The Plan: Part 2

Seunghyun pulled away and studied Sumin's face. “You’re serious,” he said, somewhat questioningly.

Sumin felt exposed. She hadn’t expected to open herself up to him in this way. She wanted to take it all back, to tell him that it was just the liquor and the way his hand had that had made her say such a crazy thing, but before she could even open , she heard him begin to laugh.

It was a quiet, almost hesitant laugh at first, but then he let it out, throwing his head back as he roared in some sick delight. “Ai,” he muttered, his laughter dying down as he faced her again. “I was right about you.”

“What?”

He leaned forward, his chest nearly resting on the surface of the small table between them. “We’re the same, you know,” he said.

Sumin already knew this. She had been denying it from the beginning, but darkness knew darkness.

“We’re the same,” he said again. “We’re not scared of our demons. We embrace them.”

She shook her head, not knowing what to say. Admittedly, she had demons, but she had never felt as if she was embracing them… except during her blackouts, when she wasn’t herself. But maybe she was herself—her true self—during these blackouts. If that was the case, then that meant that her waking life was like how Seunghyun described the idols—fake, just for show, a lie.

“You should be honest with yourself,” Seunghyun said, as if reading her thoughts.

“What?” She gasped, thinking for a moment that perhaps he could read her thoughts.

“I just mean that you shouldn’t deny yourself what you really want,” he said. His hand was between her thighs again, this time more daring, his fingertips brushing up and down the fabric of her underwear.

Part of her wanted to just close her eyes and give into his seduction, but she needed to maintain control. It was just like on the swings and how she was never able to just lift off the ground. She needed to dig her heels in, to feel the ground. Seizing that control now, she reached underneath the table and pushed his hand away. “Are you saying you’d kill her if I have with you?”

Seunghyun let out a gasp of surprise and recoiled a bit. “What?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what you’re getting at,” Sumin said.

Seunghyun seemed to think about what she said, his eyes wandering a bit but then returning to hers, as if checking to see if this was all just a game. He his lips and narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Are we making a deal here?” he asked.

Sumin was scared to say yes, to turn this conversation from fantasy to reality. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted Taeyeon to actually die. Death seemed almost too easy, too quick. What she really wanted was for Taeyeon to suffer, just as she had been suffering all these years. “I thought… I thought if I killed her, I wouldn’t suffer anymore,” she said. “But maybe… maybe making her suffer would reverse the… the balance.” She was thinking back to her thoughts earlier that day about how she and Taeyeon seemed to operate as binaries. If she was being made to suffer because of Taeyeon’s successes, then maybe it would follow that she would enjoy success if she could find a way to make Taeyeon suffer. She didn’t think that Seunghyun understood what she meant by balance, but he didn’t seem to care enough to ask.

“I can offer you a better deal than that,” he said, biting his lip now as his dark eyes widened to stare directly at hers. “We can make her suffer, whatever you want. That’s the easy part. But I can offer you something more, something you really want…”

Sumin leaned forward, as captivated by him now as he had always been by her.

“Her life,” he said.

She stared at him, trying to make sense of what he had said.

“That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” he asked. “To be her? You can have that, you know.”

“What?” Sumin felt tricked by his nonsense. “I think you’re drunk,” she said.

Seunghyun laughed. “I’m not drunk.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I’m a surgeon,” he said. “I can make you look like anyone you want.”

Sumin let out a nervous chuckle. “You’re crazy,” she said.

“Maybe a little,” he said, his expression serious.

Sumin ignored his confession, not wanting to contemplate who was crazy and who wasn’t. “You can’t give me her life,” she said. “You can give me her face, if that’s what you’re saying. But you can’t give me all her happiness, her money, her friends…”

“If you have her face, you can have her life,” he said. “We just get rid of her… and put you in her place.”

Sumin felt a dead calm inside her. She was frozen, her eyes unblinking, her body unreactive. She realized at that moment that while she and Seunghyun were both dark and potentially crazy, they were each a different type of darkness, a different type of crazy. Her mind was a black and white one with a tendency toward extremes, whereas his mind lingered in the more abstract and undefined gray areas. She had initiated the idea of violence, and he had turned that idea down a more disturbing path. It would’ve been unlikely for either to concoct this plan on their own, but together, they were the perfect storm, fueling each other’s twistedness. Despite some awareness of this, knowing on some level that what they were discussing was ridiculous, Sumin found the very idea of being Taeyeon, of wearing her face and living her life, as some sort of cosmic justice. No longer would she be teetering at the wrong end of life’s balance. For once, she’d have the opportunity to experience the other side, to have everything… while Taeyeon would finally see what it’s like to have nothing.

“Yes,” Sumin said, almost robotically.

