My Only One

♪ With the one i was desperately looking for ♪

He had been washing the same bowl for forty seconds when it started. He stopped. Stood there with his hands in the water and let it happen.

♪ My, oh my, oh my, oh my love

Be my only one ♪

His phone was propped against the soap dispenser, speaker facing up. He'd put it on a playlist an hour ago and forgotten about it, the way you forgot about weather until you were already in it. The song filled the kitchen — his small, secondhand kitchen with the one cabinet that didn't close flush and the window above the sink that looked directly into the exterior wall of the neighboring building, which was grey and uninformative.

He dried his hands.

He didn't skip the song.

Outside her door, or maybe through it — he couldn't tell — he heard movement. The specific sound of her in her apartment, which he knew the way you know a language you didn't study: effortlessly, involuntarily, because you'd been hearing it long enough that your brain had simply decided to care. Footsteps that meant she was working. Footsteps that meant she was restless. The particular rhythm of her going to her fridge at eleven-thirty at night when she was avoiding a canvas that wasn't cooperating.

Right now the footsteps meant she was at her desk.

He leaned against the counter and looked at nothing and let the song finish.

My only one.

There was a particular kind of feeling, he'd been trying to describe it to himself for years, the way a Fine Arts student tries to describe a colour that doesn't have a name yet, mixing references until something approximates the right shade, that lived in that song. Not sadness exactly. Not longing in the romantic-movie sense, all dramatic lighting and swelling strings. Something quieter than that. Something that had made its home in him so long ago it had stopped feeling like a guest.

The song ended.

He washed the bowl.

In the morning she knocked on his door at eight-fourteen, which he knew because he'd been awake since seven and had been listening, in the background of reading, for the sound of her door. Not consciously. He'd stopped doing it consciously about two years ago. Now it just happened, the way breathing happened.

He opened the door.

She was holding a small container — the brown one with the orange lid — and a pair of chopsticks balanced on top of it, and she was still in her sleeping clothes with her hair pulled up in the approximate shape of a bun, which meant she hadn't slept well or she'd been up early working, and he would figure out which one by her eyes.

Her eyes were clear. Up early working, then.

"I made extra," she said.

"You always make extra."

"Because you always don't eat." She held the container out. "Juk. Leftover from last night. It's probably better now anyway."

He took it. The lid was still warm.

She had paint on her right thumb, a very specific shade of grey-green that he recognised as the background colour she'd been working with for the last two weeks, the piece about — he wasn't sure, she hadn't said, and he hadn't asked because she'd tell him when she was ready. She always did.

"Your collar," she said, reaching up.

She fixed it with both hands, quick and automatic, the way you'd straighten a picture frame on a wall you walked past every day. She didn't look at his face while she did it. She looked at the collar. Her fingers were warm from the cooking. Three seconds, maybe four, and then she stepped back and looked satisfied in the way she looked satisfied about small fixed things.

"Better," she said.

"It was fine before."

"It was crooked."

"Functionally equivalent to fine."

She gave him the look, that specific one — the one she'd been giving him since he was eleven years old and trying to argue that incomplete homework was a form of selective mastery — and went back across the hall.

He stood in his doorway with the warm container in his hands and watched her door close.

The grey-green paint on her thumb. The specific complaint of her hinges. The way she'd said better with that small private satisfaction, like fixing his collar was a completed thing, a closed loop, like he was a problem that had a solution.

He closed his own door.

He ate the juk standing over his sink because the table was covered in sketchbooks and he didn't move them. It was good. It was always good — she cooked the way she did everything, with a specificity that looked like casualness but wasn't, each thing exactly what it needed to be and no more.

He thought about the grey-green paint.

He thought about how she hadn't looked at his face when she fixed his collar.

He thought about a lot of things while he ate, which was most of the problem.

The first time he played basketball in front of her was a Tuesday afternoon in November, three years after he'd started playing.

He'd been fifteen. She'd been seventeen. Their school had a half-court behind the gym that the older boys used on weekends and that sat mostly empty on weekday afternoons, and he'd been out there running drills by himself because the geometry of it helped him think — the arc of the shot, the specific calculation of angle and force, the way a good pass was about reading where someone was going to be rather than where they were. He liked problems that had solutions. He liked understanding the shape of a thing.

She'd appeared at the edge of the court with her sketchbook under her arm, the way she appeared everywhere, slightly ahead of announcement, and stood watching.

He caught the ball. Looked at her.

"Don't stop," she said.

He didn't.

She sat cross-legged on the ground at the edge of the court and watched him run drills for twenty minutes and didn't say anything, just tracked the movement with the focused attention she gave things she was interested in, and the only thought he had — the thought he'd been not-having for three years, since he was twelve and she'd sat on a concrete wall and said I like how it moves when it goes right, everyone agreeing on something without saying it out loud — was: this is why I learned.

Not the geometry. Not the drills.

This exact Tuesday afternoon. This specific quality of her attention.

He'd known, on that concrete wall when he was twelve, that something had shifted in him, but he hadn't had the language for it yet. He knew how certain photographs worked — the ones where you looked at them and felt something you couldn't quite trace back to any one element of the composition, because it lived in the relationship between things, not in any single thing. His feeling for Chaeyoung was like that. It didn't live in her face or her voice or the way she appeared at edges of things without announcement. It lived in the relationship between all of those and the specific way they arranged themselves around him.

He made a three-pointer.

She made a small sound — not quite a word, just approval — and kept watching.

That night he lay in bed and thought: I am in serious trouble.