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Seo-hyun often visits in the middle of the week.
Hi-soo isn’t quite sure when it began. After moving out of the Hyowon mansion, she remembers spending about a week alone in Querencia, just mulling everything over and taking strolls in the nearby park. It was like living in a daze, only occasionally breaking out of it for her nightly calls with Ha-joon. She spent her days unpacking things and sorting out the house, setting it up to be her new home now that she was in the closing lines of one chapter of her life, and was writing the start of another.
She remembers afternoons and nights spent around the house, and mornings spent at the mostly empty park. She would sit on the park bench from sunrise to midday after taking a walk around the neighborhood, or sometimes after exhausting herself from using her jump rope in her garden. The park would always be quite empty while the sun was still up, both parents and children off in workplaces and schools. The people who do come are few and far between—grandparents and toddlers, young adults with pets, teenage couples in uniform skipping classes to go on a date.
Hi-soo had gotten used to coming home under the heat of the noon sun, then eating her lunch at any time between twelve noon and four in the afternoon. One day, when the noon sun was glaring down on her garden as she got back, a familiar white car had been parked in front of her house. Seo-hyun had asked her if she had eaten already, and Hi-soo had found the clock saying twelve-thirty as Seo-hyun sat down with her around the dining table to eat.
Seo-hyun never quite announces that she’s coming—she never quite calls, and she never comes at a specific time. Still, Hi-soo had come to know when to expect her, though if somebody asked her, Hi-soo wouldn’t know how to explain how she knows that.
It’s always in the middle of the week for Seo-hyun—always in the middle of something, at the least expected times; always at the least expected moments.
Hi-soo likes it.
Today, Seo-hyun arrives here just before 10 in the morning, the midday sunlight brushing over the remnants of dew on the leaves in Hi-soo’s garden. Seo-hyun is wearing a gray pantsuit like she had the first time she came here, way back when Han Ji-yong had still been alive.
“Have you gone to work?” Hi-soo asks. They walk side-by-side, from the front gate of Querencia and in through the front door.
In the earlier days, Hi-soo thinks she would have hooked her arm around Seo-hyun’s. Now, she sticks to letting their arms brush against each other every time they take a step further into the house.
“No,” Seo-hyun says. “My schedule is free this morning. I’ll be coming to my office after lunch.”
Hi-soo turns to find those bright brown eyes looking at her. There is an art in how Seo-hyun looks at her: in Seo-hyun’s eyes, Hi-soo thinks she would find an image of herself not as she is, but as an impressionist painter would capture not the scene of nature itself, but the feelings it evokes. The way Seo-hyun looks at her reminds Hi-soo of a gushing stream in the summer, or the summer sun in the middle of a grass field—and the way an artist might waste tubes upon tubes of paint to make the right hue, to put onto canvas that which they see in their minds and give justice to the beauty they try to paint.
Seo-hyun’s schedule isn’t actually free; she freed it. She can do that. She would do that. Sometimes, Hi-soo still can’t believe Seo-hyun would do that for her. Other days, she’s thankful that she can rest assured that Seo-hyun will always be there beside her, no matter what.
“I’m reading a script for my new drama.” Hi-soo says. “You can sit with me while I read it. But you can’t tell anyone what’s in it.” Hi-soo sprinkles a dash of cuteness in there—though it makes her flush with how it feels so odd to be doing that to Seo-hyun: Seo-hyun, who has seen Hi-soo in everything from pure joy to unleashed rage to utter devastation and ruin.
Still, Seo-hyun laughs. She puts a hand on Hi-soo’s arm, and Hi-soo feels her breathing deepen.
Don’t ever let me go. Just stay, holding me, here.
“Okay, I won’t tell.” Seo-hyun says, a light in her eyes.
