Work Text:
The man was still talking. Jae dragged some semblance of attention back into his brain and focused on the one crooked tooth at the front of the bottom row in the man’s mouth. What were they called? Incisors? Don’t be an idiot, Brian’s voice came into his head, unexpectedly. They’re canines. The man kept talking. Jae thought he heard a song starting to form out of the warped mumbling.
“You still here?” a voice interrupted, and the formless tune shot away into the dark. He glanced at the man to see if he was offended, but Mark was talking to him and not the mumbling man. “I thought you’d already loaded up the van.”
“Just attending to this gentleman before I go,” Jae said as cheerfully as he could, indicating the customer.
Mark cast a quick, disdainful look at the man, who didn’t seem to realise he was there. “He’s drunk off his face. Anyway, wasn’t he here the other night trying to chat up Hyerim? Get going, I’ll handle him.”
“Yes, sir.” Jae pushed himself away from the desk. The unfocused but leering look in the man’s eyes had creeped him out beyond measure, but entertaining drunk middle aged men was just another occupational hazard of being the poor soul behind the desk at a 24-hour delivery service. Didn’t even matter if the preferred body parts weren’t present, anyone would do. Jae had worked here long enough to know that night brought out the worst hidden qualities in people, but in big cities loneliness was the constant epidemic. The man didn’t even blink as he passed him.
“You got the list?” Mark called after him. His skin looked greenish under the sterile, fluorescent light. Jae had never seen him under the sun, didn’t know what he looked like with a healthy glow and light in his eyes.
“Got it,” he waved the work-assigned tablet at him, and swung through the frosted glass door into the night.
There were some things Park Jaehyung made a point to never fuck around with. One was the flow of the universe. As a teenager he’d asked out the hottest, most mysterious girl in school, and it had kickstarted a long, agonising series of unfortunate events that he’d decided was the direct consequence of trying to work against what had already been predestined for you. There were other things as well, things that Hyerim would roll her eyes at and refuse to entertain on slow nights, things like never sleeping in front of mirrors or trimming your nails after 10pm or not writing people’s names in red ink (something she had tried to do before but he squawked at her before she could), but those were just small, secondary nothings compared to messing with fate.
He only had two deliveries left.
The name on the package said Sohee Ahn.
It just didn’t make sense.
How many Sohee Ahns existed in the entirety of the United States of America? Jae didn’t know. Maybe more than a couple dozen, he guessed, and he clung to the hope that those couple of dozen Sohee Ahns all lived in the same 6 mile radius in the state of California as he slowly closed the van doors. Was Sohee Ahn even a common name back in South Korea? Somehow the thought that he didn’t actually know the answer to that disturbed him more than the name itself. The van clock blinked a slow 01:57 back at him. It had no answers for him either.
The door at the exact address had red paper strips glued to the inside of the glass, spidery Chinese characters running down the length of them. Jae double checked the GPS, looked at the door and down the street, and prayed once more that this Sohee Ahn was some random old Korean auntie and not the girl he had once thought of as his muse almost a lifetime ago.
The low murmur of voices and the unmistakable sound of a dozen mahjong tiles clinking against each other was muffled behind the second door at the top of the dingy stairs. Jae knocked once, then twice, heard the rough yelled warning in a Chinese dialect he didn’t know, and the door was wrenched open into a millisecond of silence. The patrons of the mahjong parlour gave him a collective disinterested onceover before resuming play.
“Uhh, delivery for Sohee Ahn?” Jae said to the woman behind the counter, her face so lined it reminded him of contours on a map, destination: unknown. Behind her was a red altar with battery operated red candles, and in its glow the glares of the Chinese gods felt even more hostile, unfamiliar cosmic entities determined to push Jae back into the night that felt more familiar. He smiled slightly, to show he meant no harm. The woman pursed her lips.
“Sohee!” she yelled, leading him to a corridor he hadn’t noticed before, a dark oblong void in the dim light. Three open doorways led off from each side of the walls, and Jae stopped in the one to his right just in time to see a woman in a white dress pushing herself away from the table in that blue-tinted room while saying, “… and don’t you dare steal any of my tiles while I get this.”
She turned towards the door, and Jae knew then that the universe had just always had it in for him from day one.
It only took a second for her to recognise him, which he felt was the second best option after her not recognising him at all. “Jae?”
He held the package out and managed a weak smile. “Hey. Got a delivery for you.” It sounded lame, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
He tried not to look too hard at her as she took the package from him and signed the proffered tablet. It was hard to make out her features in the blue-tinted light anyway, and her long dark hair falling across her face didn’t make it any easier. He thought she looked the same, but he thought the same thing about his own face when he looked in the mirror every afternoon. Only closer inspection gave away the lines forming in the corners of his mouth and the droops of his eyes, the same way his father’s did. In other words, a face both recognisable and unrecognisable, a familiar imposter.
“Thanks,” she said as he pocketed the tablet. “It’s been a while, Jae.”
