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You remind yourself that you absolutely cannot be friends with Soobin. It's not his fault, you just can't be around him without feeling like you deserve to be turned into stone by Medusa. Whenever you find yourself in his presence, you find yourself wishing to be more like someone he'd like, or you find yourself wishing that he was less charming. You find yourself hurting yourself with your poisonous thoughts because of a situation that you can't control and as much as you admit to yourself that you don't like him like that anymore, you have never really gotten over him. And he was never yours, anyway. Have you always been this way? A monster painted in the green shades of jealousy? Did he really bring this out of you or had you always just been this way?




"I'm going to call it a night guys," you say. You force yourself out of your spiralling thoughts, standing up and spilling your still full bag of hot fries.


"I've got another early shift tomorrow."


"You're leaving me with them?" Hyunjin asks, but there isn't any malice in her words.


"I can't believe you have to be responsible and like, a morning person. Awfully gross of you, if I do say so myself."




She sends you off with a laugh and you mirror hers, turning toward the old, tall beach house of yours and walking away from all of the regret that lingers on the sand. Despite the slow drizzle of rain, you stay seated on the red board among the calm waves. It isn't a terrible storm, it's rather calm – a remnant of whatever remains in you anytime you let your emotions get the better of you. With a tilt of your head, you let droplets of rain land on your skin.




They kiss your neck gently, running down your bare arms while the ocean washes over the tops of your knees that sink in the water. You're out here alone today, no partner in the stand with you due to unpredictable weather.




The truth is, you don't even have to be out here either, but you need the pay and you can't stay around the house all day. It's been a week since Saturday. Heejin dressed beautifully for dinner, though she was adamant to the entire house that it wasn't a date. It was just two friends going to grab dinner while pretending they were rich heirs. She swore up and down to you as you did her hair that she didn't even like Soobin that way, reminding you that she knew how much you had liked him. Just like everyone else in the house, she was oblivious to the fact that your cheeks still flushed when the sunlight caught him the right way and the way that your knuckles always turned white when he was brought up in conversation. Nobody knew how much you still pined over him, not even you.




 You know yourself, you think. You know that of course you still like him, but you loathe him more. You hate him for taking your heart in his hands during your first summer here. You hate him for holding your cheek as the sun set and ghosting his lips over yours before pulling away to talk about something else. You hate him for trapping you between him and the walls with an insatiable hunger in his eyes only to walk away from you but most of all, you hate how you had confessed to him in front of all of your friends and he had shut you down completely.




The thought of that humiliation makes you open your eyes to the gray clouds above you, a scream wanting to rip from your throat. What would be worse – daring God to strike you down with a lightning bolt or dunking your head underwater and trapping yourself with the board? Instead, you bury your face in your hands and groan quietly at yourself before lifting your head at the sound of your name. Soobin stands on shore with a megaphone in his hand. You aren't too far out, still close enough to shore to hear him order you back to land and call you a childish name. His hood is pulled up over his head and in his other hand, you can see your own hoodie hanging from his fingers. Like a patient mother, he lowers the megaphone after his announcement and places it on his hip, jutting it out and tapping his foot like he's waiting for you to obey him.




"Oh my god, please just strike me," you murmur, casting your gaze upwards again.


"Please. Strike me." The clouds don't obey you. There's no lighting, no thunder, no cosmic force that gives you an out. It's with a heavy sigh that you paddle back to shore, dragging the paddle board behind you.  Your feet dig into the sand as Soobin hands you your sweater and when you reach to take it, he exchanges what he's holding to pick up the paddle board instead.




 "What are you doing?" You ask, wiping the water off of your face.


 "Shouldn't you be at home?"


"Well, yeah, but I went to the grocery store for Kai and you guys and ran into Mr. Bang who told me that you were clocked in today – which, didn't surprise me, I guess."  He drags the paddle board behind him as you walk back to the stand.


"So, I came here."


"You just left us without groceries?"


"I mean, I have the groceries in my car, I'll just drop them off after work." Underneath the stand, you zip up your hoodie and watch him lean the paddle board against the wood ladder.




