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She is a girl that presses her legs together when she sits on the bench of the bus stop. Suyeon knows this, hears the girl’s knees knock ten minutes after the girl has sat down and folded her hands on her lap, waiting. After several weeks, the girl’s mannerisms are imprinted in the back of Suyeon’s mind, calming in the kind of way that routine always is. The girl would come at 6:43 each time, voiceless, look both ways, then take a seat at the empty bench, scuff her sneakers on the cement. She would glance at Suyeon every once in a while, and Suyeon would just barely turn her head towards her, but avert her gaze, in that curious-but-unable-to-act kind of way, and they would wait. The bus would roll to a stop in front of them at 6:57, and they would sit 3 seats apart, (too far away to talk to, but too close to ignore.)
Today is no different. The girl, strands of brown falling over her winter coat, flicks her eyes over to Suyeon, then back to the lamp pole to the left. The sky is overcast, and mist seeps into the air like ferns unfurling in the day.
Autumn is well under way, and winter has sneaked along with it like the night tide climbing up the shore, slow and deceptively unnoticeable. Suyeon’s breath forms a swirling white vapor and joins the mist. The girl’s knees knock together again.
Suyeon wants to sit down next to her, place her hand on the girl’s legs, hear the soft press of fabric better.
It is 6:55, Suyeon notices. If the fog did not cover the street like paint on a canvas, Suyeon would see the bus from far away, growing bigger with every second but still appearing the same distance away.
She waits. The girl exhales.
Something is missing, Suyeon realizes, when it turns 6:56, and the girl curls up in herself against the cold burst of wind. Something so deceptively close but far away, that she cannot help but know, in the marrow of her bones, that something is off. The girl is looking down, at the sleeves of her coat, and suddenly Suyeon turns her whole head and just looks at her, feet turned in, fingers rubbing at the nail of her index finger, lips pursed, eyes struggling not to droop, her brown hair looking black as night in the white-gray sky and white-gray fog, her pretty eyelashes.
It is 6:57 and the blue of the bus is still not coming into view, and Suyeon knows that today is different, must be different, she can make it be different-
“It’s really cold today, huh?”
The girl’s head snaps up, eyes wide.
“Ha,” Suyeon smiles, breathless, on seeing the girl’s eyelashes unfold into long curled lines like black strokes on a paper scroll. She says, “I guess I should introduce myself before making small-talk, then. I’m Han Suyeon, nice to meet you. Finally talk to you, I mean.”
The bus, stuck in traffic, does not come until 7:18 and by then, Suyeon knows the feel of Park Eun Bin’s name in her mouth and the flash of her teeth when she smiles.
They take to sitting together on the bus every morning. Theirs is one of the first stops, and the vehicle suddenly feels too empty, apart from the rumble of the engine, if they sit separately, now that they have heard the other’s voice.
“I go to the bookstore a lot,” Eun Bin tells her, lips curved in a half-apologetic tone. “I want to become a lawyer, but I also just, love literature, so it’s the best of both worlds. There are books on court cases and Korean poetry, so it’s like my hangout place.”
“I don’t want to become a lawyer much,” she confides to Suyeon later, quietly, when winter has settled and the snow at their bus stop crackles underfoot as they approach the opening bus doors, sitting down in their spots. “My parents want me to be a doctor the most, but they said lawyer is also acceptable, and that has way less blood, honestly, so it’s somewhat of an easy choice.”
Her eyes are pinned to her lap, not daring to look up. Suyeon cannot stop staring at her eyebrows, drawn up on her forehead, her temples, her cheeks, the angle of her chin.
“Do you want to be an author?” Suyeon asks.
“Maybe not an author, but,” Eun Bin lifts her eyes, and the creases in her forehead smooth out like the surface of a pond, “I think it would be fun to analyze literature, you know? Maybe as a teacher, or just an expert, or something. To talk about books all day? All the impact that written and oral works have had on Korean culture and worldwide, how themes have emerged and changed with the passage of time, that kind of thing. Ah, I know, it sounds geeky,” she smiles self-deprecatingly.
Suyeon still can’t stop staring.