Hi-soo leads them into Querencia, to the sitting room. The curtains are drawn and light comes in through the floor-length windows, giving a view of the sunlit garden beyond. Distant birdsong floats into the room, and the slight chill of a midmorning breeze reaches them. Beside her, Seo-hyun walks in pure comfort and bliss as they make their way through Hi-soo’s home—with a soft smile on her face and warmth in her brown eyes.
“Oh,” Seo-hyun says when they reach the sitting room table. On the table rests the thick script Hi-soo had been reading, with a highlighter and a colored marker beside it—and a bowl of apples at the center of the table. Seo-hyun looks at her. “This wasn’t here the last time I came here, was it?”
Hi-soo smiles. “No, it wasn’t.” Hi-soo leans against the table while Seo-hyun takes a seat. “I tend to get hungry when I read my scripts, so I thought I should have a bowl of apples where I can reach them while I’m reading.”
Seo-hyun glances once at the apples, before looking back up at Hi-soo. “Do you have a knife?” Seo-hyun says. Her hair is combed back, tucked behind her ear on one side and let to fall at the side of her face on the other. She is wearing a light pattering of eyeshadow on her lids, and her lips are painted a dark brown. “Let me slice you some apples.”
She is beautiful, Hi-soo thinks, before nodding. “Okay. Let me get you a knife.”
Had it been anyone else, Hi-soo would have told them they didn’t have to slice her apples. She is perfectly fine with biting into one unbidden—just picking an apple up from the bowl and eating it. But something about the way Seo-hyun offers to do it, the way Seo-hyun smiles at her and the way Seo-hyun looks at her, the way the sunlight streams in through the glass windows of the sitting room and lights Seo-hyun’s face, makes Hi-soo oblige. For a moment, she just stands there, staring into Seo-hyun’s eyes while Seo-hyun stares back. When Seo-hyun nods, Hi-soo pushes off the table and walks to the kitchen to get a knife.
Hi-soo comes back with a knife and a plate, and sets it down on Seo-hyun’s side of the table. Hi-soo takes a seat just as Seo-hyun reaches for an apple, and Hi-soo notes the absence of a ring on Seo-hyun’s finger.
She doesn’t say a word about it. Instead, she follows suit—as Seo-hyun begins peeling the skin off an apple, Hi-soo leans back in her seat and opens her script back up. Highlights and notes stare back up at her, and she notes a certain line that jumps off the page at her.
Let me be the sword you wield in the time of darkest night.
Hi-soo looks up. Seo-hyun is halfway through peeling the apple, and the dark red skin spirals off from around Seo-hyun’s fingers, down onto the plate. Hi-soo remembers red around Seo-hyun’s fingers a long time ago, blood wrapping around and dripping down Seo-hyun’s thumb. Hi-soo remembers Seo-hyun kneeling down in front of her not long after, and had Hi-soo been in less pain that night, she thinks she would have held Seo-hyun’s face in her hands.
Anything. Seo-hyun would do anything for her.
“Here,” Seo-hyun says. In the time that Hi-soo had spent thinking, Seo-hyun had begun to cut into the apple and had sliced a section off. She hands it to Hi-soo.
Hi-soo smiles. She reaches for the slice, and notes the breath she starts to hold when her fingers brush over Seo-hyun’s hand.
Hi-soo takes a bite off the slice. It’s sweet and crunchy. Seo-hyun watches her as she does, and Hi-soo nods. “It’s good.” She says. The moment Hi-soo captures in her mind is perfect: soft birdsong floating in from outside, sunlight coming in through the glass windows, and Seo-hyun in front of her—smiling at her from behind a bowl of apples, the sunlight making Seo-hyun’s hair look brown and her eyes look gold.
Hi-soo knows that smile so well, has seen it more times than she can count. It is the exact same smile she has always seen, so what makes this one different?
Hi-soo slides the rest of the slice into her mouth. Seo-hyun has always been by her side like this—keeping her standing, making her smile, making the sun shine for her. Hi-soo doesn’t quite know what to imagine of her life had Jung Seo-hyun not been with her through some of her darkest days.
