Page 60 of When Worlds Collide (Between Worlds #2)

J ihoon and I barely spoke the entire weekend.

On Saturday we were supposed to have dinner with the whole group, I feigned a headache, and Jihoon didn’t even try to argue. He just said, “Okay,” and left.

We weren’t arguing, and I had apologised for the way I’d spoken to him that morning, but the apartment felt uncomfortable, like he was waiting for me to blow up again, while I wasn’t sure what I wanted.

What if Korea, or the UK went into a lockdown? Already flights were being cancelled in or out of certain countries and travel was becoming less certain.

The idea that I might be stuck here made my skin crawl.

Every hour, it seemed, I flip-flopped in either direction. To stay – or to go home.

My Visa application was like a sword hanging over my head, because we still hadn’t heard anything from ENT, or the immigration office, and my official deadline was within sight.

The frustration of inaction drove me to pacing around the apartment like a caged animal until eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep.

Jihoon didn’t come home on Saturday night.

On Sunday, the bedroom door opened in the early morning, the sun barely risen. He seemed surprised to see me awake, but I’d woken up the second I’d heard the quiet click of the front door being unlocked.

He moved towards the bed, reaching for me like he wanted to say something, but I never found out what, because the moment he was within touching distance, I’d risen up on to my knees and pulled him towards me, pushing my lips and my body against his in a desperate pull for connection.

A need so ingrained that, for a time, it overrode all else.

And, for a while, we found our way back together in a swirl of twisted sheets and shared breaths.

I didn’t ask where he’d been. It felt too much like acknowledging something was wrong.

And still, we didn’t talk about it.

My mum’s surgery date was in a few days, and I couldn’t fucking concentrate. I’d somehow gotten through the entire day on autopilot, following around the seniors and doing whatever they needed me to.

When I thought no one was looking, I aimed a swift kick at the cardboard box of packing peanuts, sending it flying across the floor of the warehouse with a satisfying hiss as it scraped across the rough floor.

“Whoa, what did that box do to you?” A jovial, New Zealand accent called over to me, and I felt my shoulders slump in annoyance, and yes, embarrassment.

“Nothing,” I grumbled, as surly as any teenager might be.

“Bullshit, you’ve been in a right snit all day. What crawled up your ass and died?”

Hana moved towards me, stepping into the circle of light cast from the only window in the storage cave. I admit, I had been hiding out down here, under the pretence of ‘reorganising’.

I took a breath, choosing my words, choosing whether or not to even tell her. I hadn’t even told Becka. It felt like the more people knew, the more solid it became. A thing to deal with, something I couldn’t ignore.

But Hana didn’t know my folks. She’d never come to stay with us in Cumbria, she’d never had dinner with us. They weren’t real people to her.

I wouldn’t have to deal with her grief, like I knew I’d have to deal with Becka’s.

The decision was only half-formed in my head when I blurted out, “My mum has breast cancer, and I don’t know if I should stay in Korea, or go home, and I’m so fucked up I can barely think.”

Hana pulled up short, blinking at me like whatever she’d thought I was going to say, this was not it.

“Well, fuck.”

“Is that it?” I said.

“Wanna go get drunk?”

A pause. And then; “Yes, please.”

A couple hours later, Hana and I were sat in a bar a few streets over in Gangnam.

It was a trendy, but noisy bar, seemingly modelled on a typical sports bar from the States.

A football match was on the big screen on the far wall, but people seemed more interested in the baseball game being shown on the smaller TVs held above the bar.

I, however, was more interested in beer.

We sat at a small table out of the way, companionably sharing anju – snack food platters – between us of savoury nuts, dried squid, pizza strips, and some dried fish. Being a total wuss, I mainly stuck to the pizza and nuts, which only made me thirstier, thus… more beer.

“Whoa, slow down there, English.”

“England,” I corrected. “You call me England.”

“I call you all sorts of shit you don’t understand.”

For some reason, I found this incredibly funny, and it took me several minutes before I was able to lean back in my chair, gasping for air. Hana just watched me, playing with the label of her green bottle.

“You’re really going through it, huh?” she asked, in what I imagined was a sympathetic tone.

“I just wish I knew what the right thing to do was,” I lamented, feeling the warm buzz of beer bubbles as they danced pleasantly through my veins.

“What does your boyfriend say?”

“We’re not really doing a whole lot of talking right now.”