“No, it sounds exactly like you.”
Eun Bin blinks, puzzled and cautious. “What do you mean?”
Suyeon thinks back on the smooth edges of Eun Bin’s nails, her lidded eyes when she is deep in thought, the way she holds her binder, gingerly, as if a fragile glass window peeking into a world of knowledge, when she asks Suyeon to help her study for a test.
“I don’t mean you’re geeky or anything like that, it’s more like. You’re so observant to everything, and thoughtful, and most of all, you appreciate it for something more than mandatory reading and writing in class. That’s what’s most important, right?”
Eun Bin lights up like the horizon at sunrise. Suyeon bites on her lip.
Her smile lingers for the rest of the ride, and when she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Suyeon,” and walks to the doors, Suyeon has to grip the bus strap not to fall over. (It’s too late for that, whispers something quiet and sure in the back of her mind.)
The new term starts soon enough, and they end up in the same history class. Eun Bin is different there, sharp and quick, her hand only half-lifted but attracting the eyes of everyone when she calls out the right answer. She sits a little to the side of the center of the class, but even then she has an aura, the tilt of her head and the folds at the shoulder of her uniform aligning into something indescribably alluring.
Suyeon sits close enough to touch her.
When Eun Bin turns around, the slope of her neck like the surface of a water-worn cliff, and passes a note to Suyeon, she thinks the rushing in her ears sounds like crash of waves against stone, caressing it until smooth as glass.
Their classmates call Eun Bin a flower, shy and quiet but beautiful to look at; mysterious - someone you need to spend time with for her to unfurl her smiles, her laughs, her thoughts and secrets.
Suyeon disagrees.
Eun Bin is sneaky and cunning. She studies and reads and sends sharp glances towards those she disagrees with, thinks up arguments and counterarguments , analyzes points of view and motivations. She would make for a great lawyer, if she were not already so good at literary breakdowns and psychological profiles.
Eun Bin is deliberate, phrasing every word just so in class discussions, when Suyeon says anything and everything that’s on her mind. Words in Eun Bin’s mouth can sting like blades while they float out of Suyeon’s lips like bubbles, jumbled, easy to break, ephemeral.
Eun Bin is so dangerous, so very dangerous, the tilt of her head and the secretive glances she sends, ones that she thinks Suyeon doesn’t notice, oh but how can she not notice when she is so aware all the time, when Eun Bin is so easy to read. Eun Bin lets slip so much by the quirks of her eyebrows, her lips, the movement of her shoulders, the places she points her gaze when she cannot look at what she wants to, or the places she points her gaze when she cannot stand to stare at whatever she should. How she angles her eyes at her lap, and thinks that Suyeon cannot feel the loneliness there, or the frustration welling up, or the disappointment and the doubt and the fears.
Eun Bin is tricky, and devious. She has already invaded Suyeon’s daydreams, and flits in and out of her sleep like a shadow. She has crept in Suyeon’s thoughts and vandalized Suyeon’s notebooks, now full of her name and her notes. She has captured Suyeon’s attention, holds it tightly and won’t let go, and Suyeon is getting so tired of feeling like she’s on a rollercoaster, heart plummeting and leaping and plummeting again every time Eun Bin’s hand grazes hers.
Enough is enough. She cannot concentrate when she sits close enough to Eun Bin to poke her back with a pen when the teacher is not looking, see Eun Bin rolling her eyes and quirking up her lips. She cannot focus when Eun Bin sits next to the window on the bus and Suyeon leans in to see the cars outside and smells the lavender from her shampoo.
She has to do something about it.
“I like you,” Suyeon blurts out one day, when the bus stop is empty and no footsteps patter over the sound of their breathing. Snowflakes sink slowly in the air, as if they’re dancing in water instead, and clump together near Suyeon’s boots. It feels like they make a protective barrier around her and Eun Bin, who sits under the overhang.
“Oh,” says Eun Bin.
They take to meeting early in the morning and strolling through the sleeping neighborhood. Suyeon gets up at five, sometimes earlier, so the light of dawn cannot illuminate their threaded fingers as they clack clack clack in the gray, icy slush to the edge of the city.
