Before Her Very Eyes

Chapter 27

Jeonghan often showered while she cleaned his apartment. She heard him sing sometimes.

He had a strangely sweet singing voice, so different from the chaotic thunderous voice he usually spoke to her with.

Once, she heard him chant something. A couplet, she thought.

Incapable of kindness this boy will be,
Doomed to be hated indefinitely...

Arin liked the way it sounded, as it resonated with her in ways she couldn't explain. She Googled it that day, wondering if the poem had more lines, but found nothing. She wondered if he made it up.

-

Of all the feelings on the human emotional spectrum, shame was definitely one of the hardest to bear.

Shame made Arin want nothing more than to disappear, to vanish into thin air, away from the people who witnessed what had just happened to her, from Jeonghan and also from Woozi.

The snide mockery in Jeonghan's voice still tormented her. She could still hear his cruel laugh and targeted verbal ridicule as she tried to collect herself. She could also still feel the unwelcome traces of his arms pinning her wrists to the floor, his lips on her face, and his body over hers.

The obligation to clean after herself offered her a brief distraction from the shame and darkness that consumed her mind and body. She focused on the washing of herself and her clothes, and then mopping the floor. She tried to think of nothing else, because if she let her thoughts stray, she was afraid she would drown in the bottomless pit of self-destruction.

When she was done, there remained nothing else to distract her from it. All she could do was sit idle on her bed, picking at the skin around her fingernails until she bled. She was so numb, she couldn't feel any pain.

Her ringing phone startled her. She didn't want to answer it, but when she saw ~'s name, she felt compelled to answer, desperate for a way out of this building once and for all.

"Arrie..."

"I need to get out of here. Please, please let me go," Arin's voice came out in a hoarse whisper, carrying all the terror of what had just happened.

"Oh sweet Ar. Jeonghan told me what happened. I'm so sorry about this..."

"Please let me go," Arin repeated softly.

"He's not evil, you know. Sometimes, his curse makes him do things like that..."

That was hardly reassuring for Arin. How was she supposed to differentiate between the "evil" Jeonghan and the not-so-evil one? She didn't want to be around someone who was volatile enough to become evil, even if it was by no fault of his own...

That thought lingered in her mind for a moment as she drew parallels between her situation and his: she was also volatile enough to 'become evil' by bringing about the death of others, even if it was by no fault of her own.

"For what it's worth, he would apologize to you if he could..." ~ continued.

Arin then had flashbacks to the recent activation of her own curse, when Joshua died. She remembered how she wished she could apologize to him, but she couldn't.

As this empathy for him started to form, she felt even worse than before. She felt bad for still blaming him for what he did to her, even after knowing this. Blaming him helped her cope by giving her somewhere to direct her anger and hatred. If there was nothing and no one to blame, what happened to her just happened out of thin air, and that was not a comforting thought.