champagne coast⏤

( ... ) The hand tremors are back—a fair reaction following the events in the forest. When he dries off his hands (on his button up), he uses Hyein's arms to steady himself enough to sit on the rim of her bath. "Sorry for showing up unannounced." Jeonghwan leans into her side and closes his eyes. "I must've startled you, I'm sorry."

yang hyein knows park jeonghwan like the back of her hand. fifteen years of love for the boy-turned-man, and she knows him enough to know that he wants nothing of her because he fears asking anything of her.

so hyein, as always, takes the initiative.

she pulls his head to her chest and holds him there as he sits on the edge of the bath. she holds him the way a mother would comfort a child as they weep over scraped knees and hurt feelings. but jeonghwan is twenty-nine going on thirty years old and his wounds are too deep for the comfort the ills that plague him.

still, she holds him and listens as he speaks, heart beating rapidly in her rib cage due in equal parts to proximity and for some odd reason the fear of being discovered.

"it's fine, you can stay," she finally says as she let's go of him, mussing his hair as she does in an effort to take the slight coldness out of her words. "i wouldn't invite you to stay if it wasn't. though minyoung is stopping by to clean tomorrow morning so you might want to make yourself scarce by 11 unless you want your mother to know where you were."

the quarters of the bathroom are tight, it's the curse of the old house, and it feels all the more present as hyein looms over jeonghwan, looking over every detail of his face as she searches from all the ways it differs from his brother's eternally young visage.

"yeah well," she starts, words feeling heavy on her tongue. she wants to put a brave face on and say it wasn't that bad, that seeing jeongbin was just a trick of the light or some shared hallucination causing temporary insanity; but standing before jeonghwan the reality hits her again. hyein notices the tremors in his hands as he speaks, and how her hands feel clammy at the thought of preceeding events that led them to the safety of her bathroom of all places.

kneeling down, she looks up at jeonghwan before taking his hands into her own. "don't worry about it," she finally says, "instead let's figure out what you want to eat. "if you forgive me for being lazy i could make you some ramen, or if you want i could make kimchi jjigae too."

entwining her fingers with his she looks up and gives jeonghwan a small smile, trying to put on a somewhat brave face despite her racing heart beat and uneasy smile giving here away.

( ... ) “I didn’t know where to go.” Jeongbin might as well have paid the crime forward. Maybe his face has thinned out over the last months. The bags under his eyes are apparent. The scratches along his cheeks are fresh from the forest. The tree branches cut through him—paper to flesh.

guilt overtakes her.

yang hyein is good at a few things, namely baduk, irish goodbyes, and thinking only of herself. her shoulder sags as she listens to jeonghwan speak, regret washing over her as she looks at him.

he strikes a pathetic figure, thin, exhausted and frightened. how he ever shared a womb with park jeongbin she’ll never know. drumming her fingers along the marbled surface of the counter she pushes herself up and moves towards the referigarator.

“have you eaten?” she asks.

it’s easier to talk around things. easier to ask if he’s eaten, than to ask if he’s okay. hyein may have lose a boyfriend/tormentor but jeonghwan lost his brother and for all of his faults, park jeonghwan always did truly love that bastard jeongbin.

she shouldn’t have left him in the woods alone.

making her way closer to jeonghwan she can see the scrapes no doubt from branches as he made his escape from the forest. she tuts in disapproval as she reaches out to his face turning his face to-and-fro as she looks at the state of him.

he looks like shit, to put it politely, wholly out of place in her otherwise pristine kitchen. pursing her lips she’ll have the cleaning lady come by tomorrow and tidy up, just in case either of them have tracked anything in. slip the woman a few more bills to not mention anything about jeonghwan being around, if he even is still around by the time the sun begins to rise.