They sit on a stone bench and watch the sun raise its rays over the horizon, like the hands of a drowning man climbing to the surface of the water and taking that first breath of air, so sweet and crisp and painful all at once - and Suyeon can relate, can’t she. It is her every breath when she is with Eun Bin like this, pressing her lips to Eun Bin’s temples, and feeling the vibrations under her skin when Eun Bin hums.
She did not think it could get any worse, how her heart thumps and tumbles between her lungs, erratic, as if it wishes to slam out of her ribcage and escape once and for all, but it does.
When the morning seems bitter and dark, when Eun Bin spills her anger and her tears over what her parents say and what they expect, Suyeon feels a pull toward her, wants to take Eun Bin’s face in her hands and kiss it until there are no worry lines or tear tracks, until the stress and injustice of it all has been wiped clean off her. Even when they argue, when Suyeon seems a bit too careless with everything and Eun Bin too careful, even then Suyeon cannot help but still lean into her. Even after petty fights and insecurity, Suyeon does not want to edge away from her warmth, and gradually they laugh it off and Suyeon’s heart kicks into overdrive once more.
It is a punch to the gut when, one of those early mornings, Suyeon is talking about bombing her test from the other day and chokes up. Exams do not matter to her as much as they do to Eun Bin usually; Suyeon knows she is not the smartest, neither the most studious. Yet tears prick her eyes in the biting wind, when the sun is still a tiny blip on the horizon line, as she remembers studying for this particular test, and how worthless it was in the end, and what kind of future can she have if she cannot even ace a test?
Eun Bin lifts Suyeon’s head off her shoulder, one hand lingering one her jaw and the other grasping Suyeon’s hand, and tells her, voice fierce and tight, “I can help you study; I’ll make flashcards for you and lend any notes I have, if you want to. But I want you to know, failing a test does not come close to defining you. A bad grade cannot capture you as you are, all your kindness and originality, all your efforts, your feelings, your thoughts, your wit, your initiative, even,” she breathes out gently, lips curving up, “your bad jokes, as bad as they are, make you such an amazing person.”
Suyeon’s lip trembles, and she feels like Eun Bin’s gaze, so true and unwavering and fond, (because it is fondness, that gives her eyes that warm shine, it is fondness that seeps into her words so that they feel like water flowing over her skin, flames flickering near her cheeks, both at the same time) might make her body turn incorporeal and phase through the earth.
A week after Eun Bin gifts her the mixtape, full of lighthearted melodies or low beats, visceral, filling up the spaces between her ribs, Suyeon compiles all the notes and scrawls on assignments and writes a poem.
It is arduous work, to sort through all the thoughts she had written down about Eun Bin, the smell of her perfume, or the pleasant sting of her nails digging into Suyeon’s skin, but how can she not persevere, when Eun Bin materializes in front of her every time she closes her eyes? Eun Bin is the reason for getting up early, for missing out on sleep, for feigning doing homework in the bookstore so she can brush her fingers against Eun Bin’s legs. The least Suyeon can do is dedicate a poem or two to her.
A poem or two turns into a poem for every week, because her thoughts spill over with how Eun Bin makes her feel, and the glow they cast on Eun Bin’s face after she’s read them is more than worth it.
“You chose to compare me to the moon here,” she notes, whispering in their little corner of the book store. “Did you know that the moon, in East Asian literature, is often symbolic of yearning?”
“Well. Now I do.”
Eun Bin laughs. “I thought you would know about all those stories, of loved ones separated by each other and connected only by the moon, which appears the same in all places. That’s why you’re never truly alone, if the moon is shining down upon you.” She angles her head toward Suyeon’s ear. “I’ll be with you when it is.”
Suyeon shivers. “Hey, write your own poem then, if you’re gonna show off all your fancy poetry knowledge. Don’t steal my spotlight.”
“Okay, but I just wanted to say one more thing. I also think it’s really interesting how you brought up the sun, because, “she lowers her head, and Suyeon knows that what comes next will either be incredibly personal or embarrassing (maybe both), “because if I’m the moon, then you’re definitely my sun.”
