Page 61 of Free Fall
This time, though, my inescapable crash is into Sejin and his sweet lips.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sejin
Our kiss doesn’tlast very long, but when it’s over, I feel like my heart’s going to pound out of my chest. I don’t think Dan is a wise bet, and I don’t think he’s the seahorse of my dreams, and yet I don’t want to walk away from this anymore. Not even if…
I swallow. Not even if it all ends in a gory mess. Still, it’s easy enough to ignore that possibility right here in this starry moment.
“So, what now?” I ask, as Dan strokes his fingers against my cheek, and gazes into my eyes.
“I don’t know.”
He’s breathing a little erratically, and I again consider tossing aside my original insistence that we aren’t having sex tonight by offering to blow him, but then he leans back and asks, “Want to listen to some music?” He turns to that bag he keeps producing camping gear from and holds up a small, square object. “I’ve got a Bluetooth speaker.”
“Sure.”
He powers it up, opens Spotify, and then glances at me. “Want to listen to one of your playlists?”
“We could, but I’m curious. What kind of music do you like?”
He shrugs. “A little bit of everything, but mainly I listen to more raucous stuff, you know, to get my blood pumping before a climb or during a hard push up a pitch. None of it seems right for…well, for a night like tonight.”
“A date?”
He smirks, scrolling through music lists on his phone. “Yeah, a date, I guess. I mean, does this seem like it fits the mood to you?”
A ripping guitar chord tears into the stillness of the night, and it’s startling enough that I yelp.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, laughing, and turning the song off.
“Here.” I hold out my hand and he passes his phone over to me. I look up one of my public playlists and press shuffle-play. The first song is a piano cover of “Stardust” by Astro, and I check the queue quickly to make sure nothing jarring is coming up next, but the app has coughed up a nice, soft piano-focused playlist of some of my KPop favorites. “This okay?” I ask.
“Sure,” he replies, and then we spend some time cleaning up the camp area and securing the food. Once everything is put away, and the twigs refreshed in the portable stove to keep the fire going a bit longer, Dan unrolls the sleeping bags.
As we crawl into our respective bags, piano notes drift from the speaker, and the night swallows them as the music drifts up into the sky. I roll onto my side and look at Dan, and he reaches out, twining our fingers together.
“When did you start listening to KPop?” Dan asks.
I stretch my hand open, and he places his palm over mine, comparing sizes. My fingers are longer, but his palm is a bit bigger. “My cousin Nevaeh, which, in case you don’t know, is heaven spelled backwards—and that’s important for the rest of this story because it tells you a lot about her parents… Anyway, she got super rebellious in high school and started dipping her toes into things her parents thought were dangerous. Like KPop.”
“They thought Korean pop music was dangerous? Why? Because it’s in another language?”
“No, they thought relatively hairless young men, wearing make-up and dancing in high fashion outfits to elaborate choreo was dangerous. Mainly because of their internalized homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism, but they truly believed Nevaeh was being subtly seduced to the queer side by KPop, and also maybe becoming a communist. Which is hilarious since South Korea is one of the most capitalistic countries in the entire world, not to mention deeply misogynistic, and frankly not at all accepting of us homosexuals—”
“I’m bisexual, actually.”
“Ah, okay. Well, not accepting of us queers, that’s for sure. It’s not even legal there to marry or adopt kids if you’re not in a heterosexual relationship.”
Dan sneers, but says nothing. What is there to say? It’s not like the US is a longtime bastion of equal rights for the LGBT community either, and our rights are being threatened every single day.
“South Korea has a way to go in that regard,” I sum up.
“I assume her parents hating KPop just made it more enticing for your cousin,” Dan surmises.
“Of course. They hadn’t yet figured out that the queer snake in the grass was me. So, she would come over to my house, where I, a spoiled only child, would have access to all the KPop goodness of her dreams. She introduced me to her favorite group, and I was a goner right from the start.”
“Was that group…uh, Astro, was it? Were they always your favorite?”