2015

“Hey.”

I glanced up from my seat, the first stair step from the upper floor, and saw Taemin standing casually in his usual demeanor; flat smile, disheveled hair, with his hands tucked on his jeans. He walked towards the staircase and took a seat beside me, making most of the narrow space to be enough for us.

“You just got back from the town? It’s near noon already,” he said.

“Yeah, I just ran some errands,” I lied. All I did in the town was visiting the market and bicycling around the suburb with nothing but my mind in wander. “Oh, I brought back some croissants for you and Krys. Also packs of cigarette too. We ran out of cigs.”

Taemin rested his head on his knees, his hands hugging his own calves. From how he stared into the nothingness, I guessed there was something going inside his mind. I offered him a pack of cigarette, but he refused.

I frowned at his weird behavior. As I put back the pack inside my coat, my mind kept reminding me that he had never once refused a cigarette I offered to him before.

He took a deep breath and sighed heavily, as if he was releasing all of the burden inside his body.

“Krystal left,” he finally said.

“What?” asking back was my first and pure reaction.

“She left,” Taemin repeated, emphasizing the last word, “without saying anything. I checked her room and it was empty. Her suitcase and things are gone. Like everything just vanished with her into thin air.”

“Have you tried calling her? Maybe she just went back to Paris earlier,” I said, clearly ignoring the idea of Krystal leaving us forever. For-e-ver.

Taemin shook his head. “Nothing works. I couldn’t even connect to her phone line and I doubt she read my messages. I wish I knew where she was going, but, no… she left no trace for us but this.”

From his jeans’ back pocket, Taemin took out a necklace with a metal pendant in half a heart shape. He handed it without looking at me. I took it and I realized it was a locket. I opened it and saw my photo on the right side and a photo of Krystal’s face cut in a half on the left side.

It was originally a photo of three of us, taken in Sorbonne on our graduation day by a lomo camera. I had never seen the result until today, until Krystal cropped our faces and fit them into four small frames with her face split in halves.

“Where is the other one? She must have left it for you too,” I asked him.

Taemin murmured, “I’ve thrown it out of my window.”

Weirdly, his answer annoyed me more than when he’d told me about Krystal sudden departure. The combination of his blunt answer, nonchalant expression, and careless gesture somehow almost drove me mad.

“I am sorry.”

He frowned. “What?”

I made my hand into a fist and punched his jaw until his head banged against the staircase’s railing. I tried to hit him as hard as I could, but my love for him as his twin still won over my rage. IThe punch was not that hard, but it was surely still painful. I could feel it from the sound of his bone cracking and saw it from a dark bruise on the lowest side of his cheek.

Taemin didn’t say anything. He just pressed his lips and made them into a thin yet peculiar smile.

“You can hit me for as many times as you want, but,” Taemin arched his body backwards, lying on the floor with his feet still on the stairs, “I am not sorry at all. Not even a little bit.”

I buried my face in between my thighs. The memory of this morning scene suddenly came back to me like a subway train; I couldn’t see how it passed me by, but I could feel the wind ing its thorns against my body.

“Taemin, why did you do that?” I asked.

"Do what?"

"Hurting her. Hurting me," I contemplated for a while, "and perhaps hurting yourself."

“I am just trying to put things back in order,” Taemin answered, “we must play by the rules, remember? Yet both of you kept crossing the line and, hey, I am not fond of that.”

I closed my eyes as I remembered the unspoken treaty between us back then.

Krystal belongs to both of us. Krystal is ours.

“But, Taemin. Things change. It’s not always about the three of us. Sometimes it’s about you and Krystal,” I turned my head to look at his face, “while sometimes it’s also about me and Krystal.”

“But it’s always about me and you, right?” Taemin asked back.

I stared at him, trying to dechiper the meaning behind his expression, but I knew I failed right away. Still in wandering state of mind, I arched my back and lie on the floor just like he did. I put my left hand behind my head, while my right hand groping inside my coat to take my cigarette.

We shared the moment of silence as we stared on the ceiling, with Taemin doing nothing but daydreaming and I was just inhaling the nicotine. Then just in a millisecond, something struck my mind right away.

“You love her, don’t you?”

Taemin didn’t budge for a while.

“Does it matter?” he asked me back.

“It matters to me,” I insisted.

I could feel his body tensed. From the corner of my left eye, I saw him wiping his face with his hand. He suddenly raised both of his hands and crossed them above his eyes, shielding the windows of his soul from me, his own brother.

“Even if I do love her, what difference does it make?” Taemin mumbled, his voice was bitter, “she will still be the one that got away.”

I got up and that was when I saw it, slipping behind the wool of his sweater.

A metal pendant in half a heart shape.