He says something to Anna, who giggles in a way that makes my territorial instincts rise, but before I can do anything stupid like rush over and rub lip gloss on his white shirt, the door closes.

Yujun ambles toward me with his sexy long-legged stride eating up the distance between us, stopping when his shiny black shoes are but a few inches from my dusty flats. I curl my toes into the bed of my shoes.

“Are you tired?”

“No.” It’s not entirely a lie. I’m in this strange suspended state where I’m exhausted but my mind is buzzing. I don’t have many coherent thoughts. One question tumbles after another like rocks in a washing machine. Nothing in my head makes sense, but there’s a lot of noise. I wish I could shut it out. “If you were tired but couldn’t sleep, where would you go?”

“By the river,” he answers promptly.

“Take me there. Please.”

He doesn’t ask any questions. He doesn’t talk. He merely leads me to his car, tucks me inside like I’m some precious package, and drives off. There’s a deep-voiced rapper going off in the background, a low-grade noise. Some of it’s in English and I catch a word here and there like “love” and “hate” and “Seoul,” but it’s mostly Korean. I lean back against the headrest and allow the synth and thrum of the beat wend their way into my bloodstream.

We drive for about thirty minutes. This late at night, the traffic is sparse. The wide-laned roads that usually have four or six cars abreast have one, maybe two. The occasional blue bus rumbles by. Even the buildings are mostly dark, with pockets glowing amber like small stars in a dark sky. The city is slumbering, resting up for its new day tomorrow. The park is deserted when we arrive, and actually calling it a park is sort of a stretch. There isn’t much more here than cement stairs, a bench, and a few metal exercise contraptions.

“The Han.” Yujun throws out his arm toward the river. He reaches into the back seat of his car and pulls out a paper bag. Something sweet and fried wafts into the front seat and my mouth begins to water. When we reach the bench, he produces beer and two thick pancake-looking things. “This is hotteok, which is basically pan-fried dough with a brown sugar center. Nuts or no nuts?”

I nearly cry with delight. “No nuts, please.”

He hands me a beer and a hotteok. “It’s better when it’s hot, but it’s still good.”

I bite into the crispy dough and let the sugar melt onto my tongue. “It’s delicious,” I say, my mouth full.

“Masitda,” he tells me. “It’s Korean for ‘delicious.’”

“Mas-i-t-da,” I repeat slowly, and then remembering Jules’s fingers around my mouth, I say it again, this time faster, pushing the sounds together. “Masitda.”

“Good.” He approves.

I bask in that compliment as if the sun broke out in the dead of night. Everything is good. The food, the weather, the company. My head doesn’t hurt so much and neither does my heart.