Dark Tide

Chapter 5

She thinks she is lost
in the whirlpool depths
of his eyes,
She tries to swim to
the surface, where
tiny pinpoint lights reflect,
but she sinks back down,
drowning
and breathless.

"Are you tired?" he asks her suddenly.

"I'm never tired," she reminds him, "I'd like to never need to sleep." And she stretches and props her head up again.

He rolls up to sitting and then takes her hand. "Come with me," and he leads her down the corridor, to the doorway of the main bathroom.

"What?" she giggles, as he turns on the bathwater, and she watches the way steam rises as the water hits the bathtub base.

He shrugs and smiles, "I just thought..." Then he is distracted by her collection of mismatched candles littered around the sides of the bathtub and surfaces. "Can we light these?" he asks. She nods and hands him the matches from the shelf above the sink. He strikes one and lights a large pillar candle, and then pauses, crouched down on the level of it, dancing his fingers through the wick flame, his gaze mesmerised, almost childlike. Then still watching the flame, he asks her, "Can you get me a drink?" adding, "Get yourself one too. If you don't want it, I'll have both." And he giggles slightly.

"Maybe the one..." she sighs, "I don't like losing control though," she adds, "that's why I stopped."

"I won't let that happen," he says. And she teases him about the irony of him promising her that when it's he who fell asleep drunk with 16 million viewers.

She tucks a towel round her, uncertain why, when there's only him here, and walks to the open-plan room. She pauses as she's pouring the second whiskey into a tumbler of ice, his bucket hat sitting next to the glasses on the countertop. It's been months, and yet she's still afraid of the effect. That feeling of losing grip: sinking down under elbows, boots and falling bodies, too intoxicated to fight; and before that, sinking under the waves. But I'm safe with him she tells herself, stroking his hat with her fingertips, and wonders if it's not about time she learnt to drink responsibly, instead of in binges.

As she returns to the bathroom, she pauses in the doorway. The light is off and he sits on the edge of the bathtub now, the room flickering with tiny candle flames, and the subtle dull glow of morning threatening to creep up from behind the shadow of Achasan in the East. She stands transfixed by the door for a moment, unable to process that he's really there, sitting totally naked on the rim of her bathtub, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. From across the room, he is a vision, the way his shoulders contrast so intensely with his narrow waist; his thighs, and she blushes thinking about how they felt between her legs; and the way his loose hair curls down in front of and behind his ears. His honey-skin flickers with candle glow and his arms are folded over his chest, his tattoo sleeve illuminated in the dancing luminescence.

For one unhinged moment, she thinks she's made him all up inside her head, and she remembers the poem about the mad girl who has conjured up a lover from her imagination, and how that poem had haunted her in Songjiho in the aftermath of their liaison.

"How are you even real?" she says, her own voice sounding far away. "You're like a fairy person, or something in a dream, sat there like that," and then she giggles at how ludicrous she sounds.

"I think I'm real," he smiles. Then she walks over to him and he folds her into his arms, kissing her as the bathtub fills quickly behind him, the two glasses of whiskey still clutched in her hands. In a while, he takes them from her, placing the tumblers down on the bathtub edge, and climbs into the water, and she hesitates, having one of those what the fuck is actually happening here moments.