blossom🌻

You’d been watching him work some magic with a…thing, a smashing thing, something involving the peels from the citrus he had been squeezing. Your cocktail lexicon was lacking. You hadn’t at all expected the wink and it felt so quick and sneaky that you felt a warmth creep up your cheeks that you covered with both of your hands as you looked away from him, glancing around yourself for witnesses. This wasn’t allowed, right? Was this kind of behavior typical for the Sinking Sands Resort?

A single pair of large, dark brown eyes watched you and those eyelids blinked slowly without the owner actually saying or doing anything. There wasn’t a scoff or an eye roll. He just watched you. He just knew it happened.

You could not name this feeling that filled up your stomach.

He had seen the wink. Maybe it was shame. It was uncomfortable. He had witnessed a man paying attention to you. That was not the issue, but he had seen your blushing reaction to the wink. He witnessed you caving so easily, a little attention from a man, from any man, and you were a melting, blushing mess. What must he think? That you weren’t the strong independent woman that the year 2024 demanded of you? That you were probably the type to sign away your checking and savings accounts to the first man could make you orgasm on the first try? That if someone saw you, but really, really saw you for who you were, deep down inside where your secret fantasies played, you might just cry about it in the shower in between all the fake arguments that you would have won if you only said that back then.

What was it called? The horrors of being known. And by Doh Kyungsoo of all people. The last thing you needed was that man knowing how desperate you felt for any bit of human affection. Your fingertips still ached from where you’d lightly touched the backs of his hands and drifted up his smooth forearms, sinking your fingertips into the firm muscles you felt there, as you used, probably the only chance you’d ever have to really stare at his lips while he was blindfolded.

What if he used it against you?

The blender whirled to life and soon Javier was serving up an icy blended cocktail, complete with a sweet cherry on top and a paper umbrella. He placed the whole pretty concoction in front of you with a friendly smile and you waited until his hands were free and clear of the entire drink before you reached for it, feeling quite silly for going out of your way to avoid touching his hands. While he was conventionally handsome, you had some reservations about openly flirting with the man who was technically at work. What if he got in trouble for being too friendly with the Shifting Sands guests.

The drink was delicious and very heavy on the alcohol. Javier was not the one paying for those fancy liquor bottles.

“How’s that?” Javier asked while wiping the counter top and wiggling his eyebrows up on his handsome face.

You bit your lip and nodded once, just one up and down. Tilting your head to the side, you tucked your hair behind your ear so anyone who might want to could get a good look at the smooth perfection of your neck. The top you wore was pretty low cut and while it gave the illusion of casual wear, it actually took an incredible amount of self awareness to keep it positioned in the most flattering place on your neckline. You then smiled your softest, sweetest smile, letting him know that it was just to your liking with a very dainty sip of the drink. You were aiming for cute. You sipped with too much conviction and the sip backfired. You felt the burn of the strong alcohol hit the back of your throat and instantly that burning made you want to cough. Ohhh, it burned.

There was no way to cough in a ladylike way. You held your breath instead and you could feel your eyes watering from the effort.

“I’ll make you something Mr. Doh. Are you a sweet, strong, or bitter kind of man?”

If ever a man was bitter…

“I’ll have the same thing,” Kyungsoo said with a shrug. You didn’t dare look in his direction for fear that he was observing you too closely again. Gathering dirt, most likely. You could make out his relaxed posture out of your peripheral vision. Elbow on the counter, his other arm draped across his thigh.

That arm moved though, and you caught a motion of him tucking his hair behind his ear; his hair that wasn’t even long enough to tuck, his hair that fell, black and straight just below his eyebrow and yet he pretended to tuck it and he then adopted a similar come hither posture with his shoulders sagged, his head tilted to the side and oh god. He was mocking you now. You were looking at him as he did it and his teasing eyes drifted to yours once, sending you the fakest, and most dramatic wink you’d ever received from anyone.

You’d stab him in the night time.

“Let’s see if I can make it without squeezing lemon in my eye again,” Javier giggled and lifted his index finger to rub over his eyelid — the winking eye —the fucking flirtatious winking eye that sent sweet and secretive suggestive signals at you earlier and you suddenly realized wasn’t a wink at all — ohhhh. Ohhh no. You were a fool. Worse, you were a fool with a witness. The shock brought the cough out of you. It was a loud, full-bodied, very un-maidenlike cough. You sounded burly. Like a 5 pack a day smoker.

Beside you, a loud snort of laughter broke through your coughing and in your peripheral vision, you could see him actually shaking as he openly laughed at you.

“Be careful with that lemon, Javier. Someone might think you were flirting with them, right, Princess?” Kyungsoo had angled his torso toward you — a better position for making fun of you as he sought your confession of what you’d just thought was taking place between you and this poor man behind the counter who was literally just trying to do his job, not the guests. Kyungsoo’s eyebrows wagged suggestively and his grin was wide and all too knowing.

You could feel the warmth of embarrassment on your face just below the surface of your skin.

You swallowed the burning alcohol in your mouth and did your best to steady the expression on your face.

You lifted your chin and you rolled your eyes, and then openly glared at the man, simply unable to come up with a single response that would save your ego. You might have even let out a threatening growl in his direction.

No, Javier hadn’t been flirting with you. No, there were no other men here who were eligible and interested in you. You’d learned earlier that Mr. Chen was a married man and devoted father of two little girls. Jun and Roxy had been an item for quite some time. Javier was more enamored with impressing the aloof Chef Doh, and well, Kyungsoo — he was winding down with his laughter but that didn’t mean he was about to stop torturing you anytime soon.

There was nothing and no one for you here. The rain outside had been steadily falling for quite some time now and you suddenly longed for an escape. The sound of the wind had died down a while ago and you longed to feel the coolness of the refreshing raindrops on your face. Maybe while you were out there a tornado would carry you far away from this jerk.

“I’m going to have a look outside. I want to go for a walk. I am going outside. Is there a way to go out?”

Kyungsoo was still watching you, his very own drink in hand and his mean words at your expense ever freely flowing from his stupid mouth.

“You sound like a dog that is slowly learning how to talk,” he muttered under his breath.

You inhaled a deep calming breath.

He’d picked up a big yellow lemon and was holding it up in front of his face like it was a ball he was about to throw. A teasing, shit-eating grin was plastered across his face.

If you could just smack him, only once. You’d make it a really good one.

His lips pursed and his voice lifted higher and sweeter.

“Does my Princess wanna go play with the ball outside?” He said it, but the second it was out he seemed to freeze in place.

“You —,” you gasped, fully caught off-guard by the usually cruel nickname said in that way — said with his falsely sweet voice and with all of his fake affection attached to it. You felt betrayed by your subconscious to be having a surge of this uninvited feeling simply because instead of with his usual disgust, he addressed you with — with — as if you were his Princess — the butterflies were quick to flutter up inside of you but you were just as quick with another swift gulp of this drink to shove them deep down inside your belly where they needed to stay.

My Princess

Pl—Please…it was laughable if it wasn't so damned impossible.

My Princess

As if —

You breathed in and out through several exasperated scoffs, each one more convincing than the last.

“You —” you swallowed the drink angrily, “sound like an ass—”

“Mr. Doh,” Sara’s voice called out, interrupting the bottom barrel scraping level insult you were about to hurl his way, which no doubt would have only escalated whatever was going on between the two of you right now. You were sure you could see remnants of that same teasing smile still lingering on his lips. His cheeks were much pinker than you remembered before. Maybe he was a lightweight and was feeling the effects of this strong drink already. Whatever bullshit he was shilling out, he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself. It did take a few moments for him to register that he was being called and actually respond to it.

“Could you come this way, please?” She asked a few breaths after she was sure she had his attention. Her smile was soft and inviting and in her hands she carried a single sheet of paper.

Your curiosity about where he was going popped like a bubble when a fresh drink landed right beside your empty glass on the counter. This one looked different. You looked up into Javier’s face and he was smiling at you with a small nod of his head toward the drink.

“This one might be a little stronger,” he grinned.

“Let me guess, your job is to get us both hammered so we spill our deepest darkest secrets all over this stainless steel countertop.” You reached for the drink. You had been joking but Javier wasn’t playing it off with jovial laughter as you’d expected him to.

In fact, he didn’t really say anything. He was just reaching for ingredients to make another drink.

Eventually though, after you’d given in to the silence and started sipping on what you liked the taste of right away — it reminded you of iced tea in color and tasted sweet and refreshing — he started to talk.

“So what is the deal with you two, anyway?” He asked first. You had a mouthful of alcohol. Your already finished half of the glass and paired with the first drink you had you were beginning to feel the familiar warm dizziness of the liquor buzzing around inside of you.

“How much alcohol is in this?”

“Lots,” he confessed, “We have a bet. I think you two are exes. Nasty breakup. Maybe one of you cheated, he’s a chef so I’m gonna say it was him. You know, job with long nights and questionable ethics. Plus something about you gives ‘good woman’ vibes.”

“Oh my god, no. We never dated, he is the devil,” you giggled. It wasn’t particularly funny but it felt funny; his dramatic story of a whirlwind romance and the kind of breakup that not only split the pair but caused an earthquake between the group of friends, forcing them to pick sides.

“But, you do like him.” It wasn’t a question, “and he likes you.”

“He does not. He hates me.”

“He likes you. And you didn’t deny it, so you like him.” His declaration sounded so sure you wondered what the hell kind of strong alcohol he had been taking swigs of when you weren’t looking.

“It doesn’t matter. We would probably end up killing each other before anything else happened between us.”

Javier pondered your words for only a few moments. “So what do you like about him?”

You felt weirdly comfortable and safe in this conversation. With Claire or with anyone else who knew you both mutually, you were extra guarded. You hated everything about Doh Kyungsoo. You never wanted to see his face ever again. You wanted to live in a world where he did not exist. But with Javier, with the quiet corner you both were hidden away in, with the alcohol in your blood, you could feel your caution beginning to slip.

“Why does anybody like anybody?” You shrugged in a sad way. You knew it didn't matter what you thought about him, the seeds had already been sewn with so much poison, nothing would ever grow. “He’s nice to look at. He’s nice to listen to when he isn’t calling me mean names, his voice sounds nice. He —” you lifted the black straw to your lips and drained the last bits of the tasty drink, “has a strong back. My grandma always said a man ought to have a strong back.”

“A strong back?”

“Yeah, like sturdy. Like a mountain. A redwood tree. Like an old, solid wood picnic table without a single crack even after generations of all of the grandchildren dancing on it at the same time. That rat bastard.” You inhaled slowly and deeply and exhaled through your lips with your eyelids sagging just a little bit.

“Jesus.” He whispered under his breath, “that’s possibly the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard in all of my years of working here.”

“I just called him a rat bastard,” you giggled and Javier laughed openly.

“Yeah you did. I’ve never been insulted with that much passion. Maybe you’ll get to test out the strength of his back soon.” He lifted his eyebrows as if he just said something that made any sense to you. You just stared at him, shaking your head after a few of his suggestive wiggles.

“If you still want to go outside there’s a small covered patio right out that door,” Javier lifted a bottle opener to point toward a big gray metal door at the back of the room, “I think the storm should be calmer now, but will probably pick back up again in about an hour. Should be safe for now but you should really come back inside if the wind gets bad again. I’ll send you another drink and maybe some company in a little while.”

Oh, was he getting rid of you now? You spun on the chair you were seated on and plopped your feet down on the tile floor, making you way toward that door, grabbing the thing and giving it a big push with all of your might.

It swung open easily enough and the outside air was fresh and chilly. There were no lights out here but the occasional lightning flashes gave your eyes a little bit of a chance to adjust to the darkness. The space was small, with a concrete bench built into the wall and the cover of this patio extended just enough for you to be able to sit down without getting splashed with the falling rain too much.

You were exactly the right amount of drunk. The rain falling sounded loud enough for your senses to cloud over and you leaned your head back against the cool concrete enjoying the way the noisy rain echoed off of that tin roof and reverberated inside of the center of your skull.

The wind still had some power. Occasionally a strong gust would bring a wave of rain your way and your bare legs would take the brunt of it. You didn’t care much, even though you knew you shouldn’t stay out here for too long in these shorts. It was just a little cold. You were sober enough to know what you should and should not do in a hurricane.

