Page 73 of Heart and Seoul (Seoul 1)

He says something to Anna, who giggles in a way that makes my territorial instincts rise, but before I can do anything stupid like rush over and rub lip gloss on his white shirt, the door closes.

Yujun ambles toward me with his sexy long-legged stride eating up the distance between us, stopping when his shiny black shoes are but a few inches from my dusty flats. I curl my toes into the bed of my shoes.

“Are you tired?”

“No.” It’s not entirely a lie. I’m in this strange suspended state where I’m exhausted but my mind is buzzing. I don’t have many coherent thoughts. One question tumbles after another like rocks in a washing machine. Nothing in my head makes sense, but there’s a lot of noise. I wish I could shut it out. “If you were tired but couldn’t sleep, where would you go?”

“By the river,” he answers promptly.

“Take me there. Please.”

He doesn’t ask any questions. He doesn’t talk. He merely leads me to his car, tucks me inside like I’m some precious package, and drives off. There’s a deep-voiced rapper going off in the background, a low-grade noise. Some of it’s in English and I catch a word here and there like “love” and “hate” and “Seoul,” but it’s mostly Korean. I lean back against the headrest and allow the synth and thrum of the beat wend their way into my bloodstream.

We drive for about thirty minutes. This late at night, the traffic is sparse. The wide-laned roads that usually have four or six cars abreast have one, maybe two. The occasional blue bus rumbles by. Even the buildings are mostly dark, with pockets glowing amber like small stars in a dark sky. The city is slumbering, resting up for its new day tomorrow. The park is deserted when we arrive, and actually calling it a park is sort of a stretch. There isn’t much more here than cement stairs, a bench, and a few metal exercise contraptions.

“The Han.” Yujun throws out his arm toward the river. He reaches into the back seat of his car and pulls out a paper bag. Something sweet and fried wafts into the front seat and my mouth begins to water. When we reach the bench, he produces beer and two thick pancake-looking things. “This is hotteok, which is basically pan-fried dough with a brown sugar center. Nuts or no nuts?”

I nearly cry with delight. “No nuts, please.”

He hands me a beer and a hotteok. “It’s better when it’s hot, but it’s still good.”

I bite into the crispy dough and let the sugar melt onto my tongue. “It’s delicious,” I say, my mouth full.

“Masitda,” he tells me. “It’s Korean for ‘delicious.’”

“Mas-i-t-da,” I repeat slowly, and then remembering Jules’s fingers around my mouth, I say it again, this time faster, pushing the sounds together. “Masitda.”

“Good.” He approves.

I bask in that compliment as if the sun broke out in the dead of night. Everything is good. The food, the weather, the company. My head doesn’t hurt so much and neither does my heart.

“What do you like about the river?”

He stretches his legs out and I stare at his ankle bone like I’m a Victorian maiden who gets to see bare skin once every eclipse. Jules said it would be a crime if I didn’t get to see Yujun’s abs, but what about his calves and his thighs? What about his defined pecs and the hairline that arrows down to his groin?

The last time we were on a bench near the river, I kissed him and then I climbed onto his lap, threaded my fingers through his hair, and tried to tongue his throat. It was the only time I’ve really touched him. The tips of my fingers tingle at the memory of his bare throat. I want to feel his warm skin under my hand. I want to stick my nose into the hollow of his neck and fill my lungs with his scent.

“You like the hotteok?” he asks.

I tear my eyes from his lap and peer up guiltily through my lashes. “Yes.”

The corner of his mouth rises. “I’m glad.”

Is he smirking? I take another bite of my hotteok. I was staring at his lap. Maybe he deserves to be smirking.

“I like it, too,” he says, and this time his voice is deeper and throatier. Are we even talking about hotteok anymore? He clears his throat and, in a mercy move, turns his gaze to the river. “I like that it’s here. The city changes every day, but the Han River was here before the buildings and the cars and the people and it will be here long after all of this is gone.”

I wipe the corner of my mouth, checking for drool, and redirect my attention to the river. I asked for him to take me to a place to clear my thoughts, not one where I’d jump his bones. Across the river, the southern part of the city rises high into the air. The distinctive tweezer-shaped Lotte Tower sits to the left, and the faint outlines of the southern mountain ridges loom behind half-constructed high-rises taking their places next to the smaller apartment buildings that were once the height of modernity. The dark river is speckled with the lights from the high-rises.

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