#esotsm

He didn't know why he had come. Hands digging into the sand, the grains slipping between his fingers as he tried to recount the moments leading up to the train ride. His bed had been cold even with him in it, curled under the covers with a pounding in his head mimicking the repetitive slamming of a door somewhere down the corridor. The headache was not one that would lead to him calling out of work, and yet he was sitting on a beach in Montauk. 

The surf crashing in its constant lullaby drowned out the line of Soobin's questioning. The chill of the last freeze was working its way throughout his body, enough to make him focus only on how red his nose must look, cold enough to fall off without him even noticing. There was still snow on the beach, pushed into the half melted piles around the worn down, sun bleached steps. The sky a hazy blue, only found in the winter months, grey and hidden behind a smokescreen of clouds blocking out any sun. 

At first, he had not seen you standing right at the edge of the water. Scarf wrapped round and round, half shielding your face from the sea breeze. Your coat was a size too big, bunching around your wrists, fingers curled in your pockets, numb without gloves. 

There had been an ache in your heart the moment you had woken up, hand curled in your pillow, wishing it was the strands of a lover's hair to run through absentmindedly. The thought had been trapped in your mind for a week, seen somewhere or read in a book you shouldn't have been flipping through during your shift at work. But it was persistent, continuously on a loop, your humming mixed with the gentle touch as if you could lull your imaginary love interest to sleep with nothing more than the brush of your fingerprints along their scalp. 

It had never interested you to find someone to serenade, someone to comfort. But it had interested you to find that soft song here on the beach, the wind picking up enough to caress your cheek like the brush of a loving backhand. There had been little to do so far upstate except come here and stare at the shore while trying to find why you felt so hollow. 

When you had told your roommate about taking the trip upstate, it had been nothing more than a passing sentence. “Montauk?” The word had sounded bitter coming from Kai, like the little beach town had personally hurt him in some way. “Why do you want to go there?” He had been distracted enough to spill his coffee, the counter covered, so you tried to explain whatever it was you were feeling. 

“Yeah, I don't know why I just feel this need to go to the beach today.” You had shaken your head, “Don't wait up, I don't have to be into work till the afternoon tomorrow, and I might get dinner out there.” 

“You want to take the last train out of Montauk?...” he had let the question linger in the air as if you were missing the context of something so clearly written out for everyone but you to see. For well over a week, it had been like this: Kai with his careful words punctuated with his scrunched brows as he watched you go about your daily life. It made the days feel like a cup at the edge of a counter, his worried looks only making it seem like you were one wrong move from shattering the glass with a careless brush of your sleeve. 

“You make it sound like I suggested we should rob a bank and not look at a lighthouse on my day off,” you tried to laugh past it, shrugging on your coat that felt as if it had gotten a size too big in nothing more than a week. You toed on your shoes, hand bracing yourself on the handle of the door as Kai cursed, looking for a rag to clean up his mess, his eyes jumping back up to you like he was worried he missed your exit. It made you pause, brows scrunching. “Is something wrong?” 

The question had been weighing heavily on your tongue since the first sight of Kai and his hollow eyes watching you. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, working on assignments, worrying over calls on his phone like someone was sick and he needed updates on their wellbeing. You had known him for years, longer than you knew any of your other friends. This was him after long nights of studying in his college dorm, only coming out for dinner after begging for him to take a break. This was not the smart, sensible Kai who went about starting his first year at his new job right with a neatly arranged sleep schedule. 

“What?” he looked caught, playing dumb enough to make you push away from the subject. You would ask again if he kept it up because with the reaction he had now, it felt as if he was desperately trying to hide whatever it was until he fixed it. You would give him time, you would give him space until he was drowning and reaching out for your hand. 

“Nothing,” you shook your head, “you can come if you want, I know the first train in, last train out, isn't really for you, especially in the winter, but it could be fun. We don't even have to stay all day,” the offer was a calming olive branch but Kai only looked away. 

“I have work, why don't we go next weekend? We can take Yeonjun, and maybe it will be a bit warmer.” he was already fiddling with his phone, “I can ask him-”

“No, don't do that, we can still go next weekend, but I really feel like I have to go today, I don't even know how to explain it. I didn't realize living in the city would make me miss the beach so much.” Because your fingers ached to run through sand like they would run through hair, but it was impossible to say that to him, “And don't bother Yeonjun, he's been here all week, I'm sure he needs a bit of time away from seeing our faces.” 

Like clockwork, Yeonjun had found time to spend with the two of you since last Saturday. He would be at the door, twisting the lock with the key Kai had gifted him the second you two had moved, so that someone would have the spare. In hand, he had your favorite warm drink from the shop right next to his place, his eyes scanning for Kai as he hung his coat. You wonder if he had sensed the change in him just as easily as you had. Their soft whispers in the living room lingered in the air when you rounded the corner to collect Yeonjun's kind gift. 

But he had not come this morning with his to-go cup offering, and maybe that was because Kai was busy just as you needed to be. “I'll be fine. I'll text you when I'm on the train.” You go through the door before he can get the last word, closing it as you tell him. “Both ways!” 

It wasn't until you were already on the train that Yeonjun called, phone tucked to your ear, voice low so the one other passenger wouldn't be bothered too much. “I could have called out, you know I love the little lighthouse, and the beach when it's cold,” 

“No, you have been stuck at my apartment longer than your own. I'm sure your home office missed you just as much as your work office did.” Your knees were tucked up against the seat in front of you, arm slung across your stomach. “And the beach will be there next week.” 

“I know, just call me if it gets too lonely, okay?” But tucked in between the way he said it was the undercurrent of worry, easily passed over if you hadn't known Yeonjun for years. Because as he tried to brush it off as casual, the glass was still right there on the edge of the counter, even if you weren't in the room. “Call me for anything.” 

And almost as soon as you had hung up with Yeonjun, your mother called, the singsong tone echoing in the train as it pulled to a stop. You tucked the phone against your ear, hurrying off to the platform. The wind kissed along your cheeks, your lashes fluttering as you turned against the oncoming sea breeze. “Why are you taking solo trips all the way out to Montauk? It's not even the season for it.” 

“Mom-” either one of your friends could have told her, your money placed right over Kai's name. 

“No, you should have gone with someone, what if-” 

“I'm fine, god. Why is everyone worrying over a train ride? It's not like I’ve never been out here alone, and hardly anyone ever comes out here anyway. Hell, only one other person was on the train with me,”  the other lone passenger already headed out in the direction of the beach. 

“I'm just worried, what if-” 

“I'm fine, I'll text you just as well as Kai when I'm headed back, I'll even send you a picture of the lighthouse.” You shoved your free hand into your coat pocket, fingers already tingling from the cold, balling the digits into a fist, trying to keep the warmth tucked into the space for as long as you could. “I'll call you when I get back if that works to clear your mind.” It was the only way to soothe her enough to let you off the line. 

The calls played in your head for only as long as it took you to get to the edge of the water. The lapping rhythm of the surf is enough to make your eyelids heavy. It didn't matter how long it had been since you stood on the edge of the sea; its soft song never ceased to intertwine with your circadian rhythm. And whatever longing you had been feeling was slowly washing away with the tide, pulling the ache in your fingers away until it was lost to the only place that could make you feel whole. 

Closing your eyes, you let the wind coming off the water rustle your coat, tug at your red scarf. And like an unfurling ribbon, it went blowing behind you, your shocked gasp at the sudden kiss of cold on your lips more surprising than the way the scarf twisted in the air. 

Soobin had been halfway to standing, hand at the back of his thigh, brushing away the sand, just about to leave, when he watched you stumble to rush after the windswept fabric. It was hurtling towards him, unravelling a string of events that would last longer than a lifetime. 

He caught the scarf before it could slip by him, your shoes kicking up the sand behind you, as you slowed to a stop from your running, awkward laugh mixed in with his nervous smile. “Sorry, I didn't even realize I hadn't tied it right.” 

“It's okay,” he passed it back to you, warmth from his gloved hands already seeping into your greedy skin from nothing more than a brush. “I’ve lost a fair bit of scarves to the wind here, umbrellas, and I think a pair of shoes once.” 

“You took the train home barefoot?” You only made the assumption he wasn't from around here because of the shared train ride, the only other passenger stuck to hear your conversation with Yeonjun, and maybe even the one with your mom if he cared enough. 

“I still had my socks but not my dignity,” he smiled enough to show the round crater dimple punctuating his cheek like a statement of cuteness, his hair caught in the wind on his brow, easily tossed and pushed aside, begging to let your fingers run through to fix. “So, might as well come to the rescue and return this to you.” 

It was a moment, fleeting, and yet unmistakable: “Do I know you?” You were trying to place his face, his build, rifling through your memory looking for spaces that would seem to fit him in, and yet you came back with nothing at all. All except that ache in your fingers. “Or do you shop at the bookstore off of 6th Ave?” 

Soobin was caught on your face long enough to get stumped on the question, trying and failing to picture you sitting behind the counter at the checkout, trying again for the counter at the shared coffee shop in the same building. “I do, but I d-” but he couldn't quite place his finger on it; he knew he would never be able to forget a face like yours, and it nagged him to no end when he looked at the dip of your nose and knew he had only just dreamt of a shape so similar. 

“That must be it, I see so many people from all around New York, or even all the states,” you wound your scarf back around your neck, tucking the end into your coat. “You should come by next Friday, we are having this huge sale on hardbacks, although if you live far, it probably wouldn't be good to carry all of them through the city,” 

“Good to know, I'm only a block over, so it's no big deal,” he felt himself flushing, cheeks and ears red over a casual conversation. Because in everything in him, he wanted to keep talking to you, and it made him embarrassed to feel this crush sink in, in nothing more than a second of easy going. He hadn't had a crush in a long time, not one that suddenly made his stomach twist in that all too familiar way; it wasn't a feeling one forgot often. 

“Great, if you stop by my checkout kiosk, I'll give you a discount, a ‘save my scarf savings,’” you giggled, smile hidden, and Soobin wanted nothing more than to catch it with his eyes at least once. 

He had never felt brave, not enough to step up to girls and ask questions, never brave enough to rush for the door before it shut just so that he could squeeze in on the ride up a crowded elevator. He preferred to take the long way, hoping that one day he would stumble upon a girl while she took that same trip, but it was never in his mind to reach out first. But now, with you standing here, the two of you the only ones on a beach that felt healing, he asked a question he had never predicted coming from his lips, even on the most confident of days. “Do you want to get lunch with me?” 

You watched the way the wind ruffled his hair again, blowing back and exposing his forehead, only to sweep along his temples. And for a moment, there was an inkling of jealousy threaded through the sight because you wanted to be the one to do it at least once. “Of course, I know this little sandwich shop right past the last lighthouse, and I also know how to get us up to the top of said lighthouse to eat if you want.” 

Soobin didn't feel a hint of discomfort at the idea. Spending a moment alone with a pretty girl over the water would have made his palms sweat, but with you? He hung onto the invitation like a token of some new beginning he wanted to keep in a jar. “Okay,” the words on the edge of some whispered hope, worried if he spoke too much, too loud, you'd slip away as easily as your scarf had. 

There was something easy about the way the two of you fit side by side. As if your footsteps were on top of each other instead of behind you, leaving trails of your passing only a few inches away from the other. Your hands shoved down into your coat pockets, chin tucked as you looked at him, both of you caught on features of the other's face as if you were still looking for something. Because never in your life had you believed what was read in books, that people fall in love with nothing more than a glance, catching sight of something in the other person without having ever spoken a word to them, and just knowing. 

Standing here sharing names felt like a rerun of a life you didn't know if you had lived before. Everything was so easy that time slipped away, crunched and forgotten like leaves fallen and blown away until it was only just the two of you sitting on that train back to New York. 

You hadn't sat right next to each other, one seat in front of him, leaning over the back of it, peering over the edge like a child caught in her crush. You didn't want to waste too much of a good thing, greedy on the best of days, but not when it felt like if you ran out of him, you'd feel nearly as empty as you had just that morning. 

The two of you had spent the whole day together, piecing a life together from all the past things until they made one person you hadn't yet discovered. And you stumbled to understand everything about him, hands pushing back the layers of him, reading the book of him cover to cover, starting with his order at the sandwich shop, all the way to his fear of slipping from the salt rusted bars keeping the two of you from falling over the side of the lighthouse into the sand. 

“It feels like I've known you forever,” your fingers aching, the sentiment bubbling up slowly until it was overflowing from your lips, once, twice, a third time, sitting right there in front of him on the train home, wishing that the day wouldn't end so fast. “Is that weird?” 

You were slightly lifted, looking down on him in his seat, his stare caught between a look of awe and understanding. And maybe that's what it was, that look of his round brown eyes, drawing lines along your body that had never felt so seen before. Because he only blinked back at you with a lazy grin, the kind that was only there because they didn't know it was, the kind people ask why you're smiling, wanting a taste of that carefree tilt to their lips. “No, not weird at all,” 

And he wasn't lying, the pounding in his head was gone, replaced by your giggle, a bell versus that constant slamming of a door he found himself waking up to and not for. “I feel the same way,”  

Neither of you knew that it had not been the first time you had met. And neither of you knew it wasn’t the first time you had reached out with steady hands and pushed his hair back and behind his ears, threading through the strands like a memory. That ache satisfied and ignited something that would make it impossible to go out because it had already been kindling, waiting to turn roaring. Only neither of you knew how easily it had been close to being snuffed out entirely after a blow strong enough to leave a candle flickering in half smoke and half desperation. 

Because it had been on a beach in Montauk that the two of you had met all those years ago, a summer bustling with people, shoeless and down on dignity, Soobin had stumbled into your life. Your laugh caught him as easily as he had your scarf. Your eyes pinned to his wiggling toes, trying to shake the sand from the fibers of his socks with little progress being made. “They sell sandals right on the edge of the beach, right next to the beach houses.” 

“I just think my friends are hiding my shoes from me, they will give them back eventually or i hope so at least.” because Beomgyu had taken them right off of him, tugging on his legs until he could free the shoes while ignoring Soobins shouting, Taehyun holding him down from twisting too much as Beomgyu did the dirty work. But it had been a while since he had seen either of them, too busy mingling with the rest of the summer crowd to care about Soobin and his shoes. 

“Well, if they don't, just think of my suggestion,” and it would have been the end right there if it hadn't been that Yeonjun and Taehyun went to the same gym, or even if Kai hadn't shared a mandatory study schedule with beomgyu. The pairs of them suggested taking the last train out, to just stay long enough to watch the sunset over the water, to sit along the sand for as long as it took to watch the families make their ways home to the beach houses littering the shore off in the opposite direction of the lighthouses so neatly waiting at the rocky cliffsides. 

No one had brought entertainment, the food had long since been eaten, and Soobin's shoes were found to make excellent toys to kick around between the boys like a makeshift ball. And it had been there where he had found the only courage he had needed to talk to you, no long path, no avoidance, just casual as you watched the way the sky went from a blue primary hue, to pink orangesicle, to a dusty salted dreamscape. Because as the boys played, the two of you started a fire, sat around the embers with knees touching and souls twisting. Talking long enough for the two of you to forget you had come with others and not alone, with only one another. 

The two of you dragged behind as you walked, Soobin's shoes in hand, wet and dripping from the final kick, sending them all the way into the ocean, enough so that Yeonjun went in the still sun-warmed water to catch them before they could be lost to the tide. But he didn't even care that he was trekking in sand after him on the train, not when the two of you sat knee to knee, thigh to thigh as you listed your favorite novels. All stocked on the shelves back at your apartment, on the shelves at your job, just waiting for Soobin to buy and find one more chapter of you that he had yet to discover. 

And when the train pulled into the station, he had been distracted enough to truly lose his sneakers, left under the seat; he wished he could have spent all night so long as it led to him talking more with you about nothing and everything. And when you two were supposed to split, waving goodbye to new friends and old ones, neither of you wanted to let go. 

With Beomgyu on one side, teasing him, and Taehyun on the other, telling Soobin he should have given you his number, he looked back at you across the street looking back at him. And it didn't matter if he looked like a madman, he turned back, hand cupping his mouth as he shouted across that nearly empty New York street right at the head of the subway stairs, “Do you work tomorrow?” 

The question had pulled everyone to a stop, your face heating up, not caring if Yeonjun and Kai joked over the clear crush you had formed over a single beach trip, “On Monday! You'll visit me, right?” 

“I wouldn't miss it!” Not when he had found someone so interesting he forgot himself enough to shout into the busy city just to catch one more line with you. And while both of you left in the opposite direction, you still wore identical, hazy, love-struck, love-sick smiles all the way home. 

It had been instant then, and it was instant now. The unfurrowing of your life lines not crossing once, but twice, when the two of you had done everything in your power to forget one another. 

The treatment had been offered as a last ditch effort to pull your relationship out of a sinking ship. A lifeline tossed into the water, thrashing with unrelenting emotions, drowning the both of you until the waves were too high and too heavy to fight. But it had not been like that at first; your ship was just sailing, and the masts were heavy and strong with each gust of wind heading your way. No low going self-implosion waiting on your horizon. At least not just yet. 

Because at the start of it all, on that Monday morning, Soobin had called in sick, faked a strained voice with the aid of his sleep-ridden one, and made sure to secure the full day without a blink of an eye. He didn't know when you started your shift, if it was in the afternoon or even at night; all he knew was that he would be there waiting to be checked out with your favorite novel tucked in the crook of his elbow. 

He hadn't gotten your number, and distance made the heart grow fonder, so the only replay in his mind was the way you made him laugh and the way he wanted to see you laughing right along with him. And when he arrived, you hadn’t been in sight, the checkout counters bare of people, just as the rest of the store. His languid stroll only made him take in the place as you might have seen it. The towering light washed wooden shelves holding far too many books to not make the place feel cramped in the best way possible. Ladders sitting at the edge of each aisle waited, and he wondered how often you must have had to climb up one for a customer scared to reach a height they hadn't been expecting for a paperback. 

And as he rounded that last corner, he ran into you with your apron on, the bookstore logo tattooed on the front in delicate green stitching above the neatly done black of your name. “You came,” your voice hooking him in the way it was just so easily said, an exhale that he had been waiting to feel the second he saw you again. Because it had been a bit like holding his breath. His anxious mind worked to ask him the question: Was she really like how he remembered her, or was it just the salt and the sand influencing his mind? 

But it hadn't been the beach, not when you stood so vividly alive there, just as you had sitting next to him on the shore and the train. “I told you I wouldn't miss it,” because anything he had been feeling washed away, and he was just a boy in a store flirting with a girl he felt like he had known for a lifetime. 

Soobin had followed you around for your shift, watching you stock the shelves, letting you talk through a book you liked, telling him the plot, the setting, the hook, line, and sinker. He didn't need to speak, didn't feel the need to interject about himself when it was so easy and intoxicating to soak up all the knowledge you laid out before him. Your dislikes were wrapped up neatly in the nonfiction section, and your likes were presented right before him in every little microexpression as you read him the opening paragraph of the one book he had come in searching for. 

And when customers came over to speak to you, asking questions, checking out, Soobin stumbled around, busying himself with sorting his feelings as if they hadn't just dumped on him like a bucket of ice cold water. He had never liked someone so instantly, so intensely, so much so that he cataloged your favorite drink from the cafe without a second thought, promised himself to try it if he couldn't kiss the flavor from your lips one day. 

And when it was the end of your shift, he was your last customer; he slid the book over the counter with a smile permanently tuned onto his face. “Just the one?” your easy act as if you hadn't spent the whole time talking together, working to make him chuckle. 

“Yeah, I heard this great review of it,” the scan of the barcode mingled with your giggle. 

“Did you? They must have excellent taste,” you were sitting down, looking up at him, the receipt printing before you tugged it free, taking a pen and writing out your number right on the bottom with a little heart written next to that girl from Montauk. You tucked it into the book, sliding it over to him, breaking the spell of your joking with, “Will you wait for me until I clock out? I mean, you don't have to, I know you spent nearly all day with m-” 

“I wouldn't want to spend it anywhere else. I know a great cafe near my place, if you want to get a late lunch?” he had blushed, cheeks and ears a kissable pink as you nodded yes. Because neither of you wanted the day to end, holding onto whatever you could so that the time wouldn't pass like it had that first day. So when your late lunch ended, the two of you walked around the park, sat at the benches looking out over the fountain, and talked like you would never run out of things to say before it was growing dark, and you both had to find a way home. 

The air had been cold, dropping to a point that even the dense city couldn't keep out the wind, and you linked your arm in his, taking a step closer so that every few feet the two of you nearly stepped on one another. “So you wanted to be a…” 

“Singer,” Soobin shook his hair out at the confession, your fingers drumming along his bicep, reminding him how close the two of you stood. “I know it's a bit embarrassing, but if I could do anything at all besides you know being an accountant, I think I'd be a performer,” 

“I think we have to go out to karaoke for our next date.” It had been a slip of words, one he caught and held onto without letting go. 

“Next date?” he had taken you right up the stairs, standing outside your apartment door with the front light glowing and golden washing down on you, putting you on the spot. You felt hot all over, face pressing into his arm like it would hide your slip up and yet it didn't matter because you wanted all your cards on the table; you wanted him to see every facet of your mind, even for a blinding second. 

“Forget I said anything embarrassing, okay?” You dug around in your pocket for your keys, “and call me after your mind has been erased of my misstep.” 

But Soobin didn't care, not when the slip up made him feel seen. He had felt blind, looking for any reason that you might like him enough to keep this up, whatever it was, but he knew he didn't want to be just friends. And finding out now that you weren't viewing him in that way fixed his stomach, unraveling all the knots when his mind had been leading him down a path of self-destruction and irrationalization. “Next time we can see a movie, eat, get drinks, and then karaoke.” 

You had looked over at him, smiling, trying and failing to keep it away, tipping down at the edges as you nodded, “Okay,” the soft whisper so hopeful it hurt. You had just opened the door, the handle caught in your hand, as the sound of Kai's laughter rang out into the night, the faint sound of the video game filling in all the space in the hall. " And next time, kiss me before you leave.” 

Soobin couldn't help but look down at your lips, eyes flickering from your mouth and back up the slope of your nose to make sure he had heard you right. His nod so shy he felt his palms sweat. It was one thing you had loved so much about him, the way he made it feel like you were the only person who had ever or could ever make him feel this way. The awkward cuteness he found himself wearing so often would trail around the two of you, with every brush of your hand, every kiss, and every word. You watched his throat bob, his mind working so fast he didn't have time to question if it was the wrong thing to do before he was leaning in. 

It was a short kiss, his lips meeting yours just enough so that his mind could catch up with what he had done, so he tried to pull away. But you had let go of the doorknob, hand sliding up the front of his sweater in a way that left him aching for more, and you gave it to him, pulling him right back to your mouth and clearing his worries. Because you wanted him just as desperately as he wanted you. The small touches, the gentle laughs, and all the words you could fit between the two of you. Kissing only clarified both of your emotions, made it known that whatever was blooming would be diligently taken care of until it was a packed garden buzzing with life and understanding. 

And when Soobin left and went home, he replayed the way your fingers had found their home right to the back of his neck, threading through his hair and tugging him closer. He lay in bed with the echoing of that feeling sinking into his bones like a shot of something he should have never taken, for it was the worst kind of thing to find yourself addicted to. It had only been two days of knowing each other, a few more of knowing of each other, and yet he wanted nothing more than to wrap you in his arms and tuck himself as close as he could, to feel the hum of your words on your neck as he pressed his face against your pulse. 

It was instantly recognized when you closed your door behind you after that first kiss. Kai looked over at you standing in the entry, caught in that webbing only a crush could tug you into, with your fingers ghosting over your bottom lip, trying and failing to mimic the feeling of his mouth on yours, so you could aid the replay. Your names mixed in with the rhythmic teasing of the words, sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g, your hands covering your face because you couldn't help the smile at the sing-song tilt to Kai's voice. 

Soobin had texted that next morning, setting a song for your ringtone, putting a heart next to your name, and deleting it again because he felt silly and like you weren't quite his just yet. But in every sense, the two of you belonged together, even if not visible to the two of you, it was impossible to deny from an outside perspective. 

He worked late, woke up earlier, and had little time for himself, but he would make time for you. Before, when he would come home, loosening his tie, he'd kick off his shoes and stretch out on the couch to watch whatever he had been playing to pass the time, or even load a quick game on a weekend that he didn't have to leave the comfort of his home for. Now he was thinking of ways to blend you in without feeling like it was too much too soon. But you didn't mind any of it, taking the opportunities as they came. 

So the two of you spent time grocery shopping, Soobin pushing the cart, following you down every aisle, even the ones you didn't need to spend time down, only to spend more time together, just talking and giggling as you went. He carried the bags upstairs, only making you take the bread and eggs even when you complained that you could handle more, while still making time to hold the door open for you when you made it up. Trusting you with the keys and still reaching around you to push it open. 

You would sit on his kitchen counter, watching him move around, placing everything away, talking about the way he had empty walls and hardly any furniture. “You live like a college student with your first paycheck,” and when Soobin pulled open his cabinet, he pulled out a single mug and asked you if you wanted tea. “You only have one mug! How are we supposed to enjoy tea together?” 

“Well, I didn't think I'd have a pretty girl over who would need her own mug, but I'm more than willing to give her mine,” 

He smiled to show his dimples, cute teeth on display when you muttered, “Next date we have to go pick up a picture frame or two, and another mug.” 

“I was thinking we could go back out to Montauk for the fireworks show this Friday, but only if you wanted to, or we could do something else, anything you want.” His rambling and pink cheeks only made you nod. Your laugh easing his nerves. 

“We can do anything, and I love the beach, there is something about the sea that you can just never forget about, like I think I'll always remember the way the sand feels between my fingers." You held your hand out, spreading each digit in front of you, peeking between them before he reached out, lacing his fingers with yours, the width of his palm eating up your own, the pads of his fingertips soft along the back of your hand. 

He had stepped into your space, right between your legs, equal height, sitting up on the counter, looking at each other, remembering your kiss, and wishing you had never stopped kissing him. His free hand rested next to your thigh, his eyes trained on your lips before he leaned in, stopping so close that the two of you brushed noses. So close that it felt easy to confess even something as small as a grain of sand, “You remind me so much of the sea.” Your hand not intertwined with his now threading through his hair, right at the back of his neck, just as he had remembered and prayed for to happen again. Your words whispered so close to his mouth that he could swallow them down and keep them tucked to his heart. “Like you’ll be impossible to forget,” 

You had spoken out his exact thoughts, written them out between the two of you just before he kissed you again and again. And it never needed to be more, both of you following the ease with which the relationship was taking you. Breathing so easily, even when you pulled away and knew it was okay, felt that a kiss could be something that wasn't scary and added questions, but something shared because you wanted to, needed to. 

That night had been spent on his couch watching movies and playing games, falling asleep and leaning on his shoulder, waking up to his arms around you holding you just as close as you had held him. 

Neither of you had asked your friends to come out to Montauk that second time, taking the trip on one of the busiest trains that went out that time of year. With Soobin carrying your picnic basket out and you with the blanket rolled and tucked under your arm, ready to be placed on the sand amongst the families who made it a yearly thing to come out to see the fireworks. It didn't matter that you had only just met, not when you fit so closely that there was no need to stretch out your arms and ask for distance. 

Both of you eating and playing a card game, the deck loosely held down by stones collected from the sand so they wouldn't blow away. The world went on around you two. The giggling of the kids being chased by their parents rang out in the salt soaked air, the sun just setting out over the water, as people started their bonfire, getting ready to roast marshmallows, to sit back and enjoy their prepared food and carefully grilled barbecue. 

And when the show started, you both sat side by side, thigh to thigh, leaning back on your hands just enough to see the dark night sky bursting with colors. Red and yellow, raining down and casting threads of illumination on the pretty features of Soobin's face. Your eyes traced the shape of his nose, the dip of his dimple, the catch in his smile as he looked up in awe. 

Looking at him left no room for questions; if this was a glimpse into a life you could have, you wanted it, reached out with greedy fingers, and begged never to lose. And neither of you felt like letting go just yet, not when the two of you could spend most of your time out on the beach in silence. Picnic left to find the quieter side of the sand. 

It was only just up from the crowd that the row of spaced out beach houses rested. Right amongst the long sun lightened blades of grass swaying in the salty breeze. Linking arms, the two of you looked up at the two stories, half lit with families who had turned in early. 

“I wonder if people live here year round, if they listen to the sea even in the winter,” you questioned as Soobin's warmth cut through the thin fabric of his jacket, soaking into you and making it easier to speak without thought. 

“I don't know if the houses right on the beach are built for much snow. I'm sure they have a hard time keeping all the sand out.” 

“It's kinda sad for them to just stay empty,” out over the water, the lighthouse shines, the slow circle of the beam easy to follow from any distance. You're sure that even a lighthouse keeper would find it lonely to spend their days on a cold beach in January compared to nights like this in July. “Imagine all the snow on the beach, that alone feels kinda magical, just to be left empty…” 

“You would live in a house like this year round?” The question had set him thinking, picturing a life with you right here on the beach where you met, the sand building in the corner by the front door, watching the water from the porch, sharing a cup of coffee with the mug you had picked out for such occasions so early on in the relationship where it should have been a suggestion to slow down. 

But it didn't feel like either of you was moving fast. For a second, it felt as if the blurred edges you had held around relationships had sharpened with a clarity you would have never known, less you met Soobin that day. The suggestion of slowness felt like wading through water instead of swimming through it. If he wanted you to spend time wrapped up in his arms at his place, you wouldn't stop him from asking with a waving yellow flag. 

Being with him felt like being in the center of a high school gymnasium dance floor, blue iridescent streamers hanging from the rafters and swaying in a rhythm that mimicked your shy steps on the linoleum. The glowing mirrorball reflecting spots of incandescent light over the two of you, framing you in a world alone where you felt giddy enough to be even asked to share this dance. Soobin was wrapped up in a shyness that did not show inexperience but willingness to learn with a faint hint of worry about messing things up when they felt so fragile. It was that softness that pulled you in, and it was the confidence that you had in him that sent him stumbling right in after you down that rabbit hole of this uncharted relationship. 

He didn't care if it felt too soon to just sit and think about you and him sharing a house, dancing in the kitchen, sharing a bed, inviting all your friends over just because you wanted to bask in the giddy glow he was radiating. Being a hopeless romantic felt suffocating on the worst of days, enough so that he had tricked himself into believing he was a skeptic, putting distance between his heart and his sleeve in fear of a stray swing of a backhand that would take years to recover from. He kept his place bare, buried himself in his work, and prayed to stumble on love, and he had gotten what he had wanted. 

Everything he had been looking for was standing right at the edge of those sand-covered stairs, your head tilted into his bicep as you hummed in question. “I could see it, and I think I’d love to live right here, quiet in the winter, warm in the summer, seagulls as pets.” 

The last line was enough to catch him unexpectedly, giggle genuine and lasting. “Seagulls? They would probably wake us up like roosters do on farms,” 

“Built in alarm clocks, maybe we would become morning people? Watching the sunrise as the waves hit the rocks by the lighthouse,” 

“As much as I would pray it would be warm, I'm sure the mornings and nights would be a bit chilly. I'd want to spend as much time curled up in bed as I could, snuggling for hours.” Soobin had pulled you in closer, his nose dipping to your ear as he said it, burying his face into your neck at the suggestion. The tickling of his lashes and soft lips made you laugh. 

It had been the first night you had spent in his bed, the train coming in late enough for you to worry about him walking all that way back to his place alone. His persistent talk of him sleeping on the couch shut down over and over again. “It's your bed, if anything, I should be the one-”

“I'd never make you sleep on the couch,” he seemed appalled by the suggestion, pushing the door to his room open to reveal the half-made bed, still sleep wrinkled with half the duvet pulled to the side. “Here,” he had pulled out his pajamas from his neatly folded clothes in his dresser, “you can take anything you want to wear to sleep, and the bed is yours.” 

