Chapter 18

With how knocked out I was throughout the night, perhaps I had drunk more at the club than I thought. I was woken up by the sunlight seeping in through the open curtains. My alarm had rung hours ago, and its subsequent snooze alarms were all equally ignored.

It was impossible not to notice Elsie’s presence behind me. Assuming she was still asleep, I was careful to avoid making a sound as I turned around to her.

The silence. The brightness. The secrecy. This was the perfect opportunity.

I didn’t think I had gotten such a clear look at her face before. Even without makeup, her skin was flawless. She did have a few freckles along her nose, but they were charming and not at all what I would consider a blemish. Although my skin wasn’t too bad either, I was still prone to the occasional breakout. I somehow doubted Elsie to have ever gone through the pain of housing a huge, scarring pimple. That much I was envious of…

Elsie must have felt my blatant staring through her slumber. She groaned awake, peeling one eye open at a time. I found myself drawn once again to the way her bronzy eyes shined under the morning sun. When I realized she was staring just as deeply into my own eyes, I instantly turned my blushing face to the ceiling, counting imaginary stars on the white surface.

“Did you sleep well?” Elsie asked, her voice still hoarse from sleep. Or was husky a better way to put it? Even to a fellow girl, it sounded attractive.

“Y-Yeah,” I uttered in a relatively higher voice. “Um, thank you for sleeping next to me…”

What kind of thank you was that? I sounded so awkward! My blush definitely wasn’t going away any time soon. I heard Elsie’s smile rather than seeing it since I forbade myself to look at her face anymore at such close proximity.

“You’re welcome, Yura. I’d be glad to help out again any time.”

Help out. Did that mean she was willing to sleep next to me again in the future? Us sleeping together regularly—Maybe my mind wasn’t fully awakened yet. My thoughts were flowing to odd places. I needed to stop them.

Having nothing better to say, I asked, “What should we have for breakfast?”

“Do we even have anything in the fridge?”

“Um…” It was the weekend. Whatever groceries I bought last week were bound to have been consumed by now.

Elsie took my lack of response as a no. “Do you want to go out?”

Go out—As if I hadn’t made this very mistake once before! If Elsie weren’t here, I would have hit my head repeatedly until I got it to function normally again. I really needed to wake up already!

“There’s a pancake place down the street,” she suggested.

“Yeah, pancakes sound good,” I replied right away.

She pulled herself out of bed. My bed. “I’m going to get dressed then.”

“Okay…”

Elsie closed the door on her way out, perhaps to give me some privacy to get dressed as well. Or was it more for her own privacy? Either way, I used this moment of solitude to remain as I was on my bed and think back to the past few hours. Then, to the past few weeks.

How things had changed from me despising the idea of sharing the same apartment with Elsie to now having spent an entire night on the same bed. And I was the one who had asked for it too!

The face of the woman at the club had yet to fade from my memories. It would be a while before I would be able to fully forget about that moment. With that said, however, what I was feeling now was the complete opposite of panic. There was a sense of comfort knowing Elsie had come to my rescue in the aftermath.

The face of her sleeping by my side. That memory wasn’t going to fade anytime soon either.

. . .

The pancakes were delicious. I couldn’t believe I never noticed there was a diner this great so close to home. From talking to Elsie throughout breakfast, it seemed she knew much more about the area we lived in than I did to the point where it was almost laughable to say that I wasn’t the foreigner among us. Even so, Elsie wouldn’t be able to hide her non-Korean roots when we returned home.

We had the entire day to ourselves now. I assumed things would get awkwardly silent pretty quickly, which would then lead us to spending the free hours alone in our respective rooms as we always had in the past. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth as Elsie and I soon sat together on the floor table, a notebook and colorful pens spread out between us. As promised, I was going to help Elsie study for her upcoming Korean spelling test.

“Is this right?” Elsie asked, turning her notebook around for me to check. Her expression was very hopeful. She had gotten the last nine words correct and was feeling quite confident about a streak of ten.

Apologetically, I shook my head. Pointing to the part she got wrong, I said, “This should be the other way.” I fixed her mistaken spelling of the word world with a red marker pen.

“Oh, bloody hell! I swear the ‘ㅐ(ae)’ and ‘ㅔ(e)’ characters are going to be the death of me! Why make two letters with literally no difference in sound?”

I smiled sympathetically. “I get confused by it sometimes, too.”

“Even the native gets confused! I say we should get rid of those two letters entirely.”

I had never seen Elsie get so worked up before. And to think it was because of something as trivial as a spelling test. She must have been a lot more upset about breaking her streak than I assumed. Her lips were now stuck in a disappointed pout.

With each passing minute I spent with her, the cool and hard-to-approach impression I once had of Elsie got broken more and more. As it turned out, she had her fair share of clumsy moments too. It was kind of cute.

“But if we get rid of those letters, you won’t be able to spell your name in Korean,” I reasoned, writing out her name in blue. “See?”

Elsie stared at her name on the notebook for some time. I began to get self-conscious of my messy handwriting. My penmanship was without a doubt the worst amongst my friends and family. Elsie took the pen from my hand and began practicing her name on a loose sleeve of paper. She tried to copy it exactly how I had written it. I wasn’t sure if I should have been concerned that she was taking influence of the way I wrote in Korean.

Once she got used to the spelling, Elsie said, “So, that’s how my name is written. 앨(ael)-시(si).” She chuckled at the fascination of it.

“Do you know how to write my name?”

“Wait, don’t tell me.” Remembering the small comment I had made earlier about my favorite color, she grabbed a pink marker to have a go at my name. She gave each letter a lot of thought before printing it below where I had written hers. After a good minute, she turned the notebook to me. “Is this it?”

I nodded. “Good job!”

“유(yu)-라(ra).”

Maybe it was just refreshing to hear her say my name with more of a Korean accent for the first time. A different kind of chill ran through me. I was smiling on the outside even though my insides felt strange. Her voice was echoing in my head of all the times she had said my name thus far. It was almost hypnotic.

Elsie just had to go on and look at me then. The brief second of us meeting eyes felt like a gunshot to my heart. 

I pulled myself back, involuntarily letting out a huge breath of relief not to be so close to her anymore. “So, um, we kind of got off track, didn’t we?”

Elsie mirrored my action of putting some space between us. “Uh, yeah. I guess we did. What’s the next word?”

I looked at the paper with the list of practice words. Without even thinking, I read off, “사(sa)-랑(rang).”

Although Elsie got it written down rather quickly, she didn’t lift her head up to ask if it was correct this time. She simply stared at the word. Or rather the three words stacked together.

앨시—Elsie.

유라—Yura.

사랑—Love.