Refuge; a place Yumi was in dire need of. The young woman needed a place where she could run away to, a place where she wouldn’t feel suffocated anymore, and she quickly learned that going to her sister’s wasn’t exactly the best choice. Then again, she didn’t really have any other place she could turn to. She had too much pride to run to her parents, and over the years she had lost touch with pretty much any friend she had acquired; therefore she was left with no other option but to go to Hiromi’s.

Instead of finding the safe haven that she was looking for, Yumi found that at her sister’s place she felt even more trapped. Hiromi couldn’t understand why her sister still insisted on getting a divorce and even though it had only been two days since she moved out, Yumi was on the verge of going insane. She never had to repeatedly explain herself to the same person like this before and despite all her efforts Hiromi still didn’t see sense in Yumi’s actions. Her sister’s lack of concern for her pain and the internal struggle she went through to finally make her decision had been both disappointing and frustrating for Yumi. Siblings were supposed to be supportive, and comforting but Hiromi was the opposite. She was indignant and ridiculed every reason Yumi came up with for moving out of the apartment.

“You need to grow up, Yumi, that’s what you need to do.” Hiromi spit back, her tone dripping with finality expressing just how fed up she was with their constant discussion of Yumi’s recent actions.

“What?” Yumi, baffled, threw the blanket she had just folded onto the arm of the couch, and swiveled around to face her sister. The room began to lightly spin around her and Yumi tried to shake away the impending migraine she knew she was going to have, all the while her growing anger eating at her and not letting her drop the subject.  Hiromi had some nerve, Yumi thought, to sound so authoritative and exasperated at the same time when she was the one who insisted on bringing up the subject once again after putting her son down for his afternoon nap.

Hiromi rolled her eyes, drama queen, she huffed internally as she stared back at her younger sister. “You keep blaming him. A marriage involves two people, the blame is supposed to be shared. But you, you’re just pushing it all on him.”

“I’m not pushing the blame on anyone!” Yumi immediately defended herself, clenching her jaw and instantly regretting it when she felt the searing pain in her head intensify. She never recalled getting into this many fights with her sister when they were younger, and frowned at the realization that like her relationship with Jinhwan, her relationship with her sister was just as screwed up.

“Yes you are,” finality once again drowning Hiromi’s words.

“Damn it Hiromi, why can’t you just be supportive for one ing minute?” Yumi hissed out, trying to keep her volume down more so as to not aggravate her headache any further than worrying about waking up her sleeping nephew upstairs. She didn’t need this – the headache or the conversation. If she wanted to be berated for her actions she could have easily just gone back to her parents with her tail between her legs. But no, she came to her sister’s in hopes that they would sit on the couch with a gallon of Ben and Jerry’s between them, watching sappy movies and cry over her failed marriage together. Yet there she was, standing in the living room trying to fold the laundry and getting into their third argument in two days.

Bunching up the shirt she was supposed to be folding, Yumi growled out. “Supportive? I’ve been nothing but supportive for the past five years!” She seethed, tossing the shirt back into the pile of clean clothes and stepped up to her sister, visibly outraged at how ungrateful Yumi was being. “I’m not going to stand here and baby you about this, telling you, ‘oh well it’s his loss’ because you wanted to marry him. You knew you both didn’t have money, or jobs or anything but you still married him. You think Mom and Dad were saying no just for kicks because it would hurt you? They knew this was going to happen, but you were too ing stubborn to listen.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this.” Yumi stared back at her sister in utter shock. The one person she had hoped truly understood her in actuality didn’t know a thing about her. “Money? Is that why you think I’m leaving him? Honestly?”

Hiromi tensed up while she processed the words coming out of her younger sister’s mouth. “Oh my,” her hand clasped over , and suddenly all the anger Hiromi felt drained out of her. Still? She wondered, her face softening as realization hit her. Muttering an endless string of apologies, she took the few steps closing off the distance between them and engulfed her sister into a hug.

