Beside
MALE READER x JEONG JINSOUL | ~5,000 WORDS
TW: Death • Grief • Loss of a Spouse • Mourning
A/N: This piece is heavily inspired by @limemrys’s Near to Heart, and can be read as a continuation of sorts. I was deeply moved by his work, as well as Jinsoul’s cover of 옆, which helped shape the emotional tone of this story. If you’d like to fully immerse yourself in the atmosphere I envisioned, consider playing the music video while reading.
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The apartment is warm. Too warm.
You know why. You know exactly why. The thermostat is still set three degrees higher than you'd ever choose because Jinsoul ran cold and you ran warm and at some point you'd stopped fighting over it. She won that debacle. She won most of them, actually, except the ones she let you have so you could feel like you had a say.
You haven't touched the dial. Can't.
Five days since the funeral. Or four. You've stopped counting because counting means the number gets bigger and bigger numbers mean more distance between now and the last time she was breathing in the bed next to you and you're not ready for distance. Not from her. Not yet.
People came. People spoke. You remember almost none of it. Someone gripped your arm hard enough to bruise and you didn't notice until that night, standing under water you couldn't feel, staring at the purple crescent on your bicep like it was written in a language you used to speak.
You sit up.
The bed is enormous. Which is funny, because six months ago you couldn't fit in it. Not properly. Jinsoul slept like she was trying to absorb you. One leg thrown over yours, arm slung across your chest, her breath pooling in the dip below your collarbone. Every night. Without fail. Like if she loosened her grip even slightly you'd float off somewhere she couldn't follow.
You'd complained about it once. Just once.
"You sleep like a koala. You know that, right?"
She hadn't even opened her eyes. "Mm. Be a better tree then."
You'd laughed. That useless three-in-the-morning laugh that barely qualifies as sound. Pulled her tighter anyway.
Now the mattress stretches beside you like something left behind after a flood. You put your feet on the floor and the hardwood bites cold, which doesn't track with the thermostat cranked the way it is, but nothing about your body tracks anymore. Too warm under covers. Too cold outside of them. Starving but the thought of chewing makes your jaw lock up.
The kitchen is worse.
Her mug. Drying rack. Chipped handle, cartoon whale that looks more like a deformed potato. Second date. Street vendor in Hongdae who clearly thought it was a masterpiece.
She'd laughed so hard at the register the guy looked personally wounded.
"It's perfect," she'd wheezed, wiping her eyes. "It looks exactly like you before coffee."
"It looks like a potato."
"I know what I said."
You fill the kettle. Two cups of water. Muscle memory, your hands moving through a routine they haven't been told is over.
You stare at the waterline. Pour half out.
Stare again. Pour the rest.
Then you leave the kettle empty on the counter and slide down to the kitchen floor with your back against the cabinet because your legs have made an executive decision without consulting you.
That's where it starts. The first one.
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Seven months ago.
You'd come home late. Not the end-of-the-world kind of late, but late enough that dinner had gone room temperature and the candle she'd lit was a pathetic nub of wax barely clinging to the holder.
"Hey." She didn't look up from her book.
"Hey. I'm sorry, the meeting ran—"
"Eat first."
You'd stood there in the doorway, briefcase still in hand, jaw working around an excuse she'd already decided she didn't need to hear. Jinsoul turned a page.
"Microwave. Thirty seconds. Don't kill the rice."
So you'd eaten. She'd read. When you finally dropped onto the couch beside her she closed the book without marking the page, which meant she either didn't care where she left off or she'd been reading the same paragraph for the last hour waiting for you.
She leaned into you. Not dramatically. Not with any preamble or production. Just shifted her weight until she was tucked under your arm, fitting into the gap between your ribs and your elbow like the space had been carved for her specifically.
"Bad one?"
"Yeah."
"Wanna talk?"
"Not really."
"Okay."
