Donghae

                “I think we should get rid of it. Pretend it never happened.” I say as I wipe my fingerprints off of the wallet. You can’t be too careful after all.

                “What?” He asks.

                “I mean, even if people find the body or figure out he’s dead, there’s nothing linking him to you, so it shouldn’t matter, right?” It seemed reasonable, at least it did in my head.

                “You think so? I’ll go with whatever you say… I just want this to be over.” He sounded so defeated. We hadn’t even started moving the body and he had already quit. I couldn’t quit though.

                “Yeah, I think it’ll work. We just need to hide the body and his stuff…” I looked at the corpse in front of me and I was met with a question that I didn’t want to know the answer to. Then he asked it for me and I had no choice.

                “But how are we supposed to do that? So there’s no t-trace left?” He doesn’t want to know the answer either. I can tell by his voice.

                “We’ll have to – I don’t know – burn it? Bury it? Drop it in the ocean? But it’s all iced over now, so we can’t do that. I guess we could burn it, but a fire out here would be too noticeable, then we’d have to do something else.” I was getting so serious about something so morbid, but I had begun to think about this as if it were a mission or a school problem out of a textbook that we’d have to solve for homework. I’d go at it systematically and then find all the possible answers and weed them out until the last one standing is the best option. But this wasn’t some math question. This was a dead person.

                “Donghae…” He called to me and he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “We can burn it. I know a place. There won’t be anyone to see us.” He hadn’t quit after all.

                “Sorry. I just – I don’t know.”

                “Neither of us know. It’s okay. We’re figuring it out together. Right? You promised, we’d do it together.” He smiled. He was always there for me when I got like this. I’d forgotten about it because of the shock, but now I remember. He was never a quitter. Never.

                “Okay. Let’s do it then. We’ll go there together and we won’t quit until we’re safe.”

                “I think I’ll be fine from now on too. Probably,” he grinned at me and all of my worries flew straight out of me, like his smile was flooding through me and flushing out all of my anxiety.

                “Alright.”