The Fermentation Hut

The rain came down all at once, like somebody up there dumped a bucket, and I stomped across the yard to the little hut at the edge of the property. The natto hut. Warm, stinky, empty. Perfect.

I shoved the door open and ducked inside. It was exactly what I needed. Just a single bare bulb, wooden shelves along every wall, trays of fermenting soybeans doing their weird fuzzy thing. The air hit me, heavy and warm, and the smell was strong, kind of nutty and sour all at once. Honestly, after six months in Taean I was used to it, but today it was almost soothing. Something alive in here, quietly working, not arguing with me.

Unlike Neal.

God, that man. I dropped onto an overturned crate near the door and let myself be furious properly for a minute. He had done it again. Right in front of Da-eun and Mr. Bae and half the volunteer crew, he had walked over to my stack of oyster shells, looked at it, and said, loud enough for everyone, "Huh. That's gonna slide."

Not "hey, Hazel, I have a thought!" Not a private word. Just "that's gonna slide," in front of everybody, like I was some rookie who wandered off the bus from Seoul, which, fine, I did move here six months ago, but I've stacked shells at four of these events now and my stacks do not slide.

Mine had not slid. His suggestion, which involved wedging broken shells into the base in a way he swore his grandfather taught him, was not adopted, because I said no, and then we'd spent forty minutes bickering across the sorting tables while everyone pretended to be very interested in oyster shells.

And then the sky opened and the potluck got moved indoors and I needed to be anywhere Neal wasn't.

So of course, two minutes into my sulk, the door opened and Neal ducked in.

"Oh," he said. "Occupied."

"It's a fermentation hut, not a hotel."

He looked at me, then at the empty crate across from mine, then shrugged and sat down on it anyway. Smirking. He's twenty-eight, five years older than me in theory and about a decade older than me in attitude, and he has lived in Taean his whole life, which he mentions roughly every other sentence. He makes rake handles for the shell gardens, actual bark rakes, and he talks about it like it makes him a professor of everything.

"Nice escape route," he said. "Very mature."

"You followed me into it."

"I came to get out of the rain. Didn't know the hut was reserved."

"Sit anywhere," I said, waving at the shelves. "Clearly."

We sat there maybe a minute, just listening to the rain hammer the roof and the trays doing their quiet fermenting business. The heat was getting to me. My shirt was sticking to my back and I could feel my face going pink, and I hated that he could probably see it.

"So," he said, "your base layer was too narrow. That's all I'm saying. It's not personal."

"You said it in front of everyone."

"It's a work site, not a library."

"You could have said it to me. You know, quietly. Like a normal person."

He leaned back against the shelf, which I'm pretty sure is bad for the trays, and looked at me with that grin. "You would've argued anyway."

"Because you were wrong!"

"Your top three rows are leaning, Hazel."

"Were. Were leaning. I fixed them after you left."

"Mm."

"What does that mean, mm?"

"It means I saw you rebuilding it in the rain while everyone else ran inside. Very heroic. Very unnecessary."

I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again. He was right, I had rebuilt it in the rain, and it had felt extremely heroic at the time and now felt extremely stupid, and I hated him for knowing both of those things.

"At least I care about the shells," I said finally, which was weak and we both knew it.

"I care about shells. I make tools for them. What do you do, design posters?"

"I do design posters, and they raised us double the volunteer sign-ups this year, actually."

"Posters," he said, like the word itself was funny.

I stood up, mostly because sitting was making me hotter, and drifted along the shelf line so I had something to do with my hands. That's when I saw it, half buried behind a tray. A carpenter's pocket level, the little plastic kind, and it was snapped clean in half, both bubble vials cracked and empty.

Neal reached past me and picked it up.

"Hey, this thing's been broke for years," he said, turning it over. "Look at it. Doesn't level anything. Sits on a shelf where it doesn't belong. Everybody's too polite to throw it out." He glanced at me. "Kind of reminds me of you."

Oh. Oh, that was it. That constituted the entire day.

"Give it to me," I said.

"Or what?"

"Give it to me, Neal."

He held it out all casual, like we were passing the salt, and I snatched it so fast he actually blinked. I don't know what I planned to do with it. Hold it hostage, maybe. It didn't matter. What mattered was that his hand had been close to mine and I'd felt it, warm and rough, and instead of dropping the level I was just standing there holding a broken piece of trash like it meant something.

"You know what your problem is?" he said, and he'd gone quieter. The smirk was still there but it had changed shape somehow.

"Enlighten me."

"You talk a big game for someone who's never once backed it up."

"Backed what up? I have been right all day."

"Right about shells. Fine. But you keep poking at me like you want something and then you run off to fermentation huts about it."

"I ran off because of the rain!"

"It started raining twenty minutes before you left."

I had no answer for that either. The bulb buzzed overhead. Somewhere outside thunder rolled long and low, and the rain just kept coming, hard enough that it sounded like the whole hut was inside a river.

"Fine," I said. "Prove it, then."

"Prove what?"

"Whatever you think I want. You keep standing there being smug about how I supposedly want something. So prove you're not all talk. Go on."

I don't know what I expected. Some stammering, probably. Some backing up and a joke and both of us pretending the whole day hadn't happened. That would have been the smart outcome.

Instead he studied me briefly, and then he placed one finger on the top button of his shirt and unfastened it. Slow. Watching my face the entire time, not his own hands, not the door, me.

"What are you doing," I said. It came out less like a question and more like a statement I regretted.

"You told me to prove it."

"I didn't mean," I said, and then stopped, because I didn't actually know how to finish that sentence honestly.

The second button went. Then a pause, long enough that I could have said stop and he would have, I knew that, some dumb animal part of me knew it the way you know which floorboards creak. Then the third.

The hut was so warm. The soybeans smelled thick and sweet and rotten all at once, and the rain was a wall of sound, and he was down to the fourth button with his eyes still on mine and my heart was doing something embarrassing in my chest.

"Say the word and I quit," he said, quiet, fingers resting on the fifth button. "Say quit and we go eat potluck potatoes and never mention this."

"Neal."

"That's not the word."

"It's a work in progress."

He grinned, that same infuriating grin, but softer around the edges now, and the fifth button slipped free, and I stood there in the heat and the stink and the noise, holding a broken level in both hands like an idiot, absolutely not telling him to quit.

He let the shirt hang open and then, instead of stopping there, his hands went to his belt.

"Neal."

"You're still not saying quit."

"That's not an invitation to take your pants off."

"Is it not?" He had the belt half through the buckle already, and he paused, holding it there. "Then say quit. Or say go. One or the other, Hazel. I'm not guessing at this."

The rain hammered the roof. The bulb buzzed. I was twenty-three years old and I'd been in this town six months and I could not believe the position I was in, literally, standing in a fermentation hut holding a broken level while a man waited on my word.

"Go," I said.

He got the belt off, then the button, then the zipper, and he didn't do a strip tease about it. He just pushed his pants and boxers down his hips far enough and took himself in hand, and his eyes never left my face the whole time. Not once did he look down at what he was doing. That was somehow the wildest part.

"Still watching," I said. My voice came out wrong, kind of hoarse.

"You're the one who told me to prove it."

"This isn't proving anything. This is just..." I waved a hand with the level in it. "Exhibitionism."

"You're still here."

That was the problem. I was still here. And worse, I wasn't even pretending to look away. He was thick and hard in his own fist and he stroked slow, lazy, like he had all the time in the world, and every second of it I could feel in my own skin, this hot spiteful