Moonlight and Memory

MINHO

The pool was the only light left in the villa.

Everything else had gone dark. The kitchen, the living room, the hallway where laughter used to bounce between walls. The fight had turned the whole house off like a switch, room by room, until the only thing still running was the pool and its underwater glow and me standing at the edge of it.

The same pool, twelve hours since dawn. The overcast had burned off hours ago and the sky had opened into something indecent. Stars everywhere, thousands of them, the water catching them and holding them as trembling copies scattered across the surface alongside my own reflection.

The filter hummed underneath, steady and patient.

I'd walked back through the villa past three windows, three snapshots of damage I'd helped cause: Ryujin on the terrace with her arms wrapped around herself, Yuna on the floor with her face doing nothing, Lia at the kitchen counter with knuckles white around a phone she wouldn't look at. I'd kept walking, didn't slow down, because if I stopped at any one of those windows I'd have to open my mouth and I had nothing in it worth saying yet.

And now the pool again. The thing I'd told myself all day - show up, be present, stop letting the water decide - was still sitting in my chest where I'd put it. My feet graced the edge of the water, and there was nothing in my hands.

The stone was cold, my legs numb. Somewhere in the villa behind me, doors were closed and music was playing through earbuds and people were sitting with the wreckage of a fight that had cracked open something that had been pressurizing for years. I'd heard Yeji's pitched voice through the walls defending something she wouldn't name.

Defending me, probably.

I wanted to deserve that. The wanting was a hook behind my ribs, pulling toward the house, toward her. Except I'd touched someone else right here yesterday morning and I still hadn't figured out how to say it.

I heard her before I saw her. Bare feet on tile, that soft, unhurried percussion of skin on stone. The sliding door had opened and closed so quietly I'd missed it, but the footsteps I knew. Five years of practice rooms and hotel hallways and 3 a.m. kitchen floors, and I could identify her walk blindfolded.

She was close, her body heat closing the distance before her arms did. Then contact. Her arms wrapped around my torso from behind, both of them sliding under mine, hands finding each other against my chest. Her forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, her nose against my spine, and then her breathing, slow and measured. She didn't say anything, but I knew her touch, since a practice room floor and a girl who couldn't stop shaking.

The noise stopped. The three windows went dark. Ryujin's silhouette, Yuna's blank face, Lia's white knuckles - all of it dropped out of my head so fast the silence had weight.

What replaced it was water lapping tile in small, patient intervals. Night insects threading the air with sounds so thin they were almost piercing. Her breathing against my back, slow and warm, fogging a small patch of skin between my shoulder blades that cooled each time she inhaled.

This. Just this.

I didn't turn around even though I deperately wanted to. Fuck, the instinct to see her was so overwhelming it took effort to override, my neck starting the rotation before I caught myself. But turning would break whatever she was doing. Whatever she needed from this moment where she could press her face into me without having to show me hers.

So I stayed. My hands found her forearms and held them where they'd landed across my chest.

The pool glowed beneath my feet, the stars trembling on the water. Her heartbeat raced against my back, through my shirt, through skin. Her arms were trembling.

Minutes passed, maybe five, maybe fifteen. The night hummed while her breathing slowed against my back until it found the same rhythm as mine, two sets of lungs running the same program without consulting each other first. I held her forearms and she held my chest and neither of us said a word until she spoke.

"I said things," she whispered, her voice unusually small. "To Ryujin. Things I can't -"

Her fingers tightened on my shirt. One small clench.

"She said I've changed. And she's right. I HAVE. I changed and I didn't - I didn't warn anyone." She took a breath. "I didn't ask if it was okay. I just did it. Because it felt right. Because YOU felt right. And now she's on the terrace and I'm here and I can't even fix it."

Her forehead pressed harder between my shoulder blades. Her hands stopped holding and started gripping. The words wouldn't stop.

I let them come. Honestly, I would have let her scream them. Twelve hours ago I’d been trapped in a nightmare watching a version of her try to scream without making a sound, her jaw trembling around silence while I drowned in it. This? This was the opposite. This was Yeji spilling over. Yeji refusing to edit. Yeji breaking the one damn rule she’d followed since trainee days: don’t burden them.