He gave her a well-practised customer service smile. “It really has. Well, have a good night.” He was back in the main room before she had a chance to say anything else, and he thought he heard her saying something in Cantonese to the lined-face woman. Sohee Ahn, as mysterious and impassable as ever.
Just one delivery left. Just one.
At the previous drop-off - a raucous Korean bar - someone had hurled the contents of a makgeolli glass through the air just as he was passing through. He’d twirled the package out of the way (didn’t pay to let Mark nag him about damaged packages and customer complaints), but it had still splashed over his bare arm. He’d been waiting to get back to the office to wash it off but in the midsummer night, the stickiness on his skin was unbearable.
He only had time to think about picking up his water bottle when Sohee Ahn herself hurried out the red paper-stripped glass door and stood on the sidewalk for a second, looking around. He was tempted to just drive away. Probably should’ve driven away, but she’d already spotted him. He watched her approaching with what felt like increasing panic.
At three minutes past 2am on a Thursday, Sohee Ahn knocked on the window of the delivery van of his dead-end job.
He had no thoughts left. He wound down the window.
Sohee’s expression was just as determined as the day, more than 10 years ago, she’d confronted him in the school parking lot about the mixtape he snuck into her locker. Everything was different, but also the same. “Hi,” she said through the window, and there was that small, negligible pause again, before: “Jae.”
But he wasn’t 17 anymore. He wasn’t even 27. So instead of completely losing his nerve, he grinned again as he leaned towards the passenger side. “Hey, Sohee. Everything okay? Something wrong with the delivery?”
“No, that’s all good,” she said. She still pronounced her Ls with that slightly rounded accent he usually only heard from his parents and their friends, small invisible remnants of South Korea that clung to them long after they had left but could not root itself in his own generation. “Could you let me in?”
Her dress glowed in the gloom, making the seedy street around her feel a little more otherworldly. He used to have such difficulty trying to put into words what was so different about Sohee Ahn, so he just sang about her instead. It had been a long time since he’d written about her, been a long time since he had been in love with her - or thought he was, love was such a weird fickle thing when you were a teenager - and he still couldn’t put his finger on it.
Maybe that was why he unlocked the door.
She bounced into the passenger seat in a way that wasn’t familiar to him and closed it behind her. “You’re just the person I was looking for,” she said, and smiled. That smile and her white dress made the grubby van look just a little cleaner. He had time to feel embarrassed about the food packaging strewn around (Hyerim's probably) and the cheap Chinese amulets hanging from the rearview mirror (Mark's), when she said, “I need your help, Jae.”
His own smile felt forced. “Everything okay, Sohee?”
“Yes, yes,” she waved her hand dismissively. “It’s nothing serious. You’re on deliveries now, aren’t you? I…” The corner of her mouth twitched slightly then, and it somehow sent half of him reeling back into his high school self, unable to decide if the Sohee sitting beside him was the familiar memory or the unfamiliar present, another imposter in his life. She seemed to be completely different, yet exactly the same. He wondered if he came off that way too. He didn't think so. A part of him had clung so tightly to the disaster of his high school self that sometimes it was hard to tell if he had ever grown at all. “I kind of need to make a few stops of my own. Do you mind giving me a ride?”
“Oh.” He didn’t know what to say. “Uhh. Where do you need to go?”
“Just over to M. It’s not too far, right? It’s sort of urgent that I get there tonight. I know it’s sort of unexpected but I guess neither of us expected to run into each other either.”
He could have pointed out that this wasn’t a personal van, that he needed to get back to the office after his last delivery, that M. was too far out of his route, but Sohee smiled then, and said, “You know, it’s really nice seeing you again, Jae.” It was a smile he had never seen before, a smile he didn't know. A smile that he suddenly, badly wanted to get to know.
So what he said was, “Sure.”
It was like a spell. Or like being drunk. Or whatever situation where he had zero control over his mind or body. The dashboard clock glowed 02:08. His arm was still sticky. Sohee Ahn sat beside him in the passenger seat. He pulled the van out into the quiet, rubbish-strewn street.
She was quiet on the ride to M., winding down the window and resting her arms on it to watch the passing streetlights. When they stopped at an intersection, the glow of the traffic light painted the crown of her head and the edges of her bare arms red. Jae couldn’t help stealing glances at her, wondering what to say. Years ago the image might have sparked something in his brain, might have formed into a decent-sounding song, but he had gotten so used to silence no matter how hard he listened it was all he ever heard.
The van radio blasted out a poppy, shallow sort of tune from the Top 40 station he usually kept it tuned to.
“Are you still singing, Jae?” she suddenly asked out the window.
He was glad she wasn’t looking at him. He thought of his guitars, hibernating in their cases at the back of his cupboard, gathering dust. “Not really.”
"Oh. But you used to love it."
