I didn’t really have any ironclad rules I stuck to. Besides, he was the owner of the gallery that would be managing my art from now on, so it wasn’t an unreasonable request for him to want to check on an artist’s work progress.
No, actually, I didn’t even need to bring up our respective positions as a gallery owner and a fledgling artist with not a single penny of income yet.
If there was something he wanted from me, even if it wasn’t out of some sense of obligation to repay his kindness… I would have wanted to grant him anything.
I met the gaze of his face as he waited for my answer, his hands thrust into the front pockets of his jeans and his shoulders hiked up, and nodded. At that single nod, he revealed a set of even teeth and smiled in satisfaction.
The fact that this man—who was bigger than me in every way, who lacked for nothing in so many aspects that he felt like the very symbol of an adult to me—was smiling with a face full of pure joy, like a child who’d just received a coveted toy, and that I was the one who had created that smile at this moment, sent a small shock through my core.
It wasn’t that I’d never experienced someone else’s smile and joy directly leading to my own happiness, but this was somehow different in nature from the warm contentment I’d felt through Morae or my brother.
Every reaction that came through him possessed a head-spinning feverishness, and a passion that drew out impulses and courage I never knew I had.
I wanted to see more of that face, and I wished I could be the cause of it—a desire whose origins I couldn’t trace—and, feeling the bravado, based on a very twenty-two-year-old sentiment, that if I could just make that wish come true, I could shake off anything and move forward… in an unexpected moment, without any special conversation or dramatic emotion, I realized that I truly liked him.
If I had been afraid of change, the feeling I should have feared and been most cautious of was liking someone. Because it changes you, without any choice or agreement.
A self-deprecating laugh escaped me as I wondered if my past self from when I first met him, the one who would feel an uncharacteristic rebelliousness flare up at others’ ostracism and indifference, had been a preview of my present. I avoided his gaze, smiled faintly, and needlessly brushed my arm.
When I looked up again, he, too, was faintly smiling back at me. He was probably smiling back because he didn’t know why I was smiling.
He was the one who shrugged and turned first.
“Shall we go, then?”
I followed behind him as he led the way down to the basement.
From the built-in bookshelf down here in the basement, and also in the garden, I took out a few drawing notebooks filled with the sketches I had been drawing for the past five days and handed them to him. My palms were sweating, and my throat was dry.
He weighed the notebooks in his hands as if to test their heft, then raised his eyebrows and looked at me.
“Are all of these from after you came here?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm, looks like you really did nothing but draw after I left for work.”
He seemed to be in a good mood as he said that with a smile.
Declining my offer to sit, he leaned against the back of the three-person sofa placed away from the wall and silently flipped through the three drawing notebooks. He remained silent even as he checked all the canvases that were turned around and leaning against the wall.
I explained, as if making an excuse, that I had only tested the oil paints to see if I could create the colors I wanted, but he just raised a hand as if to say it didn’t matter.
I felt it would be better if he at least made a comment, even if it was a critique or a harsh review. I couldn’t read anything from his calm expression and demeanor, which was no different from usual—neither frowning nor showing admiration. If this was his reaction to just seeing practice sketches and studies, it seemed I would need considerable mental fortitude to show him the paintings into which I had transplanted myself.
Flipping through the drawing notebooks again to re-examine a few pages, he faintly lifted the corners of his lips and smiled.
“This… it makes the gift I prepared seem so… shabby.”
His gaze remained fixed down on the notebook.
Muttering to himself with a barely perceptible, hazy smile, he closed the notebook and then rubbed his lower face with a large hand, as if covering his mouth.
After holding that pose for a moment, looking down at some spot on the floor with a pensive expression, he finally looked at me, handed the notebooks back, and said,
“Well then, I’ll be waiting in the study.”
○
Even as I headed to the second-floor study after my shower, Hyung and Noona were still deep in conversation. Of course, their voices were more excited than usual, but the content of their conversation about their plans to study abroad made it hard to believe they were drunk.
To avoid disturbing them, I quietly approached the living room window and looked out to see a pile of empty beer cans on the table. The two of them, who had even put on music on a phone, were clearly, as he had said, discovering hope rather than anxiety in their uncertain future.
