Page 132 of When Worlds Collide
I pulled my hands through my hair, trying to take a breath.
I felt, rather than heard, Jihoon rising from the couch, moving towards me.
I turned to look at him. He stood a few feet away, but he didn’t try to reach for me.
“I understand you want to be there,” he said – carefully, as though I were a wild animal that might lash out at him. “But being there won’t help.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Truthfully, I don’t think there was a right thing. I turned away, heading towards the sliding doors that led out onto the balcony, desperate for a breeze to cool my heating skin.
“Kaiya – if you leave… they’ll cancel your Visa application.”
“I know!”
I spun on him, and it felt like my eyes were spitting fire, a burning rage, a total, incomprehensible volcano of incompetent rage and fear bubbling up inside me, desperate for release.
“I know that! I’ve been counting the days until my pass expires, but ENT haven’t exactly been prompt. It expires in a week, anyway! What’s the fucking point? I’ll be kicked out in a week, so maybe I should just go now! God!”
I spun around, feeling the sudden urge to push my hands right into the plaster of the wall, dig it out with my bare fingernails and smash it against the floor.
Silence fell behind me, as deafening as a clamour of bells, and I… I was too ashamed to turn around. So I didn’t.
I held myself together with the tips of my fingers, staring out the glass-paned doors to the high rise across the road, boring holes into the side of the building with the intensity I poured into not… turning… around.
“I’m going to the gym.”
I didn’t bother replying. Didn’t move from that spot, not when I heard him move away, not when I heard doors in the bedroom slamming. Not when I heard him pause in the living room, and not when the front door shut behind him. But I’d wanted to. Themoment the door closed, it was on the edge of my tongue to call out to him, but I didn’t.
I didn’t move until I fell down where I stood, pulled down under the weight of my own anger as it fell down my face in rivers.
Chapter 41
Jihoon 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.
I’d spent the rest of Saturday doom-scrolling media websites about the new virus, now being calledCovid-19. There were countries threatening to go into national lockdown, and although the UK Prime Minister was being incredibly blasé about this, I couldn’t shake the thought ofwhat if.
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.