That was it. The entire negotiation. No interrogation. No guilt trip about the cold food or the wasted candle or the thirty minutes she'd spent pretending she wasn't watching the door. Just her weight against your side. Warm. Steady. Her fingers finding yours, tracing slow circles on your knuckles, the kind of idle touch that didn't mean anything except everything.
You'd cried. Not from that day specifically but from the pile of days behind it, all the weight you'd been packing into your pockets and pretending wasn't dragging you under. The tears came quiet. No production. Just a leak you couldn't stop.
She didn't speak. Shifted, pressed your head against her shoulder, worked her fingers into your hair. Held you like that in the lamplight and the hush of the apartment while your breathing did whatever it needed to do.
"You're too good for days like this," she'd murmured. So quiet you almost missed it. "You know that, right?"
You hadn't answered. Her saying it was the answer.
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Now.
Kitchen floor. Cabinet digging into your spine. Empty kettle catching light on the counter.
You pull your knees up. Press your forehead against them. The tears come and there's nothing underneath. No shoulder. No fingers. No voice.
Just the thermostat humming at a temperature meant for someone who isn't here.
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You don't remember deciding to go back to work on Tuesday. Your body just does it. Alarm at six. Shower where you stand under the water for eleven minutes without washing anything, watching the steam curl toward the ceiling like it has somewhere better to be. The suit you grab is wrinkled because ironing requires a version of you that currently doesn't exist. You notice a small stain on the cuff. Soy sauce, probably. From the last dinner you cooked together. You wear it anyway.
The commute is strange. The train is the same train. Same route, same stops, same automated voice announcing stations in that cheerful cadence that has no business being that awake at 7 AM. But the seat next to you is empty and you keep glancing at your phone like there should be a message waiting. There always was. Some mornings it was just a single character. A heart. A sun emoji. Once, inexplicably, a picture of a pigeon she'd seen on the balcony with the caption this is you running late.
Nothing today. Nothing tomorrow. Nothing ever again from that number.
The office is wrong in a way you can't name until you're at your desk and it clicks. It's the normalcy. That's what's wrong. Keyboards clacking. Someone's lunch in the microwave already at 9 AM, which is a crime against decency but nobody's ever had that conversation. Choi from accounting cackling at something on his phone. A printer jamming in the corner. The world spinning at its regular speed while yours has been lodged in amber since Sunday morning.
Your supervisor comes by around ten. Puts a hand on your shoulder. Squeezes once. "Take more time if you need it. Seriously."
"I'm fine."
He stands there a beat too long. Nods. Walks away. He doesn't believe you. You don't believe you either. But going home means sitting in her warmth, breathing air that still carries traces of her shampoo and the laundry detergent she insisted on because it smelled like "clean rain, not polluted rain, there's a difference," and you are not built for that right now. Not during daylight. At least here the air smells like burnt coffee and recycled paper and nothing that makes your hands shake.
The morning passes. You answer emails. Attend a meeting where words happen near you. Someone asks your opinion on a timeline and you give one that sounds reasonable enough that nobody follows up. The whole performance is mechanical, a puppet show where you're both the puppet and the hand, and the audience is too polite to mention the strings are showing.
Lunchtime.
You stare at the bento place across the street from your office window. The line snaking out the door. Salarymen loosening their ties. A woman in a yellow coat laughing with her friend about something that makes her double over.
The second memory hits without warning.
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Five months ago.
Jinsoul had started packing your lunches. Not because you asked. Not because you even hinted. She'd just noticed you were skipping meals during crunch weeks and decided, unilaterally, that this was no longer an option.
The first time you'd opened your bag to find a container of kimbap and a post-it note that said if this comes back uneaten I'm coming to your office and I'm not wearing pants, you'd laughed hard enough that Park from development had asked if you were choking.
It became a thing. The lunches and the notes. She never repeated one.
Eat this or I'll tell your mother you skipped lunch.
I put extra sesame oil because you look like you need it. Don't ask me how sesame oil helps. It just does.
