Work Text:
Two weeks after the police declare her legally dead, Seo Ari shows up at Yoon Sihyeon’s front door. Two minutes later, initial shock held at bay, Sihyeon makes tea as a dazed feeling threatens to overwhelm her. Ari sits in the living room, hands in her lap and staring off into space. She looks the same as ever: impeccably styled, black hair curled along the jaw – but smaller. Insubstantial, like Sihyeon could blink and she would disappear.
Sihyeon blinks. Ari stays.
Boil water. Fetch the cups. Sihyeon sets a saucer in front of Ari and jumps when she says, “Thank you.” She sounds the same and that makes it real, somehow. Seo Ari is alive. Sihyeon isn’t losing her mind.
“Of course,” Sihyeon replies automatically, hearing her own words from the end of a long tunnel. The questions threaten to spill over, but she really doesn’t know where to start. She clasps her hands together to keep them from shaking.
“I’m sorry,” says Ari, meeting Sihyeon’s eyes. She looks tired, but Sihyeon feels just as pierced by her gaze as always, like she’s being seen right through. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
Everything Sihyeon wants to say disappears in an instant, replaced with a single certainty. This is the first time Seo Ari has lied to her. Sihyeon tilts her head curiously. “Yes, you did.”
Sihyeon remembers a different conversation – carrying a weight like a time bomb, Junkyung reprimanding her for being a martyr and offering to share the burden. Remembers Ari in the same position, asking questions she already knew the answers to, lighting the fuse as Sihyeon tried to shield her from the inevitable blast. Remembers Ari blowing it all up anyway. Choices and consequences.
Ari reads Sihyeon’s thoughts like so many pages in a book, and Sihyeon tries to hate her for it. She tries to hate her for all of it. She tries.
Ari presses her lips into a thin smile. “Yes. Maybe I did.”
After all this time, Sihyeon still isn’t used to honesty meted out so easily, like truth isn’t the most valuable thing any of them possess. It steals her breath.
“I mean,” says Ari, “I never meant to hurt you, Sihyeon. Would you believe me if I said I don’t regret the rest of it? Only how it affected the people I care about.”
Like Junkyung? Sihyeon sees him tall and confident, handsome and smirking – bloody on a stretcher, comatose in the hospital. The people I care about. Somewhere deeper Sihyeon wonders, Like me? and swallows the words down. “Ari,” she says. “Why are you here?”
Ari’s face is inscrutable, a mask, a shield – and then it cracks. “Yoon Sihyeon,” Ari smiles wryly, and the point of a tooth, the bags under her eyes, she is just a person again. “Don’t you watch the news? I’m a ghost now. I came to ask for your help.”
Divorce is messy, particularly when you married the head of a law firm, and Sihyeon slips out of her apartment as the sun rises to meet with her own lawyers. It’s silent as she pads into the open living space, light a dim gray wash but getting bluer. The penthouse is furnished minimally, all pristine surfaces and massive windows looking down on the waking city. An empty home – a recent purchase. She passes the guest room as she goes, pausing to listen at the door.
Air conditioning hums almost imperceptibly; her heart beats in her ears. The morning is still and peaceful. The only sign of life an unfamiliar pair of shoes in the entrance hall.
Living with a ghost, it turns out, is not much different from living alone.
Yoon Sihyeon returned from New York with new clothes, a new haircut, and a broken heart. She got married five months later.
She didn’t have time for self-pity; there were plans for her life. You’re our golden ticket, said her father. She went to dinner with Jin Taejeon and thought she would rather be a person.
New York was a hazy dream when she got around to putting the Saint Laurent dress away. Thinking about Han Junkyung felt like pressing fingers into a bruise, aching and tender. She didn’t do it much. Instead, she focused on what she did have: a fortunate life, a doting husband. Taejeon chose her and that was what she’d been looking for, wasn’t it? She’d only ever wanted to be wanted. She tucked the dress in the back of her closet and never expected to see it again.
“My mother was arrested last week,” says Ari, hugging her knees on the very end of the couch, as far from Sihyeon as possible. It’s a large couch; it’s a long distance. “My company is going bankrupt. They’re charging her with tax fraud.”
“I’m sorry,” says Sihyeon. The television plays quietly, casting them in electric blue light. “That’s terrible.”
Ari is wearing a pair of Sihyeon’s pajamas. Peach silk. She shrugs. “That’s justice.”