He managed a self-deprecating laugh. “I mean, it was always just a silly dream, wasn’t it? I guess I just found out in the end that I wasn’t made for music. I was never going to be like Ed Sheeran or, or you know…”
She turned then. “You don’t need to name someone popular just because I’m a Top 40 girl. I do listen to other less-known artists now, you know.” Her own laugh was amused. He was glad for it, because he didn't like thinking of his guitars, or the demos tucked away in the unopened file on his laptop, or the abandoned Soundcloud with his stupid sophomore artist name on it - the stupid artist name he'd kept because she had never commented on it so he thought it was actually alright after all. It was weird how much she had influenced his life without even knowing it, this familiar stranger sitting beside him in the van. It was even weirder how he had let her.
"Do you?" he asked now. "Listen to indie artists now?"
"You don't believe me?"
"Name one."
"Mitski?"
Jae grinned, probably for the first time that night. “That's a cheap shot, but I'll take it.”
She grinned back. Even at her easiest Sohee could never lose the sharp, guarded look that had followed her high school career. "Thank you for the acknowledgment, music snob." The light turned green, and he eased the stick into gear. “It’s a shame you’re not singing anymore, though,” he heard Sohee say as he accelerated. “I thought you were great.” He pretended the radio drowned her out as he turned the corner. It was easier when all he had to do was drive.
They stopped outside a fairly innocuous looking apartment in the heart of downtown LA, and Sohee disappeared into the lobby. Jae checked the clock and the GPS and decided he could probably get the last delivery done before 4am, if he didn't have to drop her off too far. His shift ended at 6. The pink and orange Dunkin’ Donuts sign down the street was calling out to him, but he knew that if he had a coffee now he would never be able to sleep. Best make the last delivery and then treat himself to Starbucks in the morning instead. The thought, simple as it was, cheered him.
Sohee returned with a small rectangular package. He eyed it, tempted to ask but deciding against it. “Where to next?” he asked instead.
She hesitated, and frowned. "I don't want to inconvenience you, really. You could just drop me off back in Chinatown. It's already late."
“Nah, it's fine,” he insisted, though he only half-believed it. Sure, this whole situation was absurd to him, but something about Sohee made him feel reckless in a way he hadn't for a long time, and time worked on the inverse when you got to work with the moon high in the sky and got home as the sun rose. “Anyway, think of this as me being professional. If it’s not a package you’re picking up for yourself, it means you’re going to have to deliver it. And who better to deliver a package than the guy who makes his living out of delivering packages? I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t help you. It's part of my oath.”
Her eyes narrowed in classic Sohee fashion. “That can't actually be a thing."
"You'd be surprised."
“Well, if you're okay with it..." she sighed, but he thought he saw relief relax the arch of her eyebrows. "Okay, Mr Deliveryman, I put my packages in your hands.”
“Onwards, then,” he grinned.
They made three more stops in the most random pattern across the city Jae could ever imagine. Jae didn’t ask what was in the packages now littered at Sohee’s feet, and Sohee didn’t explain.
“You know,” he blurted out a red light. “If you’re up to some illegal stuff right now, it probably is better not to tell me. I’m just saying this in case you decide to. Your business is your business.”
Sohee gave him a funny look. “Why would you think I’m doing something illegal?”
“I don’t know.” Jae gripped the steering wheel. “I deliver a package to you in some seedy mahjong parlour where the boss lady knows your name. And you’re suddenly speaking to her in Cantonese. You’re picking up random packages across the city with no rhyme or reason. You could be running with the mafia and I wouldn’t even know. Not that I want to know. I’m just telling you to keep me in the dark.”
“Do you usually like to stay in the dark?”
"Part of a deliveryman's oath to not know what he's delivering either."
"Jae."
She reminded him of Brian, nagging to hear his demos, bugging him about his crush on Sohee. It was the same tone Brian used when Jae didn't want to hand over his algebra homework for him to copy, and it got under his skin. He shrugged, suddenly surly. “Why not? It’s better not to know. Knowing brings problems. So does caring.”
“I don’t think you really believe that,” she said.
“What makes you think that?”
She reached over and twiddled the radio dial. It switched to AUX mode, and she picked up his phone that had been resting in the cup holder. “If you did, you wouldn’t have agreed to drive me at all. You wouldn’t have offered to keep driving me. And you wouldn’t keep this AUX cable plugged into your phone, if you didn’t care about music anymore.” The light had turned green, but the street was empty of cars, and he didn’t move.
She held the phone out to him. He didn't take it. “Sometimes it’s better to not know about some things,” she said, looking back out the windscreen. “But I don't like it when people run away from themselves. You're better than that, Jae.”
He sat there for a second. “You don't even know me anymore, Sohee.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She leaned over to him, her dark eyes sharp and searching in the gloom of the van cab, dissecting him piece by piece. He could feel her stare dissolving into his veins, his blood fizzing in his head. She just always had that effect on him. “All that matters is that you know yourself.”
He didn't know what to say.
