Chapter Text
Soo-ah was eight when she had her first kiss.
It was one of the first memories she considered important, even though it wasn’t really a moment her adult self came to consider as very important. At least, not for a while . . .
It was a summer afternoon, back when the Park and Jang family still pretended to like each other, more pretending on the Jang side, and that of the patriarchal figure than his son who was ten and still young enough to care more about playmates than social standing. Mr. Park would come with Saeyori and Soo-ah, who spent most summers in the Park house than the orphanage.
And, being that Saeyori had a father who cared and was also passionate about following him about than playing, Soo-ah and Geun-won would run about shouting with laughter over nothing, seeing who could swing the highest on the expensive Jang swingset, and being absolute children.
When the energy would run out and they lay under a sprawling oak, red-faced and sweaty and staring up at the blue, blue, blue summer sky . . . they would talk.
“Ha-yoon told me she’s going to kiss someone this summer,” she said in the midst of their conversation about summer plans.
Geun-won shot up at the word kiss. “Is she old?”
Soo-ah shook her head, her ponytails swatting at her cheeks and swiped the sticking hairs away with the back of her hand. “No, she’s younger.”
The boy made a thoughtful sound reminiscent of Mr. Park, a sound elderly enough to have Soo-ah laugh and call him ajussi to which Geun-won shrieked and declared he was not close enough to that horrible, awful age of forty plus.
“Have you kissed anyone?” he asked her once their squabble had been settled.
(Soo-ah had successfully kept away from his smacking hands during their sprinted circles around the tree.)
She made a face and shook her head, still catching her breath.
“Me either.”
She sat up then, suddenly very, very serious. Serious enough that Geun-won’s expression turned from sweaty and tired to sweaty and tired and leery.
“We should do it,” she suggested. She lifted up her two pointer fingers and brought them carefully, delicately together for a brief moment. “It isn’t that difficult.”
“But you’re a girl,” was his immediate retort.
“Do you want to kiss a boy?”
He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No, I would like to hit boys instead.”
Soo-ah nodded decisively and then got to her feet, beckoning for him to stand up as well. “Okay, so we do it. And then we can tell everyone we’ve kissed someone and they’ll be super impressed.”
Geun-won got to his feet and rubbed at his mouth with the heel of his hand before squeezing his eyes shut and pushing his lips out in a way that reminded her of their extremely fat school goldfish.
“You look funny,” she told him.
“You’re not supposed to be looking!” he shrieked, opening his eyes and glaring at her. “I’ve seen the dramas! They always close their eyes when they kiss.”
“They also have a ballad playing,” she reminded him.
He nodded and then sprinted into the house, quickly returning with his small CD radio he’d gotten quite recently and was very proud of. It was already playing his favorite album of recent, the newest SG Wannabe.
“Like this?” He skipped through the tracks until Partner for Life kicked in with its hiphop style mixed with traditional instruments that began playing tinnily out of the small speakers.
Soo-ah listened for a moment and then shrugged. “Yeah, that works.”
He grinned and set the player down and then resumed his pose of earlier: squeezed eyes, pushed out lips, hands clasped at the small of his back.
She sighed heavily and then stepped forward, closing her eyes as well.
When their lips met, it was not as fun or romantic as Ha-yoon had told her it would be; it was wet and squishy and weird, like canned squid arms.
Geun-won made almost the same sound of disgust as she did, the two of them stepping back and wiping at their mouths with a betrayed look.
“Who likes that?” he declared, bending down and immediately turning off the music mid-chorus.
“Not me,” she said, frowning at him. “I do not think it is such an important thing anymore.”
He nodded in agreement and then they heard the familiar siren call of an ice cream truck tinkling faintly up the main road.
“Ice cream!” they both shouted, and began racing towards the front yard.
<>
Soo-ah was his first kiss.
It was one of his younger moments that Geun-won held onto as he grew older and the shadowed edges of his childhood began to drown the sunshine out with the first time his father struck him in anger instead of discipline or the first time Soo-ah told him to leave her alone. It was the fact he clung to despite her refusals, despite the aloof demeanor she treated him with . . . the fact that, once upon a better time, they had been friends.
It was summer, back when their families visited often. Well, the Jang family were the visitors but his father still let them in.
They’d usually bring Soo-ah with them, keeping her out of the orphanage as often as possible. She was taller than him and her hair was long and pretty and they both had a shared favorite ice cream flavor - salted caramel pecan. He hadn’t been forced to attend business meetings with his father back then, free to run about and be an actual fucking kid.
During the hottest part of the day they would lie under the big oak in the back yard, an old, twisted and towering tree that his father said had been tended to by their family for several generations, perhaps even planted in the end of the Joseon dynasties.
That afternoon she had started talking about her classmates and how, as girls tip-toed into being women, their goals suddenly changed. Instead of playing it was scheming, plotting, planning to get kisses.
Until, he realized, as Soo-ah told him, it wasn’t an almost-woman . . . it was a girl who was younger than them.
He thought for a moment if he, too, was supposed to be thinking about kissing for some time then. He also briefly wondered if kissing boys was the only kind of kissing to think about . . . but, no, he was a boy. No, no, then he had to think about kissing girls, right?
Right.
“We should do it,” she said.
He looked over to see her bring her pointer fingers up and press the pads of them together, pushing them in a moment before putting her hands down.
“They’ll be super impressed about us,” was the conviction he needed at the time.
And so he got up and wiped his mouth clean before he screwed his eyes in closed and pursed his lips in what he thought to be the best kissing preparation.
“You look funny,” Soo-ah said.
He vaguely remembers screaming something about dramas and what he considered to be proper methods about kissing.
Music, they had music!
He went into the house, sprinting past a glare from his father in the room where him, Mr. Jang, and Saeyori were discussing a new recipe. He grabbed his CD radio, the newest SG Wannabe album his father had commented on and said was for punks.
Geun-won liked being a punk then and he liked the track he picked, skipping through until Partner For Life began playing.
And then, the moment where he closed his eyes, felt her hand bump into his shoulder, and then . . .
Gross.
Oh, it was weird and wet like gummy candy held too long in the mouth.
He pulled away from Soo-ah with a mutual sound of disgust, scrubbing at his lips as he glared at her.
“Who likes that?” he asked, immediately shutting off the song mid-chorus. And agreed with her when she said that it didn’t feel important.
But, as he grew and that memory replayed through an older mind, it turned from awkward to special.
And,
oh, how he clung to it through the years, hoping for a repeat.