Yumi didn’t know what to do with herself. She couldn’t understand the meaning behind the complete one-eighty her sister just pulled and stood still while Hiromi hugged her tightly. “I thought you got over it.” Hiromi’s voice came out in an unsteady quiver when she pulled away, her eyes searching for an answer on her sister’s face. Again, Yumi was thrown into a bout of confusion. But her uncertainty was instantly cleared when Hiromi spoke up again. “Is this because you lost hi-”

“Stop.” The young woman hastily cut her off before she could finish her sentence, and hopefully before speaking about it would spark memories she tried relentlessly to push away. But she was too late, as her chest began to tighten and the headache she knew would eventually come hit her like a bus. “I can’t – I – I need to get out.”

---

“What are you doing here?” Jinhwan growled, clearly agitated with the fact his manager was now standing in the doorway of his apartment.

Baek Kyoung brushed off the rapper’s annoyance and pushed passed him into the apartment. “It’s been two days Jinhwan, naturally I’d stop by to check up on you.” His manager tried his hardest to sound sincere but Jinhwan immediately saw through the façade and scoffed. Choosing to ignore Jinhwan’s lack of gratitude, Baek Kyoung added. “I’m sure glad I did, what the hell is going on here?”

The place had turned into a pigsty, but more important than the tidiness of the two-bedroom apartment was the strong stench of alcohol that seemed to seep out of every pore of the rapper’s skin. Jinwhan didn’t need this. He was already frustrated with the fact he couldn’t get a hold of Yumi and the realization that he actually didn’t know his wife like he thought he did when he ending up calling people she hadn’t spoken to in years just to try and track her down didn’t help.  Therefore, a meddling manager who was most likely up to no good wasn’t about to get the privilege of a warm welcome. “Please just leave.”

Not heeding the rapper’s request, Baek Kyoung’s eyes scanned the apartment before turning to face Jinhwan and shaking his head in disappointment. “Go take a shower and change, we’ve got places to go to and people we need to meet.”

“ you.” The words were dismissive but the look in the rapper’s eyes conveyed something else. He was tired and thoroughly fed up with his manager constantly telling him what to do. Yes, sarcastically speaking, it was all part of the small illegible writing at the bottom of the contract claiming Baek Kyoung had all the rights to his life. But the contract, he had more important things to worry about. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Baek Kyoung narrowed his eyes at the man. Jinhwan may have been older than him in age but he had more experience in the music industry than Jinhwan could fathom. He had his fair share of experiences with uncooperative artists and love stricken fools. “I get it, Yumi moved out. She’s probably just upset, she’ll come crawling back in no time.”

That was the last straw for the rapper and before his better judgment could get the opportunity to say its peace, Jinhwan’s fist jutted out with full force hitting his manager square in the jaw. Baek Kyoung could have sworn he heard something crack when he stumbled backward, his eyes screaming out what the ?

Jinhwan smirked at him, pleased with how rattled his manager became, and for once proud of something he managed to learn while growing up. “Get the out.”

“You want to be that way then fine.” Baek Kyoung growled back, getting in Jinhwan’s face, their bodies mere inches away. “Fork over the money, now. All of it.” Seeing Jinwhan’s smirk falter, his manager grinned. “That’s more like it. Now go take a ing shower and get dressed.” Waiting till the rapper was the first to step away Baek Kyoung continued to nag at him. “Do you have any idea of how many interviews and appearances we had to reschedule because of your ing self-wallowing pity party?” Jinhwan didn’t say anything and grabbed the closest thing to a clean towel he had and stalked off into the bathroom, but not before muttering a string of curse words loud enough for Baek Kyoung to hear.

In no time, Jinhwan found himself sitting uncomfortably in one of the many conference rooms in his management’s office trying his hardest to feign interest in the questions that were being asked. I need to get my hands on money, fast. The rapper continually said in his mind, all the while trying to figure out what the interviewer was trying to ask. The whole using money to take advantage of him strategy was getting old, fast.

“Jinhwan?” The female interviewer called out, pulling the rapper out of his thoughts.

“Uh yea, sorry.” The rapper sheepishly apologized. He would have made it more formal or at least include her name, but this being the third interview in the last hour he couldn’t quite remember what her name was or who she worked for.

The woman’s cheeks flushed bright pink when her eyes finally meet the rapper’s black orbs for the first time since they started the interview, and as taken as she was by their darkness she had to admit he seemed preoccupied with something. “Is everything alright? You look a bit grim.”

“Do I?” Jinhwan asked, adding a small chuckle at the end while he rubbed the back of his neck, hoping he could charm her enough to avoid having to answer any more personal questions.

