Page 93 of When Worlds Collide
B – fuck, if I didn’t want them so bad.
I’d put them on immediately and hadn’t taken them off since.
My next gift had been the perfect accompaniment to two such extravagant gifts: a stack of yet-to-be released photo cards from the most recent shoot they’d done, which would be going out in the next single release for GVibes. They were mostly of Jihoon, – swoon – and the others had been… graffitied.
“It’s an improvement!” he’d pointed out, while I howled in laughter at the massive handlebar moustache Minjae now sported, while Woojin looked dashing with an eye patch and a facial scar. I couldn’t even look at Ace and Lee without crying with laughter.
My last gift to Jihoon had been something similar, but less funny.
I watched his face carefully as he pulled out the padded ring-bound book and flipped to the first page, watching how his expression turned from bemusement to… something softer. I watched the bob of his throat as he turned page after page, looking at photos of us. Photos he’d probably forgotten I had, encrypted and hidden away in password-protected folders. Little snippets of stolen time, and mostly from before we were even formally ‘a couple’.
“I loved you even then,” he said so softly as he looked down at a picture of us with our burgers on the beach – our first date.
I smiled to myself, for both a job well done, and also from the warmth that bloomed in my chest.
We rounded out the day by calling the various people we loved. My parents showed me the pile of presents waiting for me under the tree.
“Yes, well, we hoped you’d be home,” my mum grumbled.
“Val, behave,” my dad chided her good naturedly. “We missed the post cut off, and you know it.”
“Bah.” She waved a hand at him, her eyes twinkling.
“Did you enjoy what I sent you?” I asked, eyeing her glassy-looking skin.
“I had no idea Korea had such an amazing range of skincare!” she’d gushed.
“She spent half the morning looking it up.” My dad said, rolling his eyes. “And the other half putting it all on.”
“And you?” I asked, pointedly, to him. I’d sent him a whole box of Korean sweets and savoury snacks.
“Oh, you know me, kiddo. Never met a snack I didn’t like. It’s why I married your mum.”
“Oh, hush, you!” My mum pushed him, almost off-balancing him on the kitchen stool while he just laughed.
While I spoke to my parents, Jihoon called his. He sat across from me, and I looked up every now and then to see him grinning as he spoke to his halmeoni, who lived with his parents in Busan. I enjoyed the way his cheeks pinked up, clearly enjoying whatever they were talking about. My own parents were currently giving me a blow-by-blow of what various extended family members were getting up to – “did you hear Laura got married? You know Laura, she’s your dads’ cousin’s daughter–”. This gave me the scope to covertly watch Jihoon across the counter. He said something to his halmeoni that made her laugh, and while I barely heard it, I did see the way his eyes softened. They flicked up to meet mine, briefly, and my own smile widened.
Then, I heard him say, “appa”. I wouldn’t have noticed the Korean word for ‘dad’, had it not stuck out to me because of the way he said it. His tone so noticeably different from when he’d been speaking to his grandma.
I re-focused on my own parents. My mum was cheerfully showing off all the different spices in a new spice rack my dad had put up for her.
But, it was hard to miss the cold tone of Jihoon, when I so rarely heard it from him.
I was just complimenting my mum on her new watch (a gift from herself, to herself), when I was distracted by Jihoon’s raised voice.
“Mum, I’ve gotta go, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Wha-”
I disconnected the call and put the phone on the counter, not even trying to pretend I wasn’t listening to Jihoon’s call. His eyes met mine again, but they narrowed in some emotion I knew wasn’t for me. From the phone, I heard a hurried string of words I didn’t have a hope–in-hell of understanding. Jihoon responded, his accent a little less Seoul, less clipped. He’d explained to me that he sometimes slipped into Busan saatori – essentially a regional dialect, which I completely understood, being from the North of England, which has a very distinct dialect when compared to London.
As a trainee, his saatori had been trained out of him through hours and hours of speech and media training, so he only slipped into it these days when he was either really tired, or really angry.
I didn’t think he was tired now.
I was just considering taking myself off somewhere, to give him privacy, when I heard my name. It was very clearly inserted into whatever conversation he was having, and it didn’t seem to be well received, judging by the snort of clear derision from the other end, followed clearly by the words, “Oekuk saram.”
“Appa!” Jihoon near-shouted, and although I didn’t understand the context, I would guess they weren’t complimentary.