The sound of the door opening pulled your eyes back open and you looked through the space that opened up. It was Sara and she came bearing gifts.

“Javier said you were out here,” she said with a sweet smile and you scooched over just a little so she could sit down beside you on the side that wasn’t getting as much rain. She handed you a fresh drink and sat beside you, warming your cool bare arm with her warmth. She had an excited smile and what looked like a sparkle in her eyes. The moment her hands were empty she was gripping your arm. She was squealing lightly, a whispered and excited noise that came from the center of her chest and then she was shaking you in excitement.

“He likes you. Doh Kyungsoo,” she squealed right into your ear, “Oh my God. I could die.”

“He,” she was pulling your arm in big dramatic movements, she was shaking your whole body harder, ”likes,” saying each word one at a time, “you.”

You looked into this poor delusional woman’s face the moment the shaking stopped.

“Sara, he just called me a dog in there,” you said flatly. “Not a puppy or even a doggie. A dog. That’s one step up from bitch.” Her smiles dropped and you could see the worry on her face.

“What? Why? What exactly did he say?” Finally she was asking the real questions. No matter how much of a crazy jerk he was he wouldn’t say something like that to someone he liked. She had it all wrong.

“I said I wanted to come outside,” you lifted your hands to show the outside you were now partaking in, “and he said ‘does my little princess want to come outside and play with a ball’ and then he’s like ‘you know, like a dog? Because you are a dog.’ He didn't imply it. He said it.” You dropped your voice as low as you could go with your lady voice when you did the impression of him. You figured it was a pretty good likeness. You had his accent down and everything.

You reached for the drink and took a long pull through the straw.

Sara was silent, but she no longer sported the worried look. She now looked quite pleased actually.

“He calls you ‘my little Princess’ and you refuse to believe that he likes you?”

“No, you didn’t hear how he said it. He’s so mean about it. He says it like an insult like I’m a spoiled brat. He uses it sarcastically.” This drink was just as strong as the last one, the ice tea one.

“Why on earth do you think he likes me? He totally hates me.”

“He just told me.”

You looked into her face to gauge her truthfulness. She was a little fuzzy around the edges.

“He didn’t,” you said, “he’s very sarcastic when he talks. If you don't know to look for it you might misunderstand.” You’d deny it forever. You’d deny it to save yourself from the pain of giving into it and then being crushed by his overwhelming hatred the second he showed up. “Look, tell me exactly what he said and say it in the exact same tone he said it in. And what you said first, I’ll need the full context.”

“So we do these interviews periodically throughout the retreat, to gauge how well the singles are getting along with each other. As you saw earlier, I took him aside to talk. Basic things like is there anything he needs to make his stay more comfortable. He said he doesn’t expect much given the current circumstances so he’s just happy to have a dry place to sleep and warm food to eat. He doesn't want to be a bother, which I felt was very kind of him.”

“Then to kind of ease into the topic of possible love interests, I pointed out that he didn’t seem to fare too badly while cooking blindfolded. Not a single burn or a cut and he said,” She cleared her throat and lifted her chin, “‘I had the best assistant. She did really well in there.’” She had a very pleased look on her face. You on the other hand stared at her with a more doubtful expression.

“That’s it? Even I know how well I did in there. I did everything for him, of course I was the best assistant. He’s probably never experienced that kind of support while cooking, Jesus, I literally held each of his hands inside of my hands when he was cutting up that fucking fish. I had to hug him for that, you know.”

Sara was smiling and nodding, not understanding your point. It wasn’t romantic of him to say you were a good pair of eyes, it was literally just a fact.

“And how did that feel?” Sara whispered as she leaned in closer, “hugging him?” Her excitement level was too high, “did he smell nice?” She was enjoying this way too much, “did his back feel strong?” You could see it even in your inebriated state. You pushed a shoulder against hers in protest, bringing a giggle from her chest. You didn't answer her silly questions, even if the memory of the smell of his back was still ingrained inside of your nose. Even if he had a warmth to him that you longed to touch again, you refused to say any of this outloud.

“What was your very first impression of him like?” Her next question was calmly asked. She had settled down with the shaking and squealing and over the top ridiculous excitement when none was warranted and she looked into your face now, just a friend asking another friend about a guy.

“Umm,” you looked out at the falling rain, ignoring the way the wind picked up a little bit and whipped waves of rain onto your leg, up higher on your thigh now that it had started getting a little wild, “I actually saw him from a distance at first. My friend Claire was hosting a dinner and he was sitting at the end of this really long table and wow, what a face. Just, some people get to walk around looking that handsome and nobody says anything?” You were giggling when you met Sara’s eyes and you noticed your drink was mostly empty already. These things went down so easily. The once perfect level of drunk you had was beginning to tip over the edge toward downright tipsy. You hoped to God you had enough self control tonight to slow down. This team obviously wasn’t about to slow down on offering you the alcohol, this was part of their plan.

“And, I mean, our friends, our mutual friends, they even tried to set us up once but,” you frowned dramatically and looked away from her expecting eyes, “I mean, he hates me of course. It didn’t work out. It would never work, we are both just…” You let your words trail off with a long dramatic sigh.

“He said he couldn’t stop looking at you,” Sara’s voice filled in the silence after your sigh, “that his first impression of you,” she inhaled a breath and her hand wrapped back around your arm as her eyebrows lifted in wonder, “was that you were so pretty he couldn’t take his eyes off of you.”

Impossible. She was lying to you to get you to confess something incriminating. You looked down at the third very strong drink these people had fed you and you could feel it then, just how very drunk you had become in such a short amount of time. Your memory slipped back to what she had asked you.

‘Did his back feel strong?’

This was part of it. This was part of the game they were playing to get you both to grow closer to each other. To get you to admit to things. You had told Javier earlier about your feelings for Kyungsoo and now Sara knew this information. She was using your own words to push you into him, telling you exactly what he had said about you just as — you gasped suddenly with your eyes widening — just as Javier was probably telling Kyungsoo right now exactly what you had said about him.

No. No, he shouldn’t know that. He couldn't know that.

You stood up and your legs were wobbly.

“No, Sara. He is a bastard and I am a dog, remember? We hate each other and there is no getting past hate.”

You hadn’t heard the sound of the door opening.

“I hate that man.”

The wind had been too loud. The rain had been falling in stinging waves against your skin. The storm had been raging too wildly for you to have heard anything else.

You fought through the terrible feeling of your entire back being soaked and you fought the lies they tried to get you to fall for, just so you could believe it all, believe that there was even a glimmer of attraction and affection from him and then they would all giggle and laugh when he broke your heart and rejected you again.

“He’s always only been a bastard and a jerk. If it wasn’t for this storm, I would be on the first plane far away from him the second I saw his face in that room earlier. You couldn't pay me enough money to stay here with him.”

They didn’t know. They didn't know what it felt like to have been rejected by him. They didn't know how much it hurt for him to put you in your place, again and again.

“I would be so much happier if I never met him.”

You had already said so many terrible things by the time you saw his eyes — dark, cold and angry. He was standing in the doorway listening to your long speech about how much you despised everything about him and how desperate you were to get away from him.

Oh no. Oh no, all of that had been — had been too harsh of you — You were only trying to stop all of the games but he heard it all.

He was moving through the doorway and there was a loud bang as the wind took the heavy metal door and slammed it closed.

His eyes were on fire. The words that left his lips were full of carefully controlled emotion.

”You’ve never even met me. You don't fucking know me,” he wasn’t yelling, he was growling at you.

“But you sure like to act like you do. You don't know shit. So you can step down off your high fucking horse. Quit pretending like you’re somehow a victim of my terrible personality and look in the fucking mirror for once because one of us an asshole and it sure as hell isn’t me.”

He wasn’t raging and speaking loud or irrationally and that somehow made it worse. That didn’t change the way his low voice delivered his message to you with the same amount of vitriol. If anything, his clear delivery made his words hit you even harder. He was very angry and he was upset with you. You felt every bit of his anger deep inside of your belly, it made your stomach burn and clench.

You lifted both of your hands in front of you in some stupid attempt to respond to him with body language.

This wasn’t right. He wasn’t supposed to have heard any of that.

You felt as if your entire face might be burning up. You felt shame in this.

All other times you’d fought with him, the right and the wrong had been crystal clear. He was wrong and you had been right. He was the bad guy and you were the good guy. But now, this time, and with the look of actual hurt you could see deep inside of his brown eyes you felt something different.

“Kyungsoo, wait. That’s not what I meant.” You managed to get the words out. You weren’t sure why you felt so desperate to set the record straight with him but it was probably what you knew deep down inside.

He was right. You were the asshole here. H-Had it always been you?

“I’ll just — step inside so you two can talk,” Sara had stood up and moved to the door, far away from the upset that was filling most of this back patio up with an uncomfortable atmosphere that you could almost not breathe within.

But you were trapped here, with him and his anger and his hurt feelings and — and — but, wait a minute. Why exactly were his feelings hurt? Because you called him a bastard? That wasn’t new. Because you proclaimed your desire to escape him? He frequently did the same.

Why did it matter to him what you thought?

You were insignificant to his life.

The door closed behind her and you were standing as far away from the man as you could. Most of your entire back was soaked with rain. You could feel the cold from the harsh wind beginning to prickle your skin and make you shake just a little bit.

Kyungsoo had stood to face you for a while but when you didn’t immediately offer any explanation like ‘it’s Opposite Day today! You say the opposite of how you really feel because it's fun. Isn’t this fun?’ he moved to sit down on the concrete bench and he stared ahead looking at the rainstorm but not actually seeing it.

After a few deep breaths you reached down deep and pulled out some words for him.

“They’re playing a g-game with us. There is-sa game happening right now.” You sounded drunk. This might work against you. His eyes moved from blank staring into the blackness of that rainstorm to blank staring at you. His arms were crossed over his chest and he still looked very mad.

“That man in there,” you lifted a finger to point toward Javier and you made a fist, moving it downward to pantomime the smashing motions he was making with the smashing thing back then when he was doing his smashing. You motioned three times and then quickly realized your hand, moving up and down like this resembled an obscene gesture. Oh god. Did you just do the hand gesture for jerking off?

“Oh my god,” you whispered, quickly moving both of your hands behind your back. “That man,” you motioned with your chin instead, “is gathering information. He is a spy. They all are.”

Kyungsoo’s eyebrows had flattened out but he was still looking at you with that same blank expression. So far, so good. You would get him to see the truth.

“What did he tell you about me? Did he tell you something like—” you lifted your face, looking up and to the left toward the ceiling of this patio, making a quick decision about what sorts of your secrets Javier might have told Kyungsoo. It was tricky because you weren’t about to offer up the exact same secrets.

You couldn't get the secrets out. Instead you made a “mmm mmm” sound in the place of the words you might have told Javier about how handsome you found him, or about how nice his voice sounded as he whispered instructions to you as you both were cooking earlier. What if he said the thing, the strong back thing?

“Is your question to me, Did that man,” Kyungsoo lifted his hand and quickly jerked off the air three times, “tell me mmm mmm mmm something?”

You nodded your head, thankful that he was so good at solving puzzles. He understood.

But he wasn’t answering. He just sat up straighter, his eyes opened wider and he repeated the question you had asked him.

“Did that man tell me mmm mmm mmm something?”

“Yeah,” you nodded again, stepping just a little bit closer to where he sat. You were getting colder now.

“What the fuck does that mean?” His eyes were even wider now. “What does that mean? Are you having a stroke?”

You could hear genuine frustration in his voice. He was lifting his hands toward you. You’d misjudged his puzzle solving skills.

You closed your eyes and took another step, reaching his knee with your knee, you reached out and touched his outstretched hand. Maybe this might help with your words.

“Okay, so earlier, S-Sara,” it was difficult to grasp tight to her name but after a few tries you got it, “S-Sara told me that you,” you lifted your finger and reached out toward his face, landing your index finger right in the middle of his soft bottom lip. You pressed down and his lips parted with the softest gasp for air, “she said that you told her, and she told me, that you told her,” he lifted a hand and wrapped it around your hand, pulling your finger down from poking his lip as you figured this puzzle out. You looked down at the picture of his hand holding yours. “She said you thought I was pretty.” His lips were still parted and his warm hand was still wrapped around yours, holding you still, keeping you from blowing away in this wind.

