Jaemin the Icy Prince on Campus - Na Jaemin NCT

39. Not Once

There is a single white streak in his light brown hair, high above the temple, but the eyes that look at me are quite unchanged. 

A waiter appears at my elbow with a tray.

"Wine for you, ma'am?"

I take a glass. The waiter disappears into the crowd.

"Your health and fortune," Jaemin says quietly. He raises his glass to mine and drains it. I wonder if it is only me who has stopped breathing, but then I see the little telltale pulse beating in his right cheek, and I know that the encounter is as startling to him as it is to me.

"I did not know," he says, "that you are in Seoul."

The hand that holds the glass trembles very slightly, and his voice is hard, queerly abrupt.

"I flew home last week," I answer, my voice perhaps as oddly flat as his.

Jaemin and I are left alone beside the window. Junnie and Jerry have melted off somewhere; I had not even realised that they have gone. 

"Shall we go out to the terrace?" He indicates the glass doors leading outside. Without a word, I set my glass on the side table, and he does the same. Wordlessly, I step out to the terrace, and I feel his presence following behind me.

I look out on to the garden, noting the trim hedges and the smooth lawns, while a score of trivial observations run insanely through my head. 

"How white the grass looks in the snow," and "It wasn't this chilly this time of year last year" are phrases I have never yet used in my life, even to a stranger, but they seem, at this moment, to be what are needed for the occasion. They rise to my tongue, and tremble on my lips, but I do not frame them, because my throat is strangled with tears.

I continue looking out upon the garden in silence, with Jaemin stricken dumb beside me as well.

And then in a low voice, clipped and hard, he says, "If I'm silent you must forgive me. I haven't thought, after five years, to find you so damnably unchanged." 

His words, deafening in their utter quietness, drag me back to the intimate past, shattering the indifferent present into a hundred million shards of pain, like that final day he kissed me in the alley, my heart broken in two, each half still glowing, lying trodden in the snow.

"Why damnable?" My voice is someone else's; it sounds very young, unsure, not quite steady, not what a grown, poised woman of twenty-three would sound like at all.

"I thought up different pictures of you in my head," he says. "I thought of you older, harder, meaner...I made up all kinds of pictures about you." He looks at me, his eyes, those beautiful, familiar eyes, staring right into mine.

"And...?" The ghost of my whisper floats between us.

"And instead I find - this." He looks me full in the face, with a directness and that brutal honesty I remember so well.

"I am sorry," I say, biting down hard on my lips to stop them from trembling, "to disappoint you."

"You misunderstand," he says, his eyes unreadable. It is as if he has shuttered them up behind a wall. "I'm not disappointed. Just - speechless." 

He runs a hand over his face, as if he is very tired. There are lines under his eyes. I had not noticed them earlier, and it hits me all of a sudden; he is different, changed, older. He is no longer that young boy from five years ago. This Jaemin is older, harder, weary. 

"It's just that seeing you again - " He pauses, and his mouth tightens, "has been quite a shock. I shall recover," he says, his face expressionless, "in a moment or two." He stares out into the garden. "If I had known - " He stops. If I had known you would be here, I wouldn't have come. The words hover unsaid between us.