Remember that you married someone who wakes up at 6am to make you food. Act accordingly.
Some of them weren't jokes.
I'm proud of you. Eat your rice.
That one you'd kept. Folded it into your wallet behind your ID card where it still sits, the ink smudged from months of body heat, the paper softened to fabric.
You'd called her that day. Middle of a meeting prep, didn't care.
"The note," you'd said, your voice doing something embarrassing.
"Which one?"
"The proud one."
A pause. Then a sound that might have been a laugh or a sniffle or both. "Oh. That one. Yeah. I meant it."
"I know you did. That's why I'm calling."
"Eat your lunch."
"I'm eating it right now."
"With the phone in one hand and chopsticks in the other? That's not eating. That's multitasking. I want full commitment."
"Yes ma'am."
"And honey?"
"Yeah?"
Her voice had dropped to that register she only used when it was just the two of you, even over the phone. Soft. Conspiratorial. Like the words were only rated for your ears.
"Come home on time tonight. I have plans for you."
"What kind of plans?"
"The kind where you don't need pants either."
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Now.
You're still staring at the bento place. The lunch rush is thinning. Your stomach is a fist.
You open your bag out of habit. There's no container inside. No post-it. Just your laptop and a charger and a protein bar you bought three days ago that you can't bring yourself to unwrap.
You close the bag.
Go back to your desk.
Don't eat.
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Wednesday passes like something being dragged through wet cement. You eat half a convenience store sandwich at your desk because your body sends distress signals you can't ignore anymore. It tastes like cardboard and obligation. You throw the other half away and feel guilty about it because somewhere in your head there's a voice, her voice, saying that's not eating, that's going through the motions.
Thursday you almost call her.
Your thumb hovers over her name in your contacts. Jinsoul 🐳, with the little whale emoji she'd added herself because you never would have thought to. The screen glows. You count to five. Then ten. Then you put the phone face-down on the table because you know exactly how this goes. You'll hear her voicemail greeting. That clipped, slightly too-fast "It's Jinsoul, leave a message!" she'd recorded while distracted by something off-camera. Probably the TV. Probably mid-bite of something she wasn't supposed to be eating before dinner.
You'll hear it and you'll crater. No floor. No bottom. Just a voice that sounds alive talking to you from the other side of something permanent.
So you don't call. Not yet.
You're rationing her. That's what you've been doing, you realize, and the realization itself is its own kind of gutting. You're treating the remnants of your wife like emergency supplies. The voicemail. The mug. The thermostat. The post-it in your wallet. Each one a charge, a hit, a few seconds of her that you can access when the silence gets too structural. And you know, the way you know your own name, that once you start using them too often they'll lose their voltage. The way a song you overplay stops reaching the part of you it used to reach.
You're not ready to lose that too.
Thursday night you sit on the couch with every light off. The city does its thing outside the window. Sirens. A motorbike. Someone arguing two floors down, their voices muffled through layers of concrete into shapeless anger. Sounds that used to be background noise but now feel like they're happening behind glass in a world you used to belong to.
The couch still has her dent.
You can see it in the streetlight bleeding through the curtain. Her side. Slightly deeper than yours because she sat with her legs tucked under herself, always tilted toward you, always leaning. You used to joke that she had a gravitational field. That she bent space toward herself without trying. She'd roll her eyes and lean harder, proving your point.
You reach over. Touch the dent. The fabric is room temperature.
Which is wrong. It should be warm. She ran warm when she sat still. Something about her circulation, she'd said once, gesturing vaguely at herself like her own biology was an inconvenience she was barely tolerating. Her side of the couch always held heat for minutes after she left. You'd put your hand there sometimes, after she got up to refill water or grab a snack, just to feel the ghost of her in the upholstery.
Now there's no ghost. Just fabric.
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Three months ago.
A fight. Not a big one, not a screamer. The worst kind. The quiet kind where you both said things in normal voices that landed like something thrown.
