Page 62 of When Worlds Collide (Between Worlds #2)

I ’ve started to measure my life in days.

Three days until ENT runs out of time to submit my Visa document.

Two days since Jihoon and I had that drunken fight in the kitchen.

Two days until my mum’s mastectomy.

My life is running down in a series of numbers, and each one I had less power over than the last.

My mum’s surgery is on Friday and all I’ve done so far this week is drag through my work day, constantly barraged by the travel updates I set to alert me on my phone in case anything changed.

People were panic-travelling all over the world; moving their holidays forward in case they were cancelled later on, travelling home to be closer to loved ones.

The airlines were heaving, and I wanted to make sure nothing drastic happened while I was dealing with my own personal crisis.

Jihoon and I were barely speaking, again. He hadn’t come home on Monday – not that I blamed him for that – but there was a part of me that couldn't help but note this wasn’t the first time he’d just noped-out when we’d had an argument.

It made me feel… precarious, like he could just decide to leave if shit got a little too real.

I hadn’t seen him until after I got home from work on Tuesday. At first, we just stood there, looking at each other over the expanse of the living room – the unofficial no-man’s-land.

I was floundering. My life felt like it was spinning out of control, and the only thing grounding me, holding me here, was standing a room away, looking like he no longer knew how to be near me.

It was too much.

“I’m so sorry.” I was the first to break, because I was the one who broke us in the first place.

As if my words had pulled him towards me, he crashed into my body with his, pulling me against him until I had no choice but to wrap all of me around him.

“You are not my mistress,” he’d mumbled into my hair.

But I noticed he hadn’t said anything about not being his secret, because we both knew that wouldn’t have been true.

“I know you’re not cheating on me with her.” I gulped, squeezing him tighter.

And… that was it. We hadn’t brought it up again, but I still felt it between us, like an extra layer of clothing every time we touched or laid next to each other.

Now, here we were. Thursday. March 6th. The day before my mum’s operation. Two working days left for ENT to finalise my papers. Four days until I either had to Visa-up, or leave.

I’d shied away from getting in contact with HR, at first, not wanting to be a nuisance – such a typical, British attitude – but all week I’d been so far up their arse I could have given them a colonoscopy.

Each day they’d responded to say they’d forwarded my application to the immigration office, but hadn’t heard back. Without that stamp of approval, my probation with ENT would end. Either way, my time in Korea was balancing on the edge of a cliff, and every day I inched closer.

The strain must be showing on my face, because Hana relentlessly brought up how stressed I was looking. She kept handing me bottles of collagen water with helpful little asides such as, “you keep frowning like that, England, and you’ll get premature wrinkles.”

It was starting to feel less and less like she meant well.

Another side effect of the stress was that I was always just one bad moment away from crying.

I wasn’t a crier by nature, not really, and not outside of the appropriate circumstances, such as sad movies, cute puppies and parental cancer diagnosis, but for the past week, if someone asked me in passing if I was ‘okay’, I was just as liable to burst into tears, as I was to nod and mumble, ‘sure’.

It was a crapshoot which would happen on any given occasion, but unfortunately it had resulted in the few colleagues that had started talking to me, now giving me a wide berth.

I talked to my parents daily. Actually, so often that it had gotten to the point they’d forbidden me from calling them during my working hours, because, and I quote, “nothing is happening here that is more important than your job.” And, since I’d so far only caught them during coffee mornings and digging out the compost bin, that seemed comfortingly true.

But, in a way it was worse, because I was afforded these little snapshots of a life so normal, so mundane and as familiar to me as my own morning routine that it only served to remind me how far removed from it I was.

I’d never been the kind of kid to hang around my parents overmuch. My apron strings had stretched exactly as far as the local train station in Windermere when I’d moved down to London for university.

I was unused to this feeling, of anxiously needing to be home, and I was rational enough to know it was a stress reaction to… everything.

My phone pinged in my pocket, and I pulled it out to look at the screen, clocking at the same time my low battery – a direct result of how often I had taken to pulling it out during the day.

UK TO CONSIDER NATIONAL LOCKDOWN. EXPATS, AND TRAVELERS ARE ADVISED TO POSTPONE PLANS AS SITUATION EVOLVES.

Ice slipped down my spine. The word ‘lockdown’ was being liberally thrown around by the global news media now, with several countries discussing how it might work.

Would I get locked out of the UK? How would that effect my pending Visa application?

“Hey, Kaiya!” Hana’s voice broke through my reverie. “Get your butt over here, I can’t move this on my own.”

“Coming,” I called back, shoving my phone into my pocket, stowing my thoughts. For now.

I called Becka on my way home, tucked into a corner of the bus that in no way resembled the ones we used to take to and from Pisces studios, but hearing her voice in my ear threw me all the way back to that crazy period of time, where for a little while I lived in the city of angels and met a K-Pop star. And fell in love.

“What’s wrong?” Her voice washed over me, a perfect blend of assertive, and concerned.

“What makes you think anything is wrong?”

Despite my roiling emotions, a grin still managed to creep up my face.

“You’re calling me at 1:00 am.”

Horrified, I pulled the phone away from my ear, staring at the 6:09 pm on my phone screen, struggling to work out the maths in my head.

