Flickering Flames

Why this song, here:

‘Never Enough’ isn't about greed here - it's about a guy who can't metabolize being enough as he is. Yeji has chosen him for five years, and none of it ever felt enough to deserve. So when Yuna reached, when Ryujin pushed, when Karina opened, he couldn't refuse - not because he wanted more, but because he never trusted he'd earned what he already had. The song plays like the inside of his head at the pool's edge: trying to hold my breath after almost Drowning in Air, you set off a dream in me is the nightmare he's still soaked from, the shine of a thousand spotlights is every girl who turned toward him this trip, the stars we steal from the night sky are the idols he took anyway - towers of gold (the villa), still too little, and no hand that will ever accept what's already his even if they held the world (Karina’s tits jk).

[MINHO’S POV]

The pool looked different at dawn. Wrong, somehow.

The sky had gone grey overnight. Without direct sunlight, the white stone walls turned the colour of brutalist concrete. Just massive slabs of expensive rock, cold and indifferent. The water reflected the overcast sky back at itself. No wind. Just a flat, dark surface with the filter cycling underneath, humming a continuous mechanical drone.

I stood at the edge in whatever clothes I'd grabbed off the floor. Bare feet on cold tile. The space was huge. Empty. Yesterday it had seemed like a luxury ad - wide open, sprawling, built to make you feel rich just by standing in it. Today, it was just punishing negative space. The villa dwarfed me. Hard lines meeting at right angles, corners cut so sharp they looked dangerous. Glass and concrete and water. Someone had spent millions to build a place that traded comfort for absolute, unforgiving beauty.

My peripheral vision kept trying to make the water black. Every time I looked away, the pool seemed to rise, bleeding the nightmare back into the morning. I'd snap my eyes back to the surface and it would be normal, grey water. But the second I blinked, I was drowning again. Cold water at my ankles. Yeji's eyes staring at me from across the deck - empty, unblinking, waiting for an answer I couldn't give. The tribunal of faces. The verdict delivered in my own voice.

I couldn't stay in bed after that. Definitely not after Yeji pressed her face into my collarbone, still asleep, and mumbled saranghae. The shape of the word slipping out of her unconscious mouth when she'd never let it past her teeth while awake. The first time in five years.

I'd opened my mouth to say it back, and my throat sealed shut. Just dry air. I couldn't do it.

That's why I was standing barefoot on freezing stone. Lying next to her while she trusted me with her sleeping body felt like holding a grenade with a pulled pin. Her breath hitting my neck in slow, steady rhythm. The bedroom felt too tight, too full of the people I was lying to. Out here, the emptiness was at least honest.

This was the same deck. Same water, same tile, same lounge chair where I'd fucked Yuna into the cushions twenty hours ago while Yeji was at pilates. The chlorine had cycled a hundred times, eating the sweat and the fluids, but I looked at the cushions and saw Yuna's thighs bracketing my hips. And then Ryujin right after her, pinning me to this exact same stretch of stone, the sun baking us both while Yuna watched on angrily in the shower doorway.

My body remembered the exact grip of the tile scraping my back. The way my hands had split between two girls claiming me like territory, while Yeji sweat in a studio with a girl I'd be inside after dinner. Up above, Lia's window stared back at me - the glass where she'd stood and watched the entire show without making a sound.

The whole deck was a crime scene hiding under a million-dollar price tag.

I looked up. The sky was an endless slab of grey. It offered nothing. Just hung there, massive and completely uninterested in whether we loved each other, or whether I deserved to feel this sick.

I was still staring at the water when the glass door slid open behind me.

"Why'd you get up without me?"

Her voice came sleepy and confused, the words running together at the edges, and I didn't turn around immediately. I needed a second to rearrange my face into something that didn't look like a guy who'd been prosecuting himself for the last forty minutes.

When I turned, Yeji was standing in the doorway in my shirt. The navy dress shirt I'd worn off the plane two nights ago, still wrinkled because she'd pulled me through the side door before I'd finished setting my bag down. It hit her mid-thigh and the collar hung off one shoulder and her hair was a slept-on disaster, tangled on the left side where she'd pressed her face into the pillow all night. She was squinting against the grey morning light like it had personally inconvenienced her.