“She told me you said that. That was a lie, right? They’re playing games with us.”

His lips were closed and his eyes were still watching your face. It didn’t seem like he was any closer to working out an answer to this puzzle.

“What lies did they tell you I said about you?”

Something flew by, something bigger than a leaf, maybe a small tree branch. You heard it hit the column that supported this patio and the sound of it made you jump as you spun around to see what it was.

“We should go in. It’s getting worse out here. And you seem extremely drunk.” When Kyungsoo finally responded to you, he didn’t answer any of your questions.

”Did Javier say anything about a mountain, or a p-picnic table?”

Kyungsoo stood up when you were distracted by the branch. He had spun on his heels and had walked away from you, leaving you half drenched and so close to the edge of this patio that the next swift gust could have easily thrown you off the platform down into the mud.

“Because they are lying.” You grasped for it. You leaned into it. You grasped and you leaned only where you expected to feel the strong sturdy column from this patio you felt none, and when you leaned you leaned against nothing at all and you felt the world leaving your body. You felt the falling. The falling scared you enough to let out a cry of fear. There was no floor beneath your feet, you were only falling down, how far did this step drop down onto the wet earth below?

You closed your eyes and braced for the impact. It would probably hurt. It might even break something. You’d ruin your outfit at the very least. You closed your eyes and you felt someone there. Someone warm and sturdy with smooth arms that circled around your waist, pulling you back from the edge with such strength and force you knew it had to be him. It had to be someone with a strong back who could support you and keep you from falling down.

You grasped at him, pulling yourself up with tight fists clenched around the white cotton of his shirt and when you opened your eyes the world had righted itself again. There was no more falling and no more panic. Your feet were planted firmly on this patio floor, situated directly in between his feet, your arms around his shoulders and his arms wrapped tightly around your waist and the rain that fell onto both of your heads dripped through his hair, pulling wet strands of black hair down in front of his eyes, obscuring most of his vision except for what he was looking at right in front of him, which was your face, which he looked all over without speaking. Those eyes touched over every one of your features and with each second that passed of it the more you began to feel the warmth returning to and soon overwhelming your skin.

You’d never be this close to him before this. You’d never wanted to be, before this. You let your eyes drift from the up close view of his lips to take in the view of his face. You allowed the smallest gasp to leave your chest. There was a thumping inside of you that seemed to originate from somewhere inside of him. Water ran down his face and you pulled your lips in, tasting rain water on your tongue.

“Inside. Now.” His command growled against your parted lips and you tasted the light fragrance of alcohol on his breath. The grip of his arms around your waist did not loosen despite the urgency you heard in his words.

Your hands should not have been moving but they were. The back of his shoulders and that plain white t-shirt was soaked through and the rain continued to fall over the both of you. When your hand traveled up the back of his shoulders and rested over the back of his neck you felt the incredible tension within his muscles there. He was solid and stiff and your hands should not have moved any more but you had a very flimsy grasp of your own self control

From the back of his neck you moved again, touching lightly around the front of him, fingertips trailing over his Adam’s apple and up to touch his pretty face.

The tension you felt within his arms changed when you let your fingertips trail over to his soft cheeks and when you touched the soft plump bottom lip you felt the clench of his jaw, the exhale of air through his nose and the tightening of his arms around your waist. His eyes were closed and that same thumping echoed throughout your chest.

“What did Javier tell you I said?” Your whispered question was stunted through the difficulty you had with breathing.

“That you thought I was someone with strong back muscles. I guess you need someone to help you move furniture. I don’t fucking know.”

You let out a laugh and his eyes opened to watch your face. He said it with a straight face but there was something just under his words that sounded like humor. The more time you spent with him, the more you actually began to pick up on the fact that most of the shit he said was a joke in disguise. Most of it. Sometimes he was just being mean. But this one was actually funny. You threw your head back with the laugh and his eyes danced around your entire face as you wound back down.

“You better not call me to help you move. We aren’t close enough for that.”

The real irony was this man saying something like that while still holding you tight up against his entire body like this. You were pretty sure he brought you back up to a normal body temperature by lending you the heat directly from his skin.

“Did you really tell Sara that?” You couldn’t bring yourself to say the words. There was a change in his posture when you asked it though.

You felt his arms loosen. You felt one arm leave you entirely and he reached around in front of himself to grab ahold of your hand, the same wandering one which had been touching his lips tonight and he wrapped his fingers around your hand, encasing it within his warmth and he pulled it down.

You felt the absence of his heat first, then the wobbliness of your legs returned to you, reminding you of just how drunk and cold you actually were.

“You’re soaking wet,” his words followed a quick glance down the length of you and even in this darkness you could make out the traveling of his pupils. You knew the fabric of this top and the too-short shorts would have clung to the shape of you — outlining the swell of your hips, the cinch of your waist, your soft breasts — giving his imagination too much to work with in the unlikely instance that he would be so inclined to have any sorts of imaginations about you, you’d given him the material for such impossible impossibilities.

It didn’t matter.

It would never happen. He was turning away from you, taking his warmth and body heat and muscles covered in transparent thin white cotton on top and flimsy black fabric that when the lighting flash just right gave you the outline of what you both knew was occurring between your hips and his hips when they’d been pressed up tightly against each other.

He was leaving and the big metal door slammed shut and before you could even shout out from behind him, calling him a coward for avoiding your question — and before you could even tell him how absolutely full of shit he was, the door opened back up and Sara was at your side with soft, dry, warm towels and a crowd of fussing and fretting Shitty Sands Resort staff members were all blabbering on about how lucky you were that you didn’t actually fall off that patio onto the jagged rocks and cactus (!!) below and how heroic and magnanimous Doh Kyungsoo was to have saved your pathetic and insignificant life.

He spun the tale to a crowd of very impressed ooh-ers and ahh-ers and you were far too drunk to add anything more than to throw out the random accusation that the entire group of them were dirty spies and the occasional request to go back outside which was shut down instantly by every single voice in the room.

You tried closing your eyes but this room, with its lifeless cement walls, was too still and too quiet. You started to hear new sounds the longer you existed in this perpetual state of oppressive silence.

You could hear your own heart beating inside of your chest. It was a noisy racket. You could hear your own annoyingly steady breathing and when you held your breath you could hear your absence of breathing and then worse, the count down to your eventual suffocation. You could hear that timer and the small grunts of your lung muscles fighting against your own death and the noisy gasp for air when your survival instincts kicked in and jump started your breathing again — your silly brain refused to let you die. Again and again you listened. A gurgle in your stomach paired with the twinge you felt with the growl. The sound of your throat constricting and the saliva that pooled inside of your mouth was swished backward and swallowed down your throat, temporarily closing up your ears and the sound of the pressure that changed as it went down. Every sound that happened inside of you was up for grabs. Every twitch and breath could be a source of some stimulation for your brain. Eventually your ears drifted further.

You could hear wind outside and some sort of groaning sounds of what you assumed was the building you were stuck inside the belly of, shifting and shaking with the strong winds outside. Even those sounds eventually shifted to the background of your focus and at the tail ends of the third hour you swear to God you began to hear him.

A small shift on top of his bed at the far end of the room. The quietest throat clearing. A rustling of, now, dry cotton fabric as blunt nails scratched three times over an itch on his skin. A deep breath pulled into his lungs slowly and exhaled through plump parted lips. Once you’d managed to tune into the sound of the air of his lungs, you heard another breath. A steady in and a steady out. A quicker, deeper pull of air as his rhythmic pace stuttered just a bit, and the eventual evening out again of his breaths. Was he asleep? Had that lucky bastard actually been fortunate enough to drift off to sleep and spare himself some of this agonizing boredom?

For absolutely no reason you could imagine, and there really was very little reason happening inside of you right now anyway, you could feel the pace of your own breathing even out. It felt almost involuntary the way you felt compelled; with his inhale, your lungs breathed in. With his exhale, your air left your nostrils and you pursed your own lips just a little, allowing some of the expelled air to pass over your tongue and slip over your lips. Your next inhale was perfectly timed again and you didn’t even have to think about the exhale; you were in sync.

It was absolute madness that you were paying attention to this. The only thing that saved you from actual insanity was that you were aware of how insane this was. The really insane people didn't know they were insane, right? This could be what you told yourself. This could be your absolution.

How much longer could you stand? You could always…leave, right?

You weren’t technically trapped inside of this room. Your mind was drifting through the memories of walking into this place following Sara who navigated the confusing hallways easily. She knew the way. You did not. You recalled walking by a few doors and many dark corridors with many large and mature spider webs in some of the corners.

You pictured leaving this room and walking with fake confidence. Just a harmless little journey. A bit of exploration without a flashlight, through some of the sections of this bunker that didn’t receive the benefit of the generator's power.

The exploration would quickly grow spooky with the soundtrack of the howling winds and the lifelike groaning of the building around you as you prodded on down an unknown path. And when you felt the first strings of sticky spider webs brush against your skin, you would soldier through them. When you felt the bigger, stickier ones attach to your arms and legs and lightly pull against you as you tried to take them off, stubbornly transferring them from fingers to hands and thoroughly coating you so that no amount of flicking could shake them loose and when shaking turned harder you’d only gather more webs. Your cool exterior would crack as the panic set in. They would cover your arms, your torso, reaching up to your neck and your face. And by the time the spiders came out, with their pokey legs and their angry jaws sinking down into your skin, the screaming wouldn’t help any. Screaming would only give them another dark and damp orifice to crawl inside of and bite down, giving you some sort of tongue infection caused by their venom that didn’t even have a cure yet because the scientists that study spiders hadn’t had a chance to reach this part of the world to develop their anti-venom yet. Your tongue would turn black and fall off. The spider would lay eggs inside of your windpipe and burrow into all of your tubes, spreading their venom and eggs and crawly legs and biting jaws and you would die an agonizing death, alone in the darkness.

You reached a hand up and scratched at a tickling sensation you felt on your arm. You swear to god you felt the slight tingle of tiny traveling legs the more you pictured trying to leave this room on your own just because you were bored.

What would your obituary say? ‘A testament to her generation’s short attention span, she couldn't tolerate even the slightest bit of boredom. She bravely ventured out into the darkness where she was eaten alive by man eating spiders just for something to break the monotony.’

You heard a real sound. The genuine squeak of old mattress springs compressing on the far side of the room. The squeak was more than just someone shifting in the bed. This was a squeak of real movement. Kyungsoo was moving.

You heard the push off of a body from the bed, followed by shuffling footsteps moving in your direction.

You turned your head to watch him. From your vantage point he was defying gravity and walking on the walls of this upside down room. The silent man caught your eye for a second as his hand landed on the doorknob and he pulled it open.

“Where are you going?” You couldn't help yourself. You had given yourself the heebie jeebies with all the spider thoughts and even though he sucked, he was the only other human being here that you could use as a spider shield. Surely they would go for him first. He smelled good and had soft smooth skin, easier for tiny fangs to bite into. You’d already planned on pushing him through the webs first.

“Out,” he said flatly.

You tossed your legs away from the wall and sprung to life. Leaping to your feet, you reached the door before it slammed shut and you pushed yourself through the opening taking several frantic steps to catch up with him.

Your steps were very quick. You were fueled by fear as you moved and you hadn’t been paying attention enough to his steps to catch the moment he reacting to the sound of you coming up behind him.

He stopped walking forward before you had a chance to shift and you embarrassingly hurled yourself into him, bouncing your chest right off of the warm, solid wall that was the back of the man. You hadn’t braced yourself at all. Your nose bumped against the back of his head.

You bounced off of him with a surprising force. Why did he have to stop so suddenly like that?

You stumbled when you hit him and took three tiny steps back to keep your balance upright and covered your nose with your fingertips. You managed to keep the small yelping sound from the impact concealed under your hand but it felt implied with the obvious thud of both of your bodies hitting together.

Kyungsoo spun around halfway and looked into your surprised face.

“Where are you going?” His eyes bounced against your face lightly and you quickly closed your wide-open mouth and dropped the hand from your nose.

“Out,” you said with a shrug and a tiny lift of your chin.

It wasn’t as if you weren’t allowed to leave, right? You didn’t need to stay back there in that room all alone. You had been planning on venturing out all along. You couldn’t help it if you just happened to leave at the exact same time that he left, and you just happened to be traveling in the exact same direction that he was traveling in.

