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Hyeju doesn’t particularly like the rain. Even if it means the store is more empty than not, she scrolls through her phone, ignoring the raindrops that stick to the glass of the sliding doors of the entrance.
She might appreciate it more if she didn’t already finish her class readings for the week. Her thumb pauses on a repost about a celebrity scandal.
Hyeju swipes. Yawns. Ignores the time on the upper right side of her screen that tells her the time—if she notices the hour, the night will drag its heels into the mud outside, taking her overnight shift with it. Better not to keep track.
“Excuse me?” she looks up, and, well. It only helps her locate the voice, but hardly a face, too obscured by a cap with the Lotte Giants logo emblazoned across the front to make out the girl wearing it.
“You’re the cashier, right?” the girl prompts, pushing three bottles of the strongest tea they have onto the countertop. On autopilot, Hyeju reaches for the scanner.
“Right.” She looks up at the right moment, making eye contact. The girl adjusts the brim of her hat to fall lower over her face.
The silence while ringing her up is awkward, and normally, she can choose to ignore it, but maybe it’s because of the way she tries to hide underneath her cap, or the smell of lavender perfume coming from her mixing with the rain.
“These are pretty bitter,” Hyeju comments as the girl swipes her card. She reaches for a bag to shove the bottles into, grinning faces from a girl group disappearing behind the thin plastic label. “Even idols can’t get them to sell.”
The girl makes a noise. Hyeju tries again.
“How’s your night been?”
The girl looks up at her finally, wrinkling her nose. “You’re kidding me, right?”
Hyeju lifts an eyebrow. The attitude doesn’t faze her. Someone else’s bad day isn’t a reason for her to have a bad night. “No, not really.”
She hands her the bag, and the girl snatches it, already turning to leave.
“Have a nice night,” Hyeju calls after as the door swings open, but only the wind answers. Her manager never did fix the broken chime above the door from last winter.
Hyeju glances back down to her phone. Nothing about it is remarkable.
—
It’s raining again, the next time.
“Have you been well?” Hyeju asks, lightly sarcastic, because the americano she’d chugged before clocking in has done something to her brain and better judgment. She drums her fingers against the countertop.
But the girl doesn’t take the bait, and when she looks up, Hyeju feels something sink in her stomach at the sight of eyes rimmed red and nose pink.
Hyeju rings her up in silence. She stops before she’s handed the three thousand won she’s owed for the same drinks as last time.
She straightens, looking at a spot on her shoulder and squinting as the girl watches the price shutter with her employee discount.
“Here you go,” she says, sliding the plastic bag across the counter. It’s not much of a discount. It’s not much of an expensive purchase, anyway, but the girl pauses.
She speaks, words rough and mildly congested. There is no non-embarrassing way to have an exchange after crying. “Do you like this song?”
It takes a second for Hyeju to realize she is talking about the music playing overhead through the speakers. They happen to play the same station every night, and she’s long tuned out most of the songs that end up on rotation.
The girl looks at her expectantly, and suddenly she feels like this is a test.
“It’s okay,” she settles on. Reconsiders. “I don’t really care for ballads. They make me sleepy.”
The girl smiles, amused.
She bows shortly before leaving, offering a name at last. If this was a test, Hyeju thinks she passes.
“I’m Yerim.”
“Hyeju.”
“I’ll see you around.” It sounds like a promise.
—
If her life were a movie, it would mean something. The stranger that comes in not once, but twice, only when the sun hides and the sky mourns its loss, would be the catalyst for something bigger.
Hyeju loses track of night shifts again, props her textbooks behind the register and fills a spiral-bound notebook. Yerim does not see any of this, because she does not visit again.
She’s had better customer stories over her years working. Yerim isn’t a particularly unique name to remember, either. She puts it out of her mind with every crumpled receipt tossed away, a shipment of bottled tea that doesn’t get sold.
Her older sister used to read her stories to sleep when she was younger. Even then, she never believed them. Hyeju would call it pragmatism—it is a better name than self-defense.
—
Heejin holds her wrist with a firm grip. Hyeju has always thought she should ease up on all those hours she spends at the gym. If she did, Heejin wouldn’t have as much success when she beelines for her after their evening class.
“Hyeju-ya,” Heejin begins, cheerful. Hyeju thinks her wrist is going to bruise. “Let’s have a life. The university festival is tonight, and if we hurry, we’ll be right on time to catch the second half.”
“Humor her,” Hyunjin says, from experience, as she follows up from behind. Hyunjin arguably gives even worse advice. Humoring Heejin is how they started dating and looped Hyeju into becoming a perpetual third wheel.
Humor her, Hyeju repeats Hyunjin’s words in her head.
There is something funny about it, Hyeju has to admit, as Yerim stands onstage before her in cutoff shorts and a blue satin varsity jacket. The crowd around her screams for Choerry, and realization falls into place right where it belongs.