“Also, we’ve got to swing by Huntington Beach.”
The van screeched to a halt. “What?!” Jae screeched in kind.
Sohee looked sheepish. “Deliveryman's oath?”
Jae sighed despite the blood still popping in his head, and shifted the van back into gear. His last delivery would have to wait. “Deliveryman's oath.”
It was an easy drive down to Huntington Beach, and Jae would have enjoyed it if he wasn't still stinging from Sohee's earlier attack. But was it really an attack? reasoned a little voice inside him, beneath the dull, thumping annoyance. Maybe it really only got to him this much because he knew it had been truth. He had always been so easily dissected under her eyes, skin peeled open and his insides laid bare just for her to examine. His own personal researcher. Even when he fascinated her, he'd never felt like he had been enough. That had been the worst part.
There was no one at the very clearly boarded up store Sohee directed him to, but Sohee got out to peer through the shuttered windows anyway. "That's annoying, they said they'd be here," she said when she came back to the van, her eyes narrowed again. The glow of her phone screen lit up her face, painted shadows in the dips under her eyes, and he realised that her cheeks weren't as round as they used to be. It kept taking him by surprise, these little indicators of the passage of time, both in her and in his own face. Sometimes he suspected he had spent so much time running that he had never realised he was getting nowhere at all. Her fingers tapped on the screen. Her nails were a shiny, chrome pink.
Her phone pinged, and she climbed back into the van. "Whoops, almost forgot," she said, hurriedly applying some dark red lipstick in the rearview mirror before holding up the phone for a selfie.
“Odd choice of backdrop,” Jae remarked, glancing at her.
“It’s for my onlyfans,” Sohee said casually, pushing one strap of her dress off her shoulder. “They don’t usually care what the background looks like.” Jae almost choked. She parted her lips and looked seductively into the camera, snapping different angles and even biting the tip of her fingernail. Jae couldn't help laughing nervously as he tried not to look.
“You know,” he said, staring out the windshield, “When I said you were a mystery, I didn't think you'd be this much of a mystery. What other secrets are you hiding, Sohee Ahn?”
Sohee glanced at him, but her tone was fairly nonchalant. “It's really not that big a deal. The money’s pretty good,” she explained. “You’d be surprised how much people would pay to see a clavicle, or a hip bone or something like that. Victorian ladies would’ve made a mint showing off their ankles. How are you with taking photos?”
“Why?”
“I want some full body pictures with flash, and you’ll have to take them for me.”
“Sohee!”
“Christ, I’m not going to be naked. Just some off-shoulder dress action, in the passenger seat. Some people are really into that. I swear, I'll even have my knees covered.”
Jae could not believe this was happening as he dumbly took the phone from her, believed it even less when she sprawled in the passenger seat, knees covered, just like she said. In front of the camera her eyes, usually so dissecting, became beguiling, lulling him into a false sense of reality as she posed and he snapped, no longer Jae and Sohee from little league soccer, no longer Jae and Sohee from high school, no longer Jae and Sohee meeting again after years, just an artist and his muse, together creating beauty, wonder, intrigue, out of nothing.
And maybe she felt it too, as she slowly straightened and moved towards him, her gaze never wavering from his. He kept snapping even when she moved past the frame, the flash illuminating her shoulder as she leaned in, so close that he could smell her perfume, notes of juniper and cedar mixed in with a sticky midsummer night. Her hand closed over the phone, over his fingers. He held his breath. Didn't know if he should close his eyes or not, like a god damn nerd. But she only whispered, her mouth very close to his, "I'll have to charge you for this too." Then she was gone.
He opened his eyes without knowing he had shut them, the scent of her perfume still lingering somewhere near his cheek. She was buckled back in the passenger seat, scrolling through the pictures. He thought he caught a ghost of a smile on her lips.
"Okay," she said, like nothing had even happened. "Let's go."
She made him pull up just beyond the lights of a gas station just past the pick-up point, saying she needed to get a drink. The van clock said 03:47. He was beginning to regret not getting that coffee.
He watched her walking unhurriedly in to the station and just as unhurriedly out, her face as passive and inconspicuous as ever. She had several cans of beer, a packet of crisps, and some other crinkly snack packets in her arms. There was a commotion behind the glass doors and she took off towards him at a sprint, dress flying behind her. She threw herself into the passenger seat, slamming the door behind her.
“Go, go, go!” she yelled, spilling everything on to the seat and floor. He looked behind her and saw the attendant burst through the doors, shaking his fist and yelling.
“Sohee, did you just steal all these?” he asked in disbelief, but he was already flooring it. They screeched out onto the road and disappeared into the night before they started laughing.
The boardwalk was deserted, as expected in the deepest dark of a Thursday morning. The empty packet of crisps lay under Sohee’s watchful hand, and they had cracked open the cans of beer. Jae knew he could lose his job if Mark found out, but he’d once downed a few shots of soju right before a shift and had got through it fine, so what was the difference? The difference of course, was that the beer was stolen and if the van was identified he was going to lose more than just his job.
