Kelsey’s phone buzzed on her nightstand at six in the morning. The screen glowed with Han’s name, a sight that still sent a familiar, painful jolt through her chest. She answered, her voice thick with sleep. “You know what time it is here, right?”
“Technically,” his voice came through, bright and clear despite the twelve-hour gap, “it’s your birthday here. So. Happy birthday!”
She laughed, the sound rusty from disuse but genuine. She pushed herself up against her headboard, the morning light just beginning to bleed around the edges of her blinds. “Okay. How’s my birthday in the future?”
“Quiet. I’m in the van. Hyunjin is snoring. It’s a good day.”
She knew she sounded better. To him, and to herself. The raw, suffocating quiet that had followed their last video call had lasted for weeks, a private winter she thought might never end. But spring came, as it does, in small increments. She started running again, not to outpace the grief, but just to run. She helped her dad repaint the garage. She put some pieces back together, focusing on something else. Living a life without a giant hole in her chest was still living. It just required a different kind of balance.
“So, eighteen,” he said. The word hung between them, significant. Legal. Adult. A threshold she’d once imagined crossing with him nearby, probably with some ridiculous, over-the-top gesture he’d planned for months.
“Tomorrow,” she corrected, smiling. “Don’t rush me. I’m enjoying my last hours of juvenile delinquency.”
“What crime are you committing?”
“I might jaywalk later. Really live on the edge.” She heard his soft chuckle, a sound that felt like a physical warmth spreading through her limbs. This was easier. Lighter. The careful, rebuilt bridge between them could hold this weight.
“I applied to colleges,” she said, the confession coming out more casually than she felt. It was new information, a piece of the current Kelsey to offer him.
“Yeah? Where?”
“A couple UCs. ASU as a safety. I’m thinking about translation.”
“Translation,” he repeated, and she could hear the interest, the performer’s ear for language tuning in. “What languages?”
“I speak Spanish well enough. I thought about French. It sounds pretty.” She hesitated, her thumb tracing the seam of her quilt. “I thought about Korean. Or Chinese. But learning a new alphabet seemed…”
“Hard,” he finished for her, his tone gentle, understanding. Not mocking.
“Daunting,” she agreed. “No admissions yet. It’s all just… pending.”
“Pending,” he echoed. The word seemed to stretch, to cover more than just college applications. The silence that followed was comfortable, but charged beneath the surface with everything that was also pending between them. The unsaid thing they were both, very deliberately, not talking about. The love they were living around, not within.
“What about you?” she asked, shifting the focus. “Where’s the van going?”
“To a photoshoot. Then a radio interview. Then dance practice. Then maybe sleep if we’re lucky.” He listed it off like a grocery run, but she heard the fatigue layered under the routine. “It’s good. It’s busy. Busy is good.”
“You sound tired, Jisung.”
“I am tired,” he admitted, the honesty stark and simple. It was a gift. He so rarely admitted to needing anything. “But talking to you helps. It always helps.”
Her breath caught. It was a small sentence, but it landed with the weight of a truth he’d stopped filtering. She closed her eyes, letting it settle. This was the new shape of them. Intimacy woven through phone lines and time zones, a connection that had survived his leaving and her quiet grief. It was enough. It had to be enough.
They talked for another twenty minutes, about nothing and everything. The new song he was working on that he couldn’t play for her yet. Her dad’s disastrous attempt at making tamales. The way the light looked in her room right now, golden and slow. He was painting a picture with his words, and she was doing the same, building a shared space in the air between their separate continents.
When the call ended, the quiet of her room felt different. Softer. It held the echo of his voice. She lay there for a long time, watching the dust motes dance in the sunbeam now cutting across her floor. Eighteen tomorrow. A life pending. A heart in careful, deliberate denial.
She got up and moved through her day with a sense of purpose that had been absent for months. She printed out her college applications, checking the dates one more time. She organized her desk, a tidy monument to forward motion. In the afternoon, she drove to the grocery store to get the ingredients for her birthday dinner with her dad, the convertible’s top down, the wind doing its best to mess up her strawberry-blonde hair. She let it.
That evening, she was curled on the worn leather couch, a textbook open but unread on her lap, when her phone buzzed again. Not a call. A flood of photos. Jisung.
The first was a blurry selfie taken in what looked like a makeup chair, his face half-done, one eye dramatically shaded, sticking his tongue out. The next was of the other members, Changbin mid-yawn, Hyunjin posing dramatically with a bottle of water. Then a picture of the city skyline from a high window, the lights just starting to come on. And then, a photo of a single cupcake with a lone candle stuck in it, sitting on a counter in what she recognized as their dorm kitchen. The caption read: *Future birthday party. Guest list: 1.*
She smiled, her heart doing a slow, heavy roll in her chest. She typed back. *Looks wild. Don’t stay up too late.*
His reply was immediate. *Wouldn’t dream of it. Dream of something good for me.*
She put the phone down, pressing it against her thigh. The streetlamp outside her window flickered on, casting long, familiar shadows across the quiet room. The couch still smelled faintly of coffee and her perfume, and beneath that, if she imagined hard enough, the ghost of sunscreen and desert air from a different time. She thought about his request. *Dream of something good for me.*
She knew what she would dream about. It was always the same dream. A blue convertible. Music too loud. A boy with sharp, observant eyes seeing her, really seeing her, for the first time. The beginning of the long, beautiful denial.
She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The denial was a place they lived together. It was a house they’d built, roomy enough for their friendship, with walls too thin to keep out the truth of what beat beneath it. She rested her chin on her knees, watching the shadows. Tomorrow she would be eighteen. The future was pending. And in a dorm kitchen twelve hours ahead, a boy she loved was eating a cupcake alone, thinking of her.
It was enough. It was a kind of agony. It was the only thing she had, and she clung to it in the quiet, gathering dark.