As Seo-hyun continues slicing and peeling her apples, Hi-soo imagines a life where she never runs out of apples. If there is a world where Seo-hyun could just stay here with her, always peeling and slicing her apples, Hi-soo would want to live in that world if only so Seo-hyun will never have to leave her side. And if Hi-soo’s whole life could be held in a moment, she thinks this moment with Seo-hyun would come close to it.
Seo-hyun used to come when she knew Hi-soo was likely to be busy. If Hi-soo was moving furniture around that day, or had bought another piece to decorate the house with, Seo-hyun would come just as Hi-soo rolled her sleeves up and stood at the edge of the room. If Hi-soo was spending her time rehearsing alone that day, Seo-hyun would come just as Hi-soo stumbled on her first creative block.
Now, Seo-hyun comes even at the times when Hi-soo had nothing to do.
Querencia is almost fully furnished and decorated, and it had been more than just a few weeks since she had moved in. The dust is beginning to settle in the corners of Hi-soo’s house, and so are the memories she keeps in her heart. The turbulent events of months passed had become muffled behind glass, and while Hi-soo still got nightmares sometimes, they feel like another lifetime, another existence compared to the peace that she moves through every hour in recent days.
So, some afternoons, Hi-soo doesn’t quite have much in mind. There is the option to spend the afternoon in the park, or while the hours away watching dramas and movies either of recent years or of her youth. Often, more often than not, Hi-soo finds Seo-hyun deciding for her what her afternoons would be occupied with.
“Hyungnim,” Hi-soo says, a hand holding her front door open.
“Dongseo.” Seo-hyun says, smiling. Hi-soo thinks if Seo-hyun were to just stand there looking at her like that, Hi-soo would not mind at all. The sun could get covered by clouds, and a light drizzle might fall on her garden, but she would not move—not while Seo-hyun stands there, smiling at her. “Are you busy today?”
“No.” Hi-soo says. “Would you like to come in?”
For some reason, Hi-soo feels her lungs chasing after a breath when those words leave her tongue. Seo-hyun comes in, and the breath Hi-soo’s lungs chase is replaced by the scent of Seo-hyun’s perfume. Hi-soo’s eyes shut close; in this life and the next, she thinks she’ll know Seo-hyun solely by the smell of the air after she passes by.
As has become habit, Seo-hyun leads them into the sitting room and sits around the table by the window. Hi-soo follows, taking the seat opposite her. Hi-soo has since begun to leave a knife and a plate by the bowl of apples, just in case Seo-hyun comes to visit that day. Seo-hyun slides it to her side of the table, and takes an apple to peel.
They don’t quite speak. Hi-soo watches the way a small smile forms on Seo-hyun’s lips, and the way the smile stays there while the apple gets peeled.
The air smells of the crisp scent of apples, and the sun outside gets shaded over. The plants in Hi-soo's garden sway, the leaves dancing with the soft breeze that blows. In front of her, Seo-hyun wears a navy blue blazer over a midnight blue blouse, lips painted a light red and hair slightly gelled back.
Hi-soo leans her chin on her hands. If she could keep this moment reeled into gears of magnetic tape, she would never get tired of rewinding it even when the player gets broken or the cassette gets worn. If, she thinks, she could project the moments of her life in the walls of her mind, this would be one of those moments in time that she would always want playing.
The red skin of the apple falls in a perfect spiral onto the plate, and Seo-hyun digs the knife into the side of the apple. Hi-soo looks up at Seo-hyun’s face. Seo-hyun’s eyes dart up, catching Hi-soo’s gaze.
Hi-soo is not quite sure which she feels more: the immature urge to blush and look away, or the comfort and bliss at being under Seo-hyun’s gaze.
Seo-hyun says nothing, and goes back to cutting through the apple.