“maybe we should skip the meal for now” she says hand letting go of his face gently as she moves away from him, “you look kind of bad. when the hot water comes back on you should take shower, but in the meantime i can put some iodine on your face if you’d like.”

hyein doesn’t wait to see if he has any objections, but rather tugs him along with her. that’s the benefit of jeonghwan, she thinks, he does as he’s bid without fighting⏤ he has all the sense his brother lacked.

dragging him along to the bathroom, she pauses just before they enter the confined space.

in any sense, her gutlessness lends to her demise.

she never quite believes him⏤ it’s hard to take anything much of what he says as credence anymore⏤ but when she hears jeongbin’s voice in the forest and her legs take off from underneath her, clumsily leading her through the thicket of trees, all the while tripping every some odd steps scraping her knees and hands on the forest floor in the attempt of a great escape. she’s almost giddy with terror, even though her heart is pounding and her hands grip the steering wheel so tightly she can feel the way the leather burns against freshly cut skin.

park jeongbin has not sat at the front of her mind in years; a sort of defense mechanism on the part of hyein to preserve what little sanity she managed to keep in the aftermath of august 2012 but now he sits at the forefront almost mocking hyein to dare and try and forget about him once again. in the end, thanks in large part to joengbin, it’s autopilot that sees her home.

even then, her hands don’t unclench from the wheel and she listens to the way the motor hums and looks at the way the headlights illuminate the siding of her home, all the while her eyes dart to-and-fro looking for a sign of life in the otherwise bleak backdrop.

surely, jeongbin is still out there somewhere. he was a lot of things, but a quitter was never quite one of them.

hyein however is not like jeongbin, and after an hour of sitting in the car she gives up the ghost and carefully exists her car, still glancing around her as she enters her home on unsteady feet. it’s only when she gets inside does she get a good look at herself, and sees the twig in her hair and the bits of dirt marring her face. her hands too, are coated in earth and blood and she’s sure her knees⏤ though maybe bar the clods of dirt⏤ no doubt look to be in a similar state.

she hasn’t looked quite this bad since that august, nor has she felt this same level of fear since then. but then maybe that’s the appeal of jeongbin, gone but never truly forgotten; a boy capable of always eliciting a reaction.

even still, the tension leaves her somewhat when she gets in the shower and hyein overstays her welcome as burning hot water fades into lukewarm temperatures before finally emptying the water heater until she’s left with nothing but water that feels nearly frozen to wash over her.

her eyes are red-rimmed and nose red, though she refuses to say they’re tears because she’s nearly thirty years old and deluded enough to convince herself that maybe it wasn’t the voice of a dead boy she’s heard but just exhaustion seeping through her body; and at nearly thirty, she’s far too old to be crying over imagined creatures in the night.

she tells herself she’ll make herself a drink after she gets dressed. she’ll make a drink, she’ll go to bed, and she’ll go back to the funeral in the morning and pretend nothing’s off. if someone asks about her hands or her knees she’ll tell them she slipped on a patch of ice because she never went in the woods and she never heard park jeongbin because he’s dead and god and the dead do not speak.

only, when she does get dressed and makes her way into her kitchen she sees park jeongbin standing there in the low-light, body resting against the kitchen island and yang hyein lets out a scream of such terror she’s sure that her father can stepmother can hear her from their home.

she fumbles her way over to the wall, hands haphazardly slapping at it until finally she comes in contact with the light switch. the light is all to bright, but the revelation that it brings sets her mind at some ease. the face before her is thinner than the one she remembers jeongbin having and signs of age are upon it as well⏤ park jeonghwan stands before her with a glass in hand and exhaustion written into his frame.

“jesus, fuck me!” she doesn’t mean to exclaim it especially not at the volume it leaves her throat but hyein’s been through enough in the last two and a half hours to last her a lifetime and she sags against the counter as her heart rate begins to slow again. “jeonghwan what the fuck are you doing here?”

there are nicer ways to express concern, she’s sure, but they all escape her in the moment and fear gives way to irritation as she looks over him, “have you even been home yet? you look like you walked here straight from the forest.”