“If there’s anything I can do,” starts Sihyeon, and Ari glances up so sharply the words die on her tongue.
“You are doing more than enough,” says Ari, firmly but not unkindly, and when she looks down again Sihyeon catches a hint of color in her cheeks. “Thank you for taking me in. For everything. I’ve only brought you trouble.”
Sihyeon frowns. “What do you mean?”
Ari looks genuinely confused. “Your friends,” she starts, “your husband, your life. I was ruining everything, and you still chose to help me. I’m not so selfish that I don’t know I will never be able to pay you back.”
“Stop,” says Sihyeon, and blinks against a sudden wave of deja vu. “I chose this, Ari. You haven’t made me do anything I didn’t choose for myself.” She realizes then that Ari doesn’t know what she’s done, not really. She doesn’t understand that Sihyeon has no regrets either. “Seo Ari, are you hearing me? I chose you.”
Ari’s expression is completely unreadable, so Sihyeon gets up and moves closer, perching next to her, willing her to understand. They sit a hand’s breadth apart; Ari stays completely still and Sihyeon wonders if she’s made a mistake, like cornering a wild animal.
“I’m sorry about your divorce.” Ari’s voice, when it comes, is weighted and worn, but all Sihyeon can think is how real she sounds, how unlike the advertisements and interviews her true self is. Sihyeon looks at her and sees a woman in front of her mother’s shop offering her life’s savings, trying to repay a debt Sihyeon has already forgiven.
“I’m not,” says Sihyeon. “I never really loved him and he was an evil bastard, anyway.”
Laughter sneaks up on Ari like it has to ambush her when her guard is down, so the sound takes Sihyeon by surprise as well. It’s short, just a single startled peal, but Ari’s eyes turn up at the corners and her teeth flash and her pinky brushes Sihyeon’s on the couch like an accident.
“Okay, says Ari. “I guess I’m sorry about your marriage, then.”
“Me too,” answers Sihyeon with a smile, and it’s the first time she’s ever said it without thinking about Han Junkyung at all.
The thing to remember is first impressions are everything, and Sihyeon’s first impression of Seo Ari was that she was a force the world was wholly unprepared for. Her second impression of Seo Ari was that she was a thief.
By their third meeting Sihyeon was getting the sense Ari was somewhat undefinable; someone entirely honest on a mission to conquer a world built on glitter and lies. It’s a ghost town, Sihyeon had desperately wanted to tell her. Nothing here is real. Get out while you can still see yourself in the mirror.
But she hadn’t said anything, and Ari proved to be just tangible enough to burn the ghost world from the inside out. After, Sihyeon would think about places she could have stopped it, moments she could have headed her off at the pass. She would think about it until the moment Ari showed up at her apartment, and then she would realize no one ever could have stopped something so inexorable as the truth.
The secret was never the dress in the back of the closet. The secret was that Sihyeon couldn’t look at the dress without feeling a deep and dismal sense of vertigo – a hole in her chest that she was moments away from falling into. Something missing there, some dark, empty space in her life. The absence couldn’t harm her as long as she never examined it. She let it hide and fester and sink deeper into shadows, until Seo Ari faced her down and filled her up with light.
It’s a court hearing today, because Jin Taejeon has never done anything with grace in his life: why would he start with his own divorce proceedings? Sihyeon puts on her best battle outfit, expertly applies a full face of makeup, and prepares to be dragged through the mud for ten hours.
She doesn’t even make it out the front door.
Ari glances up from her new home in front of Sihyeon’s massive flatscreen and does a double-take. “You’re going like that?”
All of Sihyeon’s confidence drops to somewhere around street level, forty floors below.
“Yes,” she says, more defensively than she’d like to admit. She checks over her outfit for obvious flaws and comes up empty. This does nothing to ease her anxiety. “Why? Do I look bad?”
“No!” Ari rushes, “No, not at all. Just…are you sure about the scarf? For court?”
“I like scarves,” protests Sihyeon.
“Oh, I noticed,” mumbles Ari, and Sihyeon starts untying the scarf.
“Anything else?”
Ari narrows her eyes and then she’s off the couch, disappearing into her room and returning with an armful of fabric.
“Off,” she says, gesturing to Sihyeon’s overcoat and handing her a slimmer, sleeker one Sihyeon recognizes from an overseas couture collection.
