Chapter 181
The morning was so clear the mountains beyond the city looked painted.
Oh Min-Ji had known Han Soo-Yeon for four years, which meant she had also spent four years watching Soo-Yeon systematically keep everyone at a comfortable, safe, and carefully calibrated distance.
So when Lee Jae-Won appeared and Soo-Yeon started looking at her phone and then immediately not looking at her phone and then looking at it again — Min-Ji noticed.
Three months later. Jae-Won is officially enrolled. They sit next to each other. By accident.
Min-Ji grabbed her arm with both hands like she was preventing a fall. ‘Tell me everything. Start from before the beginning.’
“Nothing is happening,” Soo-Yeon said, with the calm precision of someone reciting a statement they had prepared in advance.
“You’re lying to me with your mouth,” Min-Ji said, “while your whole face tells the truth. Your face and I have an understanding.”
She added this to the growing list of things she was not examining.
“He’s —” She stopped. “He’s interesting. From a scientific perspective.”
“Uh-huh.”
“His origins are — unprecedented. The physics alone —”
“Soo-Yeon.” Min-Ji put both hands on her friend’s shoulders and looked at her with the gravity of someone delivering important news. “You brought him coffee this morning. You. Brought. Someone. Coffee.”
She had, in fact, brought him coffee. She had told herself it was because the café was on her way and she’d ordered too much by accident. Min-Ji did not believe this. Soo-Yeon was beginning to not believe it either.
“This is not — I am not — ”
“You’re so gone,” Min-Ji said, with the deep satisfaction of someone who had been right about something for a long time. “You are so, so gone.”
Soo-Yeon removed Min-Ji’s hands from her shoulders, smoothed her collar, and said, with great dignity, “This conversation is over.”
She spent the rest of the day thinking about the coffee. About how he’d taken it with both hands and thanked her like she’d given him something significant. About how his hands were warm even through the cardboard sleeve.
She was, she thought, in immeasurable trouble.
Min-Ji texted her at eleven PM: *told you* with seven moon emojis.
She didn’t reply. She was too busy reading webtoons and pretending she wasn’t thinking about warm hands.
Later, much later, she would try to identify the exact moment things had changed. She would look back through the days and weeks like reviewing flash cards, and she would find it impossible to point to a single one.
That was the thing about this — whatever this was. It hadn’t arrived at once. It had arrived in layers. The first time he’d remembered how she took her coffee. The first time he’d noticed she was tired before she’d noticed herself. The first time she’d realized she was paying attention to whether he was in the room.
He looked at her the way people look at things they are terrified of losing.
She had read about this feeling in seventeen different webtoons. She’d thought it was exaggerated.
“Don’t do that.” “What?” “Look at me like that.”
“Like what?” He already knew. She knew he knew.
She would decide, eventually, that the moment didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was here, in this world, and he was in it, and she had chosen — was choosing, every day — to let that be real.
Outside, Seoul moved and breathed. The city was large enough for everything she felt. It always had been. She just hadn’t known she was allowed to feel it until now.
