catchtens | RED THROAT DREAMS

red throat dreams
1,941w; pg-13 (park seojoon/ryu sera)
they're in the mood for love.

Every year, there is a week in the summer when Seoul swelters and sweat sticks to his neck even after taking an ice cold shower, ceiling fan whirring as he lays in their queen sized bed, only bothering to put on an undershirt and a pair of boxers before accidentally drifting into a fitful sleep above the covers. Usually he sweats into those, too.

He’s alone when it happens this year, his wife on a business trip to Tokyo, or at least that’s what she told him as she was packing her carry-on luggage. Seojoon watched her as she rummaged through their cabinets systematically from where he sat at their small, square dining table with a reheated bowl of dinner she had cooked for him two hours before, since she had come home from work earlier. She was very good at that kind of thing – packing – strategically rolling her shirts and trousers so they fit in each designated compartment. No more, no less. She always clicked her tongue when she looked at how Seojoon haphazardly threw his clean clothes into their drawers.

Last time his wife went on a business trip, sometime in April, her blazers smelled like a brand of department store cologne she tried to get him to buy a couple years ago, when she still bothered to convince him of things. Seojoon had sniffed it cautiously before dropping it into the washing machine. He had put in an extra cup of detergent before starting the spin cycle. When she later complained to him about how starchy her trousers had become, he considered bringing it up to her. He doesn’t quite remember why he didn’t.

He thinks about it as the ceiling fan goes round and round, cutting circles into his vision. Maybe it was because he hated how silent the night felt without her nagging him about something, only the fan and crickets filling in the vacuum of noise. The way he hated falling asleep above the covers during the one week in Seoul when the heat was so overwhelming that he’d wake up at three in the morning with his undershirt, boxers, and the covers beneath him damp with his sweat, pulling the covers over his stomach before closing his eyes again, alone. If she was home, she’d make sure to drape a thin blanket over his abdomen before lying down beside him. They hadn’t been in love with each other for years, but there were habits they couldn’t shake that made it seem like they still were.

Wednesday night. He wakes up at midnight instead of at three, which has never happened to him before. He shuffles to the bathroom to pee, wondering if that was the reason he drowsily blinked open his eyes to the lights still on, dim and yellow from lightbulbs waiting to burn out. It isn’t. He doesn’t bother putting the seat cover down when he’s done.

By the time Seojoon finishes washing his hands, he feels too awake to settle back into bed, so he decides to go out for a smoke. He leaves the door open and lights on behind him, inhaling around his cigarette. She hated when they first moved into this small apartment on the top floor of the complex, hotter than hell when the summer hit, and forbid him from smoking indoors, on the grounds that she hated the smell of the smoke and the walls, already off-white, would yellow around her picture frames much faster. Seojoon realizes belatedly that without her at home, he didn’t have to go outside just for a quick cigarette, but again, habits.

He’s taking his second drag when the door to their neighbor’s apartment opens. Seojoon turns his head slightly from where he’s leaning against the railing so he can barely make out the woman coming outside. They’d been neighbors for about five years now, maybe almost six, the only two apartments on the seventh floor, and had their fair share of elevator encounters. An even fairer share of them involved his wife, again criticizing him for something he did – like buying the wrong brand of soup base – while she, his neighbor, lifted her head, politely ignoring their conflict, to look at the numbers telling them how far from the seventh floor they were. She had very pretty eyes, his neighbor. She was a very pretty person in general.

They look at each other – her in surprise, he in calm – for a moment longer than what is comfortable. She’s got a stack of cardboard boxes fitted into one another like nesting dolls in her arms, old flip-flops that are otherwise grey with a hint of pink on her feet, her brown hair in a bun held together with what could be either a chopstick or a pencil. Her pretty eyes regard him strangely, and that’s when Seojoon remembers he’s only in his undershirt and boxers.

“Hello,” he says. She nods at him in acknowledgement before pressing the button for the elevator. Her flip-flops slap against the floor. Seojoon wonders if he should offer to help her with her boxes though he’d rather not, but the elevator comes before he can move. The heat’s made him sluggish and apathetic. A distant, close-lipped smile is on her face when she meets his eyes before the doors close. That kind of smile didn’t betray anything.

When she returns, her arms are empty. Seojoon’s almost done with his cigarette. Her flip-flops slap back to the direction of her apartment and he’s about to tell her good night when her steps stop. Approach him.

“Mr. Park,” she starts. Seojoon faces her, eyebrows raised in question, taking what will probably be the second-to-last drag from his cigarette. “Can I ask that you refrain from smoking outside my apartment during the summer?” The light from his open door catches in her pretty eyes. They watch him seriously.

