Stay Sweet Ch. 01

HEADS UP: This is one of those slow-builds that you've heard about. You know, where the sex doesn't happen until the end of a long-ish chapter, pissing off anyone looking for a quick jerk before work? Yeah, like that.

However, even if you're not bothered by a slow build, you should also know that the content of this story might be considered by some—including its main characters—to be quasi-incestuous, even though the main characters aren't connected by blood or marriage. By all means, read on and see how you feel, but don't hesitate to drop out if you start feeling a little queasy about the two leads hooking up.

On top of all that, the female lead is an abuse victim. She's fled from her abuser by the time this story picks up, and only one specific act of violence against her is mentioned in passing a couple of times. But I understand it's a touchy subject for far too many, and if you'd rather not bother, no hard feelings.

...so. Now that I've done everything in my power to convince you not to read this story I worked so hard on, let's begin. For those of you coming to this just as it was posted, don't freak out about the ending; the story is done and fully submitted, so you'll get your warm and fuzzies in a matter of days.

= = = = =

I got the call from my mom about two weeks before I was set to finish my junior year at Bedford College. I usually never pick up the phone during Game Night, but Alex Meyers had just whipped my ass at Guilty Gear Xrd, so I had nothing to do. When I saw that Mom was calling, I realized it had been a while and I figured I might as well say hello.

It turned out she wasn't calling just to check in.

"We have a problem," she said. "Ji-yeong needs a place to stay."

That was the last name I expected to hear, yet my response was like kicking out after a light tap on the knee. "That's not a problem," I said, "she can have my room. I'm not using it."

"Well, that's the thing; we don't...Pete, she's got a black eye."

And maybe that was why; my first thought was Of course.

She met a guy, Chad, during her second semester at the University of Washington; they ended up eloping in Vegas the year after, and she moved into his apartment in Seattle. She continued her education (much to Chad's annoyance, I learned later), but never came back to Natick. No phone calls, no emails, no Facebook friend requests. We'd never met Chad, but for Ji-yeong to suddenly cut us out of her life after all the support we had given her...well, we had concerns. But it seemed obvious that Ji-yeong didn't care for our opinion at the time, so all I cared to do was hope she somehow built a good life for herself on the other side of the country.

With those hopes thoroughly dashed, I had little to say about Chad except for my fondest, most honest desire for him to burn in Hell while skewered through his balls and out his mouth on a barbed rotisserie spike.

"Yeah," said Mom, reading my mind over the cellular signal. "I didn't ask, but I would bet our mortgage that she had to deal with a lot more than that. The point is, she might not be ready to leave by the time you get here."

"I'm still not seeing the problem here. It's Ji-yeong, Mom. You know I'd jump on a grenade for her." Or at least, I would now that she was back.

"Thank you, Pete. We'll figure something else out once you're home."

"Or we can figure it out now: I ride the couch, she takes as long as she needs, and no one ever tells me where her little douchebag of a husband lives, because I'll hitchhike over there and feed him his own fucking cock." I was a little too loud on that one, prompting my roommate, Steve, to give me a questioning look while boxing up his Beyblade set.

"Yeah, hon. I think you're saying what we're all feeling."

I excused myself after I hung up to walk back to my room and soak up the silence. It actually wasn't that long ago when I randomly thought of Ji-yeong Song and what I would have given for another day with her. I didn't realize I had somehow made a finger curl up on The Monkey's Paw.

* * * * *

Ji-yeong was 15 when I was 11, and I thought she was the coolest girl in the world. Granted, she didn't look the part; she was this skinny thing with an oval face and long good-girl hair that was parted down the middle, dressed in boring grey hoodies and blue jeans in the winter, plain t-shirts and denim skirts in the summer. She didn't like to go out that much, preferring books and TV to drinks and dancing. Most people probably thought she was a mousy nerd. Most people thought Ashlee Simpson could sing.

She lived a few houses down from me, in a little shack with cracked paint and dirty windows, obscured by vines, weeds, and various shrubs. Her parents were always working at their restaurant, leaving themselves with no time to take care of the house or their daughter; I guess the roof over her head was love enough in their eyes. My parents sympathized, and they opened our home to Ji-yeong whenever she needed it. They also liked to go out a lot, so they made her a deal; fifty bucks to watch over me every Saturday, seventy-five if she needed to stay overnight.