It was only after you changed that he finally let you convince him to get between the sheets. The white duvet pulled up to your chin as you rolled your eyes at his suggestion of making you uncomfortable. “I've never felt more comfortable with a person before,” you reached out, taking his hand just to trace the lines of his palm, his fingers twitching from the sensitivity, curling around your own. “I've never been so happy to have met someone,” 

The swell of that feeling sat in your chest, not heavy but whole. You slid closer to him, sinking into the dip in the bed his body made, until it would take effort to pull away. His arms were a comforting weight around your body as you lay your head on his chest, tucked under his chin to hear his heartbeat, the erratic rhythm of it making you smile. And you had fallen asleep that first night in his bed, listening to the way his heart slowly started to even out, his body relaxing just as well as yours, melting into one another, tangled legs and syncing breaths. 

It had been easy to fit into each other's lives, your friend group getting along enough to spend every other weekend out together at one of your apartments, although your shared place with Kai became a closet as you spent most of your off time over at Soobin's. Within the year of you two being together, you had hung up frames, bought mugs, and shopped for groceries with your things mixed in the cart, Soobin reaching for them without thinking twice. 

The six of you crammed into Soobin's tiny living room, the couch only big enough for two and a half. Hence, you wedged yourself into his lap, his arms wrapped around you, the younger three boys sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, while Yeonjun sat focused on the tv next to Soobin and you. Video game controllers taking turns between four of you at a time. It was all you ever needed on a weekend, time slipping past until in that soft, comforting way that made you realize that maybe these little things were all you needed to feel content. 

The summer had come in a wave of heat, Soobin, and you were making it out to Montauk for the fireworks just as you had the year before, taking the last train back without the question of where you would spend the night. Pulling open the drawer he had cleared for your things, only to pick one of his shirts to wear time and time again to bed. 

There was no loss of that shyness Soobin held seeing you in his bed, no loss of that admiration that you wanted to spend your free time wrapped up in him, with him. He would spend a million mornings watching your eyes open, your first instinct to kiss at his neck, the soft brush of your lips making the corner of his mouth tip up like you had found the button to his happiness right against his adam's apple, his pulse point. 

He would shuffle out of bed after you, rubbing sleep from his eyes, watching you in the mirror as you brushed your teeth, his hands over your body begging you to just call out, stay back with him in bed so he wasn't so lonely on his day off. You had tried to fix your work schedule to align with his, taking shifts so that you both worked the same, so that you didn't have to resist his pleas, the temptation so easy when he was this warm. 

“Stay with me,” his mouth right at your ear, as you rubbed your moisturizer onto your face, his hands slipping under the shirt you had just put on for work, thumbs running soft circles over the skin of your stomach. “I'd make it worth it,” he'd whisper, his fingers just slipping into the waistband of your jeans, tracing along the thin fabric of your panties. 

It was nearly impossible to pull away from him, his promises always fulfilled, his words of encouragement and praise filling his small bedroom with each pass of his skilled fingers. Your work clothes carefully tugged off, forgotten on the floor, and not picked up until the next day because you would inevitably get up again at noon after falling right back asleep in his arms. You didn't care if you walked around his apartment in nearly nothing, his shirt taken off his back and given to you, his grey sweatpants low on his hips as he made you both a mug of tea. 

You'd sit on the counter like that first time, blowing the steam from your mug that he had picked out for you that first week of being together, one extra in the cabinet for when his mom came over for a visit. Soobin between your legs looking over his own cup with his dark hair a mess from either sleep or your fingers. 

And on days when you needed to resist, he would walk you all the way to your job, kiss you, and leave only to come back half an hour later with a cup of coffee, order memorized since that first day, a muffin picked from the display case because he knew you needed something to eat. He would sit in the coffee shop with his laptop, playing games or reading, following you around as you stocked books to plan weekends with the boys. “It's going to snow next week, we could go out to Montauk and sit at the lighthouse drinking hot chocolate,” 

“Your birthday is next weekend, don't you want to spend it with everyone?” You had already planned to pick up his cake, the boys saying they would come over with their gifts and games. 

“I kinda wanted to rent a place out there, spend it with my favorite person, in our favorite place,” he blushed as he said it, pursing his lips as if he let too much slip, as if the two of you hadn't made it any more clear that you were obsessed with each other. But he couldn't help himself, every passing day he found more that he didn't know about you, more to discover because knowing each other a year wasn't enough when he wanted a lifetime of birthdays spent in bed with you on a cold beach, kissing warmth back into each other with every passing day of new discovered knowledge. “Too much?” 

“No,” you let the word out on a short, breathy laugh, “we can do anything you want, you're never too much,” you couldn't kiss him then, not while the store was half full of regulars as you reach up to put a book on the shelf but you want to, felt it calling to you whenever it was that he let that boyish shyness show. “Just let me know if I should invite everyone, even if it's only for a few hours.” 

“Yeah, we can do breakfast at that spot right by the apartment, pancakes with a candle in it, that kinda thing, then we take the train out together, I don't really care, I just want you to be there.” 

“Of course I'll be there, you act as if I don't basically live at your place.” You couldn't remember the last time you slept alone there. You had made quick visits to see Kai and pick up loose items you hadn't realized hadn't made it over to Soobin's. You still paid rent, and Kai said he'd never kick you out because he would always give you a place to stay, rent or no rent. The only reason he couldn't keep you from paying was because you had the account information to submit your half when it was due. And when the time came that you did officially move in with Soobin, it was never a big transition. Kai kept your room just as it was, your sheets still on the bed, your boxes still in the closet. 

“I know,” he shrugged, shoulder to his ear, cheeky smile showing his dimple you found yourself kissing almost too often. “I just like to hear you say it.” 

You booked your weekend stay on the beach even if it was going to snow, and changed the plans with the boys so they could catch him before the train ride out of the city. That Friday morning, the six of you packed yourselves into one booth, ordering a table's worth of food, plates clinking from the amount. You had packed a bag's worth of loose birthday candles, enough for every year you were celebrating him being alive. His stack of pancakes punctured with a rainbow of candles, the lighter you had brought going slowly as you tried to light each one, Yeonjun leaning over the table to help take one fast melting candle around to the others, trying not to get wax all over and failing. 

Happy birthday was sung loud enough for people to join in over their morning coffee, clapping as Soobin shyly blew out his candles, hiding his face in your neck when the boys didn't stop singing and started to harmonize. “Make them stop,” his laugh caught right against your collarbone. 

And when the two of you left to catch your train, you sat in the same seats you always did, right in the middle with Soobin sacrificing the window seat so that you could get the best view, even on his birthday. Your weekend bag was packed together and tossed over his shoulder as he held your hand while you got off. The snow had not started to fall, but would come in the night just as the forecast had stated. Both of you bundled up in your coats, walking close together until you were almost stepping over each other. 

“Look at that,” the rental right at the edge of the sand, overlooking the slice of beach just in sight of the lighthouse. The place is big with five rooms, a house made to host people on the summer weekends like the one you had met on. “The street is empty, all except our place.” The road right at the back of the houses void of any cars, even the trash bins are all pulled in and kept away from any blowing winds. 

“It's why I could get us the best price at the best place, the beach is private and blocked off just for us.” Even if no one was there, it felt special and all your own, cut away from the city, from everything but your love. 

You had picked up the keys where you had been told they would be, fiddling with the lock, trying to get your fingers to steady with the wind pinching them enough to leave them trembling. Tossing your bag down right next to the entrance, not caring about anything else besides making it out to see the sunset over the water before it was too late. Soobin wraps his arm around your shoulder, pulling you into his chest, to warm both of you up. 

With only the sound of the water, you both sat down in the sand, seagulls gone and the lighthouse making its rounds as the night started to dip to a faded grey, sun caught behind the clouds, so there was only the outline of light along the shore. Soobin kissed the top of your head, keeping his cheek right there over the spot as if that would keep it ingrained into the memory you were both creating. 

“I love you.” The words were easy the first time, and so now, when you speak them, it's natural enough not to even be felt slipping from your lips. But the impact is felt just the same, a weight that keeps you grounded instead of suffocated, because he never pushed away your feelings and always responded the same way with “I love you more,” a fight he would die on the hill of each time you shook your head and declared you loved him more. 

And even there in the open, he laid you down on the sand, the warmth of his body pressed against yours through the layers of fabric separating you, his hand hot against your skin as he slipped it under your sweater, holding your side. Your fingers cold as you twisted them in his hair, your head thrown back while he kissed along the column of your throat, muttering between each peck, “I need to get you a scarf,” his nose bumped right behind your ear, smelling your perfume, the trail his mouth made turning cold when he pulled away to find your lips again. 

He'd have you right on the sand if he wasn’t worried about you getting sick from being out in the cold for so long. So he pulled you up, helping to brush the sand away from your coat before you giggled, giving him one last quick kiss to his cheek before taking off towards the house, “race you!” 

It was harder to run in the sand, your feet slipping and heavy to pull up with each footfall. Soobin was right on your heels, laughing and calling out your name as you shrugged off your coat even while the snow had started its dusting. The second you had reached the long walkway up back to the house, the sunbleached wood creaking under you, you dropped your jacket, knowing he'd bend down to get it, giving you time to beat him even with his long legs. 

And it was exactly what he did, “not fair!” his laugh trailing through the frosting air, salted with the fast falling flakes of snow. You were already tugging off your sweater as soon as you got to the door, pushing it open because neither of you had cared enough to lock it when it was a ghost town. But before you could step foot inside, his hand, now cold, landed against your stomach, pulling you back against him. “Nope, not this time,” his face icy from the wind pressing into your neck until you shrieked from the shock of it. 

You had turned in his hold, wrapping your arms around his neck, trying to pull him into your warmth as much as possible. And he let you, cold hands slipping along your bare back, fingers dancing along the clasp of your bra, teasing you with the idea of him unfastening it. Your nose bumped against his, “I win,” your words brushing long his lips, catching in his laugh. 

“You cheated.” His tone was dipped in a hazy mix of lust and love-sick desire. His eyelids heavy; body so close to melting into yours. 

“I was only making it easier for you, skipping a bit of the undressing.” You pushed your hands into his coat, giving him the hint to take it off, sliding down along the toasty fabric of his sweater until you could slip under the hem. 

His stomach flexed under the ghosting of your fingertips, his lips light as they kissed over your jaw, following the line up to your ear as he whispered, “But that's half the fun." His soft inhale of your perfume made him close his eyes, “like unwrapping a present.” 

He did want to pull away, not even to undress himself, half rumpled coat caught in the crook of his elbows, sweater pushed half up his stomach, jeans low on his hips, the band of his underwear hugging him just right. You could see it all over him, that desperation kissed along his creased brow, the look of a man who would go to the ends of the earth for one glimpse of you, even if it was through the mist of a heavy mirage. 

So when you led him up the stairs, he followed, stumbling all the way after you, stopping at the door to watch the way you fell back on the neatly made bed, sitting up on your elbows. It was a memory that was tattooed into his mind, the way you spilled out on the sheets for him. You took up all the space in his mind, so much so that if anyone walked into the room of his brain you would be the first person they turned to see, that image of you in the sand, in the sheets of this bed, or his own, hung up on the wall like a recall of every good time the two of you shared. 

Soobin dropped his coat, grabbing the back collar of his sweater to tug it over his head, not caring where any of it landed when the straps of your bra were slipping from your shoulders, just barely keeping the thin material in place over your chest. “God, I love you so fucking much,” the words bubbling up out of his lips like a confession he hadn't felt slip, his voice dropping into a needy groan as you rolled your hips. 

“Prove it,” your chin lifted, smile biting into him as he sank to his knees at the edge of the bed, his hands sliding up your thighs, fingers curling around the waistband of your jeans, already unzipped and unbuttoned, showing the fine lace of your panties. He would be right at the foot of the bed till the end of time, proving his love, his desperation, his devotion, to you if you had asked. 

He was slow to drag the fabric down your legs, your hips lifting to help him get it off of you. Placing one of your ankles on his shoulder, he kissed your calf, trailing up your skin as you leaned forward to brush his hair back from his brow. He wanted to take his time on you, spend all night pulling every little sound he could from the depths of your soul, make you just as flushed and flustered as he always felt when wrapped up in you. And you would let him, your thighs widening slightly just for him to nip at the soft plushness of them. 

Your quiet whimpering encouraged him, his cheek pressed to your leg, he reached out to press his thumb over your clit, circling just enough to make your head roll back. “How could someone be this perfect?” and it was the raw honest curiosity in the question that made your heart flutter. The look he casts on you leaves no room for you to be shy. He would not take any head shakes of contention, not when you were already trying to push your hips closer to his fingers, wanting him as thoroughly as he wanted you. 

He did not stop his teasing, the slow circles building you up at just the pace he wanted before he pulled away. Your whine was short-lived when he slipped his fingers right into you, smiling at the way your lashes fluttered for him. You tried to close your knees at the feeling, but he had wedged himself perfectly to keep you spread, one arm wrapped around the underside of your leg propped up on his shoulder. 

Your eyes screw shut when his mouth falls down to your clit, kissing so softly like a thank you. His hum of approval at your gasp runs along your spine. He leisurely keeps his fingers pumping into you, kisses soft and barely there, content with making you messier, taking his time. There is no room for embarrassment with how wet you are, your hips trying to chase his mouth, needing more pressure, needing more attention. 

The desperation is written out in the way you pull him forward, hand cupping the back of his head until you can feel his grin teasing you. He does not make you wait long, your orgasm so close to the surface with his lips greedy to please you, sucking and toys with your clit, fingers building up their speed before he curls them. The pressure makes your thighs tremble around him, your body too weak to keep up, you fall back, arching off the bed with a low whine cumming as he hums against your clit. 

Your chest rises and falls with each breath you try to grasp, your hand leaving his head to place over your heart, feeling the way it beats erratically behind your ribs. He kisses back up your leg, leaning his cheek on your knee, watching the way you are nearly spilling out of your bra, face flushed, with your cunt still fluttering around his fingers, he keeps in place to draw out your high. “You're so pretty like this, just a mess over me.” 

Soobin's lips are kissably reddened now as he leans down, blowing cool air along your pussy glistening with aerosol, your body jolts at the stimulation barely provided and proving your sensitivity. You're whining at the pout of his face, at the feeling of simultaneously being filled but not enough. His name is drawn out on a whisper as your hips pick back up their grinding, chasing another orgasm as if you had even recovered from the first. “More, please, I need more,” the words just above a whisper. 

“More?” It's the tilt to his head that does it, his examination of your body laid out, not cynical but teasing, “Do you think I'll even fit?” he reaches out with his free hand, sliding up your side, pressing down on your pelvis, “Could you take all of me?” 

You don't even care if you've had sex before, that he's asked these same questions and got the same answer. Your body was made for him, and yet the words always made you weak in the knees, mind going fuzzy, body aching to have him as deep as he could go. “Please.” 

Your whispered plea was a direct line to his cock, already leaking beads of pre-cum and straining in his jeans. He had tried hard to last, to keep his mind, his hips grinding against the edge of the mattress, looking for some form of relief and finding little. He pulled his hands from you, loved the way you sounded as you pulled your knees in together while he stood. 

He groaned deep in his throat at the taste of you, cleaning off your wetness from his fingers before undoing his belt, the clinking of the metal making you sit up. You watched the way he slowly undid his button, the outline of him devastatingly mouth-watering as he pushed his jeans down his waist. You reached behind you to unhook your bra, tossing the fabric as he freed himself. 

You had never gotten over the size of him, not when the sight provoked your body to clench around nothing, your mind wondering exactly how he did manage to fit. The length of him twitching in his hand as he loosely tugs, your eyes following the movement until you're squirming, watching the way his thumb swirls along his tip. You instinctively widen your legs at the sight, free hand not twisted in the sheets, reaching up to pinch at your nipple, drawing his eyes right where you wanted him. 

He can't help himself from climbing on top of you, pushing your hands away to cup your breasts, and peppering kisses along the thin skin. He drags his teeth down to your pebbled nipples, biting and tugging on them until you're whining under him, hips working against his because he's so close to slipping right into you with his cock pressed flush against your cunt. But he doesn't care, not when he's leaving marks along your skin, kissing up your chest until he's back to your lips. 

Leaning up, he has his cock laid against your stomach, the length of him high enough to reach your belly button, “look at how deep I'll be in you,” his words a mix of awe and lust as you reach up to twist your fingers in his hair. And when he finally presses into you, he catches your gasp right in his mouth, swallowing it down as he resists pushing in too fast. He can only go as far as the tip before he has to pull back out to try again, taking his time when you're whining at the sheer stretch you feel when he inches in so slowly. 

You're clenching around him, trembling and needing him closer. His groan pressed right to your ear when he finally bottoms out, free hand falling to your hip to try and get you to stay still so your body can adjust. “Fucking perfect,” he's muttering, kissing behind your ear as you say his name, lost in a dreamy haze as you melt for him. But your impatience is building the longer he just stays still, his hair held tight in your hands as you attempt to move your hips, but he had you pinned against the mattress under his weight, until you’re desperate enough to beg with tears building at the corners of your eyes. 

It's when he finally moves that has you clawing at him, nails scratching down his back enough to leave red marks along his skin. He goes so slow at first, dragging his hips back so that you feel the veins of him, feel the way he just leaves his tip in before he's pushing right back in, building up a pace that leaves you right on the edge of insanity. 

Your gasp is twisted into a shocked moan when he moves his hand from your hip and presses down on your pelvis, your body seizing around him while he applies pressure to the bulge of his cock inside you, “you feel that?” but you can't answer, mind a mess, words spilling from you incoherently while you tighten around him, “made just for me,” his voice throaty as he says it against your neck, kissing along the mark he'd made. 

He's intoxicated by the way you react, hips dragging just right so that he can feel the way he's bumping just the right spot to make you tremble. Because you're shaking under him, legs widening before he reaches down further to circle at your clit. “Wait,” you're gasping because you can feel the knot in your stomach tightening to the point of breakage, so close to coming undone that you want him closer to keep you together because you know the second you cum, you’ll be falling apart, melting into the mattress without hope. 

But Soobin is lost, drowning in the ocean of his desire, finding it harder to keep his moans at bay, lips greedy as they taste the vibrations of your whimpers along your throat. Addicted to the way your body feels against his, the way you draw out the rawest form of himself. And the words bubble up without him realizing what he's saying, the question, demand, plea falling out as he keeps up his pace, hips lulling you to your cresting orgasm, bodies chasing their highs without shame. 

“Marry me,” he gasps, breath fanning over your ear. 

You almost don't catch it, the words washing over you but not sticking until he says it again, “marry me,” the desperation laced between each syllable. You pull him closer, his hand once holding him up now falling to your leg, dragging up the back of it before hooking behind your knee to stretch you wider, allowing his hips to sink deeper. 

The slight change of angle sends a ripple of pressure through your body, cunt fluttering around him before you're cumming, nails digging into his back, body trembling as he lays his weight on you. The rumbling of his moans pressed right against you as he buries his face into your neck, following right along with you as he cums. His stuttering hips stop as he presses in deep, so much farther now like this, spilling his warm cum into you in hot spurts. 

He doesn't pull out as he kisses along your skin, a fine layer of sweat coating both of your bodies. And it's between the heavy breathing that he slowly pumps into you again, your soft whine at the slight overstimulation making him chuckle. He pulls back, hand dropping your leg as he finally pulls out, dipping his nose to yours, kissing away your whimper when you feel the warm gush of your combined release spill out after his absence. 

You push your fingers into his hair, tucking the strands behind his ear. His cheeks flushed when he put his forehead to yours, kissing the tip of your nose. Soobin was clingy in the best of ways, trying to catch the pattern of your breathing to line up with his. His lips to your pulse, counting each flutter of your heartbeat as if it were a prayer he would have to recite later by memory. And as much as he would love to lie in your arms, melting into one on top of the duvet, he never missed cleaning you up. 

And it was only when he pulled away that you started to think about what he had said. The words came back the second that he had flicked on the glowing white lights of the bathroom, like it had only taken that one bulb to turn on for you to finally realize what he had said in the heat of the moment. Marry me. Whispered like a confession instead of a plea, as if he had already known your answer, because you knew exactly how the two of you felt about each other. There was no doubt in your mind, at least not until he wasn't in the room. 

He had kissed you, held you, and walked off, leaving you on the sheets with those words hanging in the air, in the light now shining directly onto your relationship. You were caught in your own thinking when he came back with a warm rag, his hand soft on your legs to pull you out of your mind. “You okay?” His question was soft, just for the two of you, a welcome reprieve from the way you turned those words over again and again; marry me, marry me, marry me.  

It was not the idea of marrying him that had thrown you off, but how he had not instantly brought it back up. Soobin was a shy mess of emotions most of the time, questioning himself and if he was ‘too much’ in the relationship, unless he was grasping out at avoidance, hoping and praying you hadn't heard him. And it was that which had caught you in the webbing of worry. That maybe, just maybe, he hadn't meant to say it at all, or maybe he had and was worried about how you would take it. 

You didn't know how to say it, bring it up only for him to get flustered, enough so that he confessed your deepest worry. The one where he hadn't meant it, the one where he said it was in a moment of weakness, that he didn't want to marry you, and the words had just slipped out. 

“I'm okay,” you tried to blink away your thoughts, shake your head ‘yes,’ but all you seemed to be able to do was shake your head ‘no.’ 

But Soobin could see the lie for what it was. The cover-up was a half done job of deception as he cleaned you up and kissed your skin again like an apology. “Are you sure? Was I too much?” 

He stood there, brows pulled together, looking at you with his puppy dog worry, his trip to the bathroom giving him the time to pull on his underwear, leaving you feeling exposed only because you felt like confessing your line of thinking was going to have you set out before the two of you, raw. “No, never,” and it was the truth because it was in that moment that you realized even if it would break your heart to know he didn't want to marry you, you would still swallow it down to be with him. 

You looked past him to the pile of clothes on the floor, his eyes following until he picked up his sweater, the discarded lace panties still tucked in with your jeans. He picked them up, tugged his sweater over your head, and gave you the space to pull yourself together a bit. It felt so much more intimate letting him watch you pull on your underwear than letting him take them off. 

His sweater was still warm from his skin, bringing you comfort to drop the question down between the two of you before you could take it back. “Did you mean it?” The four words tossed out on the bed like a spilled glass of wine, soaking into the air until it was thick with your worry and his confusion. You bit your inner lip, absentmindedly picking at your nails avoiding looking at him like it would be written on his face before he had a moment to hide what he really meant. 

“What?” he was caught, not in the way you had been worried about, but in genuine puzzlement over the question itself, and that way you looked on the verge of tears, ready to shatter with his next words like stones on a carefully cleaned glasshouse. 

“When you…” The words stuck in your throat, lost in your lungs, dying on what felt to be your last breath, “When you said marry me, did you mean it?” 

You looked up, facing your fear with a shovel in hand to bury his rejection deep, the moment you saw the truth written out, even if it didn't match his soft words, to try and cover it up. But he did not look panicked or pitiful, like you had already painted your mind to believe he would be. No, he looked caught, a boy, a mess of innocence who had been asked to explain why in his dreams he reached out for desires unimaginable. 

Because he had not realized he had said the thoughts on his mind, tucked a confession in between passion and pleasure like it was a bookmark between pages of a moment, and not a moment he should have written an entirely different story of. And now you were looking at him like it tore you apart to ask, the words a steel blade to his careful plans. He had planned it all out, thought about it the whole train ride over, a whole week, a month, even the moments you had spent right there out on the beach that day you two had met, because he had been sure then, and he was so sure now. 

And he had ruined it with loose lips and a mind made of mush because he couldn't help himself when it came to you, and he didn't know how to apologize for ruining his grand proposal without even having realized he had let the words slip in the first place. “Of course I meant it, i-i-” he was hot all over, from his ears down to his neck, hand jumping to his hair to calm himself because this wasn't the way it was supposed to be, not here but on the beach where you two had met, in the snow, together on the lonely sand made less lonely when you had each other. 

“Soobin-” because now, watching the way he was panicking, stumbling to find the words to fix the moment, you felt silly for worrying, silly for bringing it up because you should have known, and you did, it was only your fear blurring your sanity. 

“No baby, I'm so sorry, I didn't even realize I said it, of course you would freak out, and I just walked off like it was nothing-” he was pacing, thinking over only the few passing minutes after the two of you were done, and analyzing them, “fuck and I said it twice,” 

And you couldn't help but laugh, the sound a bubble holding all your pent up fear until it popped, dissipating as he looked at you and chuckled all the same because it was silly and something only he seemingly could have done. “It's okay,” you giggled, nerves settling down, now ready to shake yourself for negative thoughts when he had never done anything to make you doubt him. “Truly, Soobin, it's okay.” 

But he pouts no less, sinking to his knees at the edge of the bed as if he hadn't just been there, pressing his face into your bare thighs to try and quell his embarrassment. His arms wrap around your waist as he mutters against your skin, “I wanted it to be a surprise.” You're caught in your place, looking down at him, your hand in his hair, scratching along his scalp in the same way you used to lull him to sleep on late nights. 

As much as you had thought about him not wanting to marry you, it hadn't crossed your mind that he had wanted to do it then, that if he had meant to say it, it had only been in practice but not a question for you to answer any time soon. “What?” 

He turned his cheek, looking up at you with his chin on your knee, before sitting back on his heels at the look on your face. Because you were searching again for something he couldn't quite decipher, eyes flickering over the bridge of his nose like you were full of disbelief. 

The plan had been the beach, nothing fancier than the waves and sand, the lighthouse right on the hilltop, with the snow all around. Him on his knee, awkwardly stumbling through a speech while sinking under his weight, blinking to keep the hair from his eyes. He could see it like it had always been meant to happen, like a memory he had uncovered and needed to replay. But it didn't matter where he did it when all he wanted was to spend it confessing the truth of his love to you, because he couldn’t keep it in, and here was perfect all the same. 

“I even got you a ring,” he leaned over, reaching out on the floor for his coat, fumbling in the pockets for the little velvet box he had been carrying around for far longer than he cared to admit, trying to build up the courage. 

He was trembling, your gasp making him nervous in ways he had never expected. He knew how scary it would have been to ask you, but the words had already slipped out, and even in knowing you would more than likely say yes, he still had a devil on his shoulder saying otherwise. But it was laying himself bare before you that made his stomach twist in knots, not because he didn't trust you but because he was worried that he loved you too much, that you would look at him and see someone clingy in the worst ways, over emotional and searching for your love in a crowded room of passing affections. 

“I was thinking a lot about what I would say and realized I'm not very good with words,” he said with a short chuckle, trying to laugh off the tremor in his voice. It took a moment for him to look up at you, your fingers curled in the hem of his sweater, the one he had pulled onto you to try and find some way to bring you comfort. 

Now, you have tears in your eyes. Vision blurry as you looked down on him, dressed in nothing but his underwear, hair a mess of tousled strands, with shaking hands and stammering words. “I wanted to ask you in the place that I first realized I wanted to marry you, the place I knew you were the one. It's kinda silly to be scared now because even if I knew that first day that you would be the only one I could see myself buying a ring for, it's impossible not to be. Because I love you with everything in me. I love my friends, my family, my bed, and still, I never realized love, real love, felt like this. And I feel it in a new way when I'm with you, I read books, I watched movies, I saw how my parents were with each other, and I wanted affection, but I didn't think much of it past just being an emotion people shared,” 

“But when I met you, I felt so seen. I didn't have a crush; those words feel so childish because my love for you, my feelings for you, are bigger than anything I can pinpoint in the world. When I say you're made for me, I don't mean it in a possessive way, I mean it in a, I was put on this earth to love you, kinda way. Because when I'm with you, when I'm not, I ache. I think about how lucky I am to have you when you're here, and burn when you're not, and it feels bigger than the both of us, and that is scary, but also very comforting because it only tells me that you are the one,” 

“My life didn't feel like it had started until I met you, and I can't think of any other person whom I would rather spend the rest of my life with because you are mine, someone i would never be able to forget, someone i want to spend hours with on this beach, sipping tea, and reading books, sleeping in with, and loving forever, doing exactly what i know i was put here for. So I'll ask again, properly this time, will you marry me?” 

He opened the little box, the ring perfect and hardly seen through your tears as you nodded, not caring how you looked and just needing to be closer to him. There was no space at the foot of the bed, but you found a way to wedge yourself into it when you threw your arms around him, face pressed into his neck, the words still on your lips as you said them again and again, “yes, a million times yes,” 

The grin he had plastered on his face hurt his cheeks, dimpled, and stuck with the swell of his happiness. Neither of you cared that you were on the floor, your hand shaking just as badly as his had been, and it only made him bite back a giddy laugh. Because he was slipping the ring he had picked so long ago onto your finger, twisting the silver band until it rested just right to place the diamond on display. He kissed your still trembling fingers right along your knuckles before pulling you back in to hold. 

It felt a bit surreal the next morning when the sun was filtering in through the gauzy curtains. The diamond caught the light as you held your hand up in front of you, the smile heavy on your lips, Soobin’s body curved into yours, still sleeping soundlessly. You wanted to tell everyone, call up Kai just to gush about the moment, and spill the details of the love confession you had been waiting a lifetime for. Nothing felt half full, not now, not when it was so fresh in your mind. 

“Do you like it?” Soobin’s sleep ridden voice caught you, his nose still tucked into your neck, his soft yawn pressed to your collarbone. 

“I love it.” It didn't matter what the ring had looked like, not when you hadn't expected to ever be given one in the first place. You couldn't turn away from it, your eyes catching it with every passing moment after he had slipped it onto your finger. While you poured coffee, brushed your teeth, and pushed Soobin’s hair back behind his ears, you couldn’t stop yourself from thinking back to him, his words. 

It made the house feel all your own, the two of you fitting in like testing the future life you would both share. And even when you made it back into the city, cut from the sea and salt stained air, your happiness followed after the two of you, bled into the monotonous parts of your day. His voice echoed in your mind while you stocked books at work, ‘you are the one,’ replaying over and over, your heart aching to get back home to him, even if it had only been a few passing hours since you had last seen him. 

There had been love before, but there was something keenly different about coming back with a ring. Your friends who had known you two at the very start even looked on with softer eyes, truly happy smiles, while you shared over late night takeout, still wedged onto Soobin’s couch, holding your hand out to Yeonjun, giggling like you had shared your crush had slipped a note into your locker and not slipped a ring onto your finger. 

“You two are disgustingly perfect for each other,” Beomgyu had joked, his teasing smile turning into something sappy, “I'm really happy for you two.” 

It had been so good to bask in the light of your love, to think about what it would look like to see Soobin at the end of a long aisle. It had been easy to ask questions lying in bed late at night, your fingers grazing his cheek as the two of you whispered about wedding plans, flowers, tables, chairs, dresses, and friends. But each night that hazy state of readiness slipped from just a feeling into a blurry question of when. 

It had been slow, a passing of time that felt natural to share while engaged, the planning light, dates set and passed without much worry when you were both busy and didn't make things set in stone. It didn't scare you, and neither of you pushed to plan past the late night dreams and pillow talk. And even when the ring had been sitting on your finger for longer than a year with no plans made, you didn't let it bother you. 

Or you tried not to. 

Soobin did not love you any less, neither of you felt any different, but the weight of the ring began to feel heavy when every new question was swept under a rug you hadn't seen being placed right at the front door of your relationship. You could shrug it off just as easily as it was to brush anything away from your mind, waving your hand at the light teasing remarks made by your friends, coworkers. But each passing word was a stone hitting against your ribs until it was hard not to see the bruising starting to bloom. 

“Do you guys just not have a date in mind?” Kai had asked when it was just the two of you out. 

