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The arcade breathes life into Alyssa.
On her left, Soushi struggles to keep up with her movements and fails miserably. From the second the game starts until it ends in her opponent’s breathless huffs, Alyssa’s carefully polite expression cracks and gets replaced by something focused and real and even a little mean. Music possesses her limbs, and she flows with the rhythm so easily, so naturally, that Yeong-Gi forgets that this isn’t the usual her, the everyday Alyssa that hesitates before she speaks and oftentimes lets him take the lead.
She is so confident. She moves like the entire world is supposed to be her stage, and for once since the day he met her she seems sure of every breath she takes.
Then the music stops, and Alyssa tucks her hair behind her ears. The bubble bursts. “Guess I won.”
How quickly the mask falls back on.
“Another round,” he finds himself saying. “Against Dieter, this time.”
Dieter holds his hands up with a bashful grin. “There’s no way I’ll win. You’re too good, Alyssa.”
Alyssa mumbles something under her breath, cheeks flushed, and waves Dieter off. But just because he’s looking hard enough, Yeong-Gi catches the instant where her lips curve upwards.
He flashes Dieter an innocent smile, eyes closed and cheeks strained and all. “Try anyway.”
For a split second, Alyssa questions him with her eyes, brows furrowed and mouth slightly open. He shrugs and smiles again, a smaller one this time. “You deserve the spotlight, so I’m putting you under it.” He winks. “I’m next, by the way.”
Alyssa blinks. She mumbles something unintelligible under her breath again. Yeong-Gi catches Thank you, whatever, not at all, nothing. Then she turns her back in one swift movement and stares straight at the game screen.
Three, two, one.
Yeong-Gi holds his breath and watches her dance.
The woman says, smiling down at him, “It’s supposedly about a relationship she can’t escape. Hopefully that’s not about you, kid!”
He knows it is about him. Who else could it be about, if not him?
She keeps talking and talking and talking. “She looks stunning on that stage, doesn’t she?”
She looks brilliant. She looks more like herself than she has looked in years, and she is singing about the bruises on her ankles from the shackles that tie her to him. She’s singing about how much she’s choking and suffocating and sinking, and he is the water in her lungs that drowns her.
She looks brilliant and unreal and free. He’s been the first person to see it. But there’s really nothing he can say to that at all, now.
“You’re right,” Nol replies at last. “She is probably singing about me.”
How easy it is to agree with her for once.
“Do you think we should date?” Alyssa asks under the dim light of his room. She’s sitting on the floor, back against his bed that he’s half-laying on. Her nails pick at her cuticles. She doesn’t quite look at him when she says this.
Yeong-Gi blinks, breath catching in his throat. He sits up straight. “That’s a straightforward question,” he chokes out, barely forcing a laugh into his voice. And a funny one, too, because this is the first time she’s bothered to show up in a week.
Then Alyssa lifts her eyes to fix his own into place—brows furrowed and searching for something Yeong-Gi can’t really understand just yet. There’s something off. There’s been something off about her ever since Kousuke came to pick him up from the arcade out of nowhere, and they ran into her, and Oh, sweetheart, why don’t you join us for dinner, turning into, Save my phone number, honey, and call me whenever you want to ask something. He can’t think about this too much, though, or else he’ll start tasting bile—or worse, he’ll stop breathing.
“Well?” says Alyssa, voice a little bit harder than before, defenses rising. Yeong-Gi suppresses a flinch in the face of it, even though there is something he recognizes in the way Alyssa moves, deep down and by heart, but it isn’t Yeong-Gi who’s familiar with the act of it, so he simply blinks again.
“I’ve never dated anyone before,” he offers honestly. He feels a bit breathless. From what, he doesn’t know.
“Me neither,” Alyssa replies, the tips of her ears pink.
“I’ve never liked anyone either,” Yeong-Gi adds helplessly. Like a bird desperately flying towards its cage to escape. For what, he doesn’t know.
Alyssa opens her mouth like she wants to agree for a brief second, but then her eyelids flutter shut, and she looks away. She looks more ashamed now than when she confessed she hasn’t dated anyone. She asks, pointedly, “Do you like me?”
Yeong-Gi feels his face heat. He’s suddenly glad that Alyssa isn’t looking at him. He’s sure he’s red all over. “I…” He swallows, tongue-tied. “Do you like me?”
Alyssa steals a glance at him, and Yeong-Gi’s ears burn even hotter. Great.
Alyssa, though, doesn’t seem to care as much as he does, or like he thought she would, and says, voice somehow determined, “Well, we get along well, don’t we?”
The breath he exhales feels like it’s punched out of his lungs. How simple. How easy.