It was easy money; not only were we were both smart and mature for our respective ages, I was an indoor kid like her too, sinking my time into video games that I was happy to share with her. I remember once she came to babysit while I was playing Jade Empire. "I'm like this ninja who goes off to search for her kidnapped master," I explained in my hyperactive way, "and I get to have conversations with people, and I can either be peaceful and kind or I can be a total badass."

"The ninja is a woman?" Ji-yeong seemed surprised and enthralled.

"You can play as either a man or a woman," I explained. "I picked Jen Yi because she looked cool. A lot of the guys look cool too I guess, but they're also kinda boring."

Ji-yeong hummed, interested. She silently watched me beat up some bad guys for a minute, then asked, with a bit of a stammer, "Can I play?"

Since she came over every week anyway, I set her up with a new save file, guided her through the controls, and watched her gleefully discover how much fun it could be to kung-fu the shit out of virtual people. (Well, except for Gao the Lesser; she recognized the voice as Nathan Fillion and was a little ambivalent about murdering someone played by the star of her one of her favorite TV shows, even if he was a complete dick who kidnapped the main character's friend.) We ended up playing way past my bedtime that night, only getting me tucked into bed 15 minutes before my parents got home. That was a good night.

My favorite night, though, was during 4th of July weekend of that year. My parents got an invitation to spend the holiday at a friend's place down in The Hamptons, so they asked Ji-yeong if she wouldn't mind picking me up at day-camp on Friday and staying at our house until Tuesday. When she greeted me at the front door of my house, both her hands were suspiciously behind her back.

"So now that I beat Jade Empire," she told me, "I thought it was only fair that I share something of mine with you. But first, you need to pick a hand."

I picked the right hand, revealing a DVD box set of Mystery Science Theater 3000. "It's puppets making fun of bad movies," said Ji-yeong, beaming, "and it's the coolest thing EVER, even if you'll only get like half the jokes."

"That sounds awesome," I said, taking the hefty box in my hands. "What was in the other hand?"

"Oh, nothing," said Ji-yeong, opening the front door. "The box is kinda hard to hold one-handed. Dairy Queen after dinner?"

"Heck yes I want Dairy Queen!"

Sitting in the den, in our pajamas, eating Cookie Dough Blizzards that Jimmy Seaton next door was nice enough to deliver for us along with dinner, we started that night with Space Mutiny—"Passed from editor to editor in a desperate attempt to save it!"—and I was hooked instantly. Contrary to Ji-yeong's fears, I only got a quarter of the jokes, but it was somehow so charming and transgressive and altogether amazing that it didn't matter. I loved the vibe of the thing, and I loved how Ji-yeong loved it. She had this adorable, infectious laugh that just made everything work better.

There was a question I'd been tossing around in my head for the last little while, one that I wasn't ever planning to ask, but there was also this cheesy-romantic music that would play pretty much whenever Reb Brown and Cisse Cameron shared a scene together. (If you know this movie, you know one of them was a love scene, during which I suddenly and loudly decided to go get some soda. Ji-yeong fast-forwarded it anyway, and she looked like she wanted to die when I came back, which was hilarious and almost tempered my need to puke. However, in all their other scenes...) That music seemed to capture, in its cheap, corny way, everything I felt when I was hanging out with Ji-yeong, and I realized I had to ask her. Not that night, though; I thought it'd be cooler if I did it during the 4th of July, while we were watching the fireworks.

Not long after I made up my mind, though, we started hearing a few obvious, ominous rumbles of thunder. Ji-yeong paused the movie and turned on The Weather Channel to find that there was a severe thunderstorm warning up for southern Middlesex County, which pretty much ruined my night.

"Hey," she said, "let's turn off the computer, just in case, and we'll ride this out together. It's not a big storm; just a cold front moving through. It'll be over in 30 minutes, promise."

I nodded, and followed her into the computer room where we shut down the computer; she held my hand the whole way. I was terrified of thunderstorms; even today I get a little twinge in my gut whenever the sky gets dark or I hear the air crackle around me. Ji-yeong understood me, though; she just also understood them. She knew that things weren't as scary when you knew how they worked.