Suyeon has to laugh to keep from flushing red all over (it doesn’t work.) “That was cornier than my own poem, Eun Bin. And my poems are literally made from 100% organic, sugar-free corn.”
“Corn can’t be sugar-free, you asshole; it’s full of dextrose. And I meant what I said. You really are my sun. You make me really,” she hesitates, shoulders still tense from embarrassment, “really glad. You’re always so upbeat and headstrong, and you…” she pauses again, longer this time. Suyeon waits. She knows that whatever Eun Bin wants to say will come in time. She always needs time to say exactly the things that pierce Suyeon through the chest and free the butterflies fluttering inside.
Eun Bin swallows her apprehension and continues. “You bring a light to my life than I can only hope to reflect back to you.”
It’s like Eun Bin to delve into the associations and symbols more than Suyeon herself, even when Suyeon is the actual author. Suyeon can’t summon up a reply this time. She just stares at Eun Bin, her throat feeling like it’s too tight for the oxygen to move through it. Eun Bin glares a hole into her lap, growing more and more nervous by the second.
“Yeah, well,” Suyeon says, struggling to think with a haze in her brain, “I think that you’re my sun, and I’m. I’m a black hole, and I keep sucking your light in because you’re like, practically my everything. And, I wanna be with you all the time, uh, and-” Okay, this metaphor isn’t working half as well as that of Eun Bin. Suyeon should stick to non-fiction from now on.
“Was that meant to sound dirty?” asks Eun Bin lightly, though her eyes are still cautious and her hands are curled into fists from earlier.
“Haha, if you want it to be, with your mind being constantly in the gutter and all,” says Suyeon, winking, though really her head is still reeling from what Eun Bin said before and soon there will be a sob building up in her lungs, in her throat, and not enough laughter in the world will be able to mask it. She feels as if she’s been stripped raw, Eun Bin’s sun, and how can she possibly one-up that, when she’s been caught in Eun Bin’s own orbit from the very beginning.
“You’re,” she begins, clearing her throat of the feeling that’s lodged there, “you’re my moon because I am the tide. I want to be with you. You pull me up from my disappointments and my failures and teach me to reach higher-” is all she can get out before breaking into nervous giggles. Eun Bin’s lips tremble a little, but she’s watching, a darker shade to her eyes that Suyeon knows means that she’s thinking very deeply, judging, scrutinizing, and why is this so much different than other times, Suyeon’s voice does not waver like this, her heartbeat does not thrum so shallowly, Eun Bin does not look so careful, eyebrows lowered in musing, even when they’re in a public place like this, what did Suyeon do.
After forever, or just a few seconds, Eun Bin turns toward the book shelves, thumbing the spine of a big blue book gently. “Your poetry has gotten better,” she utters softly, slowly, but her head is in thought somewhere else.
“You love me,” says Eun Bin, sitting at a bench at the edge of the park at 5:30am a few days later, looking up at Suyeon. “You really love me.”
Suyeon takes in the bags under her eyes, the sharp incline of her shoulders under her heavy winter coat, the fur-lined hood framing her face, which has gone pale; the steady tone of her voice, almost defiant, while her hands shake. Suyeon knows it is not from the cold.
“I do,” admits Suyeon.
Eun Bin’s deep exhale, the instinctive slant of her head towards the sky, and the relief nestled in the sag of her shoulders makes it worth it.
It’s when the book store is 20 minutes to closing, when everyone has shuffled off to their own homes while they have locked themselves in a tiny bathroom with light blue wallpaper and a stand of magazines, that Eun Bin loses herself in Suyeon as much as Suyeon does in her.
The edge of the stand digs into Suyeon’s shoulders where she has sat down, Eun Bin straddling her lap.
“We only have a few minutes,” Suyeon gasps out, the feel of Eun Bin’s fingers running down her hair.
“No, silly,” Eun Bin says, pulling on the brown strands so Suyeon lifts her chin, “we have our whole lives.”
