6. Who Says All I Do Is Push You Away?
A long while passed like that.
The hands we had been holding in silence came apart.
As if to break the long quiet, Baek Serin let out a small breath and let her voice slip free.
"...It didn't feel like this back then."
"No. It didn't."
All that remained was an afterglow—body heat so faint you couldn't tell whose it had been—slowly coming undone. A trace of dampness still clung there. It hadn't even been that long, and yet the strange warmth in my palm refused to fade.
"So I can hold your hand now? Not just your wrist?"
"If I told you not to, you wouldn't. Right?"
"...You hated it that much?"
Was that the answer she'd been waiting to pull out of me? Or had she only wanted to catch the sight of me embarrassed? I knew exactly what you wanted to hear, and still some useless mischief got the better of me.
"Have I ever once told you I didn't want something?"
"Sleeping together."
"...Yeah. That one I did."
Hm. Didn't see that coming.
Looking back, no matter what Baek Serin did, I seemed to have let it pass with a simple oh, that's just how she is. We already knew each other's dislikes inside and out, so without ever meaning to, our habits had bent themselves around one another.
That was the problem.
As of today, all of it had shattered—as if the distance we'd been holding so carefully between us had finally given way.
I shoved the tangled thoughts aside and spoke first.
"Holding hands should be fine, shouldn't it? It's a long way below living together."
"Then how far do you think this goes?"
"Do we really have to settle that right now?"
"I don't want to do anything you don't like."
"......"
We hadn't been meeting each other's eyes. Our gazes had been aimed at empty air, and for a moment they turned toward one another.
More precisely—it would be truer to say that I stepped into Baek Serin's gaze, which had been fixed on me the whole time without a single waver.
Barely half a day had passed since she'd turned honest, and already the relationship we'd carried all this way was cracking at speed.
"...This isn't like you."
The words slipped out like a mutter before I knew I was saying them. I didn't bother tacking on an excuse to scoop them back up. They were already out, and no one would understand what they meant better than Baek Serin herself.
"Maybe this is the most myself I've ever been."
"Maybe. By my standards, though, it isn't."
"And what are your standards?"
"At the very least, you were never this quiet."
With that, we stepped back into the silence.
On any other day the talk would have kept going—dumb jokes, the two of us snickering our way through them. After a short quiet, though, we crashed into each other again, sinking our teeth one after another into the things that left us both frustrated. Baek Serin, driving her feelings into me without a pause, and me, too full to hold all of it and too choked to spit any of it back out.
...God, this is suffocating.
"Don't tell me you went quiet because you can't swear."
"That's not entirely wrong."
"...Just for today, go ahead and use them."
"Guess I should."
For all that she'd agreed, Baek Serin's tone stayed perfectly calm. The usual sharp snap of her voice still seemed curled up somewhere inside whatever she was feeling.
"Ah, let's just eat. I can't breathe."
"...Crazy bastard."
In the end I couldn't stand air that thick with feeling, and I got up like I was running.
I asked myself over and over why I couldn't just take it easy and accept it. And every time, the same thought came back. If I received Baek Serin's heart with a half-formed feeling like this, wouldn't that wound her in its own way?
At the very least, I ought to be able to give back a weight equal to what you were handing me. Dating—the thing I'd always thought didn't suit us—was, at its root, exactly that. Even if it took a little time, I couldn't be the one to lie first to you, when you couldn't tell a lie at all.
Lost in the thought, I found my feet had already carried me to the kitchen. A single plate sat alone on the drying rack: the trace of the salad Baek Serin had eaten that morning.
There was no need to call her. She'd come padding after me, so I only tossed my voice back over my shoulder.
"So that's why you're dieting."
"I've been doing that for twenty years."
"Then is this the part where I'm supposed to say you're pretty even now?"
"...Hey. Isn't that way too late?"
We both broke into a short laugh at the same time.
The fresh flutter of a brand-new romance didn't exist for us. We fit better trading pointless talk and grinning like idiots.
"You know why I work this hard to stay in shape?"
"You're going to say it's because of me again."
"Yeah. Back in elementary school you were always grabbing my stomach."
"Wow. Anyone overhearing that would get the completely wrong idea."
If I were to offer the usual excuse of the guilty party: I had no memory of it. Even thinking about it now, it was the kind of thing that would have mortified her—and ten-years-ago me had done that? If the story had ended with me getting beaten within an inch of my life, I figured I'd have counted myself lucky.
"Don't invent memories I don't have."
"It's true. Whenever we were resting after playing at the playground, you'd come up behind me and poke my belly."
"...I'll apologize on behalf of my past self."
Hm. What the hell kind of kid was I? If it had been that memorable, there was no way I wouldn't remember it.
"I was lying."
"You crazy bitch. Seriously."
"Pfft, it was a joke. I just don't want the girl next to you to be ugly and fat."
"That's seriously the whole reason?"