“Not really,” you didn't want to look up from the rack of clothes you were distracting yourself with, mindlessly pushing each hanger aside without looking at the shirts. 

“Are you…nervous about marrying him?” The question traveled along your skin like a bug you were trying fast to swat away. 

“No-it's not- we just never really talk about it,” you felt weird to say it aloud, to confess something you were holding in when you felt it to be small. Because it would be a lie to say you hadn't been thinking about the passing time, that each month that went by, where you talked less about a wedding and slipped back into boyfriend and girlfriend and not fiancés, pained you. 

But it felt small because Soobin was seemingly happy with the wait, happy to sit in a still frame instead of moving color. And nothing was wrong, you had not fought, you had not felt him pull away, it was just stagnant, a ring but with no follow through.  You didn't want to seem greedy, you had a man, a devastatingly devoted man who kissed you every morning on the cheek after making you a cup of coffee, who followed you around like a love sick puppy, made time and space for you in his day not because you had asked but because he had confessed to not being able to live without you. 

But it brought you right back to that feeling in the bed, the one where you sat and told yourself it was okay to swallow down his not wanting more, just so that you had enough of him. You had felt in some way that he had slipped up with his question, caught him too soon, and now, with plans half made, you could not help but think again about him not being ready. And that was okay, you knew it was, you loved him more than a marriage, but it didn't stop you from aching. 

“You don't talk about it? Like ever?” You didn't have to look up to know his brows were scrunched, his slight frown working on his lips to pull you to backtrack. 

“Well, kinda, I bring it up occasionally, and he always says, ‘we don't have to be married just yet to be in love, we just are,’ and it's very sweet, and he kisses me, and you know I get distracted, and it's just a cycle.” but even that feels like running, the truth heavy on your heels as you lie, “and it's not that big of a deal, he's right, we love each other, we’re just playing by ear,” 

“So married…five years after the engagement is likely? Asking so I can possibly get a week off of work and not just a sneaky sick day,” but Kai's joke misses its landing, the words a piano on a string, hanging over your head with no room for you to move away. 

Five years was a long time, and you were already struggling with the one year long engagement as it was, and each day, Soobin made it less clear on his direction with the casual wave of his relaxed words. While he was stretching out in the room of your relationship, you felt the walls moving in, not all at once, not enough for you to see, but it was as if the ring had moved every piece of furniture one inch over and you kept almost missing the your seat each time you tried to sit down next to him. You could get used to the room again, you're sure of it, but in five years with no wedding, you're sure the walls would be tight. 

The conversation followed you all the way home, like the words had been stones you were forced to swallow, and now they turned in your stomach. Each passing second you sat alone on the couch waiting for Soobin to get back. You had tried to busy yourself, showering until the water ran cold, brushing your teeth once, twice, tugging on Soobin's sweater, trying and failing to calm your racing mind because he wasn't there to quell it. 

There had been cracks already spider webbing along the windows of the little glass house you kept neatly placed around your relationship. Each one starting from your own worries, easy to ignore when no one else talked about it, but the conversation with Kai had only turned you to look at the glass, run your finger along the seam, and question if you were really okay. 

And you weren't. The more you pressed that bruise, you thought you would get used to the pain, but you couldn't, and you knew well enough that it was wrong to sit in silence and leave Soobin in the dark. He had done nothing wrong, and you knew, telling him, asking him the questions directly on why the two of you were waiting would only help and not hurt. 

But keeping it in would hurt. Every time he made those small comments, as if you were already married felt like a reminder that you weren’t. So you talked yourself into it, paced the living room, sat down on the couch, and stood right back up to pace again. It was how Soobin had found you biting at the skin around your nails halfway to standing when he kicked off his shoes. “You okay, baby?” He dropped his bag, suit still neatly pressed even after spending all day at the office, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. 

“I-” it had hit you then, the twisting nausea once mistaken for worry over a conversation long coming, now sinking into something swift and unforgiving. Your mouth filled with saliva, your feet carried you to the bathroom before you fell to your knees to throw up.

It was fast and upsetting enough to bring tears to the corners of your eyes. The back of your hand wiped at your mouth, Soobin's hand soft and warm on your back as he rubbed soothing circles, your first instinct to whine, “No, you can't watch me be sick.” 

“It's okay, in sickness and in health, right? You can’t scare me off that easily,” and although the words are supposed to make you feel better, they only serve as a reminder of why you were pacing in the first place. Because it felt a bit like unintentional teasing, like you were right on the cusp of knowing the joke but not being able to fully digest it. But it was only in your mind, because Soobin cared enough to buy you a ring, to profess his love, over and over again. 

You shouldn't worry, the statement repeated in your mind until it was nearly a reality. It shouldn’t matter if you got married within the year or the next five; it only matters if he loves you. And he does, enough so that he kisses your sweaty temple, and helps you stand on wobbly legs to lean against the sink while he preps your toothbrush so you can feel clean again. How could you wallow in your insecurity when he's done everything to show you he loves you, married or not? Wasn’t it greedy to beg him for a wedding when he had done everything he could to love you right? 

And while you rinsed out your mouth, he kept his hand on your lower back, keeping you steady, watching you in the mirror as you brushed away the tears you had been building. “Were you feeling bad all day?” 

“No,” at least not enough to get sick over, “it just hit me all of a sudden, I don’t know, I've never felt like that before, at least not without having something bad to eat first,” you sat at the lip of the tub, fingers pressed lightly into your eyes, mind working over the last things you had eaten. 

“Maybe you're just getting sick, you've been sleeping in a lot lately, like when you got the flu.” Soobin got down on his knees in front of you, hands sliding up your thighs, rubbing in warmth with the pads of his thumbs, “I could go and get you some medicine, something to settle your stomach if it's still feeling upset,” 

You let out a weak whine, pained over your line of thinking for hours, twisting you into knots when Soobin hadn't even brought a ribbon into the equation. You wanted to kick yourself. “No, you just got home, I don't want you to have to go back out.” You dropped your hands down to his, the bathroom light catching the diamond on your finger, “It's probably just my period coming, I'll be fine.” 

He was looking up at you, brows knit in his gentle concern, ready to go out even after a long day, just to make sure you were okay, and you were worrying about him setting a date. You felt sick, but only because he was too sweet for you and your worrying mind. “I don't mind the trip, it's right on the cor-” 

“No, not tonight, I'm feeling a bit better, it was just a wave of nausea, no need to worry,” you threaded your fingers into his hair, messing up the neat style he tried to keep for work. “Thank you,” 

He rolled his eyes, playful and annoying, “Don’t thank me,” he sat up straighter, leaning in, “just give me my welcome home kiss, you missed it earlier,” but you turned your cheek, his lips falling to your jaw. 

“No, I’ll get you sick-” but it didn't stop him, his lips falling again and again onto your cheek, down the bridge of your nose, right on the edge of your mouth. 

“You just told me you felt better,” he said between each peck, his smile felt along your skin while you wrapped your arms around him, letting him pull you into the circle of his arms. “And a little sickness isn't going to gross me out when I love my girlfriend,” 

Girlfriend. The word hit you as bittersweetly as honey flavored cough syrup, but you swallowed it down anyway because he cared to share it with you. And when he kissed you, you kissed him back, pushing past his work blazer and helping to unbutton and untuck his shirt. Not caring that you had already showered when he pulled you in after him, letting him scrub away your worries, kiss them away from your water drop speckled shoulders. 

And when both of you were done, dried and laid out on the couch, waiting for the takeout order you had sent in, you couldn’t even remember why you had been worried in the first place. But it wasn't until you opened the takeaway box filled with rice that your nausea came back, the wave of it making your head feel light on your shoulders, with a chill down your spine. 

Soobin had been next to you on the couch, chopsticks holding his next bite of food up, his cheeks already stuffed as he watched you run back to the bathroom. 

You hardly had anything left to throw up in your system, but it didn't stop your body from tying. And when Soobin's hand was back to rubbing comfort between your shoulder blades, you wanted to cry again. “No, go back to eat, don't worry-” 

“No, it doesn't bother me, let me take care of you.” Each word pulled the tears right from you, your emotions overwhelmed with having thrown up, feeling like a little kid at the edge of their bed, needing someone, but not knowing how to call out for them. “It's okay, baby.” he kissed the tear on your cheekbone, “I'll go get you something, okay? I'll be quick,” 

It was only after you were done brushing your teeth again for the fourth time that you realized there was another possibility, Soobin pressing a swift goodbye kiss to your temple, already having his coat shrugged on to head out, when you reached out for him. “Could you pick up a pregnancy test?” You’d have gone with him if the word hadn’t made your limbs feel numb all over again, “just to make sure.” 

“Okay,” he breathed the word out, let it hang on his lips like he was still trying to understand what you had asked him, but he could see the slight twinge of panic on you and didn't want to freak you out. “And I'll get crackers cause you still need to eat something,” he kissed you again, right at the crease of your worrying brow, “it's okay, I'll be right back, and we'll be fine.” 

You watched the door close behind him, your hands shaking as you twisted them together, tugging on your fingers as if that could pull your anxiety fright from them. You could picture the way the two of you had been curled in the sheets, his whispered kisses pressed to the shell of your ear as he hummed, “I don't want anything to change.” you don't know why you picked that memory of all of them to think of while sitting at the edge of your shared bed waiting for him to come back. 

Soobin's panic was not felt until he stood right in front of the rows of pregnancy tests, the pink, blue, and white boxes all lined up, warping his emotions into something masquerading as confusion, as if his body knew that's what he needed to lean into instead of worry. He had been here before with you, in well over two years of being together, you had experienced a pregnancy scare twice over, but never had you been sick before making the call to just pick one up just because. Never had you looked up at him like you almost knew the answer. 

So he grabbed an array of boxes, all the colors, all the types, single packs and triple, carrying them to check out, watching them get scanned, and coming to terms with what he was feeling. Thought about how it would be to see any of the tests read negative, how it would be to find that it read positive. And it was only when he reached the door of your shared place and knew that in some way he would find himself sad to have you read out that it was negative, and when he pushed open the door to see you worrying, he wondered if you would feel the opposite. Because now while you turned the tests upside down on the bathroom counter, he couldn't help thinking about a baby with your smile, a small, dimpled cheek so easy to kiss when they giggled a laugh made from your love. 

Both of you sat with your backs against the bathtub, your body half spilled onto his as he rested his chin atop your head, his cheek falling to your hair as you laid your hand against his stomach, counting his breaths instead of the seconds passing. “We will be okay,” he muttered, his hopeful smile trying to curve on his lips, but he didn't want to give too much away without knowing how you felt. 

You were biting at the skin on your inner lip, thinking over all the outcomes, wanting more but fearing it was too much, because it was less about how you were currently feeling and how you would feel. That same game of chicken was playing out just like it had been in that bed in Montauk when he had asked you to marry him. And when you started to think about a baby, a real one with his kind eyes behind dark lashes, you couldn't stop yourself from seeing them in his arms.

But your stomach still hurt, the unknown origin muddling up your thoughts until the alarm you had set went off like someone had pulled a cord on your back to set your hands back to trembling, cupped in Soobins as he kissed along your knuckles, right against the ring he had put there with a promise to love you like he was made to. 

He stood behind you, hand heavy on your hip as you lifted the first test, watching you in the mirror as you turned it over, your hand jumping to your mouth as you looked at the little pink plus sign, you reached back out, turning over each test you had decided to take, each one coming back with the same reading. You looked up at him, feeling flushed all over, both of you with tears in your eyes, and for only a second, you were worried, but that was washed away the moment he smiled, his laugh like a child's, pure and uncontrollable. 

You two didn't need words, his kisses coming fast, his arms wrapped around your waist, spinning you around as you both giggled, your toes touching the ground only making you breathe out a sigh of shocked disbelief, that test still in your hands as Soobin guided it closer to his eyes. All teeth and dimples when he looked back at you, “God, I fucking love you,” and he was back to kissing you, his soft lips feeling like a thank you, like a confession, his cheeks wet as he started to cry, leaning his forehead on yours when he needed a breath, his palm falling right down to your stomach, his smile watery with his tears. 

And you were crying too, crying more so when he got down before you, pushing up the sweater you wore, kissing right under your belly button, your fingers threading through his hair as he whispered right against your skin, “and I'm going to love you so, so, much,” 

It didn't feel real for only as long as it took you two to make it to your appointment. The three days of waiting since the test felt as if they went by too slowly, the bubble of your joy encasing the two of you as you vibrated with your happiness. You didn't imagine it to be so hard to keep the positive test a secret, both of you deciding to wait at least until after you had seen the scans. But that first call with Kai felt like walking on a tight rope. 

You had rushed to put the phone down, too worried that it would just jump from you in between casual conversation about the next time the boys would come over for dinner. Your hand fell to your stomach instinctively, even if you hadn't been showing since you were hardly far along. There wasn't even bloating, just the occasional nausea and heavy sleeping, missing alarms, and whining every time Soobin reminded you that you had to wake up with the sun. 

But you had kept the secret just as well as he had, sealing your lips until you walked into the doctor's office. Soobin had called in to come in a bit later to work, your appointment made for your day off. Both of you sat in your seats in the waiting room, his knee bumping yours as he leaned closer to watch you fill out the forms needed. Your pen hesitates over the emergency contact information, wondering if you should check the little box for husband/spouse, or check the one for boyfriend/partner, under Soobin's name. 

When you turned in the papers, it had been only a few minutes before they called the two of you back, the ultrasound room half dark with the soft lights from the machines and monitors. There had been little nerves until you were lying down in the bed, the paper crinkling under each movement you made, Soobin sitting on the stool next to you, holding your hand and bringing it up to kiss your knuckles. 

In the half-lit room, it felt easier to confess, “I'm nervous,” when it was the two of you, your fingers toying with his, looking for anything to focus on besides your racing pulse. 

“We’re okay and we are going to be okay.” his smile was a balm, his gaze falling over you in a way he had never once looked at you before. Your relationship was a ball of clay slowly being worked into new shapes as each day passed with this new information, as your body worked to grow a little physical form of your love. “I'm actually really excited right now, I feel like I just drank a tub's worth of coffee,” it would explain the way his leg bounced erratically, the thrum of it bumping against the bed like the hum of a car. 

“You did have two cups this morning,” you chuckled, soaking in his excitement to try and mask your nerves. 

“And I'm really excited to tell my mom,” he whispered like it was a secret, his smile eating at your heart, kissing your soul. “The boys too, I'm really excited to tell them. I've been fighting to keep it in, ignoring everyone.” 

“I guess I am a little excited about that,” he kissed your hand again, keeping it in his grasp when the doctor came in, her soft smile and cheerful voice reflected in her words of congratulations. 

It wasn't until she had placed the cold gel over your pelvis that she asked the question, “Married?” She had tilted her head as she said it, pulling out the wand for the scan, free hand working to click the keys on her keyboard to get started. 

“Nearly,” Soobin had smiled, lifting your intertwined fingers to show off your ring. The word pressed like a weight on your chest, heart skipping a single beat, but there was little time for you to wallow in your insecurity when the doctor placed the wand to your skin, and the echo of waves filled the room around you. 

Because that's what it had sounded like, the surf crashing in, pulling you into reality. The doctor's voice was a hum of sound, washed out and faded in the back of your mind as you listened in on the rhythmic swell of the ocean, “Congratulations, your baby has a very strong heartbeat,” she turned the monitor to face the two of you, finger extended out to point at the fuzzy black and white screen, “and here they are, about the size of a little sugar pea,” 

It was your gentle sob that broke from you that made you realize the two of you were sitting silent, listening in on the sound of your love like someone had bottled that very moment on the beach, Soobin's toes wiggling and your laugh catching him enough to make him blush right there on the edge of the water where he had confessed his love and you found happiness. 

And now both of you were crying, Soobin's laugh pressed to your knuckles, his eyes caught on the screen just as yours were, wet with joy you hadn't known would feel so sunsoaked in the bed of a hospital you'd never been to before. Nothing felt more important than that moment; nothing had felt more real. You wanted to reach down to lay the flat of your palm over the spot you knew them to be, to confess how scared you were, but never scared enough not to tell them how much you love them and would love them. 

“They're so perfect,” Soobin sniffled, laughing at himself but not caring because he never knew exactly how happy he could be; how proud he could be for something as little as a heartbeat, but it wasn't little, it was a blanket wrapping around him, and instead of smothering, it was healing. 

His fingers trembled as he held the printouts of the scans, the echo of their heartbeat tattooed along his skull. He had thought his life had changed seeing the test, holding you in his arms, telling you everything would work out, but he had been wrong. He had not known what it would be like to have his life truly changed. 

Meeting you had felt as if everything was falling into place, like the two of you had always been a picture, and the years together had been the frame around you. But hearing the heartbeat of your baby, seeing them even as small as a little pea, had painted your picture in vivid color. 

He loved you because it was the most natural part of himself; if he knew nothing, he at least knew that. Loving your baby was fixing parts of him he hadn't even known needed tending, not because they needed fixing, but just because they could. He cried on the phone with his mom, kissed you like he never wanted to stop, and texted the boys to meet you guys for dinner in the city. 

And there in the circular booth of a restaurant that the six of you frequented too often, you shared the news. Held the little sonogram photos up, the golden lights reflecting off the glossy paper, but not enough to obscure the image. 

Kai nearly choked on his drink, setting it back down on the table as he tried to clear his throat. Taehyun reached out for the pictures with wide eyes, needing a closer look, shocked into silence. Beomgyu gasped, mouth open in a soft O, leaning in to look at the pictures now in Taehyun's hands. And Yeonjun, sitting right next to you, pulled you into a hug. His warmth triggers your eyes to water, his kind words making the tears spill, “Congratulations,” and says for you to hear and no one else, “you're going to be the best mom.”

You sit back, cleaning at your eyes, laughing like he hadn't plucked his fingers along your heart strings to hum out the single line you wanted desperately to hear. It felt so hard to brush off all the emotions you were feeling as some kind of hormones when all you could picture in your head was spending the rest of your life friends with these very people, good men who would love your child like they were their own, singing songs, playing games. 

It didn't matter how you changed because they would be there, giggling on the floor of your living room, spending nights together as a family none of you knew you had been searching for. And now it was only expanding, a seat opening up for a baby you all already loved more than you could form words for. It didn't matter about rings, promises, or distance, when all you needed was late nights like this where you sat at a table laughing over Yeonjun's cheeks being stuffed, and Beomgyus' tearful jokes. Nights where both Soobin and Kai bumped their heads on low doorways and tried to play it off. And nights where Taehyun and you watched laughing from the sidelines. 

And tonight, when everyone went their separate ways at the base of the stairs at the subway station, they each held you a little longer when they hugged you goodbye, as if they were letting their comfort seep into your bloodstream just for the little added heartbeat that sounded like the ocean. 

You hung the sonogram pictures up on the fridge, next to film strips of you and Soobin kissing cheeks at the aquarium, of Soobin and the boys all trying to mash themselves into one photobooth. And when the two of you had an off day, you stood in the kitchen, your favorite mug pressed to your lips as you looked at the little black and white photos. Soobin coming up behind you, hands warm and slipping under his shirt that you wore, palms heavy against your stomach like a hug. “Spend the day with me?” 

“Did you imagine I had other plans on the schedule?” You melted into him, your head leaning right onto his shoulder. 

“I just like to hear that you want to spend the day with me,” he kissed right along your temple, letting his lips ghost over the spot as he muttered, “preferably at the beach.” 

Both of you knew it was always an option for the two of you, the train ride never one you felt like took too much time when you had the sand and sea waiting at the other end. So you packed a bag just for the day, sat knee to knee on the train, holding hands, watching the city disappear as you both made up fake baby names to see who could get the other to laugh first. 

“I like the name rutabaga,” your lips fighting to break into a smile, Soobin's dimples fighting against the soft swell of his cheeks. 

“Ruta-” he couldn’t help but laugh, losing as his teeth tried to sink into his bottom lip, “what even- how do you even spell that-” 

“It's a vegetable,” you're giggling, the two of you trying to keep it down, your happiness sounding louder in the silent train car. “You seem to like to call them food names.” 

“Only because the baby book we got says that right now they are the size of a blueberry, that's a cute name, baby blueberry.” It had been one of the first things he had picked up after walking you to work, slipping the small stack of baby books he had found on the counter. Every morning with his tea, he would sit down and flip through them, content with reading you quotes as you curled up next to him. 

“That is cute,” you leaned back in your seat, hand over the button of your jeans, “little baby blueberry,” 

And when the train pulled into the station, you walked hand in hand all the way down to the surf, following the same path you took time and time again. It was early enough for the sky to be washed in a grey blue haze, tipped in golden yellow where the sun tried to peek through the cover of the clouds. The lighthouse came closer and closer into view as you walked past the front of the beach houses, half empty and half full, as people started to come down for the early season. 

Sitting right at the end of the row of houses was a single house with a sign in the yard, half tucked into its own space, being so far off from the others. Soobin tugged you to a stop, his hands clammy with nerves that you passed off as the warming weather. 

He found it a bit embarrassing to still stumble into shyness around you, like he was still who he was before he met you, looking to impress you because he wanted all your attention. He would follow you till the end of the world with his puppy dog stare, circling around your head like a halo he had placed there. For a long time, he had planned this all out, longer than his plan to marry you; it felt like a package deal, like the house and the wedding were wrapped up together with a bow that would only be placed with your answering yes to his coming questions. 

When he had proposed, it had been easy to see what he wanted next, to focus on the plans he had seen that second time on the beach when you had watched the fireworks and talked about the snow. Everything was working out, the listing for the house going up only days after the two of you had gone home from the proposal. He had debated it a lot, thought about your work and his, what it would be like truly to live out by the sea. 

He wondered if it had only been a dream, something you joked about but never truly wanted, or worse, if you never truly wanted it with him, but you had said yes to his ring, said yes to life with him. So he had put in a bid on the house, looked into his savings, and wondered if it was a mistake or something you would both look back on with happiness. 

And then he heard the baby's heartbeat, like a wave on the shore, the final sign telling him that dreams came true every day if you reached out for them and caught them like falling stars. Sometimes they slipped through fingers, and others they landed right in the palm of your hand, and all you had to do was hold on through the ride. So he held on, took the opportunity to look into buying the house, and now here he was with you. 

It was on the same strip of beach as the one you had rented on his birthday. The long wooden walkway leading down to the sand, sun-bleached and surrounded by wispy, uncut grass. A wrap around porch already with a built-in swinging bench. The windows bare of curtains, the empty rooms waiting for all of the things you had packed away in your old room at Kais' apartment, all the things you both had picked up for Soobin's place. The two stories would hold the three of you, the baby's room already picked out, overlooking the lighthouse sitting on the cliff, just far enough to not wash the room in light all night long. 

He had walked the place only once before putting in his bid, and saw his life playing out right between those walls, the hardwood creaking on the stairs enough to give the house character he was ready to remember.

His hand fell to the back of his neck, fingers trying to calm him in the way you did as he blushed, sharing what he had done. “I wanted to wait to tell you until it was all official. I wanted it to be a wedding gift, and now it's more of a…I don't know,” he tried to laugh, his lips pursing for a second as he looked at your face for confirmation that he wasn't overstepping, as if you hadn’t been dreaming of moments like this with him. “I want you to like it, and if you don't, we can always find a new place, you know, or stay in the apartment, find a bigger one in the city if you want.” 

He took your shocked silence as denial, his rambling mouth working to find some way to redeem himself when he didn't need it at all, “my job said they could transfer me out here and i looked into schools and they all seem really good, they even have a after school program that takes them out for swim lessons in the warmer months. And I know that's a long time off, but I thought it would be good to look into and I know it's hectic in the summertime with tourists, but the house has enough rooms to invite the guys or family over and-” 

You laughed, watery and unmistakably happy. 

“Do you hate it?” because you were tearing up, looking up at him with eyes unreadable to him. 

“You bought me a house on the beach where we met,” you whispered, trying to hold in as much as you could without spilling out in front of him like a bag of gems on a table. “How could I ever hate it when I love you so, so, so much?” 

“Was it too much?” he reached out for you, thumb on your cheek, brushing along your skin, fingers pressed right under your ear. 

“No, you're never too much,” because you didn't feel like you deserved a love like this, not when he made it so easy to love him, so easy to let yourself be loved in return. In a past life, you must have paid all your dues, worked day and night to finally make peace for this version of yourself, and you felt like your luck was running out. That one step to reach for more would break you in two instead of bending you. But if you had spent all your hard work to have someone like Soobin next to you, loving you, you had no reason to ask for more. 

To live right there with the sea, with your little heartbeat, and the love of your life, you'd spend a million more lifetimes working to pay off whatever debt you must have been building. He took you to the front door, watching you as you looked around with wide eyes, hand squeezing his as you looked at all the empty space. A fireplace unlit, a wall of windows, a kitchen fit for holidays, and bedrooms made for life. 

He had waited to sign the papers until you had seen the house, sharing the place in both of your names, keys hanging next to keychains you had bought at a gift shop down the street years ago. And only a week later you began packing, late nights spent deciding what to keep and what to throw away. Your names were written on boxes carried down the steps by the boys who had helped you guys. A truck rented that was large enough to fit your whole life in without you ever realizing how you had far too little and seemingly too much stuff. 

The air is a mix of curse words and laughter, none of them letting you lift a thing, leaving you to tell them where to place boxes. The struggle of getting the mattress up the stairs was worse than when they had gotten it down the apartment's stairs. Taehyun and Yeonjun on either end, one always trying to go faster than the other, and neither of them listening to beomgyu, who insisted over and over again that Yeonjun was one misstep away from tripping and falling backward. 

But Beomgyu was already lying out on the couch they had brought in earlier, leaning up on his elbows to shout from the living room as you and Kai unboxed the dinnerware in the kitchen. Soobin was laughing, the echo of the sound heard from all the way upstairs as he told them where to place the mattress. It was one of the last things that needed to be done; the sun only just started to set when you all decided to stay out on the beach. 

Taehyun and you stayed back in the kitchen while the rest of them found something to kick around for a game. Earlier, you had paused in the day to pick up things for lunch and dinner just for the day, now you cut up the fruits they had picked, Taehyun happy to take up cooking the rest of the food. He hummed softly under his breath, the echo of the sizzling and chopping the soundtrack of your evening, before he asked without even looking up, “Are you happy?” 

The question was not one that was full of concern but genuine curiosity, like he was only asking because he could see it on you. “I'm very happy,” because it was the truth, like you had been captured in a snow globe, only nothing could have shaken you to disrupt the image. 

“I'm glad, I'm happy for you, I'm happy for him.” he left no room for anything else but his honesty, like he knew what it meant to you. 

“Thank you for everything, the move, and bringing him to Montauk randomly one summer day.” 

“Oh, don't thank me for that, any of it, I'm sure in some way you would have met and I would still be moving you two in here, maybe a little bit off from this timeline, but eventually. You two were made for each other,” he transferred his food onto plates as he said it, like it was something he didn't have to think twice about. “Should we call them in or just take it out there?” 

“Let's take it out.” So you did, you carried the sides and fruits, setting them down on the beach towel you had put out with a few water bottles for them. 

All of you sat down in the sand, knee to knee, listening to the waves like your little heartbeat was right there with you, the boys flushed from running around, eating like they hadn't had a feast for lunch. They all decided to stay until the morning, the lot of them driving the truck back to the city to drop it off. They asked about your new job at the little shop in town, and you told them about how you were going to miss the bookstore in the city, how your coworkers teared up and promised you always had your spot back if you changed your mind, but they knew it was falling on deaf ears. 

Kai joked about being sad that his roommate was moving out, even though you hadn't spent a night at your old apartment in years. The six of you leaned back in the sand until the wind off the water started to feel a bit too chilly, your shiver felt in Soobin's arms as he held you. “Okay, let's go in; the boys have something to show you.” 

“Me?” You press your hand to your chest, shocked that the night wasn't ending. And even when they took you upstairs to your little heartbeat's room, you didn't realize what you were seeing. You had believed it to be empty, your shopping not having been done just yet. But there, right under the little window looking out to the lighthouse, was a white wooden crib, a mobile of stars hanging down over the center of it like they had known your whole world needed the view of what they would look like in your eyes. 

They all turned to you, holding their breath for your reaction, smiling when you pouted, “You guys just like to see me cry, huh?” 

“Do you like it?” Kai looked at you so hopefully, his boyish smile breaking out as you nodded, “I love it so much.” 

“We researched to find the best one,” Taehyun clarified, “even the mattress and sheets.” 

“It was a bitch to build, I pinched three of my fingers,” Yeonjun said, holding up his hand, the tips of three slightly pinker than the others. 

“It was only so hard to build because he couldn't follow directions,” Beomgyu interjects. He throws his arm around your shoulder, tugging you into the safe space of his side, like he knew you needed someone there to hold you even for a second, “But don't cry, we even checked to make sure it was eventually done right, Taehyun tested it out.” 

“You put Taehyun in the crib?” You giggled at the thought, wiping at your cheeks even when you felt as if you had a million more tears to shed. 

“He is baby sized,” Beomgyu shrugs, only feeling brave enough to say it with you blocking him from Taehyun's swift hit. 

“We are only a few centimeters off from each other; you act like I'm on the floor in comparison.” he rolls his eyes. 

“Thank you guys, truly this is perfect,” but it doesn't feel like enough, like no thank you will even make up for all the good things they have put into your life. And when they go home the next morning, you ache to watch them go, to see them waving goodbye from the driveway of your new life. You had told Soobin to make it a point to invite them often, to tell them never to think they are not welcome over, because you would miss not having easy access to weeknight laughs over video games and takeout. 

If you had known what was coming, you wonder if you would have told him you wanted to stay in the city. But there was no way of knowing, not when your last days of happiness were spent wrapped up in Soobin, the two of you lying out on the beach, falling asleep under the sun, half hidden by the umbrella you had set out. 

You listened to the sound of the waves like you were back in that ultrasound room listening to your little heartbeat. Your love for both your baby and Soobin was so sun-warmed that it soaked into you as you rested on the beach towels you had spent so long rolling into the perfect position to sit up, slightly elevated. Soobin lying sprawled between your legs, arms circling your waist, his ear pressed to your barely there bump as if the sea was their lifeline, your fingertips tracing hearts and stars on his sun-kissed back, warm and lulling him to sleep when you moved on to threading your fingers into his hair. 

This was to be your life, happy and quiet on the beach, humming as the sun set over the horizon. Days spent with Soobin's lips on your skin, reminiscing about the time you went skinny dipping, the time when he had kissed you under the sprinkling snow, and yelled across the streets of New York to ask you when you worked next. 

You had spent those first three months of your pregnancy happy. With Soobin's lips pressed to just under your belly button, whispering to your baby like they would talk back, pressing his ear to that barely there swell and humming in response like he already knew their answers. The two of you unpacking slowly because you will have enough time later since you planned on spending a lifetime raising your family between those walls. 

Every kiss to your ring finger felt more like a promise and not a placeholder. You couldn't find it in yourself to stress over a wedding when everything was already falling into place. Because he had done what you wanted, he was committed to you, wedding or no wedding. Your baby would grow up loved, and that's all you truly needed. 

But that morning, you had felt the first faint undercurrent of pain. 

You wonder if you should have known what was coming. That hazy calm before the storm wrapped around you, blinding you enough so that you ignored that first unsteady sway of the boat you sailed on. Only a day away from four months, the first morning you had woken up with the sun and not after it, Soobin still curled around you in bed instead of being the first one awake, trying to sneak away to get ready for work without waking you. The window had been left open just a bit to let in the fresh air, the gauzy white curtains you had picked out blowing in the soft breeze coming off the water. You watched the way the sun filtered in, catching the specks of dust in the air, and listened to the way the surf hit the shore and how the seagulls chirped. 

