twice mina/chaeyoung - raindrops on eyelashes
Warm and dry in the doorway, Mina has to squint to watch Chaeyoung move through the darkness and the heavy, opaque lashings of rain. The sky cracks open with a synchronized burst of lightning and thunder, and Mina winces. When she opens her eyes again, she can’t see Chaeyoung at all.
It’s only a few minutes, but Mina spends it rattling her leg on the threshold, gripped in fear—for what Chaeyoung will find, for Chaeyoung herself, for something bigger than the night that she doesn’t even understand.
But Chaeyoung pops back up on the other side of the road, just fine, and she lifts a thumbs-up high in the air for Mina to see before she secures the plastic tub in her arms and ducks her head over it to run back to the building.
“You were right,” Chaeyoung says as she comes under the awning. Her voice is as low and calm as always, incongruous against the storm. “But look, I think they’re all okay.”
She straightens and lifts the tub. A mother cat and four little kittens, all bedraggled from the rain, huddle in the nest of old towels Chaeyoung made for them.
Mina puts a hand to her mouth. New fear washes in over the old fear’s relief, endless like the rain. “Come on, let’s get them warm.”
In the apartment, Chaeyoung drops her sopping raincoat and boots by the door and takes the box right over to the radiator. “Do you want to eat, mama?” she asks the cat, and then in the same calm voice, “Do we have any canned fish?” That one, presumably, was for Mina.
“I’ll check.” Mina finds some in a cabinet and glares at her trembling hands as they struggle to open the can. She breaks some up on a plate and gets a clean kitchen towel, too, as she goes back to where Chaeyoung and the wet tub are dripping all over.
“Here you go.” Mina sets the food down in front of the mother cat, who sniffs but doesn’t move yet, curled tightly around her kittens.
“What a fierce mama,” Chaeyoung says. “We should call you Jihyo.”
Mina laughs, just a little, but it feels like it changes the color of everything inside her chest. “Now come here, you,” she says, taking Chaeyoung’s chin. “Gosh, you’re soaked.”
“It’s raining,” Chaeyoung deadpans.
A thousand things are happening in Mina’s heart, but Chaeyoung lifts her rain-wet face quietly, and the world settles down to the simple task of patting her cheeks dry as the cat mews and moves toward the food.