But the ocean breeze was clean and salty, the invisible waves crashing on the beach were peaceful, and the beer was cold and still good. Everything felt like it would be alright.
“You know, I can’t remember the last time I came down here,” he remarked, swinging his legs in the air. Beside him, Sohee’s skirt kept flapping against her legs. She crossed them and tucked it beneath them. He could just make out her dark hair whipping in the wind.
“Even though it’s only a 40 minute drive away?” she asked.
“Only at 3am,” he pointed out, and was gratified by her laugh. And it was weird that he still felt something of a thrill at making her laugh, or smile, even though they had spent the last couple of hours trapped in a dirty van together, that he had helped her take some very thirst-trappy photos for her thirsty followers, that she had maybe almost kissed him, that he had been her shoplifting getaway driver. He wasn’t drunk, but he felt like it. “Kinda crazy that I ended up being your delivery guy, huh? The universe sure works in some weird ways.”
“You say that like you think I knew you worked at that courier.” Sohee remarked. Her accent curled around the ‘courier’.
“I could believe anything at this point.”
She laughed. “Don’t make it sound so fantastical. I didn’t know you did. I don’t know anything about what happened to you after graduation, actually. None of us do. You just... disappeared. Did something happen between you and Brian? I remember you used to be close. Sometimes he and Bernard ask what happened to you, but no one seems to know. I think they kind of miss you.”
The light, bubbly feeling dulled a little. “Oh. Nothing happened. We just stopped talking.” He paused. “Actually, maybe I was the one who stopped talking. Do you want to know?”
She slipped back into that old, passive expression, just for a second, then shifted closer to him and looked at him over her beer can. “Only if you want to tell.”
Did he want to tell? It had been a long time since he'd properly talked to anyone. Sohee Ahn was the last person he'd ever thought of talking to, but as it happened it seemed like she was the only one really willing to listen. So he shrugged.
“Sure. I made you that dumb mixtape right, but we didn’t work out. And that’s fine and all, right, but I guess you were just out of my league and the universe knew that. So it just became this domino effect of always trying to reach for things that weren’t meant for me and never getting them, or maybe the universe decided to push them out further to teach me a lesson, I don’t know. Music college fell through, I moved out to LA to try and make it big, but everyone I gave my demo tapes to never wrote back. So I figured I’d just play within my level and just survive day to day, or night to night.” He grinned, but it didn’t stop the shame. “So three years ago I got this job. And now here we are.”
“Sesange,” she said under her breath. It reminded Jae of his mother, the exact shake of her head whenever she said it. If he had been better at Korean, would he be able to understand Sohee better? Was the true barrier in their previous lapse in communication just a diasporic one? Sometimes, like with his mom, Sohee felt like she really had come from another world when it was just another country that Jae’s blood was a part of but had never tasted.
"I envy you, actually," he said, taking a long drag of beer.
"Why's that?"
"You're so... free. I don't know. You've seen things I've only read about in books. Or a Vice article. You were popular in school without even really trying, and I spent most of it trying too hard. I mean, it was a miracle you even were interested in me." He quirked an eyebrow at her, and grinned. "I can't imagine what you were even interested in."
She shrugged. “I thought you were pretty cool."
“You’re just being overly nice,” he finally nudged her with his elbow.
“No, really,” she insisted. “I know we didn't work out, but that was expected from two awkward idiots who didn't know how to talk to each other. But I really did think you were cool, even if I didn't know how to say it. You knew what you wanted to be, and you just did things your own way, even if they were kind of questionable.” She turned away slightly so he couldn’t really see her face, but he could hear the smile in her voice.
“Like getting Dowoon to break into your locker to give you a mixtape?”
She laughed. Out here with the infinite stretched beyond them, sky and sea indistinguishable from each other, it sounded clearer than ever. “Exactly that.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “Because I used to think the exact same thing about you. Minus the questionable parts, of course.”
Sohee said nothing, taking a long contemplative drink of beer. Then she laughed again, and said, “I know you used to think I was a mystery and all that, but I think you’re more of a mystery now than I ever was.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just find it funny that we both thought the same of each other, but I’ve tried to live the way you might have, and you’ve actually been lost here alone all this time.”
He drained his own can in silence, and crushed it with his foot. It crushed lopsidedly. Brian would call him pathetic.
“I’m lonely too, so I understand how you feel.”
He looked at her. “Are you?”
“Well yeah,” she said earnestly. “My parents went back to Seoul a couple of years ago. I guess it just always felt more like home to them, but I didn’t want to go yet. Still don't know if I want to go. So I’m here all alone.”
“But you have friends,” he pointed out.
Her smile looked wistful. “It’s not always the same, is it? And you can barely speak Korean. Sunmi only knows how to swear.”
“Hey, I could learn.”
“Would you?”
