To Be Young and in Love in New York City

In quite literally every other probable set of circumstances in the world, “Did you break up?” is not the best icebreaker for you and your girlfriend to go off on.

Yuri stops, mid-slurp of what looks to be a much more savory bowl of noodles and broth than it is, and eyes you with a warning shot. She chews hastily, swallows ungracefully, clears her throat, “We were never together,” with that uneasiness in her eyes you know means nothing good. “We didn't even kiss in the drama, you know.” She reaches down, kneads her calf, and you just let her. 

“I know,” because of course you did, “but you had really good chemistry. On the show, off the show, maybe even behind the cameras?” You pick at your California roll—a soy sauce-soaked grain of rice here, a loose sesame seed there—trying but obviously, laughably failing at laughing and passing it off as a mere observation. Her eyes are still hell to avoid: soft, or piercing, or mysterious on command, and today is no exception. Her phone isn’t a valid target either, just sitting there on the table, screen locked but facing up so it reflects your gaze every time it falls within. You have to look up, and once you do, those hellishly gorgeous eyes find yours in no time at all. She looks at you with a weird flavor of amusement, like entertaining the most ridiculous thought you’ve ever had. 

“He was nice. Tall, handsome, sweet too, at least that's what I'm told,” she huffs, trying just as hard with that smirk to keep the situation light. “Now I'll bite. Tell me, oppa, why do you ask?” Yuri leans back on her chair, arms crossing and her smirk growing just the slightest bit wider, testing the limits of what she can let herself get away with saying.

You had the nerve to ask her to this random New York noodle house for lunch, thousands of miles away from both your homes and jobs, while you’re both on vacation for Christ's sake, and ask her that as a shameful last ditch attempt at petty conversation you knew you couldn’t keep up with. “Just,” you concede with a pause that’s definitely, maybe a bit too pregnant, “just curious.” Not that it was a lie, but it’s a grave understatement—you did miss her, it looks like she missed you too, overreading the situation be damned. 

She laughs, which, mission accomplished for you. “You can’t fault me for wanting our breakup to have been worth something,” mirror her crossed arms with yours, throw back a pointed stare of your own. “You were giving up a real catch, so I didn’t want you regretting it.”

“Right, right. Sorry.” She clears her throat and wipes away the stray broth from her lips, throwing down the napkin like she was right back at home. With that same tone she always took with you, only you, “Well, if you must know, it was not worth it. At all. I mean, seriously, do you really think that he could compare?”

And there it is. It stops you both in your tracks, the tension of meeting up with an ex in a weird place after an ambiguous breakup immediately replaced by the realization that, for lack of a better term, “I don’t wanna compare,” rubbing your neck out of embarrassment more than humility, “I don’t wanna say ‘worth it.’”

Different this time, “Right, sorry. You know what I meant.” Yuri’s eyes cast down just as quick, and you find your respectfully waiting sushi on the plate right across from her gently cooling bowl of noodles. The clatter and chatter of sounds around you comforts you in a way you can’t explicitly understand, but the way her smile creeps back into her cheeks and her honest attempt at checking if what she said was okay with you means more than anything else. 

“Yeah, I know.”

Her phone lights up, breaking the ice better than you ever could, but Yuri’s face all but sours when she reads the notification. She wills the screen back to black, and flips it over this time. No more distractions. She turns back to you, hiding all the emotions from her face. Continues on, like nothing happened.

There's really no good way to describe the feeling again. It’s some parts anxious, other parts offended, yet other parts just plain relieved. Confusing is another word you’d love to use, but you’ve long accepted that everything was confusing in the face of one Jo Yuri, even if it was the last thing she wanted. She grips your arm tighter as her glasses fog up with a puff of breath gone awry. There’s a slight shiver in her fingers, dreadfully obvious even through her winter gloves, that makes its way up your sleeve and onto the arm she’s gripping onto. It’s confusing, anxious, offensive, just plain relieving, to have her on your arm like this again. 

