Pop Singer: A Dark BWAM / AMBW Romance (40 page)

JONG-SOO

With the last of her money, Bit-na was going to go and hire Yakuza for us. She could bribe them, get them on our side, not all of them, but some of them. Money was the biggest player in the game, and Bit-na still had a bit for us to last on.

After bribing them, we would gain safe passage, and be able to literally walk into Oh-seong’s lair.

Forget about trying to find him on foot, or by word-of-mouth, or by any other way—the Internet, by phone…

We would go to the source directly, using what talked best.

“We’ll put you back in the bag,” Bit-na said. “Henrietta and you can go inside the luggage case. I’ll have you all wrapped up like a present.”

Oh-seong would be alone. Flanked by only a couple of guards, and maybe Hyun-jun, plus some Yakuza who would be working for us, Oh-seong would have no recourse.

“And what if the Yakuza turn on us?” Henrietta said. She was really getting into the plan. As much as I hated her being in the thick of things, I could not prevent her from joining us, could not prevent her feelings of revenge from boiling up to the surface—causing action.

She seemed to want this.

Badly.

Furthermore, Bit-na was not budging about bringing Henrietta along. Before, she had thought her deadweight, a secret best to be kept under wraps. Now, we were really going to keep her under wraps.

Bit-na did not care if Henrietta died though—I could see that in her eyes. This was solely about her fighting back Oh-seong. Which I could understand, but if she got in the way of Henrietta’s life, I knew where my interests lay.

Henrietta came first before Bit-na, and there could be no other way.

“I’ll roll her in, and you,” Bit-na said, “and from the inside of the bag, you’ll just pop a shot at Oh-seong’s face. I’ll position myself so that I won’t have to wait too much to kill the others. Anyone who stops—or tries to stop—our operation, I’ll shoot.”

“How are we going to contact the Yakuza?” Henrietta said.

“That’s easy,” Bit-na said. “When you’re the girlfriend of one of the biggest kingpins in Korea, you know a couple of people. Just like how we boarded the ship before this one, I can get us a link. There are always weak ones willing to cave for extra cash. Always someone around who needs extra.”

“Whatever we do,” I said, “we have to do it within the next couple of weeks. They’re going to be very active, all of the underground world. Considering they haven’t been able to capture us, and they only scored a kill on Hae-il. Which, by the way, I’m still not sure why him.”

“You never knew it,” Bit-na said, raising her voice, stirring her Ramen noodles gently. “But he had been talking to Yakuza about assassinating you for some time. It backfired on him when Oh-seong decided to link up with the Yakuza instead. Hae-il didn’t have the kind of clout you had—plus, by eliminating Hae-il, there was one less successor to the throne. They planned on getting rid of you in the meantime.”

“Ah,” I said. “That old trick.”

Some of the old fisherman came by to check up on us, asking if we needed anything else. We requested a couple of glasses of water, and some soda for Henrietta, and then some hard liquor for Bit-na.

Bit-na could really drink. Her throat never burned, and after a couple of shots, she was speaking more than she had ever during the past couple of weeks.

“You know what else he did to me?” Bit-na said, her vocal chords grating together. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it, what she had to say, but then again, life was rough out here. And people could not shelter themselves away from the dangers. By trying to block out the pain, we could never confront our demons truly. We would always be afraid of them. So talking about them was the best course of action.

This was our therapy, for those of us who could never feel right in a psychologist’s chair.

“He took me one day,” she said, “and he sat me down in his lap. I remember him being so warm, embracing me with his legs, wrapping me tight against his cock. I waited for him to come, as he stroked his legs. He wanted me, and I guess, I wanted him. He wasn’t a bad fuck. Not at all. I liked him a lot in those days, because he was kinder to me. He knew how to please me as a woman, treat me well.

“And then he changed. I’m not sure what caused the change. But over time, I noticed him becoming rougher with me, grabbing me with his nails, digging them into my skin. Breaking them across my back sometimes. Sometimes he wouldn’t even clip his nails, it was disgusting. I felt degraded, like an animal or an inanimate object. Something to be held, to be petted, to be examined.