He thought about it. It had been some time since he'd called his own mother, since he had gone home. He thought of how she looked when she scolded him in Korean, thought of her hands, rough from years of hard work, when she placed a plate of sliced apples in front of him, when she put her hand absentmindedly on his head while he sat on the couch. “I would, if you’ll teach me.”
Sohee grinned. It scrunched her whole face up. "I'll hold you to that."
Out at sea, a lone seagull cried. Its call echoed back to them on the beach, and Jae’s heart reached out to it, felt the sound reverberate through every inch of his body. "This is going to sound so stupid, but I just think the universe is out to get me. And I don't know how to fight that."
Sohee was quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe it's not about fighting it," she said finally. "Maybe it's just about working around it. Because the universe might have made us run into each other again, but I decided to ask you, and you’re the one who chose to help me out, didn't you? You could've said no, but you didn't. It's like... I'm choosing to live the way I do, not because some dumb unknown higher power decided it for me. Right now you're choosing to run away, but you can always choose to come back."
"You must have studied psychology to get this wise," Jae blinked.
She laughed. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
"Anyway," she added as they got up to go, scooping up their cans and dropping them in the bin. "If you really want to go with the universe angle here, you could say the universe made you choose to help me. You know Min still works at Club Tricks, right? She probably has tons of connections. And now I can get her to help you in return. Boom, the circle completes.”
He stopped her before they got into the van. "Why do you have so much faith in me?"
Sohee looked up at him. He was a head taller than her, but that meant nothing. They might as well have been standing on level footing, greeting each other as equal friends. Out here he could still hear the waves rushing and falling back in time with his heartbeat. Out here, far from the constant drudgery of perverted old men, faceless recipients of unexplained packages and terrible coffee, he felt some semblance of peace. It rose up in his throat, and if he opened his mouth and let it free he knew it could burst into a song. "Because I thought your music was great then, and I still do," Sohee shrugged.
“Please don’t tell me you still listen to my covers,” he groaned, but her nonchalance kept the poignancy in check, and he appreciated it.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s embarrassing.”
“Can’t make it big if you don’t want people to listen to your stuff. Come on, let’s go.” She swung open the door. “One last drop off. Me. You’ve still got to get back to work after this, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” He turned the key in the ignition. His heart felt strangely light. “Let’s go home.”
"I'm sorry, by the way," he said on the drive back, streetlights on the highway stretching out before them like the spines of endless snakes. "All this time I never asked how you were doing. That was a shitty thing to do to a friend."
"It's okay," Sohee wound a lock of hair around her finger. "You had other things on your mind."
Not quite, Jae thought, but didn't say. “Hey, you talk a lot more now, you know,” was what he added instead. “I don’t mean it in a bad way, I think it’s great.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “Well if our old conversations taught me anything, it would be that I’d have to get better at making conversation or suffer.”
He shoved her with his free hand, and laughed. When she took his phone and asked if she could play his covers, he let her.
The GPS led them to the entrance of a multi-storey car park, which felt incredibly suspicious to Jae but completely unfazed Sohee, who looked around her with the same look she wore in the mahjong parlour, while collecting her parcels, while walking out of a gas station with an armload of shoplifted goods. It was a look that said nothing could ever surprise her. “Okay, well this is me. Thanks so much for tonight, Jae. I owe you.”
“Wait,” he said, as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “Who exactly are you meeting?”
“Worried about me now, dad?”
“Firstly, please don’t ever call me dad again. Secondly, yes I am, this is like the dodgiest place you could ever meet someone and I’m not going to leave you here alone. I might be a lonely loser but I’m not an idiot.”
She smiled. “Thanks, but you really don’t need to worry. I’m just going to give all these parcels to my boyfriend. We usually meet up here.”
Jae furrowed his brows. “That sounds… romantic. Who is this mysterious, incredibly romantic, not at all dodgy-sounding boyfriend?”
“Well… you might remember him. Austin?”
“Austin? Austin from school Austin?”
Sohee shrugged. He had learned enough to know that her shrugs usually meant that she was trying not to let emotion get in the way. “Why not? He’s cute and he’s probably going to inherit his dad’s business some day. It’s easy.”
"You know, I've spent the entire night tagging along with all the weird stuff you've wanted to do, but this is the first time I'm judging you."
She frowned at him. She had rubbed off the red lipstick, but the look was definitely older than it had been in high school, so the effect was no longer cute but more deadly. "Hey! He's not that bad."
He let out a disbelieving scoff. “He bullied the fuck out of me until we were 17. You could say I don’t exactly have fond memories of the guy.”
“Oh.” Her expression did change a little then, the tiniest quirk of an eyebrow, a twitch in the corner of her mouth that looked somewhat apologetic. He thought it was nice of her to be affected by it. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Really. But you know, it’s probably not going to last anyway.”
He grinned despite himself. “You surprise me everyday, Sohee.”
She smiled. “Nothing is forever.”
