My Seoul Man

Chapter 38

"What's that face?" I asked, hopping down from the spiral rock.

He sighed and said, "More intrigue back home. It's...I'll let my lawyers deal with it."

His face had turned hard as the stone walls looming around us. So I knew I wasn't going to get a real answer.

I was trying to learn how to crowbar my way through when the doors slammed shut like that. But I'm not good at wheedling and whining. And I try to respect people's feelings as much as possible, too.

See, where I come from when somebody says to leave them alone, you do that and just wait for a little moment of weakness to flicker in their eyes sometime.

That's how we dealt with decades of deep pain over in The Quarters. Pain so bad you wouldn't want to force someone to talk about it.

Pain that started when they shoved us on those ships back in Africa and continues to this very day. Words and whining hadn't changed it in all this time, so we just hauled those burdens back up on our strong shoulders and got on with it.

This, though...

Well, I loved this man. Yeah, I said it. My whole body and soul knew it even if it wasn't necessarily time to be talking about it out loud so soon.

And whenever those doors closed on me...it was like an eclipse of the Sun, you know? My world went dark.

So, I tried, "You know I'm going to be worrying about this all day now, right?"

And he put his hands on my cheeks and said, "Look where we are, aegiya (baby). Millions of years, it took that river to make all this beauty. I mean, our little silly problems are like...well..."

"I hear you, but—"

"Let's just be here together in this place and not thinking about things that don't even matter, okay?"

Yeah. He'd shut that door good and tight.

So, I let out a little groan and pressed my forehead to his.

And he kissed my nose and said, "I can almost feel the presence of all those people who touched that wall thousands of years ago. Now, they had problems, huh? Just trying to survive."

I hooked arms with him and walked on down that path they'd all traveled. That had been cut through the stone over millions of years.

But I didn't have millennia to cut through the obstacles in our way. I could feel them looming over us just like the salmon pink walls we were walking past. Obstacles I might never be able to climb over or break through.

When we got to the little pools of rainwater or places where the old stream got a little wider and deeper, he hoisted me up on his back like I was just a 10-pound sack of flour.

It'd been a long, long time since a man had done something like that for me.

I used to watch women in the parking lots of stores or in the doctor's office leaning on their long-time loves—the old couples, especially, I'd envy. Shuffling in holding onto each other, knowing they had someone they could hold onto 'til death, like they'd vowed.

And I'd tell myself it just made them helpless, the women who'd been cared for like that. Which is bullshit, of course.

Having a mighty love to lean on would probably make you 'way stronger than someone who'd never had anything to rest up against their whole life.

So I let myself be cared for, for once. Lord knows, it felt delicious to just lay there letting myself be carried away in more ways than one.

And when we came out through another big crack in the cliff face, I whooped at the sight of the tall trees and the glistening stream snaking off into the distance for as far as we could see.