I opened the cupboard, set the ingredients down, and turned my head just enough to glance at Baek Serin. Serin was perched on the kitchen table, swinging her legs. Our eyes met for a second, and she let out a short little laugh.
"What? I'm the kind of woman who'll do anything to become someone who suits you."
"Why does that sound like you're telling me to put in some effort too?"
I turned back to the pan and started putting the ingredients in, and Baek Serin's voice came again. Low. Quiet.
"I shaped myself to fit you."
"......"
It took me a long time to measure what that short sentence held—long enough that I put off the answer that should have come out on reflex.
"You really do seem broken."
"Dumbass. I'm saner than anyone right now."
"Can't you just go back to being embarrassed?"
"Why? Bad for your heart?"
"Never mind. It's like you. I like it."
As if to wash out the faint sound of her laugh, I turned on the sink. I watched the water rise in the pan, then let my voice out, blurred by the sound of it.
"Was there never a time I embarrassed you?"
"...Obviously there were tons."
"Tell me, while we're at it."
I set the pan on the stove, dropped the noodles in, and only then turned to face her.
It wasn't the sulky face I was used to, or the one edged with mischief. Her eyes had settled, faintly. The corners of her mouth were back where they belonged. Calm light-brown eyes, unmistakably aimed at me.
"That's the problem. That."
"I'm asking you to explain, so why are you handing me another riddle?"
"Look. I stuck to you like that, so what did everyone around us say?"
"They asked if we were dating."
"And what did you say?"
"I don't know. I don't think I even said we were friends. Something like, beats me."
Baek Serin let out a long breath thick with frustration, dipped her head, and glared up at me with only her eyes.
"You know what my friends used to say to me?"
"I wouldn't know what girls talk about."
I'd never had much reason to get close to other girls. One Baek Serin was more than enough to fill the place of a friend of the opposite sex.
"They said they'd introduce me to other guys. Isn't that hilarious?"
"Sounds about right. We weren't exactly touchy."
"And you're the one saying that? Quit playing clueless. You knew."
Just as she said, I'd expected talk like that. It wasn't that the lack of touching kept other people from deciding we were a couple. It was simply that the two people at the center of it had never decided the relationship themselves. An extremely simple, extremely stupid story.
In the short while I was lost in the thought, Baek Serin—tired of waiting, maybe—threw her voice at me first.
"I waited for you to admit we were a couple. But you never did."
"You were the same."
"That's why we went sideways. Stuck together all day, and neither of us said we liked the other. Not once."
She was probably asking the me of now, not the me of then. Why did you hide it? Why did you only ever make it suffocating?
I wasn't sure this would count as an answer. I didn't even remember every feeling my past self had carried, and it felt wrong for the me of now to define, on a whim, the heart I'd had back then.
So. In the end, wasn't what mattered now?
"So are we apart right now?"
"No."
"Have either of us ever dated anyone else?"
"We haven't."
"Then hadn't we already decided?"
"...Decided what?"
Maybe it was an excuse for an old mistake. The answer she'd wanted was probably an explanation of why, back then, I'd been like that at all. I wasn't someone good with words, and I wasn't someone who could casually offer up talk that left nothing behind but a sugar shell.
So what, then. All I had left was honesty.
"Because I thought we'd be together for the rest of our lives."
"Of everything you've said today, that sounds the most like a lie."
As if to hide the flush starting to rise in her cheeks, Baek Serin drew a faint smile.
"Unlike a certain someone, I can still lie."
However she took it, that was what I'd thought then, and what I thought now. Not defining the two of us as lovers. Not taking an interest in any other woman. I'd simply thought it was obvious that Baek Serin would be beside me, and she'd thought the same—like people who had always left the seat next to them empty for each other. This was already everyday life for us. I'd only ever wondered why we needed a word to name it.
Then had what I'd been holding onto been not the us of now, but the us of the past?
...No wonder Serin had been frustrated.
"You know you're being completely contradictory right now? The guy who does nothing but push me away says something like that?"
"I don't hold hands with people I don't like. I don't stay with them like this, either."
"Another excuse?"
"If what you want is to hear that I like you, that one's still—"
"So why."
Silence started with Serin's question.
I turned, just slightly, and looked at what was in the pan. Heated through, it was beginning to boil. Guess this one's frustrated too, the way it's rolling like that.
Inside, the noodles and the sauce were slowly reducing. Things that had started out separate had, at some point, begun to cling together on their own. Weren't feelings the same? We were already mixed through, already soaked into each other. All that was left was to let it finish cooking. A simple thing like that.
I let out a shallow breath and let my voice drift, almost a mutter.
"Because it isn't time yet for your heart to start racing."
Not for you. Not yet.
I didn't want to set an undercooked feeling down in front of you. As if she'd read the thought, a small voice slipped out on a faint sigh.
"...How long do I have to wait?"
If this honest version of you kept going, the heat probably wouldn't cool.
"Not that long."