Is that what it means to be with someone?
“Yeah,” he breathes out again. He can sense his face cooling over. “We do.”
There is a long stretch of silence.
“I do care about you,” Nol confesses, then, into the dull walls and small space of the room. Though a more curious, uglier voice from the back of his head says, she put Alyssa up to this.
“I care about you too,” Alyssa replies without missing a beat. Her words finally come out easier, more natural, and some of the tension in her shoulders eases as she says them. She rolls her eyes. “Obviously.”
He huffs out a laugh. He’s more relaxed now, too. He nudges her shoulder with his knee, cheeky. “Really? You do?”
Alyssa turns to slap his leg away at once. “Shut up. Whatever. Don’t take it the—” She pauses abruptly, mumbling something under her breath. She pulls her knees closer to her chest.
He smiles. His voice is a gentle thing when he says, “Don’t take it the, what?”
Alyssa shrugs, face falling. “Force of habit. Killed all the romance. Sorry.”
That was romance? He thinks, but he doesn’t ask it. What would he know?
Back at the entrance of the arcade, the woman asks Alyssa, voice sweet and venomous at once, “Oh, sweetie. Is he your boyfriend?”
They have learned to call each other honey and sweetie and babe. In the rearview mirror, Alyssa’s face is blank.
“We can just go out,” Yeong-Gi says, and his voice sounds all strangled. “Then we can go to Karaoke with the guys. I’ll explain later.”
Alyssa turns her face to him, and says, “Honey.”
“Just saying,” Yeong-Gi retreats, a bashful, plastered smile on his mouth. “You don’t have to do this. We can just go. It’s no big deal.”
Alyssa puts her hand on his. He wonders, a tad bit bitter, if this feels more natural to her, by now, than it does to him. “I want to.”
Why? his mind’s voice wails. Why do you want to? A part of him wants to kick and punch and hurt something. An uglier part of him. Nola—
He shrugs, that careless and halfway stupid demeanor oozing off his shoulders and matching her dutiful, understanding smile. Yeong-Gi and Alyssa.
“Still,” he offers as the car slows down.
“Babe,” Alyssa says, her hand still on his. Her voice is kind. So kind, too kind. “We’re already here.”
He wonders if they will ever kiss, or if that is something they won’t ever grow into. His fingers prickle with the wrongness of the thought. He wonders whether couples are supposed to feel this way, whether it’s normal for a boyfriend to recoil at the notion of kissing his girlfriend. He wonders if this is why Alyssa avoids him; why Alyssa is gone, why she doesn’t hesitate to brush his arm or crack a picture perfect smile but doesn’t ever come close enough for even a hug.
He wonders how many Yeong-Gis and Alyssas they would need to bring together to make a singular couple, and even a million doesn’t seem enough.
But what would he know?
At the party, by the stairs, Sang-Chul says, I’ll go keep Alyssa company for you while you’re at it. I still haven’t gotten my kiss.
His stomach churns with so much anger he feels sick with it. The smugness to his voice, the goddamn drug vial—Yeong-Gi half has the urge to run back to Alyssa, except he can’t, because Shin-Ae is screaming just upstairs and she’s already unsafe, so his ears ring just loudly enough to take his feet back to Sang-Chul instead. Shin-Ae wasn’t supposed to be here, Alyssa wasn’t supposed to be here, and now they both are; drawn into a big black hole with no bottom, and his arms aren’t big enough to reach for both of them at the same time.
So he reaches and throws a punch.
It hurts me, it hates me. The kind voice of my heart drowned out by violent storms. Raging inside my head, my legs begging me to run, get away from this plight. Should I try and seek refuge? Should I try and go and fight?
He leaves the woman there, and gets up to leave. Once he turns his back, it echoes in his skull.
I am the harm and I am the storm and I am the plight.
On the balcony, in the cold, Alyssa asks, “Do you hate me?”
There is a long beat of silence, because he does, sometimes.
“I don’t,” replies Yeong-Gi, because he hates the fact that he does more. “I’m sorry for even making you think that I would. I hope you can forgive me.”
But he doesn’t think he will. Neither himself nor her.
Yeong-Gi asks, leaning forward on the bed, “Do you… like her?” Alyssa turns her head to look at him, brows furrowed, and he adds, nervously, “Kousuke’s mother?”
Alyssa’s eyes shine like they never did before. “Of course. She’s a brilliant woman.”
He doesn’t know why he even asked the question, when he’s listened to and heard the answer enough times by now. Desperation, desolation—denial, maybe. For a few seconds, he just looks straight ahead, wordless.
“Why?” Alyssa asks when he doesn’t speak.