“He held me there on his lap, and then he told me that I was useless. I was worthless and had nothing to offer to humanity. That I would die in a ditch alone somewhere. There was nothing I could do about it—I was under his control, he told me. I was worthless and couldn’t go anywhere, because no one would value me the way he did.”

Bit-na stirred her noodles faster and faster, chopping them up crosswise. With quick strokes of her wrist, she chowed down on the rest. Eating them so quickly, I thought she might choke. Then she dipped her head backwards, and drunk the rest of her hard liquor, requesting another round, paying the tab so fast, we might’ve gone broke if she continued. She had so much money on her though that none said anything.

“It’s always been a hard life for me,” Bit-na continued. “My parents abused me, did some things that I don’t want to even remember. I tried not to think about them, but the day my mother hit me with a metal whip, I…”

Her voice was breaking, and Henrietta had to go around to the side of the table where she sat, holding her, caressing her as only woman friends could do.

“For some reason, I feel extremely ashamed. Like it was all my fault. Like I brought it down on myself—if I were a better person, then so much of this would never have happened to me, I would never have been abused.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Henrietta said. “You should never blame yourself.”

By now, Henrietta and Bit-na had developed the same kind of Eng-orean that me and Henrietta were so accustomed to using. They were able to understand one another, I could tell by the way they talked, by the way Henrietta comforted Bit-na.

And it was a beautiful sight.

“We’ll get back at him,” I said. “We have a plan in place. We know what to do. We can get Oh-seong, and bring him down.”

Bit-na sobbed there at the table, though she kept it short, and returned to her calm demeanor. “I know we can,” she said. “It’s the last thing I want to do. My life may well be ruined, but I can at least take out someone else.”

Henrietta and I shared a look. Yes, it would be easier to get rid of Bit-na, but she was a hurt, pained woman.

And this fact bonded us even further, made me and Henrietta sailors in the same boat— we had to take out this evil in the world.

We had to.

HENRIETTA

Holding her there, I didn’t know what to say.

You just never encountered this kind of stuff back in the States unless you went out and looked for it.

And I definitely never did.

I surrounded myself with good people, who understood what it meant to work hard for your honest keep.

Okay, well, sort of.

Yet, here I was, trapped with this woman, her troubles and struggles.

I couldn’t understand exactly where she was coming from, but I could empathize deeper than ever before.

“I can bring you to the United States,” I said. Wouldn’t that be an interesting idea?”

“I want revenge,” Bit-na mumbled. “I want it so bad. I want to have him against my barrel.”

“You can come with me later,” I said. “We can all escape there. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“It would be,” Bit-na said. “I guess that would be something. An exit plan of sorts.”

Everything was beginning to take shape. The places we were going to go to. What we were going to do, how, and why.

I still think most people, if they interviewed me there on the boat, would have thought me insane. Absolutely bat-shit crazy.

But figure me out like this: Bit-na was holding me hostage. I couldn’t leave or go anywhere without her behind me, tracking me down and making sure that I didn’t snitch on them. Jong-soo would come with me, but I don’t think he had it in him to hurt Bit-na—like he said, he never had killed a woman, and by what he told me, he never really fought one unless it was self-defense.

No one understood me—using English in these rural parts of Korea and Japan was practically useless. The languages I knew were failing me.

I couldn’t just go back to the embassy either—who would believe me?

I could already hear what the headlines would say about me. What all of the news networks would run on the front of their screens, all of those people on television talking about how I was an insane person, lying and making things up.

Even my own family…

My dad.

My heart now ached to see him more, but then I was also embarrassed about revealing the truth of what I was up to. All of what had happened. Would he believe me? And Latasha, I knew she would be smug, the frenemy sister that she was.

I was caught between a rock and a hard place, with no real choices.

What could I do now besides jump off the boat and kill myself?

And that was not an option.

For this small town girl, that was not an option.

“I think I need to get some rest,” I said to Jong-soo and Bit-na. “I’m going to go to the room.”

The fishermen had saved us one downstairs, although it was located near the fishing hull, where they kept all of their raw meats. So, our room stunk. It smelled horribly, and I could not stand to really be inside for too long.

