REDAMANCY: THE ACT OF LOVING IN RETURN

Wonho disappeared for five days after that.

Which meant, 120 hours, 7200 minutes, and 432000 seconds.

Time had never been so relevant to me. Most of these hours, and minutes, and seconds I spent pondering over my brash and abrupt confession to Wonho, and wondering if that was what drove him away. Was that too sudden? Was I being whimsical? Did he think of me as an easy and brazen person?

I knew that only couldn't be the reason for him to keep his phone off for five days, almost a week. When I tried to call him I was directed straight towards the voicemail section, no matter what time of the day it was.

So I let him be. When I asked Changkyun if he knew of Wonho's wherabouts, he simply said he'd come around, that he was maybe resting. When I inquired Hyungwon, he quirked an eyebrow and thought for a while. There wasn't anything from his past experience that he could think of.

Wonho's graduation from the university was oncoming, and he probably needn't be in the campus, he probably had to study a lot, or think about his furure from here on.

His silence was like an obstrusive shadow of a humongous cloud looming over me from right above. It didn't seem to faze anyone else, but it stayed attached to my shoulders and head.

I couldn't shrug it away. No matter how much I indulged myself in the university lectures, and club activities, and the part time job, and occasionally flipping throuh the pages of the books I sometimes borrowed from the library, I couldn't set my mind anywhere properly.

Wonho resided in a big portion of my mind, even though he was absent in reality.

A text came just before I was starting to feel really unsettled.

The short text from Wonho arrived when I was in one of the university auditoriums, attending a boring, and lengthy seminer on contemporary writing relating it to pre modern writing, just because I didn't know what to do when fully alone with my thoughts.

I didn't want to spend time with Changkyun and Hanbyul either as I didn't want them to ask me again what I was thinking about, and I didn't want to explain them why.

A breath of relief surged through the pit of my stomach when I read his text, asking me if I was at the campus right then, and if I was free to talk. It took me right back to not so long ago, when I had kissed on Wonho's cheek, and I didn't see him for the next three days.

Unlike then, I couldn't feel so happy after him coming back. I was just relieved. I skipped to the backdoor and stepped out of the dark auditorium as the elderly lecturer started presenting a few slides on the whiteboard.

Outside, the afternoon sun was casting a golden light on the fields and on the student's heads passing by. I took a quick ten minutes walk to the central library, where I had decided to meet Wonho.

The atmosphere of the coming evening was sleepy, insipid, and gave all the reasons why students were slowly dissappearing from the campus grounds. Probably to take a coffee break before spending their evening working on group projects, or studying alone at the library, or, they just went home as they were done for the day.

Wonho stood before the oak tree, wearing a pale blue t-shirt, pairing it with white shorts and sneakers. That was my first time seeing him in shorts.

His hair was a tousled mess, and when approached closer I could see a sheen of glistening sweet around his neck and face, the blue veins under the skin of his naked and large arms prominent, as he was holding onto the straps of his bacpack.

The afternoon was dimly lit, and ephemeral with the coming evening, so looked he.

I couldn't help but think I was only seeing a hologram of him, and that too would disappear as soon as the sun would fully set.

The corners of his lips perked up when he saw me, and he beckoned me over. We sat on the crisp grass, warm and inviting due to lack of rainfall this week.

I couldn't find anything to say so I just quietly observed him. He sat with his revealed legs crossed on the ground, and he was fiddling with a small twig he found on the grass. He was breathing slowly, and deeply, and for a moment, I found myself lost in the rhythmic rising and falling of his chest.

"Were you practicing kendo?" I finally asked. A vivid image of him in a dark martial arts suit, sweating profoundly, yet smiling so brightly visited my mind, from the day I first saw him.

He nodded. "You must be tired," I said.

"I'm okay. How have you been?" He finally turned his face towards me, and really looked at me. For some reasons, I couldn't keep up with him and averted my gaze.

"Good." I lied. "Where were you?" The question came from a distant voice within myself, as if it didn't really come from me but I was watching an alternate version of mine spewing it out.

Truthfully, I didn't know if I had the permission to ask where he was, and why he had ghosted me. Maybe I had, but I didn't want to sound demanding.

"I needed to look over a few things," he answered curtly, with an impassive face. "Sometimes I feel like getting away is necessary, you know. And cellphones really are such a hassle to keep up with."

I just knew he wouldn't answer anything beyond that, even if I asked. He was reserved but this was my first time seeing him being so evasive.

I didn't want to press any further. "I was hoping you were alright. I was worried, you know."

He smiled at me, and it was not dim or faint anymore like the twilight. He wasn't a holographic image, he really was here. "You did?"

"I thought it could be because of me..."

"No!" He interjected before I could finish. He gave a slight shake of his head to the sides. "No, it's not about you, I can promise you that."

"Oh," I mumbled. "You didn't give me any answer that day, so I thought-. Actually, it was my fault. I was abrupt. I probably never gave you a single hint before that I really liked you."

He looked at me shocked out of his skin for a second, realizing that I did fully confess to him just then. And then it dawned on me too, that I had.

