Chapter 15: In English

I found him on the rocks below the bluff, forty minutes later.

Chan had wanted to go. I had made him stay, with a hand flat on his chest and the word "no."

"If he sees you, it's worse," I said. "Let me."

So I took the path down through the wet grass in my Docs.

It led to the shelf of grey rock where the tide comes in.

Hyunjin sat at the edge with his knees up and his bare feet in the water.

The fog had thinned enough to show the sea, flat and the colour of pewter.

I sat down beside him, not close.

"Your feet will freeze off," I said.

"They already have."

"That's a dancer's feet. They're an asset."

"They're a liability. I have asked them for everything and they never complain."

He did not look at me.

"I'm not angry," he said.

"You can be."

"I'm trying. It doesn't come." He pushed wet hair back with his wrist. "I'm only tired.

"I thought, this once, I'd be the first. I know that's stupid."

"It's not."

"You told me not-now, and I counted days like a child. He asked, and you said yes in an hour."

"I didn't say yes in an hour. I said it this morning, after he fixed my porch light."

That got a breath of a laugh out of him.

"He's the steady one," Hyunjin said. "I know what everybody wants from him. He's the floor.

"I'm the one who dances on it. People look at me and they stop thinking, and that's all I am to them."

"Is that what you think I did?"

"I think you're kind to me because I'm a mess.

"And when you're done being kind, you'll want the man who doesn't wake you at three."

I looked at the sea for a while.

"Hyunjin," I said. "Your feet are blue."

"Mara."

"I'm trying to have a feeling with you, and I can't while your toes are dying.

"Come up to the house."

"If I go up, he'll talk."

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