I zip my suitcase then take one long, last view out the bay window at the sparkling ocean. I take a picture with my camera, then another. Finally, I close the shutters and turn my back on my oceanic room and ghosts of history that will forever haunt its walls.

Joy follows me down the stairs, her alert eyes taking my every move. She knows this is a different day from the ones that same before. My doggy detective doesn't miss anything. She understands the language of suitcases and change. I kneel down and kiss her head. "I'll be back," I whisper. Irene opens her arms to give me a hug.

"Come visit next summer," she says. I nod, afraid if I speak my voice will betray me. When I arrived she was almost a stranger. Two months later, she became my second mom and friend. Nervously, I reach my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt. I feel something that I think, at first, a coin. But it isn't.

It's the charm on the now-broken chain that Sulli gave me before I left. I look at it again.

"Arrive the same, leave different," it says.

I walk outside to the car and Joy runs out the door behind me. Jungkook waits behind the wheel, tapping his hand against it. He stops when he sees me. Joy leaps up and tries to jump through the open window. Jungkook smiles and lifts her up. He gets out of the car and carries her back inside.

The sky is dark and overcast. Poetic justice. In 4 hours Busan will be far behind me, a distant planet.

° ° ° ° °

I press my head back against the seat as the plane goes faster and faster until it lifts off the ground. The ocean, so wide and glittering, gets farther and farther away until it's hidden behind masses of white mist. I close my hand around the two figas on my neck. The first one from Yoongi. The second, the color of the ocean, from Jungkook.

"Stay safe for me," he'd said, placing it around my neck as he kissed me for the last time.

Something from him to hold on to, to keep close to my heart. A lifeline between us until I see him again.

Can you hear the way my heart is pounding now, even when I'm miles away from you?

° ° ° ° ° 

We didn't talk much on the way to the airport. I didn't want to fill our last minutes together with white noise. Jungkook looked over at me and smiled, then turned back to the road. I reached out and ran my fingers over the smooth, round curves of his hard shoulder, trying to make my fingers memorize the feel of his skin. Would I ever get over the need to steal glances at him? Would I ever feel I'd taken in enough of his face? His being? His touch?

His existence was my oxygen. I needed it to stay alive.

But right then I was breathing too hard, short breaths, trying to satisfy my burning. aching lungs. How could I bear the hurt? Like a sensitive barometer, he turned to me, narrowing his eyes.

"You okay?"

I nodded. "Fine." And then the tears came.

"I'll visit you at Christmas," he said. "Seeing you will be my present."

I promised to fly up to the University of Busan at Easter. He had two more years before starting their graduate school of oceanography. So fitting that he's devote his life to studying the ocean, a high priest in his temple.

° ° ° ° ° 

For now I try to live in the moment. I focus on what's happening. I'm going home to two new places to live. You don't ever get comfortable with the idea of your parents splitting apart, but it's been two months now and some of the sting is gone.

"You're your own person," Jungkook had said to me, the night of the storm. "You have to make your own way in the world."

"But my parents -"

"You have two of them," he'd said, resolutely.

I stopped and caught myself.

"You're a survivor," he'd said. "Hold your head up and don't forget that."

So I draw strength from Jungkook and from Yoongi, my guardian angels. I turn inward and tap into the power I have to heal myself and make the most of my life. I still have two parents, even if they're not together. I try not to blame them anymore. There's no point in that.

"our marriage didn't fail," eomma says. "But it's like a living thing and it's changeable and unpredictable."

"But Appa -"

"Things happen for a reason," she says, and stops. I don't need to know everything. What I do know is that relationships aren't simple. And they're not always the way they appear.

"Both of us will try harder than before to be there for you," she says. "You've lost a house, but you haven't lost me - or your appa."

"I'll miss the house where I grew up, and especially the big oak tree outside. For as long as I can remember, the old tree with its strong, branches spread wide open has been standing sentry in our front yard. But one day while I was away, there was a bad storm, eomma had said. She'd heard a deafening boom outside and ran to the window.

"the tree was struck by lightning," she'd said.

I look at the black burn now, a painful scar all across its trunk. It hurts me to look at it.

"Let's watch it, give it time," the arborist had said. "We;ll see if it makes it."

I can't think that it might not.

Weeks after we move out of the house, I drive by just to see it again. I stop just short of the driveway. There are different bushes outside now and new flowers. The old oak tree is still there though, and the black burn still scars its thick trunk. Only now there are bright green shoots coming out of the sides of the trunk.

Something else unexpected turns out for me after I return to Gwangju, something I never counted on at all or could've imagined.

The phone rings one night when eomma and I are in the middle of dinner. I jump up and grab it.

"Joy is so sad without you," Irene says. "She still sleeps in your bed, and she mopes around the house like a lost soul." She puts the phone to her ears and I speak to her.

"her face lit up!" Irene shouts, laughing. She asks to speak to eomma and I watch her face as she talks to Irene.

"I don't know," she says warily. She listens some more and nods, almost to herself. A few "uh-huhs," and then silence. Then she holds the phone away and turns to me.

"Irene said the house is getting filled up because while Jungkook and Jieun are in college, she's taking care of Jimin, so she'd be willing to drive Joy down here . . . and if she's happy here and you want her, she said you could keep her."

"Are you kidding? YES!" I scream into the phone. "YES!"

So Joy and i will have two homes and she'll have a bed and dog dishes in each home of them. She won't have the beach anymore, but she'll have two backyards instead of one. She may be confused at first. She may miss losing the first home she had, but in the long run, learning to cope with change can make you stronger.

"Children have energy, strong spirits, great resources," Yoongi said. "Nature wants them to survive."

He might have been thinking about Joy too.

And also about me.

° ° ° ° ° 

I'm up in my room in eomma's new house when my phone rings one night.

Jungkook.

I know his ringtone by heart. BTS's Magic Shop.

"Suzy," he says. Just my name. but in a second, the sound of his soft, easy voice is all it takes to bring me back to one special moment when we were together. I had just come out of the ocean and was standing on my blanket on the beach in the hot sun. I'd turned to face him, to take him in, while he stare ly at me through his binoculars and the outside world seemed to faded, leaving us two in the universe. He's 125 miles away now, but I can see his face as clearly and feel his presence around me.

"There's a full moon tonight," he says. "I can't stop thinking about you."

I go to the window and stare out of it. "I can see it from my room."

"I know you can."

"How do you know that?" I say, sitting on the edge of my bed.

"I saw you in a dream."

"What did you see?"

'You were home. You were painting."

I look across the room at the easel. There's a canvas on it. I started a picture, but it's unfinished.

"What's on the canvas?" I ask him. My heart starts to pound.

He laughs softly. "A picture of me."

I've done more than ten of them. I'm obsessed. If I tell him, he'll think I'm crazy.

"You're scaring me. You know too much."

He laughs. "I can't help it." Then he's silent. I hear him exhale. "I miss you," he says, his voice turning serious.

"I miss you too."

My heart starts to thump in my chest. Can he hear it when we're so far apart?

"Yes," he says. "I can."

"Good, because I really really like you, Jungkook."

He laughs again, I just love hearing his laugh. "Suzy, me too. I seriously like you a lot."

I chuckle and sighs.

"I love your laugh as well. Perfect."

GUYS, THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER OF LIFEGUARD JEON!

I hope you all enjoyed the story, although it wasn't much romance. I wanted to try a different tactic on a story.

This was my first BTSxSuzy, and I know a lot of people don't ship them together. But I just wanted to try something new.

Thank you for reading and I hope you'll enjoy my next book, ALMOST V.