We broke off the eye contact at the same time and I found myself staring at the green pasture before us, gleaming at the pale sunlight. I could hear him shifting in his position a little. Other than that, he was completely quiet.

There was not one bit of breeze around us, it was completely still. There were a few scraps of thin clouds evenly spread across the sky. Below, only a handful students ambled around the campus as far as I could see. The dusk was rushing in, and only the birds made a clamouring noise as they flocked towards their home. Otherwise, this whole scenario could be a picture, a frozen snapshot of the reality.

"I don't really have an answer for you right now, but I don't want to be distanced from you either," Wonho spoke. Reality came back to me.

"I guess, I'm not ready for a relationship, yet, I don't want to remain only friends with you either. I don't think we are limited to being friends right now, and I somehow like this present situation between us. Though I also think it will be too selfish of me to ask you to stay in my life as you are, for now." He articulated each word with hesitation, yet in a firm tone, as if he had thought about it for a while.

"I don't have any problem with that," I replied after he was done. "I want to stay like this with you."

That confirmed it. I no longer had a confusion with the label of us, because the label didn't exist to begin with.

He gave me a slight nod, the lustre of sweat no longer on his face and I could see a very vague outlines of dark circles under his lucid eyes. His skin was so pale that even a slight misshape could easily show.

I let out a small huff of breath as I took the sight of him in me, imprinting it in my brain. "You do seem tired."

"I am, a little," he said with a short laugh following. "It's the practice."

"You can lean on me, and rest if you want," I said carefully, my heart beating out of its required pace for a second.

"Is it okay to do that?" He asked in a curioused tone.

I nodded at him, and I expected him to lay his head on my shoulder, but he shifted and turned his body to the other side, he then leaned back and rested his head on my lap, on my thigh as my legs were spread out horizontally on the ground.

That caught me off guard. He was so close to me that he could possibly hear my irregular heartbeat. My dark jean separeted us from being skin to skin, yet I could feel how soft his dark hair was. I resisted the urge to pat his head with my everything. I couldn't even peer down at him. I was looking ahead.

"Thanks," Wonho said in a sheepish, low voice.

I cleared my throat, and let out an exhale of air. "It's no problem."

After a moment of silence, I spoke again, mainly to forget he was actually resting on my lap. For the last few days I couldn't keep my mind off him and now after finding him, it was too overwhelming for me.

"You know, I used to write a little when I was a teen. I wrote anonymous blogs about those small things around me, the sunset at the rocky beach in my hometown, the swings on the backyard of our house, my mom's cooking, my sister's little baby who liked a loaf when she came out, the sunrise from my balcony, and so many other things. I added photos too sometimes," I said.

"Really? That makes me realize I don't know so many things about you. I didn't know about your elder sister, or your niece too. I didn't know you wrote."

I could picture him looking up at him with his eyes filled with piqued interest. I couldn't find it in me to look down at him.

"My niece is five years old now, I call her Nini. My sister is a happily married woman. I really wanted to write about different places and phenomenons around the world, but I was confined to my tiny little hometown. So I wrote about things around me."

"That sounds amazing. Could I read those writing of yours someday?"

I couldn't help but let out a small giggle. "You don't have to. Those were not that good, plus I lost my password to the blogging site long ago."

Wonho let out a sound that clearly conveyed he was disappointed.

"Maybe you can read something from my present writing."

"Really?" He beamed, and I finally looked at him. His eyes were sparkling even though the sun had set and a blue light was spreading about.

I could feel myself grinning. "Yeah, I don't know what came to me but I created a blogging site for myself. I only have one entry as of now, and, it's about the library I work for part time. No one read it yet, and I don't expect anyone to."

"So I'm going to be the first reader." He smiled back at me.

I nodded. I probably wrote something to take my mind off him. I didn't think I was serious about it until I had started telling him. It had been several years since I had written anything for myself, and I thought I had lost the touch, but it seemed to me that my writing has improved more than the past.

"I named the domain, Sunny's universe," I told him.

"Sunny's universe," he repeated. "That sounds just like you."

I looked up again, no one was here around us. A couple of students sat far ahead, one of them playing a guiter. The rhythm reached us here.

"Maybe the things I'll write about could include you too." I let out a small huff of breath.

"Like?"

"Like, our walk in the bunny filled park."

He giggled softly. Encouraged, I continued.

"Or right now, right here, with our backs facing the gigantic central library, sitting on the grass, listening to the dull sound of a depressing guitar song, and in the future it could be us running down in an empty street at the break of dawn, or observeimg a starry night, or skating on a frozen lake in winter secretly after sneaking in the national park."

"You make everything sound so magical," he whispered. After a second, he added, "I'd like to do all that."

"The skating part too?"

"I can't skate, but yes."

I gingerly placed a hand on top of his head, so lightly that he didn't seem to notice. It was pretty dark, the darkness that always came when the street lamps were just about to light up.

I especially mentioned skating in a park only as it involved the winter.

Because, if Hyungwon was right, Wonho would die before the clouds could rain snow.

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A/n: stay warm! It's currently winter here.