“How’s work?” Again, not the best icebreaker, though by now you’ve gotten quite used to the awkward silences since her. What you’re not used to, unfortunately, is having her there with you. She grips tighter, not to any considerable degree, but enough for you to notice the flex of her fingers against the thick fabric of your coat. But you can feel, even without seeing the corners of her lips curve up, that she finds this more amusing than you do. 

“It’s fine,” Yuri breezes against your arm, “I’m glad to have a little time to myself before heading off to Manhattan or something,” before settling with a huff that produces a thin cloud of breath in front of her face. “What about you? You must’ve been busy too, not much time to be sitting around and missing me.” 

A moment of weakness is an understatement. What you’d give in exchange for the courage to tell her the truth that, yes, you missed her with all your heart, and that not a day on this God-given earth has passed that you haven’t wished she was right back there with you, without any or all of this complicated nonsense that you can’t bring yourself to tell her drove you two apart. Or, on the other hand, you could also say no, not one bit, you haven't even thought of her, and your password isn't your anniversary anymore, and the gallons upon gallons of midnight oil you burned at your desk at work didn’t have anything at all to do with not having her near. 

Instead, your hands ball into fists in your coat pockets. It’s for the warmth, it has to be for the warmth. There’s no particular reason why your tongue finds its way between your teeth, why the flashing digital billboards of brands you’ve never heard of suddenly seem so interesting, why the birds and chatter and the buskers singing love songs are much too loud for 3 pm. But you look to your right, see the tiny girl clung to your arm like a koala, half watching where she’s going past the crowd of people going the opposite way and the other half looking up at you. 

“You’re holding back,” she huffs, another breath-turned-fog-cloud rising up her face, though it’s just a smidge too late to hide the tiny furrow in her brow when she says it. “You never hold back.” 

Nevertheless, reassure her, “Am I? I don’t think so.” Pat the hand that clings to you, convince her that you’re okay and convince yourself harder, “I’m fine. You?”

Clearly not satisfied, (of course she’s not, not even you would buy that bullshit you just spouted), she presses: “Something’s bothering you. You think you’re so slick.” She pokes your side, in the spot you curse that she remembers is ticklish. “Fine, don’t tell me yet. But I bet you’ll slip or something. You always were,” she stops for a moment, the playful tinge in her voice flickering. “You always were an open book.”

She suddenly stops, fingers still tight on your arm, but she pulls out her phone with her free hand. She puts it to her ear, mumbles a simple “Uh-huh,” and her face does that thing again when she gets bad news. “Alright, thank you, oppa,” before pocketing it back with a sigh.

“Everything okay?” 

Not even one breath after you start, she perks back up: “Come up with me.” She tilts her head to the right, pointing at the big revolving door of the hotel she must be staying at. “My legs are tired, and it’s too cold, and everything is so loud here.”

“Oh, if you’ve had enough—”

“Come up.”

It’s one singular moment of hesitation—both yours and hers—before she pulls you along, into the lobby, past the staff, into the elevator. You almost don’t mind the eyes, human or digital or otherwise, that might catch you; you only allow yourself one of the worst palpitations you’ve ever had the displeasure of the thought of Jo Yuri being caught with some nobody not even worth a second of her time. She rushes down the hallway, avoiding eyes and ears like the expert you know her to be, until the last moment before she places her hand on a seemingly random doorknob: a man emerges from the room to the left, asking her who you are. 

“He’s new,” she says, before you realize that she was talking to you. She shoots you a new smile—a teasing one—before addressing the man this time, “He’s someone I need you to keep from management and everyone else, especially you-know-who. He’s not here at all.” The door flies open, Yuri doesn’t wait for a reply from him, shoves you in. 

Everything like old times, from the rambling about work and schedules, to how her mother and yours are doing, to fighting over the TV volume that has to be either a multiple of 2 or of 5 before ultimately settling on a crisp 30. That’s why it’s unsettling to you, creating friction somewhere deep in your chest, at the stark lack of it outside. It’s most apparent when she takes a big, lazy, manspread seat onto the sofa while you do the same on the floor in front of her, falling into step like you used to. You know things have changed, and she knows that things have changed, and that your old routines aren’t, shouldn’t, be the same as they once were. But the world is quiet, save for the TV spewing nonsense about the news or this telenovela or even this funny streamer she loves so much. You want the fighting, the interrogations between each other, the explosions of passion and yearning like the dramas—like it should be.