He insisted on waiting, not wanting to leave her alone in that giant vacant car park. They leaned against the side of the van until a bright blue Camaro pulled up, the low roar of its engine sending an undercurrent of threatening energy through the still night. The driver left the engine running as he exited the car. Jae narrowed his eyes. Puberty had served him pretty well, but Austin Grant still had the flawless hair and lopsided, easy smile that had automatically placed him in the upper echelons of popularity, leaving him to prey on glasses-wearing debate club nerds like Jae.
They were the same height now, but Jae had the body of a reed about to be toppled by the wind, and Austin… well Austin could win prizes for modelling, or whatever models did to become well known. He could also probably lift Jae with one hand, and that was easy to tell when his white t-shirt was skin tight.
“Hey babe,” Austin said now, perfectly coiffed hair and immaculate build silhouetted against the headlights of the Camaro.
“I didn't get to say this earlier, but as much as I like the whole vibe, I miss you with glasses,” Sohee said to Jae without turning around, and went over to Austin as coolly as she had sauntered out of the gas station. That surprised Jae on two counts. One, because he'd thought for a second that she might skip over instead, and two, because she'd actually thought he was better looking with his glasses, also collecting dust in his bedside table drawer. He sighed. It was still hard not to think of Sohee as a character, but he was now starting to realise that it had never been an act. Everything about Sohee was genuine, just as she had always been through high school. He had just been too bedazzled by her to figure it out.
“Babe, didn’t I tell you to not call me on this phone? How many times do I have to tell you that this is my main line? And there’s a package missing. Did you forget to get that one?” Austin asked in lieu of greeting. Jae had always thought he sounded like a snake wrapped in candy floss, venom only soaking through when it found its prey.
“They weren’t there,” Sohee shrugged. “I thought I’d just go back tomorrow.”
“Come on, you know this can’t wait anymore. Couldn’t you have just waited there?”
Jae had enough. To keep from rolling his eyes, he raised a hand at Sohee and turned to go.
“Wait,” Austin said, and it sickened Jae to see his arm hooked around Sohee's shoulder. “Is that Jae Park?” He let out a wild laugh. “Oh man, it’s been a minute Jae. Last I heard you were trying to make it big in the music industry.”
“Yeah, well, life happens, you know?” Jae plastered a customer service smile to his face. “Not all of us have trust funds or stuff like that. See ya, Sohee."
“Hey thanks for getting Sohee around,” Austin called out to him. “But I guess you should be thanking me. Must’ve been the first time you got to be seen next to someone this hot.”
“Shut up, Austin,” he heard Sohee say sharply.
Every single survival instinct was screaming at him to just go, that Austin was just an idiot who never matured past fifth grade, that Sohee was much more capable than he had ever been and would ever be, but somehow he just couldn’t let it fly. Maybe the Jae from 3 hours ago might have, but he had stolen beer and old rage coursing through his veins, and besides, Sohee was his friend. She had let him in tonight, however little, and he couldn't betray that. That, and he was done letting people walk all over him, himself included. He turned around. “You’ve always been a real asshole, you know that?” he called.
Austin stared. “What the fuck did you just say?” Beside him, Sohee was staring too.
“I said, Sohee’s been running across town getting you your stupid packages when you had a Camaro all along so just leave her alone, you giant blockhead.”
He really needed to work on his insults.
He saw the arm lift, saw the bear-sized hand coming towards him, and he really should have dodged. Could have dodged, if he had kept up playing badminton, but those reflexes were long dormant in his muscles. Austin slapped him. It exploded in a burst of blinding white light across his eyes, and he was on the ground before he even knew that he was. His brain felt like it was being pinballed between the confines of his skull. The asphalt smelled oddly of earth.
When his face stopped ringing, he opened his eyes to see Sohee shoving Austin roughly away from her. She dropped to her knees beside him. “Where’s the key?” she asked as she looped his arm around her shoulder and hauled him to his feet, no small feat on her part when he was a head taller than she was.
“Shirt pocket.” His mouth was moving weirdly.
She fished them out and shoved him into the passenger seat. “Wait, can you drive stick?” he asked through lips that felt too big for his face.
She adjusted the seat and flashed him another bright, secret smile. “Sure. I’ve got a motorbike at home, too. It’s fun.” She turned the key in the ignition and floored it.
“Fuck,” he said, when he touched his lip and came away with blood. “I still haven’t made that last delivery.”
When Jae was younger, he’d spent far too much time in online music forums instead of actually checking out the live music scene, which was probably why he’d never really made any proper connections. That was probably where it all started. Or maybe it all started when he was too shy to accept Min’s invitations to free gigs. Or when he had let Brian’s teasing laughter get to him. Or when he and Sohee found they had nothing in common and had slowly fallen out of touch. Maybe it had just always been the shame.
