Waiting for yesterday UPDATED 이미 이루어졌다

칠 chapter seven- oversharing

Just then my phone buzzes. I almost end up snipping off a part of Ethans ear I'm so nervous. It keeps ringing and ringing and Ethan raises an eyebrow in the mirror.

"I better take this," I say when the ringing won't stop. On the other end of the line, there's a hysterical girl. It soon becomes clear that she's one of my students, one of my private students that I coach for my job. She's got a major assignment due Monday and she hasn't even started it, she says. Can I please give her an emergency tutoring session? I check the time. The reunion starts at six and it's now lunchtime. I have time to give her the session and one look at my mum tells me that if I don't take care of my clients I'll lose my job. So I agree to teach her two hours from now. For some reason, her voice reminds me of me. Is it me from the past? Getting lessons to ace her exams?

Ethans hair is jet black and dead straight. His eyebrows too are quite sparse when I look at him up this close. It's not that he's not attractive, he so is but up this close, he doesn't seem as scary as I remember. In fact, he looks a little vulnerable. Maybe it's because I know that he lied his whole life about where he was from. Maybe it's because I'm holding the scissors? I snip cautiously at a lock of his hair. I hear a dry crunch as the scissors snip through his thick hair. His hair, I notice, is really clean not greasy.

"You washed your hair before coming here," I say.

"Yeah..." he flushes. Wait a minute. Did he wash his hair thinking I would be here? He didn't want me to think he had dirty hair? Usually people don't wash their hair when they come to the hairdressers because they want to get their hair washed and their head massaged professionally. Only kids wash their hair before going to the hairdresser.

"How did it end up this long?" I ask.

"I travelled," he says.

"Where to?"

"Japan."

I don't ask him what he was doing in Japan. Obviously reconnecting with his dad, but it's none of my business.

Instead I say, "are the cherry blossoms as beautiful as they say?"

"More so," he says.

"And the food, is it as good as they say?"

"They give stingy portions," he says as I snip off more of his hair. I notice that his hair is looking unbalanced. I'm really bad at this.

"Speaking of, Is it lunchtime?" I say.

The hairdresser starts saying something and eventually I realise that she's saying that she's going to bring food for all of us. She's in the middle of washing my mums hair. She pauses and makes a phone call to order food. Ethan protests but she insists on feeding us all. "Do you eat kimchi?" She asks him and I realise that she thinks that he's biracial too. Poor guy. He couldn't help pretending when everyone assumed.

"I don't eat anything else," says Ethan with a reassuring smile.

I'm tempted to run my hand through Ethans hair. I'm supposed to be cutting it but I really want to run my hand through it. It's surprisingly spiky and not soft, as I thought it would be. I brush it lightly with the palm of my hand. I don't quite run my hand through his hair but I almost do. I keep looking at him in the mirror. I see that he has a strong jawline and he has shaved. He smells of aftershave.

"They're so different, korea and Japan," says Ethan suddenly.

I'm taken aback by this sudden offer of information. I don't know what to do with it so I say nothing.

"For the longest time, I played samurai, you know that?" He says. "I didn't even realise samurai were japanese, not Korean.."

"And I didn't know that the Japanese forbid Koreans from having Korean names, or speaking their language..."