’m not paying attention—slow, deliberate, the particular focused warmth of a man who is cataloging details he has no business remembering—and then he says it out loud.

“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” His voice is quiet. Certain. The particular unhurried register he uses when the words matter more than the delivery. “I am the luckiest person in Los Angeles. Probably the entire universe. And I mean that in the specific, boring way that means I have done the math and the math is very clear.”

I tell him to stop. My voice comes out thinner than I want it to, the particular frayed quality of someone who is holding something too heavy and has just been handed something heavier. “You have it backwards. You have this completely, catastrophically backwards. I’m the lucky one. Do not—do not stand here in the rain and try to rewrite the equation, Jae, I swear to god—”

“It’s not rewriting if it was never written down in the first—”