His eyes narrowed on you for a moment, no doubt jumping to his own conclusions.

You stood your ground, crossing your arms over your chest to really sell it and you did your best to ignore the light tickle you felt running up your leg just above your sock. Spider. Big hairy spider crawling. The second he gave up and turned back around, resuming his forward momentum, you reached down and swatted away whatever it was you’d imagined crawling on you.

Your hand came back empty which you took as a good sign. You hadn’t squished something with a belly full of a hundred eggs against your leg. You didn’t feel the scattering feet of thousands of tiny babies crawling up your leg, under your shorts, seeking refuge in your own personal orifices.

While you’d done an excellent job of matching his breathing pace back inside the room, you were doing a shitty job of walking at the exact right speed to keep up with his quick legs. He wasn’t outright running away from you but he was definitely putting some cardio in right now. This was the pace of a speed walker at least. You caught up to him though and you even managed to read his posture enough to catch yourself from running into him again when he abruptly stopped and turned fully around to face you again.

His eyes were wide and his eyebrows were raised.

“Stop following me,” he warned with a low voice. Yes, yes. The very menacing man is very threatening. You tried not to visibly roll your eyes.

You simply shook your head and shrugged your shoulders in full denial.

You had no idea what he was talking about. The man was losing his mind. You were just out for a stroll. This was a big coincidence and frankly he was acting silly with his suspicions of you.

“I’m not following you. I’m just…going out.”

“Going where?” He challenged.

“Out.” You countered, “Out. Out of the room, just out.”

He definitely seemed like he had a destination in mind as he moved. You wondered if he got some sort of a grand tour of this place that you didn't get before you arrived. He knew you were full of shit, and you knew you were full of shit, but of course you weren't going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. You wanted to see what he was up to and where he was going because you were not about to be left back there in that silent concrete tomb all alone while he explored and adventured over here doing who knows what.

You’d gathered enough to know that he was headed toward whatever room was behind that solid big blue door at the end of this hallway.

You were going to witness it. You needed something. Anything.

He gave up again and he was moving.

You were on his tail, stepping inline right beside him where he walked so you could pry some intel from him. He obviously knew more about this place than you did.

“What’s in there?” You asked, pointing to the blue door.

“Kitchen.”

“Ooo, a kitchen.”

You reached for the handle when he reached for the handle and you pulled at the door when he pulled at the door. You pushed yourself through the narrow opening when he pushed himself through the narrow opening and you found yourself shoulder to shoulder with this man as he pushed hard against you, trying his absolute best to beat you through this doorway. You weren’t about to just let him have it. The struggle made you grunt and you could feel his body tensing beside you. The struggle turned into a silent shoving fight of hands, elbows, and fingertips; causing you both to get stuck right in the middle of the doorway. The hard wooden door frame on one side of you and a brick wall of a man’s shoulders and thick biceps on the other side of you, pushing you back, forcing himself to move through the doorway before you could manage, with sheer brute strength.

He grunted and pushed back harder and he popped out on the other side of that doorway first.

He won.

You wrinkled your nose and scowled at him, deciding then and there that if it came down to it, he was getting fed to the spiders.

Beyond the doorway the room opened up into an industrial looking kitchen space. It was lit up and to your surprise was occupied with five people. Five whole people were in this room. Their surprised heads turned to look at the doorway the moment the door opened and five people witnessed the fight to get through the doorway with varying expressions of curiosity on most of their faces. Two faces, the two people you found most familiar here, Sara and Mr. Chen had different looks in their eyes. More amusement than confusion.

“There they are! You two are right on time.” Mr. Chen smiled widely with a note of excitement in his tone that you struggled to return with your greeting. You felt too caught off guard with what seemed to be happening inside here.

In here Doh Kyungsoo was a different person. The shift was jarring. He was friendly and smiling and bowing politely, shaking the hands of the three other people in the room. Making their acquaintance. Being very pleased about it. Catching their names and using them immediately to commit them to memory.

He was grabbing a stool and pulling it up, taking a seat around the big stainless steel countertop as if he knew it would be there and he knew something was coming.

Your feet were slower to follow him in here. The more you looked around you began to notice details. There were bags of supplies on the counter. Nothing bad there. Enough food and goods to get you all through the week without being able to leave this place. Pots and pans and kitchen utensils were on the stoves and you could even smell something delicious cooking in here. Aside from the kitchen equipment, you also saw bags, small office supplies for writing. A few had power banks charging their phones. There were wired earpieces unwound on the tables and a portable radio that was on low, giving some weather related reports.

There was a big white board with scribbles on it. The moment your eyes zeroed in on it someone else cleared their throat and another person grabbed the whole thing and flipped it upside down. You were still able to make out your name written there before it was flipped. Below your name, a small list with different bullet points. Details about you. Very basic things. None of it bothered you much. What did send a wave of annoyance though you, was the other column with Kyungsoo’s name written atop and a matching bulleted list. In all other instances that would have also been fine. The real issue you had was the single red hand drawn heart that sat in between both columns.

Someone in this room, maybe even all of them, had been crafting a scheme, it seemed. A scheme that warranted a red heart. It seemed that the five of them thought they were still working on a love match, despite the hurricane outside, despite the change of setting, despite the fact that there was no way…not even if he was the last man on this entire island… not even if the rest of the world ceased to exist and it was up to the two of you to repopulate the human race or it would face extinction…there was no way. RIP to humanity.

Your eyes reached for Sara. She avoided you as you expected she would. The single sheet of hand written paper she held in her hands was her excuse.

It seemed that they had been working hard to prepare something for you both. A fact that surprised the hell out of you given the current limitations and the unusual circumstances, but something that struck you as even more shocking was the nonplussed expression on Kyungsoo’s face. He merely sat down on the stool, chatted with one of the staff members who was preparing some dish on the other side of the counter and acted like he did not find a single thing about this puzzling.

The howling wind outside grew louder for a moment and the lights flickered.

”Okay then. Let’s get started shall we? The first thing on the itinerary that I’m sure everyone has read, the first event tonight is dinner. And of course the meals you will enjoy will be a fine dining experience. Made with locally sourced ingredients and freshly made in house. Luckily Javier, our head chef and our wonderful staff here prepared for such an emergency situation and even though we may be temporarily displaced here in this shelter, we will do our best to give you the most authentic Shifting Sands experience we are able to. Whatever we are lacking in facilities, we hope to make up for with our passion and sincerity.”

Wait a minute, there was an itinerary?

You never got an itinerary. You looked down at Kyungsoo and where he sat leaning his elbow against the countertop and the man seemed much too relaxed in his posture for him to also not have an itinerary. In fact he was the one who came here at the exact time that this event had been scheduled to take place. Not only did he have an itinerary, but he also had planned on coming here for a fancy schmancy dinner without telling you about it; and even had gone out of his way to dissuade you from following him here.

Mr. Chen continued speaking, “Now in the grand fashion of the Shifting Sands Resort. In spite of the unconventional kick off of the Seventh Annual Singles Retreat, and in accordance with the fine print, A. K. A. the terms and conditions that you both agreed to and signed during registration—”

You leaned just a little bit so you could ask Kyungsoo a question without the rest of the group hearing and without interrupting the explanation of what today’s dinner menu would be. It smelled delicious and you were sure you would enjoy whatever they gave you. You’d been getting pretty hungry actually. You hadn’t had a thing since the snacks on the airplane and you’d been trying to ignore your own stomach growling for the better part of three hours since you weren’t sure what kinds of emergency provisions this place had been stocked with. Now that you could smell the food you actually began to relax a little bit. You even spied some alcohol in one of the corners. Some tasty high end food and some cocktails sounded like exactly what you needed right now.

“I didn't get an itinerary,” you whispered over his head, “did you get one?”

Kyungsoo heard you but did not look up at you. His eyes remained fixed on the man in the suit giving his talk.

“Mhm,” he mumbled.

Mr. Chen continued. You admit now you may have missed a bit, “…and your partner will complete a series of fun activities designed to test…”

”So you knew this was going on and you didn’t tell me?” You gasped with the realization of his dirty trick he’d tried to get away with, “You even tried to leave me behind back there!”

“bring you both closer…”

”It's not my job to take care of you, Princess.”

You stretched your hands out toward him but stopped just short of making any actual contact. You did, in great imaginative detail inside of your mind, bring your hands right up to him and wrap them tightly around his exposed neck, letting your fingers dig into the sensitive and squishable windpipe that supplied this man with oxygen and allowed him to say such rude things to you; shaking and squeezing hard enough to get him to make that satisfying ‘GAK GAK GAK’ sound just before the lights went out.

“…and of course, the ———— the specially prepared five-course meal our head chef, Javier, has ready for you. It smells delicious doesn't it? If you don't eat it, we certainly will.”

Mr. Chen and company were all giggling amongst themselves.

Your hands were still raised for attack when Kyungsoo looked up at you but you were quick to drop them and hide them behind your back as you pushed a sweet smile up to your face. If he had noticed your murderous thoughts he didn't mention them because he was looking up at you with his big brown eyes as if he had something else on his mind entirely. Why was he suddenly interested in what you were doing? Why were his eyes so clear and big?

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he whispered under his breath. Whatever it was seemed to have shaken him up a bit. You suddenly wished you had been paying more attention to tonight’s menu.

The next words Mr. Chen spoke sent a chill down your spine.

“If you lose, you’ll face some stiff penalties.”

Wait a minute…

“Although you will still have a chance to win some basic ingredients with certain…limitations attached to their use. Break those rules and you lose ingredients one by one. If you aren’t careful you could find yourself dining on plain white rice tonight.”

He couldn't be serious. You’d agreed to this in the registration terms? You had to be imagining this. Maybe you’d gone mad with hunger.

“Dammit. Son of a— ” Kyungsoo was still having a dramatic reaction under his breath. There was cursing. For once you agreed with the man. There was no way you had agreed to this.

He was standing up and he reached a warm hand down and he grabbed ahold of your wrist, pulling you toward the side of the room with an oddly serious look in his eyes. You hadn’t expected to suddenly be manhandled so your legs reacted with hesitation. He had to pull you a little bit harder to get you to actually move but you protested, “What? What’s happening?” You were unprepared. You felt more confused than you were hungry, if that was even possible.

“Were you even listening? This is why you don't have an itinerary. Come on, we have to win dinner. I’m so damn hungry.” With his complaint, your stomach sounded out in agreement as it growled noisily enough for him to hear it too. “Good, maybe you’ll be motivated enough to cooperate.”

“Cooperate? What are we even doing?”

“Games, Princess. Are you slow? We need to play together and win the right to eat that dinner they’ve got us smelling.”

The games, had your partner been anyone else but him, would actually have been fun. They might actually even be something you could win.

You couldn't wrap your brain around feeling bamboozled. When you raised your hand before the first game to ask, “Excuse me, I never got an itinerary,” the upward inflection at the end made it sound like you asked a question and Sara, who had been setting up for a game, was the one to respond.

“Each pair received one itinerary to share,” she said as she moved to another table where she filled a big plastic bowl with cotton balls. She lifted an index finger and pointed at Kyungsoo. “He’s got it and was told to share it.”

His big eyes looked at you and then away from you. Between your hunger and his crimes against you, you couldn't bring yourself to say anything to him. You felt on fire inside.

It had been sabotage after all. This was who he really was. The more you learned, the more you wondered if the universe had saved you that day you’d been stood up by him.

There was a game involving little plastic spoons and cotton balls, the object of which was to work together to scoop up cotton balls while wearing a blind fold with a spoon held between your teeth and place them into a bowl on top of the other person’s head. It required both parties to get close enough to each other to be able to feel where the bowl was. The goal was to get five cotton balls in the bowl. Five cotton balls and you would eat dinner. Just five. This could have been so easy if only you could trust yourself to touch him without wringing his neck.

When time was called and you removed the blind fold you had a single lonely cotton ball inside the bowl on top of his head. His skin was flushed and he looked slightly damp from the effort. He wouldn't meet your eyes. His straight black hair was tousled on top of his head and it laid in a way that was infuriatingly attractive for how much of a scoundrel he was.

The second game was an instant loss. It was some sort of a trivia game in which you had to act out the name of a popular song for him to guess. The man did not know a single of the top 5 hits making their rounds on social media right now. The next round was him acting out the titles of popular animated movies. You hadn’t watched an animated movie since The Land Before Time betrayed your trust and scarred you for life.

