Page 19 of When Worlds Collide (Between Worlds #2)

“ H i mum!”

“Hello, love, I wondered when we might hear from you.”

I cringed at the gentle reproach in my mum’s voice. I’d been putting this call off, and it had been way too long since I’d checked in.

Jihoon and I had gotten back to the hotel a little while ago. After leaving Hyungsoo's apartment we'd done a little sight-seeing in the city. We planned on checking out in the morning, and I’d wanted to call my folks now before I got distracted by packing, or anything else.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I’ve been rubbish recently. Life’s just been a bit hectic.” To say the least.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” My mum immediately frowned, going right into the specific kind of mum-mode she entered when she tried to find things in my life that needed fixing.

“No, mum, I’m fine,” I sighed. “I just need to tell you some things, and I-I need you to try and understand.” I swallowed past the lump that was forming in my throat, taking a deep breath in through my nose. I will not cry.

When I got too emotional, it all tended to spill out of my eyes, regardless of what emotion it was.

Jihoon was in the living room. He’d offered to leave entirely, but I hadn’t wanted him far away, so I was in the bedroom, packing.

“Hang on, let me get your dad.” I watched as my mum stood up and walked through the airy kitchen and into the living room, supposedly seeking out my dad.

“Ern? Ernie, Ky’s on the phone. You’d best talk to her with me.”

The phone shuffled around, sounds of scuffling and muted colours flashing on the screen as it was passed over until, eventually, it was propped up on something – probably the fruit bowl – and my parents could be seen sat closely together at the familiar, scuffed dining table.

“Hey, Pops.” I waved at my dad, watching as he slid his glasses down his nose from where he’d perched them on top of his head.

“Love? What’s wrong? Do you need money?”

I couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of me. Such a dad response.

I rolled my eyes as I said, “No, Dad, I do not need money.”

“Alright,” my mum took over, “then what’s wrong?”

Inwardly, I sighed, but there was no use beating around the bush. My parents were my rocks; if anyone would understand, it was them.

I took a steadying breath. “This is going to sound… well it’s gonna sound like I’ve lost my marbles, but I need you to trust me."

“Kaiya, we love you, baby, but spit it out.” My mum narrowed her eyes at me as she stared down into the small screen and right into my soul.

“I’ve moved to Korea.” As soon as the words were out, I simultaneously wanted to laugh loudly, and slap a hand over my mouth. It was as if the words hung on the air between us, almost tangible and noisy in the deafening quiet of my parent’s frozen expressions.

My dad broke the silence first. “You’ve moved career?” He peered down at me.

My mum slapped at his arm. "Not career, you daft, old sod. Korea. The country!" But it was as if in saying the words, her own moment of realisation was delayed. I watched my mum's face as she suddenly began to compute what I'd actually said.

I tried again. “I’ve left LA. I’m-I’m in Korea. In Seoul. I’ve been here…” I tried to think, working backwards in my head. “A few days.” It seemed longer.

My mum’s frown seemed to deepen with each word. I could practically see the questions forming in the furrows between her eyebrows.

“Ky…” she started, but then closed her mouth. I watched as she briefly closed her eyes, before focusing on me once more. “Are you okay?” She said each word slowly and carefully, and I realised, that for her, this might mean something very different.

When she’d moved abroad, she’d fallen in love, gotten pregnant and had to leave because the father – my father, I thought with a very faint wince – did not want to be involved.

I’d moved abroad and fallen in love, but that was where the comparison stopped. Although, I hadn’t before realised how closely I was following her history.

“Mum, I promise I’m okay.”

“Love,” my dad started, and I watched as he put a comforting hand on my mum’s arm. “I think you ought to start at the beginning. What about your job at the studio? What about Becka?”

I very briefly told them I’d resigned from Pisces. I brushed it off as best I could, with only having a couple months left on my work Visa anyway.

“Becka is fine. She’s still in LA. She can afford the apartment on her own. I was only really contributing the bare minimum anyway,” I smiled ruefully.

“So, what is this? Are you just travelling, then?” He scratched his eyebrow, and bless him, I could tell he was really trying to understand this outwardly irrational set of circumstances.

“Um, sort of,” I hedged. “Yeah, see, the thing is. Korea is where my… where my boyfriend is from.”

Silence.