It was different from baseless optimism. Because they didn’t know what awaited them, the future was an object of anticipation and hope that they could prepare and plan for.
I wondered if he, who had defined their age as a time when one desperately wants to explain and be understood, had ever felt such a desire for someone in the past.
Pushing aside the ever-expanding curiosity, I left the living room and went up the stairs.
All the lights were off in the second-floor hallway, but thanks to the moonlight shining through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling window, the corridor leading to the study wasn’t too dark. When I knocked on the door, a voice told me to come in.
He was sitting at a large desk positioned to face the door. The study, illuminated only by two lamps—one on the desk and one next to the sofa set where we had talked—was dim, just like the day I had asked for his help here. But it wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t distinguish objects. A cozy, orange glow was as tranquil as candlelight.
“You’re here? Sit over here.”
He pointed to a long bench in front of the desk. It was a wide leather bench that had no backrest, but like a beach chair, one end could be adjusted and raised.
As I sat awkwardly on the bench, rubbing my arm, he soon finished what he was doing, got up from the desk, and came over. He must have also finished showering in the meantime, as the cool scent of a deep blue shower gel, fitting for summer, wafted from him.
As he sat down beside me, he held out a slender, rectangular object. The packaging was so stylish and beautiful that it seemed a shame to open it, and it caught my eye.
“Congratulations on the move. It’s a new start, so I think it’s something to celebrate.”
“……Thank you.”
“Save your thanks for after you open it. You might not like it.”
Listening to his low laugh, I slowly untied the ribbon and unwrapped the gift. My hand paused at the simple box that appeared from within the wrapping paper. I gently bit my lower lip, then carefully opened the box, which was designed to unfold to both sides.
“……”
Inside was a pair of sunglasses.
If my eye wasn’t mistaken, it seemed to be the same design as the one I had tried on in his car a few days ago.
“It was pretty inconvenient in Hong Kong without these, right? I thought it’d be good for you to have a pair. There’s still a lot of summer left, too.”
He said, sitting next to me, leaning an elbow on his thigh and propping up his chin as he looked up at me.
“Ah… uh…”
Frozen with surprise, I couldn’t react quickly to the gift before me, my mouth just opening and closing, speechless.
He laughed lightly. Though it was just the two of us in the room, he straightened his back, leaned his upper body toward me, and pressed his lips close to my ear before lowering his voice.
“But by any chance… were you expecting a different gift?”
“……”
Was he deliberately playing a mean trick, knowing everything? My skin flushed red from the base of my neck.
No, rather than expecting, there was something I had been anticipating, or perhaps bracing myself for. He had kept talking about ‘it,’ after all.
But the fact that it wasn’t that was different from being disappointed. This gift, which, contrary to my expectations, held no sexual meaning at all, felt all the more like a real gift because of it.
The sunglasses that were always tucked into his left breast pocket. Though, of course, the design was different almost every time.
It was true that in the car from the Hong Kong airport to the city, I was the only one not wearing sunglasses. I wondered if he remembered that, along with the time I had impulsively snatched his and tried them on a few days ago. He wouldn’t know, but it meant a lot to me.
As I shook my head no several times, he let out a low laugh that seemed to crumble by my ear. The high bridge of his nose brushed softly against my ear.
“The right drawer, try opening it.”
“……”
When I turned my head, the tip of his nose touched mine. Our gazes pulled at each other from an extremely close distance, and in that instant, he tilted his head ever so slightly and gave me a brief kiss, just enough for the surface of our lips to graze. My eyelids trembled at the short but slow, cautiously deliberate kiss.
The moment his body touched mine, I stiffened with tension and excitement, swallowing my saliva so audibly it made a gulping sound, but this time, he didn’t laugh.
As he had indicated, I reached out and opened the drawer of the sofa table in front of the bench. Another wrapped box lay askew in the empty drawer. Perhaps because of that one brake, I was able to unwrap the gift and open the box with a calmer touch than I expected.
Resting neatly on fragrant potpourri and shredded paper for decoration was a piece of thin, delicate, black lace underwear.
He leaned against me, his chin pressing on my shoulder. Together, we looked down into the box resting on my thigh.
“I want to be precise about this, but they are definitely for men.”
End of Volume 3
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