Seo-hyun likes to cut the apple in quarters before slicing them into the usual pieces. At times, the apple would have a quarter of it sliced off while Seo-hyun and Hi-soo shared two of the three slices that come out of the quarter sliced off the apple. Seo-hyun eats her apples like a goddess—barely a drop of juice falling from her lips, not a smudge of it coming off on her fingers. It almost seems inhuman. But, then again, Seo-hyun has, more than once, bit into the seed of an apple. When Seo-hyun does, her face would scrunch up from the bitter taste—and Hi-soo finds that charming. Seo-hyun would laugh in embarrassment before handing Hi-soo another slice.
Seo-hyun slices into the quarter of the apple and hands Hi-soo a slice.
“Is there a reason why you always watch me slice you apples?” Seo-hyun says.
Hi-soo laughs. “Do I need a reason to?”
Seo-hyun’s brown eyes look back up at Hi-soo. On her lips, Seo-hyun’s smile widens, and it just makes Hi-soo shrug and lean back in her seat.
‘Do you have a reason to? ’ is the question in Seo-hyun’s eyes.
‘Would I be watching you if I didn’t want to? ’ is the answer Hi-soo delivers.
Seo-hyun chuckles, looking away from Hi-soo and back down on the apple. Hi-soo is not quite sure how much longer they sit there together, but when Seo-hyun leaves, it is almost sunset.
Just as Seo-hyun leaves, Oh Soo-young arrives to drop off some scripts for Hi-soo to go over. They stand side-by-side on the front steps of Querencia, the scripts left on the table with the peeled and sliced apples. “Unnie," Soo-young says to Hi-soo as they watch Seo-hyun drive away. "You didn’t tell me you liked your apples peeled.”
Hi-soo turns to look at Soo-young. Soo-young mocks a pout, as if to say ‘we’ve known each other for so long, how could you not have told me?’
“What?” Hi-soo says. “I don’t really mind if they’re not.”
When Hi-soo goes back inside after seeing Soo-young off as well, she notes how Soo-young did not seem convinced of her answer. She also notes that Soo-young seemed to not really be asking her about apples at all.
Hi-soo had found it impossible to focus on the script she was reading.
She had been reading the same line over and over again for the past few minutes. How did it even fit in the story? How would she even deliver it? She was barely getting a grasp on the words on the page, and no matter how many times she tried, nothing was sinking in. What does the line even say? She isn’t sure, couldn’t even absorb it enough to retain the most basic idea of what the character is supposed to be saying.
Her stomach grumbles. The bowl of apples is just within reach, just beyond the script she had finally dropped onto the table with a sigh.
She stares at the bowl, and the heaping pile of apples in it. She could take one and bite into it, just like that, just as she always has. Hi-soo had never minded eating apples whole—just biting into it and letting the juice flow down the side of it, whether it made a mess or not. In her life in and after Hyowon, the action even made her feel somewhat grounded—she is still the same Seo Hi-soo who had worked herself from the ground up to get to what success she has attained, and no amount of money or luxury will make her forget that.
But, she thinks, she wants her apples peeled and sliced.
She sighs. She moves her script aside and slides the plate and knife over to her side of the table. It is a bit odd, she thinks, for the plate to be here and not on the other side. She takes an apple from the pile and begins to peel.
When Seo-hyun peels her apples, Seo-hyun would focus on nothing else but the apple. Seo-hyun’s eyes would zero in on where she was peeling, and every stroke of the knife, every movement of her thumb, every slight rotation of the apple is done with rapt attention and deftness. Hi-soo often finds it hard to keep her eyes away from Seo-hyun. Though, perhaps, she simply couldn’t keep herself from watching Seo-hyun.
Watching Seo-hyun peel and slice apples. Watching Seo-hyun walk through her wardrobe. Watching Seo-hyun throw away empty boxes of takeout, washing dishes and glasses after they share a meal at dinnertime.
Seo-hyun, trying to cook her lunch. Seo-hyun, relaxing on her couch. Seo-hyun, falling asleep in the guest bedroom, head angled towards the window to the garden where Hi-soo had been moments prior.