Soobin nuzzled in close to you, pressed his nose right to your pulse point, humming low and content with the warmth of the bed, your body. You didn't need to be up until midday when you and Soobin had plans to grab lunch with Beomgyu and his family. The lot of them renting a house down the road from your own, spending the weekend capturing what had captured you after your first train ride out to the beach. 

It was just warm enough for tourists to start pouring in; the tables of every restaurant and café were packed full. But you all had grabbed your food to-go and found a spot near the docks to watch the boats take off. 

All of it felt normal, easy, happy, no twinge of foreshadowing staining the edges of your picture. Not even when you waved goodbye to Beomgyu and his family as they walked in the opposite direction from your home and towards the lighthouse. Soobin kissed your head, your hands interlocked, swinging between you two while you held your shoes in your free hands, feet digging into the sand with each step, making you go slower as you watched the water. 

“It feels like I'm exactly where I want to be, like I could die right now, I'm just…happy,” Soobin mutters when you're back in bed that night, looking at you in the moonlight with eyes shining, tracing the planes of your face like he was feeling them under his fingertips, following the slop of your nose, the curve of your bottom lip. “I love you so much,” like a prayer said in a confessional, whispered as if it were caught in candlelight and hope. “Nothing could ever change that.” 

You had fallen asleep happy, a vase filled with water, a tapestry yet to unravel. And there, the moment you had let hide behind your ignorance, danced to life with one careless glass-shattering swoop, unweaving your endearing dreams. 

It had been the sound of the faucet that woke him, the deafening rush of it like an omen whispered off the wind. His stomach had fallen, sinking down in a sea of worry over nothing more than faintly warm sheets, like everything had been fine only a few fleeting minutes ago. His arm was still under your pillow, body curved around the shape of you, except there was nothing but a few spots of blood where you should have been. 

The yellowing light from under the bathroom door washed over the carpet, mingling with the moonlight. And even now, Soobin can't help but question that if he would have known what was waiting for him, would he have been able to respond differently. Mold the part of himself that fell into unwavering silence and devotion into something that could have made you stay, that could have brought you back to him. 

But he could not undo the past, only erase it, and if there was anything he had wanted to erase, it was that pain; the agony of his loss, yours. And yet down deep inside of himself, he must have remembered that moment, almost as clearly as he had remembered the first time you had met, with his feet sinking into the sand, his heart on his sleeve, and the sea sounding like a lifeline, like a memory, like hope. 

He would have fallen to his knees for you then, just as he did there on the bathroom floor, speckled with red and tears, your hands trembling like a caught moth between his, your ring cutting into his palm as you mixed your water-stained words, the cocktail like a shot to his nervous system. “It hurts.” 

“It's okay, it's going to be okay-” but he hadn't known if that was true, the words feeling like a lie as they sank to the floor, his arms pulling you in as if that would stop the bleeding, stop the hurt. He would have done anything to take it away, shell-shocked into action, your phone turned downward on the tile as if it had slipped from your hands the moment you had noticed all the blood. He reached out for it, keeping you against him as you cried, tears pressed into his chest as he dialed the only number he could think of when you see that much blood. 

He had held you until the paramedics came, his hands trembling while they told him the same things that he had just said to you, as if he were the one breaking apart. He's sure he must have been, that everything was sinking under his skin, but he didn't feel the effects, not just yet, because of the shock of it all. Because there were strangers in his house, dressed up in navy blue, soothing voices slipping right past him when he watched them carry you out, and he was there following after, trying to keep up, his shoes not even half on. 

It wasn't until they pulled into the hospital's drop-off lane that he realized he hadn't even closed the door, hadn't even grabbed his keys. All he could see was your hand, so small in his, loosening your grip, the gradual release like an unraveling he wasn't ready to face. “Most of her bleeding has stopped,” the paramedic had said, the line supposed to bring some relief, but all he could feel was that ache, his mouth dry. 

And he watched the way your eyes kept shut, squeezed instead of softened by some kind of merciful sleep, tears slipping down your cheeks from the corners as you bite your bottom lip to keep in the sound. 

For years, the two of you had kept your relationship like a ball of clay, every new thing learned like a thumb pressed into the piece, molding the two of you into shape, unfired and easily worked. But that night had been a fire, burning and solidifying the two of you into place. If it had been a careless hand, smushing the relationship into a new shape, he's sure the two of you could have made it out. 

But when they pulled you into your own private room, the lights a blinding contrast to the rest of the night, half hidden in shadow, they wheeled in an ultrasound monitor and even without the sound turned on, you both knew your ocean wave heartbeat was gone. 

Left alone in your room to decide on next steps, the silence weighed heavier than the rush of your sobbing that soon broke. Awful chest-wracking sobs that tried to fill up the emptiness, tried to cover the sound of the roaring fire hardening the two of you into something that could only shatter instead of dent and take new shape. 

He held you through the blaze, tried to stay a rock that would not break down, would not cry, not when you needed strength, not when you needed him. 

“I'm so sorry.” Your words, drowning around a sadness he could not masterfully describe, were a bat to the glass house of his dreams, swung with no intent to hurt anyone, not even him. And yet they were a gut punch, a soul-leveling whispered statement. 

The soft voice of the nurse explained over and over about how there was nothing that could have prevented what happened, nothing that could have been undone. There, they had looked at you, hands clasped in front of them, voice as soft as the look they gave, as if their gaze would add more weight to the crumbling structure above you. 

Your hand rested in his, your fingers cleaned by a sweet nurse while his stayed red, your blood drying under his nails. And the only thing that came to his mind was the way the door to the house had stayed open, leaving room for more strangers to come in without knowing the scene they would step into. The undoing of your world before their feet in a way he wasn't ready to revisit so soon. 

While the nurse prepped you for overnight monitoring, hooking you up and taking your vitals, he stepped just outside the door, thumbs working fast to solve any problem he could reach for, anything easily obtainable, your phone the only one he had taken in the rush of it all. 

The screen had cracked during the drop, the fracture cutting across the background you had picked out of the two of you on the beach, a clumsy phone taken by Kai. Soobin's eyes had been squeezed shut, all teeth and dimples as he laughed, your lips pressed to his cheek. 

He couldn't look at himself happy, not then, not when before it had felt like a mirror, and now it only felt like a lie. So he scrolled through your contacts, Beomgyu's name flashed across the screen, his silly face a welcome reprieve, and for the first time that night, Soobin felt his chin wobble. Looking at his friend even in a picture was a constant he needed then, and as the numbers on the call started to tick by, he lifted the shaking phone to his ear. 

“Are you okay?” Beomgyu’s voice was a deep rumbling of worry and sleep, and in his mind, Soobin could see the way his brows must have been pulled together, his hand pushing his hair back as he looked at the time, too late in the night or too early in the morning. And then it was Soobin's voice instead of your own. 

“I'm-” he hadn't said it in the room with you; instead, he had let it hold his tongue down until it felt solid in place. And now it choked out of him, the force of it moving him forward, “im so sorry,” he tried to hold the tears back, wanted to stay the stoic partner who didn't crumble but the second he had heard Beomgyu’s panic it washed over him almost as if someone had pushed him off the pier after tying a boulder around his waist, he couldn't swim to the surface of his sanity, not now when he was being dragged down by his sadness, his mouth opening but filling with water, with tears. 

“Soobin? What happened- what's wrong- where's-” and somewhere in a house on the beach, Beomgyu sat up in his bed and listened to his best friend sob over the phone as if he had his heart ripped out of his chest. 

He was trying to wipe his tears, but his crying felt like bleeding, uncontrollable, and he couldn't find the strength in himself to stop it, not when it was this bad, when it hurt this much all at once. “She lost- we lost the baby,” his lips moved on their own, the corners turning down, quivering as he tried to catch his breath, his free hand covering his eyes, pressing into them as if that could stop the spilling. 

The words were a blade, cutting across his back, his chest, into his heart, burning and leaving him choking on the ash. He was trying so hard to calm the shaking, to stop the feeling of thrashing happening inside of him. But it was inevitable, the pain, the heartache. 

Dreams had not felt real to him as a child, you, had been the person to show him they could become a reality, your laugh was the soundtrack to dreams he never knew he had, your touch making them bloom alive under his skin, and before they had never felt so tangible but now, now he knew the consequences of being so deeply in love with something, someone, some idea, hope. Because this ripped him apart, split him down the middle, and burned. 

He sobbed, cried out like he was ready to spill his guts, the sounds feeling so deep within him they might as well have, the tears coming from some reserve he never knew was buried so deep. And beomgyu let him, he listened, he muttered into the hollow of Soobin's chest over and over again that, “it's going to be okay,” the nurses had said it, but he couldn't believe it, it went in one ear and out the other. But here with his best friend at his ear, his brother, he could swallow it down; he had to, for you. 

“I'm getting dressed, I can be there in five minutes-” he could hear beomgyu on the other end, shuffling around, climbing out of bed, tugging on his hair as he did when he looked for something. 

“No, no, I um- I called because I-i left the front door open, i-” he didn't know how to put into words that he didn't want to lose anymore, not tonight, not today. He sniffled, reigning himself in, his hand sliding along a deck as he tried to pull himself from the ocean, or at least hold on until the tide started to pull back out. “I just need you to lock up, and clothes, I-i don't have any clothes and I'm-” but his chin wobbled again, the tears that had been slowing now trying to wash back up his throat as he looked down at his stained shirt. 

“I'll be there, I promise.” he didn't need to say anything else, not when he could hear the war between each breath that soobin was taking, feel it in the way his fingertips had gone numb at the sound of his sorrow. He knew his friend, knew he was trying to pull himself back together even if he had to be on strings to do so. “I love you guys.” 

Soobin's teeth bit hard into his lip, the pressure heavy as his throat constricted, his breath held as if that would keep his sob back. He waited until he could handle opening his mouth without it reading the sound of a wound he didn't think would be closed for a long time, “thank you,” 

And when the call was over, soobin returned to your room, face flushed a deep red, the corners of his nose, the tips of his ears, the edges of his lips, the rimming of his lashes, and you couldn't hold yourself together. He came to your bed, your hand, tapped over with the IV they had set up, curled into his, clinging with little strength. He didn't care that he probably shouldn't climb into the bed with you, but he did anyway. 

He held you, your face flush against his neck, damp with your tears as you spilled out a fraction of your mourning. You didn't speak; there was no need, not even when he got up to collect the overnight bag from Beomgyu. 

Soobin could find no other words besides thank you, but it did not feel like enough, not when this was no light thing, but he knew beomgyu would have brushed it off. He would have gone to the ends of the earth for the two of you without question; this was no different, no thanks needed. But soobin knew he could not stay, not when he knew having beomgyu see you like this was not anything you would have wanted. So he left, understanding and with a hug that did nothing but fracture the glass further. 

Making quick work of changing, soobin made it back just as the doctors were coming in for another check-up, clipboards in their hands. soobin sat down in the chair that he was expected to spend the rest of the night in, pulling your fingers back to his, he held tight. 

“We so very sorry for your loss,” the words hardened something within him, the weight of them tightening his understanding of how his future would look, it didn't matter if it took months, or years for him to grow around the pain, these words would still linger in the backs of so many peoples minds, his friends minds, his own. There would be before this moment, and there would be after. He had seen it faintly in beomgyu when he had hugged him, and now he saw it written across the doctor's faces as they explained how they could make the transition easier. 

“Over the last few years, a new type of recovery treatment has been offered here at the hospital. It's minimally invasive and painless, only offered to those who have gone through tragedies such as your own. We know the pain is fresh, and the decision does not have to be made today. Because of the magnitude of your loss and grief, we offer both partners the opportunity to undergo the procedure. But I'll let Dr. Howard explain exactly what it is,” 

With that, the second doctor stepped closer to the bed you lay on, the machines beeping into the silence left between the spaces of melancholy. “Hello, this is quite a horrible time to meet, and I am very sorry for your loss.” 

Your fingers twitched in Soobin’s at the words, as if you too could feel the weight of the albatross being placed around your neck. “I specialize in the neurological field that targets memory. Through my many years of working with retrieving memory, we have found the very root of how they have been erased in the first place. This led to the memory erasure procedure we are offering the both of you now. It is entirely painless and leaves almost no trace at all that it has been completed; it happens right at home after a single visit to the office.” 

“No,” it was instant, almost as raw and true as your tears had been, immediate, and the strongest thing you had said in hours. “I don't want- just no.” because they were offering it to erase the sound of the very thing you had held inside you, not just the sound of the waves but the outline of a dream you never wanted to live without, even when it felt as if it had slipped from your fingers in nothing more than a few hours. 

It was too fresh, too painful, but you knew you needed to feel the pain, needed to know that the agony you were going through physically and mentally was because they were real, your baby had been real, they had been an amalgamation of your years spent in Soobin’s arms, an amalgamation of your love for each other. You would not wave it away as if it were nothing more than what it actually was. You would sit, you would wallow, and you would feel their loss, because it was the only thing you had left of them. 

“You do not have to decide now, we only come to offer some reprieve in this trying time-” and in a flash, you felt it, red hot anger, it cut through your sorrow sharper than any scalpel they could ever wield. 

“Get out- go-” you shook your head, hand shaking in Soobin’s as he tried to clear the air, his face still red but tearless as you silently shed your own at the thought of these people taking anything from your mind.

“We are very sorry-” 

“Get out!” it tore through you as if you were as fragile as a piece of paper, ripped from somewhere deep between your ribs, your lips trembling as you tried to hold onto the tears, because as soon as the fire was raging, it was just as quickly snuffed out. As if it had been the last cry for help you could give before it was all over, the last breath. 

Neither of the doctors stayed; they apologized once, twice, and left as quickly as they had come. Soobin did not stop them, did not speak up, and there your relationship began to mummify. 

It did not happen all at once, but slowly, achingly wrapped up in the emotions you were feeling all the way home, sitting in the back of a cab with your head leaning on Soobin’s shoulder. Your hand resting over your stomach as it had before, the paperwork scattered in the seat next to you, a pamphlet for the memory erasure procedure ripped in two. 

The two of you returned to an empty house, made emptier now that you were ghosts of the people you were before leaving that night. Beomgyu had made sure to pack a set of your keys into the bag of clothes he had brought for the two of you. Soobin, carrying the papers, the bag, the keys, unlocked the door for you, letting you step in first. 

But you could make it in no more than the doorway, not when you knew what was waiting upstairs, the unmade bed, the bloodied floor, the nursery. You felt your head shake, your eyes squeezing shut as you swallowed down the new wave of tears as they crashed down on the shore of your resolve. “I can't-” it was too much, too soon. Because something in your heart was dried up, wrung tight in a fist that was too strong to be anyone's but your own anguish’s. Here, back in the house you had built and filled with dreams was like walking into a coffin, and going upstairs would only shut the lid. 

Soobin's hand was heavy as it pressed to your lower back, warm and flat against you, trying to guide you forward through the mist clogging up the interior. “Here,” he didn't care as he dropped everything down at the doorway, he let it spill, and pulled you to the couch. 

Neither of you would know until later that beomgyu had taken the time to change your sheets, stripped the bed you would not want to lie in for days after your return. The bathroom was scrubbed clean when he had not needed to do so. He had come back and cleaned because he knew what it would mean to walk back into this house and see the mess. 

So you lay on the couch, soobin flush on his back, holding you against his chest, your hands making fists in his shirt, fingertips just brushing your pulse to remind you that you were alive. Because lying there had never felt more surreal, your body swaying in your mind, the couch a boat on a sea you could not hear anymore. 

And maybe that's why you couldn't hear it, because there was no sea at all, just a mountain of sand, so fine it did not brush your cheeks. The wind, his lungs pressed to your ear, the only sound you heard as your world hollowed and echoed the hum of your emptiness back at you, and that one line you had heard soobin speak. 

“She lost- we lost the baby,” whimpered from lips trying too hard to keep in sobs. 

You wished to reach out at the anger you had felt at the thought of erasing the memory of your happiness. Hold onto it as strongly as a balloon string in the gusting wind, pull it into you so that for one moment it would not be this ache but a fire. Something that cleaned and crackled, spit sparks instead of feeling like a pit that had opened up at the bottom of your feet. 

There was no curiosity as you fell down into the darkness, no light looking down on you. It was just nothingness. An empty black void that had no floor. Because as the time passed, as you lay out on the couch, with or without soobin, you looked up at the ceiling and wondered what it would be like to stand and bark instead of cry. 

But as you curled into the cushion, the emptiness pressed down like a blanket, comforted you like the hand soobin had pressed on your back when you had walked in. There was no warmth to it, but it was constant, weighty, and easy. 

There was no struggle to get up when you did not try; you could stay right there on the couch with no one's company but your own, and shed your incessant tears. That first week, you had learned crying was as easy as breathing, as forgettable if you did not think too hard about it. It happened, and there was no stopping it, not unless you paid attention. 

Not until soobin came and wiped at your cheek, his sweater sleeve wet as he sat next to where you had found yourself stuck, melted into the threading. He did not speak, not into the silence that had taken over; he simply helped you to sit up and wrapped his arms around you, held the back of your head as you pressed your face into the soft spot where his throat met his shoulder. You could not find it in yourself to hug him back, arms limp around his waist. 

You had been prepared to feel sadness, swallowing that thought down like a mouthful of salt water when you were asked if you wanted your memory erased. The pain would be better than forgetting, but you had not prepared for the way the pain had turned into emptiness. Into nothing at all. 

“You should change,” he whispered, the suggestion written down on a list of things you should have done, knew you would have to do eventually, but felt too daunting to do just yet. 

The sound of his voice, patient and soft, made your fingers curl into his sweater, as if the words had been the key to getting a small reaction out of you. The thought of getting up, of pushing your limbs farther than the bathroom, made you shake your head. “I don't want to go upstairs,” it was muffled but true, “not right now.” 

He did not press, not when you were all bruise, purple, and far from yellowing. He stood, let you fall back to the only safe space in the house, and rest. In the night, he tucked himself behind you as he would in bed and slept, his lips at the back of your neck, his breath like a kiss that helped lull you to sleep that you would not find yourself out of until well into the next day. 

Every morning you woke on the couch, your eyes opened to the dust dancing in the pale light, the sky grey, the sea churning. You would follow the trail of it, looking for something to bring you back into the beam, something that made you feel anything like yourself before. But even with the heat of the sun on your skin, there was nothing that could have made you want to climb up the stairs. 

You were a knot, braided of twine, fraying around the tension, unkept and struggling to make tea in a mug you had picked out when you thought love would always be enough to make it through anything. You let the ceramic burn your fingers as you cupped your hands through the handle, did not jump when the heat scorched your tongue, or the roof of your mouth. 

Tea was all you could keep down, chewing too difficult when your jaw felt locked from your grief, stilled too because soobin had gone silent, in the wake of your depression. He would hum in wordless greeting, kiss your cheek, and change the bedding on the make-shift safe space he held you in. 

The couch was the only space in your house that looked any different, a divot made from the hours of rest, a collection of empty mugs scattering the coffee table, a sweater thrown over the armrest where you kept your pillow. Everything else had stayed perfectly the same, frozen and as cold as you felt when you looked upon it. 

And that was the cruelest part. That everything moved on as if your world had not fallen apart right there in the bathroom upstairs. That every dream had not been misshapen, that every star you wished on had not blinked out as quickly as flicking off a light switch, when your whole life you had been reminded that the stars shone for you and your happiness. And now this house was a time capsule of your dream now lost, your ring a reminder, and your bed upstairs a collection of memories far too sharp around the edges to touch with your still healing flesh on display. 

But you tried, picked yourself up at the small suggestions that soobin made, even when it felt as if it took everything in you. Because how are you supposed to tell the one person who had seemingly stitched you back to life when you hadn't felt like needing fixing that you were nothing more than an open wound that was hemorrhaging the moment you walked past the threshold of your doorway? That there wasn't enough needle and thread to cover the damage that had been inflicted by no one other than yourself. He could try to blot away the blood, pack the site, and place his tourniquet, but it was no use when you felt this far gone. 

He had called out of work for you, his gentle voice rough around the edges as he talked to your new boss. The call ending was a vacuum seal to the room, sucking all the air out until you felt the film tightening around your skin. He called his job next, muttered dates and apologies like either of you had anything to be sorry for. 

The sweater he had helped you put on, a day ago? Two days? Softened with wear, the laundry detergent scent of your bed, worn away each time the cuff of your wrist brushed clean your tears. The mugs, a mix-matched collection of the years you had spent together, sat, molding at the hollow of them where you couldn't swallow down the last dregs of your pretending. 

You could tell him you just needed a bit more time; it was true, but after every utterance of it, where you felt worse instead of better, it felt more like a lie. And as the time went on, days blurred into something like condensation on the outside of a cold glass, you wondered how long he would be able to handle you like this. 

A shell of the person you once were for him, someone who was trying to claw their way out of the darkness, but found that, as thick as it might have felt around them, it was made out of nothing tangible, nothing that could have let you sink your hooks in as deeply as it had sunk its claws into you. 

He did not show it, did not say it; he kissed your temple, held his lips there, and muttered an ‘I love you’ like a prayer. Like his faith in you would pull you both from the wreckage in time, the ocean thrashing, your nails digging into the hull, refusing to leave because the building of it had been special, your initials carved into the mast. For him, you surfaced, face just out of the water, enough to try and trick yourself into normality. 

So you answered the calls on your phone, even when they hurt, and accepted Kai's invitation to lunch. Soobin's careful stare followed you as you changed in the laundry room, still too much for you to make it up to your bedroom, his reminder of how he could come with, call out again from work, hold your hand on the train ride into the city. 

Your refusal had been soft and insistent, he had taken care of you like he was piecing together a puzzle someone had carelessly swept off the table. Taking his time and letting the two of you breathe through your grief in their own separate, silent ways, but he was yet to find that you were missing pieces that once had been the center of your picture. 

And instead of letting him know, instead of telling him, you took the train, and the second you saw Huening waiting right at the end of the station, you fell apart. 

As soon as the doors had opened and you saw your best friend's downward smile, you knew you wouldn't be able to handle it anymore. Shoulders heavy, sagging under the pressure you had felt keeping them up on the ride, your meek smile dipping down as your chin wobbled, you couldn't hold in the tears again. 

Limbs weak, he pulled you into his hug, warm and all enveloping, he didn't complain as people split around the two of you right at the doors, like you were standing stones in a stream that roared too loud, too fast. He didn't tell you to stop soiling his shirt while you sobbed into him; he carried the weight of your body as you melted into your sadness. 

“You're so strong,” he muttered, like it wasn't a lie you threw at yourself to convince you to make it out here in the first place. He said it like he believed it, and you couldn't take it anymore. You pulled away from him, fingers rough against your cheeks, pushing at your skin to clean away the mess you were leaving. 

“I'm sorry.” It had been the only words that surfaced when you looked at anyone but yourself. You bit your lip hard enough to stop it shaking, holding your breath to keep your lungs from struggling. The pain scratched at your throat, rang in your ears like the sound of nails on a door, paint flaking, and wood chipping. 

“Don't.” Kai would never demand anything from you, but he drew the line here at you pretending, apologizing. “I wanted to see you, not a lie, you have nothing to be sorry about,” he wrapped his arm around your shoulder, tucking you into his armpit, and taking off some of the weight of walking. 

It wasn't far to the spot you two liked to go, a place that felt safe when it had been there well before your dreams started to change into something that looked a lot like the house out on the beach in Montauk. Here, on the street where the rain soaked into the scuffed, cracked pavement, underfoot, you realized how little you had thought about the senses you couldn't feel. Before, in the house, you had thought it was just the sea, but as the train took off, the tracks sounded faint, the rain did not have its same smell, the horns honking as you crossed the street you used to live on took far too long to reach your ears. 

If you had surfaced as well as you wanted everyone to believe, it would not have felt like this. This was you gasping for breath from lips pursed so the water covering your ears still wouldn't slip into your mouth like it desperately tried to. And for a moment, with Kai, you didn't have to keep your arms moving, thrashing under the waves to keep your body up, because he understood you without sitting in the same room. 

He was not in the water like soobin was. Kai could reach out without also trying to keep himself afloat. 

He would let you cry until your ribs hurt, shake until your bones had gone loose under your skin, and you didn't feel the pressure of having to stop so soon, to realign yourself so that your spine was strong enough to carry the weight of Soobin’s grief too. And it made you feel guilty. Devastatingly so, because you wanted to be strong, to hold him as he held you, and yet all you could do was crumble in front of him. 

Here at the cafe of your past, sitting across from Kai, who pressed his knee to yours under the table to remind you of his presence. You could ignore how the scent of coffee did not make you giddy with morning anticipation, how the grinding of the beans, the chatter of the patrons, giggling of the students studying in the corner all sounded dull, traveling under water to meet your ears too late for you to care if someone called your name for your order. 

Kai brings your tea over, places it in the circle of your hands resting on the table, and sits in the silence with you, unbroken as you watch the steam rise from your cup. “You're allowed to not be okay.” 

And you wonder if he can see the guilt that's clawing up your throat like smoke from a house still burning even after it's sunk to the bottom of the ocean. If, after every attempt at speaking, the evidence is tattooed all the way down to the pit of you. 

Blinking, you shake your head, looking anywhere but at his kindness, “No, no, it's not that, it's just-” you circle your fingers around the paper cup, missing the cardboard cupholder that's supposed to keep the heat away. You let the burn numb your hands, distract you from the stuttering, let it ground you enough to spit out the one thing you couldn't find the strength to say when out on the sand. “How can I move on when everything has changed? How do I make it better when I was the one who broke it in the first place? How do you just get back up after this?” and you're not looking for answers, just an outlet that isn't the inside of your own skull, you bite back the tears, “how do I go on when I did this to us?” 

“You didn't do anything wrong, it was nothing you did-” 

“I know- I know that, but the aftermath, it feels like I'm the one who's holding on, like I can't let go. And he's never asked me to. God, we don't even talk, and I think that's always what it is, my mouth feels too heavy to say anything when I see him, and he’s looking at me like he still loves me, and I don't- I don’t love me. Because I don't know who I am right now, I don't know anything, I just know I'm not who I was, who he loved before, and I'm worried,” 

“Worried he won't love you anymore?” he said it like it was hard to swallow, as if he, too, could see that first time the two of you sat on the train together, blushing and giggling like you had known each other a lifetime. 

“Worried that I made the wrong decision,” your voice cracks at the confession, split down the middle like a broken heart drawn on blue-lined paper. “Back at the hospital, they told me about this memory thing, that they could take away the loss, and I just- I couldn't. They wanted me to just give it all up, like it would be easy, they made it seem easy, like the loss wasn't something that needed to be remembered, as if it wasn't the only thing I had left of us before I-” your voice gave out, flatlined as you imagined all that blood. 

Kai reached out for your hands, twisted his fingers between yours, and pulled you back up for air. “Nothing about this is easy, for either of you, and it's okay to go back and want to redo things-” 

“But that's just the thing, I still don't want to forget them, even when it hurts, but it feels like…” like it might as well be the only path you have left to take, like the tunnel you're falling down is already taking you there, because there is no pinprick of light, just darkness. “I don't know,” you look to the glass window next to you, your face reflected, distant and only faintly familiar. 

Kai doesn't try to force it out of you, and it's exactly why you knew you needed to do this, have this conversation, sit here in a space that didn't feel like the kitchen at a wake for a funeral you should have never attended. “And soobin? Did he say he wanted to forget?” 

“No, we didn’t talk about it,” he had picked up the papers from the floor after that first day, put them away somewhere you couldn't see, and didn't say anything but I love you. “And that's just it, if I forgot, maybe I could be the person I can see him waiting for. Because that's what he's doing, he's waiting for me to be okay when instead I'm just rotting from the inside out, and he doesn’t deserve that, it makes me hate myself.” 

Your tears patter down on the hardwood table like the rain on the asphalt road outside. You feel the drip of them from your chin, but you don't clear them, don't care about hiding as kai looks in on the mess you've made. “I love him, but I can't love him, not in the way he deserves, not right now, and it feels like I'm just empty. And I know soon, when I can't even make it up the stairs after months of this, that he will know and he will be too nice to leave me.” 

Because all your dreams had turned to nightmares, the only thing that came to mind was the way it would look as he walked out the door. You wanted it to hurt, wondered if then you would feel it as sharp as a knife twisting in your stomach, or if you would have been too far gone. You let everything hang between the two of you now, let it hurt you and be just as unforgivable and inconceivable as you knew it should have been. 

“You lost your baby, you're grieving,” and you know he's right, but it doesn't sink in; you won't let it. 

“We, we lost our baby, but I'm the one who is making us lose everything else. I can't think about the house, the ring,” you lift your hand from his, your ring feels looser now, turning around your knuckle until it bit into your palm when you curled your fist to feel your nails dig into your flesh. “I was happy, this all made me so happy, and now all I can think about is how he got us that house to fill with life, and I've done nothing but lie on that couch dead.” 

“And what would forgetting get you?” The line was a coin you turned over in your head night after night since making it back from the hospital. Soobin's lips just brushing the hair at the back of your neck, enough to remind you he was there, so close you wondered when it would hit you that the cavern you felt between you two was internal. 

“It would be easier for him,” but you couldn't stop thinking about how it would be no easy thing to walk in, remembering the dreams you had of holding your baby, a baby you had not yet picked a name for, but knew you loved more than life itself, and leave with nothing, not even a scar. Your lips trembled, “it wouldn't feel like this,” 

Because if it hurt, so much so that it felt like you were a black hole, it meant that you had loved them, and it was the love you didn't want to forget. Didn't want to clear out the nursery beomgyu had painted, giggling as he put paint in soobins hair; didn't want to hide the crib the boys had built and gifted to you that first night. You didn't want to forget the way their heartbeat had sounded like the ocean, how soobin had cried and held you, kissed your skin like a promise. 

But the sea had stopped making a sound in your empty house, and maybe it was far easier to forget that love than drown yourself in the pit of the sadness it left behind. 

You knew Kai could see it, like an outfit you wore, no matter how well you tried to dress yourself up, clean around the edges, comb your hair, brush your teeth, that sadness was still written over you like a red pen to a paper you had spent far too long on to get such low marks. He did not turn away from the sight; he drank it in, having you in front of him, he memorized the divots under your eyes, dark and shadowed by a pain he knew he had little understanding of. All he knew was that your grief was clinging to you like a second skin, bleeding into your soul, and all he could do was be there. 

“I think that if you choose to forget, it won't be because you don't love them but because you loved them so much,” his voice was low, solid, and present, “and you have every right to want to hold onto that love, and every right to want to go back to the way things were. But please, please, know that no matter what path you decide, I'll be here for you,” 

Your shoulders slumped, your chin turned to the ceiling as you tried to blink away the glass in your eyes, “I know,” you whispered it because it never would have been able to come out any louder than that. “And I want to try, I'm trying to get back on track so that I don't have to decide, so that I don't- I don't want,” and there before you, you dropped your one fear, the one thing that you were fighting with yourself over and over again, "I don't want to lose him like i lost our baby, its killing me, and losing him, it would be too much, i dont think i would ever recover,” 

Kai nodded, his frown of understanding enough for you to stop the conversation dead in its tracks. “Small steps, I want to get better, I'll try,” 

And when you were headed home, Kai walked you to the train station instead of down the block where your old bed was still made, kept neat behind the door Kai always left open just for you. He held you, and this time, you kept the tears down, clinging to him as if that was the equivalent of a thank you. “Here,” he took your hand, wrapping your fingers around the gift, not letting you give it back. “You will always have a place with me, no matter what happens, forgetting or not, I will never turn you away,” 

He kissed the top of your head and sent you off. Your body slumped in your seat when you unfurled your hand to reveal a silver key, your old apartment number stamped into the side, half rubbed smooth from the years it had spent in your purse, pocket, hand. You had given it back to him when he was on the ride home from unloading your life in Montauk, months ago, and now you wished the gesture didn't feel like a step backward instead of forward. But a lifeline was a lifeline at the end of the day, no matter what turmoil it stirred inside of you. 

