Chapter 4: Panic
Sunlight, sharp and merciless, cut through the thin gap in Emily’s curtains, painting a hot white stripe across her closed eyelids. She groaned, rolling over and burying her face into her pillow. Her mouth tasted like stale beer and regret. The events of last night assembled in her pounding head not as a coherent narrative, but as a series of high-definition, catastrophic flashes.
Jay’s laughter on the bus. The wary acceptance in Yuna’s eyes. His posture in the broken chair. The vulnerable cut of his jaw in the dim lamplight. Her own voice saying, Don’t make me regret it.
Her eyes flew open.
“Oh, god.”
The panic was immediate, a cold vice tightening around her ribs. She sat up, the thin blanket pooling around her waist. Her studio apartment, usually a comforting cave of organized clutter, felt like a crime scene. The empty beer can on the floor by the couch. The second one on the windowsill. The faint, lingering ghost of sandalwood and weed in the air. Evidence.
She’d let him in. Not just into Yuna’s apartment, but into the machinery of her life. She’d shown him the brackets that held her together, the stress fractures, the cheap fixes. And for what? Because he’d looked at her with those lost, earnest eyes and asked her to tell him what ‘tired’ felt like?
“Idiot,” she muttered to herself, swinging her legs out of bed. The worn floorboards were cold under her feet. “Sentimental, sleep-deprived idiot.”
Her phone buzzed on the crate she used as a nightstand. She snatched it, heart hammering. A notification for a bank transfer from her part-time job. Relief, then immediate shame. She’d been half-expecting… what? A message from him? A ‘good morning’ that would somehow smooth over the terrifying intimacy of last night?
There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. It was Saturday. He was probably still asleep in his pristine, silent apartment, blackout curtains drawn, no fax-machine guy screaming downstairs.
She stood, pacing the short length of the room. Five steps to the kitchenette, five steps back to the bed. The bulletin board stared back at her, a mosaic of her obligations: a calendar with deadlines circled in red, a bus schedule highlighted for her cleaning job shifts, a faded photo of her parents beaming in front of their old sedan. Their hopeful faces were a gut punch. This was the path. The scholarship. The degree. The stable, soaring career that would lift them all. There was no room for a beautiful, complicated distraction who treated her life like a field study.
He’s unpracticed, she’d said. The memory made her cringe. Who was she to diagnose him? She, who budgeted by the gram and whose idea of a big night was a shared joint and canned beer.
Her phone buzzed again. Yuna.
Yuna: you alive? or did u die of mortification lol
Emily: Currently weighing options. Spontaneous combustion seems efficient.
Yuna: omg stop. it was fine. he was… surprisingly not the worst. MJ is a gem btw. gave me his number ‘in case i ever need a structural engineer.’ smooth bastard.
Emily: He was a tourist. We were the zoo exhibit.
Yuna: and u were the prickly porcupine he couldn’t stop staring at. u saw the way he looked at u when u were talking about the ceiling stain. like u were explaining the meaning of life.
Emily’s thumb hovered over the screen. She typed, deleted, typed again.
Emily: I told him to meet me at the river park today.
Three bouncing dots appeared. Then:
Yuna: BITCH. SCREENSHOT OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
Emily: It’s a mistake. A huge, colossal, grade-threatening mistake.
Yuna: It’s a DATE. Call it what it is. U deserve a date that doesn’t start with ‘can you cover my shift.’ Just… be careful. His world has seatbelts and airbags. Yours doesn’t.
Emily threw her phone onto the couch. It landed with a soft thump on the cushions. Be careful. What did that even mean? Don’t catch feelings? Too late. A low-grade current of something had been humming in her veins since the fabrication lab, and last night had plugged it into the mains. The smart thing, the Emily thing, would be to cancel. Text him a polite, professional excuse. Project milestone due, need to focus. See you in class.