The last and final game was back-writing. He drew something on a sheet of paper stuck to your back and you had to guess what it was. He was allowed to choose his own drawing.

It started out well enough. You were 80% sure it was a pair of eyes. Something with a pair of perfectly round circles. Not too big, not too small. There was a smaller round circle in the center of each bigger round circle and there was something wrong with you when he drew the next part. It should have been something easy, something with a face, but there was something strange you were feeling coming out of the tip of his marker.

Something that threw your mind back to more than three hours ago, the little bickering fight you had with him in the room. His wet shirt and muscles below the shirt. His toned and defined bare chest and — and yours. Your transparent top. That comment he made about your wet t-shirt and about just how much he had been able to see of you. The red hot embarrassment you felt when you realized he had seen everything. You’d dwelled on it for a significant amount of time during the time spent upside down on your bed in solitary confinement. His marker was making a double sweeping motion below the circles. The shape of your breasts below your round areolas and perky nipples in the center. There was no mistaking it. You felt your face grow hot. Your breathing quickened and you could feel the upset brewing inside of your belly. How dare he?

Nipples.

Nipples in the center of breasts. No doubt as seen through a wet transparent pink t-shirt and a very sheer lace bra.

Was this man drawing your own nipples on your back?

You gasped out loud at the thought and before you could control yourself you whispered out a scandalized, barely audible guess.

“N-n-nipples?”

“What did she say?” The two people across from you were whispering to each other. “I think she said nipples.”

“She didn't say nipples.”

“She definitely said nipples.”

Kyungsoo’s marker had stopped drawing. You turned around to look into his face, spinning further in some foolish attempt to see the paper that was stuck to your back in the process.

“Did I get it? Did you draw my nipples? Just to fuck with me, right? Because you saw them earlier?”

Kyungsoo’s jaw was clenched and his marker was still hung in the middle of the air. His face was pink and his eyes were closed.

“My nipples, she said. My nipples. He saw her nipples earlier”

After a few seconds he lifted a hand to run over the length of his own face and he reached for the cap of his marker, quickly covering it and tossing it onto the table in front of you with a noisy clatter.

You were straining, reaching behind you to grab the paper with your fingertips. You ripped it off and quickly brought the paper around to look at it.

It was Pororo. The little cartoon penguin from the children’s television show. It was a pretty good likeness. He did a great job. It didn't resemble a pair of tits at all.

You were a fool.

Across the room, you heard the squeak of a dry erase marker. Someone was writing something on the white board. Sara had made a note below the little red heart that sat in the center space between your names.

- he saw her nipples

“I saw his nipples too. Put that down.” You had your finger lifted and you were pointing at Sara. After a few seconds of her looking at you she turned back around and the marker was squeaking again. She placated you and made it even again. You were temporarily satisfied to see, ‘- she saw his nipples too,’ written below the heart.

“I think one of them is more significant than the other.” One of the staff members, Jun spoke up.

“That’s what I said,” Kyungsoo said in agreement.

“Right?” Jun was going now. “I mean a guy’s nipples, that’s everyday stuff. But when a guy sees a woman’s nipples…that’s first base at least.”

Sara was squeaking again. Long slow squeaks. She was circling the ‘nipples’ bullet points. Beside it she wrote “1st base.”

“Wait a minute,” you spoke up, “how is that first—”

“That's not—” Kyungsoo started to object too.

”Okay,” You were both interrupted by Mr. Chen, clapping his hands together, “let’s move on. So you lost the game. That means we get to eat the five course dinner Javier has prepared.”

Another squeak sounded out as Sara flipped the white board over, effectively ending the discussion that the two of you probably weren’t ever supposed to witness anyway. Heads were nodding around the room. You were outnumbered.

Soon you were distracted by a new task he was explaining.

“Not to fret my lovelies, We still have a kitchen loaded with fresh ingredients for you to win. These games will be easier. I’m not a monster,” He was laughing to himself.

Kyungsoo had come to stand by your side and was leaning in to whisper something to you as you tried to pay attention this time to Mr. Chen’s instructions.

“I need you to stop fighting me if we are going to eat anything. We just need a few things and I’ll cook something good. Can you just be nice for like an hour?”

Was he asking you to make a deal with the devil right now? Yeah you would win these ingredients but you weren’t about to forget how he revealed the incident with your nipples during the drawing game.

“You didn't have to do that…talk about the nipples thing like that.”

You felt his hands on you then. He had gripped you by the arms and he spun you around so you could look into his face. His eyes were wide and his expression was deeply, deeply flabbergasted.

“Are you stupid? You did that. You did it. I drew Pororo. I never said anything about your goddamned nipples. They would never have even known about your nipples if you hadn’t said it.”

Oh he was heated. He must also get grumpy when he is hungry.

But he was right. His eyes were full of fire and passion and you replayed the recent betrayal again in your head. You remembered Pororo now. You had just been in such a rush to blame him for everything that you forgot yourself for a bit. You felt like maybe your brain didn’t work right around him. Maybe it had been the strict no carb, low calorie diet you had been on for the month before this trip. You’d packed plenty of sexy bikinis and you’d finally reached a level of confidence in your body at the expense of your own health to wear them. This was supposed to be a beach vacation, afterall.

“Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah that was a good Pororo. I’m just so hungry, I feel like I’m going to pass out.”

The fire in his eyes went out and his expression softened a tiny bit. If you hadn’t been watching his face so closely you might have missed it, it was so subtle. He was looking very closely at your face. His frustrations were replaced with something else entirely. Something you’d never seen before. Something you didn’t feel comfortable commenting on here. You didn’t need that kind of observation written down anywhere that could come back and bite you in the ass later.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

You closed your eyes with his difficult question. You couldn’t remember times anymore. You’d changed too many time zones to get here. “Barracuda,” you whispered with a little head shake. You really did feel awful. You could feel a sticky dampness on your skin.

“Hey, can she get like a banana or something, I don't think she’s okay.”

You’d had something shoved into your palm. Something sweet to eat. You lifted and you took bite after bite, chewing and swallowing and you were steered to sit down. Sara was beside you as you slowly began to feel human again and you looked up into all the faces in the room, admonishing yourself for seeking out one face in particular. You had no business looking for him first.

“I’m okay now. Thank you, Sara.” You patted the back of her hand twice and you stood up, keeping careful control over where your eyes wandered. Sara seemed to be looking at you much too closely and after a few moments she looked behind her where Kyungsoo sat on his nonchalant stool with his nonplussed elbow propped up on his aloof countertop as he waited for you to get your shit together already so he could eat something at some point tonight. She looked back at your face with a slight narrowing of her eyes before she was standing up and making her way back over to that goddamned white board.

You had to ignore the squeaks. She was reading into things again. She had watched way too many romantic comedies and read too many romance novels.

Mr. Chen was explaining the game as her marker squeaked and squeaked and before you had the chance to read what she wrote, the whole board was flipped around again. You’d caught enough only to notice another two entries had been made into the love column between both of your names. You had no idea what she added, and the curiosity was probably going to give you an ulcer.

Mr. Chen wasn’t exaggerating when he said that the games for the ingredients would be easier. They were laughable really; very basic trivia questions that either of you could have answered back in elementary school. You both soon had a pile of things that Kyungsoo would surely be able to spin up into something amazing. You’d never tried his food before but Claire had once said one of his dishes had almost made her leave her husband, so you were sure it was about to be good.

You should have been more on alert. The games were too easy, you should have known that this psychopath Mr. Chen had something up his sleeve.

“Now, If you recall earlier I mentioned that these ingredients that you won come with certain …limitations to their use,” He was explaining again.

“Only one of you will be allowed to handle these ingredients and cook them,” He said.

The limitations were just that. You were both made painfully aware that the use of these ingredients carried with them the extra rule that only one person would be able to cook.

Well that was easy. Kyungsoo would cook. He was literally a chef. You weren’t that great in the kitchen anyway. You could do very basic things but nothing fancy like he could do. Just when you’d allowed your posture to sag a little bit Mr Chen hit you both with the other half of the rule.

“And the one who cooks, will have to be blindfolded as they do it. Whoever is not cooking will be allowed to see, allowed to speak, and allowed to touch the other person, but none of the ingredients. Only the cook will touch the ingredients and as long as ingredients are touched, the cook must remain blindfolded. Any ingredient the non-cook happens to touch will be forfeited. You will have one hour.”

There it was. You felt so very tired.

You felt blindsided. This was ridiculous. One glance at Kyungsoo told you he had similar thoughts about this. It was evident now that those easy ass games to win these ingredients was a sham and the real game was starting right now.

Kyungsoo had reached your side and you could feel the warmth of his arm as he leaned in beside you.

“So, I guess I will cook. You’ll be the one telling me what to do. This isn’t my kitchen, but just tell me where things are and it might work. You wouldn’t,” his eyes narrowed at you and he lifted a finger to lightly gesture in your direction, “you wouldn’t try and actually kill me, right?”

“Kyungsoo,” you rolled your eyes at his silly question, “I promise I will not intentionally kill you today.” It was the best you could do. You were about to blindfold this man and give him fire and blades. You would probably do your best.

“I guess that’s the best I’m going to get. A flimsy promise.”

You had a sudden thought and you reached for his arm, pulling him back from the pile of ingredients he was examining as he got the kitchen area ready.

“I just had the best idea!” You heard your own excitement. “Let’s just eat the ingredients raw. Like a salad maybe.” You’d been looking at the mounds of veggies, you saw zucchini, lettuce and tomatoes, Picking up the mandoline and pretending to slice the cucumber as you added, “Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber,” with a giggle. He didn't laugh. He didn't get it.

He looked at your face and shook his head back and forth. He was not online enough to get the reference.

“Are you a grizzly bear? Eat this raw?” He asked bluntly while motioning to the entire fish complete with head, scales and tail fins that laid on the countertop in front of him. “No way am I wasting this. Look at its eyes. This was caught this morning. Right Javier?”

“Yes, Chef Doh!” Javier shouted in excitement from the big table where the crew, Mr. Chen, Sara, Javier and the two younger staff members, Jun and Roxy, were already eating the fancy dinner, just as Mr. Chen had promised they would. It looked and smelled delicious and you frowned toward Kyungsoo, giving in, out of defeat to whatever maniac-esque idea he had about cleaning and cooking this entire fish while blindfolded.

“Just because I’m eating doesn’t mean I’m not watching you two. Remember the rules!” Mr. Chen shouted across the table between bites, lifting his steak knife and pointing it toward you for emphasis.

Kyungsoo had his blindfold on. You waved a hand in front of his face to make sure he couldn’t see anything and you even dipped your head down below his face to see if he could somehow peak through the bottom. He gave you no reaction and you motioned to the group at the table that the blindfold was secure.

Kyungsoo was just standing there and you very quickly realized the entire point of this.

You had to touch him.

“Umm…” you mumbled out, “I’m going to touch you. Just a warning,” you added lamely.

“I figured you might,” he monotoned and you lifted both of his forearms so his hands were elevated, grabbing each of his hands you turned them palm up.

Ignore this.

This was survival.

Ignore this, it’s not even happening. You repeated this to yourself again.

His skin was warm and smooth. The backs of his hands had some of the softest skin you’d ever felt below your fingertips and you had to actually cradle his hand within yours to hand him the vegetables. He was standing beside the sink, washing things. It was a splashy, messy thing. You grabbed his wrists to guide him to the colander and towels.

“Which way is the bowl?” His hands were reaching across the countertop.

“Left,” you said while also trying arrange the cutting board and knife on the counter.

His hand reached out fast and he knocked a head of lettuce, sending it flying as it rolled off the counter onto the floor.

You heard giggles at the dinner table.

“Sorry, I meant right.”

“Right?” He reached right and found the bowl easily. That lettuce was gone. You weren't allowed to pick it up.

“Yeah, I get them mixed up. Sorry,” It was definitely your mistake. You always had trouble with the horizontal directions. You didn't know what it was about them but they never came out right the first time. Not when you were rushed and didn’t have a chance to really think about it.

“You get right and left mixed up?” Kyungsoo was talking now, he was lining up carrots and zucchinis on his cutting board and he was carefully feeling everything with his fingertips; the location of the knife, the location and orientation of the vegetables and he made a quick cut of the tops of the vegetables, clearing the scraps away with the blade.

