The rooms were named after Japanese writers and shared the same colours, alternating. 2, 4, 6 through 22 had red sheets, red curtains; Yoshimoto, Natsume, Shikibu. 1, 3, 5 through 21--- Takami, Kirino, Mishima, those rooms were green, the sheets turquoise, the curtains light, the tiles dark. The green rooms were mismatched.

The woman who ran the hotel was 63. She had lived in Kagawa, Japan for 36 years, had a dog named Elsie Tran and thought Kang Ho-Dong off the tv was a handsome guy. John knew her from somewhere. He brought Seunghyun here because it was quiet and isolated.

A sign at the front desk read, 'Mitoyo, Kagawa – Sister city of Hapcheon province'. It was scrawled on a piece of paper taped to the window separating the reception desk from the lobby. It explained the anachronism of a japanese redoubt in the middle of nowhere, South Korea. Population : 1

The hotel was small and as far as Seunghyun could see, empty.

'Busy season,' he joked.

John, facing ahead, cracked a smile. 'She doesn't need the money'.

Seunghyun fixed the cuff of his sleeve.

'I hope not'.

The reception smelled like cats and old sweaters. It made his nose itch and his skin feel moist.

Seok Mi-Young, ex Kagawa-ite, widow of an oil man, owner of the least popular hotel in the southern hemisphere, greeted John with a kiss on the lips that left lipstick on the side of his mouth. She was distinctly un-Korean. What she was, was discrete and observant. John trusted her to keep the secret or the prelude-to because it hadn't happened yet. Their relationship that wasn't a relationship.

John booked 'a room, any room, up the top somewhere,' for three nights. Filming was suspended while the weather took a turn. He had meetings on all three days and more work than Seunghyun had himself but when John pulled him aside and said 'I'm going away for the weekend, would you like to come?' Seunghyun said yes.

They were a 36 minute drive from the set, 58 minutes away from their regular hotel and 4 hours and 34 minutes from his bedroom in Seoul, 367 kilometres from his bed. He tried to work it out on a tourist brochure he found downstairs that had a not-to-scale map of the area and an arrow showing where they were in relation to everything else. It was the sign in a shopping centre that said 'you are here,' except here was the middle of nowhere and so was everywhere else.

The brochure had 4 pages, used the word idyllic 8 times, serene 5 and pleasant twice. Their bedroom had 8 cracks in the ceiling, 2 dark patches (possibly mould?) and one spider that roused unpleasant memories.

Everything was numbers.

Seunghyun counted 68 flowers embroidered in the linen on the bed, 13 coat-hangers in the closet and measured 8 steps from the door to the window. It was easier to count those things than it was the others.

John laughed 14 times on the drive over, said Seunghyun 3 times in the lobby, made eye contact 7 times after bringing in their bags and touched his hand briefly, just once. Seunghyun had 42 entirely separate thoughts about John in the car, watched his fingers on the steering wheel 6 times on the drive over and wondered what it would feel like to hold his hand 9 times. After getting to the hotel, another 4.

He catalogued every moment. Every thought. Reasons why this is a bad or good idea, by Seunghyun 2010' --- had less than five cons (all serious and compelling), but an accumulative list of many pro's consisting of glances and touches and feelings he couldn't control.

John was an enigma. Seunghyun liked him.

He liked him.

So – numbers.

They helped calm him down. They provided a sense of rationality and when that failed, allowed him to plot escape routes when he realised he was freaking out. That occurred some time between seeing the double bed in their shared room and their suitcases together by the door like they were old friends.

He was on a tryst. With a man. A man man.

So – 36 minutes, 58 minutes, 4 hours and 34 minutes, 367 kilometres. Those numbers were all it took to get away. To go somewhere safe where things like this didn't happen. Where men didn't like other men or think about their hands or the way they smiled.

John moved through the room with a careful, tentative swagger and smelled of lavender. He was long fingers, broad smiles and something long overdue. He was fives and sixes and twelves and twenty-threes.

