Taeyang lives in the corners of my vision—where the shadow meets the light and refuses to be either. He lives in the ache that wakes with me and goes to sleep only when exhaustion wins. He lives under my skin, where the bond has learned to speak in a language I can’t unlearn.
I told myself I didn’t miss him. I told myself that what we had wasn’t real. I told myself that if he wanted me, he wouldn’t have left.
Lies are so easy to plant. They never bloom the way you hope.
Each night the bond pulls tighter—as if the thread between us has decided to be a spine and I have no choice but to stand. Dreams bring his voice in both directions at once—a curse and a prayer—and I wake with the mark on my collarbone hot as a coal cupped in flesh.
I wipe soil from my fingers onto my tunic and stand. Across the garden, the old stone bench waits beneath a spill of wisteria. We argued there once, under a sky so bright with stars it felt obscene to be that sad. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t kiss me. He only gave me the cruelest gift—his truth.
“You were never meant for anyone.”
I was meant for him. The mark knew it first and told me in heat and light and quiet. He heard it too and walked away anyway.
A soft rustle threads the air behind me. “Minji?” I ask the garden, but there’s no answer. Only a breeze combing through the wisteria and the pull of something I cannot see.
I sit on the bench and fold into myself, knees to chest, chin to bone. I am supposed to be training. I am supposed to be steel. Today I am a girl who has lost something she refuses to name out loud.
The bond flares.
No warning, no mercy. Not pain—longing. A drop-to-your-knees, shut-your-eyes,there you arekind of longing, as if hands I can’t hold have found my waist from a city away. It steals the breath I was hoarding. It makes a small sound fall out of me before I can catch it.
A single tear slips warm over cold skin. I don’t wipe it. I am tired of pretending I don’t care. I am tired of punishing myself for wanting what wants me back and is still not here.
“I hate this,” I tell the riot of flowers that will bloom with or without my permission. “I hate how much I want him.”
The garden listens the way living things do—with patience and no advice. A bee shouldering into a lily’s heart. A petal loosening its grip and deciding to fall. Somewhere a gardener laughs, and the sound arrives thinner than I wish, like a memory that refuses to fatten into the present.
I lay a palm over the mark, the way you soothe a skittish animal. Heat rises to meet my touch. “Do you feel it, too?” I whisper, so quiet not even the fae wind can carry it without my consent.
The mark answers—one steady pulse, then another—and a tremor moves through me that is not entirely my own. For a breath, the thread between us is a warm hand through a door, and I press back from my side because there are some cruelties I will not practice anymore. He may have left; I will not make the bond starve to prove that I can.
“Secrets,” I say to the wisteria, to the lilies, to the stubborn fire blossoms that bloom with char still hidden in their roots. “Do you want to hear mine?”
The flowers are very polite. They keep them.
I tell them anyway.
I tell them I still keep his cup in the cupboard because it makes the kitchen feel less empty. I tell them I kiss the inside of my wrist each morning where I once pressed his mouth and said,There—you do have a pulse, and how now I check mine because sometimes I am not sure. I tell them I am afraid to hate him because hatred is still a kind of tether and I am more afraid of being cut loose. I tell them I am braver in gardens than in bed with a window I can’t stop opening.
I tell them I loved a demon and learned that love has teeth. I tell them I am willing to bleed if it means I’m not the only one trying.
A wind gust shakes the wisteria into a lilac rain. Blossoms scatter across the bench and my lap, soft as apologies you mean but can’t make land right. One petal catches on the wet track of my tear and rides it to the corner of my mouth like a small, ridiculous boat. I laugh—the kind that breaks in the middle—and the sound startles a bird out of the hedge. It startles me too. I haven’t heard myself laugh in days. Weeks. Since.
Across the path, a fire blossom struggles up crooked, petals torn, stem bent where a boot once found it. I slide off thebench and kneel, cupping soil around its base. “You don’t have to be straight to live,” I tell it, and hear my mother’s voice in mine, and something in my chest loosens with the familiarity of being loved by someone who didn’t leave. “You only have to keep trying.”
I think of Seori’s fierce heart that refuses despair, of Minji’s hands that choose to mend, of the way Rheon watches Seori like choosing her is breathing. I am not alone in a world where people stay. That knowledge hurts and heals in equal measure.
The bond hums low, a cat settled in a lap it will eventually leave and then return to as if nothing happened. It is not forgiveness. It is not an answer. It is simply the truth that won’t stop being true: he is there. I am here. Something ancient and disobedient connects us anyway.
“Please,” I say to no one, and to every god who ever listened when fae daughters whispered into soil. “If he comes back, let me be strong enough to ask for what I deserve. If he doesn’t, let me be strong enough to stop asking the air to hold my hand.”
Another pulse—just one, like a knuckle against a door, like a star brightening and deciding not to fall. The air around me tightens, then eases, and I know—deep as marrow, sure as tide—that somewhere he felt me. Not the words. The shape of them.
I sit back on my heels and let the morning light find my face. It paints me honest. It makes no promises. The gardens breathe. Life does the humble work of continuing. I press my fingers into the earth one more time, dirt lining my nails like a vow, and tuck the bent blossom a little deeper so it can lean without breaking.
The mark warms under my palm, then cools, then warms again.
“I know,” I murmur, to it, to him, to the girl I am when no one is watching. “I know.”
