Page 117 of The Way Back Home

I held on to every single one.

Seyeon

34 Years Old

I’m not sure what wakes me. My eyes open to a dark room and for a second I don’t know where I am, blinking stupidly at the ceiling, the shadows of the store’s back room settling around me. Then awareness seeps in and I hear sounds.

Awful, gutted sounds that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Movement beside me, violent and jerky, the blankets rustling and pulling taut. I push myself up on one elbow and look down.

Ryowoon is tangled in the sheets, his body twisting, legs kicking like he’s trying to get away from something. His lips move around words I can’t make out, his face contorted, brow scrunched, eyes screwed shut, teeth bared. He looks like he’s in agony, like someone’s holding his bones to a fire. The sounds coming out of him are terrible, broken and small and desperate, and they make my stomach flip and my pulse slam into my throat because I’ve never heard anything like them from him. Not once. Not even after the worst of what his father did.

I don’t think about it before I move for him.

I grab his shoulders and shake him, hard. “Ryowoon.” His skin is damp beneath my palms, sweat soaked, his body burning. He thrashes against my grip, head whipping to the side, moaning like it’s being ripped from somewhere deep inside his soul. My own chest squeezes painfully.

“Yah, Cha Ryowoon, wake up, damn it!”

He comes awake with a gasp that sounds like he’s breaching water, eyes flying open, wild with panic, and in the same instant his body moves with pure survival instinct, his fist swinging wide and fast. I don’t have time to pull back. His knuckles crack against my jaw and the room tilts. I go sideways off the mat, catching myself on one hand, my other clamping over my face. Pain blooms across my jawline and I taste copper, my teeth having caught the inside of my cheek.

“Fuck,” I hiss, pressing my fingers against the tender spot, feeling the sting spread.

A sharp inhale. Then his voice, tight and cracked: “Seyeon. Shit. Seyeon—”

His hands are on me before I can straighten up, gripping my arm, pulling me toward him. I blink through the dull throb in my jaw as Ryowoon’s hands find my face, cupping it, turning it toward the faint light from the window. His palms are trembling so badly I can feel my own head vibrate between them. His eyes are still too wide, still wild, but the panic in them has shifted, not for whatever haunted his dreams, it’s me.

He sees the blood on my lip and his face crumples.

“No,” he moans. “Seyeon, fuck. Seyeon, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t—”

His fingers shake against my skin, thumbs hovering near my mouth like he’s afraid to touch the damage. His eyes are growing bright, shining in the dim light, and his breathing is all wrong, hitching in his throat on every inhale.

I stare at him. I’m still a little dazed, my jaw pounding, the taste of blood on my tongue. Ryowoon’s punches certainly haven’t gotten lighter with time.

But Ryowoon isn’t here with me. He’s somewhere else, somewhere terrible, staring at my face like he’s watching himself become something monstrous from outside his body. His breath wheezes and his shoulders curve inward and he keeps saying, over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” his voice getting thinner each time, more fragile, breaking like a bone that can’t take any more weight.

Tears spill down his cheeks. A sudden flood that glitters in the faint moonlight from the window, tracking fast down the sharp lines of his face. And that scares me, because in all the years I’ve known Cha Ryowoon I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen him cry.

I snap out of it.

I grab his hands where they’re still shaking on my face and pull them down, grip his chin instead, tilt his head so he has to look at me.

“Hey. Look at me. It’s okay. Ryowoon, I’m okay.”

He makes a strangled sound, his face twisting, and shakes his head. The tears keep coming, his chest heaving. I feel a spike of genuine fear that he’s going to start hyperventilating, that this is going to spiral somewhere I can’t reach him. So I stop trying to reason with him and just grab him.

I yank him forward, one arm around his shoulders, the other hand cupping the back of his skull, and pull him into me. His face hits my shoulder and he lets out a devastated sound, a sob that shakes his frame, and then another, and another, his body wracked with them, shuddering against mine. His arms loop around my back and he clings, fingers twisting against my skin, gripping so hard it almost hurts. I hold tighter, one hand pressing his head against my neck, the other rubbing slow circles between his shoulder blades.

“It’s alright,” I murmur against the top of his head. “It’s okay, I’m right here.”

He sobs harder. Each one shakes through his body and into mine. I can feel the vibration of it in my own ribs, can feel how badly he’s trembling. My eyes burn, my throat tightening as I hold him and let him fall apart because there’s nothing else to do. Nothing else that matters. I press my face into his hair and keep my arms locked around him, whispering things I’m not sure he can even hear, just noise, just my voice to anchor him. Letting him get it out while it feels like someone’s wrapped a fist around my heart and squeezes it.

It takes a long time for the sobs to thin out gradually, the trembling slowing in stages, his grip on my back loosening by degrees. His breathing evens, rough and unsteady but no longer the gasping heaves of before. I keep rubbing his back, keep my mouth close to his temple, saying nothing now, just breathing with him.

When he finally lifts his head his eyes are swollen and red, his face drawn and pale, but there’s determined set to his jaw. He pulls away from me and gets up without a word, disappears into the hallway. I hear him rummaging. He comes back with the first aid kit and drops down in front of me, opens it.

“Sit still,” he says, his voice gravelly.

He tilts my head with two fingers under my chin and dabs at my split lip with antiseptic. I hiss and jerk back.