 You climb up without another word, pulling your hood up when you reach the top. His bag is laying by the foot of his chair, towel and belongings messily tossed around. As he climbs up, you grab his spilled contents and hand it to him when he gets to the top, ignoring his quiet thanks as you settle into your seat. It's quiet between the two of you, nothing surrounding you but the soft patter of the rainfall on the umbrella stretching over your heads. It didn't used to be this way. When you first moved here and first got this job, you would wish for days like this where there would be nobody at the beach but you and Soobin. He never let you sit out here alone, knowing that you wanted the extra hours and that you were good company. You two could spend days out here just talking. He learned about your past and you learned about his upbringing here, he'd tell you the in town gossip and you'd tell him the happenings of the house. There were days like this where he'd tackle you into the sand after dancing with you. There were days where you would abandon the chairs and sit at the edge of the stand to lean into each other. It didn't used to be this way, but things changed in the blink of an eye.




"How's San?" He breaks the silence.


"Talk to him lately?"


You turn toward him, lips pressed into a thin line. You only dated him for two months – right after Soobin rejected you and only to get over the sting of it. He was a great guy, but the truth was you had spent more time convincing yourself that you liked him than admitting that you only said yes to his offer because you wanted to prove to everybody that you'd moved on just fine. It was your fault that you two had broken up, to everyone's shock but yourself. He had been fun and a great distraction, but he didn't line up in your life the way you had desperately convinced yourself that he had.


"Yeah," you lie, watching him meet your eyes.


"A little bit." 


"Oh," he pauses.


"Yeah, that's cool. So... you're going to his party, then?" You nod. You're too good of a liar, you decide, and you don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. 


"It's his birthday, I wouldn't miss it." Soobin looks lost in thought, looking out at the ocean like he's searching for an answer.




There are bags underneath his eyes, making you bite your tongue before you ask him how he's doing. He's that kind of person who will do a grocery run for an entire household before he does it for himself. You've witnessed him offer the shirt off of his back without realizing it's his last one left. Soobin is the kind of guy that will spend his life taking care of everyone else without taking care of himself and when you guys were closer, that was your job. You didn't mind. It was an honor to run your hands through his hair and let him sleep in your lap.




You would give yourself up to make sure he was okay and you wonder now who's taking care of him – if anyone's taking care of him because he won't do it himself. Your fingers itch to reach out to him, but you cover them up with the sleeves of your hoodie and reach for your backpack, digging for your phone in the side pocket. Your lies can't catch up with you, especially in front of him and you comb through your text messages before sending one to San.


"Anyway, this weather," he continues finally.


"I bet it's gonna rain all over his beach party."


"He'll just have to take it indoors."


"But that's boring, so high school. Did I ever tell you the time he had to do that during his senior year? Yeonjun and Wooyoung wouldn't let him breathe because his basement was so small and his parents went to bed at like nine," he babbles.


You let him finish his story, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the correct times, laughing when he did and listening to him talk about how badly San embarrassed himself. Before you can even interrupt, Soobin launches into another story of how embarrassing San is but you're focused on your text messages in front of you, barely listening to what he's saying to you. San's eager to hear from you, extending an invitation to his party immediately and to dinner tonight. You look up at Soobin, who animatedly explains what happened at Yeonjun's birthday and how San almost never recovered from the humiliation. He's not even looking at you, he's still watching the ocean, searching for somebody else that needs rescuing.




It's like he hopes that somebody is out there in the rain, drowning and taking on too much water so that he can leap into action and bring them back from the brink of death. He doesn't even notice that you're half-involved in the conversation, talking too much to allow you time to respond. In the entire year that you've known Soobin, you can admit that there are more times where it seems like he doesn't notice you. He sees everyone else and everything else that's in action, but he just doesn't see you. Being close to him was like giving yourself whiplash, the way that he would spend nights on the beach with you holding your hand only to wipe his palms on his shorts when someone approached you guys in the mornings. Or, how he would reject every other girl that tried to dance with him only to push you in the direction of a cute tourist. Or, worst, how he would spend days at a time looking for somebody that wasn't you. Someone in the water, someone in the crowd, somebody who wasn't you.




"I mean, isn't that just humiliating?" Soobin finishes, finally looking at you. He meets your eyes, then drops his eyes to your lit up phone.


