Page 17 of The Dandelion Princess
“There’s nowhere for you to sleep,” I return to the closet, wrestling with my pajamas. A light sheen of sweat glistens on my misshapen forehead. Even the exertion of carrying on a conversation with a closed door is exhausting. Still, I persevere. “You’re, what, 190 centimeters?” I sound offhand, but I know exactly how tall he is. “Too tall for the sofa.”
When I emerge, he’s sitting on the edge of my bed, bouncing lightly. Testing it.
“I’mnot taking the sofa,” I say. The only other option is a hammock chair. He’d be crippled for life.
He smooths the bedding. “Your bed is big enough for two.”
Oxygen vanishes from the room. This is what comes of maidens consorting with forest spirits. This is what comes of being carried in the arms of the man you used to love when you’re not in your right mind. Trouble. “We’re not sharing a bed,” I snap.
“You’d rather die?” he echoes with a little laugh.
There’s nothing to do but turn it into a joke. “Worse. We’ll fall in love,” I say, giving a horrified shiver.
He grins, running with my tired Seongan drama plot line. “Our families will fight in the Great Hall.”
“Your mother will slap me across the face with spicy fermented cabbage and scream about how I corrupted her treasured son.”
“Corrupted?” The word is soft, barely audible. Then his eyes narrow. “My mother would never scream at you.Ammaloves you and your mama loves me,” he says, giving another bounce on the mattress. “They’d have us married before the month was out.”
There’s a sharp pain in my lungs, but I excise the feeling and replace it with cold-blooded reason. “See? Disaster. There’s not room for you, me, and all those stuffed animals.”
He leans back, palms against my coverlet. “We could build them into a wall.”
I do a hot word problem. How many plush racoons would it take to form a wall tall enough and thick enough to keep me away from Marc in my bed? Answer: Infinity of them.
“No,” I clip, alive to the possibility of danger. “No sofa. No bed. You have nowhere to sleep.”
Marc pushes off the mattress. Instead of heading to the door, tossing health warnings over his shoulder, he opens an antique linen cupboard and digs out a thick coverlet and pillow.
“When I’m in Seong, I often sleep in the traditional way,” he says, spreading them on the floor along my side of the bed. He looks up with a taunting smile. “Give up, Ells. I hate to lose.”
I release a shaky breath. “I have an extra toothbrush under the sink.”
We brush in silence, but I feel as though I’ve stepped into one of those slice-of-life movies that throw the beauty and tragedy of ordinary things into soft relief—the peeled tangerine rind catching the light, the wind blowing papers into the ocean, the ice cream offered to a crying child, a solitary dinner eaten under a cruel light. Beauty and tragedy. I listen to the rhythm of us and wonder which this is.
He wipes his face and catches my eye. I return a strained smile. I was good. I was good for so long. I was good when I made promises to Future Me and My Lutheran Babies that I’d cut out this fruitless love for the man who had zero interest in being their father. I was good when I focused on self care and my exit plan.
There is evidence that I wasn’t good all the time. Things between Marc and me got muddy over text these last months,but he was more than 8,000 aeronautical kilometers away. When our teasing tipped into flirtation, it presented no real danger.
I close my eyes and remember how Marc would send me a snap of himself hiking through a forest in traditional Seongan workwear—baggy pants, a utilitarian button-up shirt, a hot pink chainsaw hooked to a utility belt, and a dusty face mask covering his nose and chin. He would type a caption: “No filter. What are you wearing?”
He always seemed to send these when I was still in bed, but I’d send him a selfie, no matter what. Would I angle myself out of the morning sun? Yes. Would I rake my hair in order? Also, yes. He said no filter, but he didn’t say no judgement.
I step over his pallet and slip into bed, the sheets cool and soft against my skin. My hands grip the edge of the blanket and my eyes bore into the ceiling as I prepare to count off every second of this long night.
With the flick of the light switch, he settles on the floor.
Perhaps he can sense my restiveness because he begins to talk, his voice warm and dark, bridging the distance between us. He tells me stories about clearing roads in Seong—of the endless wreckage caused by the earthquake and tsunami, of whole houses carried off their foundations. He speaks of ancient characters found deep in the hills—mountain gods in the form of goat farmers scouting for survivors and castaways, and friendly fire spirits tending their woks, feeding the volunteer force day and night.
We drift off to sleep like that, laughing softly back and forth, and I dream that he rouses me hours later when the night shadows have deepened and the palace is at rest from turret to dungeon.
“How’s your head?” he asks, cupping a hand around his cell phone flashlight, shielding me from the sharp glare.
In the dream before this one, I was wearing a fluffy pink cupcake dress, surrounded by fortress walls, a churning moat, and canons belching balls of flame as a hero hopped inexorably in my direction.
“The princess is the worst,” I grouch.
He pushes the hair off my forehead and I feel myself slipping back into cupcakes and fire canons. Cool lips touch my forehead and his whisper reaches me on the frontier between these dreams. “Not my princess.”
