A dozen answers crowded my throat: Because everything I touch learns to flinch. Because if I put my hands on her again, I will never learn how to let go. Because love makes men slow, and slow got my family killed. Because I don’t know how to live in rooms that aren’t on fire. Because the last time I believed in future, I had to bury it.
What I said was,
“It’s too late.”
Jisoo didn’t argue. I wanted him to—wanted him to call me a coward loud enough to shake something loose. He only lowered himself to the ground a few paces away and sat, forearms on his knees, like a man keeping vigil over a grave he dug himself.
“I tried to atone by leaving,” he said after a time. “By staying out of the rooms I hurt. It felt righteous. It was easier than walking back in and asking to be seen.”
“How’s it working?”
He smiled with half his mouth.
“You’re the one in the woods, brother.”
Fair.
We fell into quiet again. A long time ago we were different men in different halls. Now we are two kinds of ruin passing water between us when one remembers, then the other. He tipped his flask toward me. I didn’t take it. My mouth already burned.
I pressed my palm to the mark because lying to myself works better when it hurts. Heat rose to meet me—insistent, intimate, a truth under the skin I can’t tear out. The glow bled through my shirt, faint as a bruise.
Across that fragile thread, she moved.
Not much. A shift of breath. The soft drag of her palm over the place where our lives decided to be one. The small, aching sound a body makes when it has been brave too long. I felt the wisteria tremble over her head. Soil under her nails. A single petal sticking to the track of a tear and refusing to fall.
The ache in me went from general to specific. It found a name. It found a face.
“You still think you’re protecting her by starving this?” Jisoo asked, not looking at me. “Or are you just protecting the version of yourself that knows how to live without asking?”
“Some of us were made to be used,” I said. The words came out flat and ugly. Good. Let them be. “That’s a clean kind of purpose.”
He turned, and for a moment the pity in his gaze made me want to break something just to get my balance back.
“We were all made for something. It’s the using you choose that keeps you human.”
I almost told him I wasn’t. The gold edged into my vision on its own, and I had to blink hard to bring the world back into a shape that didn’t tempt me to destroy it.
The statue at my back groaned quietly, settling under my weight or memory’s. Cracks stepped across its chest like a map of old mistakes. I reached up without thinking and set my hand against the weathered stone where a heart would be. It was cold. It held anyway.
“I was fifteen,” I said, because I never say it out loud and maybe that’s the mistake. “He smiled. I decided not to love anything I couldn’t carry out of a burning room.”
“And now?” Jisoo asked.
“I found something that makes me want to put the fire out.”
Silence widened, then softened. The mist moved the trees a fraction closer to each other. Jisoo’s mouth tilted like he’d received a benediction he didn’t trust yet.
“Taeyang,” he said, the way a friend says your name when it’s late and the lies are tired. “It isn’t too late unless you use it as a reason not to knock.”
I swallowed, and the motion hurt.
“What if she’s done? What if I walk in and all I do is make the room small again?”
“Then you kneel in the hall,” he said simply, “and keep the wolves from the door until she can sleep with both eyes closed.”
I hated how clean that sounded. I loved it more.
I bowed my head. The mark pulsed once in answer—the gentlest knock. A flicker of pain that wasn’t mine brushed the edge of it, the kind that follows a brave thought. She was thinking of me.