Too late to matter. Too soon to tell the difference between fate and coincidence.
—
Yerim is back the next night.
“You left before my set was done.” She sets the three bottles of tea between them, lined neatly in a row.
Hyeju scans one and types in three into the quantity section. She pauses before entering her employee discount. “Had to beat the traffic home.”
“What did you think?” Choerry—Yerim—asks unflinchingly, without reservation. Hyeju notices she’s not wearing a cap today, but her hood is up this time, and it all makes sense now.
“Are you fishing for a compliment?” she doesn’t try to hide the dubious edge to her tone. Yerim had an entire audience’s worth of praise the other night.
“You seem hard to impress,” Yerim pushes, and Hyeju looks away.
The stage she’d caught wasn’t a ballad—Hyeju won’t admit under knife point that she’d looked up the discography of Choerry, soloist—so she has some diversity to her catalog. Good for her. It does not want to make her tell the truth any more.
Yet honesty wins out. Sometimes lying is more effort.
“I thought you looked lonely up there,” admits Hyeju after a long while, softly as she watches the hurt flash across Yerim’s face like a passing downpour, too much and then nothing at all. She bows her head, almost in apology.
Yerim recoils. “What would you know?”
“I wouldn’t,” she fires back, testily, “I’m just the cashier, aren’t I?” Some part of her, maybe, daring for Yerim to acknowledge otherwise.
The girl, Yerim—the idol, Choerry—says nothing, just takes her receipt and goes.
—
Once is an accident. Twice is intentional. Three times is stupid. Fourth—well.
She catches Yerim sleeping outside in the morning, slumped over one of their tables. Hyeju considers leaving her there as she opens. She could use the peace; she’d only traded shifts with Heejin as a favor.
“You do have a job, don’t you?” Hyeju drawls as Yerim stirs. “The whole idol thing?”
Yerim takes her time to stretch, limbs slow as she moves. “Maybe I just like bothering you,” she answers, still sharp. Hyeju is mildly impressed. “I’m also out of tea.”
Of course. Hyeju shuffles around her, pulling the umbrellas over the outside tables high as the sky begins to lighten with the promise of the sun. “If you help me bring in shipment and restock,” she offers, “I’ll scan whatever you want for half price.”
Yerim laughs, too loud to be polite. “I could use the savings.”
There isn’t a customer in sight, but Hyeju replies: “I could use the help.”
It’s a quiet morning, only the noise of rummaging and unpacking of boxes, items being placed on shelves. After awhile, her ears perk to the sound of Yerim humming softly along to her own song playing in the store.
Growing up, she’d been told all the best stories started boldly and loudly. Perhaps beginnings are better this way instead: muted like watercolor pastels, brushstrokes across canvas without purpose or reason.
—
“You’re the only 24-hour convenience store in Seoul close enough to drive to,” Yerim supplies the next time Hyeju sees her.
“Sure,” Hyeju replies, just to rile her. She watches Yerim wander up and down the aisles instead of her usual beeline for the drink display, thinking of the university festival and the way she had shone underneath the lights, a kaleidoscope of colors dancing across her skin.
A hundred eyes on one person and somehow, she knows, Yerim’s eyes on her.
She looks exceptionally normal tonight, baggy jeans and gray sweatshirt. Harsh fluorescent lights of the store and all.
Yerim looks at the assortment of grab and go packages. She takes two instant ramen bowls, stacking them on each other and sliding them across the countertop for her to scan.
She raises an eyebrow, but to Yerim’s credit, she doesn’t stand down.
“You have a break, right?” and Hyeju snorts, reaching underneath the counter where they keep the chopsticks.
—
Yerim makes her listen to her songs. Hyeju calls her a narcissist, to which Yerim smartly replies, “that’s what all idols are, Hyeju,” and she really can’t say anything to that.
“Would you fall asleep to these?” Yerim asks of her other ballads, empty ramen bowls and tea bottles strewn out in front of them as they sit side-by-side on the stools they have in the back of the store.
Hyeju shoots for truthful, landing somewhere between sheepish and wry. “I’d try not to, now.”
Yerim giggles, then sighs. she leans her head against Hyeju’s shoulder, the weight and press of it warm as lavender fills her nose. There isn’t another soul in the shop but the two of them, and Hyeju is glad the CCTV is broken and her manager too cheap to fix it.
—
So she gets used to asking the same of Yerim every time she sees her, a callback to the second time they’d crossed paths and thought it could never be anything other than chance.
On a rare day, Yerim will text her ahead of time, and once or twice, they’ve walked along the Han River for a change of pace. Hyeju still brings her tea regardless.
“Have you been well?” Hyeju asks, and the answers vary each time. Choi Yerim feels more honest than Choerry ever is. Maybe both are too tired to lie, anyway.
