Page 127 of Hamartia
“I love you too,” I whisper to no one. “In another life I would have chosen you.”
It feels like hours before exhaustion makes the tears dry up. Lying there in the fading light with Shiro curled around my feet and Raphael curled, immovable, around my heart.
He would be in the air now.
I wake up sometime through the night with my bladder full and my stomach tight and sore from crying. I drink some water, refill Shiro’s bowl, and go back to bed, falling asleep again almost instantly.
A horrendous banging wakes me. Startling me awake, panicked and afraid. The apartment is draped in low afternoon light and I know I’ve slept well into the day. I pat around the bed and under the pillow for my phone to check the time but I hadn’t switched it on again. As I power it up, the banging goes on, louder and more urgent. It’s from the front door, I realize. Then Ji-hoon’s voice bellows down the hallway toward my room. He has the lock code so I’m not sure why he is not using it.
“Jaehyun-ah! It’s me! Open the door!”
Groaning, I haul myself out of bed, exhaustion still clinging to my bones despite the days’ worth of sleep I’ve managed since Raphael left. My eyes are crusted and dry from crying and I know how I must look, but it doesn’t prepare me for the expression on Ji-hoon’s face when I pull open the door. He blinks at me in shock, drawing his gaze down my body and back up.
With a sigh, I back away from the door.
“You have the combination, why did you have to knock so loud?” I rub at my eyes as the light stabs at them.
“I didn’t know if you’d be alone. Naked. Whatever.” He looks around the apartment as he closes the door behind him. “Where is Raphael?”
“Gone,” I say and the tone must be revealing because Ji-hoon’s face does a whole manner of things. Finally settling on curiosity. “Coffee?” I ask him from the kitchen.
“Have you been online?”
“I’ve been asleep, Hyung.”
Another curious look. This one melts into something else, pity I think. But there’s more to it. It makes me pause refilling the coffee machine. I think about pictures of a reunion between Raphael and Camille, the announcement of their baby, a marriage, and I have to set my hands on the counter and take a deep breath in.
But I haven’t been asleep that long. And it can’t be that because he thought Raphael was here.
Ji-hoon is pulling his phone out of his jeans and coming towards me. He punches something in, flicks through, and then he’s sliding it across the kitchen counter towards me.
It’s a video. Grainy but still clear. It’s Xan and Kai behind the DJ booth at Dal’s but then the camera pans to the left and it’s Raphael and I. Our heads are close, whisper close, the angle is such that you can see all of my face and only part of his but it is undisputedly him. The tattoos confirm it.
He whispers something into my ear and I grin and nod like a stupid careless idiot in love and then he is kissing me. It’s soft and gentle and the memory of it makes my mouth open in readiness as I watch. Ji-hoon takes his phone back and taps something, then there is another, of us leaving the bar hand in hand.
“They are all over. The company are trying to get them taken down here but it’s not just Korea, Jaehyun-ah.” He sounds…sorry for me.
I back away from him and run to the bedroom to swipe my phone off the bed, opening Naver to search my name. It is article after article asking if I am in a relationship with Raphael Scott. Links to screen grabs of the video and the video itself, hundreds of them, thousands, multiplied and zoomed in and cropped and in each one of them we are very clearly in love with each other. I look happy. I was happy. And now…
Some posts call it fake and edited, proof on why this is the case are listed in the tweets below. From those who don’t think it is fake there is mainly shock and disbelief. On the trending page on Twitter it is my name, and when I click on it there are thousands of posts reacting to the video. Humorous reaction gifs and lots of emoji’s and people using a lot of capital letters.
There are negative comments too but they are noticeably…rare. And many of these seem to be because if I am with Raphael then it means I am not in a relationship with Ji-hoon.
Some have pictures of Raphael on stage, topless, soaked with sweat, and screaming into the microphone and appear to be congratulating me. Some compare Camille and I by saying that Raphael has good taste. Some are even saying Raphael is more attractive now that he also likes men. I know the reactions will not be the same on his side of the internet, they cannot possibly be. He is—was—the straight, lead singer of a rock band. He was engaged to be married to a beautiful French actress.
I think of the names they will call him. I think of the words he and his bandmates used when they thought I could not understand them. Fury and guilt grip me. He was always so nonchalant, always acting as though this thing between us could not damage him in any way.
I wonder how he feels now.
As I examine my own feelings, I realize that absent is the horror I expected to feel should such a thing as this ever happen. Absent is the fear and the shame I had prepared for my whole life, should who I was be discovered.
For so long I feared such a thing as this; my private life, my sexuality, the core of who I am being exposed for the world to see. For my father to see. But now, all I can focus on is how happy I look in this stolen moment. How completely seen I always felt when Raphael looked at me. And I simply let him…walk out of my life. So easily. Without a word of protest.
Dumbstruck, I look up to find Ji-hoon standing in the doorway. I search his face for anger at me for what I’ve done, for what I’ve allowed to happen, but I don’t see it.
“We have a meeting.” He glances at his watch. “You should shower and dress. The car will be here soon.”
Shaking my head, I whisper. “What have I done?”