Chapter 2: The Breaking Point at the Bar
The whiskey was doing its job, which was to make everything soft at the edges and quiet inside. Donghae swirled the amber liquid, watching it cling to the glass. He’d lost count after the fourth. The bar was all low murmurs and the clink of ice, a place for muted confessions. He was a spotlight of wrongness in it, his shoulders hunched, his face a mask of raw grief he couldn’t bother to hide anymore.
“You’re going to hate yourself more in the morning if you don’t drink this.”
A glass of water appeared on the polished wood beside his elbow. He didn’t look up. The voice was female, smooth, unfamiliar.
“Already hate myself,” he mumbled, the words slurring into each other. “Morning doesn’t get a vote.”
He lifted his whiskey glass again, but a hand—small, with manicured nails—caught his wrist gently and guided it down. He finally looked.
She was young, maybe mid-twenties, with sharp, pretty features softened by genuine concern. She’d slid into the booth opposite him without him noticing. “Yeah, I figured. The whole ‘tragic figure sculpted from heartbreak’ thing is kinda hard to miss. You’ve been staring at that same ice cube for twenty minutes. It’s not gonna talk back.”
Donghae let out a weak, humorless puff of air. “You a therapist?”
“Bartender’s friend. I’m Jessica.” She nudged the water closer. “And you’re a guy who’s had too much. Drink the water.”
He obeyed, if only because it was easier than arguing. The water was shockingly cold, a clarity he didn’t want. It washed away the comforting burn, leaving the pain underneath exposed and gleaming. Hyukjae’s face flashed behind his eyes. Not the Hyukjae from today, all confusion and rejection, but the one from before. The one who would laugh and hook his chin over Donghae’s shoulder while he cooked, who would seek out his hand under tables, who whispered promises into his skin in the dark.
“It’s someone else, isn’t it?” Jessica said quietly. She wasn’t flirting. She was just watching him, her head tilted. “The person you’re drowning over.”
“He’s not someone else,” Donghae said, the words volcanic, tearing out of him. “He’s him. He’s just… lost. He’s lost and I can’t find him.” His voice cracked. He took another gulp of water, but it felt like swallowing glass.
“Amnesia? Accident?” she asked, her tone practical yet not unkind.
“Something like that.” He couldn’t explain the sterile doctor’s terms, the scans, the profound unfairness of it. He just knew the result: a hollowed-out shell where his life used to be. “He remembers being eighteen. He remembers me as his friend. His bandmate. Nothing after.”
Jessica winced in sympathy. “Ouch. So everything you built…”
“Gone.” Donghae’s fist clenched on the table. The memory of Hyukjae flinching away from his touch replayed, a needle shoved under his fingernail. “He looks at me like I’m a stranger. Worse. Like I’m a liar. Like I invented this… this whole life we had.” The alcohol thinned his filter, his pride. “I told him about our first kiss. He said it sounded like something I’d do with a girlfriend. Not with him.” A choked sound escaped him, half-laugh, half-sob. “He said his skin crawls when I touch him.”
“Jesus,” Jessica breathed. She didn’t offer empty platitudes. She just listened, and in that moment, it was the only kind of mercy on offer.
The silence stretched, filled with the distant saxophone from the speakers. Donghae stared past her, at the neon bleed of the city. He felt untethered, a satellite ripped from its orbit. The careful control he’d maintained in the practice room was gone, dissolved in ethanol and despair.
He kept talking, the words spilling out like blood from a reopened wound. “I sent him a text. I said I just needed him to remember one thing. Just one. He hasn’t opened it. He’s probably sitting in that fucking practice room, looking at my name on his screen like it’s a threat.” His vision blurred. “All I want is for him to look at me the way he used to. Just once. So I know it was real. So I know I wasn’t just… dreaming for nine years.”
Jessica reached across the table, her hand covering his clenched fist. Her skin was warm. “Hey. It was real. You know it was.”
That was the problem. He did know. And knowing alone was a prison.
He looked down at her hand on his, and for a disorienting second, superimposed over it was Hyukjae’s hand—paler, with distinct veins, a familiar callus on the index finger from guitar strings. The ghost touch was so vivid it was agony.
A violent, sudden need overwhelmed him. It wasn’t directed at her. It was directed at the universe, at the illness, at the unbearable, fragile silence from his phone. He turned his hand over, gripping her wrist before she could pull away. His grasp was too tight, fueled by a desperation that had curdled into something darker.
She stiffened, her eyes widening.
Donghae leaned forward, the world tilting on its axis. The candlelight caught the sheen of tears in his eyes, made them look fever-bright. His voice dropped to a raw, shattered whisper, all his broken hope condensed into one impossible plea.
“Just tell me how to make him remember,” he hissed, the words urgent, cracked. “Tell me what to do. A spell, a drug, a fucking story I haven’t tried yet. Anything. Or I’ll break into pieces right here, and I don’t think anyone will be able to put me back together.”
The moment hung, suspended. Jessica didn’t yank her arm back. She held his frantic gaze, her own filling with a startled, deep pity. She saw it then—not a drunken pickup line, not a melodrama, but the genuine splintering of a man.
Outside, a taxi’s headlights swept across the window, throwing their locked tableau into stark, fleeting relief before plunging them back into dim gold and shadow. The music played on.