And when you got home, soobin still gone at work, you climbed the stairs. Your hand gripping the banister hard enough to crack your knuckles, you stood looking at the half open door to your bedroom, building the courage to cross the threshold you had been struggling with since you had returned home that night. 

It was small, but it was enough, and you were so, so tired. 

So you peeled off your clothes and fell into bed, under the duvet, between the sheets that had been unused since Beomgyu had changed them those months ago. You looked up at the ceiling, feeling the weight of the day start to settle over you. The conversation had been enough to get you to this point, to the bed you had feared, but it was a bandage, not a scab, over the wound you had been carrying. 

Without thinking, just as you had the second you had known you were sharing your body, you placed your hand right below your belly button and let yourself cry. No need to hide or to feel ashamed, as you thought about how far along you would have been, how you would have known if you were going to be having a boy or a girl. You would have stayed up late at night with soobin, genuine names slipping from your lips, whispered with question marks between the ones you giggled just to poke fun at each other. 

It hurt to think, but you forced it onto yourself, broke the bone again so that it would be able to heal straight. “I miss you,” you whisper out into the empty room, and you don't know who it's for, yourself, soobin, your baby. All you know is that it's true and all-encompassing. 

You sob, horribly, painfully, until you're curling in around yourself, face pressed into pillows that don't smell like him, like you, holding yourself with limbs too phantom to keep you from spilling between the cracks. 

It's Soobin’s soft hand on your back that wakes you. He drags his palm across your shoulder blades, fingers brushing the soft skin on the back of your neck. “I didn't mean to wake you.” The room was washed in moonlight, his shadow thrown across your body like a blanket. He was dressed down, out of his work uniform, and cleanly washed, his hair still dripping as he climbed in next to you. 

He did not ask about the room change, just pulled you in as he had on the couch, and held you until you fell back asleep. 

It was your first attempt at pulling yourself back up; the rest was found in going back to work, in stepping on the tiles of your bathroom as you got ready without picturing the way the speckles of blood had looked like ink underfoot. Instead, you avoided the ground, watched yourself as you smoothed your moisturizer over your cheeks, applied cream on the dark circles under your eyes to try and lessen the contrast of the bruises your insomnia was blooming against the soft skin. 

Soobin sat at the edge of the bed, his gaze following each of your movements, watching you in the way one watched a storm roll in over the sea, helpless and accepting. But he did not follow you in as he once had, no soft pleads of you to call out when all he wanted you to do was find some form of normality again. 

Neither of you acknowledged the way it once had been, how he would hang off your shoulder, trying to peel off your clothes when you were trying to tug them on. His soft kisses peppering down your neck like a promise of more to come if you just stayed. His lips tasted like honey from tea he had brewed freshly for you, like love you didn't know would grow stagnant. 

If you thought too much about it, felt it all at once, you'd have stayed, not because of him, not because he had asked, but because he hadn’t. You would finally wrap him in your arms instead of letting them lie limp around him each night. 

You wanted that, to kiss him and not think about how it felt like a reminder of times when it made your stomach light up with anticipation, joy, like little fireflies flickering in tandem with each peck. And maybe that's what you're missing when you leave for work. A kiss from him that feels less like something he does because he's worried, but because he wants to kiss you from nothing more than desire. 

“Call me if it's…” too much, you can see it in the way he waves at it, scared to say it out loud. Like if he utters the words, they will become real. 

“It's okay, I think it's what I've been missing,” but it's not; it's a lie. What was missing was so much larger than work, and falling into it like he had was not something you thought would fill the space, but was well worth the try. 

“I still want to know about your day,” you were standing in the kitchen, looking up at him as he brushed your cheek, holding your gaze as if he could catch what you were feeling in his hands and help you mold it into something else, something that would be easier to carry if you shared the weight of it. 

But you smiled, as best as you could make it, like pretending would let it bleed into you and help. You did it for him, for what you were worried about losing, and he smiled back. Something small and fractured, nothing big enough to show his soft dimples that hadn't been seen in months. It made you waver, sway in your step when he leaned down and kissed you just soft enough to make you see how you weren't yet whole again, both of you still two ghosts in an empty house. 

You were determined as you walked out to use the time away to recharge, to soak up your pretending of normality and calmness so that when you got home, it would almost feel real. The little bookstore with its sunbleached wooden bookshelves and creaking floorboards was a welcome space to try and heal in. 

But it had only just passed an hour in when you felt the filter you tried to hold up over yourself begin to wane. It had not been what you believed would have broken you down. The mothers with their children sitting around the little toy lighthouse under the strings of fairylights, reading and giggling over books you had set up. 

No, it had been your coworker, sitting at the checkout desk, her whisper picked up over the small shop as she tried to hold back the sounds of her happiness. She was talking to a boy, who leaned over the edge of the counter as he listened to her every last word. His dark hair was shaggy in his eyes as she leaned in, bumping her nose to his. 

It was easier to ignore something you had never felt but dreamed of than it was to watch something you had before slip away. You had not planned to cry, you had found that in this last week, you had gone dry, that the nothingness had taken the well and drained it out as it had your emotions. It was what had made the decision easy to call your boss and tell them you could handle a day shift. No worry that if you thought too long and hard about everything that you would burst like a water balloon thrown right at the pavement. 

But seeing some excerpt of your life before had your throat tightening, your swallow thick and hard to choke down as you busied yourself with stocking books you had no intention of reading or looking into, as you once would have. Now it was just a monotonous routine, a performance you went through while you counted down the hours until you could leave. 

You did not cry on the walk home, not even when you curled yourself up on the couch as you had that first day you had gotten back, the throw pillow tucked against your chest as if it could replace soobin and his gentle breathing. But you were rocking on the boat alone this time. 

If going into work had been to rebuild yourself in some kind of peace, it had done the opposite; it had only been a reminder of how much you had changed, how much your relationship had changed. Maybe in time, it would have been something that would have thinned, worn down into a shape that was completely different than the way you had started. 

But it would have been after years, not months, not a single night. You would have lived out your dreams, married, in your house, wrapped up in him, in your bed, kissing like love instead of routine. It's what you dreamt of before he finally got home, his hand on your back as it always was. “Let's go upstairs,” as if he could see the backsliding you were doing down the hill you had been playing at climbing and he was coming in to help you back up the small progress you had made. 

So you followed him, and as if he knew your dreams, remembered just as well as you had the morning spent with him, his hands all over, slipping into the waistband of your pants, along your sides as he pushed your shirt free from your body, undressing you. He mimicked the movements, helped you not into bed but into the shower, the warmth of the water fogging up the glass of the mirror until it was easier to play that this was the past and not a reenactment of it. 

This was easier, lying against him as he washed you, scrubbed you new because you were not strong enough to do it. His lips on your shoulder, speckled with droplets of water, his fingers scrawled across your stomach as he let you curve into his chest, held you as if he had always been made to, but you just happened to find yourself in separate drawers until now. 

And you cried, let the water beat down on you, let it cover your cheeks like the tears spilling because it had been a drought, and today it rained, memories and dreams like falling stars that did not bring wishes but mourning anew. Soobin could see it, worried over it the second he saw you curled back up on the sofa, the indent mimicking the shape of you, worn away and not made for you like he was. 

He cleaned you, and didn't bother about cleaning himself when you needed it more. He dressed you in nothing but his old shirt and your underwear, the same as he had seen you waking up in for years, and laid you down in the bed as he had in the sand, holding you to him, twining your legs with his like a loose braid. 

Your fingers holding his shirt, smelling like him, your nose running up the slope of his neck as you pulled yourself impossibly closer, wedging yourself against him until all you could think about was the way he felt so strong, so comforting. 

It had been so long since you had kissed over his pulse, lips just grazing his skin. It happened, once, twice, where you let yourself lean into wanting him just as you had before it all. You held him, body once stiff, melting into the shape of someone you once were, who you wanted to be again. 

And you kissed him, trailing up his throat, to his jaw, the edge of his mouth, where he gasped, not questioning the sudden surge of need, as you tangled your legs in his, rolled your hips closer to him, fingers curling in his hair like a memory. 

His body reacted instantly, hot and alive, unfurled as he met you halfway, pushing as you pulled. And when he kissed you, he did not jump back from the way you went from soft pecks, finding your footing, to a full on devouring. Something had been sparked, like an ember tossed from a car wreck, catching in a grassy field, lighting and raging. 

You pulled on his hair, moaning into his mouth when his leg brushed against a spot of you that had long since been forgotten. He swallowed your whimpers, matched them when you rolled on top of him, straddling his waist. It was new and yet all so familiar to find the spots of your waist he had held before, his fingers digging into your thighs, pulling you down flush against him. 

Your hands rested on his chest, pushing yourself up to catch your breath, to reel in your mind at what exactly you were doing. There, the two of you froze, looking at one another, washed in the moonlight, the sound of your restless breathing the only thing filling the room besides the rushing of blood in your ears. 

Soobin lay under you, lips kiss-reddened, hair a mess of inky strands on the pillow, spilling along the threads, his thumbs working circles into your hips, not coaxing but remembering. It was with a painfully fragile look in his eyes that he ran down your body. And for a moment, you almost pulled away, snuffed out the fire like one blows out a candle, but you leaned back down, ghosting your lips over his until he tilted his chin and pulled you in for the kiss you wanted desperately. 

He pulled himself up, meeting you as he leaned back against the headboard, his open mouthed kisses finding the landmarks they had missed for so long: the soft spot where your jaw met the edge of your ear, the thump of your heart pressed to his lips, your collar bone, and the hollow it left at the base of your neck.

You were greedy with your touch, limbs now revitalized for this one mission of exploring him the same as you had before, flipping through the pages of a book you had thought was lost as you pulled off your shirt, your arms wrapping around his neck, fingers dragging through the fine strands of hair at the back of his head. Your body arched into his as he dragged his nose down your chest, between your cleavage, and kissed at your sternum as you rolled your hips against his, still clothed at the waist and yet never feeling more exposed. 

His hands reached around you, holding you close, his fingers outspread along the expanse of your back, the warmth of them all encompassing, dragging down your spine until you were trembling for him. And you hadn’t even noticed that you were crying, silent tears that caught in the pale, glowing light. Didn't notice until soobin pulled away, cupping your cheek. “Baby,” 

And it broke you, your lips finding a pout until you couldn’t hold in the sob anymore, you fell forward, burying your face into his neck, clinging to him as he held you. “I'm sorry,” you tried, when you pulled away, shaking your head as you cleared your tears, “I'm fine,” but the words were watery, mixed in with your sniffle as you threaded your fingers back into his hair. 

“We don't have to,” he whispered, his hands holding you still on his lap, running up and down your sides, warming you, telling you it was all okay when it was the last thing you felt. 

“I want to,” you bit at your lip, trying to stop the way your chin was wobbling. You didn't know if it was a lie or not; you wanted him, you wanted normality, you wanted this moment, you wanted to remember who you were before, but you couldn't have it without tears, without some kind of ache. 

“I want you,”  you whispered it, looking into his eyes so he knew that, at the very least, was what you felt in your heart. 

“I just want to lay here with you, okay?” and you couldn't tell if it was pity or guilt he was feeling, couldn't read this look smoothed between his brows because you could hardly understand your own emotions. All you knew was that it made you cry. The tears followed a trail down your skin, dotting along his shirt, before he cleared them away. “I just want you to come back to me, nothing more, nothing less.” 

But you were here, right in front of him, hollow but not in a way that you thought would ever be filled. But you nodded nonetheless, letting him pull you back into his chest, rolling the two of you into your place in bed, the blankets pulled up into place as he kissed the top of your head. 

“I love you,” as soft as a first breath, a first kiss, a heartbeat. 

And you were broken, ground down to dust, sprinkled like sand, like ashes. 

The next day, you called out of work, watched soobin as he got ready, while you stayed in bed, your face pressed into the pillow on his side, looking out the window, half open, watching the surf crash down on the sand. He leaned over the bed and kissed your shoulder as a goodbye, and when he came back, he found you had not moved, and you didn't even realize the sky had gone just as dark as you felt. 

He washed himself, slid into the space you had kept for him, and did it all over again in the morning. Only this time, he pulled you to sit, handing you a cup of tea he had made, and cringed when you grabbed the mug around its base and not the handle. He sat until you finished it, and left without a kiss. 

There on the nightstand, your collection grew, a new mug for every year you two had spent together, piled up, haphazardly stacked, spoons still glazed with honey, stuck to the hardwood. The bottle of your prenatal vitamins was wedged between the wall and the back of the drawers when you had knocked it over that second night in bed. 

The window stayed open to circulate the air into the room, the curtains catching in the breeze, as you watched over and over again how the sea rose and fell without a sound. The silence of it was as loud as your relationship had become. 

It hurt, somewhere distantly inside of you, the shape of it circling around the center of you like razor wire. But it wasn't enough to pull you up. All you could think about was how much you wanted to do things, but the energy that would be needed was wasted there.

As you lay, as you let yourself be, you could see the way the only energy you had left was resting like a fine layer of water where your joints met the bed, like you were a glass on its side, still clinging to something but not enough for a mouthful if picked up and swallowed down. You wouldn't have even noticed if the ocean had swallowed you whole. 

It's how Yeonjun found you, the spare key you had gifted him so long ago, finally in use after not hearing from you for well over a month. You hadn't even heard the front door open, didn't hear him climbing the stairs, but even if you had, it would have been brushed off as Soobin coming home from work, your perception of time lost. 

“Hey,” he said it just from the doorway, your back still turned from him, but you knew his voice, could recognize it anywhere. He had come around when you had been stuck on the couch, but you had turned him away, not wanting him to see you like that. And even if this was much worse, you didn't really care anymore. 

You rolled to your side, looking at him with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat, his face giving nothing away as he looked at the mess your room had become, even when you hardly got up to dirty it. The laundry was piled in the closet, spilling from the hamper so that the door didn't shut, the nightstands with their graves, the sheets just as mussed as your hair, and the sweater you had not changed out of in a week. 

The house had become a tomb, stuck in place everywhere except the kitchen and your bedroom. Not one made out of stone, but one of molding mugs, dried tea bags, and silence that sank to the bottom of the floor like deadweight, suffocated and consuming. The dishes piled up, the rack of shoes next to the door empty, the contents spilled out, the mail stacked up next to the bowl of keys collecting dust. 

And you, Ophelia in her river, just at the surface of yourself, drowning in clothes now too heavy around your bones. Eyes bruised, pale, and sunken around every soft curve you had possessed nearly a year ago. “I didn't know you were coming.” You didn't even move to sit up. 

“I know, you didn't answer my calls.” he pulled out his phone, holding it to give him something to do besides worry, even if it was all his body was doing. 

“Sorry,” and he knew you meant it, even when it was said so weakly. 

“Don't be, I get to see the beach now, it's been a while,” he stepped in, crossing the threshold into the stale air even with the window open, sitting at the edge of the bed, reaching out for your hand, laying as limp as a flower cut too soon from its stem, fingers curled as if you were just starting to unfurl them. “You're cold,” he whispered, mostly to himself, thumb gently rubbing curled on the back of your hand. “It's colder in here than outside.” 

“It's going to snow soon,” you sniffled, pushing yourself up, pulling your hand from his because it felt all too revealing. You pressed your fingers into your eyes, yawning as you stretched your legs out in front of you. 

You knew the grey skies and seagulls' departure for what it was, the seasons changing, the crowds leaving. 

“Do you remember the summer we spent two days here and I got that horrible sunburn?” he laughed at the memory, and you couldn't help but give the smallest chuckle because you did remember that summer. The one right before you had met soobin, yeonjun had been pink and red all over, sitting up from a nap on the beach and groaning as he realized his grave mistake. 

“You laid yourself on the tile floor in the airbnb's kitchen and curled up like a shrimp someone dropped, even your ears were burned.” You pulled your knees up, hugging them closer to your body as yeonjun nodded, smiling at himself, at the fun you had somewhere not far from his house now. 

“Kai had to cover me in that slimy off-brand aloe gel we found, and it only took two days for my skin to look like a lizard's,” he had gone back to your shared lecture with sunglasses on just to try and draw attention away from the way his nose had started to peel. You and Kai had picked on him for months after, hanging the picture of him on the floor on the fridge. “You told me that the next year we should come when it snows, that you prefer the less crowded beach in the colder months.” 

“Yeah,” the two of you had made it out to the beach, too late in the day to spend much time just watching the water. You had sat in the sand, bundled in your coats, watching them string lights on the long walkway leading up to the lighthouse. The sea had been loud, crashing into every sentence you shared, the wind strong enough to turn Yeonjun's ears just as pink as they had been with his burn. 

You can't even remember the last time you set foot on the sand, or the last time was that you made it past the doorway of your room. Yeonjun doesn't ask you to go, not out loud, but somehow you both end up there, right at the end of your winding pathway leading down to the sand, grey instead of its lemon-rine color it holds in the summer. 

Yeonjun had helped you put on your coat, now somehow too big for you, bunching around your wrists as you curled your hands into fists in your pockets. Your scarf was still loosely hanging around the collar, the same one soobin had gotten you after proposing, bright and red like the string he had whispered was wrapped around your pinky and his. 

And there the sea sat, calm, lulling back and forth, slow enough to drag its sound out until it was stretched thin enough for you to talk. “Stop looking at me like that,” because his stare was heavy when he believed you wouldn't notice, weighty on your shoulders as you kept your eyes locked somewhere in the distance, where the waves broke the grey horizon with its white rolling foam. 

“Like what?” but he said it like he knew, because it was obvious, he had carried your mugs down to the kitchen sink even though you had protested, embarrassed all that once seeing them in his arms, even if he wasn't judging you. 

“Like you're worried about me,” the wind cut in across your face, your lips pursed as you looked down at your shoes, dark against the sun-withered wood speckled with sand, and yet you still didn't take the final step out onto the beach just yet. 

“I am,” he doesn't even try to deny it, as he steps in front of you, sinking in the sand, bending to catch your eyes, following them even when you try to look away. “How could I not be? Look at you,” it's not accusatory, it's laced with concern, pulled tight around ribs that were finding it hard to take a deep breath.  “You don't-, you’re not-, I am worried.” 

He let it hang between you two, looked right into your eyes as he said it, so you knew, so he could watch you swallow the bitter pill of it down. And still, even when you knew, felt it as deeply as the chill kissing the tip of your nose, you wanted to lie. “I just need time,” 

Yeonjun huffed, a sound that was more sarcastic than humorous, “time,” he nodded, biting back anything else he wanted to say, before he just let it go. You could see the battle, watched as he gave up, shoulders sagging, pursing his lips as he turned away from you. “I miss you,” 

It sounds so close to the way soobin had said it, I just want you to come back to me, as if you weren't standing right there before them. “I'm right here,” you had wanted to say it there in the dark, shout it out at the sea, at him, at the mirror. 

“Yeah.” yeonjun sniffled, his knuckle coming up to rub at his cheek, “I know, just buried.” 

“I'm trying,” but you hadn't been, not after the one day of work, a week ago? Two? They had been calling more than you had to ask for time off. You could feel that panic, somewhere flickering in the back of your mind, when you saw their number appear on the screen of your phone, but talking felt too much like teaching a lecture on something you only had an hour to learn beforehand. 

Nothing around the house was done, soobin went to work for longer and longer, and the days stretched like an elastic band that had lost its shape. “It's just a lot. I'm working on it. What do you want from me? To take up meditation? Hot yoga? Join a book club for depressed housewives? If you can even call me that.” It had been the most you had spoken in one go, the deflection like a hiss from a cat backed into a corner, too scared to realize this might be someone who wouldn't hurt but heal. 

“I just want you to be honest, not with me, fine, whatever, but with yourself.” Your jaw hurt, teeth grinding as you shook your head, your heel dug into the wood, and slid on the sand as you looked back up at the house. 

The window of the nursery was shut, the mobile stuck frozen in place as if it had been painted against the glass. Your bedroom window open, the gauzy curtain pulled by the call of the wind rippling like a white flag in the air. “You want honesty?” Your throat was tight, pulled in on itself as you squeezed out the words you needed to say, “i hate who ive become, i hate that i cant feel like i use to, that im numb, and it makes me feel so guilty because he- he still loves me, or i hope so, and that hope makes me feel worse, because he shouldn’t,” 

Yeonjun stays quiet, lets you sit with your confession between you two because he's not judging, he's grieving. “This isn't the end all.” 

You look back out at the water, to the dark, wet sand where the tide meets the shore. “Like I said, I'm trying,” 

The two of you stood out there for far longer than you had expected, shoulder to shoulder, not quite touching, but enough for you to feel the warmth of him. And when you both made it back to the house, yeonjun picked through your fridge, the eclectic array of foods had been bought by soobin on short trips to the store on the way home from work. But it was enough for yeonjun to piece together a meal for the two of you to sit and share. 

He cleaned after himself even after your protesting, washing every dish in the sink, stacking the ceramic plates and cutlery like Jenga blocks, playing at his own private game he was positive he would win after convincing you to shower. 

And when you were clean, your hair still wet, Yeonjun kissed your head, scuffing over the spot with his coat sleeve as if he were cleaning a window, a joke he found funny every single time he did it. Your smile was slow but genuine; his was melancholy-tinted at the edges. “Don't stay a stranger,” 

“I won't,” although neither of you knew if it was true or not, but it was enough. He left to catch a late train back into the city, looking over his shoulder at you when the door was closed. 

It was only the next morning that you found yourself up early, far earlier than soobin, who slept soundlessly on his back, one arm tucked under your head like a pillow, when you opened your eyes. His chest rose and fell, and you mourned to feel so far away from him. 

Without waking him, you made your way downstairs, following the same monotonous routine that felt easiest on days like this. Filling the tea kettle, you set it on the stove, clicking once, twice, on the burner until it caught with its flame. 

The mugs all sat in the dish rack, half emptied in your attempt to keep up with the boost Yeonjun’s visit had brought you. And when the phone rang, you answered, knowing it was your boss, knowing you didn't feel up to going to work, and yet still you felt dejected when she muttered a soft, “We're really sorry, but it's just not working out, if we need an extra set of hands in the busy season we will give you a call, but for now it's just not the right fit anymore. I'm sorry.” 

“No, it's okay, I understand,” because you did, wholeheartedly, you had called out more times than you had been in the building itself. Most times, you hadn't even called, and you were new, not like how you had kept the same job in the city for years, the seniority and friendships giving more grace. 

You should have seen it coming, smelled it out when the calls kept coming and you didn't pick up, the denial written off as anything else but what it actually was. 

The first mug to fall had been an accident. The brush of your sleeve as you placed your phone down had sent it toppling. The tea bag pressed under the broken ceramic. The watercolor painting of the lighthouse cracked in two, severed in a diagonal, like a sword had been wielded right through the memory. 

The little Montauk slogan found on hats, shirts, and coffee mugs is kept in perfect view. The catchy little joke because the beach was right at the very tip of New York's east end, just dipping into the Atlantic Ocean. 

at the end. Montauk, NY.

You had picked it up on your first solo trip out together, where you kissed his cheek over and over again as if you could spare the touches like grains of sand, giggling as you held the mug up for soobin, “so at the end of the day, you always have a mug to share,” he had smiled, dimples and teeth, nose scrunching when he pulled a hat onto your head with the same saying. Singing softly, “With youuu.” as if you had left off the last bit of your sentence and he needed to fill it in, just clarifying that he only wanted to share coffee with you, and only you. 

Time still stood, like an oncoming car had flashed its brights in your eyes as you crossed a road you shouldn't have been traveling down. You read the line over and over again, at the end, as if someone had carved it into the bathroom tile upstairs the second the first drops of blood had appeared.  

You didn't move to clean it, but instead reached out for the drying rack, picking up the next souvenir from a past too muddy for you to dig through. The logo of the bookstore you had worked at in the city was tattooed on the base, a chip already at the foot of the mug. You had picked it up the first time his mom had come to visit, the first time she had held your hand and told you how happy she could see he was. 

And this time, you let it fall to the floor deliberately, relishing in the shattering, the sound like an exhale. Because as you picked up the next one, throwing it down, hard enough for the ceramic shards to spray along the tile like spilling beads from a bracelet ripped from a wrist, you could finally breathe, force out all the air in your lungs until you picked up the next mug. 

The creamy white porcelain, one half to a whole set, a gift from Taehyun, silly his & hers mugs he had found soon after your engagement announcement. They had been sweet, painted with hearts, and the final ones to be thrown, cracking and splitting like bone, brittle and built on a promise you felt had been for a girl you didn't know anymore. 

Left in the rack, a navy blue mug, bare of any inscription at all, the same mug that had been in the cabinet of Soobin’s apartment when you first met. The lone survivor of the massacre you had never seen coming until it was too late. And there, scattered on the floor, a mosaic of memories lost too soon, swept off the counter in a fit that tried to mask itself as rage but wasn’t close to it at all. 

This had been a lapse, not in judgment but in your play at healing. And you had never been a good actor, because as much as you tried to hold it back, suck down gulps of air to avoid the shake in your resolve, you couldn't hide from the tears. “No, no, no,” the single syllable repeated like a prayer, a plea, a spell, as you fell to knees far too weak to rest on an altar made of fragmented dreams and vows. 

You swept the mess with the side of your hand, trying to collect the fragments, not feeling them cut along your palm, into your pinky finger. But the burn traveled up to your elbow, your whine mixing in with the whistle of the tea kettle, screaming and screaming, continuously ringing in ears that had blocked out anything but the echo of their own sorrow. 

Soobin rushed down the stairs, disheveled, hair an inky mess, as he slid to a stop at the sight of you, bent, bloody fingers curled around a fractured half of your Montauk mug, pulled to your stomach, as if it would pull you back together while you swept the shards of glass up with your free bare hand.   

For a second, he froze, stuck, still half asleep as he had been that night, the whistling kettle mimicking the ring in his ears before he hurried to push at the pot from the burner, his hiss at the heat from the metal quick before he kneeled down with you. “Stop-” 

He swept up your hand, thin shards of the ceramic digging into his skin as he cupped yours, your head shaking, as he moved to catch the large piece you had been reaching for. “Soobin-” but it was too late, his hand brushed at just the right angle, the burn of it as instant as the kettles had been. And there along his lifeline, blood bloomed.

“Fuck-” he sucked in the word, his fist closing instinctively over the wound. 

“I-” but you didn't know what to say, how to apologize for so much destruction. There was no word for how sorry you were, not just over the mugs, or spilled blood that now dotted the floor like a cruel retelling of your mutual ruination, but for everything. 

He didn't let you continue; he pulled you away from the kitchen and the shattered relationship you both had bled on the tile. Standing behind you, he cupped your hands over the running sink in the downstairs restroom. Peeled your fingers back away from the single piece you clung to like he would an orange, letting the shard of your past clink to the base of the blood-spotted bowl like a lost baby tooth that you would never get back. 

With care, he held your hands under the warm stream, brushed his thumbs over the length of your fingers, letting the pink water wash over the saying you had never associated with pain until now, at the end. Montauk, NY. 

There he waited until the water had gone cold, gone clear, and pulled away. 

You could hear him sweeping up the mess, the glass clinking against the dustpan loud like the grinding of cars sliding against the on-ramp rail. And in the mirror, your reflection only showed you in grey, speckles of blood over your sweater. It's how you found yourself in the closet. The door pushed open just enough so that you could step into the mess of the laundry. 

Your foot sank into it, and the light flicked on as you looked at the half-empty hangers. The mess of the drawers was half pulled open, as if you and soobin had been in a rush to collect the necessities and leave as fast as possible. It didn't matter what sweater you pulled out to replace the one you wore so long as it did its job. You added to the pile on the floor, kicking at it as if that would help. 

Half hidden, a pale white box was tucked into Soobin’s dresser, the emptying of his shirts from his collection revealing it just enough to catch your eye. Nearly the size of a shoe box, only flatter, was the hidden archive of that very day. 

It was almost as if it had been calling you, laid out just right in your line of sight when you were thinking about it the most. Because when you push back the lid, the ripped pamphlet is waiting at the top of your discharge papers. The Memory Erasure Procedure, as done by Dr. Howard M. 

The tear had almost underlined the name, all while cutting the grassy background of a sunny field in two. A picture of how your days could be if you just went and cleared away all the bad memories, or so they wanted it to appear. 

You picked up the second half of it, the slogan making your jaw ache, restoring peace & renewing clarity. It had hurt you, hand still trembling in the back of the cab, but steady enough to know you hadn't wanted it. It had been your instinct to deny it, to go against the way your body, your mind, wanted to grieve, felt too unnatural to dig around in someone's head for memories that didn’t hurt. 

But they did hurt; they broke something inside you to look back on, if you lay in bed and thought too long about the sand, Soobin’s ear pressed to your belly, your laugh, his. It was all enough to have you crushed far longer than you had intended the memory to leave you. 

You had been holding onto them still, waiting for the moment when they would clear up, when the haze around them was not poisonous to breathe in, waiting for the part in the play when you knew it would end happily. Only it was months later, nearly a year later, and you weren't better, no incline on your health but a downward spiral that was never ending, as if you had been sucked down the drain and hadn't yet fallen into the lake just yet.

And that's the bit you were holding on to, the just yet, you were waiting for the moment of clarity to come on its own, the internal peace that would work its way into the spaces that had collected dust and echoed your silence back at you. But whatever hill you had been climbing was steep, steep enough to burn your calves and lock them in place, freezing you in time so that when the landslide came, it swept you back to the bottom and buried you under the rubble, and now you were too tired to dig yourself out from the mess. 

There had been hope that someone would come and help, but it was given up when they had attempted, and you found that there was a certain comfort in the darkness, one that was familiar because it was coming from deep within your bones, as if somewhere inside you, that instinct of an animal knowing its time was near had taken over. You had circled your spot like a vulture did its prey, and laid down and sank deeper into the reprieve. 

You could see the end, felt it with every absence of a kiss on your cheek when soobin left for work, where he had called for extra hours outside of the house he had built on the very dreams and memories they had offered to erase. 

Your thumb ran over the list of benefits they provided: Reduced symptoms of grief, trauma, or anxiety, Improved mood and emotional stability, Enhanced ability to form new, healthy attachments.  

It shouldn't have felt so gutting. The list was like a sharp knife that completed the evisceration. And you knew it was everything you should have wanted, for yourself, for him. How easy they made it seem, painless, no scars, just spots in your mind that you couldn't fill in. days and moments that would be replaced like most insignificant moments in life were, you would know you had lived that day but it would be written off as having done what you always did, not anything life altering enough to be forgotten. 

At the first mention, it had made you angry, your snap as loud as a whip, as fractured as the mugs you had just thrown down, and yet now even that memory had been eaten by the emptiness. And now all you sat with was guilt. 

If there had been time to think, talk it through, maybe the two of you could have been saved. Mourned and let it shred you to ribbons, and then find yourself awake in bed braided anew. But you had let yourself, your relationship, your dreams, rot at the bottom of a sea that never stopped churning. And soobin had fought the waves, carried you as best as he could, but you could see how tired it was making him to love you. 

And how could he not be tried? As much as Kai and Yeonjun could tell you otherwise, they did not live in your skin, did not sleep in the same bed as him and wonder how life for him would be so much easier without you in it. It kept you up, not just the lost dreams but the torment of knowing you were the problem. He could get up, brush his teeth, comb his hair, get dressed, work, and what could you do? What had you done?

The seedlings of the separation had been set early, maybe even before the loss, maybe in the thin stretch of the years between the engagement and the wedding that never came. Maybe your rose colored glasses had been too thick, too pink, too red, for you to see the signs. You had picked over that scab so often that the wound would never heal, and this, who you had become, had only stitched the skin in the opposite direction, flayed instead of healed. 

