“I want you to see something,” Yujun says quietly. He leads me away from the windows to a bank of LED screens where I see people standing on a viewing platform, much like the one I’m on.

“What am I looking at?”

“It’s Busan’s observatory. There’s a camera there and it broadcasts the interior of that tower to ours here. They can see us in real time.”

Yujun waves and then smiles, poking a finger into one of his dimples. My knees nearly buckle at the cuteness. He turns to me and makes a V with his fingers and places them over my chin.

A couple on the screen do the same thing. It’s adorable. The girl says something to the boy. At first, he shakes his head, but ultimately, after some cajoling, he gives a wildly exaggerated hand kiss. The girl folds over in laughter, covering her mouth. I bring my own hand up to muffle a giggle. I turn to see if Yujun is laughing, too. He’s not. Instead, his face holds the fondest expression. My breath catches and then shudders out.

“Busan is three hundred and twenty-five kilometers away from Seoul. Not as far as Seoul to Iowa, but still there’s distance, and yet, in the right place, it’s as if you’re right next to each other.”

It makes sense when Yujun says these things. There’s no distance in this world that can exist. Not with phones and planes and the internet. That’s what he’s saying. That my short stay doesn’t have to be a barrier. Not if I don’t want it to be.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I thought it’d take forever to fall asleep after Yujun drove me home from Namsan, but I was out the moment my head hit the pillow. I didn’t even dream, which, I suppose, is par for the course. We relive our nightmares, but the special moments are fleeting. When I wake, I replay our last moments together in an attempt to embed them in my memory bank. He drove me home in his Audi SUV because he wasn’t about to have my experience in Seoul ruined by some drunk ahjussi on the subway. His hand rested on the gearshift for most of the drive and I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at his long fingers. If I’d been braver, I might have covered his hand with mine; instead I just fantasized about interlocking our fingers.

He left the vehicle idling and hiked up the mini-mountain with me. At the gate, we said our goodbyes. I didn’t want to go in and I don’t think he wanted me to leave. His hand came up and tucked my hair behind my ear. I waited for him to kiss me, but he didn’t. I think it’s because he didn’t want to be that guy—the one that everyone has warned me about. The guy who thinks foreign women are easy, and to be honest, if he had made a move, I would’ve proven all those stereotypes true. I was a second away from grabbing him by the shirtfront and taking him down to the asphalt but managed to summon an ounce of dignity and slip through the gate before I did something irreparably humiliating.