The Prisoner

Sumin drove the Porsche through Seoul as if in a trance, her eyes focused solely on the streets that led to her old apartment building, and her thoughts focused solely on the idol being held there. She envisioned Taeyeon strapped to the chair in Seunghyun’s dark chamber, still half-, the tears streaking like white silk down her cheeks. She smiled at the thought of this. It was the only break in her otherwise expressionless face.

She parked just outside the building and stepped out onto the sunny sidewalk out front, thinking for a moment how odd it was that she was greeted by such a beautiful morning when so much darkness was storming within her, soon to be unleashed once she came face to face with Taeyeon.

Had she looked behind her at that moment, back on the street, she would’ve seen Sehun’s car pull up just behind hers and would’ve realized, had she noticed his expression through the sun-glazed windshield, that it wasn’t quite suspicion that had incited him to follow her, but more like a worrisome curiosity.

But she never turned around to see this. Instead, she continued forward through the entrance and up the dark stairway to Seunghyun’s apartment on the second floor. As soon as she reached the second floor landing, she suddenly stopped, seeing Seunghyun just then coming down from her apartment one floor up.

“I didn’t think I’d see you so soon,” he said, as he took one more step down to meet her on the landing.

Sumin’s eyes narrowed on his. “Why aren’t you watching her?” she asked.

Seunghyun shook his head and scoffed, as if blowing off her worry. “She’s handcuffed to a chair. She’s not going anywhere.”

Sumin relaxed a bit, but only for a moment because, just then, she saw that he was holding some of her clothes in his arms. “What are you doing with my stuff?”

“What’s with all the questions?” he asked, again scoffing, but then his mouth curled up in a mischievous smile. “Why don’t you stop talking and use that mouth to greet me properly?” He shifted the clothes to one arm and grabbed her with the other, pulling her body close to him. “I missed you last night,” he whispered.

Sumin rolled her eyes and tried to take a step back, but Seunghyun only held her more tightly, his dark stare beneath those thick eyebrows unrelenting. “Give me that mouth,” he said.

Though she didn’t want to admit it, she felt slightly by the idea of kissing Seunghyun after having just kissed Sehun. It was like moving between the light and the dark, the pure and the sullied. It felt very much like the conflict between the face she wore and the soul she hid. And so she acquiesced, greeting Seunghyun the way he had asked with her lips dragging across his as they tasted each other, their shared breaths hot and their yearning palpable. When she had kissed Sehun earlier, she had felt evil, as if she was stealing his very goodness from him. But with Seunghyun it was different. It wasn’t that she found a mutual evil in Seunghyun, for she had long ago realized that most of his maliciousness was just a pretense; instead, it was like her evil was accepted by him. He knew who she really was and still he wanted to kiss her, the real her. It made her feel as if she was worth something.

“Is everything going okay at SM?” Seunghyun asked, after breaking from the kiss. “They don’t suspect anything, right?”

“It’s fine,” Sumin said, dismissing the question. She then glanced once again at the clothes he was carrying. “Are you going to tell me why you’re carrying my clothes around?”

“It’s for… her. You pretty much stripped her, and it’s not like she can wear my clothes, so—”

“What? You’re going to have her wear my clothes!?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Seunghyun asked.

Sumin looked at him incredulously. “She should be suffering!” she said. “Let her sit there wearing only her underwear! I want her to feel humiliated because that’s what she deserves!” She could feel her anxiety coming on and tried to restrain herself from pulling at her hair.

“Fine,” Seunghyun quietly said. He walked toward his apartment door and held it open for her. “You coming in?”

Sumin walked in without saying a word and eyed the ajar bedroom door at the end of the hall. She glanced behind her as Seunghyun set the clothes down on the counter, and for a moment, she thought of how strange it would be if Taeyeon did end up wearing those clothes, in a way becoming Sumin. “Has she said anything yet?” Sumin asked.

“No,” Seunghyun said. “I kept her gagged all night.”

Sumin smiled. “Good,” she said. She eyed the bedroom door again and then began walking down the hall toward it, anxious to finally see the idol. Seunghyun followed after her, the floorboards creaking beneath their heavy footsteps.

When they entered the bedroom, Seunghyun walked ahead of Sumin to the far wall, opened the chamber door, and then flicked a switch inside to light up the otherwise dark space. There, in the center of that small room, with each wrist handcuffed to the arms of the medical examination chair and with that ball gag still strapped to her face, was Taeyeon. Her head had been hanging down low, her chin resting on her collarbone, but as the light filled the room, she lifted her head to look up, her eyes blinking as she awoke. When she saw Sumin—that Taeyeon lookalike—standing beside Seunghyun in the doorway, her eyes opened wide and her breaths grew fast and heavy, her body visibly shaking.