He thought about all this while he sat at a shadowed table in the corner of the dark music club, everything that had happened in the thirteen years since high school racing through his mind and flitting away before he could even reach out and graze them with his fingertips. At the front of the club, the stage was empty, the musician of the night already packing up their guitar while the patrons slowly dwindled away. Sohee had pulled up in front of Club Tricks - of course she would - but Min wasn’t there tonight, which he suspected she knew. Despite what she said, Sohee seemed to know everything.
“You really didn’t need to,” she said when she returned with a ziploc bag filled with ice and a tray with two glasses of water on it that she expertly placed on the table with one hand. Jae wanted to ask her about it, but his lip had split open when he had fallen, and it made talking just a little bit difficult.
“What?” he asked around his swollen lip.
“Said what you said,” she pressed the bag to his mouth. “I know you were defending my honour or something like that, but you can’t pick fights you can’t win. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
“Not really. She taught me how to make a mean kimchi,” Jae mumbled into the bag.
Sohee snorted. It seemed completely unbecoming with her white dress, and he felt a little fonder of her for doing it. “You can make me some then,” she grinned. “I just can’t make it like my own mother’s, and I miss it.”
“Thank you,” he said when she removed the dripping ice bag to check on his lip.
“What for?” she asked. She didn’t raise her eyes from the cut, but her eyes went sharp and searching all the same.
“For changing my life?” He grinned.
But she shook her head, and gave him a serious, pragmatic look. “Stop being weird. I’m not here to change your life. I'm just another human being,” she said drily. “I'm just your friend.” She put the bag of ice in his hands. “Sunmi, Min and I still go to gigs sometimes. Come with us next time. Okay?”
“Okay. And thanks anyway.”
Her eyes softened. "If you start singing again, that's all the thanks I need."
He watched her walk back to the bar, completely out of place in her flowy white dress but somehow also perfectly fitting in, and the song he had put on that mixtape for her rose unbidden to the top of his memory, dusty, faded, age-spotted but somehow still perfectly intact.
She walks down these hallowed hallways
Turning heads, turning hearts,
Oh, but if I could write a song to make her fall in love
Then I would have her in my arms
But alas, all I can do is wish and wonder
A hundred and one secrets hidden behind her eyes.
The words didn’t seem to match anymore. Because this was Sohee: midnight mahjong player, secret polyglot, onlyfans creator, occasional shoplifter, motorbike rider. But this was also Sohee: practical, hard working, loyal friend, lonely soul, heart of gold. Finally, Sohee: his longtime muse, but more importantly, his friend. An improbable sum of parts, but somehow all coming together in a person that just made perfect, total sense.
He pressed the ice to his mouth and smiled, already rewriting the song in his head to something that felt more like truth.
He left her at the club as the chairs were being placed upside down on the tables, a mismatched artificial forest of steel and wooden legs sprouting at the close of the night.
“You sure you can get home safe?” he’d asked as he dragged himself away from the table.
“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “Min will be by soon to get the keys. I’ll get a lift from her.” She took his hand as he made to leave, fingers cool and soft over his. “Hey, Jae. If you ever need help, or someone to talk to… just call me. We can hang out. I promise I won’t make you drive around for 3 hours again.” She grinned. “And I've still got you down for Korean classes.”
He nodded. “And… what was your number again?”
“Silly,” she smirked. “I never changed it.”
He should’ve known. “One more thing,” he added. “What were in the packages?” When she looked at him, he shrugged. “I know I said I prefer to be in the dark, but maybe I don’t want to be anymore. You’re my friend. I want to know.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Sohee’s eyes sparkled as she laughed. “Austin’s going on a trip. I was just picking up some extra supplies for him. Shavers and stuff like that.”
“What, a grown ass man can’t go and get those things himself?” Jae had scoffed, but relief coloured his snipe, and he couldn’t help laughing too. After dropping the van back at the office and dodging Mark’s demanding questions and Hyerim’s bewildered look at his swollen lip, he finally stumbled his way back to his apartment, the excitement of the night finally giving way to drop dead exhaustion.
Leaden-legged, lip throbbing, Jae dragged himself up the stairs. The sun was just beginning to peek around the other apartments surrounding his complex, golden rays glinting off the corner of someone’s open window. Somehow that light lifted the weight in his chest, formed itself into something like hope, and he felt for the first time in a long time like picking up his guitar and weaving it into a song.
He looked back at the sky as he reached his door, at those wonderful candy coloured clouds, and took a deep breath. His arm was still sticky, phantom makgeolli clinging to him like a past life. Across the atrium, at a half-open door identical to his, a girl in a white dress brought her own gaze down from the sky and looked directly at him.
Jae expected to be surprised, but if there was anything he had come to finally understand about Sohee Ahn, it was that he would just never stop being surprised by her.
“Hey,” he called across the space between them. “What do you call the front of your bottom row of teeth?”
“Incisors!” she yelled back. He grinned. Maybe one of these days he’d text Brian. Her brilliant smile reached him across the atrium. He gave her a wave in return before unlocking the apartment door and letting himself in.