“It’s cold out!” Sihyeon complains, but shrugs off her coat anyway. Maybe sending a courier to collect most of Ari’s wardrobe was a mistake.
“You’re not dressing for the weather, you’re dressing for a judge,” Ari states plainly, and then leans back to assess her work. Sihyeon fights the urge to shift under her critical eye. God – Sihyeon is a well-respected trendsetter in her own right! She opens her mouth to say as much, but Ari is gone again, back into her room and banging open closets.
It dawns on Sihyeon that this is how she thinks of that room now – Ari’s room – not the guest room, not the second bedroom, not a hollow, cavernous space as empty as the rest of her life, but Ari’s space, full to bursting with clothes and accessories and the most alive legally-dead woman she has ever known.
“This,” says Ari, and then she is dangling an enormous diamond necklace in Sihyeon’s face.
Sihyeon sighs. “I want the judge to side with me, not decide I was only with Taejeon for his money.”
Ari rolls her eyes – “Well it obviously wasn’t his looks.” – but holds up a different necklace, this time tasteful and silver. Sihyeon pretends to consider it for a moment, but Ari really does have an excellent sense of style.
“It’s pretty,” Sihyeon says, “help me put it on?” She’s pulling her hair to one side before she even thinks about it, and a flash of something crosses Ari’s face before she can catch it.
“Of course,” says Ari, and then she’s behind her, and Sihyeon’s world collapses into a narrow focus.
Ari’s arms around her. The necklace laying cool and liquid across her collarbones. Fingertips brushing the nape of her neck. The necklace moving, clasp being found. Ari’s breath, gentle on the top of her spine. Heat – in her face, in her chest, against her back.
Something clicks.
“There,” murmurs Ari, but it’s kind of whispery, kind of uncertain. She clears her throat and the spell is broken, Sihyeon takes a small step forward and turns around.
Ari looks how Sihyeon feels: off-balance. Like some great wave has crested, and all the movement in the world is suddenly rushing down to a single point.
“Thank you,” says Sihyeon. Her mouth is dry. “Yes – I mean – thank you. I should go now.”
“Good luck,” says Ari seriously. “Take him down.”
Despite herself, Sihyeon smiles. “I certainly look the part, don’t I?”
Ari waits to lock the door behind her, but right before it closes she says, “You look beautiful, Yoon Sihyeon,” and Sihyeon wonders if she was meant to hear it at all.
“What do you think?” Ari wears oversized sunglasses, a face mask, and a truly terrible candyfloss pink wig cut into three layers of bangs.
“Wow,” says Sihyeon. “You look like a harajuku girl.”
Ari tilts her completely obscured face slightly towards the ceiling, and Sihyeon takes it as an eye roll.
“Thanks. I mean, would you recognize me on the street?”
And the thing is – Sihyeon would. But she knows that’s not what Ari’s really asking.
“No,” she shakes her head slowly. “If I were a random person on the street I would never recognize you.”
Ari whips off her sunglasses just to level Sihyeon with a suspicious look. “What do you mean?’
“I know how you walk,” says Sihyeon, and then because that came out much creepier than it had sounded in her head: “I just – I, myself, would recognize the way you walk. You enter every room like you own it. Very, ah. Tall?” This is embarrassing, some part of Sihyeon’s brain supplies; probably the part that is flooding her cheeks with heat. “No one else would notice, though!” She finishes in a rush, and then mentally clears time in her schedule to pitch herself into the ocean.
Ari’s eyes narrow slightly, like she’s analyzing every angle of what Sihyeon’s said, or maybe just Sihyeon herself. Coupled with her ridiculous outfit, the effect is entirely disconcerting. Ari’s piercing eyes on a blank canvas. Sihyeon thinks, how did I get here? And then she thinks, how did you get here, Ari, and how much of me will you take when you leave?
“Ok, I’ll slouch,” says Ari finally, and she puts the sunglasses back on.
Some days are quieter than others. Sometimes Sihyeon comes home and the apartment is empty, Ari’s door cracked open to reveal a dark interior. Sihyeon knows Ari still ventures out to work on whatever revenge plot caused her to fake her death in the first place; she knows Ari is being careful. She tries not to worry.
“I can’t tell you,” says Ari when she comes back later and Sihyeon asks. “I’m sorry. But you’re almost free of all this now, I don’t want to drag you back into my mess.”