Sumin stepped forward. “Remember me?” she asked. “I told I’d see you soon.” She took a few more steps forward until finally stopping just inches from the idol.

If Taeyeon wanted to answer, she had no way of doing so. She shook her head a bit not to say no, but more in a struggle with the ball gag that had been keeping her jaw nearly unhinged since it was first put on. Sumin could see saliva dripping down from around the bright red ball in Taeyeon’s mouth, leaving filmy streaks down Taeyeon’s chin. “Get that off her so she can talk,” Sumin said.

Seunghyun went ahead and unbuckled the leather straps. The gag had been bound so tightly around Taeyeon’s head that the straps had left bruised indentations in her cheeks.

Taeyeon, now free of the gag, began crying, her tears rolling down her face and her voice a stuttering whimper. “Why is your face... why do you look like… like…” She turned her head and closed her eyes, as if unable to look at Sumin directly. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this… I didn’t do anything…”

“You didn’t do anything?” Sumin asked, mockingly. She scoffed and bit down on her lip, trying to control her anger. “You’re the reason my life fell apart! I was forced to leave school after what you did to me!”

Taeyeon’s tear-filled eyes were full of confusion.

“They sent me to all these hospitals and then my mom abandoned me and I had no one after that. No one! And it was all because of you!”

“Please,” Taeyeon cried again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“That day on the playground!” Sumin yelled.

“I don’t understand,” Taeyeon said. She squeezed her eyes closed. “I don’t know who you are…” But then her expression suddenly changed with a wave of what seemed to be a surfacing memory. “The playground?” she quietly asked, looking back up at Sumin. “Were you… oh my god, were you the girl on the swing?”

Sumin, surprised that Taeyeon remembered, took a step back.

“That was you?” Taeyeon asked again. “But… but I was only trying to help you,” she muttered.

“Help?” Sumin asked. She looked at Taeyeon curiously. “You attacked me!”

Taeyeon swallowed hard. “No, no.” She shook her head, as if trying to jostle the memory. “I was trying to help you! You… you had this key in your hand and you just started cutting yourself. I remember now… you just started slicing up your arm like crazy and… and there was all this blood and… and I just remember trying to get that key from you and you fell off the swing and…”

“No, you’re lying!” Sumin yelled. Her heart felt as if it would seize from pounding so hard. Trying to calm her anxiety, she began pulling at her hair, grasping clumps and tugging at them so fiercely that her scalp burned. “Stop lying!”

“I’m not lying!” Taeyeon cried out. “I tried to help you! You were cutting yourself everywhere and wouldn’t stop and…”

“You’re a liar!” Sumin yelled. “Just like how you lied about dating Baekhyun!”

Taeyeon’s face went white. “How… how do you…”

“I know all about your lies now,” Sumin said. “Even your little girl group that’s supposed to be all sisterly is total bull. They laugh at you behind your back!”

Taeyeon shook her head. “No, you’re wrong,” she mumbled. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“I heard them myself! Just laughing at me when…” Sumin’s words trailed off. She couldn’t admit to her embarrassment in the studio earlier.

“You must’ve heard wrong,” Taeyeon quietly said. “You must’ve imagined that. You… you need help.”

Sumin, who was still tugging at her hair, suddenly ripped a section out. She immediately felt the warmth of blood from her scalp drip down her fingertips, which reminded her of that day on the playground when she lay on the ground beneath that swing bleeding from the scrapes down her face and arms. She had always believed that it was Taeyeon who was inflicting those scrapes, but Sumin couldn’t envision that scene now. Her memory only allowed her to see the scrapes suddenly appear all over her body, as if inflicted by an invisible presence. Was it possible that it had never been Taeyeon hurting her, and that, in reality, the scrapes were self-inflicted? Had she actually just been lying there on the dirt beneath the swing slicing herself up with that key while Taeyeon was struggling to stop her?

“No,” Sumin said aloud. “No, no, no.” She slowly backed away from Taeyeon while trying to convince herself that the idol was just spinning more lies to mess with her head. She was so lost in these thoughts that, as she stepped back, she nearly stumbled into Seunghyun, which then jolted her out of her anxiety. She stopped, breathed in deeply, and fought to regain her composure. “You’re the one who needs help,” she quietly said, her eyes narrowing in on Taeyeon. “Because while you’re trapped in here, I’m going to be out there, destroying your life.”

Taeyeon, her face full of hopeless desperation, could do nothing but watch as Sumin then turned and walked out without so much as a goodbye to Seunghyun, her mission-oriented mind focused only on destruction.