The light of the sun coming through the surrounding forest's trees and the cottage's windows tell her that it is morning, disturbing her sleeping. She has never been one able to sleep through sunlight. And neither has the man over whom she is draped. And yet, he does sleep, his grip on her commanding enough to impede her easily extricating herself. Certainly, he would not sleep through such an exit on her part.
She uses this interval of her entrapment to keep watch on his face; the cool, smooth cheeks, the lashes, the scattered scruff that will signal he needs a shave this day. As always, he fascinates her, an artwork worthy of endless scrutiny.
She should have a baby that looks like him, she thinks, startling herself with the force of her longing for such a thing. But above even this, she knows what she wants is him; sincerely, aspirationally, and desperately. The last three days feels of nothing so much as a hefty penance he has levied on both of them, his absenting himself from everything in this cottage-world they have come to vacation in—absenting himself from her. She all but immediately sees such a move as his strategic withdrawal, understands it for what it is. And yet it found her racking her brain to try and devise a way he would allow her into the circle of his anguish, a way to create a conversation out of his closed-door reaction and interior retreat.
Through this she never doubts that he is her desire, her truest wish. And that, conversely, she longs so to be his.
Two nights gone of their abrupt separation, she wandered the cottage much as she had the night prior—before laying down on the floor alongside the couch he occupied. She had dismissed herself before he woke, that morning-after, uncertain what she had enacted and endured on the hard floor was not more for her own necessity than his.
And yet last night, as the hour crept into the wee smalls, she took the risk, the risk of a rejection she knows she would not have well-endured. He had to have awaken at some point, she tells herself, and found her. He must know she is here consciously—and not merely unconsciously in the way he embraces her still, the way in which her body has been allowed to conform to his—even their temperatures synched, his need of this superseding his shock and dismay—the chaos she knows embroils his waking mind at the challenge they have been handed.
It is her full intention to be brave and hold her place at his side until he wakes, until he is forced to encounter her in this intimate space, but as the moments wear on, she finds she can no longer fully ignore the cramping of her muscles from the inconvenient, contorted position she has found herself in for several hours.
Once again she finds herself in the borrowed cottage's bathroom. He did not wake upon her dismount of the couch and his sleeping figure, his exhaustion more complete than even she had imagined. Standing up from her seat on the toilet, she swears under her breath at what she sees, for there, after eight-and-a-half weeks, is the answer, arrived.
In possession of only two tampons—her emergency stash—in her purse, and no other products with her, she dresses quickly and somewhat haphazardly in order to drive to a pharmacy in town, more than half expecting to sneak out still without disturbing him.
On the kitchen countertop she rummages through her purse, not wanting to carry her entire handbag for such a short trip, looking instead for her wallet. She feels him walk up behind her, out of her sight—though he stands at a distance far enough away science would argue she could not possibly sense him there.
Her hand closes on the wallet and she pulls it out and to her chest, so distracted by knowing he is near she does not notice her bag fall over, other of its contents spilling out onto the counter, a few bits falling as far as the floor.
She turns, all to-business, and his eyes come up to hers from wherever he had been looking. To her, he appears more together, less tousled than a man newly-waked should. His eyes are remarkable in the fact that they are, in this moment—unlike every moment of the last three days—seeking out hers. It appears he has taken in and processed the car keys and wallet filling her hands.
It's a foolish sentence to stumble over, a ridiculous statement to feel the need to pre-plan and edit, and yet the weight its few words carry is ponderous and unfamiliar. She does not know for certain where its knowledge will send him, if she will be able, again, to reach him there.
"I have to go out," she says, "I've started my period."
"These things can happen," he hears her say. "I mean, they've never happened to me—I'm like clockwork. But I'm told they can happen. And do."
He has no trouble understanding what she is saying. His comprehension speed is twenty-fold of what it was three days ago. The world of the borrowed cottage all about him unfocusses, and nothing is clear to him save Se-Ri's face, the knuckle-white where she is holding the car keys too tightly to easily explain.