“Yes?” Seunghyun’s curvy smile reappeared. “And you’ll give me what I want then?”

Sumin, still unblinking, nodded her head, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was agreeing to. “You want… to be with me, right?”

Seunghyun suddenly stood and pushed the small table between them aside, his eyes focused on hers.

“Right now?” she asked.

He walked toward her, standing where the table once was, his body surmounting hers as he leaned down toward her, their faces inches apart. “Yes, now,” he said. His hot breath was on her neck, his tongue rolling down her skin. “I want you while you’re still you.”

Sumin sat up in a panic the following morning, not recognizing her surroundings. She rubbed her eyes, her sight no longer blurry but clear, and she then saw where she was, remembering everything.

Seunghyun’s bedroom was, in a way, what she had expected. Like the other rooms in his apartment, it was dark and quite empty with only essential furnishings. The bedsheets were silk—a black, shimmery silk, which she now pulled up to her neck to cover her bare chest as she lay back down beside him.

He was still sleeping. Sumin rolled over and studied his face, never noticing before how fierce his look was, even when sleeping. It was his eyebrows, she realized. Each began low on his brow and then arched outward in a thick slant, forcing an almost villainous look.

As she watched him sleep, she wished that she could look at him as if he was indeed villainous, as if he was some monster who had taken advantage of her, but the truth was that she had enjoyed their night together. She hadn’t thought she would, not at first. He had been so eager, so fast with her, but he had slowed down the second time, making every inch of her feel so loved, his lips raw from kissing her so intensely, that, afterward, she had wondered if perhaps it was love.

She sat up again now, her mind racing with these thoughts again. No one had ever expressed any love for her before, not even her parents. Her father, who was always drunk, and her mother, who was always depressed, both neglected her until the moment each left her, with her father dying when Sumin was thirteen and her mother abandoning her just one year later, when Sumin was fourteen. She had been shuffled through the system after that and thought that she’d have another chance at life with a foster family, but that chance was destroyed when a court-appointed counselor evaluated her, determined that she was ill, and recommended that she stay in a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Sumin ran away before they could take her and had been on her own ever since.

After more than a decade of being alone, she had grown quite used to loneliness. But last night with Seunghyun changed that. The feeling of being touched, of being kissed… it made her realize what she had missed all these years. Maybe she didn’t have to suffer anymore, she thought. Maybe she could just forget her hatred for Taeyeon and find some happiness with Seunghyun. But these optimistic thoughts gave way to her usual doubts, and she soon felt silly for ascribing any meaning to their night together.

She stood from the bed now, wrapped the black silk sheet around her body, and sort of aimlessly walked through Seunghyun’s room. Thinking that she would change into one of his shirts, she opened the door to what she had assumed was his closet, only to find that it wasn’t a closet at all but was instead a small dark room, a chamber of some kind. Suddenly, she heard Seunghyun’s voice.

“That’s where we’ll keep her,” he said, as he sat up in bed and pointed toward the dark entryway.

Sumin was startled to see that he was awake, and even more startled to see that, when she had taken the sheet to cover herself just a moment earlier, she had left him completely . Despite being so exposed, Seunghyun posed confidently with his chest puffed out as he leaned back, making no attempt to hide his ness from her.

“Unless you’ve changed your mind,” he added. “We don’t have to do this, you know.” There was something about his tone that was different from the usual way he spoke, with something truly genuine about it, as if all the layers of his ego had been stripped away, leaving no pretense. “I mean, I want you to have what you want,” he said, leaning forward now. “It’s just that, once I give you what you want, I won’t have what I want anymore…”

Had Sumin been listening, she might’ve sensed his desperation to hold onto her, but her attention had already returned to that small dark room where she could see, now that her eyes had adjusted, what appeared to be a medical examination chair in the center, likely taken from his clinic downstairs, that was modified with handcuffs attached to the armrests. Her eyes then wandered to the walls, from which hung various ual paraphernalia: whips, blindfolds, chains…

“I used to be into all that,” he said. He stood and walked over to her, joining her at the doorway to his private room.

Trying to avoid staring at his body, Sumin forced her eyes to stay on his face. “But you’re not anymore? Since when?”

Seunghyun shrugged, looking almost bashful. “Since last night,” he quietly said.

Sumin stared at him a moment, not knowing how to interpret what he had just said, but then she turned her attention back to the room and began to imagine Taeyeon strapped to that chair, her hands bound by those cuffs.

“You sure you still want the surgery?” he asked.

She nodded, her eyes still peering into the darkness of that small room. Whatever thoughts she’d had earlier about happiness with Seunghyun potentially allowing her to rise above her hatred for Taeyeon… were long gone now.