“Ari,” Sihyeon says, exasperated, “look around. I’m hiding you from the entire world. I’m already in.”
And the look on Ari’s face is so stricken, so guilty, that Sihyeon instinctively grabs her hand to keep her from doing something stupid, like running away.
“Wait,” says Sihyeon, “wait, that’s not what I mean.”
What does she mean? That it’s not a mess? It is, though – the world she knew broken down and sloppily rebuilding on its own ruins. Everyone out there trying to dig back into their squalid little holes like Seo Ari didn’t drag them out to face the sun. Worms squirming on the asphalt.
Ari can’t meet her eyes when she says, “God, I’ve been so stupid. I never should have come here.”
And Sihyeon says, “No, Ari, wait–”
“All I do is burden you,” Ari’s voice is thick with regret and she tries to pull away, but Sihyeon doesn’t let go. “From the very first day. I thought – I just didn’t want you to think you’d failed, that night on the roof. I didn’t want you to think it was your fault. Because you did save me then, you did, and I didn’t want you to think you hadn’t done enough when you do so much and I should have known better than to keep asking, but I showed up here anyway.”
And then to Sihyeon’s horror, she falls to her knees.
“Forgive me,” she whispers, head bowed.
The world splits.
There was a version of Sihyeon, months ago, that would have tried forgiveness. A woman with boundless tolerance who still thought the things she had held value, that the life she led was virtuous, that she was capable of granting absolution. That woman whose greatest sorrow was heartbreak, whose greatest sin was pride.
This Sihyeon searches within herself for forgiveness and comes up empty.
“Get up,” she says. “Get up, Seo Ari. Pull yourself together.”
Ari stands, despondent. Sihyeon reaches out and tilts her chin up with two fingers. Meets her gaze. Something alive in the air between them.
“You say I saved you that night. Good. That’s my impossible debt repaid, then. You think you ruined my life? That you’re a terrible burden who hurts everyone close to you? Get over yourself. One point three million followers doesn’t mean the whole world revolves around you, and just because they all hate you doesn’t mean you deserve to be hated.” Ari looks shocked, but Sihyeon isn’t done. She stares her dead in the eyes and says, “The only thing I regret is telling you not to go to the police in the first place. Understand? My only regret was trying to stop you from being yourself, to protect the shitty people in my shitty life. So if you can’t see you saved me as much as I saved you, then you aren’t who I thought you were, Seo Ari, and you’re going to have to find another place to stay.”
Her words echo out into silence long enough for Sihyeon to think maybe she’s really broken something this time. Ari’s eyes are wide under her bangs and her lips are slightly parted in shock and Sihyeon thinks, ridiculously, that this is a new emotion she’s never seen her face before, and then she wonders when she started keeping track.
“You’re always honest with me, huh, Yoon Sihyeon?” Ari sounds almost awed in the empty space. Forty stories in the air and they truly are alone. Two women and the truth unspooling between them.
“I don’t like seeing you grovel,” Sihyeon frowns. “You’re too cool, it doesn’t fit your image.”
Ari searches her face for something and must find it, because she laughs once in disbelief. “I don’t have an image anymore, remember? No one cares how a dead woman looks.”
It’s clearly a joke, mostly, but that doesn’t stop Sihyeon from being a bit too serious when she says, “I care.” That sends the moment spinning so quickly from her control that she has to physically back away and into the kitchen to escape the way Ari looks at her.
“H-how do you feel about ordering pizza for dinner?” She scrambles in the takeout menu drawer and feels the heat creeping over her face and knows with tingling certainty that something is happening; the apartment is too empty and it’s leaving room for all kinds of things to grow.
Across the room, Ari smiles. “Whatever you want.”
When the weather report calls for thunderstorms, Ari raises all the blackout shades in the living room and watches the clouds roll in.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she says, hushed, with the singular appreciation of someone who once had something, lost it, and is faced with it again at last. The stormfront is oppressive, an encroaching fortress of dark and billowing shapes, and all the light in the world has gone flat and gray. Sihyeon sits next to her on the floor and together they watch the first raindrops splatter against the massive windows.
“Yes,” says Sihyeon, as the first flash of lightning does Ari up in incandescent white and gold. “It is.”
The day Sihyeon’s divorce is finalized she comes home to find Ari making dinner in the kitchen. (“You cooked?” – “Hey, why are you so surprised?”) They open a bottle of Sihyeon’s best wine, and then a second a few hours later. They end up on the couch and Sihyeon is 90% celebrating and 10% utterly miserable, which translates to 100% drunk.