"I have to get to the pharmacy and back," she repeats her plans to him, his mind cycling through wanting to delay her departure, to keep her here.
It pings on the coming doctor's appointment. "There'll be no need for the doctor, then," he asks, trying to get her to keep talking.
"I'll keep the appointment," she tells him, but he sees her looking over his shoulder rather than at his face. "I have to—we have to—I see that stronger measures will have to be put in place to be more certain—" she gulps and then speaks at speed, like a scooter gaining momentum travelling downhill, "we are not in a similar position in future." By the time she reaches, 'future', her hand is on the exterior door's knob, and he cannot be certain that as her foot reaches the cottage's front step her voice doesn't break into something like a gasped sob.
She knows she has left him awash in a new dilemma, standing in the borrowed cottage's kitchen, as she drives away down the gravel path through the tall verdant trees of the forest escaping into the nearby village. She knows it's the opposite of what she wants to do. Knows that one touch—one deliberate reaching out on his part-would render her where she wants—where she most needs-to be, in his embrace. Collected to him like a treasure, like something only his.
For three days they have been magnets, their like-poles facing, repulsive of each other, unable to properly align themselves. She ignores the radio knob calling to her to play something to help remove her mind from the situation. She resists.
Instead, she puts the windows down, the moonroof open, the wind created by her speed pounding into the car's interior, trying to tear her hair from her ponytail, reminding her that she is capable of sensations other than grief, that she should breathe, that the earth was fecund with possibility even if—for this moment, this time period, such did not extend to her.
The kitchen dims somehow upon her exit, its trappings sharpening into focus for him. He takes in her toppled handbag, in a knee-jerk response at seeing it reaches for the items that fell to the floor, grabs one handle to pull its compartment open and toss them in when something unusual catches his eye. It is a stick—a handle-bright, jolly yellow. It is none of his business, certainly, what things Se-Ri might be stowing in her purse, and yet he grabs for it and pulls it out.
Long minutes later he is brewing a coffee, still contemplating this yellow conundrum where he has laid it out on the counter, not unlike the many test wands of three days past. It is plastic, this yellow baby's rattle toy—with what he assumes is an attached teething ring at the end of the handle. 'My Hunny' says the shaker's top ball in English, written as though in a child's hand, Winnie-the-Pooh smiling with a paw full of honey beneath, his tummy peeping as always out from under his too-small shirt. It seems impossible, a point of wonder, that something so small, so ready for an infant's wee fist grip can loom so large, its yellow at once brightly cheerful and nauseatingly threatening, even while inert on the cottage kitchen's countertop.
When Se-Ri returns home with her new purchases it is still there, visible on the counter. He is no longer actively contemplating it, but like the old wizard in Mr. Frodo's Hobbit hole, it sings to him nonetheless like that golden ring, in the back of his mind as he sits apart from it on the couch in the adjacent geosil.
He knows he is waiting for her return. He does not know what he will say to her.
She tries to shrug off the feeling that she needs to psych herself up to walk through the borrowed cottage's door. Her trip to the pharmacy was uneventful, they had the products she was in need of. She opens the painkillers in the car and takes one before starting the engine to leave.
He is there, seated on the couch that has become his default bed, the spot repose of his self-chosen banishment. His eyes meet hers, though she is not as actively seeking his as earlier she was. She can too easily spot the question in them.
Entering the cottage, she had felt—would have responded to a self-check—that she was fine, her emotions level, recent drama at ebb. Locking eyes with him, reading a questioning intent there, she sees how wrong she was. Unintentionally she breaks their eye contact, her gaze sliding toward the kitchen as she walks to replace her wallet in her handbag.
Not unlike a blood stain, the bright yellow of the baby rattle against the bare countertop is impossible to miss.
He sees her posture spike at finding the rattle out in the open. He wants to ask her about it, to understand its arrival here. To learn how long it has been carried around with her.