Eun Bin mouths kisses down her throat, her ragged breaths tickling Suyeon’s clavicle when she pauses there, and lifts her eyes to see Suyeon again. Eun Bin’s pupils are black and blown wide and Suyeon feels ready to drown in them when Eun Bin says, “Can I take off your shirt this time?”
(Eun Bin’s hands are sliding up her stomach, like tendrils of something not quite solid, like a breeze, etching fluttering strokes across her skin. Suyeon loves her like this, when she’s forgetting all about the outside world, the worry, the stress, the acting like they’re just friendly classmates sharing homework tips. She loves when Eun Bin remembers only to press her forehead against Suyeon’s and share the same breath of air as Suyeon. She loves when Eun Bin looks at her like she’s realized something so precious and important, something more valuable than a grade or a job or a parent’s approval, something that makes her lose all focus of the dirty ground her knees are touching or the heavy whirr of the air conditioning, and pin Suyeon with it instead.)
Suyeon bites her lip so much she wonders whether it looks as cracked and dry as her throat feels. “Yes,” she utters, voice breaking, “Please.”
“This is for you,” whispers Eun Bin, when she is hugging Suyeon from behind, and slides her hands down Suyeon’s arms. She takes Suyeon’s hand (and her touch burns, even after all this time,) and slips on something icy on her finger.
Suyeon’s reply falters, her brain sputters to a stop.
The ring glints yellow in the light of a nearby lamppost, though Suyeon knows objectively that it must be whitish-silver, if it really is one of those, collector’s edition, combining white gold with silver, only 1000 in existence, the jewels arranged in a wave that curves across her finger like the press of Eun Bin’s lips.
“W-Wh- How-“
“I bought them with the money I get from disc jockeying,” explains Eun Bin, sudden and curt, shoulders raised against the cold (or maybe to hide how nervous she feels, thinks Suyeon, in the still functioning part of her brain.)
She nods twice to herself, and Suyeon regains enough of her bearings to actually form a sentence.
“Th- It’s like. A marriage proposal then.”
Eun Bin gapes, opens her mouth and closes it and opens it again, floundering. Finally she turns her head, eyes boring into the trash bin to the side.
“I can’t believe you bought me a ring and didn’t even think how this could be construed.” Her laugh sounds very far away, eclipsed by the torrent in her ears and the drumbeat of her heart, how she feels like she’s dying and coming alive at the same time.
Eun Bin finally speaks. “Bought us a ring,” she croaks, swallowing her surprise, “I bought us a pair, for both of us. As girlfriends.”
She takes out a matching band from her pocket, its metal twinkling almost as much as Suyeon’s eyes.
“And this makes it seem like less of a marriage thing how?”
“Just shut it and say thank you already,” Eun Bin says, rolling her eyes, and leans in to kiss her. Suyeon feels her smile and tastes elation in it, and her knees finally give way.
Eun Bin is a flower, sure, but she is one of the carnivore ones, dangerous, deceptive, and look at what she’s done to Suyeon:
Her chest aches when she’s not with Eun Bin, but it aches when she is with her too. Her heart either beats too fast, like that of a hummingbird, or not at all, as if her breath her pulse her gaze her existence freezes like it’s liquid nitrogen that has touched her, and not the cool metal ring that Eun Bin slips on her finger when they are all alone. She stares at their selfies together for eons at a time, and her eyes always slide to the hickeys she has left on Eun Bin’s neck, and her mind drifts off to when they giggled all the way to the store together to buy concealer, applying it on the other’s skin for school the next day. She feels like an alien, so completely removed from the rest of her friends, caught up in a clandestine escapade that makes the blood crash through her arteries like water overflooding the banks of a stream (and that cannot be healthy, Suyeon thinks.)