He turns away from her to exhale the cloud of smoke. Strands that didn’t make it into her bun stick to her neck like the strands of his hair sticking to the corners of his forehead. His wife told him to get a haircut before she left that Monday. He still hasn’t. He taps the end of his cigarette against the railing. “Why only during the summer?” he asks, rubbing his chin with his palm.

His neighbor frowns. Her name eluded him – they’d never talked extensively for him to use it, so Seojoon’d catalogued her as “his pretty neighbor” in his mind. Her surname was Ryu, he knew, from the neat name printed beside his near their mailboxes. Ryu something.

“I don’t want secondhand smoke,” she explains. “And I can’t close my windows when it’s this hot.”

Seojoon hums in thought at that, contemplating how to reply. “My wife doesn’t like when I smoke, either. But she’s okay when I come outside and do it.” He looks at her – Ryu something – still trying to fill in the blank.

She cracks a small smile at that. It betrays a slight amusement. “I’ve heard her nagging you about it through the walls,” she admits, his pretty neighbor. Ryu –

He laughs, scratching his forehead with the wrist of the hand the cigarette’s in. Seyoung? “I think she’s cheating on me,” he says just to say it. When he glances back at her, the smile’s slipped of her face.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she tells him, wrapping her arms around herself. She really does sound sorry. Seojoon wishes he regretted starting this conversation, but he doesn’t.

The cigarette hands between his fingers, useless and burnt out. “You know, when I was twenty-two years old and marrying the thirty-year-old her, I didn’t think I’d spend a week this hot alone in a cramped apartment with no air-conditioning,” he finds himself continuing. Her toes curl in her flip-flops before uncurling. Se-mi? “I guess things changed.”

She – Ryu something – bites her lip. “I never noticed your age gap was that large,” she comments. Ryu Seyoung? Ryu Se-mi? Ryu…Sera. Ryu Sera.

Seojoon turns so his whole body, not just his face faces her. The railing holds the small of his back. He suddenly feels very vulnerable and exposed in only his undershirt and boxers, talking about his wife who is possibly cheating on him, before Ryu Sera. “I’m twenty-eight now, and we still have no kids.”

Sera shifts so the light from his open door isn’t in her eyes anymore. “Would you want kids?” she asks, tilting her head slightly to the side. The shadows collect on her knees like bruises.

There’s a stark silence between them, punctuated by crickets and the imaginary whir of his bedroom’s ceiling fan. It is a silence not unlike the one that stretched between them fifteen minutes earlier, when she had her arms full of recyclables and he a mouthful of smoke. They were looking at each other then, too. A mild discomfort sits between them in the humid air.

“I don’t know,” Seojoon finally says. He’d never thought much about it until Sera asked him. Children were something he assumed they needed for a successful marriage. The stage he and his wife had hit after six years but had been stuck in since two.

They keep looking at each other. Sera’s pretty eyes glint with a hint of empathy in the dim lighting between their apartments. Maybe that’s why Seojoon thought her eyes were so pretty – they betrayed how she felt. Unlike his wife’s, a dark, dark brown that was almost black, sharp even as she stared at where their bodies were connected during sex. Sera, on the other hand, looked at him like she would try to understand all the things his wife didn’t like about him.

She looks away first. A chill runs down his spine from the loss of it all. “It’s late,” she says, turning back to her apartment, rubbing at her arms. “Good night, Mr. Park.”

“Seojoon,” he supplies instead. Sera glances at him over her shoulder, startled. “Seojoon’s fine.”

She nods as a last goodbye before slipping back inside, leaving him alone. There’s an emptiness that lingers in the hot air as he stares at the blackened tip of his useless cigarette, like something very serious occurred but the importance of the event had been forgotten. Seojoon feels like some kind of understanding passed between them – of what, he wasn’t sure of. What he was sure of was the heat, and the silent discomfort of two people who were uncannily similar that they had held.

His wife’s blazers smell like that department store cologne again when she comes back. Seojoon holds one in his hands for a bit as he’s throwing things into the washing machine, fingers digging into the fabric more desperately than he thought, before dropping it back into the laundry basket. He closes the lid with the normal amount of detergent and starts the spin cycle.

Later that night, his wife has her blazers in her arms, dumping them in his lap as he’s watching television with a popsicle in his hand. “Why didn’t you wash my clothes?” she snaps at him, like he’s done her a colossal wrongdoing. He thinks she’s being ridiculous.

He throws them to the side. “Wash your own damn clothes!” he yells before standing up and pushing past her. It’s probably the first time Seojoon’s yelled at her in years. She doesn’t take it well.

As they scream at each other for another two hours, Seojoon wonders if Sera can hear every word they’re saying.