"So it's very hot and humid outside," explained Ji-yeong back in the den, laying down behind me with her arm wrapped tight across my chest, "but wayyyyy up in the sky, at the top of the cloud that's saturated with rain, it's actually very cold. Because hot air is lighter than cold air, the heat actually pushes some of the tiny, tiny raindrops from the cloud back upwards, allowing it to freeze into chunks called 'hail.'"

A bright flash filled the room through the windows; a second later we heard the air outside explode like a volley of gunfire. I jumped, but Ji-yeong held me close and soothed into my ear.

"It's okay. It's okay. Just stay with me. What's happening is that the hail coming down is colliding with the icy water being carried up, creating all sorts of electrical buildup that has to be discharged somehow. It's the order of things: buildup, release. Charge, discharge. Chaos, peace. It's a wave that we've got no choice but to ride, so we might as well appreciate it."

"Why do we have to ride it?" I asked.

"Because we can't understand peace without chaos," Ji-yeong said. "How would we know what a beautiful summer night looked like if we didn't get our butts kicked by a thunderstorm every once in awhile?"

I thought about this, noticing in the meantime that the lightning flashes were getting a little fainter, the thunder sounding a little more distant.

"I mean, that might sound crazy, but it's the best I've got."

"It doesn't sound that crazy," I eventually said.

For a while, that was it. She kept me against her while we listened to the thunderstorm slide away from us, feeling my ragged heartbeat slow down through her hand, taking its cue from the serene, steady beat I felt on my back. When the storm passed, we finished Space Mutiny, still snuggled together while I came down from my anxiety attack.

Then it was time for bed. After I brushed my teeth, Ji-yeong followed me into my room, stepping over loose bits of laundry—"We gotta clean this room tomorrow, Pete."—and tucked me in after I slipped under the covers. "Too tight?" she asked.

"Nice and snug," I assured her, though I couldn't get it to sound assuring.

"Okay then," she said. "Pancakes tomorrow?"

"Sure." Again, I sounded less excited for pancakes than I actually was.

"Still a little freaked out about that storm?"

"Maybe, I dunno. I just..."

"What's up?"

I decided, then, that it didn't make sense to wait until the 4th of July. Ji-yeong was here, she clearly sensed something was bugging me, and I didn't want her to think she was screwing up.

So I asked her, "Will you marry me?"

Ji-yeong's eyes bugged. "Wow," she exclaimed, laughing in shock and maybe a little bit of charm. "Okay! Why do you want to marry me?"

"Because I like being around you all the time," I said. "I miss you when you're not here; Saturdays are like my favorite days of the week because I like hanging out with you so much. I mean, that's why you're supposed to want to marry someone, right?"

Ji-yeong looked away, but I could tell her smile had gotten wider, and for a moment I was hopeful. "You are adorable," she said, facing me once more and mussing my hair, making me laugh. "But marriage is a lot more complicated than that, and we're both a little young for it."

"Why?"

"Pete, can you even spell my name?" It was a friendly challenge, a good-natured bullshit call meant to prove a point rather than embarrass me.

I proceeded to embarrass myself. "Sure I can! G-E-E-Y-O-N. What else?"

Ji-yeong laughed out loud, shaking her head.

"...seriously?"

"Look," she said, getting her composure back, "even if you did know, it's...I dunno. It's one of those things I can't explain; you'll get it when you're older, as annoying as that is to hear."

It was as nice a shootdown as I could have asked for. I was a little disappointed, which showed by how I glanced away from her for a moment, but in the end, "It's okay," I said, looking back at her, "I trust you."

She nodded, relieved. "I'll tell you what," she said, kissing me on the forehead. "If I get to marry someone as kind, smart, and fun as you are, I'll be very, very lucky."

I smiled back at her. It was enough. "Good night, Ji-yeong."

She answered back with the same line she gave me every Saturday night before she closed the door on me: "Stay sweet, Pete."

* * * * *

Just before she left for college, Ji-yeong gave me a letter. I can't recall it from heart, but I remember it seemed very nice. She wrote about how grateful she was for our friendship, how much she'd miss me, miss playing video games and watching MST3K together, and how she couldn't wait to visit me over winter break. Finally, she signed it by printing out her full name, which she had cruelly gone out of her way to hide ever since I spelled it wrong. And as usual, she told me to "stay sweet."