He waits, patient, and as hopeful as the boy who had waited until Monday rolled around so he could see you again at your job. And as of right now, it feels like he will be waiting a lifetime because you don't have a breadcrumb trail leading back to the girl you used to be. 

If time could heal all wounds, how could it not also create them? He would wait, he would stay, he would watch you, love you until it was only because he remembered that he once had, not because he did. You would suck the life out of him, you already had, even if you were the only person who could see it, admit it. And you couldn't let him do that. 

Couldn't let him sit and love you, couldn’t let him sit and wait for someone who knew they were too far gone, who had stitched their shared loss into their skin and wore it like a tattoo, and let it scream out into the silence. Couldn't let him pour himself empty into your glass that was riddled with fractures. 

If you love him, really, truly, deeply loved him, you would give him the only thing you had left inside you, worth anything at all; your ability to let go. The opportunity to move on without having you there to hold him back. 

There was no fight left in you when you made the decision; your mind was set, and even that didn't evoke anything else besides sadness. 

You dropped the pamphlet, placing the lid back onto the box, and neatly closed the drawer. Soobin was still in the kitchen when you made it down the stairs. He didn't question when you pulled on your coat, your shoes forgotten as you walked out in nothing but socks onto the deck. 

The tide was pulled back, showing the rippled, dark, wet sand. The line was distinct and cut across the expanse of your eyeline like someone had taken scissors to the sea and the shore. The air was just cold enough so that every exhale was like a puff of smoke, fanning out in front of you like a lost soul, curling around the edges of your lips like a goodbye kiss. 

“It's going to snow.” You didn't move at the sound of his voice, low and falling down your back like rain. Gingerly, he wrapped your dropped scarf around your shoulders, the brightest thing against the cloudy backdrop and your dark coats. 

You tilt your chin towards the sky, frosted pale blue, just bright enough to let you know somewhere the sun is hidden under all the layers of white sheet clouds. Icy and bitter, the wind burns your cheeks until soobin blocks the gust, stepping next to you. 

It's enough to bring the tears forward, the building of them catching on the edges of your lashes, not quite falling as he hums,” I don't even remember the last time I came out here to see the beach.” 

Neither of you had to say why, not with the rise and fall of the waves, the cawing of the seagulls gone for the season, the boats pulled in with the water this choppy. It was just the sound of the sea, even the lighthouse stood abandoned, the row of houses a graveyard of wood and glass. For all you knew, it could have been just the two of you out this far off the end of the Long Island peninsula. 

“Soobin, I’m-”  he can hear the weaver in your voice, in the way it gets caught in the cold and freezes in the wind. 

“Don't,” no matter what it was that you were going to say, he knew he didn't want to hear it, couldn't swallow it down when being out on the beach felt as close as he had been to you in months. Your hands, pushed into your pockets, left just enough room for soobin to link his arm with yours. “Walk with me?” 

Neither of you had your shoes on, and neither of you cared. The walk down was slow, and you leaned into him, his warmth. And this time, you didn't stop right where the wood dipped into the sand, but stepped out, let the grains slip around your feet, and watched how soobin wiggled his socked toes. 

You wanted to tell him, explain how you couldn't do this anymore, but when you opened your mouth, all that came out was a short, breathy laugh. Because he was here, still, pulling your scarf around you, blocking the cold, striking memories like you would a match, and despite the wind, you were willing to cup your hand around the flame so it wouldn't go out, not just yet. 

Dropping your head to his arm, you let yourself go and whispered, “I love you,” because it was true; despite all else, you knew that. 

“I love you more,” said like it was the start of a song you hadn't heard in forever but knew all the words, felt it in your fingertips, and sang along to every bittersweet nostalgic note. It hurt that you had almost forgotten it, almost as badly as you knew it would be to forget the color of his eyes. “So, so, much more,” 

You turned your nose into his coat sleeve, breathed in the scent of him deep enough to let it catch in your lungs, and held the air until you were sure you wouldn't burst into tears. “No, I love you more,” and even with your voice weak, it was a declaration, a vow, an oath. A vocal snapshot collected from all the flickering facets of your past together, where you had said the words between kisses, moans, and casual goodbyes. 

The two of you let the silence settle, the sea pushing back at it with its rise and fall, the waves sounding like the turning page of a book caught at its edge, the kind you had to check to make sure it wasn't ripped by the end. And you wondered if he, too, was thinking of your shared heartbeat, if it was at the shell of his ear like a whisper of a past you only thought of when the ghosts hummed late at night. 

“I lost my job.” You didn't need to say anything else, not when you both knew it was coming eventually. But you had needed to fill the space with something other than the creeping memory of the silent ultrasound. 

He lifted his free hand, letting it cup your cheek, not turning your head away from his arm but resting. “There are hundreds of jobs out there for when you're ready.” 

Your lashes were soft against your cheeks, forehead heavy against his arm, before you reached up to take his hand, as you pulled away just enough to look up at his already expectant face. 

He was so pretty, even in sadness, the cupid's bow of his lip, still slightly parted, ready to tell you no, because he knew what was coming, it was written all over you. You were looking up at him like you were tracing over every last feature of him, trailing the pen across his eyebrows, following his lash line, painting the exact shade of brown his eyes were. “Stop,” he shook his head, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip, holding himself back from saying it any louder. 

“I think it would be better if I went back to the city,” his fingers curled around yours as he twisted his lips into a pout carved out of denial. 

“No-,” because he knew you meant alone, without him. 

“Just for-,” he didn't let you lie, he pressed his lips to yours, drinking down your words, pulling them away from you as if it would make it any better. 

The kiss was soft, testing as the first one had been, and when he pulled away, his nose bumped yours, and he was flushed. Cheeks a shade of pink you had imagined was lost with the version of yourself that had been pulled from under your ribs. He looked as if he were worried he had startled you, as if he had accidentally caught an animal in hands that had only meant to feed it. As if you had just told him they sold shoes right at the end of the street. 

The wind rustled his hair, brushed it along his temples, and pushed the strands back to expose his forehead. And for a small moment, you mourned that you would never be back here with your fingers in his hair, your jealousy of the wind making your hand twitch. If it was going to be the last time, one last memory, you might as well just sink into it until you drowned. 

You lifted just enough to crash your lips against his, unlinking your arms with his so that you could thread your fingers into his hair, leaning into the familiar give of his mouth and the curve of his body. He wrapped you up in him, tugging you closer as your scarf brushed your cheeks as it fluttered from the breeze you couldn't feel when he was so warm. 

He kisses you like there was no time lost, as if you never stopped pulling that soft shyness from deep within him, as if you were cracking him open, splitting him right down the middle so that he could make room for you to share his space. He wanted all of you, in any way you gave it to him, in this love disguised as lust, and even in sadness.

Neither of you knew how you had found yourselves in the sand, your cold fingers at the base of his neck, his lips on the edge of your mouth, sliding down your jaw, his nose cold as he dragged it down your throat. He whimpered into your skin when you dragged a hand down the front of his chest, gasping when you slipped your hand into the hem of his shirt. 

You felt each breath under your fingertips, his stomach flexing as he rolled you onto your back. You matched him with every kiss, every push, as you widened your legs, memorizing him with every sense you could. Because he smelled like the day you had shared a bed for the first time, where he laid next to you as stiff as a board, blinking up at the ceiling as you linked your hand in his. And his breath caught just as it had the first time the two of you had made out on his couch. His body shuddered above you when you kissed under his ear. 

Neither of you had to speak, not when you could read every I love you, between touches and heartbeats, like a eulogy, so focused on holding onto the moment, tattooing it along your skin as he dragged his hand down your side and pushed up your sweater just enough to feel your skin against his. Your breaths mingling in the cold air, puffing out like mist, like lost promises, lost time. 

He didn't let the chill reach out for you, letting his open coat block most of the wind, his body doing the rest as he rolled his hips against yours. And he didn't stop you when you reached down to the button on his jeans, unzipping them just enough for you to slip into the waistband of his underwear. He moaned into your mouth when you wrapped your hand around him softly. You swallowed the sound down, held it in your lungs. 

It had been so long since either of you had been so close in this way, past the shower and the attempt in the bed that felt empty even with you in it. He hummed against your pulse, his open-mouthed kiss caught against your skin when you let yourself get lost in the familiar motion of drawing out his desire. You had been here before, just like this, with his hand sliding down your side until his fingers pushed past your panties and could circle sweetly over your clit.

He’d kissed salt and sun from your skin, blushed just the same as he did now, not from the cold but from your touch, greedy to feel more as he rolled his hips into your hand. Mimicking your slow movements, he soaked in every soft sound you made, pushing his fingers into you, pressing the heel of his palm in place for you to grind. 

It didn't matter how long it had been, not when you had spent years learning every little thing about each other, enough so that you knew that this last attempt at memorization was futile. Still, it wasn't because you wanted a last goodbye but because you needed it, and he deserved it. So you whispered the word into his mouth, “please,” as if begging him to ask you to stay instead of begging for more. 

It didn't matter that you were on the beach, the very one you had met, or that it was winter, just as you dreamt of spending with him. You let him push your pants down, let him melt into you, keep you pressed against your coat, the sand. You gasped at the heat of him, the stretch, the familiarity. 

Your hands, still sore from your cuts, made from memories too sharp, burned as you tangled your fingers into his hair, his face pressed firmly to your neck as he let himself be surrounded by you. The two of you in a world alone, wrapped up in your affection, your lust, the nostalgia. 

There was no rush; every movement, careful and deep, threaded with memory, so close as if neither of you could stand to be apart. He held you, kissed the salt on your skin from his tears away, as he had the salt from the sea. Not caring about crying when you were so close to slipping away from him. He knew it, felt it between every breathy whimper the two of you shared. This was different than the last time you two had tried; he had felt you grasping at him desperately, trying to hold on, find purchase on him as if it would have been able to pull you from the water. 

This time, here now, he knew you were letting yourself go, breathing him in as if he was the last bit of air you would ever swallow down before your lungs stopped trying behind ribs too bruised from chest-wracking sobs. And he was greedy, he wanted you, even like this, in any way he could, because he loved you, loves you, had never stopped, and he never thought he would, and he was just as willing to give everything up for one more moment. 

His tears caught on the hollow of your throat, sliding down your skin like an undone necklace, his lips finding your jaw, catching your moans when he finally pulled his mouth back to yours. He held you as you trembled, coming undone for him one last time, his weight keeping you in place as he reached a high too bittersweet and yet blisteringly vehement. 

And he didn't ask you to stay, not when he clung to you as if he was moments away from waving you off to a plane he was too late to grab a ticket on. You were as close as you could get, legs wrapped around him, arms locked around his neck, his nose pressed to your cheek, his browbone slotted into the hollow of your eye as he whispered against your skin like a ghost would into an unsuspecting ear, “Do you remember when I called out for you in the street?” 

His hands slid under you, between the sand and your coat, fingers tucked against the warm spots where the two of you met chest to chest. And you can see him back at the beginning, shoeless, one hand shoved deep into his pocket, the free one cupped around his mouth as he yelled into the night, the streetlights shining down like golden sunrays, his hair a mess, his expectant smile, his dimples. 

And just as the snow began to fall, in small, fragile puffs that melted on your cheeks and clung to his hair, you whispered, “I remember everything.” 

“That was the day I knew you were the love of my life,” and he held you as he had on the couch, as he had the moment he could finally wrap his arms around you for the first time. kissed you just as he dreamed he would while taking sips of coffee from paper cups he picked up from your job, just to get a taste of your lips. And the two of you lay in the sand like a swaying boat on a sea gone dry. 

His letting go and your running was a mutual mercy. 

This is what you repeated when you stood at the train station, your ticket the only one printed for the empty ride. The scarf tied around your neck felt heavy on your shoulders, your nose tucked into the fabric as if that would convince you in some way he would still be with you. Because his hands had been so soft as they wrapped you up as if you were a gift he had been all too excited for, peeling back the paper the day before he was supposed to open it, careful to make sure no one would know he had sneaked a peek. As if he were hopeful you would still be there in the morning, still his, even if you were in the city, even if you weren’t in your shared bed. 

The scarf felt like a name tag, one you wouldn't throw away, but tuck into the back of the closet like you would a receipt between pages of a book for safekeeping. The color is like a burning reminder of him, and as you try to keep the wind from your cheeks, you're flooded with memories of how he smells, what it was like to press your face into the fabric of his sweater, his pillow. 

The heel of your palms are numb, nails pinched against your skin, jaw aching as your teeth rattle, grind, the pressure holding in each trembling breath that wants to turn into a weak whine. You focused on the feeling of your closed eyes, how your lashes felt heavy with unshed tears you refused to let go of, not willing to look up at the way the snow fell on the beach with increasing speed since leaving the sand. 

It fell like rain, sheets and sheets of the flanks swirling in the air under the streetlamps lined up on the edge of the platform you stood on alone. Your world felt like a salt shaker, taken in a careless fist over a boiling pot, too casual with the flicking of a wrist that never intended the harm it was causing with one simple movement. Every inhale with closed eyes and aching hands made you sway, like you were the tide and he was your moon, beckoning you with slowness and promises you had to push against like waves at the edge of the rocky cliffs the lighthouses sat on. 

There was no Shakespearean end, no half-written tragedy uncovered with your closing of the door behind you, only silence. And when the train pulled in, tugging on the red end of your scarf with its arrival, you couldn't help but follow the line of its direction. He would be sitting on the back porch watching the snow exactly where you left him, the sea loud enough to cover the sound of your leaving, because to him it swallowed even the silence. 

You looked back because somewhere deep down you wanted him to be running back up the side of the hill, flushed red, socks slipping in the sand and snow, begging you to come home even if it was a house that hadn't been a home for far too long. There was no reason to be disappointed not to see him there; you had done nothing but ruin, nothing but lie stagnant like water at the bottom of a covered well, no stone he could throw at windows or like pennies mimicking wishes could change that. 

He did not come, he did not beg, and you did not stay, no matter how much either of you wanted to do the opposite. You climbed the short steps into the belly of the empty rain, let the seat right by the door swallow you down, and waited for the memories to chew you, to spit you out on the streets of New York. because behind you, the ghosts of the past sat giggling, sharing book recommendations to blushing boys who lost their shoes, who whispered funny baby names just to see you smile, who kissed you under every bridge you passed. 

You let the ghosts leech off your sadness, a final gift as if that would make them stay longer than you would ever know. Feeding their memory so that even when you forgot, they would sit here, haunting the very train you took to fall in love. 

There was no reason to push any of the thoughts away, not when you had so little time to dwell on them. You had only one thing in your pocket besides your phone and key ring, the half-ripped pamphlet with the number to Dr. Howard's office. 

As much as it said it would not hurt, you wondered if you would know, somewhere deep down, that something was missing in you. You had not known exactly how vast and empty you could feel, not until this wave of depression, and if that could be hidden, would the memory of him be tucked away somewhere? Folded down over and over like a piece of paper or burned to ashes? 

Loving soobin would leave a scar, even if they said it would be unnoticeable. There was no amount of perfected surgery or magic that could pull him away from your being unmarked. In the fine wedding of your heartstrings, his fingerprint was etched; you had not known it, not until he looked up at you with his boyish smile and eyes warm enough to feel like nostalgia. It was not something they could erase, not entirely, because it was a part of you far longer than you had known him. 

It would not be easy to erase him when he was woven too deeply into the threads of your tapestry. You knew it as soon as you stepped off the train and looked out at the road, packed with cars leading to places you never envisioned going, with people you never cared to meet. His question hangs in the air like a knife on a string. Do you remember when I called out for you in the street? Here you had been just a girl, and you learned that heartbeats had wings, ones that were made of wax and beat for boys who felt like the summer sun on bare shoulders. 

You ran, not caring about the stares, face scrunched to keep back the tears because it felt all too real now, three hours away from him. Your coat was too heavy, too warm, suffocating when it wasn't snowing in the city just yet. Every step down your old street, up the stairs to your apartment shared with a life before him felt heavy, weighted with iron tied around your ankles. 

You had not called Kai, not when you had only thought about soobin and his hands, his last breaths puffed into your lungs as if it would reanimate you. It had slipped your mind to ask if it was okay to run to him when you were looking for someone to tell you it was okay, that it would all work out no matter what you chose to do. 

Instead, you had picked up the key that Kai had turned into your palm, and fell into the familiarity of coming back to your shared apartment as if it was another day after class, or work, only now your hands were shaking, trembling enough to miss each attempt to fit the key into the lock. 

Everything was overstimulating: the flickering overhead light down the hall, the sweat now making its way down the back of your neck from so many layers of clothes, the tears that blurred everything around you and made your throat tighten enough to feel like a hand had replaced your scarf. “Fuck,” you blurted the word, moments before the door pulled open. 

Kai stood bathed in the golden light from the lamp in the far corner, still dressed down in his pajamas, hair a frizzy mess, eyebrows pulled in concern at the very sight of you being at his doorstep. “Kai,” his name was a sob, like the bubbling sound from a stopper being pulled from a tub's drain. 

He pulled you into him, tucked your face into his chest, and held you while you fell apart, the gentle swaying of his body allowing you to spill out. It didn't matter how or why you showed up, he would take you in just as he said he would. You let him pull you in past the door, and as soon as he let you go to shut it, you ripped off your scarf, shedding your coat, your shoes. Your hands wiped at your cheeks, knuckles digging into your eye sockets to force yourself to stop the incessant tears. 

You wanted to sound clear, to make it known that this was a decision made from reason and not one made from wallowing, even if it was all that was written over you. 

Holding your breath, you looked around at the space you once shared, now tinted with the years of Kai having been alone. The small touches you had placed over it were still there, only added to. He kept the hooks by the front door, still half filled haphazardly with his winter coats, your jacket placed right where he always kept the spot open for guests. Your scarf slipped to the floor, even after he had taken the time to make sure it would stay in place, the red fabric like a pool of blood at the entryway. 

He still used the blanket you kept on the back of the sofa; the pillows never switched out, even as they started to flatten over the years. The coffee table was picked out for its color and price when the two of you had scraped by for cash to spend on to have somewhere to eat besides standing in the kitchen. He had added to the collection of photos on the fridge, replacing the magnets you had taken with you to the house in Montauk with his own memories. 

Your old bedroom door was closed, right across the living room from Kais, the door half open to show where he must have climbed out of bed on his off day to let you in. 

Life had gone on, yours, his, even if it felt familiar, it felt distant. As if you were stepping back into your childhood bedroom after the first year of college, no ghosts but dusty reminders of what you had grown into. The bittersweet nostalgia felt cold around its middle like a reheated meal you hadn't let do a full turn in the microwave. And there on the side table, a picture frame of your friend group, Kai’s sisters, all sitting around the living room on his birthday, crammed onto the small two-seater couch, smiling for the camera. Soobin's face was pressed into your cheek, his eyes scrunched in a laugh because you were fighting hard to get away from the way his lashes had been tickling you. 

You had only been able to call Kai for his birthday this year, promising him that in a week you would make it up to him when you felt less under the weather, even when both of you knew you weren't fighting a cold. 

It was the picture that pushed you to say why you had come to, “I can't do it anymore,” and even if all you felt was shame to come out with the confession, you were shocked to find relief in between every syllable. “I thought when I saw you in the city that I would be okay, that eventually I would get better, that somewhere there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, and I just hadn't found it yet, but it’s taking so fucking long,” 

And he knows what you mean, the realization not something that he thought was shocking when he could hear it in your voice after every call, knew it when yeonjun had gone and came back with red-rimmed eyes after the train ride home. “It's so much, and I lost my job, and I don't even really care about it, and I think that's the thing. I know how I would have reacted before, and now not even feeling a hint of that? Every emotion is so far away, and I can't do it anymore. I can't sit there and make him suffer through it with me when I don't think there will be any end to it, not unless I forget what happened.” 

“Did you talk to him about it? Have you told him-” 

“What is there to tell? I know exactly how he will react. I love him so so much, I can't hide that, because that's all there is, that's what's left, but it's so hard to act on, to be who I was for him before when I first started to love him, who i was when we first moved into the house because now im just empty, and he still would love me and when he couldn't anymore, because one day he will see what I've done to us, he will still stay and let himself be brought down by me because that's who he is thats that he does,” you fall to the couch, elbows heavy on your knees as you lean your face into your hands. 

“You didn't do anything wrong, none of this is your fault-” 

“I know that, somewhere deep down, I'm sure I know it, but we are losing everything. I lost my job, I lost my feelings, we lost…we lost our baby,” you whisper the end of the sentence, and you're sure it's the first time you've said it allowed. Soobin had been the one to make the calls to your family, to your friends, you had replayed the sound of his voice, growing cold with each pass of condolences and weak thank yous, over and over again in your head until it was all you could hear. 

You should have been there with him, at his side, leaning on him as he leaned on you, carrying the weight of the truth so that it was spread between you two instead of sinking you both. But you had been just as silent as he had grown. Let him sit with the heavy words from people who didn't really know you two, their comfort like bullets to glass, far too cracked to do anything but shatter. Everything happens for a reason. You can have another one, move on by bringing in happiness, showing that the spark is still there, and you can still be happy… 

It was all bullshit. You had heard it in the distance, and you hadn't given him any outlet to talk it through, both of you shell-shocked, knowing it was meant well, and yet it did anything but soothe your hearts. And maybe that's also why you were running, some selfish part of you was embarrassed about who you had become for him, a partner who did not know how to help with his grief, had not tried. Your mother had told you that it was natural and not something you should beat yourself up about. But it was so hard not to throw fists at a mirror that now only showed the parts of yourself that you hated. 

You had tried, but it felt so lackluster in comparison to what he had done for you, how he had made attempts and had been met with a brick wall, and still did not give up, even if it was silent. He was waiting for you so that you could build new dreams together, build yourselves back up, and work through your feelings in healthy ways that would help process your grief.  

But it was so easy to get stuck, so easy to think about what was gone, what had gone wrong, and still he waited loving you even when you didn't anymore. 

“I'm drowning, fully, and I don't know how to help it, but I know this,” you pull out the pamphlet, place it down on the table before you, letting kai take the half ripped sheet, “every time I think about picking myself back up to live out the dreams we had set out for us im right back down in my bed. Because once I think about it, all I can see is how easy it was for it to be taken away from us, how easy it was for the wave to come and knock me on my ass. There was no fighting it. I'm trying, but I can't do it anymore, not when I see him and what I did to him. I'm not the girl he proposed to, not the one he fell in love with anymore. We hadn't gotten married in all the time it took before I got pregnant, years, it took the thought of having a baby for him to talk about it again, for us to move out of the city, and now that's all gone.” 

“And I don't know why I'm so caught up in that dream being lost, why I can't get out of bed, why I can't let him love me. That's why I can't let him suffer anymore, because at the end of the day, I wouldn't want to marry me either, I wouldn't want to be saddled with someone who crumbles instead of snaps, he deserves so much better than whatever I have to offer, and I can't do this anymore. I try, Kai, that's that part, this is me giving it 100% and I want to give so much less, I feel it, weighing me down, it keeps me in bed, it keeps me from forgiving myself for what I did-” you’re bleeding tears, they coat every words and shaking breath as you lay out every thing that had been plaguing you. 

Your last moment on the beach had pulled a thread from you, anchored it to the sand and sea, and as you ran, you unraveled. That fine red sting pulling taut as you spoke without fear because you needed Kai to know why you were doing this, you needed someone to know it was out of love, just as well as it was selfishness. 

The couch dipped next to you, his weight drawing you closer to him before he wrapped you in his arms. And without knowing it, your shoulders sank involuntarily at the realization that it was not soobin pulling you into his sweater, but Kai. “You didn't do anything wrong,” 

“But I did! It was me, it was my body, it was my baby, it was my life, and I ruined it. I can't do this anymore, I can’t sit here and feel this anymore, and I love him so much, so much it hurts, it rips at me, it kills me and I cant lose him not like I lost our baby, and I’d rather forget it all then wait for him to realize im the cause, that im everything I know I am, I can't do that to him, I can't hurt him anymore than I already have and I don't want to forget him but I have to, I need to, for him,” 

“You don't have to, you could go to therapy, stay here for a bit, give it a week, a month, time.” His hand, warm and heavy, soothes circles over your back, grasps at ways to calm you.  But your mind is made up. 

You were always back in that hospital bed, screaming to be left alone, avoiding the one thing that maybe could have kept all this pain away in the first place. So quick, so simple, like knocking off all the dinnerware from a table, but you had been worried about the mess, concerned about collecting the pieces of broken glass like scattered bones grown from wombs of memories, that you had rejected everything besides grief. And now everything was laced with regret, and all you wanted was the first option. 

All you wanted was painlessness. It was the only dream rattling around in a heart made up and dressed like a tomb. 

Kai knew it, you both did. His attempts at convincing you otherwise were lost, and when he called yeonjun and left the two of you alone in the apartment, he knew it too. Saw it in the way you had begged to sleep on the couch, scared to find yourself in a bed that you had shared with soobin only a few times, the mattress far too short and his legs too long, having to curl up into you like the perfect excuse to hold you tighter. 

Instead, you lie on the couch as you would in your own home. Yeonjun didn't even speak up. He sat with you, your feet resting on his lap, his coffee cup, too cold for winter, dripped onto his numbing hand as the ice slowly melted enough for him to ask, “Are you sure?” 

You had already made the appointment for that day, making Kai promise that he wouldn't tell Soobin, that he wouldn't tell anyone besides Yeonjun. 

The office had asked for memorabilia from your relationship, one item that had significant enough meaning to keep soobin right at the forefront of your mind. You had nothing more than the clothes you had come with and your engagement ring. Your fingers curled, but you did not take it off, not yet, not until they asked you for it, not until the last moment. 

Yeonjun had promised to pick up the rest of your things in time from soobin, swearing to keep the secret even when you could see it on him that he didn't want to. You could only tack it to the list of reasons why you felt so guilty, your one choice of not erasing your memory sooner rippled the waters enough to affect everyone around you. If you could go back, you would. You had been closest to the shore then, closest to soobin, to your baby, to the life you had dreamed of. 

“I'm sure.” Even if it was heavy like a lie on your tongue, weighing the statement down with some resonance of truth, you carried it all the way to your appointment. 

Yeonjun held the door open to the sterile office space, the walls grey and peeling, tacked up with inspirational posters every few feet like a color bandaid on a scraped knee, too small to cover all the damage, but pretty enough for its job. 

It was nothing like the hospitals you had been to before, more like a dentist's office, the few seats already filled with people holding boxes and photo albums like driftwood on a thrashing sea, they prayed would calm soon. It was a small building with no more than three rooms in the back, faint elevator music covering the soft, muffled voices behind the thin walls. 

“Good morning,” the receptionist smiled, the brightest person in the room, the sunny disposition shining down on the wilted flowers we all found ourselves being once we had decided this was the only option. “Appointment?” 

For a second, your throat had tightened up, as if tears would come instead of words; spill with a desperation that read more like a plea than a declaration. You swallowed, hands tightening on the hold you had on your coat, tugged off from your shoulders to use as a blanket between you and the realization of what this all meant. 

It was Yeonjun who spoke up for you, nodding and taking the clipboard, papers, and pen with his pursed smile, the one he used for work and bad days. He led you to the only two free seats together, waiting for you to sit so that he could make sure you weren't running. He wouldn't stop you if you did. You're sure it would make him happy to leave here with you, intact but not whole, but the rawest form of you that there would be before bits of you were picked out like fruit from a cake. 

He passed the clipboard over, set the pen in your hand, and watched as you filled out your name. It was the only thing you could do to distract yourself, list out the basic information about you that had nothing to do with soobin, no, that wouldn't happen until later, until at least the second page of forms, where you would have to list out your explanation of why you were here in the first place. 

The stinging in your eyes was like someone was blowing air right along your lash line, your blinking only working for so long before you were finding it hard to read the checkmark boxes asking who you had brought along with you to take you home. It was only a little reminder of Soobin, of a time when you had been happy enough that the anxiety was eaten away at the edges like ends of books you had stacked on your shelf; spouse/partner.  

It had been so simple then, when your problems had been nothing more than cold feet worries and not soul-crushing silence, but even now you can't help but want him right here with you, pressing his knee into yours, his legs too long for the chair so he needed to spill closer to yours, when really all he wanted was to be closer to you, touching you. His laugh lit up the silent room, echoing as he joked about the posters, eyes going wide when your name was called, like he had been caught by a teacher for passing notes. 

The pen slipped from your fingers, falling before you had even realized you had been crying so openly. Yeonjun bent and picked it back up without much thought, held it out for you on the flat of his palm like an invitation, one to take or one to leave. He'd walk out with you if you asked, you kept reminding yourself over and over about it, and still you couldn't stop now, not here. 

But it didn't feel real until they pulled you back without him, your lifeline slipping between your fingers with lightning speed at a rate you couldn't catch, but you could feel the burn of. The chair, much like that of a dentist’s, was cold and squeaky, the pleather not worn down or softened by any number of people who had come and shared this very seat. The lights dimmed like the ultrasound room you had shared with soobin by your side, a screen pulled up right in front of you just the same. 

Your knuckles ached, the grip you held on your coat too tight as you bit back the wave of fresh tears threatening, the questions rising from somewhere deep you didn't want to look down into. If you went back, pulled away now, and ran all the way to the waiting bed you made for the two of you, neither of you would survive. 

You could go, let him tuck you in close to him, whisper that everything would be alright when you both knew it wouldn't. You could convince yourself that he was telling the truth long enough to make it feel real, even for a night. 

But what were you running back to? An empty house, gutted clean with the cracked porcelain made from memories you found so easy now to throw away, or so it seems. The ocean singing its mocking tune that you couldn't quite hear unless you were thrown into the deep end, haunted by the sounds of heartbeats and I love yous. 

There he would be sitting, waiting for you to drag him under the tide that had spit you out like weathered driftwood that hadn't touched the sand long enough to remember just what it had been grounded to before it snapped and drifted out into a sea it had never seen coming. He would wake next to you, in the house you had turned into a crypt, and place the last mug of tea down on your nightstand like he would flowers right at the edge of your grave. Whisper so soft like he would blow you out like a candle if he spoke too loud, kiss your temple like the cold headset they now laid against your skin. 

The dry acidic tang of the rubbing alcohol they used to clean at the edge of your brows burned your nose. Gentle fingers making sure the headset, icy and awakening, was set right into place, the drone of the doctor's voice coming in waves, painless, simple, all you have to do is remember for one last time. 

Your ring, the one he kissed at your knuckles while in bed, in the sand, slipped from your finger, placed, clinking like the tines of a fork on a glass of champagne for a wedding the ring never saw, on a silver tray just a foot away from you to look at and picture him as if he wasn't always on the forefront of your mind. Hands now empty, lay so neatly against your coat in your lap, as if forcing yourself not to curl them into fists would help distract you from what you were doing. And when they told you to close your eyes, you let your lids fall heavy, let yourself get lost in the memories, in poison you had slipped in the well to tell yourself that this was the right way, the only way. 

The machine hummed low next to you, the buzz of it like the beating of a moth's wings, like the littered kisses he'd pepper along your hairline. 

“Baby?” his nose nuzzled against your ear, so close it almost felt real, his voice a memory of a time you had been just on the verge of waking, tucked under the sheets in his apartment, his hands a heavy weight against skin worn into sleep-ridden bliss. “Stay with me?” 

You had lived this moment, heard him whisper over and over again the one thing you had been waiting for him to ask when you were laid out in the sand, when the snow began to fall. You had turned in his arms, legs tangling with his, pressing your face into the warm spot at the base of his neck, nose dipping into the hollow of his throat as you pulled him in closer. “Ask me again,” 

“Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me…” the words faded out, slowly until you couldn't even hear what was being said, only the rumbling from your own throat as you rolled out of an empty bed for work. The heater had been turned off late into the night, Kai and his plans to save money on the electricity, leaving both of you to sleep bundled up under layers of blankets, wrapped around you like arms. 