—
Yerim performs at universities across the countryside and ends up back in Seoul before dawn more often than Hyeju thinks is reasonably healthy.
Hyeju asks her usual, “Have you been well?” once, and Yerim waves her off to nap.
“It must have been hard,” Hyeju says, a bit too sincere, when she wakes up. Yerim’s gaze is heavy and there is a fresh bandage at the crook of her elbow where the needle to an IV once was. It is the kind of earnesty that makes tears spring to the other girl’s eyes.
Embarrassment makes her a fool, but affection makes her brave. “You did well,” Hyeju adds.
Yerim blinks hard, then nods, as though to say: It was hard. It was hard, thank you for noticing. Thank you for seeing me.
—
“It’s the most important part of my job, I think,” Yerim says, thoughtful, the makeup wearing off her skin, imperfect as Hyeju knows her to be only in this space between them. “Comforting others with my songs.”
Hyeju folds her arms, lowering her head onto them. Yerim’s phone vibrates with a text from her staff. “Then who comforts you?”
—
She’s never liked being addressed by name from people she doesn’t know. That doesn’t change now.
“Are you Hyeju?”
Even if that person is a woman pretty enough to be a celebrity. Hyeju looks up from her textbook from behind the counter, squinting.
“Yes,” she answers slowly. “Who’s asking?”
“Kim Jungeun,” the woman replies, like it should mean something. When Hyeju continues to stare blankly, she huffs. “I’m Yerim’s manager.”
The context takes her by surprise enough that it lets Jungeun continue without much interruption.
“She was supposed to show up to a meeting an hour ago, but she sent me a text canceling,” Jungeun explains, “She never cancels. I thought she’d be here with you.”
And in the span of a short exchange, Hyeju realizes Yerim’s manager a) knows her by name, which means Yerim must have been referring to her by such, and b) she knows this is where Yerim has been spending her free time.
“I’ll tell her that you came around if I see her,” she says, and Jungeun nods, grateful.
—
“You worried your manager.”
Yerim grimaces. “I’ll have to make it up to Jungeun unnie later.”
She pauses. They sit in Yerim’s car, her old one traded in for one so new that the interior still has that new car smell.
“Why did you do it?”
Yerim glances out her window, discomfort settling on her shoulders. “I was just tired,” she says eventually, “I was tired and I didn’t want to work anymore.”
Hyeju doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to.
“I thought about what you said before,” Yerim says, changing the subject. “Who comforts the comforter.”
It takes a second for her brain to catch up. Hyeju thinks about what it means that when Yerim goes missing from the rest of the world, she finds her. When even her manager can’t place her, she becomes the assumption, you are the place Yerim would run to.
“And?” Hyeju asks. It feels like delaying the inevitable.
Yerim twists her fingers in her collar. Her thumb brushes against her pulse, and Hyeju can smell the lavender of her perfume.
Like a bruise, the kiss lingers.
—
(“Your car. The store. The Han River,” Hyeju ticks them off with her fingers, “Will we ever meet anywhere else?”
“I don’t want to,” Yerim replies quickly, then amends. “I don’t want to share you.” Not with the world, not with anyone. Yerim doesn’t have to say it for her to understand.
“That’s fine,” Hyeju surrenders, so quietly Yerim has to still to hear her, clandestine made. “This can just be ours.”)
—
The interlude to the story that can’t be called love just yet: a tour.
The announcement sends Yerim’s tears spilling onto her uniform. There is no celebration, of course.
—
“The tour sold out.” Yerim doesn’t come back to visit until a week later. The air is notably different. “My team is talking about taking it further next time. A longer leg, this time over the States.”
Hyeju knows what comes next isn’t what Yerim wants to hear. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
Hyeju’s silent gaze. Look at you.
“I can do more. There’s—momentum,” Yerim stumbles over her words, and Hyeju can imagine her staff telling her this enough it’s begun to warp into the sound of her own voice, too. Has even Jungeun agreed to this?
“Awards season isn’t far away.” It sounds like rambling. It sounds like an excuse to run Yerim into the ground. “They’re saying I can get the Gaon nomination.”
Hyeju pushes a bottle of tea into her hands. She’s learned by now that Yerim only drinks it because it’s the only thing she can keep down safely after packed schedules and skipped meals. She chooses her words carefully.
“Have you ever thought you don’t have to be your best to be enough?”
Yerim’s mouth snaps shut. It’s an answer without one.
—
“Come with me,” she asks, a wildness to her voice when Yerim calls early in the morning, when Hyeju is off a shift and sleeping through the morning.
Hyeju shakes her head even though she can’t see. “I can’t leave school,” she says, shifting underneath her weighted blanket. She doesn’t say: I can’t watch you do this to yourself.