“But they never change. Right will always be right. You only have to learn it once.”

“Feels like it moves to me, I guess. I never get it right. East and West too. I’ve always been like this.”

“Ahh, so just touch me next time, instead of saying right or left, okay?,” His small concession left you feeling odd in a kind of warm way. It wasn’t judgmental or pushy. Just accommodating. You didn't dwell on it. He was chopping. He was quick, even without his sight you could see the small touches he made with his finger tips curved in a way to direct the blade. The resulting slices were all perfectly even and he made such quick work of the vegetables you actually had trouble clearing the spaces as he worked. You had to work twice as fast as you thought you might to keep up with him.

The team of staff members had slowly finished their meal and had made their way to the countertop to watch.

One thing that struck you was how very calm he sounded here. Nothing felt urgent or angry. He was very controlled in this environment. There were small whispers.

“Where is the filet knife? It’s long and skinny and very sharp.” And you would respond by leading his elbow in the direction of the knife handle, always being sure to hand him only the handles and never any parts that might injure him. He found a rhythm naturally; moving around the space as if he could actually see where he was going. He even mixed something sweet looking into a container and popped it in the freezer behind him with minimal help from you.

Each of his questions received a quick response from you. Each instruction received immediate action.

“Can you fill the two saucepans on the stove with water and put them on high to boil? She can touch the water, right?”

“I need tweezers and a damp paper towel placed above the cutting board.”

“Where is the trash?”

You were moving as instructed, feeling quite proud of yourself when you’d anticipate something he needed and giving it to him the second he began to ask.

“Towel?”

“Here.”

“Oil?”

“Right here.”

“Garlic?”

“Here it is.”

Eventually a sauce was made. Fish was cut up in sections with a little, “are you very hungry? I’ll make bigger pieces,” as he touched the filet with his fingertips to gauge the size and thickness of the cuts.

Maybe this was your calling. Maybe you were meant to be a seeing eye person for a famous chef. You cleaned up behind him with ease, leading him to the tongs and even letting him know the moment you thought his frying pan was hot enough for the fish. He reached a hand out very close to the pan and you pulled his back hand fearing he might not realize how hot it was.

“It’s okay, I need to feel it.” He got very close to it and said, “You’re right, it’s perfect.” You felt about as full as you could. That was a compliment, right?

He hovered with his tongs over the fish and asked, “do I have it?” And you adjusted his position just a little before you confirmed, both with a soft “yes” and a little tap of your fingertips over his hand that held the tongs.

From your peripheral vision you could see Sara scribbling something on that damned white board of hers.

Most of his mixing and seasoning seemed to be happening by smell. You noticed he leaned in very close to smell everything he was using. Mixing sauces was done by smell too. He would add more of something after getting a good smell of it and finally he dipped his pinky finger in to taste the result. He was mostly quiet as he did this but after a few simple nods of his head he must have particularly liked something he came up with because he dipped his finger in again, holding it out in the direction of where you stood.

“Try this,” he said and you stared at his outstretched finger with some thick light colored sauce on the end of it. Both of your hands were full. You were holding the next things he would need for the fish and he was shaking his finger, looking for you, “where did you go? Taste this.”

You leaned then, letting your lips part over the sauce and trying to get only the sauce between your lips. You left behind most of it on his finger.

What you tasted though, was almost magical. How in the hell did a flavor like this come out of that random pile of ingredients you both won in the games?

“Oh wow,” you remarked honestly. Kyungsoo pulled his hand down and stuck his finger back into his mouth licking off the rest of the sauce you left behind and nodded his head in agreement.

“Good, right?”

Behind you, there was a furious squeaking as Sara wrote yet another bullet point on that blasted white board. Probably calling this little exchange your first indirect kiss with the man. Probably highlighting how you hesitated before moving in and how nonchalant you acted about it while your ears turned bright red from the embarrassment of technically having swapped saliva with the man.

Your hour for cooking was almost up. Mr. Chen had been occasionally announcing the amount of time remaining and you were gathering plates for him to serve things up.

“He can’t see can he?” Someone asked as they watched him work. The other members of the staff were enthralled and you watched in wonder as he plated dishes in pairs, starting with some puree he had made, swirling it beautifully on the bottom of the plate before placing the fish on top and topping the whole thing with two different sauces. On top of all of it went some sprinkling of something bright green and bright orange. The other plate had a chopped salad with greens, nuts and fresh fruit. He even pulled a sorbet out of the freezer for dessert and you could hardly believe this man had really made all of this in an hour while blindfolded. Even with your help the results itself were remarkable.

When the timer went off he removed his blindfolded and looked down at the spread, giving the smallest nod of approval.

“Now don’t go doing something stupid like falling in love with me after you eat this, Princess.”

It had been a joke, of course. It was received as a joke and the room erupted in chuckles. You had trouble with forcing the laugh in a way that was natural and convincing and you knew the reason why.

It was because part of why you’d been so hurt by everything cruel and mean that he had said and done to you so far was because you knew deep down inside that you were already very much in danger of doing the very thing he had warned you against.

So you did not laugh at his joke and the food was probably the most delicious meal you’d ever experienced in your entire life.

You did not laugh at his joke, not like Javier who chuckled whole-heartedly from the kitchen as he took taste tests of everything Kyungsoo had cooked.

You just ate your delicious food in silence and avoided the curious eyes of Sara who, alarmingly, also did not laugh at Kyungsoo's joke.

Sara who only watched you while you avoided Kyungsoo’s eyes for the rest of the night.

Sara, who came to some sort of conclusion that required her to stand up, walk up to her insufferable white board and squeak, squeak, squeak out some new bullet point below the hand drawn red heart that sat between your names.

“Is it normally this loud?” You shouted across the tiny airplane cabin but the lone flight attendant had her head turned as she peered through the open cockpit door. She didn’t hear your question and offered you no reassurances as she stood up, straightened her uniform, a tasteful pantsuit, and disappeared through the open doorway

“Fasten your seatbelt and prepare for landing, Hon,” she popped her head back out for the quick announcement and disappeared through the space again, leaving you completely alone to contemplate your own mortality and what you hoped would be a swift end. It felt impossible. You hadn’t even been able to see land from outside your window. It had been endless ocean for hours now. Maybe you wouldn’t even feel the impact. Maybe the adrenaline dump would protect your dying mind and body from the pain that came from with a water impact. Your knuckles were bright white as you gripped your armrests and you remembered that one episode of MythBusters that said the best position for a plane crash was with your body bent in two and your head tucked down between your legs.

The plane was shaking terribly. It was rattling and screeching. You were clenching down so hard on your teeth you half wondered if you might knock a few of them loose. You were praying to yourself with your eyes squeezed up tight and you wrapped your arms tightly around your thighs doing your best to hold yourself together even if this plane fell apart around you. There was a boom. You hoped you wouldn’t pee your pants but thought you might be justified if you did. The search and rescue team would understand as the collected your remains.

The roaring and trembling of this world around you creaked and moaned and swayed and eventually you could feel the change of speed deep inside your chest as everything, every groan and strain and clench came to a stop with a dramatic throwback on the landing that jostled your body and made you feel positively seasick.

The plane had stopped.

You were not dead.

“Ladies and Gent—” The pilot's voice broke through the tiny speaker over your head. You pulled your sweaty head up from your lap and looked through the still open cabin door as the man speaking paused for a moment to consider his words, “uhh…just lady, we welcome you to La Malinche Island. The temperature is a damp and balmy 89 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping as the winds pick up. Not sure what possessed you to fly to a tiny island in the Caribbean right before a hurricane hit but Barracuda Air does not want to know your business. We only care about our promise to you. Our promise of course, at Barracuda Air, with a … 0% flight cancellation rate, not counting that one incident with Jerry — be it rain or snow or sleet or hail, Barracuda Air does not care. Barracuda Air will get you there. Welcome to La Malinche. We hope you like 150 mile-per-hour winds and torrential rain.”

Hurricane? Is that was the roaring and terrifying shaking has been about? A goddamned hurricane?!

You’d checked the weather last week. There was zero mention of a hurricane. You pulled your cell phone out of your back pack and turned off airplane mode and you watched the cell service signal in the upper right hand corner spin and spin. It eventually gave up and gave you the saddest little no signal sign and you toggled airplane mode on and off again with the same terrible result.

But…but…

You were due.

“Thank you for flying Barracuda Air.” Your flight attendant was standing near the exit at the front of the plane; her voice just loud enough for you to hear it; her smile just wide enough for you to get the message.

You tried your phone one more time, this time turning the whole thing off and turning it on again while holding it up high above your head to be able to catch the signal better. You just needed a minute for it to come back on. You only needed one bar, one bar would be enough.

“Thank you for flying Barracuda Air.” This time her voice was closer. She was standing at your row now, her voice betrayed none of the urgency implied with the repetition. Her smile was still believable enough.

You looked down at the useless paperweight in your hands and outside of the window on the tarmac below, you watched the lone airport employee wheeling your checked bag away from the airplane. The wind whipped his rain jacket around his body fiercely in all directions and you swallowed down the very real sense of dread that was beginning to fill your stomach.

This was supposed to be a vacation. This was supposed to be paradise. It had been advertised as such in the brochure. The single’s retreat at the five star resort where only other eligible global singles of extremely high caliber would attend. The probably very expensive luxury retreat that was a gift from your very best friend in the entire world, Clare, who sold you on the idea that here — here you would surely find your soulmate. One that would be as delighted to meet you and you were to meet them.

Here you would be the most beautiful and captivating woman any of these sad, but not clinically; lonely, but not in a creepy way; brooding but not in a mean way; hurt and broken but not broken in some way that some sweet woman’s attention couldn’t fix — you’d be the most womanly woman any of these manly men had ever seen!

Definitely not the kind of man that still lived with an overbearing mother, but one who still loved his mother very much, but maybe lived far enough away from her that he didn’t have to listen to everything she told him anymore. Hell, maybe you’d get lucky and land a man with a dead mother. No, no, no. No need to be greedy.

But the kind of man — no, the kind of men who were very, very attractive.

They were going to be tall with clean skin and clean teeth and they’d be successful, but not too successful. They were smart, but not annoyingly so. Oh! And charming! But most importantly, they were men who would find you to be absolutely irresistible. These men were supposed to be waiting for you. They were going to be beside themselves when they got a load of you. They were going to flirt with you and call you sweetheart or darling with a southern drawl or and they would buy you drinks and feed you cheesy lines about how they’d never before seen a woman that held galaxies inside of her eyes like yours did.

“Ma’am,” a voice called to you, sharper than before, “you need to get off the plane. The airport is closing because of the storm. You can't stay here.”

You hadn’t even unbuckled your seat belt yet.

God forbid they give you a damn minute.

It was a disaster.

You quickly gathered all of your belongings. The flight attendant had pulled your carry-on bag down from the overhead bin and her smile had long since vanished as she held it out for you to take and get the hell off her plane already. You grabbed the handle, no longer grateful for her help. No longer thankful for the small bag of peanuts she’d fed you earlier or the two cans of soda she’d handed you hours ago. She was ushering you down the aisle, through the exit door, and had watched you navigate the scary stairs until you plopped your two feet right down into the cement of the tarmac belonging to the smallest airport you had ever visited in your entire life.

The wind came at you in waves. One second you were sure this whole hurricane thing had been exaggerated and the next your hair was taken and spun around your head, whipped into some sort of frenzied do as strands hit your cheeks like tiny, stinging whips. You did your best to grab ahold of it with one hand but lost your cardigan in the process. It flew a few feet and landed on the floor in a brown puddle of water beside the door with a hand-printed arrow directing you to open it for Baggage Claim.

You were an adult. You had been a responsible, self-sufficient adult for some years now. You had found yourself in situations that required you to navigate this cold cruel world by yourself before but as you reached down and picked up your sweater and watched the muck drip in slow, fat, thick drops from the once pristine knit fabric, you suddenly felt more alone than you’d ever felt in your entire life.

Behind you, far beyond this mystery puddle, the only one in this entire dry concrete hell; somewhere on that small runway you heard the Barracuda revving its engines for take off.

Maybe you weren’t due for anything good to happen in your life ever again. Maybe it was just going to be shit from now on.