“Trouble in paradise?” The brazen woman asked, her reporter instincts kicking in as she wondered if she could milk some type of scandal out of his gloomy disposition. “Did the misses not like you telling the world you guys were married?

Jinhwan instantly regretted being so polite with the woman earlier when her true colors were revealed while she desperately grabbed for anything that would make a more interesting article. “To be honest, I never expected to get this much attention from the media. I mean I went from rapping on street corners to suddenly doing interviews. I’ve never had so much planned in one day - it’s hard to keep up.”

The interviewer’s face falters and disappointment is apparent in her eyes. So much for the big scoop, she groaned looking down at her notes and grimacing at the lackluster questions she had initially wanted to ask. “Jinhwan, I’m sure you’re sick and tired of everyone asking you questions about your wife and how you’ve met, but what I would like to know is, how did you guys last this long? I mean, marriage is no walk in the park and on top of that you kept yours a secret. Surely you had your fare share of fights, how did you overcome them?”

The smile on the rapper’s face gave the young woman enough reason to want to give herself a pat on the back for pulling that question out of her . “What’s a marriage without fights?” Jinhwan asked rhetorically. “I would be lying if I said we hadn’t had our own set of ups and downs, but that’s all part of life. For us, all the disappointments, all the arguments they only pushed us together. I mean Yumi and I went through hell. We struggled with money, we coped with loss,” Jinhwan paused midsentence. A look of melancholy washed over his face and his head dropped to look at the pen he was twirling around in his fingers before he continued. “But we’ve persevered together. And in the end, that’s all that matters.”

---

Yumi couldn’t take being in her sister’s house for another minute and made a dash for it out the front door, grabbing Roman’s leash on the way out. This time it wasn’t her head that hurt but her heart. Clipping the end of the leash onto the German Shepherd’s collar, her feet were quick as they moved with purpose. She didn’t exactly know where she was going and rather let her canine guide her movements, but all she knew was she needed to get out. She didn’t want to see that look of pity in Hiromi’s eyes, but more than that, she didn’t want to hear her sister finish her sentence.

Her pace quickened and in no time, Yumi was running at full speed down the street. She was tired of the pain and hoped that if she could run fast enough, if she would let her dog choose the speed at which they traveled then maybe, dear God maybe she would become numb. However, her body didn’t seem to want to do what she wanted it to, and instead Yumi just hurt more. Her chest tightening far worse than when she was standing in the living room minutes earlier and let’s not even address the searing pain in her head. Forced to stop, Yumi collapsed onto sidewalk, both her and Roman panting for breath while they sat on the curb.

Tears naturally poured out of her eyes and Yumi was fed up with trying to stop them from falling. Hiromi’s words were playing on repeat in her mind and she could do nothing to stop it. Her decision to move out, to demand a divorce wasn’t something that was out of the blue. She had fought with herself for years about it. The young woman tried to mend their broken marriage, made attempts to salvage what was left but nothing worked. She joined support groups online with women trying to do the same things as her but she found a flaw. Most of those women fell out of love with their husbands, but for Yumi it wasn’t like that at all. For Yumi, she felt, for lack of better word, disconnected. Every woman on the forum described her desire to feel loved, appreciated, and wanted again, but more than that, Yumi wanted to feel worthy.

It didn’t take a rocket science to notice how Jinhwan had drifted away from her, and it was the gradual changes in their interaction that got to her. First he would stop returning her phone calls then cancel dinner dates, but the day he stopped touching her hurt Yumi the most. The moment she noticed that he would never come home until it was dark outside and she was asleep in the other room, Yumi was convinced he no longer liked her. Yumi knew their marriage was doomed to fail in the beginning of their second year, and the worst part was she could do nothing to stop it.

It was my fault. Hiromi had it all wrong when she claimed that Yumi was throwing the blame on him. It was entirely my fault, she admitted to herself. It was Yumi who couldn’t hold onto Jinhwan like she should have, like how a good wife would have. She was the one to blame for why Jinhwan was no longer attracted to her, for why he suddenly started to sleep in the other room. Pulling her knees closer to her chest she hung her head low and wailed. It was her fault she lost him.

word count: 2737

thanks for reading!!