Seo-hyun, glasses on her nose, going through work emails while Hi-soo tried to read a script.
“Seo-hyun-ah.” Hi-soo tests on her tongue. Hyungnim. It had always been Hyungnim. And she doesn’t mind, doesn’t really want to change it, likes the sound of that word with her voice knowing there is only ever one person she really calls Hyungnim.
(Jin-hee doesn’t count—Hi-soo has never really even seen her since she left.)
“Seo-hyun-ssi.” Ji-yong-ssi . Before he had asked her to marry him and before she had finally let herself call him her boyfriend, she had since dropped the formalities and simply called him, Ji-yong-ssi . It was the name she used to whisper in his ear before giving him a chaste kiss on the cheek. It was the name she used to call out in a Korean convenience store in London to let everyone know he was hers. It was the name she used when she had said yes, she was going to marry him, she was going to spend the rest of her life with him, loving him.
“Aein.” Sweetheart . Lover . Hi-soo remembers Seo-hyun using that word once. They were walking down the stone path from the parking lot to the houses, and Hi-soo’s arm had been hooked around Seo-hyun’s. Lover. That was the word Seo-hyun used.
Hi-soo wonders who she was, and how it was that Seo-hyun came to love her. Hi-soo wonders how that lover made Seo-hyun feel, if she made Seo-hyun laugh, or cry. Hi-soo wonders if Seo-hyun was happy with her, and if she had been Seo-hyun’s happiness once—enough to make Seo-hyun wish she could watch her all her life, may it be her peeling apples or simply her being alive.
Hi-soo’s lips part, and her fingers still. The apple is half-peeled, and the red of the skin rests on the plate. Seo-hyun’s happiness? Or perhaps…
“Mine.” Hi-soo tests it on her tongue. “Jung Seo-hyun. My,”
Oh .
Hi-soo is in love with her.
Seo Hi-soo had fallen in love with Jung Seo-hyun.
“My love,” she tests on her tongue, on her lips. Her heart races; it feels… right. “Jung Seo-hyun.”
“My love.” The voice makes Hi-soo jump. To her left, Seo-hyun stands at the edge of the room with a hand in her pocket. Her smile is as soft as ever, and it makes Hi-soo’s heart skip. She is supposed to be afraid of what Seo-hyun might have overheard. Instead, Hi-soo feels herself smile.
“Hyungnim.” She says, though it suddenly feels hollow. Lacking, somehow, though she is not sure why.
Seo-hyun walks towards her. “Do you want me to peel that for you?” She says. She takes the seat opposite Hi-soo. Hi-soo takes care to remember to breathe, after seeing the way the sun hits Seo-hyun’s face from this angle. “You seem to have a lot more of that script to read, my love.”
My love . Hi-soo feels herself flush. When Seo-hyun looks up from the apple and into her eyes, Hi-soo has to look away.
Hi-soo clears her throat. “Alright.” She hands Seo-hyun the apple. With deft skill and absolute familiarity, Seo-hyun takes the apple and continues to peel it, just as she has done so many times before. Hi-soo relaxes back into her seat. “My love.”
Hi-soo watches the smile twitch up on Seo-hyun’s lips. My love. My love. My love, Jung Seo-hyun. Hi-soo wants to say it out loud, wants to say it again and again and again, but finds it a little embarrassing to do so. She isn’t a high school girl anymore, experiencing love for the first time.
Instead, Hi-soo rests her chin in her hands, and watches Seo-hyun peel and slice the apple. When Seo-hyun meets Hi-soo's eyes, Seo-hyun’s fading smile jumps back again, and a soft blush blooms on her cheeks.
Later, when Soo-young comes out of Hi-soo's study after sorting out the scripts that Hi-soo had rejected, she asks if Hi-soo is about to start dating again. Hi-soo denies it, though with how she feels herself smile and blush, she knows that Soo-young knows she’s lying.