“I never loved him,” she says, and thinks this might not be the first time she’s said it. She repeats herself for good measure, though, because it’s important. “I never. Never. Loved him. Thought I did, though, yeah. But nope.”
The world kind of swims in and out of focus, but she’s distantly aware of Ari, next to her, above her – her head is in Ari’s lap, that’s what it is. A slight vibration signals Ari’s light laughter.
“Sihyeon,” she says, “I think it’s time for you to go to bed.”
“Nooooo,” says Sihyeon. She’s warm and full and comfortable and mostly, mostly happy. “I didn’t even want to marry him, did you know that, Seo Ari? He was so. Annoying. And I had a boyfriend! I thought he was going to propose! Thought he,” she hiccups, then, and briefly considers throwing up, but decides against it. “I thought he loved me. But he didn’t. And my whole. Stupid. Family. Wanted to sell me off to Daecheon. Taechhheon. Taejeon. For politics! I was a pawn in a game, Ari. It was so mean. I didn’t even want to play.”
She thinks she’s talking too much. And she knows she’s drunk, she’s not stupid. But it feels so good to tell someone the whole awful story, because if it’s out there then it’s not inside anymore, eating her alive.
She’s divorced. She’s free. She’s invisible. She needs someone to see her. She needs Ari to see her, really, because Ari’s the reason for all of it and it’s important that she knows.
Ari’s voice is gentle when she asks, “What did you want?”
She brushes Sihyeon’s hair back from her face and it is so unbearably tender that Sihyeon’s answer slips from the surface of her mind. She knows what she wanted. She remembers New York and the dress and a man who loved her once, but not enough to tell her.
Ari’s hand is warm and her eyes are brown and fathomless. Sihyeon feels exposed and peeled raw, like Ari is seeing right down to her bones. She is the prettiest ghost Sihyeon has ever seen.
What did you want? What do you want now?
“Don’t know,” mumbles Sihyeon, “I can’t remember.” And then she falls asleep.
The rush of invitations that usually clutters Sihyeon’s inbox slows considerably after the divorce, but she is still a CEO in her own right – she still has status and causes and work to do. People still know her name and clamor to capture her image at their events. There was a time when she would have juggled each offer with grace and finesse, prioritizing and organizing and socializing, a gyroscope only stable in constant motion.
As it is, she’s been knocked off her axis. She is so unbelievably tired. She goes to her closet to sort through outfits and there, in the back, is a box that doesn’t hurt to look at anymore.
She pulls it out and stares at it while she decides what to feel. Saint Laurent special edition. The words feel ephemeral, meaningless. This dress meant something once. Something more than what it was, something more than a gift or a memory. This dress was with her the last time her life felt like it was under her own control, and she takes it out now to examine it, feeling a little like an archeologist uncovering an ancient skeleton.
She knows it’s not technically the same dress, but it looks the same, and she holds it up against her body to – actually, it’s not the same. She stops. Checks again. Frowns down at the garment in her hands.
She walks across the apartment to Ari’s open door.
“How did you know my size?” Sihyeon asks, and Ari, sitting at her desk and diagramming furiously in a notebook, looks up and furrows her brow.
“What?”
“That dress you bought me, after I told you not to. The original was a size too big, but you got the right one.”
“Oh,” says Ari. She gives Sihyeon a strange look. She scratches the back of her neck. “I don’t know? I guess I must have noticed. Why?”
Sihyeon opens her mouth. No sounds comes out, so she closes it again. It’s not the same dress, not in any respect, but looking at it doesn’t make Sihyeon want to fold in on herself. It didn’t fit before but it does now. Funny, she thinks, because she’s pretty sure she doesn’t need it anymore.
“Never mind,” she says, “it’s nothing.”
Ari half-smiles at her, perplexed, and goes back to writing.
“What’s wrong?”
Sihyeon startles, but it’s only Ari hovering in the open doorway. “Sorry,” she says quickly. “Just the door…I heard you talking to yourself. I’ll go.”
“Wait,” Sihyeon says on impulse, and bites her lip. “There’s a gala tonight. I can’t decide what to wear.”