Yerim nods. Sighs, just a little. Hyeju watches the sun hide behind her curtains, eventually falling back asleep on the line. If there were a picture next to the phrase quiet defeat in the dictionary, it would be this.
—
Exhausted, wan, against the blue light of her phone, they Facetime.
Hyeju doesn’t ask.
Have you been well?
Yerim’s fading smile is enough.
—
The advertisement at her bus stop changes, and Hyeju stares at Yerim’s picture, beaming and bright, splashed over a slogan selling vitamins.
Hyeju can’t help but linger even after the bus pulls onto the curb, her shoulder jostled by passing riders moving past her to climb on.
Man destroys nature. The world swallows the sun. Humans have never learned how to love something without ruining it in the process.
—
“What was the most serious fight you and Hyunjin have had?”
She watches the way Heejin’s eyes widen in surprise. A bolt out of the blue—Hyeju doesn’t ask about her and Hyunjin’s relationship if she can help it. She’d known Heejin before Hyunjin as coworkers, even when she’s known of Hyunjin for years, technically, all the way back from high school.
Heejin tips her head toward the sky, lips pursed as she thinks back as they sit in the campus courtyard. “I was working a lot more. Hyunjin was too busy at Yonsei most of the time. It felt like everything was trying to keep us apart, and we got more frustrated with each other because of that,” Heejin pauses a beat.
“We fought a lot over the exact same things. It felt like—I felt, really—”
“Stuck,” Hyeju finishes, still on the endless loop of watching Yerim choose a life that makes everything impossibly harder.
Heejin sighs. “Yeah.”
“How did you get unstuck?” She tries to keep the ache out of her own voice.
“I changed my hours. Hyunjin graduated early. There was an end to it,” Heejin offers her a regretful smile. She knows it isn’t much of an answer even as she says it. “It felt like we were walking the edge of a cliff for so long, but we held onto that last thread of hope.”
“I can’t say there was any trick to it. We wanted to be together,” Heejin trails off, leaning over to squeeze her arm. “We were stubborn, and we wanted so many things, but we wanted to see each other at the end of it all the most.”
—
Hyeju’s question catches in her throat.
“Can you tell me something? Will you be honest?” At Yerim’s small noise on the other end from some city in Japan, Hyeju tries again. Clings to that rope for as long as its frayed edges will let her. “Do you still love singing?”
Yerim exhales. “Yes,” she admits after a long while. “It’s everything else.”
The schedules. The touring. The never stopping. Yerim will break her own bones for this, Hyeju thinks. For herself. For her younger sisters back home that know the lyrics to every one of her songs.
“It’s my dream,” whispers Yerim. Hyeju feels the last thread of hope slip through her fingers.
It’s raining outside the convenience store, but there is no mix of lavender, no tea to scan for the girl that isn’t here.
Did Sisyphus ever forget why he was doomed to eternity to roll that boulder uphill? If you are always hurting, Hyeju wonders, do you become so used to it you forget that it’s not normal?
Was he stuck? Are you? Are we?
“My last show is in Seoul. I’ll be home soon.” Hyeju has never sat through an entire show of Yerim’s since that first night.
It’s a question. It’s begging. It is a precious person asking her to hold on a little longer even if it hurts them both. No one ever tells you how selfish love is, how much it wants. Maybe this is what people write songs about.
“I’ll get you a ticket. Please come.”
The silence and the end of something without a name is the cruelest loss of all. They write about this, too.
—
Easy (if that were a word, if that could ever be applied to this) would look like this:
She loves the girl. The girl maybe loves her back. The girl loves the stage. The stage does not love her back.
But it does.
Hyeju knows it before Yerim even steps out behind the curtain. She hears it in the audience around her. “Her album helped me during a hard time in my life.” “I hope she sings forever.” “This song got me through my first love, my first heartbreak.”
She’s mine, she wants to say, the confession trapped in her mouth. She’s mine.
—
She loves the girl.
“Congratulations, Yerim-ah.”
The girl loves her back.
“You came.”
The girl loves the stage.
“What did you think?”
The stage loves her back.
“You should keep singing.”
Most love triangles don’t have happy endings.
—
Yerim releases a mini-album in the new year. The title track is a ballad.
Hyeju reaches behind the counter of the convenience store to take a sip from a bottle of tea. The brand never sells, and her manager is tired of carrying it so much, but she’s convinced him to keep it in stock anyway.
The chime above the door is still broken, so she doesn’t hear it open.
“That tea is pretty bitter. Someone told me once that even idols can’t get them to sell.”
Hyeju looks up at Yerim, who steps closer to the counter that divides them, and everything she’d say, everything she’d imagined she might say in a moment like this one, can’t quite leave her.
Such as:
Congratulations. I missed you. Or, it was the right choice, wasn’t it?
Yerim beats her to the punch.
“Have you been well?” she asks, and it sounds warm and longing.
Stories only end if you let them.