She was burdening me. Finally. And the weight of it felt like the only thing keeping me upright.

"And you've been - all day, Minho. All day. I saw it. The pool this morning - you thought I didn't notice but I noticed EVERYTHING. The way you held my hand at the kitchen counter and your fingers waited before they closed. A quarter of a second. Do you know I can feel that? Five years and I can feel when you hesitate. I FELT it."

My jaw went tight. She'd seen it. Of course she'd fucking seen it. The quarter-second delay I'd thought was invisible. She'd been reading my micro-responses since before either of us knew what we were doing.

Five years of that. I couldn't hide from her even when I tried.

"And I keep thinking - it's me. I'm the problem. I'm the weight." She pressed her face harder into my back. "I dragged you here. I put you in the middle of this mess and now there's a fight and it's all because I got greedy."

She stopped, her breathing gone ragged.

"I keep reaching for you. You know that, right? All day. Every time. Me reaching. And you catch me every time but I don't know if you're catching because you want to or because I'm not giving you a choice -"

My hands reflexively tightened around her wrists.

"It's not you." The words came out rough. "Yeji. It's not -" The rest of the sentence died behind my teeth, and I tried again. "I heard the fight through the walls."

Her arms loosened slightly as I said that.

"She's scared," I said. "And so are you. That's it. That's the whole fight."

"Neither of those things are your fault, Yeji."

Silence settled between us, the pool filling it back in with filter hum, water, insects. "I just -" Her voice cracked on the word, small and splintered, and then it stopped. She'd run out, nothing left but her breathing and her hands.

I turned my head just enough that my voice would reach her without my face. Her arms loosened the same moment I started to turn.

She came around me as I came around to her. Her hand trailed along my ribs as she moved, fingertips maintaining contact while the rest of her body repositioned. Like she needed to keep touching me the whole way or I'd disappear. I turned and she drifted and we met somewhere in the middle, face to face at the pool edge, the water glowing beneath us and the sky open above us and a breath of warm Jeju air between our chests.

The pool light hit her from below. I'd seen Yeji in a thousand kinds of light. Stage spots, practice room fluorescents, hotel lamplight, candlelight, the blue glow of her phone at 2 AM. This was different though. The teal radiance caught her from underneath, shadows falling upward, every line and angle of her reversed from what I knew. Her jaw sharper. Her cheekbones higher. Her eyes enormous, dark, wet at the edges. The cover-up hung translucent on her shoulders, the pool light travelling through the fabric and turning her silhouette into something half-visible, half-imagined.

I'd never get used to looking at her. Even after five years and counting.

Her eyes were dry. She'd held it through the fight, held it through the pour on my back, held it through everything she'd said in those five unbroken minutes. Her face had the set of someone who'd been clenching her jaw so long the muscles had forgotten how to release.

Then she saw my face.

Whatever I'd been wearing - the fear, the tenderness, the trying - it broke something in her that the fight hadn't reached. Her chin trembled first. Then her eyes filled fast, the moisture rising like water in a glass tipped past level, and the first tear spilled over before she could catch it. It ran down her cheek, catching the pool light, a bright wet trail that curved along the hollow under her eye and pooled at the corner of her mouth.

My thumb caught it on instinct, my hand cupping her jaw and catching the tear before it could change direction.

The backward tears, the empty eyes. It hit me without warning, nightmare-Yeji's face overlaid on this one, transparent and wrong, tears crawling upward while her mouth opened in a soundless scream. Then it was gone, blinked away. Because this tear was going down. Real gravity. Real physics. Real Yeji. Her eyes were full and bright and holding mine with a need so raw it nearly put me on the ground.

She was real. She was warm. The tear under my thumb was warm. Thank fuck.

I kissed where it fell. Her cheekbone, the wet salt path, the small hollow beneath her eye where the skin was thinnest and the pulse closest to the surface. I pressed my mouth there and held.

"I missed you." So quiet I almost missed it. Her mouth barely moved against my palm, the words warm and wet with salt.

My hand stayed on her face while her tears kept coming, silent and steady, tracking down over my fingers and wetting the heel of my palm. She let them.