She doesn’t say it’s her first public appearance since the divorce, but something soft in Ari’s eyes tells her she knows anyway. It’s odd, to have Ari this close in this room. She hadn’t thought about it before, but Sihyeon’s bedroom is the only place in the apartment Ari really never ventures into. Everywhere else has her imprint: movement trails of light in a long-exposure photograph.
Ari cocks her head to the side. “Are you asking me to style you?”
“I’m asking for your opinion.”
“You think I have good taste.” A smug, self-assured smile is spreading across Ari’s face, and Sihyeon has a dawning suspicion she’s made a mistake. She tries to double down.
“One-point-three million people thought you had good taste. I think I have good taste, and you have a relevant opinion.”
“Don’t forget, you were one of my followers too. You’re my fan, Sihyeon, admit it.”
“I’m not your fan, I’m your friend. I’m basically your landlord.”
“Uh…roommate?”
“You don’t pay rent.”
“I’m legally dead right now! The government seized all my accounts!”
“Look,” says Sihyeon. She gestures to the dresses laid out on the bed. “Just tell me: red, black, or white?”
Ari comes closer and frowns in deliberation. “Are you aiming for ‘Diana revenge dress,’ or ‘born-again and purified?’
Sihyeon stares. “Neither?”
“Red,” says Ari definitively, pushing her towards the walk-in closet. “Go, try it on.”
Sihyeon tries it on.
When she emerges, Ari is sitting on the edge of her bed, wrinkling her nose at the discarded dresses. Sihyeon registers a mild sense of surprise – there was a part of her that expected Ari to be gone already.
She clears her throat awkwardly; Ari takes one look at her and flushes pink, neck to bangs.
“Zip me up?” Sihyeon says at the same time Ari breathes, “Wow,” and Sihyeon feels like there is too much air in her lungs.
This time, pulling her hair to the side is accompanied by a rush of familiarity as Ari stands and Sihyeon feels – shy? Self-conscious? Ari’s fingers are gentle on her back, just the barest hint of pressure against Sihyeon’s spine as she zips the dress. Sihyeon shivers and tells herself it’s the air conditioning.
“You’re lucky I’m here,” Ari murmurs as fabric closes around Sihyeon’s body, and her heart skips a beat.
“What?” Sihyeon spins so fast she nearly hits Ari as her hair fans out.
Ari looks at her warily, hand hovering in the air, a blush still sitting prettily on her high cheekbones. “To zip you up.”
“Oh. Right. Yes.” You’re lucky I’m here. Unbidden, Sihyeon blurts, “I wish you could come.”
Ari’s eyebrows shoot up into her bangs. She seems confused. “I’m tired of being a celebrity, Sihyeon, that was kind of the whole point of all of this?”
“No, I know,” Sihyeon feels dizzy; the world is tilting or she is. Ari is in her bedroom. Ari is so, so pretty. “Not as a celebrity. Just as my – my guest.”
Ari’s eyes widen slightly and she’s looking Sihyeon directly in the face, as though anywhere else would be dangerous. Sihyeon expects her to say no. Instead she says, “Maybe. After I stop being dead. It might be fun.”
Sihyeon grins. It looks goofy; she doesn’t care. Her heart feels light.
“Yeah, okay,” Ari rolls her eyes. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Infatuation: being so bewitched or captivated by something that you can’t think straight.
Tableau: a group of motionless figures representing a scene. A living picture.
Han Junkyung walks into the room and his eyes go straight to Ari. Ari stands automatically, drawn to him. Sihyeon can’t see her face. Doesn’t think she wants to.
There’s a story here, Sihyeon knows, it won’t stay a picture forever, and she doesn’t need to stick around to see it play out.
After – everything – Sihyeon goes home alone.
Maybe everything is too simplistic. It was Ari’s final plan going off without a hitch; ultimate revenge achieved. It was everyone going to jail who belonged in jail. Jin Taejeon finally facing justice. Maybe it was just Han Junkyung waking up.
Sihyeon goes home alone and lies on the floor and stares at the ceiling. She’s thinking about New York, not because of what happened there, but because coming back from that was the last time she felt this alone.
The doorway to Ari’s room yawns open and dark as a mouth.
First impressions are everything, and Sihyeon’s first impression of Seo Ari was that she was a force the world was wholly unprepared for. It turns out she was half-right. The world wasn’t prepared for Ari, but she wasn’t a force, she was only ever a person.
