The last night in Arizona was a quiet, suffocating thing. Jisung stood in the driveway of his host family’s house, the rental car packed and waiting, the air tasting like dust and finality. For the past week, since her school had ended, any hour Kelsey wasn’t at her part-time job had been spent in a suspended, golden haze. In her pool, the water cool and blue. On her couch, Tenley wedged between them during a movie. At her kitchen table, losing spectacularly to Kohl and Jace at some complicated board game. They had meticulously rebuilt the easy fortress of their friendship, brick by careful brick. They did not talk about the dance. The space between them felt vast and fragile, a canyon spanned by a thread, even when she was close enough that he could, and did, count every single faint freckle across the bridge of her nose.
Now, under the bruised purple of the desert twilight, there was no more rebuilding to do. Only this.
She stood before him, hands shoved into the pockets of her shorts. The porch light caught the sun-streaked strands in her strawberry blonde hair, turning them to gold. She wasn’t crying. Her green eyes were clear, but they held a weight that made his chest ache.
“So,” she said, her voice softer than its usual confident volume. “Early flight.”
“Yeah.” His own voice felt rough. “Manager would kill me if I missed it.”
“You’d deserve it,” she said, and the ghost of her smile, the familiar tease, was a small, sharp pain. It faded as quickly as it came. The silence pooled around them again, thick and hot. He could hear the distant, lonely cry of a coyote from the wash behind the houses.
She moved first. One step forward, then her arms were around him, her face tucking into the space between his shoulder and his chest. He froze for a heartbeat, his performer’s instincts screaming at the sudden, intimate contact, before his body remembered this was Kelsey. His arms came around her, holding tight. She felt solid and real, her back warm under his palms, the familiar scent of her shampoo—something like coconuts—filling his senses. She didn’t cry. He could feel the steady, controlled rhythm of her breathing against him. He, however, felt a treacherous heat prick behind his own eyes, a tightness in his throat that was entirely new and terrifying.
He held on, memorizing the feel of her. The way her hair brushed his chin. The exact pressure of her hands fisted in the back of his t-shirt. This was the anchor. This was the piece of home he was voluntarily leaving. The stupidity of it threatened to choke him.
She pulled back first, but only just enough to look up at him. Her eyes searched his face, as if trying to trace the features she knew so well onto her memory for the long stretch ahead. Then she rose up onto her toes.
The kiss landed on his cheek, just beside the corner of his mouth. It was soft, warm, and over in a second. A friend’s kiss. A goodbye kiss. It burned where her lips had been, a brand that felt anything but friendly.
She settled back onto her heels, her hands sliding from his back to rest lightly on his arms. “Bye, Jisung,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
His name in her mouth, said like that, shattered something inside him. He couldn’t speak. He just nodded, his jaw clenched so tight it hurt.
She gave his arms a final squeeze, then turned. He watched her walk to her blue convertible, parked at the curb. She didn’t look back. She got in, started the engine with a familiar roar that seemed obscenely loud in the quiet street, and drove away. The red taillights shrank, blurred, and vanished around a distant corner.
He stood there long after the sound of her car had faded into the hum of the night. The phantom warmth of her hug, the ghost of her kiss, lingered on his skin. The house behind him was dark, his host family already saying their goodbyes inside. He was alone.
Two years. The sentence echoed in his head, a life sentence. He would be busy. Debut. Schedules. Practice. Tours. A whirlwind that would eat every minute. She would be here, living her life. Going to college maybe. Meeting people. Dating.
The thought was a physical blow. His hand, which had been resting against his thigh, curled into a fist. That possessive, grounding instinct—the one that always made his hand find the small of her back in a crowd—twisted inward, useless. Who would he be grounding her from now? Some guy from her classes? Some friend of a friend at a party? Someone who didn’t know that she hated the texture of peaches, that she laughed louder when she was tired, that she secretly loved the cheesy horror movies she pretended to scorn?
Someone who hadn’t earned her.
The truth, stark and undeniable, finally broke through the careful dam he’d built over months. It wasn’t just protectiveness. It wasn’t just friendship. The jealousy he’d felt at the barbecue wasn’t an anomaly. The way his heart had hammered against his ribs as they danced, her body aligned with his, wasn’t just proximity. He was in love with her. He had been, probably since that first drive into the desert, the wind stealing her laughter and giving it to him as a gift.
And he had just let her walk away. He had called her his friend. He had let other men think they could try. He had stood there and let her kiss his cheek and say goodbye.
A dry, soundless sob racked his frame. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, forcing the heat back. Idols didn’t cry over girls in driveways. Trainees didn’t get to have this. Han Jisung had a path, and it led to a stage in Seoul, not a sunbaked driveway in Arizona.
But the boy she had found waiting after school, the one who drummed on her dashboard and rapped his fears under a vast sky, that boy was crumbling. He got into the rental car. The interior still held a faint trace of her coconut scent from earlier that day. He sat there in the dark, gripping the steering wheel, and let the silence crush him.
He started the car. The headlights cut two lonely paths through the dark. He didn’t look back at the house as he pulled away. He drove toward the airport, toward his future, with the certain, desolate knowledge that he was leaving the best part of himself behind. The highway unspooled ahead, a black ribbon under the stars. He rolled down the window, letting the oven-dry air whip into the car, trying to scour away the feeling of her. It didn’t work. He knew it wouldn’t. The anchor was gone, and he was now utterly, terribly adrift.