She walked to the small sink, splashed cold water on her face. The face in the speckled mirror was pale, dark circles under intelligent, worried eyes. She’d hidden behind oversized hoodies and a perpetual scowl for so long, it was her default armor. Letting someone peek behind it felt like a structural failure.
The memory of his confession surfaced, unbidden. I’m afraid this is all I am… a very well-dressed hole. He’d said it like he meant it, like it was a shameful secret. In that moment, he hadn’t been Jay Seo, heir to everything. He’d been just a guy, scared of his own reflection. And she, against every instinct, had felt pity. Pity, and a terrifying sense of recognition. They were both performing, just for different audiences.
“No,” she said aloud to her reflection. She wasn’t going to cancel. Canceling was fear. She met challenges head-on. She would go. She would wear her normal clothes—worn jeans, a simple t-shirt, her old jacket. She would bring her own coffee in a thermos. She would walk with him by the river and she would lay down the law. They were project partners. Maybe, tentatively, acquaintances. Anything else was a liability she couldn’t afford.
She set about cleaning the apartment with sharp, purposeful movements, erasing the physical traces of the night. The cans went into recycling. The windows were shoved open to let in the cold, clean air. She scrubbed the tiny kitchen table until the Formica shone.
As she worked, her resolve hardened into a plan. She would be friendly but factual. She would steer conversation back to the transit hub design, their upcoming presentation. She would politely deflect any personal inquiries. She would prove, to herself more than anyone, that she could control this. That the brackets would hold.
By the time she was dressed and ready to leave, the panicked flutter in her chest had been replaced by a steady, low thrum of determination. She checked her phone one last time before heading out. Still no message from Jay.
Good. Let him wonder. Let him be the one off-balance for once.
She locked her apartment door, the click of the deadbolt a final, decisive sound. She walked down the stairs of the Vernon, past the now-silent door of the fax machine guy, and out into the brittle morning sunlight. The path to the river park was familiar, a route she took when she needed to think, to breathe. Today, every step felt like marching into uncharted territory.
She arrived early. The park was mostly empty, just a few dog walkers and joggers braving the chill. She found their bench—their bench, though it had never been theirs before—and sat, pulling her thermos from her bag. The coffee was bitter and hot. She wrapped her hands around it, waiting.
She didn’t have to wait long. She saw him before he saw her, walking along the path from the direction of the sleek graduate dorms. He wore dark jeans and a simple navy sweater, no visible logos, hair casually tousled by the wind. He carried two paper cups from a cafe downtown, the kind that cost more than her hourly wage. He looked, as always, like he’d stepped out of a different universe.
He spotted her. A hesitant smile touched his lips, nothing like the easy grins he deployed on campus. This one was smaller, more tentative. He lifted the cups in a sort of greeting.
Emily stayed seated, taking another sip from her thermos. She watched him approach, her heart doing a hard, single knock against her ribs. This was it. The line in the sand. She would hold it.
Jay reached the bench, his shadow falling over her. “You brought your own,” he said, looking at her thermos.
“I told you to,” she replied, her voice steadier than she felt.
He nodded, sitting down beside her, leaving a careful foot of space between them. He set the expensive paper cups on the bench between them. “I brought you one anyway. In case.” He looked out at the choppy gray water of the river. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
The admission surprised her. She studied his profile—the tightness in his jaw, the way his hands rested uneasily on his knees. He was nervous. The realization was a crack in her carefully constructed wall.
“I said I would,” she said simply.
He turned to look at her then, his eyes searching her face. “Last night… I meant what I said. I don’t want to be the guy you walk past.”
All her prepared speeches, her rules and boundaries, dissolved in the raw sincerity of his words. The wind picked up, rattling the bare branches of the trees behind them. She looked from his anxious eyes to the two untouched coffee cups, a silent offering in the space between their worlds.
Emily took a deep breath, the cold air filling her lungs. She closed the thermos with a click.
“Then don’t be,” she said, and reached for one of the paper cups.