Instead, after the hellish couple hours of leisurely catching up like neither of you deserve, she chuckles, swings a leg over each of your shoulders, breathes out a slow sigh. Wraps a calf around the front of your neck, snuggling you between her thighs, and you place your hands right on her shin—not to remove, but simply to touch—kneading the muscles she's been complaining of soreness ever since the morning. 

Your eyes stay fixed on the TV, but watching it has long been out of your mind. The little people onscreen couldn't do anything right now to grab your attention back; now it's just on the gentle voice somewhere above and behind you, humming a familiar song as fingers run through your hair and ruffle through the liminal spaces between every strand. “Can't believe you remember we used to do this,” Yuri says, and she bends down over you, tilting your head back just a smidge with a soft tug. It's not demanding in the slightest, though you fight down the urge to tell her you would've given in if she did.

Her eyes were always so pretty. They could be soft, or piercing, or mysterious on command, but now it's nothing more than that comforting curiosity that got you to fall in love with her in the first place. It's always been the trust she had in you to be patient even to a fault, to let her go off into the wide open world as you stayed behind, to be there for her when she comes home and complains about her feet hurting as you come down to rub all the tension out once more. 

With the awkwardness only finally starting to melt away, you whisper in the most gentle tone you never knew you could muster, “This was my favorite part. I'm glad you let me do this back then,” as your fingers prod and squeeze away the spots of pain and pressure woven between her muscles, “even now.” She continues running her fingers through your hair, letting you feel the gentle strokes of her fingertips and nails against the skin of your scalp. She comes eye to eye with you, tilting your head far enough back that it rests on her lap, and she shows you that raw honesty you can tell she's been dying to show anyone. “Do you remember why we broke up?” you ask her, whispering far too quietly, scared to break this unbreakable peace you’ve already built with her. 

She sighs through a mouth curved into a sad smile. “No, it's been so long. I bet you remember, though. I must've been a bad girlfriend or something. Did I forget your birthday?” Warmth from a hand on each of your cheeks now, and the smoothness of a pair of lips right on the center of your forehead. The ends of her hair tickle your face wherever they land, but you don't mind them enough to brush off. Yuri peppers tiny pecks all over your face, and you have to let it happen. You get to let it happen. 

“Let's let that be my burden to carry. I don't blame you for not remembering.” You close your eyes slowly, receiving her love like you deserve it. On one particularly slow kiss right between your eyebrows, her smile grows a little wider, her exhale a little more forceful as she takes comfort in the tiny graces you pay her back. Your fingers continue to knead her calf, feeling the tension melt away as she grows ever more pliable under your hands, half-hoping that she doesn't realize you've been playing Fur Elise on her leg for the better part of the hour now, with the other half hoping that she does. 

And then, without warning or heed, her lips meet yours. They're just as soft as you remember, with the familiar pout you've come to memorize and, hell, even miss. She parts them slightly, takes your upper lip gently between her teeth. It's everything to you to let her have her tiny nibbles, all the while you get to love her right back. She takes the utmost care, as if handling the most fragile of glass mirrors, as she rubs her thumbs across your cheeks, feeling how corporeal and simply present you are with her. It's everything to be here again, to be hers again, to be again. It feels like an eternity and a day that you stay in her presence, taking from her without deserving, yet—

She pulls away, just for a moment, and whispers against your lips: “Here you go again with the owing me something. I know that twitch in your lips. I don’t like it.” She traces circles on one cheek, holding you steady by the other, waiting for you to settle. Waiting for you. Waiting for you. 

“You can’t not remember by now,” you chuckle, breath pushing lightly against her smile. “Tell me why we broke up. Right now. Come on,” poking and prodding at her psyche, before she breaks into that same adorable giggle that lights up the room and everything in it. 

