The Man Left in the Past Tense

The next day his name was there again, inevitable at the top of her call log. She knocked her forehead against the wall—but while the seasons turned, the habit itself never changed.

At first she had called only when she was drunk. Lately she rang Lee-kyung even with a perfectly clear head. One day she asked after him. Another, she rewound old memories. And on still others she let him soothe the loneliness and the bleak ache of a life lived in a foreign country.

In the meantime, new men found their way to Won-young as well. Five relationships. Five endings. And the boyfriend she had met only the day before yesterday was a model working in Europe—a full six years younger than she was.

That morning, eating cereal soaked in milk, she called Lee-kyung out of habit and offered him the small, ordinary pieces of her day.

Even a confession of love dropped on him without warning no longer drew much of a reaction. Only the familiar answer came back.

From Japan to Italy. She had made plenty of new friends with every change of address, but the one person she could tell about an ordinary day and feel entirely at ease was still, without question, her seonbae.

Even the fight in her—the way she used to fly at him as if she meant to kill him the moment they met—had lost its strength before the years that had passed. To the Won-young of now, Ryu Lee-kyung was only an ex-boyfriend from a foolish stretch of youth. A faint, lingering crush from the pure, clear days of school. The person who, whenever she looked back, had made her cry the most. Whether that had been from happiness or from sorrow, he was a man left in the past tense, a memory grown distant.

That was the only feeling she allowed herself to keep. Not that she had carved Ryu Lee-kyung cleanly out of her life. If she had, there would have been no reason to call like this, now and then, simply to ask how he was. Even lately, when she dreamed, the whisper of his that used to tickle her ear rose like a sweet temptation and set her simmering.

If she was honest, she had never imagined thirty would arrive so quickly. As a child she had vaguely believed that by thirty she would be a finished adult. She knew better now. Her thirties, taking after the first love she had carried at eighteen, were still unfinished—still not quite grown.

Lee-kyung let out a short laugh. She knew he was a coffee fiend who drank more than four cups a day, and it seemed today was no different. He must have picked up in the middle of one; she heard the soft clack of a mug set down.

Ugh. People don't change. They really don't.

Cold bastard.

Cheeks puffed round, Won-young glared at the disconnected phone, then soon let the anger go and pressed Jian's number.

Ryu Jian was Lee-kyung's younger sister by blood, and a friend the same age as Won-young. Usually quiet, with more than a little gloom about her, Jian had changed a great deal in middle school once she fell in with the bright, lively Won-young. Even as high school students the two had shared so much of themselves that they could hardly bear to be apart.

In all the time she had spent abroad, Won-young placed a video call—something she had never once done with Lee-kyung. With Jian, the distance of a far country was nothing; they could look each other in the face and talk the whole night through.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

At the end of a short ring, the other side picked up at once. Seeing Jian's familiar face on the screen, Won-young smiled and spoke.

At the cheerful joke, Jian jostled the camera's focus.

In a flash, the person filling Jian's camera was unmistakably Lee-kyung. Unlike her, who still seemed not quite grown even after thirty, he looked like a man who had finished becoming an adult. He glanced this way.

That air only he could give off passed over her. For a brief moment her eyes met her seonbae's—handsome in a way that resembled the deep scent of coffee.

"...!"

With a thud, she had the illusion of a heavy stone being shoved toward her, grinding loud as it came. Breath she could barely catch surged all at once, breaking into a rush and then heaving however it pleased.

Oh, no.

She knew perfectly well how sorry it was—to feel her heart stir for another man when she had a boyfriend six years younger—and still she could not easily look away. It was like déjà vu. The same as the day she first met Ryu Lee-kyung, when she had hidden behind a towering zelkova and stolen secret looks at his face.

That shifting of a moment, at once an instant and an eternity, scattered the second Jian's voice returned.

At once the camera caught Jian's face again. Even so, Lee-kyung would not quite erase himself. He lingered before Won-young's eyes like an afterimage: the clean line of his jaw, the sharp cut of his eyes, even the playful shape of the mouth that used to tease her without end in bed. All of it was exactly the same.

As if under a spell, her answer came out none too clear.

Won-young was relieved—relieved that neither of them seemed to have noticed how every fine hair on her had stood on end. While she swept her long hair back, Jian went on.