"Couldn't sleep," I said. "Didn't want to wake you."

She studied me. Not suspicious, not yet. Whatever question was forming behind her eyes, she decided the morning was too new for interrogation. She yawned into the back of her hand and padded toward me on the cold tile, bare feet making her steps quick.

"The pool looked nice at dawn," I offered. It hadn't. It had looked like an empty practice room with the lights off. But Yeji glanced at the water and accepted the premise the way she'd accepted my excuse, generously, without pressing, and slid her hand around my arm.

"Come inside," she said. "I'm cold."

She wasn't asking. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my sleeve and she tugged once and didn't wait.

I went. Of course I went. Wherever she was, even when her warmth made the cold I was carrying ache worse.

Her hip pressed into mine as we walked, steering me toward the kitchen instead of the bedroom. Coffee, morning, the ordinary version of the plan she'd had before she woke up to cold sheets where a warm body was supposed to be.

The kitchen was bright. Too bright. Aggressive morning sunlight, the villa deciding the grey hour at the pool didn't count and starting the day over without me. The clouds had broken apart in that Jeju way where the sky goes from grey to brilliant blue in twenty minutes flat. Sun came through the east-facing glass in clean slanted columns that turned the white countertops warm and made the copper pans on the wall rack glow. One of them caught the light wrong and flashed, just a flicker, just the sun hitting curved metal, but for a quarter-second the reflection was water, dark water, before it was a pan again.

Yeji released my arm long enough to open the fridge.

"I'm making breakfast."

Hwang Yeji's relationship with cooking is adversarial. Catastrophically, historically, MEME-LEVEL bad. She's burned instant ramyeon. She's made rice that was somehow both crunchy and soggy. Ryujin once described watching her attempt a fried egg as "a war crime against poultry." And here she was anyway, phone propped against the toaster displaying a recipe she'd already deviated from by step two, tongue between her teeth, holding the spatula like she'd confused it with a weapon.

"You don't have to -" I started.

"I want to." She didn't look up. She had the same concentration crease between her eyebrows she gets during difficult choreography, treating scrambled eggs like a dance break.

She poured oil into a pan that was already too hot. It spat at her. She flinched and recovered, jaw set, then dumped the eggs in and the sizzle was violent.

I let her try for ninety seconds. Then I stepped in beside her and took the spatula out of her hand, turned the heat down, scraped the survivors to one side, and cracked three fresh ones into the cooler zone of the pan.

Yeji watched my hands. Her whole face opened up, lower lip caught between her teeth, eyes warm in a way she couldn't have faked.

She wrapped both arms around my left bicep, leaned her head against my shoulder, and didn't let go. Her skin was warm and solid against mine, pushing back against the residue of the dream where every body I'd reached for had been cold.

"You're not helping," I said.

"I'm supervising."

"You're clinging."

"Supervising involves close observation."

The Bluetooth speaker on the counter was playing something soft, a playlist I didn't recognise, Korean and mellow with acoustic guitars. And she was humming under her breath. Yeji doesn't hum. Yeji has opinions about her own voice the way other people have opinions about their tax filings, and she was just letting sound leak out of her into my shoulder like it didn't cost anything.

I flipped the eggs. She tightened her grip on my arm.

The pool was visible through the kitchen window behind us. Just a rectangle of blue, innocent in the morning light. But my eyes caught it without permission and for half a second the water went dark, went flat, went wrong -

"These smell good," Yeji said against my shoulder.

Morning light. Eggs. Her hand on my arm.

"They're just eggs," I said.

"You rescued my eggs. That's sweet."

"That's BASIC FOOD SAFETY."

She laughed, her head tilting back on my shoulder.

The kitchen filled up in waves. Chaeryeong first, already dressed and suspiciously alert. She took one look at Yeji attached to my arm and stopped in the doorway, her whole body seizing. One hand flew to Lia's arm. Lia, who'd materialised behind her through what I can only assume was teleportation. And then Chaeryeong said "Good morning!" in a voice two octaves too bright for the hour.