Intangible

            For the next week, I barely left the house.  I slept during the mornings, worked all afternoon, and tried to finish up by the time Ryeowook appeared in the early evening.  As it was still winter, the sun went down around dinnertime, which gave us a long stretch of time together each night.

            We started the evenings cooking together, or rather, Ryeowook would instruct me how to cook dinner.  He began that after watching me char a couple of my dinners.  He was a remarkable cook, according to himself, and my cooking was coming along under his supervision.  I still found myself somewhat distracted while cooking and frequently messed up, but thankfully he kept me from burning the kitchen down.

            The rest of the night, we usually spent talking.  We didn’t know much about one another, but the more I found out, the more I found myself mesmerized by his talent and witty, funny personality.  We had a number of things in common, including a love of music.  He told me it was the only thing that made living in the house alone, these last seven years, remotely tolerable.  On occasion, he would play the piano, which was one of the things he missed most about life.  Since he’d begun appearing every night, however, he hadn’t played it a single time.  It had been nearly a whole week already and he hadn’t touched it yet. 

            I felt like taking a night off of cooking and ordered a pizza before Ryeowook appeared for the evening.  I made sure it was delivered to the house before Ryeowook materialized.  I didn’t need to scare off the one pizza place in town that delivered to me because my ghost happened to appear at the wrong time.  I ate several pieces and then continued my afternoon project before the sun went down. 

            While I waited for Ryeowook to show up for the night, I worked on fixing the window in the dining room that Sungmin and I had snuck into, before I’d bought the house.  After a short stretch of time, I noticed a reflection in the glass, a shadow of movement behind me.  I didn’t bother turning around.  It had only been a week since my return from the hospital and I was already used to Ryeowook sneaking up on me.

            I glanced out the window.  The sun had disappeared behind the trees across the lake, although the sky was not completely dark yet.  “Welcome back.”

            “Thank you,” he said, walking over to me and looking at my progress.  “Fixing the window?”

            “I’d rather not make it too easy on Yesung, if he wants to kill me.  He’ll have to work hard to get into the house now,” I explained. 

            Ryeowook didn’t bother arguing for Yesung’s innocence.  We had this debate nearly every night since my return home.  We were never going to agree until one of us was proven right.

            I glanced over at him.  He looked more translucent than he had been when I first returned from the hospital.  I felt like he kept fading more and more every day.  He looked more like a projection than a real person.  But even if he looked more like a ghost than a human, he was still stunning.  That night, he was dressed in a simple long-sleeved black shirt and jeans.  As usual, he looked distractingly hot, but it made me wonder if he had a ghostly closet of clothing he dressed from every night.  If he did, where was it?  Were they his old clothes that he owned before he died?  Or did he just think of what he wanted to wear before showing up and he magically got to appear in whatever the hell he wanted?

            “Why don’t you have to wear white like all the other ghosts out there?”

            “Have you seen other ghosts?” he countered, looking down at his clothes. 

            “No, but they’re always portrayed that way and usually they look like their dressed in rags from two hundred years ago.”

            “I only died seven years ago.  They’ll eventually wear out, especially if I have to keep jumping into lakes to rescue people,” he pointed out.  “Although they are not as trendy as they once were.  I’m going to be terribly out of style in few years, if I’m not already.”

            “Your clothes are fine.  I’m just messing with you,” I assured him.  “In fact, you look really good, considering you’re dead.  I’ve been to some funerals before and I’ve never seen any dead person look as hot as you do.”

            “I’m going to assume you’re complimenting me, so thank you,” he said.  “I don’t have any other ghosts around to compare myself to, but the way they depict them in movies seems a little off.  I mean, for one thing, I don’t get to float or fly.  That’s a little disappointing!”

            There was almost nothing about him which reminded me of the version of ghosts I’d once held from movies or books I’d read.  I found myself often forgetting he was a ghost and reaching over to touch him, only to watch as my hand went through his hand or arm.  Each time, I felt my heart break a little.  It was becoming painfully apparent that I wanted more out of our relationship than I could ever have.

            “I don’t really think of you as a ghost.  You don’t look ghostly to me—aside from the fact that I can see through you—and you don’t scare me.  That was always my perception of what a ghost was.  I sometimes forget you are one.”

            He reached over and pointed at the top of the window.  “You should tighten up that corner.  It loosened up a few years before I died.  My father never got around to fixing it.”

            I grabbed another nail and began pounding it into the wood.  Sure enough, once it was in, it was harder to open.  I shut it tight and then latched it shut.  “There.  That ought to keep the killers out.”

            “Unless they just break the window,” Ryeowook pointed out.

            I just glanced over at him before picking up all the tools around me and setting them back in my toolbox.  I debated leaving it in the house, but there wasn’t a good spot for it, so I headed for the back door.  It technically belonged in the shed.  I walked to the back of the house and pulled on my boots. 

            “Where are you going?” Ryeowook asked, nervously watching me.

            “I’m just putting this away.  You can come with, if you want,” I said, heading out the back door and leaving him behind in the kitchen.

            Ryeowook suddenly appeared next to me, walking down the path to the shed beside me.  “I don’t like you going outside in the dark by yourself.  It’s dangerous!”

            “I won’t be out here long…and I have you with me.”

            “I can’t help you!”

            I stopped next to the shed and stood there a moment, thinking.  “Why is that?  Every time I ask you to touch something or move something, you tell me that you can’t do it.  But you could do it the night I was attacked.  You saved me from drowning, kissed me—”

            “For the last ing time, I was not kissing you!  I was blowing air into your—”

            “—pulled me off the ice, drug me up the stairs and into the house, took all my clothes off—”

            “Do you have to keep bringing that up?”

            “—wrapped me in blankets, started a fire, and called Hyuk!  But you have done nothing since!  Can you only do something when I’m in danger?”

            He shook his head.  “No!  Otherwise I’d feel fine about you being outside, wouldn’t I?” he shot back, getting upset.

            I took a deep breath, just staring at him a moment.  He refused to explain how his ability worked.  Was it stored up power?  Had he used up his ability to interact with the physical world for a long time by doing so many things the night he saved me?  I pulled open the doors of the shed and put the tool box away on the top self.  “I don’t understand why you just won’t tell me.”

            “Because it shouldn’t matter to you,” he answered, running his hands through his hair.  He looked flustered by the conversation, but I didn’t feel sorry about it at all.  I’d felt flustered about him since he first showed up in the lake and kissed me.  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

            I closed the doors to the shed and leaned against them.  “But it does matter to me.”

            “Why?”

            I reached out and let my hand pass through his chest.  “Because I want to touch you.”

            “Kyuhyun, I’m a ghost!  I’m not part of your world anymore.”

            “Then why can I see and hear you?”

            For a moment, we just stared into each other’s eyes.  But then, Ryeowook suddenly looked out into the dark woods.  “Someone or something is out there,” he quietly told me.

            “I think you’re avoiding our conversation.”

            Just then, I heard the sound of a branch