I swirled the tip of my finger through a ring of condensation on the table top.

“That bad, huh? What’d you say his name was, again?”

Something about her tone made me look up at her. She was a little fuzzy around the edges, which was probably why her expression seemed… triumphant?

Oh fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck. I screwed my eyes shut, and groaned.

“Uh huh,” Hana chuckled, “I fucking knew it. What’s his name, England? This secret boyfriend of yours?”

I sighed. Bad Kaiya. Too much beer. I put my bottle down on the table. It was already empty.

“John,” I said, tipping my chin up. John was close enough to Joon.

“Sure, and how long have you and ‘John’ been together?”

“How long have you been with your boyfriend?” I shot back, trying to give myself the time my inebriated brain needed to come up with a way to get her to stop asking dangerous questions.

“Fiancé,” she answered immediately. “We met at uni two years ago. I’ve told you this before.

“That was quick,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, well what was the point in waiting? When you know, you know. We wanted to be together, what’s easier than that?”

Oh, how little did she know. But this seemed like an easy way to sidetrack, so I leaned into it.

“Remind me, what’s his name?”

I noticed I was slurring slightly. Definitely switching to water.

“Lee Jihyun,” Hana said with a look on her face somewhere between adoration and glee.

I remembered now. Hard to forget when your boyfriend shared the same name as your work colleague’s.

“Do you live together?” I asked partly for the topic switch and partly because I really was interested.

I came to Korea with a lot of assumptions, and I’d been proved wrong on many, many occasions. This was just one of them. It was not nearly so uncommon to live with a partner before getting married, despite what the more modest K Dramas would have us all believe.

“We moved in together after we graduated last year, but our place is tiny. Barely enough room for us both to be in the kitchen at the same time.”

She grinned, and it seemed like a nice image. A cozy, normal sort of life that two people just starting out would have and – for a moment, a twinge of jealousy soured the beer in my stomach.

“Does his family know? Y’know, about you living together?”

Hana looked at me strangely.

“Why wouldn’t they? I’m not some sort of secret girlfriend!”

She laughed, that weird, high-pitched sort of laugh that somehow always felt like it was directed at me.

I tried to join in, but I knew I had moved past the point of being a funny drunk, and was swiftly sliding down to morose drunk. Honestly, I hadn’t been very funny to begin with.

“I think I’m gonna go home,” I mumbled.

“I think you should,” Hana nodded sagely. “I wouldn’t want to be away from my mum when she was going through something like that. It’s the right decision to put her first.”

I blinked. Wait, what were we talking about now?

I tried to think past the fog of fermented hops in my brain. My mum?

Oh.

And suddenly I wanted to cry again, even as I felt my body slump further into the wooden stool than I would have thought it was possible to slump.

Hana was right. I should go home. What the fuck was I thinking?

My mum has life-threatening cancer, and I’m worried about an intern job? Who the fuck did that?

Somehow, my convoluted feelings delivered me into a weird, middle ground between bloody furious at the whole goddamn world, and so desperately sad it felt like I might be sick from the way my sobs were gearing up to rise up from my chest.

“Oh, bloody hell, England. Let’s get you in a taxi and off to wherever it is you live with your secret boyfriend. Come on, up you get.”

Hana, with a strength you would not suspect such a slight frame capable of having, heaved me up, grabbed my rucksack and nearly carried me out of the bar and into the street.

It was raining. No – it was tipping it down in the way that I’d come to respect that only Seoul could do: heavy, thick droplets that could soak you in seconds. And it was LOUD!

So, when Hana shouted for a passing taxi, I cringed away from how loudly she shouted next to my ear, but simultaneously grateful, because the next moment, the back door of a yellow cab was opening, and I was being slotted onto the back seat like a letter into a post box.

“Yah! England, where you live?” Hana shouted to be heard over the thunderous downpour, and unthinking, I called back the address in Hannam.

I thought she might not have heard me, because she cocked her head at me in a way that seemed like too much thought for a simple instruction, but the next moment, she was relaying the address to the driver.

“I’ll see you again, England.”

She grinned at me before closing the door, standing on the sidewalk to watch as the car pulled away.

I fumbled with the lock on the door, leaning against the cool, stone wall in the hallway, before the door flew open. Jihoon was stood in the entrance hall.

“Kaiya, where have you been?”

Uh oh, he sounded mad.

“I’m not mad, I was worried.”

Oops, had I said that out loud?