I scoffed. “As if I’m some great prize.”
“I’m not trying to plump your ego, Pom,” he clarified, “I’m saying that guy was so into you that he got all up in my face just for talking to you. Possessive issues aside, that doesn’t sound like the kind of guy that would give up just because of a bit of distance.”
“It wasn’t easy. We had no idea when we’d see each other again. I just left, and-”
“What do you mean you ‘just left’?” He frowned.
“When my mum got sick. I chose to leave Korea.”
“Ky, that’s not a choice. You didn’t ‘choose’ shit.”
I didn’t know why I was feeling the need to defend him, but it kept rising until I had to push it down.
“Whatever,” I conceded, “the point is that we hadn’t seen each other in months, he was under a lot of stress, and there was no end in sight. It got to be more than he wanted to deal with, I guess.”
“So you were the collateral? Yeah, nah, I don’t buy it.”
Temper rising, I bit out, “Did I ask you to? I’m just telling you what happened.”
To my surprise, Tae laughed.
“Damn, Ky. You’re a spicy little tomato, aren’t you?”
Though I tried, my face cracked under the weight of him smiling at me, until we were both giggling like idiots.
“I take it back,” I said, “you are an arsehole.”
“Yeah, yeah, so I’ve been told.”
We fell silent, the laughter subsiding in ever decreasing ebbs until the air stilled.
“You didn’t text me back,” I said quietly. “I kept expecting you to, but you never did.”
I tried to keep my tone light, because what I didn’t say was that after the breakup, I’d felt cast out. Disconnected from a life I’d always expected to pick back up.
The group chat with GVibes had been deleted by the time I’d turned my phone back on and that hadn’t been a surprise, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d always expected Tae would pick up the threads. But he hadn’t.
He was silent for so long I almost expected him to change the subject. I would have allowed it.
But, then-
“He asked me not to.”
Nothing he said could have prepared me for that.
“I don’t know how soon after he ended it with you,” he said, and I tried to pretend like I wasn’t crumbling like a sandcastle.
“He came up to me one day. Said he knew we were friends. He told me it was over between you two, and asked me to not reach out. It sounds shitty now, Ky, I get it,” he said.
His eyes reached out to mine, holding on like he was desperately trying to impart information.
“But he told me it would hurt you less, and I believed him because he looked like shit. He practically begged me. This was the same dude that bodied me out of a lift just for being your friend, and he’s begging me for help? I believed him.”
It hurt to swallow past the lump in my throat, and when I spoke, my voice cracked. “He thought it would help me to have one less friend?”
Tae growled, and started tapping a staccato beat on his knee.
“I’m not explaining this well.”