The floor is hard and cold. Sihyeon watches dust motes float through the air and wonders what Ari is doing now that she’s fixed everything she set out to fix. Wonders if Ari knows just how broken a trail she’s left in her wake. Wonders if Ari is thinking about her at all.
It’s over. Sihyeon has a headache. She closes her eyes.
CALLER ID: SEO ARI
Sihyeon nearly chokes on the ice cream she’s been wretchedly spooning into her mouth when she sees the screen.
“Hello?” Sihyeon does her best to sound casual, like she hasn’t been in pajamas for a week, watching movies and eating junk and not being depressed, no matter how much the internet seems to suggest symptoms of depression.
“It was Junkyung, wasn’t it? Who you were seeing before you got married.” Ari’s voice is strange, thick, like maybe the connection isn’t perfect. She sounds tired, but it’s her, and Sihyeon doesn’t know how to answer – what good would it do?
“Well, I broke up with him,” says Ari. “I just wanted you to know.” And then she hangs up.
One week after Seo Ari is re-declared legally alive, Yoon Sihyeon shows up at her front door.
Ari seems surprised when she appears, but her eyes are also swollen and she looks teary and miserable and when Sihyeon says, “Why would you do that,” it is more an accusation than a question. She says, “Why would you break up with him, Ari, he loves you, he chose you, and he makes you happy – tell me you haven’t done something stupid.”
Ari just stands there and sniffs, like she’s too exhausted to even meet Sihyeon’s energy halfway. “It wasn’t stupid, Sihyeon.”
Something in Sihyeon’s chest is sparking, she feels almost manic, fingers buzzing; her chest is filled with firecrackers. She needs to know. “Ari,” she says, “tell me you didn’t break up with him for me.”
Ari’s gaze flashes to hers so quickly it’s lightning arcing from the sky to the ground. Her eyes are bloodshot and in pain but her voice is completely neutral when she says, quietly: “Would it be so awful if I did?”
And Sihyeon’s heart is breaking in two. “Yes,” and with one word Ari’s expression is caving in on itself but Sihyeon isn’t done because – “I don’t love him, Ari, I haven’t loved him in a long time and I won’t ever love him in that way again. I need to see you happy, don’t leave him for my sake, please –“ but she has to stop because for some reason, Ari is giggling. Hysterically. There are some tears mixed in. Right when Sihyeon fears it might be more crying than laughing, Ari straightens up and wipes furiously at her eyes, shaking with some nameless emotion.
She looks better. She looks worse. She is looking at Sihyeon with the most vulnerable expression she has ever seen.
“I didn’t break up with him for your sake,” says Ari. “I broke up with him because I’m in love with you.”
Oh.
It’s a snowglobe of suspended time. The light spilling out of the house. Ari with her short hair half tied up, panda slippers. The air is crisp and the wind sends leaves scattering down the street. Sihyeon feels each individual beat of her heart, muffled and molasses in her ears. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
“You’re in love with me,” Sihyeon hears herself say dumbly.
Ari presses her lips together – she’s smiling, she’s sad, she’s afraid. She’s resigned. She nods. She has never lied to Sihyeon, never.
“Oh,” says Sihyeon, and then she surges forward and kisses Ari on the mouth.
It’s messy; it’s magnetic; Sihyeon’s hands cup Ari’s face and Ari’s hands come up to tangle in Sihyeon’s hair and she is breathless, she is exactly where she is supposed to be. Ari is sweet and warm and real and she tastes like strawberries – Sihyeon draws away just long enough to breathe and manages, “Were you eating strawberry ice cream?”
And Ari’s eyes are huge and dark and her mouth is wet and stained with Sihyeon’s lipstick and she says, “Yes, obviously, I was depressed,” and then she’s pulling Sihyeon back into the kiss, message clear: Stop talking.
After, love-drunk and reeling, both of them panting lightly, Sihyeon strokes Ari’s hair away from her temples and says, “I always knew you were going to change everything.”
Ari peers up at her with their artificial high heels-to-slippers height difference and says, “That’s really melodramatic, Sihyeon-ah, what are you talking about?”
Sihyeon kisses her again then just because she’s allowed, just because she wants to see the dazed look in Ari’s eye. Then she says, “You were the only one who could have worn that dress better than me,” and Ari snorts and Sihyeon is so in love she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Ari takes her hand and leads her into the house and for the first time, Sihyeon decides she’s okay with that.