That bastard who was his hyung, who only existed at that point to eat up the food Gyu-ho prepared, had begun to complain that Gyu-ho wasn’t cooking enough because of his new job at the clinic. When Gyu-ho shot back at him, the bastard apparently opened the fridge and got out eggs to throw at him. I could feel my own face growing red with rage just hearing about it. There was still some yellow egg yolk on Gyu-ho’s neck.

—Hey, let’s call a truck.

And there went Gyu-ho and I, straight to Incheon together. It took two hours to get there by subway. To think he took this route both ways every day, for work and to come to my house. Thinking how we’d been together for seven hundred days but I’d never visited him at his place made me feel somewhat guilty. When we got out of the station and onto a bus, I heard an oddly familiar jingle playing on the radio: “Let’s go together to You Sulhee, You Sulhee Nursing Academy, then it’s off to nursing college, for you and me.” Our eyes met and I tried not to laugh.

His bastard hyung was not home, he was probably off somewhere stuffing his face, and he hadn’t cleaned up the smashed eggs in front of the fridge. I told Gyu-ho to pack his bag fast. He grabbed his clothes, two pairs of shoes, and a laptop. Everything fit into a large wheeled trunk.

—Is that it?

—Yeah. Plus the mattress I bought with my own money.

That was the extent of his share in that house. The moving truck that we had rented arrived just then, and Gyu-ho and I with our not-great backs managed to haul the super-single mattress onto the truck, groaning all the way.

Cold stars appeared in the skies that evening, and we crammed into the narrow passenger seat together in the truck, exchanging body heat through our thighs as we sped down the highway toward home. To a place that was no longer my apartment, but our apartment. The orange road lit up by streetlamps was making me tear up, and the city felt as if it were beginning anew.

Of course, that feeling did not last long. Try as we might, we couldn’t figure out how to make Gyu-ho’s mattress fit in my studio apartment. We ended up putting it in an awkward position by the sliding balcony doors, stepping on the mattress and pillows whenever we wanted to go out to the balcony. After four days of sleeping with me in my bed, Gyu-ho declared that my snoring was too loud and went to go to sleep on his own old mattress. Cold air seeped through the doors. Gyu-ho said that with the electric blanket on, his body would be warm but his nose cold, which he seemed to find hilarious.