You rubbed the sleep from your eyes, cringing at the overhead light from the bulb right over the checkout counter, a stack of books waiting for stickers at your side, as your jaw ached from the stretch of your yawn. He laughed, the kind that you knew his dimples would show through, teeth just caught at the bottom of his lip, “sleeping on the job?” 

He placed a mug, steaming with tea, on the smooth wood, as if it were on your kitchen counter, not the register. Distantly, you can remember that you had lost a job, cried over it until you had broken something that had hurt instead of healed. But here right now, soobin was leaning over the checkout, bending to kiss the tip of your nose as you rolled your eyes, “you kept me up all night.” he had been humming in the kitchen, clinking plates, mugs, making something late at night because you had craved it. 

“They kept you up all night.” You couldn't help but smile, hand falling to the waistband of your jeans, only fitting snug enough to make it seem like you hadn't changed overnight. “How are my girls doing now besides being tired?” 

“Girls? Our baby is the size of a pea, and you're just picking a girl just because?” You tilted your head, looking up at him like some lovesick, love-struck fool, mid shift. But he was blushing, flushed pink, his smile turned downward as if he was trying too hard not to act caught detailing dreams you hadn't yet shared while tucked in bed at night. 

“I'm happy with whoever they end up being, so long as they are healthy, but when I think about you holding our baby, I see you and her, and she smiles like you.” he was just pulling in to kiss you, taste the edge of your happiness caught on your lips, when someone cleared their throat. 

You were caught frozen, distracted enough to spill the paper cup of tea you had grabbed at the beginning of your shift right over the edge to splash on your shoes. The customer waiting in the spot you had just been looking at, lost in some daydream you can't remember, passing you a book about whales, the familiar lighthouse out in the distance, just at the edge of your periphery as you ground your reality, listening to the echo of the waves on the shore. The water just reached the tips of your shoes, threatening to soak your socks if you didn't take a step back. “Do you remember our first time out here? Together when we walked on the beach?” 

“Like the back of my hand,” you had held it out for him, showing him the smooth expanse of skin, fingers spreading before he caught them in his, intertwining them like yarn woven to make a blanket, a sweater, before he pulled your knuckles up to kiss. You had no ring then, not until the next time you went out to Montauk together for his birthday. But for now, it was you and him, caught in the snowglobe left unshaken, just a picture of a memory now being cleaned of dust bunnies dressed in the shape of him. 

“Can we stay here?” Your heart was picking up speed, beating to the rhythm of your steps as you ran, feet dragged down from the sand slipping into your boots, clinging to your socks. Laughing as he chased you, bent to pick up your coat, your dropped sweater as you pushed open the door of your home. 

Not a house, but your home, with its creaking floorboards and open windows, the fridge covered in magnets, the sonogram picture hung right next to the filmstrips, every mug stacked in the dish rack. And soobin is standing in the kitchen with your baby on his hip. 

This was something close to a memory, the dream you had caught in your hands that first night in your bed after taking a million pregnancy tests. sick and yet too happy to care as he kissed your skin, explored your body in ways he never had before, fingers drawing shapes of hearts and whispered names like first laughs made in cribs that birthed fairies like stars blinking alight in the sky. 

He called out your name, a question on the edge of his lips as he looked over his shoulder at you, one hand holding a spoon as he stirred the pot he had boiling, bouncing the baby with their dark hair, giggling as the bubbles rose and popped, the floor a sticky mess as you stepped into the kitchen. The sweet powdery smell of baby lotion mixed with the salted air from the sea breeze. “Listen to how happy she is,” 

Your breath stilled, frozen in the moment, the weight of your dream so close to the feeling of holding her in your arms, not quite able to see her face but seeing the swell of her dimpled cheek as soobin bent to press his face into her neck, blowing a raspberry just to hear her squeal. 

In your dream, you had met them in the middle, brushed your fingers into your daughter's hair, and listened to the happy babbling. But now the image blurred out of focus, as if you had drawn them with ink and not the starlight the dream had been made of. Dipping the parchment into the water now swirling around your feet, the colors running, the ink bleeding, dripping like blood on tile, in the sink, until the water ran clean. 

Your throat was tightening, mouth opening, gasping as you watched your empty house fill with the sea, water rising, the hollow halls purged clean of anything but salt, and you. The rush was loud, like a dumping waterfall off a cliff, the hum heard even under the water as the riptide pulled you in. Spit out into reality as you surfaced, the offices dimmed lights a stark reminder of what exactly was happening, what was being lost. 

It was only at the dripping of your tears off your chin that you realized why you felt as if you had broken through the surf. “No-no- not that one-” the words sounded so loud, so desperate like closing fists and prayers. The memory of your proposal crashing into you at the sight of your ring sitting on the metal tray. 

“I even got you a ring.”  his trembling hands cupped the little velvet box, his laugh so shy, the tremor in his voice carrying over your bones, sinking into your joints and building you up at the realization that this was exactly where you had wanted to be. Happy and lovesick, right at the end, on a bed in Montauk. Eyes burning, hazy with tears that welled up just at your lashline like they did now. 

His voice was echoing around you, the words left when the sight of him, the feel of him, was slowly slipping away behind your tears. “I was put on this earth to love you, kinda way. Because when I'm with you, when I'm not, I ache. I think about how lucky I am to have you when you're here, and burn when you're not, and it feels bigger than the both of us, and that is scary, but also very comforting because it only tells me that you are the one,” like a church choir sitting in the rafters, he went on, your body remembering the motions, how he pulled you in, how he kissed you. 

You reached out fingers digging into your coat, tight enough to bruise knuckles, crack skin, as you cried, because now everything felt wrong, you didn't know how, didn't know why, but it felt so wrong to erase wanting this boy who was blushing before you as you leaned against your apartment door. “And next time, kiss me before you leave,” you were saying it, but somewhere distantly your mouth could only form the words, “no- not this one, let me keep just this one-” 

Soobin was looking down at your lips, his throat bobbing with his forced swallow, his mind working so fast he didn't have time to question if it was the wrong thing to do before he was leaning in, reaching for something you couldn't remember if you had ever had before. It was all too short, so shy like sitting under a playground slide, the woodchips digging into your palms the way your nails did as you clawed to hold onto this one thing. 

Because your hand was sliding up his sweater, drawing him in closer like you were nothing more than the only person in the world who could bring him to his knees. His lashes fluttered, hazy and drunk off the feeling of you curling your fingers in the hair at the back of his neck, wanting him just as desperately as he wanted you; every small touch, gentle laugh, so you pulled him in for one last kiss. 

Your eyes were heavy and raw, blinking open in the golden, dimmed office, lips buzzing as if you had only just been kissed, the salt of your tears bittersweet on your tongue. Your knuckles creaked, stiff and aching like you had them curled around a steering wheel for hours on a road trip. Nothing was pointing out why the crescent-shaped indents from your nails were burned in like a gruesome engraving into your palms. 

But somewhere right on the edge of your vision, you could tell something was off. Inside, there was a space so vast and full of seawater that there must have been something lurking underneath. You were a corked ship in a bottle, snuffed, and filled with echoes, but hollow while seemingly being told you were complete. 

“All done!” the doctor clapped behind you as the nurse lifted the headpiece from your temples. “Your scans are all clear, and it looks like you are free to go.” 

But it must not have been right, there was something you wanted to ask, found it right at the tip of your tongue, and yet you couldn't imagine what it was that you were forgetting. Your thumb swept over the indents your nails had left, counting: one, two, three, four, over and over as the nurse wheeled away an empty metal tray that had been sitting in front of you. 

There was nothing you could ask, nothing you knew how to pin down, when all you felt was empty. 

ོ  ⸝⸝⸝

It was easier to imagine you were still in the house, somewhere in another room, late to bed as if you had a long shift and an early morning. He would sleep because you had sent up to the room to warm the sheets, promised you'd make it up before he closed his eyes, and yet you never did. 

He left the bed wrinkled, the covers just pulled back on your side, just as you had left it that morning that he woke to find you a mess on the floor of the kitchen. Your sweater still thrown over the foot, dotted with blood gone dry, left out from his meticulous tasks he had set out to do while you were gone. 

The list had been long, and there was dust collecting around every corner of the house. He started with the ceiling fans, pulling a ladder from the garage left by the previous owners, climbing up with no worry of falling off with no one spotting him. You would have laughed at how he climbed far too high, bending back at an awkward angle once he realized he could hardly do anything with his head pressed flush against the rooftop. 

But he didn't find it funny, his jaw ticked, tight as he imagined it, angry at the way his reality was working up. The dust falling like the snow had over the sand; like ashes over the grave the couch had become the first time you had come home from the hospital. 

He vacuumed, the house silent instead of full of the music you would play loud enough to sing over the violent hum of the hover. The windows were open, the cold puffing in through the curtains pulled back, his coat and sweater on as if this was all he could get, the heater turned off when it was just him, and since he wasn't keeping you warm. 

He washed every dish in the sink, the single mug, carried down load after load of laundry, separated them by color, by delicacy, and made the laundry room his oasis. You had always dumped the warm clothes on him while he sat on the couch playing games. The fabric softener's scent flooded his senses before you jumped on him, pulling him as close as you could get him, not caring if he lost his game when he felt so cozy like this. 

You would sit watching him play over a voice call with Beomgyu and Kai, folding everything into piles that he would carry with him upstairs to put away after you had fallen asleep, curled up. It was how you had done it at the apartment and the start of your lives right at the edge of the sea. 

He didn't want to sit back on the sofa and think about how you had tucked your feet under his thigh on the colder nights, holding up socks to see which pair went together when they were seemingly all the same. So instead, he stood folding clothes straight from the dryer, precise with his technique, taking his time until the light in the dryer went off and all the clothes had grown cold. 

He mopped baseboards, fixed squeaky doors, and repainted the porch swing blue. Anything to keep his mind off the fact that it had been two weeks and you had not called him, had not texted him, had not breathed a single thought in his direction.

Maybe it was better. Something that you truly did need, you had spent so many years together, nearly every day and every night had been in the same bed, the same house, with words shared over the phone, or between shared air. 

Like a bone snapped in half, his life had fallen into two distinct pieces: you on one end and him on the other. And maybe to you this was a rebreak so that you could heal properly, and it was taking a lot longer than the first time the injury had occurred. Hastily plastered over in hopes that it would all be alright, but the splint had done nothing but make the two of you heal in a shape he had never seen before, close to the real thing but not quite right. 

He told himself over and over that you just needed time, more than he could give you when he was right there; he would wait in the same bed, on the same beach, far away, or close by, but he would wait. If it were the last thing he would do, it would be done, and he would clean the house, go over every little thing that had been set askew, and place it right so it made it easy. 

But with each thing he cleaned, each thing he fixed, you were still gone, and the house was cold and just as empty as it had been before you left. 

It pushed him to the beach, to sit out in the snow, not feeling the wind on his face, but feeling the way it threaded through his hair like your fingers would. The boats would be out, rare now that there was hardly anything to catch, but to watch the whales as they came by chasing warmer waters. The lighthouse would shine its light in its constant circle, going round and round as he told Taehyun not to worry about coming over, that he was busy enough. 

“Just for the weekend,” he wasn't trying to push; Taehyun was only giving him the option, showing that he was on his side as if there were sides at all. But it felt wrong to have someone else come into his space when you weren't there. 

Any other time, he would have been okay to have him over, but Soobin had left the door open for you and no one else. He was waiting for you to walk in next. Even if he wanted to see his friend, even if he knew it was okay to show you were grieving someone alive or dead, he still wanted to do it alone, and now that the house was clean, he wanted to do it alone on the beach. 

It was the closest place he felt to you when you weren't here, the last place he had held you, kissed you, told you he loves you. He could lie in the bed all day, smell you on the sheets he had neglected in his cleaning, see the spots of your blood on the sweater, and still it would not be as close as he felt with you right in the sand. 

It was the first place he knew you would go if you came back, right to the edge of the shore, looking out over the water with him, reaching out and sticking your hand in his pocket to grasp his, twisting your cold fingers into his warm ones, leaning your head against his shoulder without saying a word because there was no need to. He wanted that back, needed that back, and this was where he could imagine it best. 

Looking up at the house felt like looking at a closed book, as if someone had written the ending as soon as you had left, and now he was here with the only copy. He couldn't stand it. 

He wanted to run to the city, scratch at the door of Kai’s apartment, and beg you to let him stay, to make a home right there like you had before, when everything felt easy, when everything was better. He’d sell the house, put all the money back into a studio with windows looking out at the park, or a townhouse, a brownstone, anything you wanted, so long as you let him stay. 

Because all he wanted to do was have you back, whole or not, and maybe that was selfish, maybe he was greedy, but it's all he ever felt after one taste of your love. Living three hours away now felt like torture; a few blocks like it had been at the start would be enough for him, enough to relearn each other. Trace fingers over all the new scars and grooves that had been carved into skin far too weak to realize the damage that would come with playing at happiness. 

He wanted you back, in any amount he could get, and he'd change just about everything to get it. Because he had never stopped loving you, he had not come to any grand conclusion that he wanted to stay separated once you had pulled away. If anything, it had made it so clear that he could not do it alone, and he could not spend any more time waiting when it was eating him alive. 

He was angry, far too angry at himself, at the situation, at the damn house and its mocking bedrooms painted to hold cribs and wedding photos. Now it was a dusty shelf, cleared of dust he supposed, but still a mausoleum of all the dreams that he had let slip right past him. 

Letting the sea drown out his thoughts helped, but only so much; he was raging on the inside, thrashing around searching for meaning in the middle of an ocean that had been searched thoroughly enough to have nothing left for him. He let the cold burn, slip past his coat, gnaw on the parts of him that had been left out to dry after the sea had gone stagnant with your leaving. 

It was never anger at you, always at himself, for his silence, but every time he had opened his mouth, nothing had come out. The words were stacking up inside him, shifting around with every movement, every dusting, every fake smile he walked in with when going to work. He was not okay, not entirely when you were here, but now it felt so much worse. With you, he could hold onto something that he knew was right, and without you, all he could think was a list of things that needed to be done, what he should have done differently. 

It had only been a few days after you had left that he came out to the beach on a grey day like this, his navy blue mug in hand, spilling as he stepped out onto the sand. Standing in the kitchen, smelling chemically cleaned, he had made it out and stood where he does now. Picturing himself in his mind standing behind you as you slept on the couch. 

He had wanted to say something, anything, to make it better, if there was a way that he could make it better. But he had stayed silent, shedding his work shirt, and climbing in behind you, holding you because it's all he could think to do. What was there to say to someone you had let down? 

Without thinking, he had thrown his mug into the sea, tossed it like he would a stone, and it had flown, heavy and smooth, tea a ripple in the air before hitting the dark water and sinking without a sound. It had only taken him a second before he had rushed in after it. 

The water had been cold, soaking into his clothes, his coat suddenly heavy enough to keep him down, his eyes burning from the salt, his mouth flooded as he gasped at the icy shock of the needle pricks digging into his neck and hands. It had not been hard to find the mug, to turn it upside down, feet dragging in the sand as he walked out of the ocean on a day far too cold to be this wet. 

Pressing his thumb into the ceramic hard enough to hurt, he sank to the sand, not caring anymore if he was too close to the water's edge. He let the tide come in, watched the way the sand darkened, and poured away from him, sinking him lower and lower. 

You would have laughed at him, a blush creeping on his cheeks at the sound, instead of how they only turned red now because of the cold. He pushed his free hand into his eyes until the world went white and then red, into black. He laid back, snow still pushed back on the shore where the tide couldn't melt it. It didn't even affect him when it slipped down the back of his collar. All he did was laugh, sharp and cutting, splitting him in two at how ridiculous he was being. 

He had thought of selling the house then; it's the same thought he had now, dry and more of a sound mind than he had been so soon after you had left. Now he just watched the lighthouse, the beam spinning, guiding ghost ships that would never find their way past the rough waves; relentless in their search. 

Maybe that's what he had become, someone who sat still and waited, silent, or maybe it hurt him to admit that's all he's ever been. Burning as the lighthouse did, stuck circling for someone that had already seemed to vanish from view without him seeing it. But he had seen it, felt the way you had slipped away from him, and he had been holding onto the remnants, the house, when he should have followed, run after you, and helped patch up the relationship that had been wrecked, and he had been too stunned to help before. 

It's why he found himself back in the city. Getting off a train that led to you, standing in front of your old apartment, counting each of his breaths as if it would finally give him the courage to step up and knock on the door he remembered so well. 

He had whispered his speech to himself on the train ride, pacing back and forth at the station before it pulled in. A love confession tied up in promises and pleas, apologies and vows. What felt like a lifetime ago, he had spilled out before you, speaking without thinking truths he had not found fully formed until they left his lips. 

It had been the most honest telling of his emotions that he had shared, and even when he felt as if he was going to be sick, he had said what he knew to the deepest part of himself. You were made for him, the one person whom he had been put on this earth to love, to ache for. And it ruined him, pulled him apart at the seams to be so far from you, to sit there amongst your things and know you weren't coming back. 

He had sensed it when you had kissed him in the sand, one final time before you ran, and he hadn't run after you, even when everything in him was telling him to go after you. 

But that would have been selfish, he knew; you needed time and space. He knew it when you came back from visiting Kai and seemed revitalized, or as much as you could be at the time. It had made him jealous, the snake of it twisting around his insides for only as long as it took him to realize how anything to make you better was worth it. 

This was like that, this was as if he was standing, watching his friends talk about memories he wasn't privy to, happy they had a good time, and yet trying to find his own space to fit into. He wanted nothing more than for you to be happy, to find a routine that helped you get out of bed, even if it looked different without him. But it didn't stop the feeling of guilt, as if he wasn't enough to help, hadn't been the one who could, even after promising everything he was and had to you. 

He wanted to see you happy when you opened the door, even if it was a different kind of happiness that he had not been able to provide, but it wouldn't burn any less, and it was something he would never confess to anyone, not even you. It was something he would have to learn to get over, and for now, he avoided that pain with more distractions. 

The city was so much louder than he remembered it: the car horns, the lovers yelling in the street, the shuffling of his own feet against the concrete as he walked down the familiar road to your old job. He hated to admit that it made him feel so small, hated the echoing mock of it all, asking him what exactly he thought he was doing here. 

But he needed time, something to give him a warm up to seeing you again, in whatever state you would be in when he intruded on your well deserved seclusion. So he picked the one spot he remembered you best, the neutral middle ground outside of your place or his. 

The bookstore had not changed much since the last time he had picked you up here. The shelves were stacked high, with books littering the tables and carts yet to be put away, the coffee shop's buttery desserts and bittersweet coffee filling the air with warmth and fresh baked memories. You had talked about wanting to bottle the scent: books, coffee, and cinnamon, something to light when at home, tucked together on the couch with no plans. 

He stood in line, this time not looking back at the checkout counter you would have been waiting for him at. His smile plastered on his face as you made silly faces at him or blew him kisses. He would pretend to catch them, unashamed of the people around him watching his display of obsession. He had walked into your orbit, and he would stay as long as he could, circling you like a moon, round and round, never dizzy. 

But now your ghost was waiting at the edge of his periphery, the memory like a haunting, your air kisses jaw breaking sucker punches if he looked too long at something he had let burn too bright. So instead, he focuses on the chalkboard menu even when he knows he's ordering the same thing he always orders. The same cup of coffee taste that he had kissed off your lips so many times before. 

He practiced how exactly he would pass it to you in his mind. Where he would place it, whether you were in the living room, your bedroom, or the one opening the door for him. He stood in line, blushing as if you were looking up to him then, and not just a figment of his imagination, a mix of who you were at the house in Montauk and who you had been living in your apartment when everything had been fresh and new. 

You'd lean against the door, not quite letting him in. This sad, resigned look falling away to the faintest smile, the kind that warmed his cheeks and twisted a hand around his heart. He would let you pull it free from his ribs, let you yell at him to leave, go back to the beach, wait. He would let you pull him in, hand twisting in the fabric of his sweater as he pressed his forehead to yours, shyly breathing out that he couldn't stay away any longer, couldn't keep himself from seeing you. 

He was a tornado of emotions, ribbons tied tight over his insides, guts made into knots at the idea of you pushing him away. He would sell the house, move back to the city, start over, fresh like scar tissue, anything, even if it hurt. 

The barista called out his name, messily written on the side of two takeaway cups when he heard it. 

Your laugh, bubbly and alive. 

If there had been a moment to haunt him, it should not have been now, not when he was so close to seeing you. Not when you had not run through the halls of his dreams, or down the sand dunes covered in sand after him as he jumped into the winter water. You should have been there, even if you were just a laugh he had imagined hearing. This felt cruel but not artificial. Because deep down he knew he could never forget the way your laugh had sounded, anywhere, caught in the wind, at his neck, pressed into his skin, his lips, and most certainly here between the stacks of books where you had spent so much time trying to keep it down when he told you jokes that weren't even fun. 

It shocked him still, limbs prickling over as they had when he went in after the most trivial mug you guys shared. He feared turning around to find a stranger who had the same laugh, although he didn't think it was possible, and that's what made it so much worse. He knew exactly how you had sounded, had captured the sound in his mouth and swallowed it down, answered to it over the phone with his own laugh, played the soundtrack in his dreams because he knew. 

And when it came again, it echoed in his ears, over the coffee grinder, over the honking cars in the stress, and even over the sound of his own racing heart. Because it was beating wildly in his chest, both hands fisting coffees, the sea of people parting around him as he stood looking down at his feet, as if he looked back, he would know there would be an angel waiting, frozen in stone just as him, but there. 

“I'll call you after my shift ends,” it was small, something he had heard too many times when he had been late at work and you had early off. He remembered the way you would tease him about lying in his bed with him gone, rolled up in the blankets half dressed, waiting for him. He’d groan, beg the universe for more time off, or at least schedules that lined up, and still he would wait for your call on your walk to his place, standing outside his work building on a break just to stay on the phone after your shift had ended so he knew you made it home safe. 

“Stop worrying, you act like I haven't had this job and the exact same walk back to the apartment before.” and again you chuckle, “Okay, I'm hanging up now, Kai, byeee, stop worrying about me pleaseee,” and he turned around, fully to see across the short path it was to the checkout where he had found you so many times before just like this. Two coffees in hand and a prayer that no one else would walk up to disturb the two of you for the whole shift, so he could stay perched right there talking your ear off as if he had nothing better to do because he didn't. 

He didn't know exactly what to expect when seeing you again, at least not here, not when he had been planning everything in his head about seeing you in the apartment, laughing or not, but here it felt as if he had walked into a spider web, caught like the fly on the way he saw himself as now. 

You turned off your phone, placing it face down next to the register as you pulled a stack of books over for you to place stickers on. It had been one of your favorite things to do, meticulous in your work as you lined up barcodes and numbers with the spine. 

And he couldn't help himself but admit you did look better, fuller, as if you were finally taking meals at the right times, eyes less sleepless but still slightly hollow from the months of late nights and long days. 

It scared him to think he had not grown at all in his time apart, that you would see someone stuck in a past you had run from and did not care to turn back to. He had done nothing but clean, and even that had been in silence, no pondering besides the questions of what he could have done differently, and the anger. He felt nothing now but panic that he would not live up to whatever it was that had helped you. 

Worried that you were growing separately and not intertwined as you had been before. And it was okay, maybe the two of you had been too codependent, maybe it was good to find yourselves away from one another. But he still felt as if he hadn't found anything at all. He had done nothing but keep everything the same, silently waiting to orbit his moon again. 

He squashed his fears, takeaway cups burning into his hands because he forgot the paper sleeves at the sound of your happiness, and he walked up to the counter. 

You did not look up at first, and he took the time to follow the shape of your nose, how it dipped and led to your lips, pulled between your teeth as you lined your sticker, concentrated on the task to not notice him. Not until he whispered a weak, “hey,” 

It had taken almost everything in him to say, his heart bleeding on his sleeve as you looked up, your eyes, the ones he knew so well, passing over him, and this time without a spark of realization for who was standing in front of you. “Hi, how can I help you, sir?” 

Soobin gave a humorless chuckle, dry and brittle enough to crack a bit of the ice inside him. Maybe it would have been different if you had looked as he remembered, or if you had said it with the light in your eyes that you got from joking with him, or even if it didn't gut him to truly realize that he really had done nothing but wallow while you grew. 

But as the time stretched where he did nothing but look at you without speaking, he realized there was no recognition in your eyes. This was a look you gave to customers who truly did come to the counter to ask for help, your questioning, “Sir?” echoing around him before he opened his mouth like a fish out of water. 

He wasn't even angry, shocked that he must have looked so different, just as you did as time passed, but it had been two weeks, nothing long enough to forget, and yet you didn't even get the glint he saw at the edge of your eyes when you turned your attention to him. He had seen it even at your lowest, memorized the look as if he had been a light you couldn't turn away from and chose to look at head-on. 

Now there was nothing. Not a single glint, no teasing, no anything. Just a girl who had gone off and left him bleeding because it was better than bleeding out right next to him. Maybe he had been pulling you down, and he hadn't even noticed. Every talk he had with himself over these past two weeks had been right; you had been right to leave because he truly hadn't been enough for you. And he knew it must have been the truth seeing you here like this. 

“I forgot what I was going to say.” And as his world was falling apart, you smiled the same as you did on the beach in Montauk, when he didn't know you, and you didn't know him, and your laugh grabbed him in its hold just the same. Saying, “They sell sandals right on the edge of the beach, right next to the beach houses,” instead of, “If you remember it, just let me know, I'll be here all day.” 

He felt himself nod, chin making the motion as he turned on a foot too numb to know where it was going, and he left. Pushed past the door with his back so that he could catch on glance at you, not even turning to watch him leave, your head dipped to place the next sticker on the spine of a book he would never read. 

His hands were trembling, following the pattern of the earthquake he was experiencing as his hands clammed too tight over the cups he had picked up, one for you, one for him, now crushed, coffee spilling over the backs of his hands like a caress’ he’d brush over your cheeks. The scalding hot liquid bleeding into the cuffs of his coat before he let the cups fall to the concrete floor, splattering like paint onto his shoes, the street. 

Eyes burning, he knew how he must look, fighting back tears, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot as he gasped silently for air. His chest tightened with every step he took, air scratching down his throat as he reached into his pocket for his phone, for something to ground him as he was running away. Fingers numb and far too slippery, he dialed the only person who would give him a straight answer. 

Kai had been avoiding his calls, texting back hours later with the same line, She's doing okay, I'll let you know if anything changes. But it seems he had lied, you had changed right before his eyes, and he hadn't found it important enough to mention. ‘Okay’ seemed to mean something internally different to him than it did to Soobin. This was better than okay; seeing you like this was when you was so much better was devastatingly bittersweet. You did not look as you did coming home from your job in Montauk; this was a new look, refined and aged as if your healing had taken no time, and his had stayed still open, frozen. 

He was happy and yet torn apart. Yeonjun could hear it over the phone, the shocked gasping mixed with the swift humiliation that he knew would come, “I just saw- I um-” he was breaking down, walking so fast, weaving between the walkers on the street, avoiding bicyclists, and honking cars. He didn't know where he was going, paying no attention to street signs but needing to bring back the distance as if that would help fix him too, give him the sight you had gained living back out here. 

“Soobin-” he didn't know what to say, didn’t know how to even when he had known it would come eventually. 

“She acted like she didn’t even know me,” he was crying now, tears hot on his cheeks, his hand pressing too hard into his skin to push them away. 

There was no need to be angry, not now, not at you. He knew this is what was best, this is what was needed for you, the relationship but it didnt hurt any less to see you happy without him, sitting at your old job like the world had moved on and he had been there on the beach waiting for you to dock your boat at the edge of the clif you had planned to build your life together. 

He was cracking open again, as if seeing you had snapped him, and now everything was spilling out, raw and unfiltered as he went, “she just- God, she just looked right past me, she didn’t see me like she does, she just smiled,” he laughed something broken and ugly, wet with his tears, voice slick with the sound, “was i that bad? Had I been that bad? Did I not see it? Did I not have it in me enough for her to stick around to not act like she doesn't know me anymore? Or have I changed that much not having her with me? Have I been that different?” 

Soobin walked right into someone, tilting and running into the wall from the collision, “Watch it!” he didn't even register the stinging of his shoulder, moving forward without any plans. 

“Where are you?” Yeonjun stood on the other end of the line, pulling on his jacket and grabbing his keys. He had witnessed you falling apart and didn't enjoy hearing your other half melting away. 

“I don’t know,” he was crossing street after street, not caring if the light was green to walk or not, he didn't even know the direction, just away from what felt close to shame. You hadn’t even been wearing his ring. 

“Meet me at the diner near your old place, the one we had your birthday at before you moved,”  he was nodding like Yeonjun could see, looking up at the street signs now having something to do, someone to explain, a direction to go besides home to a house he had cleaned till he saw bleached bone and faded memories. “Stay on the line, I'll be there in ten.” 

Neither of them talked as they made their way, the clash of sound from Yeonjun’s side of the phone mixing with Soobin’s as he made it into the only empty booth in the otherwise full diner. 

It was the one in the far back, the same one he had sat at for his birthday, only now it was him, clutching the plastic casing of his phone with white knuckles, and fighting back tears as the fresh sleet started to rain down against the window behind him. The low hushed mumbling of the other patrons felt like bees in a hive, buzzing over his skin, tingling behind his ears at the spot you loved to kiss when tucked into bed against him. 

There was no hiding from yeonjun when he came, hair wet and sticking to his temples before he pushed it back, shaking from the cold after getting caught in the frozen rain. Soobin was hot all over, but he knew his body must have felt it somewhere that he was dripping, his breaths had come out in puffs of smoke, the city blurring around him as he made it in, the neon sign fuzzing out around the edges telling him he had arrived. 

He had not tried to wipe his eyes, not anymore as he sat back, replaying your words coated in professionalism, “how can i help you, sir?” it felt like a knife he couldn't quite pull out, one he didn't know if he had placed there himself or if you did. 

“She looked right at me and pretended to not even know me,” 

Yeonjun had nothing to say, his jaw tight, cracking under the pressure of his teeth as he tried to hold in the confession he knew soobin deserved. Kai had promised not to tell but yeonjun never did, he had promised to look out for him, not keep secrets. And now soobin was a crumbling house, the roof ripped off in the storm, folding in on itself with splintering wood and curses. 

“Shes better now, or looks it… she looks happy, she's laughing,” he sniffled, lips turned down as he tried to hold in the sob waiting to break through, "happier than she was with me,” it had been all he wanted, for you to find some way back to him, to be okay. 

You had not broken up with him, you had taken the ring, left all your things, made it seem as if you would be right back, the bed still unmade, your sweater thrown over the edge, his heart still in your palms. He wanted you to find yourself, to know that it was okay to grieve in any way you needed but he hadn't seen you pushing him away, hadn't seen this cruel ending coming, and maybe that's what had been the final stab. Knowing that whatever you had found, he could not find with you, had not been a part of some plan that was out there in your healing, instead, he was this: a boy sitting in a diner where he once wished for a life with you on candles weak enough to snap under careless fingers. 

“I wanted her to be happy, to smile again, to laugh,” and he felt evil for wishing anything different, not if he was the one who had been bringing you down. “I just didn't think she would act as if she didn't know me. I should have run after her, but that's stupid because she wasn't doing well; she needed this, she didn't need me. But it hurts so fucking much to realize that,” 

“Wanting her to be okay doesn't change the fact that it would hurt like hell to be without her.” Yeonjun took a breath, using the clinking of the plates from the bar seats to push in further. You were his friend first, but it would kill you to be in his place; it would kill you to know that just as Kai and Yeonjun tried to convince you of his love that he did feel the loss of you just as deeply as you would have felt his. “Soobin, she's not acting.” 