Suffocating on the stench, I had to pinch my nose and fan myself to get any sort of breathing room.

In the darkness, I sat there alone, until Jong-soo joined me, saying, “Bit-na is going to stay upstairs on deck. She wants to sleep there.”

“That girl is crazy,” I said, knowing how somewhat hypocritical I came off. Maybe Jong-soo thought I was crazy as well. Maybe we were all crazy! From the perspective of someone who grew up in American suburbia, gangsters and thieves and criminals—this entire underground world—none of it made sense.

These people were crammed against hard choices—with no recourse. These were their choices: bad decisions.

I had empathy and then I had hatred. I wanted to hate these gangsters for their choices, but I had to empathize with the circumstances. How could you hate people who had no choice?

Like a tongue twister, I unraveled the logic of what they were doing. Bit-na, Jong-soo, and all of the other people I had met so far. The Yakuza, the Twin Swords, Double Dragons.

“I don’t mean to make any judgments,” I said. I put my hands against my face. “But this is getting really insane. It’s all catching up to me.”

“You change like the wind,” Jong-soo said.

“You misread me,” I said. “I’m not changing my mind at all. I’ve always thought that this was insane. But now, the terms are becoming clear to me. It’s sort of like reading the fine print. I still want revenge myself. But I want to go home as well. And I don’t want to be in danger. But I want to have revenge. It’s like a circle, a cycle, a negative feedback that I can’t break.”

Jong-soo wrapped his arms around my waist, and I immediately calmed down. He hummed, his songbird voice soaring to heights of marvelous fervor, making my mind soft and numb. Like a chewy granola bar, gooey and delicious. His voice had a cadence to it, a sonic depth people could only imagine having. Singers all over America would be jealous of him if only they heard him. If they knew of him.

“When all of this is done,” he said, “I’m going to write us a song. I’ll write a long song, and then perform it in public somewhere. Maybe a bar. Or a library. And then on a concert stage, if I can ever get back up there.”

“I almost forgot—forget sometimes I—that you’re a popstar. Not that these fishermen would know, but you must miss it. Having people recognizing you, in the streets, or in places that you would go to regularly. The supermarket, restaurants, or anyplace.”

“People always imagine fame as being something desirable. But it’s more of a hassle than anything else,” Jong-soo said, his thumb brushing down to my wrists. He wrapped his thumb and index finger around my wrist, spreading his fingers across mine. “People think that being famous is always something that you want to have. Our societies idolize it, really want to have it around. But it’s nothing special. Once you have it, you wish it would go away. And in that sense, I’m kind of glad that everything has ended up the way it has. I met you, and then I’m no longer in the spotlight, no more pressure. My world—the one I had been trying to take down for a long time, is finally going away. No more criminal organizations. I’ll have had my own sweet revenge against Oh-seong.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever explained to me what your grievances against him are,” I said. Come to think of it, I don’t think I knew in particular what he hated about Oh-seong.

“It’s nothing in particular, actually. Besides abducting me and torturing me? I mean, nothing in particular. Maybe it’s the torture that sets me off. Maybe it’s his punchable face?”

I laughed.

“No, really. He’s a despicable man. I don’t know how anyone could want him alive and running around. But if I ever went to the police, ever talked what I knew I—my reputation would be ruined. It would be too hard of a life after, living outside in the normal world. Even though I’ve never murdered, raped, stole…”

“You never had a choice,” I said. “Like Bit-na, you’re always only defending yourself. I don’t blame you. I don’t think anyone can.”

“I’m glad that someone can understand me. Because Korean society would be quick to judge me as faulty and defective. I wouldn’t be able to fit in anymore, wouldn’t be able to have a regular life because of the tabloids and the news networks. Everyone wants to destroy someone for something.”

“Humanity can be unforgiving,” I said, slowly bringing my hands out of his. I gripped his palms, squeezing and pumping him. Then I turned around, straddling my legs against his hips. I pushed him slowly against the bed, and he relaxed, closing his eyes.

“If I stroke you like this,” I said, “how does it feel?”

Jong-soo grinned.

“Very good,” he said.