He watches as she slips her wallet into her handbag, back in place where it belongs. But where does this other item now belong—in the home—in the life-of a couple no longer destined to be parents?
The shopping bag she plops down on the counter beside it, and she opens a cabinet to reach for a cup for coffee. Hers are routine moves, ordinary movements through space, things he'd witnessed her do many, many times. Why they should affect him so today he was not sure. "That needs to go in the bin," she tells him, signaling it as trash. "I forgot to throw it out," she says.
Oddly, she doesn't touch it, or make any motion herself to remove it, simply turns to pour herself coffee.
That evening, with their return to the chalet set for the next morning, the second half of their trip cancelled—his planned penthouse stay, the shopping and the meal at Prime Tower's Clouds postponed indefinitely—she rolls her suitcase from the bedroom out to the cottage's small entryway. He is still there, standing in the geosil, his mind not yet to occupying the truncated couch for the night. The tension between them has modulated, lost its spiky, injurious edge, but tension remains, like that of a stretched rubber band, longing for the release, the snap-back, uncertain it will be granted such. Or, instead, sever.
She walks to him and takes his hand in both of hers. "Ri Jeong-Hyeok," she tells him, "it's time for bed."
He looks down at her, hears the dangerous hum of her tempting that rubber band. "I can't," he says, and it is the closest he has gotten to explaining himself to her. "We can't." In the evening light, his eyes shine with what threaten to become tears.
"I know," she says, understanding, never having not understood his mind, his dread, his self-blame. "Just come along, and let's fall asleep. We can do that. You need to let me do that." She does not say that it is what he needs, though it is. And she knows it.
She doesn't have to lead him to the bedroom, they walk as one. She has not convinced him, so much as shown she understands him, the position he has chosen.
When he lies down beside her he does not insist she face his back, but orients his face to the exposed beam ceiling, lets her take his arm and pull it up under hers as she burrows into his side. She places his hand along her collarbone and neck, but it is he who settles it there. He, who, sometime after the lights are turned out, asks her, into the dark, "when did you buy it?" in non-sequitur—though neither of them have been able to think of any other topic now for days.
She is not asleep, his body tells him that. Not asleep, but she was becoming comfortable. He feels her tense, but in the way of a body weary, tired with effort and emotional stimulation. "With the tests," she tells him, her voice floating up toward those rafter beams—he imagines it hanging there, lost in hidden cobwebs, its sound and meaning captured for decades to come. "It seemed like the right thing to do—to have—something to let a coming child know that it was welcome, that it brought happiness with its coming."
Later, he sleeps in fits and starts, but when he wakes he is never alone, and neither is she.
Sometime after three, he rises, but briefly. He returns to the darkened kitchen, where he takes the rattle she had earmarked as refuse—as unneeded and useless-and picks it up. He thinks for a moment, and then finds what luggage he brought on their getaway. Inside, he locates the necktie he brought for the second city-based half of their trip, and one of the polished loafers he would have worn with it. Tenderly, he wraps the rattle in the silk tie, resting it inside the loafer not unlike a baby in its cradle. When they return to the chalet he will find a discreet moment to transfer it into the carryon he brought from NK, where it will rest quietly, forgotten but not forgotten, along with the other items packed there, awaiting their long overdue call to return.
He finds himself anxious to come back quickly to the mattress and under the sheets. He does not wish her to wake and find him gone. Se-Ri must not think that.
She wakes, hearing rustling noises, noticing the mattress seems higher, less burdened by weight than it was. She lets herself roll slightly from side to side, feels out the space with her body, eyes still closed. But she hears the slap of his slippers on the hardwood floor, and almost immediately feels the breeze as he lifts the covers to join her under them, the weight and warmth of his form back beside hers.
"Be well, Yoon Se-Ri," he says, quietly, in just the right tone and volume for three a.m., and she is not too far asleep to mumble, "Ri Jeong-Hyeok-sshi," her response incomplete before turning further into him and surrendering again to sleep.