It was about money. Or time. Or the way you'd been pulling away without realizing it, working later, talking less, turning into a silhouette of the person she married. Honestly you can't even remember who started it. What you remember is the end.
You'd been standing at the kitchen counter, both of you on opposite sides like it was a negotiating table. She'd said something and you'd said something back and then there was this silence that felt like the air had been sucked out of the room.
And then Jinsoul had walked around the counter. Slowly. Not angry anymore, not performing calm either. Just moving toward you with that look on her face, the one where her eyes go soft and her jaw unclenches and you can see her making the decision in real time to choose you over being right.
She'd stopped in front of you. Put both hands on your chest. Looked up.
"I don't want to win this."
"Win what?"
"This. Whatever this is turning into. I don't want to win it. I just want to be next to you."
Your throat had locked. She'd felt it, felt the way your chest seized under her palms, and she'd stepped closer.
"You're so hard on yourself. You know that? About everything. Work, life, us. You carry it like if you put it down for one second the whole thing collapses." Her thumbs moved in small strokes over your sternum. "But I'm standing right here. I'm not going anywhere. So put some of it on me."
"I don't want to burden—"
"That's not how this works." Sharper now. Not angry but firm, the way she got when she needed you to hear something you kept dodging. "You're not a burden. You're my husband. There's a difference and I need you to learn it."
You'd exhaled. Long. Shaky. The fight drained out of you like someone pulled a plug.
"I'm sorry."
"I know." She'd pressed her forehead against your chest. "I know you are. Just stop running from me, okay? I'm fast but I shouldn't have to chase you."
"You're not that fast."
A muffled laugh against your shirt. "I will end you."
You'd wrapped your arms around her. Stood like that for a long time. The counter no longer between you. The argument, gone, dissolved into whatever atmosphere absorbs the fights that don't matter in the end. Just her heartbeat against yours, stubborn and steady, doing what it always did despite thirty years of being told it might not.
Her damn stubborn heart. You'd loved it. Trusted it. Built a whole life on its rhythm.
That was your mistake. Not the trusting. The assuming it would keep going.
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Now.
The couch. The dark. The dent beside you shaped like someone but holding nothing.
You lean into her side of the cushion. It gives. Nothing gives back.
You stay there until your neck aches and the streetlight shifts and the arguing downstairs burns itself out. Then you get up, drink water from a glass instead of the bottle because she hated when you drank from the bottle, and go to bed.
Her pillow still smells like her. You press your face into it once, fast, like ripping off a bandage. The scent hits your limbic system like a flashbang. Lavender. Something warmer underneath. Something that was just her, that no product or perfume could replicate, that existed nowhere else in the world and now exists only in the fading chemistry of cotton fibers.
You pull away. Turn over. Stare at the ceiling until your eyes give up.
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Friday you find the surgery brochure.
It's in the second drawer of the bedside table, under a phone charger and a sleep mask. You'd printed it weeks ago. The hospital abroad, the discounted program, the numbers you'd crunched a dozen times on the back of a napkin before transferring them to a proper spreadsheet. All of it neat. All of it organized. All of it completely, spectacularly useless now.
You hold the brochure and something inside you finally cracks along a fault line you didn't know was there. Not the crying kind of crack. Something structural. Something load-bearing.
You'd had a plan. She'd agreed to it. You were going to fix this. You were going to take her abroad and sit in a waiting room for six hours and pace and bite your nails and then a doctor was going to come out and say it went well and you were going to cry in a hospital hallway and she was going to call you dramatic and you were going to spend the rest of your lives arguing about the thermostat and fighting over whose turn it was to get water and falling asleep tangled together in a bed that was too small for two people who refused to let go of each other.
That was the plan.
You fold the brochure in half. Then in half again. Then again until it's a thick, useless square that fits in your palm.
You put it in the drawer and close it.
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A year ago.
Before the ring. Before the vows. Before any of it was official.
