“What do you like about the river?”

He stretches his legs out and I stare at his ankle bone like I’m a Victorian maiden who gets to see bare skin once every eclipse. Jules said it would be a crime if I didn’t get to see Yujun’s abs, but what about his calves and his thighs? What about his defined pecs and the hairline that arrows down to his groin?

The last time we were on a bench near the river, I kissed him and then I climbed onto his lap, threaded my fingers through his hair, and tried to tongue his throat. It was the only time I’ve really touched him. The tips of my fingers tingle at the memory of his bare throat. I want to feel his warm skin under my hand. I want to stick my nose into the hollow of his neck and fill my lungs with his scent.

“You like the hotteok?” he asks.

I tear my eyes from his lap and peer up guiltily through my lashes. “Yes.”

The corner of his mouth rises. “I’m glad.”

Is he smirking? I take another bite of my hotteok. I was staring at his lap. Maybe he deserves to be smirking.

“I like it, too,” he says, and this time his voice is deeper and throatier. Are we even talking about hotteok anymore? He clears his throat and, in a mercy move, turns his gaze to the river. “I like that it’s here. The city changes every day, but the Han River was here before the buildings and the cars and the people and it will be here long after all of this is gone.”

I wipe the corner of my mouth, checking for drool, and redirect my attention to the river. I asked for him to take me to a place to clear my thoughts, not one where I’d jump his bones. Across the river, the southern part of the city rises high into the air. The distinctive tweezer-shaped Lotte Tower sits to the left, and the faint outlines of the southern mountain ridges loom behind half-constructed high-rises taking their places next to the smaller apartment buildings that were once the height of modernity. The dark river is speckled with the lights from the high-rises.

The city changes every day, he said. This modern, fast-moving, coffee-shop-on-every-corner, face-mask-at-every-counter society is not how it was twenty-five years ago. While the water in the Han is always there, it changes daily. It flows from the mountains and races down to the Yellow Sea, every current bringing something new.

I close my eyes and lean forward to hear the river speaking as it strikes against the base of the bridge columns that rise to my left. Did my mother ever come here to the river? Did she ask the water what to do? Did she think that if she got rid of me like the water, she could start new?

The next bite of hotteok lodges itself in my thickening throat. I should go back to imagining Yujun without clothes. Everything was sweeter then. I reach for the beer to wash it down and meet Yujun’s concerned gaze. His hand wraps around mine.