“Ah, f…” I trailed off, mindful of the group of ahjummas sitting a couple rows away from me.

“So, I repeat: what’s wrong?”

“I’ll let you get back to sleep, don’t worry about–”

“Babes, I swear to god if you don’t spit it out, I will fly over there–”

“My mum has cancer.”

Only the sound of the chugging bus engine assured me I hadn’t gone deaf, as all I heard down the line was a silence so loud it was deafening.

“What did you say?” Becka’s voice was so strained I barely made out the words.

“I know,” I sighed.

Once upon a time, I’d worried that Becka would be too much, too brash, too American for my parents, but upon meeting her for the first time, they’d damn-near adopted her. Becka had loved it, relishing the attention like a well-fed house cat.

Traveling back to the US for every other national holiday was completely impractical, and so she’d come back up north with me, to stay with my folks. I didn’t even bother asking after the first couple of times. Becka just packed a bag and asked me what time the train was.

We were both the only children our parents had, and I guess that was one of the reasons we’d stuck together – maybe we saw in each other the same parts of ourselves that other people didn’t always understand.

And in my parents, in my home, I think she found a little more family that maybe we all crave.

“Tell me what you know,” she demanded.

Ah, there was Rebecca Hanson – the practical one that made sure shit got done. I’d always envied her ability to turn any kind of situation around, to detach from the emotion and see something as a problem to solve.

So, I told her everything I knew.

That she was stage II, she was having a single mastectomy, followed by chemo, her prognosis was good, but she’s high-risk. All of which I’d managed to fact-find after grilling my mum about her treatment this week. She was practical and didn’t believe in sugar-coating it for me.

“When are you going home?”

“I–” My mouth opened, and shut reflexively, because when was I? Was I? Should I? My head swam, and the familiar knot of frustration rose in me, because these were the same questions I’d been asking myself all week, and I still had no answer.

“Kaiya – you ARE going home, right?”

I knew she didn’t mean to, but the tone of judgment was loud and clear.

“It’s not that simple.” I was suddenly so, so tired.

“Babes, this is one of those times that family comes first. I know you love the idol, and I’m not telling you to break up, but... It wouldn’t need to be forever – just until she’s better, and this goddamn virus goes away."

Becka sighed, and there was a pause as I realised I didn't have any good words to say.

“I’m sorry if I sound harsh, but if I’m the only one telling you this, then you need to hear it all the more. You need to go home. Today, tomorrow. Soon.”

“My Visa will be cancelled.” I regurgitated the same thing Jihoon told me every time we had this conversation. I wasn’t even sure if it was my argument, or his.

A tear ran down my cheek before I even knew it was in my eye.

“Fuck the Visa!” Becka bit out. “Has it even been issued yet?”

I leaned forward, but resisted the urge to lean my head against the metal handle of the seat in front of me.

“No.”

“Babes…”

And she didn’t need to say it, because… I knew.

Becka heaved a breath. “I would never tell you to do anything that wasn’t to follow your dream, chase your love, and live your best life, you know that. Or, at the very least, I try to do all that in accordance with what I think is best–”

I barked out a laugh.

“–but this time… babes, you know that curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’? We’re there. We’re living in interesting times and if I know one thing you Brits don’t, it’s that when a storm is brewing, you head home and batten down the hatches. Babes, go home.”

I don’t know what I would have said at that moment, because just then the bus slowed to a stop and, looking out the window, I saw we had arrived at the stop closest to the apartment building.

“Becka, I gotta go, I’m at my stop. I’ll call you… later.”

“Think about what I said.”

“I will.”

And I would, because how could I think about anything else?

Jihoon was late. He and the other members were in the studio laying down some backing tracks, and so when he eventually arrived home, it was well after 11:00 pm.

I squinted as he turned on the lights. I’d been so busy looking between my phone and my laptop that I’d barely noticed the transition from light to dark, as the light coming in the balcony doors went from fading sunlight to the ambience of street lights.

“Ky? What are you doing in the dark?”

I looked up at him, and knew the second he saw my face. I could tell that he knew. I didn’t need to say it, but he asked anyway.

“You’ve decided?”

Wordlessly, I nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“I have to.” My voice was hoarse from all the crying I’d done, from almost the moment I’d gotten in the front door. Maybe before that.

Because Becka was right. Of course she was.

Jihoon came over to me, kneeling beside me as he gently brushed a strand of hair out of my face.

“Your Visa application will be cancelled.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore.

“I think we both know it wasn’t going to be approved.”

He said nothing, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. The man I would have given anything for.

Almost anything.

I was trying. I was trying so hard to keep it together, but I was tired. So bone-weary I could have laid down right there and slept for days. I’d be like Snow White in that glass coffin.

“I have to go,” I said to convince him, as much as to convince myself, because while I believed it was the truth, saying it made it real, something I had to do, instead of something I should do.

But the words cost me, breaking open a dam in me, and even as the words fell out of my mouth, they came out on the back of a heaving sob.

I slapped a hand over my mouth, trying to shove the grief back inside, but it poured out of me like water through sand.

As my shoulders heaved, I was dimly aware of being pulled into Jihoon’s arms, of being supported by his strength as mine left me.

And just as he had days ago, he held me there, on the floor, rocking me as I cried, except this time I wasn’t the only one.