Don’t, he wants to say. Don’t like her. You shouldn’t like her, or get close to her, because she is deceitful and terrifying and nothing brilliant, and then he thinks, how is it not obvious? How can you not see any of it? His chest aches with the force of it. He wants to say, Please.
Instead, he simply shrugs. It’s the worst thing he’s ever done.
As he feels his knuckles ache, the venomous, ugly, resentful voice from the depths of his mind hisses, But Alyssa wanted to be here. Alyssa wants to be around those people. Alyssa prefers these people.
How funny, how fucking laughable that you feel sick over not being able to get back for her safety. This is the first time in months where she accepted to be around you, all for her and her and her, and these people that want to crush her in their fists like an insect, and even so, she cannot stand to see your face.
He presses her body against his and buries his face in her shoulder, cold weather and soaked clothes be damned, and Alyssa goes perfectly still. He says, because he thinks maybe Alyssa loves him more when she doesn’t have to see him at all, and if you’re still in there say something now say something now say something now, “I applied to schools abroad.”
Alyssa shifts in place, his arms around her big enough that they could be a cage, and then she says everything will be fine, because they are practically long distance now, and what’s a few more hundred or extra thousand miles?
And, Oh, he thinks. She does not want me to stay at all.
In the hospital room, Alyssa cries into her hands. “You can’t go! Not now!”
At the party, Alyssa says, as she turns away, “Just leave and go someplace you would rather be before you ruin things any further.”
And he can’t even fault her for it, because he’s been running and yelling and losing control over both his drink and tongue than he possibly ever has in his life, and how funny, how utterly fucking laughable it is, this resentful honesty that keeps leaping out of him every time she is at his side. How absurd that he has his own hands wrapped around his throat, but feels the shape of her fingers when they close up. There isn’t an adequate description for the feeling that punctures holes in his stomach. He wants her gone. He wants her just by his side, not an inch out of sight. He wants her out, so far away and forgotten that she hasn’t even entered his life; he wants to let her slide and sink deeper into the hole dug for him, because not once has she tried to claw her way out. He feels so angry that he wants to break something and yet, the only person his hands can reach is himself. She’s here because of him and she’s here because of her and she’s here because of her own self, this endless fucking loop, and this endless, rootless feeling burning inside his chest hits him with such a force he almost shakes.
He supposes there’s a simpler word for it.
Alyssa shrieks away from him on the floor, and it brings him a strange sort of delight, seeing her like that for once, all walls stripped away. He loathes the fact that it took a clawing, crawling kind of temper for this intimacy, finally.
He walks towards her trembling body, growing smaller and smaller by the second; one step, two, three, and he—
extends his hand to her, of course.
And by some god-awful coincidence, this is when she angles her head to look up at him, hesitant, maybe hopeful, even, and he sees her neck, blooming blue and purple all over.
It knocks the breath out of him so fast and hard that he almost falls over to the floor himself, and he loses the sight of her for a fleeting moment. It had been him. It had only been him, caught and drowned in this never-ending trap.
The kind voice of my heart drowned by violent storms.
He doesn’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
He—
The big big house has its walls closing in on him, and Nolan watches Alyssa on the dinner table with his father and Kousuke and the woman.
The woman compliments her and Alyssa beams, eyes closed and cheeks strained and all. She looks so up in the clouds that she briefly forgets his presence, seated on the chair next to her. Then, to his surprise, she turns and gives him the same smile, too—and Nolan, for the life of him, cannot figure out if it’s real or fake.
The realization dawns on him for maybe the millionth time. You’re just like me.
You and I are the same.
“I know her nature. Better than anyone,” Nolan says in Shin-Ae’s room, ghosts hanging over his shoulders. “I hate it.”
—hates her.
Without a doubt.
“So?” Alyssa questions after a while, shifting her position on the floor. “What do you think?”
Yeong-Gi shrugs again. Something awful has crawled into his lungs. He can’t quite breathe right. “Dunno… We get along well. Right?”
“Yeah,” Alyssa replies. Her voice is quiet. She smiles at him, just barely.
There’s something so terrible, so paranoid grasping him straight from the spine. But Alyssa is here, and Alyssa is beautiful and talented and smart; cranky and unintentionally funny, sometimes, and they get along well, and maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe that’s all there is to love.
All of a sudden, he doesn’t have the will to say no. He feels her smile reflected on his lips. So loaded it’s almost painful. “Okay, then. Why not?”
Alyssa’s smile grows, and the bubble bursts. An involuntary, giddy giggle leaps out of her, and though he doesn’t really know why, it spills and gets on him, too.
And looking at her flushed cheeks and clasped hands and pleased smile, he thinks, maybe, he loves her.
But what would he know?