I watched my parents blink in unison, which would have been comedic under different circumstances.

“Um, guys?” This seemed to restart my mum, whose frown seemed to impossibly deepen.

“Boyfriend?” Her voice falls somewhere between disbelieving and… I didn’t actually know.

“You didn’t tell us you had a boyfriend.” My dad seemed to want to make a joke out of it, but he looked too bewildered to make it land.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.” I was floundering.

“Kaiya, have you moved halfway across the world for a boy?” Mum’s voice sounded strained, and I felt like the world’s worst daughter.

I opened my mouth to say, no, of course not. But then, was that really true?

“I’m going to apply for a job at his entertainment company.

It’s a bit like Pisces,” I hedged. “They also do music production, along with a whole bunch of other cool stuff, like music videos and concerts, and managing singers and actors.” It was the very barest explanation of who and what ENT was, but it also wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

“Apply?” My mum picked up on the one word I’d been hoping they might skim over. “You mean you’ve not actually got a job? Kaiya, what’s actually going on?” Her shrewd eyes were laser-focused on me, and clearly half-truths weren’t working so… I took a deep breath.

“Mum, Dad, the thing is, while working at Pisces, I sort of figured out that production isn’t…

it’s just not something I really…. like.

” I picked at my fingernails, choosing to focus on them, rather than my parent’s faces.

“I think, maybe, that I never really enjoyed it as much as I thought. I don’t think it’s something I want anymore. ”

My parents were quiet, and I chanced a look at them. My dad looked confused, but my mum was nodding in that slow, minute way she did when she was really thinking about something.

“But, what about your degree?” my dad said, frowning at me.

“I know,” I sighed, “I know it cost a fortune to send me there-”

“Love, we don’t care about the money,” my dad cut me off. “I meant, when did you know this wasn’t something you wanted to do anymore? You were always so gung-ho about it in school. I’ve never seen you so determined.”

I fought back the urge to sigh again, because he wasn’t wrong.

I remembered how passionately I’d sold the idea of going to university to study music production.

It was such a specific career path that initially, they’d tried to encourage me to go a bit more broad.

Media studies, music theory, something with a bit more versatility, but I hadn’t relented and, in the end, they’d let me make my own choices.

“I know, Pops. I think…” I paused to consider my words. “I think I convinced myself at uni that it was what I wanted, because I didn’t really know what I wanted." I took a moment to think about what I wanted to say. How best to convey what I'd come to realise over the past several months.

“Working at Pisces, it wasn’t really music production,” I huffed, “but I saw enough of it. I was around enough of it, professionally, to know that I can’t do it. All the tedious minutia kills it for me. And the politics of it all…” I rolled my head on my shoulders, exhausted somehow.

“I think I had to be in that environment to understand that it’s not what I want, because, I think – I know – I still want to be in the music world, but I don’t know how. Yet.”

I wasn’t explaining it well. Even in my head I muddled through it.

I could feel the passion I still had for music creation.

I just didn’t want to be the one creating it.

I wanted to wrap the artistry of an unfinished song around myself and watch as it came together in a collaboration of artist, producer, and instruments.

I wanted to celebrate its creation. I wanted to talk about it, write about it in my blog.

But how does that translate to a career? Maybe it didn’t. The thought was too bleak to be spoken aloud.

“And you think working at this Korean company will help you find something you want to do?” My mum asked sceptically. “And you couldn’t do that in LA, or back here in the UK?”

“I don’t know, Mum.” I fought to keep my tone even because I knew what she was getting at.

“But you do know you don’t want to be a music producer anymore?”

I felt my hackles rise at the bite in her voice.

“Yes, that I do know.” I felt the tic in my jaw, and tried to relax.

“I don’t get it, Kaiya,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “This just seems very rash. You only graduated a year ago, and you weren’t even in LA a year. Have you even given it a chance?”

“I tried, Mum, this wasn’t an easy decision.”

She scoffed, and Dad turned to her and said, “Let her speak her piece, Val. You know as well as I do that she won’t have rushed into this, not our girl.”

A lump rose in my throat, for an entirely different reason this time.

Sometimes it was so easy to forget that I was not his own flesh and blood.

He’d married my mum when I was three years old, barely a year after meeting her, and then he’d legally adopted me.

Ernest may not be my father, but he was my dad.