You'd been sick. Really sick. The kind of flu that turns you into a pile of blankets with a voice, useless and pitiful and convinced on some primal level that you were dying even though it was just a fever and a cough.
Jinsoul had shown up at your apartment uninvited. You'd opened the door looking like a war crime and she'd walked right past you with two bags of groceries, a thermometer, and an expression that suggested arguing was not on the menu.
"Go to bed."
"I'm fine. I just need to—"
"Bed."
"Jinsoul, I can take care of my—"
She'd put her hand on your forehead. Held it there for three seconds. Looked at you the way a mechanic looks at an engine that's making a sound it shouldn't.
"Your head is on fire. You smell like a pharmacy. Go to bed or I'll carry you there and I'm small but I'm motivated."
You'd gone to bed.
She'd made soup. Not from a packet. From scratch. You could hear her in the kitchen, banging around your cabinets, muttering about your lack of proper cookware, occasionally yelling things like "Why do you own four spatulas and zero ladles?" and "Is this ginger or is this just old?"
When she brought the bowl in, you were half-conscious, fever doing strange things to the edges of the room. She'd sat on the bed beside you, legs crossed, and spooned soup into you with the patience of someone feeding a child.
"You don't have to do this," you'd croaked.
"I know."
"Then why are you?"
She'd paused. Spoon hovering. A strand of hair falling across her face that she didn't bother fixing. "Because you'd do it for me and you wouldn't even think about it. And I want to be the kind of person who does the same. Not because I have to. Because your soup is getting cold and you look pathetic and I think I might be falling in love with you."
That last part. Thrown in at the end like an afterthought. Like it was the same category as cold soup and pity. You'd stared at her. She'd stared back. Then she'd shoved the spoon at your mouth.
"Eat. Process your feelings later. Soup first."
You'd eaten. And somewhere between the third and fourth spoonful, with a fever of 39 and a nose that couldn't smell anything and a woman sitting cross-legged on your bed who'd just detonated a confession between complaints about your kitchenware, you'd known.
Not thought. Not suspected. Known.
"I think I might be falling in love with you too," you'd said.
"You have a 39-degree fever. You're not a reliable source right now."
"Ask me again when it breaks."
"Deal."
She'd asked you three days later, standing in your kitchen with a ladle she'd bought you. You'd given her the same answer. She'd kissed you holding the ladle and you'd both tasted like ginger and garlic and it was the least romantic, most perfect kiss of your life.
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Now.
Saturday morning. A week and a day. Or a week. You've stopped correcting the math.
The apartment is still warm. You still haven't touched the dial. You're starting to think you never will. It'll just be this way forever. Her last setting. Her last preference. One final argument she won without being here to gloat about it.
You're washing dishes. Her plate from the drying rack. The mug you've been avoiding. Your hands move through warm water and soap and you're fine, you're managing, you're keeping it together until your thumb traces the chip on the mug handle and your chest does that thing again. That cracking. That structural failure in the architecture of you that she used to shore up just by being in the room.
You set the mug down carefully. Both hands on the edge of the sink. Breathe.
Your phone buzzes on the counter. A notification you ignore. Then another. Then nothing.
Then, for no reason you can name, you pick it up. Open her contact. Your thumb finds the voicemail you've been rationing. The one you've been saving like the last match in a dark room.
You press play.
But it's not the voicemail.
It's a voice memo. One you've never heard. Dated three weeks ago, filed under a cloud backup that synced automatically from her phone to yours. She must have recorded it late at night and never sent it, or meant to and forgot, or just needed to say something out loud to someone even if that someone was a microphone in a dark room. It's been sitting in your files this whole time. Waiting.
Your heart does something arrhythmic. You almost laugh. Her heart was the defective one and here yours is, skipping beats at the sound of a file notification.
You press play.
Jinsoul's voice fills the kitchen. Close, like she was holding the phone against her mouth. A little rough. Either just woken up or about to sleep, that liminal register where her voice dropped half an octave and went slightly raspy.
