Royalty

31k words

You’ve turned to absentmindedly flicking your table lamp light on and off.

Your mind is elsewhere, daydreaming, drifting away to any escape from the stack of books scattered across your desk.

See, it’s the most important year of your university life. You’re graduating this year, and following what all your teachers, classmates and you too believe, every second not spent studying is a second wasted.

Curse thinking that chemistry was what you wanted to do when you “grew up”. Now all your time is spent chained to a wooden chair trying to remember the formula of when carbon reacts with oxygen reacts with hydrogen reacts with hydroxide ion, or figuring out what is the ionisation energy of Sulfur’s 12th subshell.

Eventually, your mind drifts to your last ex, (you had just broken up with her barely a week ago, the wound was still devastatingly fresh), and you jolt in your seat.

You sigh, then decide that it’s time for a break.

Interestingly, your house isn’t exactly the style of a typical boy’s. There’s soft cat plushies on the couch, too many shoes at the door, little magnets with cute designs pasted on the fridge, holding up notes written with such beautiful handwriting it could never be yours, even if you spent all your hours practicing writing instead.

See, this isn’t your house. You’ve rented a room in someone else’s apartment, and that someone isn’t home yet.

You open the fridge, intending for milk but taking a double take on the chocolate you find inside. Whatever is hers is yours, but the calories stop you, and you settle for the glass of milk in the end.

You debate about turning on the television, but that’s not what a good student would do. With another long sigh, you return to your room, plopping down on your bed and whipping out your phone instead.

“Be a good student”. Pssh… your mind tells you. Fuck that.

Your room is dead simple. You have a bed. You have a desk. You have an attached bathroom. You have a closet.

You also have a picture frame on your bedside drawer. It’s framed nicely, and it depicts your landlord on the far end of the dining table outside in the living room, hands clasped together with a cheap slice of cake in front of her. She has a silly hat on, wearing pyjamas, and her smile is positively radiant, stretching from ear to ear, her eyes curve into perfect crescents.

The one day you managed to surprise her with a shitty cake on her birthday. Her smile looks like she must have just learned she’d were to own the world.

You drop your phone and turn the photo around. On the back it says Jo Haseul’s birthday followed by the date, 18/8/22.

That was over a year ago. And you regret not getting her something this year. She understood, though. She always does. You were going to graduate, you didn’t have time to “spend on silly old me”, as she put it.

You turn the picture back around, taking care to display it nicely. It’s the only picture you own in your room. Your parents were always more focused on your success in life than your enjoyment of it, so you reasoned you should have something that reminded you of happiness, not of pressure.

When you rented the apartment, Haseul said it was the best thing she could have asked for. She had been dreading some ratty, unclean douche that would leave dirty tissue paper all over the house, along with a stench that would describe how he hadn’t showered in ten days.

But she got a student, and she liked students. As it turns out, Haseul graduated from the same school as you the year before you enrolled, and she claimed she was blessed to have a decent human being for a tenant.

Haseul once told you that she bought this apartment the year she was to graduate from the same university, with her savings and a little of her parents' money. She bought a large apartment specifically with the intent of renting out a room to make some income for herself. Smart.

Naturally, you asked about a previous tenant, and she told you she wound up having her ex live over instead.You wisely ended the conversation there.

Finishing your glass of milk, you head out to wash up, where Haseul has already taken a shower and is cuddled up on the sofa watching TV. She hasn’t noticed you yet.

You head to the kitchen and turn on the tap, catching her attention and gaze through the glass separating the kitchen from the living room.

“Hey,” she says, her voice melodic.

“Evening, Seullie.” You respond in kind. It was almost eleven thirty.

“How’s your studying going?” She asks, propping up her hand on a plushie nestled up next to her to look at you.

“Fine,” you say as always, as dryly as you can.

It’s always the same routine with Haseul. She asks you how your studies are, you always say the same thing. Then, she’ll ask you to-

“Come sit with me a second. Your studies can wait.”

Wait they shall, ten minutes a day with Haseul will forever counteract the exhaustion from ten hours of studying chemistry.

The two of you sit and begin to talk.

When you two converse, there’s always genuine warmth to it. The daily topics of school and work come to mind first, but soon it branches off into anything else under the sun. The movie she was watching lays dead in the background, while you continue to absorb the infectious energy Haseul radiates through her conversation.

That’s a reason you like Haseul so much. She is always listening, and by that you mean genuinely listening. She’s not just nodding along to whatever you say and sympathising with “ damn, that must suck ”, she’s always engaged, like everything you say is as important to her as it is to you, and always saying what you want to hear.

“Studying laboriously isn’t really that important you know. Looking back on it now, the hours I spent dryly reading through my biology textbook weren’t really well spent. It would have been better if I’d spent some of that time getting a proper rest.”

“Jeez Seullie,” you groan, even though that was exactly what you needed to hear. You already feel the burden of studying fly off your chest. “Not everyone is as naturally gifted as you.”

She smiles, and you swear she overpowers the ceiling lights with her radiance.

She turns back to the television, thinking. She cups her chin in her palm. You take the chance to admire her side profile.

“You know, only my ex used to call me Seullie.” She says suddenly, and you hear a pin drop off in the distance.

“Oh. I’m sorry, I can call you something else if you want,” you apologise quickly.

“No, it’s fine. I’ve just… always been surprised that you picked up the same nickname as him.”

You put a toe across the fine drawn line.

“Was he nice?” You ask.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was pretty great. He was… sweet, caring. He used to listen to me ramble, a bit like you do now.” She turns to you, smiling.

You hope you haven’t gone too far across, but the question spills out of you before you can even stop yourself. “How did you two split?”

“He cheated on me.” She says simply, her eyes darting elsewhere.

“Oh, I’m sorry, that’s terrible,” you sympathise.

“No, no. It’s fine. I wasn’t mad he got with another girl or anything. I was mad that the day he came home with that guilty look on his face, he didn’t bother telling me anything. He even lied to me when I asked him about it,” Haseul explains. “If I mean that much to you, you should tell me the truth honestly, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” you agree. “But, you know… maybe he felt so ridden with guilt he couldn’t even work up the courage to apologise?”

“Maybe,” She says, turning back to the television show.