Had you somehow brought all of this on yourself? Maybe it had been the bad thoughts you’d had. The ill wishes you’d genuinely hoped to fall on those who had done you dirty in your life. Your recent ex-boss, you’d hoped and prayed would face a bout of public uncontrollable diarrhea. Your ex-coworker who’d stolen work from you, lied about you and sabotaged you and who you believed led to you being fired, you hoped she would be hit by a city bus, not enough to kill her but you hoped at least three bones would be broken.

The ex boyfriend who cheated on you with your ex friend, you hoped the both of them would sail off into the sunset and be lost as sea, eaten by a whale or something scarier with suckers and sharp teeth.

And most recently, that friend of a friend, that charming, sweet, funny, and handsome man who would be absolutely perfect for you, according to Claire who set you both up — the blind date who not only stood you up, leaving you to wait for him for a whole hour at the fancy ass restaurant, but also, in some wacky attempt to tarnish your good name told all of your friends that you were in fact the one who flaked on the date. You could not imagine why he couldn’t have just come clean. Well you weren’t going to let him win. He was trying to play the victim when in fact you had been the loser who was stood up. You denied it earnestly. He maintained his lie and you both had been stuck in a bitter stalemate ever since. Any gathering of friends where he was scheduled to be there, you refused to attend. You heard through various sources that he had a similar reaction to the threat of your presence and this only fanned the flames even hotter. Any time his name was uttered in pleasant company you rolled your eyes and made snide remarks under your breath. Doh Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo. Chef Doh. Decorated and celebrated private chef, a genius with a knife and a frying pan. You wanted to vomit.

After a while the fight moved from only inside your own head to the real world. He would leave sarcastic replies to some of the things you said to your friends. Things you told them with love and respect would get a passive aggressive laughing reaction from him or some sort of contrary comment right below yours. You both evolved into taking little snips at each other in the comments of your mutual friends' social media posts and like the good friends they were, everyone of them politely ignored it.

Just, how dare he? There was nothing worse than men who lie. You hoped at the time that he would be exposed for the fake and liar that he was, although now as you wandered through this empty airport this punishment seemed not enough for your shitty mood. In this moment you hoped and prayed that he would have been the one trapped on a deserted island with a hurricane bearing down over his head. Even his name and profile picture filled you with an irrational rage. That sweet and innocent looking, fake ass motherf—

Wait.

Wait one goddamn minute.

Your forward movement abruptly stopped and you stood with your luggage in your hand on the sidewalk of an empty and deserted airport with no cell reception and no idea how to get to the hotel.

Wasn’t all this doom to my enemies wishing how you got yourself cursed by the universe? Was all of this really your own doing?

You took a step, trying to remember if the hotel was situated within walking distance of the airport. Trying to recall it was to the west or to the east or if maybe it was to the south.

This was a tiny island. Maybe it wasn’t that far. Maybe if you wandered around town someone might point you in the right direction and you wouldn’t be mugged or mudered.

You closed your eyes for a split second and smelled something crisp and funny in the air. You could feel the hairs on your arm standing on end and a feeling of panic surged through you as the first fat raindrops began to fall from the sky at the same time as an ear deafening boom sounded out over your head. It was so loud it shook the roof over your head.

You screamed and covered your head, taking several big steps back and away from the empty parking lot where the blinding flash of lightning must have struck.

There was a gross taste inside of your mouth. Your rational brain attributed it to the close lightning strike but you knew deep down what that taste really was.

It tasted like you might be about to make a deal with the devil. You shouted right out loud into the air above your head, “Doh Kyungsoo is great! I misunderstood him! He is a prime example of a man and a genuinely good person! I hope his pillow is always cold and his toast is never burnt!”

You knew it was silly. You were a silly lady.

Of course it was silly.

It wasn’t as if the skies would magically clear, the whipping winds would calm and five taxis would drive up each more eager than the last to drive you to your luxury resort for free.

You did hear something new and unexpected though. Something that had you spinning around to investigate.

There was a man standing behind you. He wore a clean crisp suit and a very wide and bright inviting smile on his face. He had cleared his throat. This respectable gentleman clearly had something to say to you.

“Yes?”

His smile widened with your acknowledgement, “Hello. My name is Mr. Chen. I’m the Concierge with Shifting Sands Resort, are you by chance Miss—” his eyebrows lifted and he extended a hand, palm up, the beginnings of your name formed on his lips.

“Oh my God, yes. I am her. She is me. Oh, thank you, thank you!”

His smile deepened and his eyes turned up into little moons on his pretty face and the relief that surged through you was complete and instantaneous.

“Might I take your bags, Miss?”

Was this man your savior? Would he have come to your rescue all along? Or was Doh Kyungsoo your karmic stabilizer?

You were loaded up and buckled in and well on your jolly way to your promised paradise of pampering and relaxation. Dare you wish for a handsome man or two desperately waiting to make your acquaintance?

Maybe you’d even settle for just one. One handsome and suave proper gentleman to spend the week with; to wine and dine with; to sweep you off your feet. Surely this entire trip wouldn’t be a complete waste. Surely you hadn’t dug yourself down that far deep yet.

Your driver had been maneuvering the big comfy van in silence up until now but you caught his kind eyes glance back at you in the rear view.

“Mr. Chen, please tell me some other people have showed up for this singles retreat.”

His eyes held on to yours for only a few seconds and his lips were pursing together in more thought than you figured was necessary.

“Ummm…” his voice trailed, “well…actually…”

His eyes drifted away from yours under the guise of watching the non existent traffic on this scenic road that, had it not started raining, might have been a beautiful drive.

You weren’t sure what kind of sacrifices the universe demanded. You wanted just one. You didn’t even ask for much, just another living breathing human male who was the complete opposite of that slimey, slandering, thought he was slicker than a bowl of shit, Doh Kyungsoo.

The car screeched to a halt and your seatbelt caught and firmly locked you into place, digging hard enough into your neck to leave a mark. The rain outside pelted the roof of the van, much harder now and Mr. Chen seemed to be breathing quite hard as he tripped the steering wheel tightly enough to turn his knuckles white.

“Miss, are you alright? I am sorry, this road is blocked. We will need to take another way around.”

Jesus. The near kiss with death had you gripping your seat very tightly and you closed your eyes.

That…that…ass— as lovely on the inside as on the outside, Doh Kyungsoo.

That saintly and angelic man.

That accurate and symmetrical and pragmatic and punctual, Doh Kyungsoo.

You could feel yourself running out of adjectives. What is the opposite of a rat bastard?

That legitimate, law-abiding, insured, and licensed to drive, Doh—

“Ahh, what were you asking? Other guests? Yes miss, of course. The singles retreat — well, we don’t have nearly the crowd we expected but there is at least one other guest who you should find most agreeable. He is very handsome and charming. All of the other staff members are positively enraptured by him already. Especially the ladies, but I have to admit I myself felt a bit of a flutter when he caught me in those big brown eyes of his.”

It worked. It fucking worked.

Son of a bi — son of a w-wise and gentle lady probably — what the hell did you know about his mother? She raised a f-fine excuse for a son, that much you knew. A real piece of work— err — art! A piece of art. A real, honest to god, adult male human being. You really needed to get that man out of your head. You could actually feel the first real dangerous slips into madness the more his name and his profile picture danced through your head.

You closed your eyes tight and you tried your absolute best to think about someone else. Anyone else. The mystery man who you were about to meet. The tall, dark, handsome, sweet and successful man who would sweep you off your feet the moment you met him.

The alternate route to the resort was down right pleasant. It was scenic and beautiful and you looked out the window as you drove the long way around, the very deserted road that took you along the breathtaking coastline. You continued the almost ritualistic positive compliments in your head Mr. Chen was chock full of his own compliments for the handsome and admirable guest who was to be your only other companion during this week’s retreat.

You were fine with that. Even if it didn’t turn into love — by the sounds of him and based on how Mr. Chen absolutely raved, you were sure the two of you would get along quite well and maybe even become good friends once this whole thing was over.

The fancy resort was as lovely and beautiful as the brochures had promised, yet your chest felt tight with apprehension. Something was wrong. There was nobody here. Mr. Chen profusely apologized for the shortness of staff due to the incoming storm which from the sounds of the serious news reports you could hear playing on the overhead television in the empty lobby, was already wrecking a neighboring island. The huge and scary category 4 hurricane which threatened to turn into a category 5 at any moment now and who’s outer bands were already knocking trees down outside and whipping rain fiercely against the windows. This wasn’t even the real storm and the wind and sheets of water hitting the window outside sounded so scary. It even sounded as if the building itself was moaning under the pressure of the wind outside. The longer you stood in this enormous and astonishingly empty building, it was becoming more and more evident that maybe you shouldn’t be here at all. Here you stood, your presence alone putting these people in danger. You, the only insane person who stubbornly refused to accept the reality of this storm. Not only would not be the relaxing and love connecting vacation you had been preparing for, but what if something really bad happened to you here? What if you died on this island? Fuck love, fuck men, fuck that man, Doh Kyungsoo in particular — what if you actually died here?

There seemed to be some sort of serious whispered discussion taking place between Mr. Chen and two other uniformed employees of the resort.

You weren’t being checked into your room. In fact, you still had your own bag in your hand and there wasn’t some moist young whippersnapper scooping your bags up to lead you to your room so you could snack on strawberries and cream and sip on champagne.

Someone made eye contact with you. There was a small regretful smile on her face and you caught the deep chest filling breath Mr. Chen took as he looked away from your curious face. It took him a moment of looking away before he exhaled, closed his eyes briefly to collect himself and the same rueful smile took over his face when he turned to come to you, taking several large steps to return to your side, he looked up into your face and carefully began to speak to you. His voice sounded grave and serious.

“Miss, I am,” he lifted a hand and laid his palm over his chest, “extremely, terribly sorry.” His eyes were sad, his eyebrows curved his face into a grimace, “I have received some bad news. The resort will have to close. We have lost power to all of the guest rooms. The ballroom was flooded, as it was closest to the ocean. The kitchens are down. It seems we are in an emergency situation due to the storm.”

This felt like a bad dream. Maybe you had fallen asleep on the plane and when you woke up it would be a bright sunny day in paradise like you’d been promised.

“We will all need to leave. The other guests have already been moved. I’m so sorry, Miss, of course the entirety of the cost of the stay will be refunded. We are prepared to offer a free week’s stay at any of our resorts for you and a guest to use at a time of your choosing. But right now we must go. The roads are beginning to flood and we can only go to the shelter at the highest point on the island. We have to move quickly before the storm surge.”

“Storm surge?” You could feel the panic and upset building inside of you. “Sh-shelter?” You knew it was evident in your voice. “The other guests were moved?” You looked outside the window. Anyone with any sense at all knew there was very real danger happening out there.

“Other guest. Sorry, there is only the one guest. I apologize but you both will need to bunk together in the barracks. The generators should last throughout the storm. There is no other place to go.” Mr. Chen was talking but you felt dazed. You were ushered into a different vehicle and the other staff members climbed in beside you. Mr. Chen was still talking about the place where you were being taken. Something about a room full of bunks, used during some historical war between two countries that didn’t exist anymore. Something about the man, the only other single from this god forsaken Singles Retreat. He was to be your bunk-mate. He, a complete stranger, was supposed to share the very large and spacious barracks with you. There would be ample space for you to spread out, as the space was designed for armies of 20 soldiers or more, but you were not to fear because Mr. Chen and his staff would be right next door should either of you need any assistance.

The road up the hill was bumpy and hectic. This vehicle was obviously well equipped to handle the rough trip, but you still found yourself jostled around, feeling seasick with the swaying back and forth and big bumps the wheels traveled over.

You began to think you might not make it. The queasiness from the ride had you closing your eyes and trying to breathe through it. Begging and pleading that you would not be sick inside this vehicle. You took deep steadying breaths through your nose, exhaling through your mouth, willing your overly sensitive stomach to calm down. The big truck soon began to slow and eventually crawled to a stop.

“I — I need to get out,” you mumbled just under your breath, unbuckling the seat belt and pushing yourself toward the door. You reached for it and pulled the handle, kicking hard with your feet. The rain was falling hard outside and you leaned over, breathing deeply as the raindrops quickly soaked your entire head.