"Okay, I don't even know if I'm gonna send this or if I'm just talking to myself at—" A pause. A small laugh. The sound of her checking the time. "—2 AM apparently. Cool. Very normal behavior, Jinsoul."
You can hear sheets rustling. The faint creak of the bed. She was lying next to you when she recorded this. You were asleep. She was watching you.
"I was watching you sleep just now. Which sounds creepy when I say it out loud but I'm your wife so I think I get a pass." Another pause. Longer this time. When she speaks again the joke is gone from her voice. "You finally looked... peaceful? For the first time in like a week. And I just. I don't know. I wanted to say it out loud because I don't think you hear it enough and you definitely don't say it to yourself, so someone has to, and I guess tonight that someone is me and my phone at 2 AM like a crazy person."
Your grip tightens on the phone. Your knuckles drain white.
"You're a good person. Like, genuinely. You're so good it's kind of annoying sometimes because you don't even see it. You just go and go and go and you beat yourself up for every stumble like the stumble cancels out the entire run and it doesn't. It doesn't, honey. The reason it's so hard right now is because you've been running so hard. For us. For me. And I see that even when you think I don't."
Her voice wavers. Not much. Just a hairline fracture in the steadiness, the kind only you would catch because you've spent years learning the micro-expressions of her voice the way other people learn instruments.
"And I know you can't trick anyone. Can't bullshit your way through stuff. You're too honest for that. Too kind. You're the kind of person who's so good they can't even hide it and I—" A breath. Shaky. She's crying, you realize. She was lying next to you in the dark, crying quietly into her phone, and you were asleep. You were right there and you were asleep. "—I know that better than anyone alive."
A sniffle. Then the sound of her breathing, deliberate and slow, steadying herself the way she always did. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the technique some doctor taught her years ago for when her heart rate climbed too high.
"So. Yeah. I just wanted to tell you. In case I forget to say it tomorrow or the day after or however long it takes for you to stop being so weird about the work thing." A wet laugh. "I'm right here. I'm always gonna be right here. Beside you. I'll always stay beside you. No matter what dumb thing you did at work or how many lunches you skipped or how many times you try to carry everything by yourself like it's a one-man job when it's not. It's a two-person job. That's literally what the rings mean."
A long silence. You can hear her breathing. The clock on the wall. The distant hum of the city through the window.
"I love you, honey. Go to sleep. And eat your damn breakfast tomorrow."
The recording ends.
The kitchen is silent. The kind of silent that has weight, that presses against your eardrums, that fills the space where her voice was with nothing.
You stand with the phone pressed to your ear long after the audio dies. Listening to the static hiss. The ghost frequency. The nothing that sounds like nothing and everything.
You play it again.
And again.
And one more time because her voice is warm and close and alive in a way that contradicts everything you know to be true and for two minutes and thirty-seven seconds you can pretend. You can stand in this kitchen and let her talk to you from three weeks ago like she's still in the next room. Like she's just around the corner. Like she's about to walk in and catch you being dramatic and flick your ear and tell you to put the phone down and eat something.
Then the recording ends. Again. And the kitchen is silent. Again. And she's gone. Still.
You put the phone on the counter.
You look at the mug with the chipped handle and the whale that looks like a potato. You look at the thermostat set three degrees higher than you'd choose. You look at the chair where she sat a week ago with love in her eyes and fury in her fists, demanding you stop hiding from the one person who never wanted you to perform.
She was right about everything. The running. The carrying. The stubborn, lonely machinery of trying to do it alone.
But she was wrong about one thing.
She'd promised. Right here, beside you, always. And she meant it. God, she meant it more than anyone has ever meant anything. She was right there. In the bed, breathing, heart beating its stubborn rhythm, warm against your side.
And in the morning, only one of you woke up.
The apartment is warm. Too warm.
You leave it that way.
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