And what should love be, if not something that feels as though it’s precipitating a heart attack? Whoever said that love was like floating in the sky or lying on clouds at heaven’s gate, never experienced love, never truly loved, Suyeon thinks; Love is like plunging down the earth from the stratosphere, streaking down the sky like a comet, air ripping through your throat and rain piercing your skin like blades, it is swift and painful and destructive, it is her every glance cleaving your chest in two, you cannot breathe, you cannot think, when she is near. It is when she bites her knuckles to keep from laughing too hard, it is the flit of her eyelashes when she looks down at her book, or her nails, or at your hands at her hips. It is a pleasure so immense your heart folds in on itself like a church with no supports collapsing from within (with a groan and a rip and a crash of wood and stone and living tissue, and no such wreckage should feel so incredibly good, Suyeon thinks.) It is like leaping in icy water, so freezing cold it feels like setting fire to her own skin, and Suyeon would be totally okay with that, so long as Eun Bin continues fitting her fingers in those of Suyeon each passing day. It is her downfall, great and terrifying and unstoppable and exhilarating and so immeasurably simple, to love Eun Bin.
Suyeon thinks this in class, scribbling notes halfheartedly on the axis of planets and gravitational pull of the Moon, and falls and falls and falls again, and the worst thing is, she saw this coming. She saw it all coming and still fell into it like a fly in honey, she’s trapped in Eun Bin’s looks, in her eyelashes, in her winter coat and her pleated skirt, in the soft skin between her knuckles, and she has no plans to get out, because Eun Bin is so very intoxicating, and she saw it coming, she did, but that just makes it sweeter that she fell into the feeling anyway.
“I love you,” Suyeon says to her, rushing towards her first thing in the morning.
Eun Bin presses her face in the juncture of Suyeon’s throat and chin, and her eyelashes tickle, and Suyeon never wants to forget the warmth of sharing yourself with another.
“I know,” she says simply.
A spring wind blows this morning at the bus stop. It pushes the fog out and brings the taste of rain and greenness in the air. It is the time that buds appear along branches and flowers bloom, and Eun Bin blooms along with them, bright and smart and beautiful, and just as eager to discover more about Suyeon as Suyeon is about her. Spring brings with it a reinvigorating scent of newness, of dew along the patches of grass and just the tiniest sprinkle of frost as a reminder of what they have been through, what they have passed now, and how much more remains to do with one another once the cold melts away and butterflies unfold their wings from their pupa skins. How there can still be so much left to experience with a person that she has known for months, Suyeon does not quite know, but she savors the feeling in her bones anyway, something so very right that she wonders how she did not feel its absence in the days before she met Eun Bin.
They wait again, under the overhang where they first met, what feels like lifetimes ago. The bus is late.
“I do have a test today,” Eun Bin mentions, and the angle of her arched eyebrow could rupture the bus driver’s confidence and make him fear for life, even at this distance. Suyeon stares and bites her lip to keep from smiling.
“You have too many tests these days anyway. What’s wrong with missing one?”
Eun Bin scoffs, to hide her laughter. Suyeon loves how the sun bounces off her hair and spills into her lap. Suyeon wants to rest her head there, where it is warm and she does not feel anything else but Eun Bin’s breaths, chest rising and falling gently.
“I think, I’d be more than okay with spending my time here instead of doing a test anyway,” Eun Bin admits.
“Yeah? I’d like it even better if you just skipped school altogether and came over to my place instead,” Suyeon says, her hand sliding surreptitiously across the bench to that of Eun Bin.
Eun Bin laughs, throwing her head back, and the sound vibrates in the air, clings to the breeze, and Suyeon breathes it in and thinks, it tastes like spring.
Eun Bin glances around her, around them, still grinning but ever the cautious one, and when she’s sure that no one is nearby, at 6:59am, she grabs Suyeon. Eun Bin holds her face, her palms resting on Suyeon’s cheeks like they’re holding her in place in case she disappears, and Eun Bin says, “What would I even do without you?”
Suyeon laughs, heart swooping in her chest, “You’d probably get even better grades than you do now.”
Eun Bin’s eyebrows bunch up, lips turning up into a smile-pout. “It would be living a life only half-whole,” she says. Her cheeks frame her eyes, crinkled like she’s joking, but she’s so completely serious that the breath is knocked out of Suyeon again, like it does every time that Eun Bin waxes poetic and all she can hear is her heart in her throat.
Suyeon feels herself drop into a space in the world that’s all hers, dropping into freefall all over again, dropping into Eun Bin’s arms, because (finally), Eun Bin is there to catch her now.