His face felt tight, the confusion settling in for as long as it took for yeonjun to continue, to mutter the name of the procedure as if it hadn't been on his mind. It had been the one thing that had brought back so much emotion into you in the last few months, your anger sharp and instant, so vivid in comparison to the way you had hollowed out for him. He knew exactly why you had done it, what had pushed you over the edge to get to this point. 

“I thought I was…I don't know why I thought I was ever going to be enough.” The words caught on his trembling lips, his sob soft like a last breath, the confession taking everything in him, his last little hope that he had over everything. Because he understood exactly what it all meant, “I should have known, I should have seen it coming,” 

Yeonjun opened his mouth, but soobin did not stop; he kept going, spilling out as if the knife had finally been pulled and it was taking all the blood from his body, every word that was left of him. “I would have changed. I didn't know how, but I could have learned. I cleaned the house. I would have sold the damn thing; it doesn't mean anything without her. I would have done anything. Instead, I just stood around and watched her bleed out in front of me without saying a damn thing and thought it was love, and I deserve it- I promised so much and I wasted it all- Even through my grief, I tried,” 

“Stop it- she didn't do it because you weren't enough-” 

“You can't tell me it wasn't one of the reasons- I was content, pushing through the day and letting us try and heal around each other, and I didn't even see, I mean I saw- but I hoped I would be enough, even if we were apart, even if it took us time, I hoped she would come back to me.” 

“She loved you, down to the last second, I know she did, and she didn't do it because she didn't, she did it because she loved so much. I know she wanted to be more for you, to do more, and she felt this was the only way, and I'm so sorry,” Yeonjun looked down at the table, his eyes following the soft circles decorating the wood, sanded down to be something useful. He had kept to himself for a long while after you had come back to Kai's apartment from Montauk, sobbing, hollowed out with the only sign of life being that aching sound he would never get out of his head. He knows Soobin had tried; you had told him enough for him to see it, but that wasn't the poison that had been put in the well. “But love is not just about showing up, it's about showing yourself, and I don't think she's been herself for a long, long time,” 

And soobin didn't think he had either. Not since he lost you and you hadn't slipped through his fingers two weeks ago, it had been the moment he had woken up alone in a bed dotted with blood in the space you should have filled. 

He took the train back to the house out in Montauk, no more home than a museum, walked past the front door and around to the back, the moon hanging heavy in the sky, the stars hidden behind clouds painted over their canvas. He walked down the creaking wooden sun-bleached path to the sand, his jaw just as set as his mind was when he pulled his phone out to call Beomgyu. 

Answering on the first ring, he cautioned his name, “Soobin?” 

“I need you to tell me what I'm doing is right, even if it's wrong,” he could hear Beomgyu’s shuffling on the other end, sitting up in bed, on his sofa. “Just lie to me,” and maybe he called Beomgyu because he knew he wouldn’t. 

“Today I went to see her, and I heard her laugh. Like a genuine one, the kind that makes you want to laugh with her, the kind that I love so much and haven’t heard in forever,” he bit on his inner lip, hard enough until it bled, before he continued, “and the second I heard it, I knew I'd ruin it, just by being there,” he whispered it, said it aloud because he didn't have you who would have known what he was feeling with a single look. 

“And then Yeonjun told me that she…she erased everything, and I feel so selfish,” he had thought it over on the train, just as you must have when you left and he didn't run after you. And he would have, he wanted to, but had beaten himself down into the sand just hoping that you would ask him to come with, that you would turn back around and chase him with the realization that you needed him just as badly as he needed you. 

Only now he felt as if he was holding onto the corpse of your relationship, clutching you to his chest, every memory a compression on a chest long since done rising and falling, every plea was a breath past lips that did not wish to breathe any longer. Keeping his memories now after knowing what you had done to survive felt like desecration, and he knows himself. 

If he kept on to everything, he would die; it would poison him to know that he couldn't run to the city to find you, to confess his love over and over, even if you didn't know him. He was selfish when it came to you, and he hated it about himself, and he didn't want to ruin your happiness to find a taste of what had been. He saw what the memories had done to you, what they had done to him, and it was not anything he ever wanted to you to feel ever again. Forgetting would be a mutual mercy for you both. I final goodbye that did not tease him with the possibility of messing up the one thing you had wanted. Peace. 

“If I did the same, it would be like meeting her halfway, carrying the rest of the burden to bury, because I don't think I can live knowing I had everything I ever wanted and all I needed to do was go to New York to try and get it back. I’d ruin everything again, and I hate how badly I want to do it anyways, even when I know it's wrong. If i dont erase her, ill still be imagining her laughing as I dust the house I got for us, I’d dream she was just in the living room and I fell asleep too early for her to see her climb in the bed after me, I’d jump into the water and search for her until I drowned. I'd never give her up, not when I needed to, not when I knew the result of letting her walk away the first time. I would have never let her leave, Beomgyu, I’d take it back, I’d run after her, I’d do it all over again because I love her, I love her, I love-” 

And for the first time Beomgyu spoke, soft and unwilling to hide the pain he felt for his friends, “do you really think that's love?” anything was better than nothing at all, years of your relationship would be gone in an instant, and maybe it was better than pain, maybe anything was better than that, but he’d like to hope somewhere out there you two would find each other, work it out without having to erase the love. 

His throat closed, but he forced the words out anyway, “I think it’s the only thing I have left to give her,” 

Soobin sat with the phone in his hand until he watched the sun start to rise, long after the call had ended with Beomgyu, who promised to take care of the house, sell it with all its furniture that you had picked out, help him move back into the city, and take him to the inevitable appointment. 

He was ashamed to say he felt closest to you sitting in the office chair, his one item to bring forth your memory tucked against the healing scar across the lifeline on his palm. A single folded receipt that he had saved under a fridge magnet, your handwriting tattooed along his veins, your number, the one he almost called every night, right on the bottom with a little heart written next to that girl from Montauk. 

You had been that girl, and so, so much more to him. And when they pushed back his hair with their gloved fingers, it made him cringe to know he would not remember the feel of your hands twisting the fine strands of his hair until he fell asleep. 

He wondered if you had been scared or relieved to sit back against the unforgiving pleather of the chair. If the stink of the alcohol pad and the buzzing of the headpiece made you just as sick as he felt. Queasy enough to close your eyes and fall back into a memory you had not visited in so long it felt like coming home. 

“We will be okay,” he had been optimistic, leaning against the bathtub, your body spilling onto his as he silently hoped for the pregnancy tests to read positive because all he could see was a baby with your smile, echoing your laugh. Walking into a bedroom on the beach, with you leaning back against the headboard, your baby laying on your chest, and him climbing in after you. 

Every warm sheet wrapped around you, only for his eyes to open to find he was asleep on a bed swaying in the middle of the ocean, cold and empty, your ring, the one he kissed at your knuckles waiting on the pillow, the one he leaned down to press his face into until he couldn't breathe. 

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” your fingers in his hair, scratching down his bare back, lips kissing his shoulders, right at the nape of his neck, he turned over, pulling you into him, pressing his face into your collar, into your warmth. “I should be able to sleep in on my birthday.” your laugh alive, and for him and not a room full of people you didn't know, even ones you had chosen to forget. 

“But if you sleep in, I won't be able to give you my gift,” and he rolled onto you, followed the same trail of kisses he repeated until he knew in another life, every spot would turn into a freckle, a vivid mark of his love left for him to find time and time again throughout every lifetime. He caught your words on his lips, your moans in his mouth, your laugh right against his ribs. His hands digging into the sheets, the sand, his nose drawing along your chin until you pushed him, rolled him onto his back, sitting above him like the sun. 

He closed his eyes for only a second, and you were gone, and he was alone again, sitting up as he gasped, half naked in the snow, his boxers cold, his socks wet. “Oh god, you fell.” Your laugh doubled you over, shivering and pale as you wrapped your arms around your middle. He did not remember whose idea it was to go nearly skinny dipping mid January in the ocean, the snow thick on every guardrail, the wind cutting against his wet skin. “Hard.” 

You had run up to him, let him pull you down with him, screeching at the cold waves lapping at the shore, his lips turning blue as the two of you grabbed all your clothes, running back to the rental beach house to climb into the tub, the hot water raining down as he peeled off your bra, soaked your hair with the steaming showerhead. The rush of the sound was loud like the passing train outside his childhood bedroom window. 

The same window that faced out to the tracks, his bed, still made with his old high school navy blue sheets, nestled against the wall where you examined every photo he had pinned up. He had never had a girl in his bed before, not that one, not anyone he loved as much as you. “You have stars on the ceiling,” the sticky faded green stars, still holding on to the white popcorn of the roof. He had flipped off the switch, let them glow for themselves as you lay back against his only pillow, making room for him to climb in next to you, close enough so both of you were slightly hanging off either edge. 

“My mom put them up for me, said I have stars on my baby mobile, and they helped me go to sleep.” Your knuckle had brushed the back of his hand until he stiffened, blushing in the dark of his room as if you two hadn’t kissed, as if you hadn’t just met his mom, and said I love you. 

You had slipped your hand into his, looking up at the green stars as if you were lying in the grass on a warm summer's day, sharing first love confessions, and he couldn't help himself but say into the night, “I wish we had met when we were kids, but I still don't think that's enough time to love you the way I was made to,”  

And somewhere down the hall, he had heard the phone ring, his mother's voice interrupting the moment as she yelled out for him to pick up the landline for her. But before he could roll away, you had tightened your hand in his, pressing a whisper to his ear like a kiss, “There's never enough time, so make sure you stay with me.” 

“Wait-” he wanted to a redo of this one, to not let the words morph into a lie so far down the line, his hands, sweaty against the armrests of the chairs, slipped as he tried to get a better grip to sit up with, a nurse pressing him down softly muttered behind her mask, “we are almost done,” 

And as he leaned back into you, the phone still ringing, like the warning bell of a disaster waiting to happen he whispered back, “I promise I'll stay, I’d run after you, I don't think I'd ever just be able to watch you leave,” 

He shook his head, hard enough for the head piece to jostle, the nurse rushing to place it back as he reached for the phone in his memories, answering with a lovesick smile warped onto his lips when he saw your name appear on the caller ID, a white heart at the end as if he could mimic the one you had drawn for him on the receipt he kept pinned to his fridge. 

“We made it to the end,” he could hear the smile in your voice, right over the sound of Yeonjun and Kai bickering in the back. On the yearly trip the three of you took out to Montauk, the first weekend you would be spending without an excuse to see Soobin, even if it had only been a month since you had met. 

“You say it so hauntingly,” he sat on his couch, leaning back, trying to imagine you curled up right next to him, looking up with that specific shine you got in your eyes that made him feel like the only person in the world. 

“Hauntingly beautiful, I hope, since it just so happens to be the spot we will be telling our friends we met at,” he had wondered if this was what the honeymoon phase was, or if this would be the rest of his life, giddy to pick up the phone when you called, aching to have you right next to him. He knew you had meant your families. Your friends, and his had been teasing the two of you for the entirety of the month when you came back to your separate apartments with grins wide enough to make anyone wonder what had gotten into you. 

“Right at the end?” 

“Right at the end.” You echoed back, “We should get a mug for your place that has that on it, something for me to drink out of.” 

“You drink out of my mug just fine,” he could see you sitting on his kitchen counter, blowing the steam of your tea into his face, your bottom lip flush against the navy porcelain as you tried to convince yourself the too hot mug was ready to be sipped from. He’d take it from you so you wouldn't burn the roof of your mouth, again, and kiss you just because he couldn't help himself, your lips so warm he couldn't help but pull you in again and again. 

“But I want to share tea, not watch you sip on a glass of cold water, while I get hot water,” you had brought it up every time you came over, and he wanted to hold out longer, listen to you beg to spend time with him even if it was just to share tea and fold the laundry you had brought over to his place and his in unit washer and dryer. 

“Fine, next time we go out there together, we can pick up a mug, maybe make it a tradition,” you cheered over the phone, happy, and he even ventured to guess, in love, even if it was new, it had felt like he had known you a lifetime. 

“I miss you.” It had only been four hours then, or maybe even in his memories, he knew that he would be sitting in that chair, missing you for a lot longer than he ever wanted to. 

“You dooo?” You had stepped outside, so close to the surf he could hear the sound of the waves like a heartbeat. 

“I do.” 

You gasped, hand over your heart, or maybe wrapped around his, “You know that basically makes us married now?” 

“Does it?” and he was a blushing mess, smiling in his empty apartment, dimples hurting his cheeks, teeth digging into his bottom lip. 

“Uh-huh, so now you have to make plans to join me and see the place where we are going to spend the rest of our lives,” the waves crashed, and he could almost see the lighthouse, golden like the light he knew your love bled. 

“In the place we met?” 

“The very same,” he could see it written out on the mug, knew it was the place he'd propose to you, even if in that moment he felt as if the two of you were already married, your pinkies tied together with an invisible red string, winding round and round the two of you, pulling you in together until the end of time. 

“I do miss you… a lot,” and he couldn't tell if he had said it allowed, like he was repeating the lines of his favorite movie, or if it was an echo of a past he was now desperately regretting letting go of. He imagined your face looking up at him, his eyes tracing the slope of your nose, catching on your lips right before he pulled you in for a kiss, your eyes recognizing him in every shade of your life, even past this. 

“I guess you’ll just have to come over and meet me in Montauk.” 

she was standing in front of you, hair a beautiful shade of brown, wet curls sticking to the sides of her face. she was humming to herself, something you vaguely recognized from a french indie playlist, and tapping the heel of one foot like she was too big for the space her body occupied. her coat looked thrifted and covered in enamel pins. she smelled like strawberries and something artificial, maybe candy.

when she turned around, it was because you sneezed. violently.

she blinked at you. "bless you."

you offered a half-smile. "thanks. sorry."

she tilted her head. "don't apologize for being allergic to the universe. it's not your fault."

you blinked. and maybe that was the first moment she had you.

she stepped aside in line. "order with me. i can't decide if i want coffee or tea and i need someone to force a decision."

you hesitated.

she looked you dead in the eye. "c'mon. it's just caffeine, not marriage."

so you ordered with her. she got an espresso and jasmine tea. you went with black coffee, no room for cream. she winced dramatically when you said that. "you're definitely a taurus or something," she said.

you weren't, but you didn't correct her.

the place was crowded, so she said, "let's share a table. if you try to murder me, i will throw this scalding tea in your face and scream. deal?"

you laughed before you could stop yourself. "deal."

you don't remember most of what you talked about, not in detail. you remember the rhythm of it. how fast she spoke. how fast she made you forget to be guarded. how she asked you questions with her whole body, like everything you said was the most interesting thing she'd ever heard.

her name was manon. "like 'manon of the spring,' but more annoying," she said, sipping her tea. "i do art. and other things. i get bored easily."

you told her you worked in design. you didn't tell her how lonely it felt. how most days you went to bed feeling like you'd sleepwalked through your own life.

she leaned forward and said, "you feel sad. not like... right now, but like, in general. you carry it around."

you blinked. "you always this blunt?"

she smiled, unbothered. "yeah. sorry. it scares people sometimes. but i'm not trying to scare you."

you weren't scared. you didn't leave. you didn't want to.

she wrote her number on a napkin with a heart beside it.

you texted her that night.

the beginning was chaos and thrill. manon didn't just walk into your life, she burst in, electric and too bright, like a song turned up too loud. she was spontaneous and unpredictable. she'd show up at your place at 11pm with a bottle of sake and a stolen traffic cone. she'd disappear for three days and then come back with three new tattoos and a story about a drag show in queens.

you never knew what to expect with her. but for a while, that was the whole point.

she made you feel alive. she made you feel like something was happening.

you first kissed in the middle of an empty street at 2am, both of you half-drunk and laughing, the snow falling around your shoulders. she told you she was a terrible girlfriend. "just a warning," she said. "i'm messy. and loud. and i change my hair every two weeks. and sometimes i say things i don't mean."

you said, "i don't care."

you meant it.

but love wasn't enough.

not when she came home exhausted and refused to talk. not when you sat at the edge of the bed, waiting for her to say something, and all she did was sigh and bury herself under the covers like you didn't exist.

not when she accused you of not listening, of holding things in, of being cold. "you never let me in," she said once, curled up on the couch, eyes rimmed with red. "it's like you've already decided i'll leave, so you're trying to get ahead of it."

you didn't answer.

"say something," she begged.

and you said, quietly, "i don't know how to love you the way you want me to."

she stood up, shoved on her boots, and left. no jacket. just fury and heartbreak, storming into the street like the night could swallow her whole.

she came back hours later, drenched and shivering, cheeks raw from the wind. you helped her out of her soaked clothes. she let you. she let you wrap her in blankets and press kisses into her hair while she cried silently into your chest.

other times, it was louder.

like the time she found your old journal. read the part where you questioned everything. whether you were happy, whether you were safe with her, whether you'd made a mistake letting her in.

"you don't trust me," she said, standing in the doorway, journal clutched in her hands. "you've never trusted me."

you tried to explain. "that was months ago. i was scared—"

"you still are."

she threw the journal on the ground like it burned her. "why do you even keep it if you're not going to tell me these things to my face?"

"i don't say everything out loud. that doesn't mean i don't feel it."

"that's the problem! you never say anything until i'm already drowning in it."

the fight lasted hours. you cried. she cried. you screamed. she left again, always leaving, like pain was a revolving door she had to walk through to make sense of things.

but then came the soft moments, too.

she'd come home with groceries and cook your favorite meal. "you need to eat something that doesn't come in a box," she'd say, handing you a bowl, eyes tired but gentle. you'd sit together on the floor, eating in silence, knees touching.

or the time she stayed up with you until 4am, talking you through an anxiety spiral. you couldn't breathe. she got in the shower with you fully clothed, let the hot water run over both of you. "you're okay," she whispered, over and over. "i've got you."

and maybe that was the worst part, the way you kept surviving the breaking.

it always ended in some fragile apology, some middle-of-the-night confession under shared blankets. "i'm trying," she'd whisper.

"i know," you'd say. "me too."

you'd kiss her then, slow and exhausted, both of you already knowing it wouldn't last. but the softness made you stay anyway.

there was always another fight. another snap. another silence that lasted too long.

like the one over her friend you never liked. someone who texted her at 2am and sent hearts too often. you didn't accuse her of cheating. you didn't have to.

"you don't trust me," she said again.

"because you keep putting me second."

"i can't make the world disappear just to make you feel secure."

you told her to sleep somewhere else that night. she didn't. she curled up on the floor, crying quietly, refusing the bed. you watched her from the doorway, arms crossed, and hated how much it hurt to see her hurt.

she moved back to the bed eventually. you held her while she shook.

"i'm sorry i don't know how to be softer," she said, voice cracking.

"i'm sorry i make you feel like you have to be," you whispered back.

but the apologies were wearing thin.

you accused her of turning everything into a game, of never taking anything seriously, of loving the version of you that smiled more than the version that shut down. she told you she couldn't read your mind, that she wasn't a mind-reader, a therapist, a punching bag.

you told her she made everything too loud. too sharp. that she didn't know how to sit still with things, how to let silence be a comfort instead of a weapon.

"i don't think you actually like who i am," she said once, during a fight that started over dishes and ended in catastrophe.

"that's not fair."

"you want me to be simpler. quieter. someone you can manage. that's not me."

"you want drama," you snapped. "you create it. you can't go five minutes without chaos."

she flinched like you hit her. "at least i am able to feel things."

that night, she didn't sleep in your bed.

you laid there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of her breathing on the couch. the distance between you felt endless.

a week later, she left.

no dramatic speech. no closure. just a note on the counter in her handwriting:

‘i think we broke each other. maybe that's all we were ever going to do.’

you wanted to scream. you wanted to chase her. say you could fix it, again.

instead, you sat on the floor of your apartment for hours, holding a hoodie she left behind, breathing her in like oxygen.

you didn't see her for two weeks after she left.

there were no texts. no calls. no breadcrumb trail. just silence. thick, total, deliberate.

it was almost worse than a fight.

you went through the motions of life like someone underwater. work, home, sleep, cry. you deleted the photos. then re-downloaded them from the cloud. you opened her favourite book to find the underlines she made in the margins. you told yourself you were fine.

then the envelope came.

plain. unmarked. just your name on the front in stark block letters, no return address. you slit it open with a key, half expecting it to be a letter from her.

but it wasn't a letter. it was a form. a cover sheet. clinical. cold.

lacuna, inc.

our clients thank you for respecting their right to privacy, comfort, and mental wellness. the following individual has undergone a memory erasure procedure and has specifically requested that you do not contact them or attempt to rekindle any prior relationship:

manon bannerman.

you read her name twice before it fully landed.

there was a line below it. your name, typed in sharp black font.

you flipped through the rest of the packet, hands trembling. it was a list of instructions, like you were contagious, don't approach, don't call, don't attempt to remind them. for the sake of her emotional well-being, you were to pretend she never knew you. like you never happened.

the paper crumpled in your grip. your ears rang. you felt sick.

she erased you.

not blocked. not ghosted. not pushed away in the heat of an argument. she deleted you from her brain. like it would make things easier.

you called the number on the bottom of the page.

you don't even remember what you said. something about an appointment. something about making the pain stop.

—

you went in on a tuesday.

the office looked like a dentist's waiting room. pleasant. generic. you sat in a stiff chair beneath a framed painting of a meadow. the girl at the front desk offered you tea. she wore blue glasses and smiled like she wasn't telling people how to forget each other all day long.

then someone called your name.

dr. mierzwiak was older than you expected. soft-spoken. polite. with a tiredness behind his eyes like he'd seen people make the same mistake too many times.

"we'll need a few things," he said, handing you a clipboard. "anything and everything that reminds you of her. gifts. pictures. notes. clothes. audio recordings. we use those to map the memories."

you stared at the form. "how long does it take?"

"the mapping takes a couple hours. the procedure itself is overnight. you won't remember the session. you'll go to sleep and wake up, and she'll be gone."

gone.

it echoed in your chest.

you came back the next day with a box. it felt like a betrayal, giving her things away like they were evidence in a case you were losing.

inside was the hoodie she left. the journal with her handwriting. a playlist burned onto a cd. photos. receipts from your first trip together. a birthday card. her hair tie.

you left out the ring she gave you, a cheap, silver one from a flea market that didn't fit either of you right. that one stayed in your coat pocket.

dr. mierzwiak didn't ask.

that night, they put a cap on your head, wires connected to a computer, a screen flickering with dots and lines you didn't understand. you stared at a monitor while someone asked you to describe her.

her face. her voice. her smell after the rain. the way she licked her thumb before flipping pages in books. how she always said your name twice when she was drunk.

"start from the beginning," the technician said. "we'll move through the memories one by one. try to let yourself fall into them."

you closed your eyes.

manon's laugh. her teeth against your neck. the fight about the dishes. her eyeliner smudged after crying. your hands clutching her hoodie in bed the first time she left. the way she kissed your knuckles when she thought you were asleep. that look she gave you from across the subway platform.

the technician typed something. "okay. we're good."

you laid down on the recliner. a blanket was tucked over you. they dimmed the lights.

"sleep well," the woman said gently. "when you wake up, it'll be like she was never there."

and maybe that was the worst part.

because you didn't want to forget her.

but you already felt her slipping.

the memories began to disappear one by one.

you were inside them, literally inside them, watching yourself move through old moments like a dream you couldn't control. there was no linear order. they came at you like waves during a storm, some soft, some furious, some you didn't even realize you still remembered.

the first time you met.

you were sitting alone in a coffee shop, reading something you'd later pretend to love just to impress her. she walked in wearing a green coat and silver hoops, her hair a messy halo of red and copper, like she had sprinted there from another life. she ordered something absurd, matcha with oat milk and cinnamon, and when the barista gave her a look, she winked. then she saw you.

"is that any good?" she asked, nodding to your book.

you blinked, startled. "not really."

she grinned. "at least you're honest."

that was it. then when you saw her again, you knew that was the beginning of something unforgettable.

you watched it fold in on itself, the smile fading from her face, the ambient coffee shop sounds muting into a soft hiss. you tried to hold the chair she sat in, tried to keep the way she bit her straw when she was nervous, but it slipped through your fingers like water.

the memory collapsed.

the park in spring.

manon in a yellow sundress, her knees scraped from falling after trying to climb a tree because she wanted a better view of the sunset. you had laughed. she had pouted dramatically, holding her scraped hand out to you like a child needing a band-aid. you kissed her palm. she blinked, stunned for half a second, then pulled you in by the collar.

that kiss lasted forever. until now. now it was nothing.

gone.

another memory surged up, violent and raw, the fight in your bedroom at 3am. you were both screaming over something stupid. dishes? plans you'd cancelled? it didn't matter. she had tears in her eyes and mascara streaked down her face. you had said something cruel. you didn't even mean it. her lip had trembled before she slammed the door behind her. you chased her down the hallway. apologized in a broken whisper. she had folded into your arms like paper.

you tried to hold that too. but it faded.

the next memory hit like a knife.

you were both lying in bed in total silence. one of those nights after a fight where no one knew what to say. the room was dark, your backs to each other, but you had reached out, your pinky finger brushing hers, just enough. she turned, barely, and murmured, "i don't know why we keep hurting each other."

you whispered, "because i'm scared of losing you."

she turned all the way, her voice soft. "then stop pushing me away."

you didn't answer. you never did. and now you never would.

gone.

another memory.

the night she got drunk and started crying about her mother. you hadn't seen that version of her before. the one that unraveled like thread. you held her in the kitchen, the smell of tequila and salt and grapefruit sharp in your nose. she told you, slurring, that sometimes she felt like she wasn't real. that maybe she was just a storm pretending to be a girl.

you had whispered, "you're the most real thing in my life."

she had kissed you then like it was a promise.

gone.

the memory of you bringing her soup when she was sick. of her groaning dramatically under blankets and calling you her "nurse" in a fake british accent. of feeding her strawberries and rubbing her back while she sniffled. of her half-laughing, half-coughing and whispering, "don't fall in love with me, okay? i'm too much."

too late, you'd said. and meant it.

gone.

the memory of your birthday.

she'd filled your entire apartment with string lights and old records and tiny photos of the two of you stuck to the wall like constellations. she gave you a ring, a cheap, silver one that turned your finger green, but you wore it anyway. she looked scared when you opened it, like she thought you'd say no.

"i just wanted you to have something of me," she'd said.

you had kissed her slow and deep and whispered, "i already do."

gone.

gone.

gone.

you started to panic.

the memories were unraveling faster now, fraying at the edges before you could even feel them fully. you started running , through doors that no longer led anywhere, past places that no longer had names.

the fights. the nights apart. the quiet moments. her sleeping on your chest. her dancing barefoot in your kitchen. the way she always said "i hate you" before kissing you senseless.

the night she said "i think we're doomed" and you laughed until you realized she meant it.

her crying into your coat at the train station. her voice shaking as she said, "i don't know how to stop loving you, but i also don't know how to keep doing this."

your hand reaching for hers. her stepping back.

then, in the middle of it, she was there.

not the memory version. her.

manon.

or some figment of her your brain was clinging to with everything it had left.

she looked different here. blurry. soft around the edges. but her eyes were the same.

she looked at you like she'd just woken up from a nightmare.

"why are you here?" she whispered. "you're not supposed to be here."

you reached for her. "you left. you erased me."

she looked down. "i didn't think you'd do it too."

you grabbed her wrist. "i didn't want to."

"then why did you?"

you swallowed. "because i couldn't keep waking up without you."

her eyes glistened. "i was scared."

"i was too."

she leaned into your touch. "we can hide. we can stay in the memories. think of something. there are still places they won't look."

you followed her.

you buried yourselves inside the cracks.

a made-up apartment with walls you painted together. a childhood treehouse. a drive through a city you never visited. the night sky from her hometown. a room filled with books you never read, but she swore you'd love.

each time, the walls collapsed around you like paper burning at the edges.

you clutched her tighter.

"i don't want to forget you," you choked out.

she looked at you, eyes glassy. "then remember me now."

"tell me something only i would know."

she leaned in close. "you cried after i kissed your shoulder for the first time. but you said it was because of the movie we were watching."

you laughed, even as you cried.

"tell me again."

she kissed your cheek. "i loved you."

the room faded.

"say it again."

"i love y—"

gone.

you woke up gasping.

and the ache in your chest was enormous. like something had been torn out without anesthetic. you didn't remember her name. her face. her voice. but you missed her.

you missed her so much it felt like drowning in a dream you couldn't quite remember.

—

it was snowing again.

not the heavy kind, not a storm, just a slow, drifting fall, like the sky was emptying itself in the gentlest way it knew how. the kind of snow that softened the city, blanketed the world in hush. traffic moved slower. voices grew quieter. every sound was absorbed into white.

you walked down 7th street with your hands in your coat pockets, scarf drawn up to your nose. you didn't have a destination. just movement. sometimes it helped. sometimes it didn't.

today, everything ached without explanation.

your fingers were cold. your chest was heavier than usual. there was something playing on your phone through your earbuds, lo-fi, wordless, the kind of music you always chose when you didn't want to think too hard. and still, something stirred.

a memory that didn't feel like a memory.

a girl laughing in a kitchen.

cigarette smoke on a balcony.

a fight in a hallway that ended with someone saying, "don't walk away again."

but no name. no image. just static where something important used to be.

you pulled your coat tighter. turned the corner by a bookstore you used to like but didn't remember why. that feeling was happening more often now, small places or objects or sounds tugging at something you couldn't quite grab. you figured it was just déjà vu. or anxiety.

the wind blew past.

and then-

you saw her.

walking toward you on the opposite side of the sidewalk. the crowd parted like a trick of fate, just long enough for your eyes to find her.

she wasn't looking up at first, she was pulling something out of her bag, her pace quick, her hair short, auburn maybe, with streaks of gold like it had once been bleached and grown out. she wore a navy coat and brown boots, and she had a small tear in her scarf, right near the collar.

you stopped.

your breath caught in your throat before your brain could catch up.

then she looked up too.

for one unbearable second, her eyes met yours.

and the world stopped.

not metaphorically. not just in your head. it truly stopped.

the wind stilled. the snowflakes froze mid-air. a bus idled in the street but didn't move. your heartbeat thundered in your ears, not fast, just loud, like it was echoing off of something deep and hollow. the shape of her face, the tilt of her head, the slope of her mouth, none of it felt new.

but you couldn't place her.

she looked at you like she was trying to solve a riddle. her eyes scanned your face, then flickered down to your hand, where you were clenching something without knowing, the corner of a wrinkled paper, sticking out from your pocket. you hadn't noticed it before.

you didn't know where it came from.

she didn't say anything.

you didn't either.

but something passed between you. a heaviness. a pull. a gravitational echo of a thousand things left unsaid. her mouth parted like she might speak, but didn't. instead, she gave the smallest smile. polite. cautious.

familiar.

and then she walked.

right past you.

you turned, just a beat too late, just in time to see her disappear into the crowd. you could've called out. could've said, excuse me, have we met? but you didn't.

because how do you ask a stranger if they once held your heart in both hands?

you kept walking.

and the snow kept falling.

you didn't notice you were holding the paper until the wind almost stole it.

you pulled it from your pocket and opened it. there was no return address, no letter, just a page, yellowed and creased, torn from a notebook. on it, in handwriting that looked an awful lot like yours, were the words:

"remember her anyway."

you stared at it for a long time.

then folded it and tucked it back into your pocket.

you didn't know who she was. or what she meant. but tonight, you'd dream of someone dancing barefoot in your kitchen. you wouldn't know why it hurt.

you wouldn't know why it mattered.

you'd forget again.

but something would always stay.