"Oh, I'm sorry."


"No, don't be, I'm just–"


"Are you texting him right now?" He reaches for your phone and you snatch it away from him before he can reach it.


"That's none of your business." Soobin scoots his chair closer to yours, a devious smile sprouting on his lips as he scoots closer to you. His hands reach for the small device in yours as you reach out, attempting to hold the phone away from him. A giggle leaves him, contagious in energy and drawing one from you as he starts to stand up. You stand up in defiance, dropping your arms behind your back as you guys laugh with each other among the rainfall.


"What's he saying?" He asks.


"Ooooh, I love you so much, let's kiss at my party and hold hands."


"Shut up!" Soobin says your name in a mocking tone, continuing to pretend to be San.


"Wanna come over and play volleyball against me? I'm so good at beach volleyball, I could teach you."


"Ew, stop, you don't even sound like him!"


His chest bumps against yours as you back into the side of the stand, your phone still behind your back. Your eyes meet his round ones, dark pupils staring into yours at your proximity. Your heart races so loudly you can hear it in your ears, the grip on your phone loosening by the second. Soobin's hands brace himself against the railing, pushing himself off of you, giving you just barely enough distance to catch your breath. It's just like last summer, all over again and you're suddenly dying to pull him against you.




But, you didn't do that summer. You never had the courage to press your lips against his and kiss him like there was no tomorrow. All summer, you spent time with him and yearned for him, letting your chest catch on fire every time he looked at you and letting your mind go numb whenever he laced his hand with yours. But, you never let yourself really kiss him. His lips barely tracing yours in the sand didn't count, that wasn't a real kiss, not the kind that would make your heart stop and your lungs fail.




"What does he sound like?" Soobin leans down, coming eye to eye with you. His hood is falling off of his head, leaving his hair tousled and unkempt.


"Tell me."


"He..." You lose your breath, watching his eyes fall from yours to your lips when you speak.


"He sounds different."


"Different, how?" His eyes trail back up to yours, taking in every feature like it's his first time seeing you, like you're something he needs to memorize.


"When he's with you? I've known him all my life, I know how he sounds."


"No, you don't. Not the way I know how he sounds."


You see his shoulders tense briefly, his face remaining unchanged. You know the look that crosses his gaze, like he wants to say something but he doesn't.


"Yoo-hoo! Excuse me?"


 A sudden voice makes you both jump. Soobin leaps away from you like you've burned him and you fling your phone into the sand behind you accidentally. Both of you turn away from each other, you toward your phone and him toward the woman with a white, floppy hat on. "Yeah?" Soobin calls down with a cough.


"Is the beach open today?"


She asks and you start to climb down the ladder, completely ignoring her and Soobin.


"Can me and my family swim?"


He gives her the spiel on the dangers, that there's no lightning and no thunder, that he'll be around for a couple of hours if they really want to. You, oppositely, fall to your knees and pick up your phone, shaking off the sand and pulling a face at the state of it. You know that your housemates are going to make fun of you again for it, but when your phone lights up, you read the text message on the screen and give a sigh of relief. Maybe you won't have to spend the night at home at all. Because what you don't want to admit to Soobin is that you do know what San sounds like. He was fun, that's all he was to you because he was a good kisser, and good at making you forget, and good at making you say his name so much you forgot about Soobin.






While you had spent those two months waking up and going through your days pretending like Soobin hadn't ripped your heart out, he had spent those two months doing a good job at making you forget all about him – for a moment at least and he didn't even know he was doing it.


"You okay?" Soobin calls down to you. You look up at him, turning your phone off and scrambling to your feet.


"I gotta go." He says your name, almost pleadingly.


"Come on, I'm sorry – stay."


"No, it's not you,"


you lie. You're still slightly dumbfounded from how close he was, your heart still racing – for him, for San, for yourself. You're not sure anymore. He doesn't say anything in response, watching you half-heartedly climb up the ladder to retrieve your things. You do it in silence and when you climb back down to retrieve the paddle board, he stops you and tells you he'll bring it back himself. You look up at him, but he's not looking at you anymore, he's looking out to sea.

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