◻

On the first night, they shared dinner ---- the three of them. Four if you counted Elsie Tran, which you had to on account of she had a seat at the table. Seunghyun wondered how sanitary it was to share a dinner table with a maltese lap-dog but it seemed a non-issue. John didn't bat an eyelid. Not at the dog, anyway. Seunghyun wondered if Elsie Tran was one of the dogs who'd been taught to eat with a fork or a spoon, like he'd seen before on youtube.

She wasn't.

Seunghyun ate silently, not sure what to say to a 63 year old woman, her dog and the man he was having an undefined thing with.

Mi-Young was happy to fill the silence between them. Her voice was lilting when she spoke. It didn't suit the harshness of her face. 'He's taller than I expected'. She spoke without facing anyone and to the centre of the room instead of at somebody. It took Seunghyun a moment to realise she was talking about him, to John.

He listened in uncomfortable suspense. She spoke with John as if they were alone together, swapping gossip like women in a salon.

'And famous? That's bold. How did you manage it?'

John answered, unflustered, 'I didn't plan it'.

It? What was It? A thing? A confirmation of a thing. It. It signified a THING. A cosmic entity of thing-ness.

'I would have. He's handsome'.

Seunghyun stared at his bowl, face flushed. Nobody looked his way. They spoke about him as though he wasn't there.

There were 5 pieces of tofu in his bowl, four prongs on his fork, 5 glasses on the table. His heart beat 5 times waiting for a response.

John answered, 'He has a nice face'.

Seunghyun bowed further. What about my face is good, he wondered.

The two of them spoke and Seunghyun didn't interrupt. He made eye contact with the dog, but even the dog seemed in on it. He periodically growled every time John spoke.

John told Mi-Young Seunghyun had a taste for wine, listened to an antipodean mix of rap music and jazz and collected figurines, all of which he said without judgement.

'Figurines? Like dolls?'

'Like figurines,' John answered.

He could have written the blurb on the back of Seunghyun's biography.
 

◻

 

The first night, John fell asleep beneath a blanket of papers, glasses slid half down his face with the light still on. There was something endearing about that. Seunghyun wondered how much of Johns life consisted of falling asleep mid-thought.

Seunghyun slept in another room and had 5 separate dreams. Only 1 of them was about John.

 

◻

The second day, John left early in the morning, before Seunghyun woke to know he was gone. He had a meeting.

Seunghyun spent his morning going over the script in his bag, committing lines to memory by the window, unafraid for the first time in years of the telephoto lens. There were no buildings surrounding the hotel. No-one perched in a tree or an opposite building with a camera so large they could see his pores from 30 miles away.

He read over the script until his hunger drove him out of the room and downstairs, tentatively rounding corners to sound out the whereabouts of Mi-Young.

Elsie Tran found him first, her whole head disappearing up the leg of his pants before Seunghyun could shake her free.

When Mi-Young eventually surfaced from the bowels of the hotel, Seunghyun had all but given up on food. Destined to wither and starve, he'd sat down in a chair and whiled away the time by letting Elsie Tran her way up the entirety of his arm.

'She likes you more than Jae Han'.

Seunghyun sat up abruptly at her sudden arrival and the dog ran off.

'She me more'.
 

◻
 

Mi-Young made Seunghyun lunch.

He racked his brain trying to think what appropriate conversation with an elderly woman constituted. He didn't speak to his own grandparents very often. He was inexperienced. Was 62 elderly or was it the latter end of middle-aged? Maybe 62 lay in that in-between place, shucked to the department of 'getting on in years'. An ambiguous decade of general confusion.

In the end, she spoke first and put him out of his misery.

'You and Jae Han are friends?'

Seunghyun had his mouth full and he choked ungracefully. Saying yes was the right answer but he didn't give it.

'I suppose so'.

Mi-Young made a sound in that made her seem all the more ornery and off-putting. She wore a lipstick so dark it was almost purple and parts of her resembled a wraith-like creature from a children's film. She spoke without speaking. She grinned on the inside like a hyena from the Lion King. Seunghyun could sense that the way he could sense all the questions she wasn't asking and all the questions she was making him ask himself.

He wasn't John's f