Page 134 of When Worlds Collide
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 haveyoubeen withyourboyfriend?” I shot back, trying to give myself the time my inebriated brain needed tocome 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?
