SYJ x HB : The Stories Behind (Book Two)

The Man

Glass of cheap scotch on the rocks on one hand, a cigarette on the other. 

In the middle of a hot starry, summer night and sitting by the rooftop of a very cramped hostel which reeks the smell of alcohol and smoke, the ice slowly evaporated and droplets of water piled on the bottom of the glass as he watched it blankly. Picking it up, he chugged the contents in one go, feeling the smoothness and bitterness of the liquor both at the same time. If that was not enough to bring hell into his throat, he inhaled a long puff of smoke, before exhaling some and the others, well into his system, mixed along with the fiery liquor he just had. Giving out a deep sigh after a few moments, Yoo Min Woo looked back into his life and what happened some decades ago.

*****

He took a torn sheet of paper from his notebook and wanting to leave an impression, he folded it nicely and tore off the jagged edges. He hoped that it would reach the girl he so wanted to see and befriend.

'Hi, I was wondering if I could meet you? If it's okay, please see me by the alley near your school. I will wait for you tomorrow after classes,' he wrote, and was smiling as he did so. He folded it, placed it in an improvised envelope, and in a very neat handwriting he wrote her name.

Eon Jin

He smiled as he deemed it right and perfect. He felt lucky that one of his friends has a sister in the school she was going to. Junghwa Girls High. He tucked the letter on one of the pages of his notebook and kept the same in his school bag. Done with his tasks for the day, he switched off the lights from his study table and prepared to go to sleep. As he laid down, he was smiling. Covering himself with a worn-out duvet, he tried to close his eyes.

But as the late autumn breeze came through, he felt that he couldn't sleep. His shabby room was made of cheap wood, thin enough to hear the scuffles of the room adjacent to it. He could hear strange sounds at night, presumably howling and growling. At one point, he was afraid, but as he realized, and heard these sounds every night, he realized it was not a monster. It was a different one, and his young mind fell into something that he didn't know how to place properly. 

He got acquainted early on, and at his age, when his pheromones were too high, the girl was somehow the subject of his liquid dreams. He would wake up sometimes panting, crazily in love or about something else worse than that. He tried to shake his mind off these things, because he knew they were not supposed to be doing so. He fought it, and when he did, he felt happy. 

He never wanted to hurt her in any way, not even in his dreams and wildest fantasies.

He patiently waited for the day to end and when it did, he took his school bag from his chair and stormed out to get to the alleyway near Junghwa Girls. He looked at his military strapped Swatch watch. It was 4:15pm, fifteen minutes away from the dismissal period. He smiled once more and straightened up his shirt, which he tried so hard not to get smeared the whole day. He knew how they are, if they could play basketball in the middle of lunch break they would. But he sacrificed that for today. At least.

As time went on, he wondered would she ever go there? Or did she receive the note? He was patient enough to wait until his stomach growled, telling him to get some food since he didn't eat since that morning. Excitement was all over his head that he forgot to get a grub. When he looked up, the dusk was slowly eating the remaining of the light emitted by the sun. The girl was nowhere to be found, and he didn't know why.

Days went by and he wasn't able to understand why she did not show up. He tried to move forward, and in doing so, his dreams of her went on every night. Sometimes he would wake up feeling wet, and he didn't even understand why it happened. Until one day, he knew the reason why she didn't come. He heard she went to Seoul to pursue something.