Heir To Nothing But You

He Remembers Her Coffee Order

The article appeared in the student paper the following week, a four-hundred-and-eighty-word exposé titled “Behind the Sails – What Hanul’s Sailing Team Won’t Tell You.”

Chi had managed not to print the line about the easy version.

She printed almost everything else – the grandfather, the little boats, the fundraiser details, a quotation from one of Ji-hoon’s teammates about the guy being “annoyingly good at making people feel important,” and left the rest precisely as he wrote it, unpublished, for him to find or not.

He texted her in the morning it came out.

Unknown number: you made me sound almost normal. Concerning.

Chi stared at her phone for ten seconds before realizing that it had to be Sae-rom who’d gotten his number somewhere, and another ten before she decided what to say.

Chi: I have a source. She talks too much.

Unknown number: noted. I’ll bribe her with snacks.

Chi: she’ll take the bribe and tell me everything.

Unknown number: fair. Coffee? As a thank you. Purely professional.

Chi stared at her phone for longer than was strictly necessary.

Her five-year plan did not involve coffee dates with sources.

Her five-year plan, she reminded herself, also did not involve getting dumped in an elevator, and somehow, she’d survived that.

Chi: purely professional.

The café was small enough that Chi hadn’t even realized it was there before Ji-hoon led her to a corner booth like he’d been there a hundred times before.

“You didn’t even look at the menu,” she pointed out, watching him flag down the barista with practiced ease.

“I don’t need to. I know what I want.”

“That’s very efficient for someone who took ten minutes to determine whether he likes sailing or not.”

“Those are two completely different decisions,” Ji-hoon said primly.

The barista placed two steaming mugs on the table, and Chi blinked at the sight of an oat milk latte in front of Ji-hoon and black coffee, no sugar, in front of her.

“How did she know that’s mine?” she asked.

“I told her before you got here.”

“You don’t know my order. We’ve had coffee together once, at eleven at night, and I nearly died of dehydration.”

“You drank it black then too. People generally don’t change their minds about something out of spite.”

Chi wrapped both hands around the warm mug, suddenly feeling inexplicably grateful for this small, precise kindness, and hated herself for feeling that way.

“That’s a very specific thing to remember.”

“I remember specific things. It’s a curse.”

“Is it.”

“Ask my tutor. I remembered every reading he ever gave us in September, and I still failed the March exam. Selective memory, apparently.”

She laughed before she could stop herself, a short, surprised burst of sound just like the first time she’d heard him hum in the kitchen, and busied herself with inspecting her coffee to hide her face, which she was fairly certain was turning red.

A tall, sun-baked guy slid into the empty seat across from them without waiting for an invitation, his windbreaker from the sailing team still on, sunglasses pushed carelessly into his blonde hair.

“So this is the journalist,” he drawled, shaking Chi’s hand with a grin. “Marcus. I’m the reason half your article is factual. Ji-hoon would have told you he single-handedly rigs the boats. I do most of the rigging.”

“Slander,” Ji-hoon muttered.

“Documented fact,” Marcus countered cheerfully, turning back to Chi.

“You’re the one from the apartment thing,” he said, as if talking to himself.

Chi felt her cheeks redden. “Word gets around fast.”

“Word travels at the speed of Sae-rom, which is faster than fiber optics,” Marcus said with a grin. “For what it’s worth, he cleaned before you got there. That never happens. You should feel special.”

“I did not clean,” Ji-hoon said quickly.

“You texted him at midnight asking if it’s weird to leave the ice bucket outside the door.”

“That is not an unreasonable question,” Chi said, surprised at how strongly she felt the need to defend him.

“It is a question no one has ever asked before,” Marcus said, equally surprised, it seemed, by her reaction. “That’s the weird part.”

Chi watched the two of them, the way Ji-hoon’s face tightened with some private brand of irritation, the way Marcus tilted his head, studying her with the easy familiarity of someone who knew Ji-hoon well enough to understand every word he said, or rather, every word he didn’t say.

It was the kind of conversation that had probably happened a dozen times between the two of them, the kind of conversation that no one else would have understood if they listened in from the outside, and Chi felt something twist inside her at the unfairness of it – that she had to learn about Ji-hoon from other people when she spent every day with him.

She tucked the feeling away, as she always did, beneath layers of careful self-restraint.

Not for the plan.

Not for anything, really, except that it hurt just a little, to watch them interact like that.