His exhale was a visible plume in the cold air, a tension she hadn't fully recognized leaving his shoulders. “Okay.” He picked up the other cup, his fingers brushing hers briefly. The contact was electric, a silent jolt in the quiet morning. “So what’s the protocol for a river park non-date? Do we discuss fluid dynamics or the artistic merits of that graffiti?”
Emily took a sip. The coffee was smooth, subtly spiced, a universe away from her bitter thermos brew. “We could. Or you could tell me why you actually showed up at Yuna’s last night. The real reason.”
He stared at the river, his throat working as he swallowed. “MJ said I needed a clue.”
“And you thought you’d find it in our two-bedroom zoo exhibit?”
“I found it when you talked about the gusset.” He turned to look at her, his gaze direct and unnerving. “You build solutions. You don’t just complain about the load. I don’t know how to do that. My whole life, solutions have just… appeared. Generated by the family account.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I watched you steady that woman on the bus without even thinking. You just moved.”
Emily felt heat creep up her neck. She focused on a scuff on her boot. “It’s just what you do.”
“Not for me.” The raw honesty in his voice was disarming. “I would have worried about liability. Or awkwardness.”
A reluctant smile touched her lips. “That’s the most transparently privileged thing you’ve ever said to me.”
He laughed, a short, surprised burst of sound. “See? You call me on it. Everyone else just nods.” He grew quiet again, his voice softening. “I want you to keep calling me on it.”
The wind gusted, sharper now, cutting through her jacket and whipping loose strands of hair across her face. It tugged insistently at her baseball cap, the one she’d worn like a helmet since freshman year. Annoyed, she reached up to secure it.
Her fingers fumbled the adjustment. The cap, already perched precariously on her piled-up hair, slipped.
Instinctively, she caught it, but not before it lifted completely off her head for a naked, exposed second. She fumbled, quickly pulling it down again, but the damage was done. She nervously lifted her cap to adjust her hair, her movements rushed and self-conscious.
He had never seen her without a hat before.
The wind had revealed a sleek, dark fall of hair that framed her face, softening the sharp lines of her cheekbones and jaw. Without the cap’s shadow, her eyes seemed larger, more vulnerable. She looked younger, and somehow more real, one of the last pieces of her uniform temporarily discarded.
Jay went very still. He didn’t stare, but his eyes took her in—the unexpected elegance of her neck, the way her hair caught the weak evening light. It was a simple revelation, but it felt monumental, like she’d silently handed him a much heavier truth.
Emily’s face flushed a deep, warm crimson. She fixed the cap firmly back in place, pulling the brim low. “Windy,” she muttered, a useless statement of the obvious.
“Yeah,” he agreed, his voice oddly thick. He cleared his throat, looking back at the river. He took a long drink of his coffee, buying time, letting the moment settle between them. “It suits you,” he said finally, casually, as if commenting on the weather. “The hair. But the cap is good too. It’s… you.”
It was the perfect thing to say. Not a gushing compliment that would demand a response, not an ignoring of what had just happened. Just an acknowledgment. An acceptance.
The tight coil of embarrassment in Emily’s chest loosened. She risked a glance at him. He was watching a bargе move slowly up the river, his profile thoughtful. She found herself speaking, the words coming out before she could vet them. “My mom hates the cap. Says I’m hiding.”
“Are you?”
“Sometimes.” She traced the rim of her paper cup. “It’s easier. Fewer conversations I don’t have time for.”
“What kind of conversations?”
“The ‘you should smile more’ kind. The ‘let me buy you a drink’ kind. The kind that assumes things.” She shrugged. “The cap filters a lot of that noise out.”
Jay nodded slowly, absorbing this. “So I just got through the filter?”
“You crashed through it in a luxury vehicle.” The joke was out, lightening the air.
He grinned. “Noted. I’ll try the pedestrian entrance next time.” He paused. “Is there going to be a next time? After the project is done, I mean.”