“I said I was gonna be busy.” The way she says it is plain as day, as if it’s the simplest thing. “And you took it like ‘She doesn’t want to spend time with me anymore’ when you know it’s not that.” She rubs your cheeks again, trying to pull away the layers even though she knows it’s not you that’s hiding, “it was never that.”

“What was it then?” Keep testing her, even if you know she’ll get all the answers right anyway. The little things get lost in the noise, but not the big thing she keeps close to her heart. 

“It was,” with a pause much too short to be pregnant, “It was me saying ‘You aren’t worth the few free hours I have anymore.’ And you hated that, because who wouldn’t?” she confesses, voice shaking like old wounds were opening again. “But that’s not what I meant.”

Your turn to kiss her forehead, and the way you pull her down isn’t as awkward as you want it to be. Instead, she takes one slow glide into position, hovering right above your lips, and you don’t make her wait a millisecond longer than she needs to. “I know what you meant. But do you think I’d have ever forgiven myself if I ever got in your way?”

And then she pulls back, meeting your eyes again as if seeing for the first time the blazing galaxies behind the inky cover of night. Her smile tugs at the corners of her mouth, stretching ever so slightly, like it’s getting wider against her will. “It’s not fucking fair,” she says, gaze still locked on you, smile reaching peak width. “You make it look so easy, loving me. It’s like you’re this perfect fucking soulmate for me. How do you know me so well?”

“I,” you take a deep breath, bracing yourself for an answer that pains you to give, “I don’t know.” It’s the truth, that you don’t know how easy it was to fall for her, or why it was so simple to learn her little habits. How long she stays in bed scrolling after waking up, the number of the place she always gets her spicy marinated crabs from, her unnatural insistence that the volume of the TV has to be a multiple of 5. It’s all these little things: stuff that you and only you could ever know of her, stuff she only ever lets you see. It strikes you as every bit of odd, knowing so much about her, when all you are is some background character in the grand scheme of her life—

“I don’t get it.” Yuri’s voice shocks you back down to Earth, “You’re not the type to cry. Or hesitate. Or keep things hidden, at least from me. That’s that twitch in your lips, when you want to say something out loud but you bite it back. I don’t like it.” She thumbs your cheek again, more slowly, deliberately, “I don’t like when you don’t tell me things.”

Her phone again, this time a Kakao message judging from the notification sound. It reaches you both at the same time, but the effect it has on her is the worst yet. She shuts her eyes hard, as if wishing the message would be gone by the time she checks, and she doesn’t plan to check anytime soon. You even feel her hands get ever so slightly chillier, like it pains her to think about what that message could be. 

“You can get that if you need to.” You always had that soft spot for her, knowing where you stood in her life and when it was your turn. And of course, you were more than happy to step aside, because God forbid you, as you accidentally so eloquently put it, got in her way. 

But a fresh, warm breeze of breath hits your forehead. “That’s the second stupidest thing you’ve ever said.” Her eyes open again, and it hits you: soft or piercing or mysterious on command. Shining like the blazing galaxies that hide behind the inky blackness of the sky. All at once, the mystery of how you remember everything about her even after all this time just seems to solve itself. 

But there’s that doubt in her eyes again, when she sees your lips twitch again. “I really hurt you, didn’t I?” She’s downtrodden, and you can’t console her. Not like this. “What did I do?” 

Lie. Just lie. “Nothing, that was it.” Fight the twitch in your lip again, pretend you can hide it when she’s this close. 

You want her to let go, then say she’s busy, then pick up her phone and read it and say she needs her rest, then kick you out. But she doesn’t, even with the incessant pinging seemingly getting louder and louder. Through it all, she stares into your eyes, thumbs brushing the skin of your cheeks, trying to find any clue she can find. Instead she mumbles, “Bullshit,” focused on you. 

The TV hangs above a fake fireplace far from the foot of the bed, waiting patiently for the next time they can light back up. A newly-snuffed stick of incense fades out in its stand in the kitchen, and the far off cars and people somewhere on the busy 10-in-the-evening New York street beneath you try their hardest to throw soundwaves up that many stories and through your window to you. And her.