That might as well have been the last time I saw her, though. When she came back for winter break, she seemed constantly anxious; something we chalked up to her parents selling the house for a condo that barely had room for her. Not that we could blame them for wanting a simpler, cheaper place to live in that economy, but there was just something inherently mean about blowing up an air mattress and telling your daughter to sleep in the living room. Yeah, necessity is what it is, but maybe we would have felt differently if they appeared to show her any affection throughout her life and not just financial support.

We thought it would be better over the summer, but instead she was just completely checked out. She was crazy about Chad at that point. "Chad, Chad, you gotta meet Chad." Chad this, Chad that, Chad here, there, and everywhere. She kept talking about how boring Natick was and all the cool shit you could do in Seattle. That Chad showed her. Because he was Chad. Maybe it was jealousy, but I always thought that jealousy would mean that I still liked her and just wanted her attention. What I wanted was the old Ji-yeong, the one who was super smart and played video games with me and introduced me to puppets making fun of bad movies. Midway through July, I started to think that maybe she was gone forever and all that was left was this hipper-than-thou bitch. Maybe that's why I didn't remember the letter all that well; after that summer, after she stopped talking to us, it all just seemed like bullshit.

I was thinking about this while Dad drove me home from the airport, almost ten years after that juvenile proposal, thinking that maybe, at some point, I should have a conversation with her. I wanted to tell her exactly how badly she had hurt us—hurt me—and for what? A guy that ended up beating the shit out of her? I thought about bringing this up with Dad (he and Mom are both psychologists), but I decided to wait until I saw my old friend and see how I reacted.

When I entered the house, towing my large suitcase behind me, I heard Ji-yeong's somewhat familiar voice coming from the kitchen, somehow both a little deeper and a lot weaker. "...isn't going to help right now. Right now, I need time, obviously I need a job and an apartment, and...oh!"

Ji-yeong had turned to look at me; the black eye that Mom said she had was gone, and I couldn't see any physical evidence of Chad's abuse. But her posture was messed up; where she used to stand tall and ready to engage, she slouched in preemptive defeat. The light in her eyes, once shining with curiosity and love, had dimmed considerably. She had smiled wide when she realized who I was and how much I'd grown, but even that felt a little forced.

I spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks thinking about how mad I was at Ji-yeong, but also what I'd do to Chad if I ever saw that rat fuck in the street. One look at Ji-yeong and the state she was in, and not only could I not be angry at her, but I couldn't even think about the piece of shit who had been hurting her. I was just glad she was home and safe, and all I wanted to do was open my arms and bring her in.

"Oh wow!" Ji-yeong clutched me back, resting her head against my shoulder, "I actually have to look up to talk to you now! That's so unfair!" I laughed; my growth spurt hit me like a sock full of nickels, taking me from a 4'9" munchkin to a 6'1 freak of nature. I used to barely come up past Ji-yeong's chin; by the time she left, we were just about eye-to-eye, but now she barely came up past my chin. For her part, Ji-yeong hadn't changed all that much. Her sense of style was updated (I later found out she had to re-buy her wardrobe, having left a lot of it at Chad's apartment), wearing a checkered blue-and-white button down and grey crepe shorts from some fast fashion place, and her long, fine raven hair was styled into a short ponytail. Otherwise, she was just as I remembered her.

And she looked good.

Smelled good, too. I had forgotten that she wore this perfume that smelled of jasmine; having that sweet, airy floral scent hit my nose again was just, I dunno, nice.

"Listen," Ji-yeong said after breaking the hug, "your parents were kind enough to let me stay in your room, so—"

"And you're welcome to keep staying there," I interrupted.

"Yeah, I'd rather not," said Ji-yeong. "If I sleep on the couch, I'll be more motivated to start looking for a job, maybe even move into a place of my own. I don't want to put you guys out any longer than I have to."

"You're not putting us out, Ji-yeong!" Mom's voice almost cracked. "Trust me, we would tell you if you were."

Ji-yeong looked really bothered by that, but if she was, she didn't say. "Look, Mrs. Flaherty," she insisted, "the couch is fine, honest. I crashed there whenever I babysat for Pete. It's comfy, I sleep well on it."

"Wait," said Dad, "didn't we give you permission to use our bed whenever you needed to stay overnight?"