Page 94 of The Way Back Home

Ryowoon’s nostrils flare. He rubs a hand over his face, drags it down his jaw and drops it. The rain hammers the roof above us, water still trickling from the gap in the ceiling, dripping into the bucket with steady plinks. For a long moment there’s nothing between us but that sound.

“Alright,” he says. Flat. Walled off. “Fine. I get it. Whatever. We’ll get this done and you can go back to your life in Seoul and you can forget all about me soon enough, alright?”

I stare at him. My laugh sounds worse than the last one, incredulous. “You make it sound so easy.” My bleeding hand throbs. “But I guess it was for you, wasn’t it? To turn your back on everyone and everything and throw us away and run off where no one can find you.” I can hear myself getting louder. Can feel the thing I’ve been keeping locked inside for three days, for weeks, for the entire drive from his apartment to Haemok, pushing its way out. “It’s all okay as long as you don’t have to see how your actions affect anyone else, isn’t it?”

His chin lifts. “You think it was fucking easy for me? To start over from nothing? To have not a damn penny to my name and try to build a life out of the piece of shit hand I was dealt?” His voice climbs to match mine, his shoulders squaring, and there it is, the fire I remember, the same combustible temper that’s been coiled up in him since we were children. “Not all of us have college funds and a safety net to fall back on if we failed, Seyeon.”

“You chose to do it that way.”

“I had to get out, or I was going to be trapped here forever. No different from you.”

“I didn’t fucking abandon you,” I seethe, flashing back to the inside of that bus back to Seoul when I pressed my face into my hands and sobbed into my palms for four hours. “You didn’t give us the chance to help you. Not me, not Mrs. Nam, not anyone. You just vanished.”

“I didn’t want anyone’s fucking charity.”

“Yeah, that’s why.” I scoff bitterly. “That’s why you covered your tracks and disappeared like a ghost. Because you didn’t want handouts. And not because you’re a fucking coward who ran off to protect his own feelings.”

Ryowoon’s eyes go black with anger, his mouth a thin line. He shakes his head once in a short violent jerk. “You can hate me for it all you want, but you turned out better for it, didn’t you?” He gestures at me, at all of me, a sweep of his hand that takes in everything I am. “You graduated college. Got the job you always wanted. Got your nice apartment and your dog and your neat, polished big city life. You got exactly what you wanted.”

My chest cracks open.

“All I wanted was you!” I shout, throwing my hands out wide.

The store goes quiet. Just the rain. Just the water dripping into the bucket. Just Yuro’s nails clicking softly on the wet floor as he pads nervously between us, sensing the voltage.

Ryowoon stares at me. His lips part but nothing comes out. The anger on his face splinters, beneath it I see something I wish I couldn’t. A flash of it before he can quickly shutter it. The look of someone who already knew.

I close my eyes. Tip my head back until I feel the rain mist against my face from the gap above. I blink, my eyes stinging, and exhale. Long. Shaking. When I look at him again I’m calmer. The anger drains out of bitter sadness takes its place.

“But that’s stupider of me, I guess,” I say quietly. “You made how you feel perfectly clear, didn’t you?” I swallow. “I wasn’t going to be enough for you.”

Ryowoon’s jaw clenches so tight I can see the muscle jump beneath the scar on his chin. He shakes his head. When he speaks his voice is rough.

“My problems were never about you, Seyeon.”

I look at him for a long time.

“Yeah,” I say. “Whatever.”

I turn and walk past him. My shoulder brushes his as I go and neither of us flinches, but neither of us stops either. I push through the door into the back hallway, blood still dripping from my closed fist, and start opening cabinets one-handed, looking for the first aid kit I know Mrs. Nam used to keep somewhere in this house.

I find the kit in the cabinet above the sink. The white plastic box with the faded red cross on the lid, the hinges stiff when I flip it open. Some of the supplies inside are ancient, the gauze yellowed, a tube of antiseptic cream that’s probably expired twice over. But there are bandages. Clean ones, still in their wrappers.

I carry it to the back step where the kitchen opens onto the courtyard. The rain is coming down in sheets out there, bouncing off the stone, flooding the little drain channel Mrs. Nam dug along the base of the wall years ago. The sound of it fills the kitchen, fills the hallway, fills every corner of this place. I sit down on the step and set the kit beside me, uncurling my fist to look at my palm. The cut’s still bleeding sluggishly. I reach for the bandage roll with my good hand and start trying to tear the wrapper with my teeth.

Ryowoon sits down beside me.

I don’t look at him. Don’t react when his knee bumps mine, when his weight settles on the step so close that I can feel the warmth coming off his arm. He reaches over and takes the bandages out of my hand. And not gently, he yanks them away, then grabs my wrist and pulls my bleeding palm toward him with the stubborn set to his jaw that says don’t bother arguing. I let my hand go limp in his grip.

He tears open an antiseptic wipe with his teeth, the foil crinkling. His fingers are rough and calloused and careful as he turns my palm up and starts dabbing at the cut, cleaning the blood away from the edges. I watch his hands. The scarred knuckles, the slightly crooked set of the fingers on his left hand. The ink on the inside of the opposite one, black dots connected by thin lines, visible every time he tilts his hand.

“Do you feel better?” he asks quietly without looking up.

My eyes stay on the constellation on his wrist.

“No.”

He sighs, slowly exhaling through his nose. He turns my hand, pressing the wipe against the deepest part of the cut where blood keeps welling.