You couldn’t meet him yet. Not like this. Not schrodinger's man of your dreams. Not fighting nausea while looking exactly like a drowned rat as you were babied by some kind hotel worker who probably shouldn’t be getting wet in the rain like this.

The cooling effects of the rain helped to calm the nausea and you felt a hand at your shoulder a moment before the deluge of rain falling over your head stopped. Someone had placed an umbrella over you. Someone was leaning into you; the staff woman from the hotel was talking to you.

“Miss, are you alright?” She rubbed a comforting warm palm over your back between your shoulder blades in slow and careful circles. You opened your eyes, noticing first the soft swell of what had to be a baby in her belly before you looked into her concerned face. She looked to be pretty far along too. She was probably due any week now. Her name tag said Sara and she had kind eyes.

You forced your shoulders back and pushed a smile upon your face. You worked for it and did your best to straighten out the expression on your face, gripping the stick of the umbrella and angling it so it covered more of her body. You’d be damned if you gave some expecting mother pneumonia just because you’d always had an overly sensitive stomach and the Barracuda Air pretzels were sitting funny.

“I’m okay. Just got a little carsick but it’s passed now that I’m out of the car. Let’s hurry inside before we get too wet.”

Your belongings were already rushed inside the drab, depressing, tan colored cement walled building that was to be your shelter for the next week or so and you rushed inside quickly with Sara stepping inside right behind you.

There was a click of the big heavy doors and aside from the two small windows next to the door, there wasn’t much in here for natural lighting. There was a musty smell in here and a thick layer of dust over most of the surfaces.

“I really am sorry that things have ended up this way, Miss.” Sarah waved hand back and forth in front of her face, waving away some of the dust in the air. She didn’t pause for long enough for you to absolve her of any guilt related to this messed up situation before she was speaking again, this time stepping further inside the space. There was a hallway up ahead that she turned into.

“If you could follow me, I’ll show you the room with the bunks and introduce you to Mr. Doh, our other guest. We changed all of the bedding so it’s clean and the space really is quite big.”

She was walking away from you as she kept taking. You felt a strange tickle along your scalp. A raindrop rolled down the back of your head, tickling its way down inside of your hair.

Did she say Mr. Doh? That same dream-like feeling that had been haunting you ever since you’d stepped off of that airplane returned.

Sara was turning a door handle and she had both of her hands pressing on a door.

“I’m sorry, what did you say his name is?”

“I’ll introduce you,” she smiled widely and leaned her head in closer to you as she dropped her voice, “He’s not that tall but he’s so, so, so handsome. He’s funny and witty too. I’m sure you’ll get along.” She said this last part with a genuine giggle of excitement. “I am just so excited!” She squealed. The eagerness in her face had a feeling of dread building inside of your belly. That stubborn queasiness you’d felt before returned.

The room was empty. Of course it was empty. Bunk beds lined each wall and a center aisle just wide enough for a person to pass through single file separated the rows of bunks and on one of the beds, the one closest to the door sat a black travel bag. A dripping rain jacket was hung over the metal frame of the upper bunk and whoever owned these items was not around.

“Oh, he was…just here…” Sara was spinning around, reacting to a sound, the sound of a door opening and your eyes followed to catch the movement of a person, a human, a man as he emerged from what you imagine was a bathroom. His head covered with a small white towel and a tanned arm rubbed swiftly over his straight black hair. On his torso, he wore only a simple white t-shirt and the fabric was too thin. The rain shower he’d been caught in made the shirt nearly transparent.

It only took a moment.

You knew what was going on.

It took less than a second for your eyes to touch deep inside of his big round brown eyes and you knew in an instant; you knew exactly who this Mr. Doh was, this esteemed and honored guest of the Shifting Sands Resort, you knew who he was and you knew exactly what this was — this man who stood in front of you; this man who was not very tall but so, so, so, and yes she was right, so handsome — because he was very handsome; even you could admit that, of course he was.

You wouldn’t have agreed to that idiotic blind date with him in the first place if you hadn’t found him to be incredibly attractive, with his clean skin, soft as hell full lips, achingly deep brown and oh so judgemental eyes, sexy and strong back, bulging arm muscles; his goddamned smart ass comments, and annoying as shit filthy lies that he told to tarnish your reputation with at least four good friends — this man who dropped the towel slowly as his eyes looked into your own stunned ones, this was that man; the one and only, Doh Kyungsoo.

You knew exactly who he was. The rat bastard, Doh Kyungsoo and you knew exactly what this situation was.

You were dead.

You had died in that airplane; gone down in the Caribbean Sea with the rest of the Barracuda Air flight and cabin crew.

You were dead and this was hell.

If your face betrayed the shock you felt right now, Sara didn’t notice. She must not have been paying any attention to you at all. She simply giggled as she gave her sweet introduction of you, raising a hand out palm up as she called out your name and recited some lame facts about you and what kind of man you were looking for in a relationship. Facts that you’d haphazardly typed out during the registration process for this Singles Retreat from hell, she said them all with a wide smile and a small silent clap of excitement as she got the words out.

Sara recited from memory, straight from your own mindless words, “Her ideal man is someone who is funny and witty. Someone who is just the perfect height for plenty of eye contact — and of course a man smells nice and is handsome.” Her hand motioned over and around his pretty face as if she simply could not help herself.

His eyes were wide with just as much genuine surprise in them as you had in yours.

Sara continued her introductions, bringing that palm right back around in front of his chest, at an even level with the nipples you could just make out through the sheer fabric of the wet t-shirt, and she proudly declared, “this is Doh Kyungsoo. His ideal woman is someone who’s as kind as she is honest and trustworthy. She is someone with an iron stomach who isn’t afraid to try new foods and explore new adventures with him.”

You felt too stunned to move. There was no way this was really happening. You felt the room spinning and it reminded you a lot of sitting with your head down between your knees as that airplane fell out of the sky. The same feeling as bouncing around the back seat of that off road truck that brought you up this hill to this bunker out of the immediate threat of the hurricane that blasted outside and into the waiting arms of a much more agonizing threat.

Sara had finished her introductions. Neither of you moved.

He was the first to break the silence.

“What the hell are you doing here?” His question was blunt. He hadn’t bothered with appearances or with how abrupt and callous his question was, or with how full of disgust that expression on his face might appear to Sara.

He never once considered just how far down her shoulders might deflate to have the cold hard truth splashed in her face. That not only did not you check a single one of his boxes, but you might very well be the last woman on this entire earth that he might fall in love with.

That he’d rather sneak out the back door after catching a glimpse of you waiting for him, all gussied up with your cheap drug store makeup and little black dress from the clearance racks at Target — a specimen so far below his level that he couldn’t even spare you the humiliation of faking a smile all the way to dessert before ghosting you the next day; instead he’d rather leave you stranded and embarrassed. Having to foot the bill yourself for your three glasses of white wine and no entree. Having to suffer through the pitiful glances of the waitstaff as they took turns asking if you were “still waiting for someone,” all the while knowing you’d been abandoned and publicly marked as unlovable.

“Me?!” You were too blindsided for tact. Your indignation at his bluntness filled you with just as many questions as he must have had in that pretty, stupid head of his.

“Why you?”

Once the first question was out, the second came out with gusto. He balked and his eyebrows furrowed. His fist clenched around the towel he was holding. You reached down deep within your diaphragm and the words came out too loudly.

You couldn't help the anger you felt. This was supposed to be your Prince Charming. This was supposed to be paradise. You opened your mouth and you let it fly. The frustrations from the trip so far, from the sham of a blind date, from being so unethically and undeservedly fired from your job, that fucking hurricane outside that stole the 5-star resort from under your feet and plopped you down inside this musty concrete prison from the 1940s and the words came out of you as if you threw them hard right into the eye of that hurricane outside.

“Why is it you?! Why are you the Mr. Doh that she is introducing me to?!”

“Because that is my name!!” His voice level rose higher and you actually flinched at the sudden volume he used. This motherfucker. How dare he shout at you. And in front of Sara. The poor girl took two steps away from the both of you and covered her belly with both of her arms.

“Why are you yelling?!” You took a step into him and shouted right back, right into his face. You needed answers for his awful behavior. He did not retreat. You could smell the light cologne he wore from this close.

“Because you yelled at me first!!”

His clenched fist gripping the towel tight was lifted, his eyes were wide, and his voice had so much more power than yours ever could that you nearly cowered. You almost backed down and backed off. Almost. He was clearly just as stubborn as you were.

Also the words he said took only one second to sink in and your next bit of anger got caught inside of your throat, refusing to come out.

Damn. He was right. You did yell first. It was you who did it first.

You’d just been so caught up in your awful mood that seeing him standing in here, knowing that what this man already knows about you would basically ruin your chances of finding any other man here to trick into falling madly in love with you. What if he told them all about your messy life. You hadn’t bothered concealing any of your recent failures on social media. You’d obsessively scrolled through his own profiles often enough to know that not only was this man a work-a-holic, but he was a big ol’ nerd. You figured he had done the same with you since some of his recent digs at you in Claire’s comments had been about you being recently liberated from your job. You’d been in his circle for long enough to know plenty about him, you were sure he had all of the dirt on you. You stepped back and away from him. From a normal distance he didn’t smell so damned nice.

“Oh I did, didn’t I?” you said in a much more normal tone, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

Your apology was as abrupt as the yelling had been, but it seemed to have a bigger effect on him. His eyes seemed to grow softer or perhaps just more confused and he blinked rapidly as his focus touched lightly around all edges of your face.

“Sara, not this one,” you pulled your eyes away from his face, not quite finding the conviction to be able to fully look away from him, but your words were at least directed away from him and onto the woman who stood three feet away from you with what you almost thought was a fully enthralled expression on her face.

“Do you have any others?”

Kyungsoo made a sound. It was a scoff mixed with a grunt. It was disgruntled. You pulled your mouth into the sweetest fake smile you could manage and directed all of that sweetness at him.

“I mean the room, of course.”

“Sara, I think I’d also like to switch to another room. This one seems to have something fundamentally wrong with it.” Kyungsoo said without taking his eyes off of your face, “it’s not for me. This place seems undeservingly high maintenance and might even have some nasty pests hidden in the walls. I bet they really come out at night.”

Sara was silent for long enough for you to actually need to look at her. When you did, you smelled trouble. Sara was smiling. It was the kind of smile you got sometimes when you found a great drama to watch and you knew that these two wacky characters were about to thoroughly ruin each other's lives before they fell in love.

Her eyes were bouncing back and forth between you and Kyungsoo and with each pass her smile only widened.

“Sara.” You said in a flat tone. You had seen enough romantic comedies to know what she was thinking. “Sara, no. Not in a million years.”

She was giggling and nodding her head now.

“There are no other rooms.” She said with a voice three octaves higher than normal and she was giggling as she said it. “This is the only room.”

“You can’t even leave because there’s a hurricane outside.” She was outright laughing.

“I have to go tell Mr. Chen everything,” she whispered to herself and she was rushing toward the door, pulling it open with all of her might and vanishing through the opening much faster than you thought a woman in her delicate condition should be allowed to move.

“Sara, I swear to god,” you shouted down the dark hallway that she disappeared down, “Sara!” But she was long gone and behind you the huffing and puffing, very put-out man was grabbing every single bit of his belongings from his bed and moving them all down to the bed at the farthest end of this enormous room, putting himself and his itty bitty towel and his sheer white t shirt with his visible nipples physically as far away from you as possible.

It was actually funny to see him throwing such an obvious fit.

“I can see your nipples through your wet t-shirt, you know.” You said it under your breath but not at all trying to not be heard.

“I’m not the only one in this room with a wet t-shirt, Princess. Between the two of us, your nipples are far more eventful than mine,” he sing-songed back, using as much sarcasm as he could manage with the pejorative he used as a nickname for you.

You gasped covering your chest with both hands — the liar. The damned liar. There was no way. But when you looked down, you could very clearly make out nearly every detail of the entire shape and outline of your breasts, even the dark circles of your nipples in the center stood out. Cold and wet with your precious cardigan long tossed in the trash can back at the airport after it got wet in the puddle and you left with only the sheer bra you stupidly decided to wear under this light pink colored shirt and the hope that maybe, maybe this was one of those countries that didn’t extradite murderers and you might get away with killing him in his sleep tonight.