The question hung there, the real one they’d been circling. Emily didn’t answer immediately. She watched the barge, a slow-moving smudge of rust against the steel-gray water. She thought of her bank balance, her parents’ hopeful faces on the bulletin board, the exhausting arithmetic of her life. Then she thought of the quiet solidarity in the fabrication lab, his unexpected cough in Yuna’s apartment, the way he was sitting beside her now—not trying to close the gap, just existing patiently within it.
“The project isn’t done yet,” she said, hedging.
“But after.”
She turned to face him fully, meeting his eyes. “Ask me after.”
It wasn’t a promise. It was a possibility. And for now, that felt like enough. He held her gaze, and something unspoken passed between them—a mutual, wary agreement to see this through.
“Alright,” he said, standing up. He offered a hand. “Then let’s go make sure we have an ‘after’ to talk about. I have the revised model files on my laptop. We could find a warm place. Critique them. Argue about load-bearing aesthetics.”
Emily looked at his outstretched hand, then up at his face. The setting sun caught the gold in his irises. After a heartbeat, she slid her hand into his, letting him pull her up. His grip was warm, firm, and he released it just as she found her footing.
“Lead the way,” she said, falling into step beside him, the two coffee cups left behind on the bench like forgotten artifacts. The path ahead was unclear, but for the first time, she wasn’t walking it alone.
The path ahead was unclear, but for the first time, she wasn’t walking it alone. They fell into step, the gravel crunching under their shoes, a companionable silence stretching between them. It was broken by the practical need for a destination.
“The library’s open,” Emily suggested, her breath making small clouds in the air. “Quiet. Good tables.”
“And terrible coffee.” Jay made a face, but he was already nodding. “Lead on, Kang. I’ll suffer the burnt drip for the cause.”
They took a shortcut through a quadrangle lined with sleek, newer academic buildings, all glass and brushed steel. This was the donor-funded part of campus, a world of automatically opening doors and silent, filtered air. Emily’s usual route skirted its edges, a conscious choice. Walking through its center with Jay felt like crossing into a foreign district.
He was telling her about a structural flaw in a famous architect’s early work, his hands sketching shapes in the cold air, when a voice, melodic and assured, cut across the path ahead.
“Jae-eon? Is that you?”
A woman was approaching from the doors of the Haas Business Innovation Center. She moved with a runway certainty, her camel wool coat swinging open to reveal a knit dress that clung to her like a second skin. Her hair was a perfect, expensive sheet of honey-blond, and her boots looked softer than butter. She smelled like winter citrus and money.
Jay stopped mid-gesture. “Soo-jin. Hey.”
Soo-jin reached them, her smile brilliant and practiced. She air-kissed Jay’s cheek, her gaze already sliding over to Emily, performing a rapid, thorough assessment. Emily felt it like a physical scan: her worn jacket, her sensible boots, the baseball cap pulled low over her un-styled hair.
“We missed you at the Foundation gala last night,” Soo-jin said, her voice a light chide. “Your father mentioned you were ‘indisposed.’” She said the word with playful irony, as if ‘indisposed’ were a cute, boyish hobby.
“Working on the thesis,” Jay said, a bland, polite mask falling over his features. Emily recognized it—the persona he wore in rooms full of sycophants and yes-men.
“Of course, the famous project.” Soo-jin finally turned her full attention to Emily, her smile not warming. “And you must be the brilliant partner I’ve heard about. From the engineering school, right?” It was framed as a question, but the assumption was clear: not from the business school, not from the law school. From the practical, gritty side of the tracks.
Emily’s spine straightened. “A-ri Kang. Graduate architecture.”
“Marvelous,” Soo-jin said, the word empty as a echo. Her eyes flicked back to Jay. “We’re doing brunch at the Clarendon tomorrow. Mimosas and misery. You should come. Bring your partner.” The invitation was clearly for Jay, with Emily as an accessory, a curious artifact to show off. “It’s so refreshing to meet someone from outside the usual circle.”
The condescension was so artfully delivered it was almost impressive. Emily felt a familiar heat climb her neck, the impulse to shrink or snap warring inside her. She saw the slight tightening around Jay’s eyes.
“We’re slammed with deadlines,” Jay said, his tone effortlessly casual, a deflection so smooth it was clearly a refined skill. “Rain check.”
“Always the diligent one.” Soo-jin’s laugh was a tinkling bell. She touched Jay’s arm, a proprietary gesture. “Don’t become a stranger, Jae-eon. Your crowd bores each other without you.” With a final, meaningless smile for Emily, she glided away, the scent of her perfume hanging in the air like a challenge.
The silence she left behind was dense. The earlier ease was gone, punctured. Emily stared at a crack in the pristine concrete beneath her feet.
“She’s… a family friend,” Jay said, the words sounding inadequate even to him.
“She’s your life,” Emily corrected quietly, not looking at him. Her voice was flat. “The gala. The brunches. The Clarendon.” She named the famously exclusive hotel as if it were a distant planet. “That’s the ‘usual circle.’ I’m the refreshing outlier.” She finally met his eyes. “The zoo exhibit.”
“No.” The word came out sharp. He stepped into her line of sight, forcing her focus. “That’s a background I was born into. It’s a soundtrack I never chose. You’re not an exhibit, Emily. You’re the first real thing I’ve looked at in years.”
He meant it. She could see the earnest frustration in his face, the genuine fear that she would slip away. But the ghost of Soo-jin’s perfume was still there, a olfactory reminder of the immutable facts of his existence. Emily had budgets and bus schedules; he had galas and rain checks. Her brackets were made of steel and sheer will; his were made of trust funds and social obligations.
She started walking again, faster now, a need to move burning in her legs. He kept pace.
“I can’t do brunch at the Clarendon, Jay. I work Sunday mornings. I clean offices.” The admission was barbed, hurled at the space between them. “My ‘crowd’ is Yuna, who might get fired for stealing stale pastries from the café, and a guy who screams at a fax machine. That’s my reality. Not a refreshing change of pace. My reality is grout and tired feet and counting tips.”
He caught her arm, gently, stopping her beneath the skeletal branches of a large oak. His touch was warm through her jacket. “Then let me see that,” he said, his voice low, intense. “Not as a tourist. Let me just… see it. And you can see my circus. The whole tedious, gilded parade of it.”
“Why?” The question was a plea.
“Because I’m tired of the soundtrack.” He released her arm, running a hand through his hair. “And because when your cap blew off back there, I forgot how to breathe for a second. And I haven’t forgotten anything in a very long time.”
The vulnerability in his words disarmed her. The defensive anger seeped out, leaving a weary confusion. She saw two Jays: the one reflected in Soo-jin’s polished eyes, and the one standing before her now, looking genuinely unraveled.
A group of students passed, their laughter scattering around them like birds. The world moved on, oblivious to the silent fault line that had just been exposed.
Emily shoved her hands deep into her pockets, her fingers curling into fists. “I need coffee. The bad library kind.” It was a retreat, but not a surrender. A return to neutral, agreed-upon ground.
He understood. “Right. The cause.”
They walked the rest of the way to the brutalist concrete library in silence, but it was a different quiet now. The simple curiosity from the river was gone, replaced by a charged, complicated awareness. The path wasn’t just unclear anymore; it was littered with obstacles she’d only just begun to see. He walked beside her, his presence both a comfort and a question mark.
As he pulled open the heavy library door for her, warm air rushing out, she paused on the threshold.
“Jay?”
“Yeah?”
She didn’t look back at him, her gaze fixed on the fluorescent-lit interior, a territory she knew how to navigate. “Just so we’re clear,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not interested in being anyone’s rebellion.”
She stepped inside, leaving him in the chill doorway with the weight of her words.