After rattling on about the Golden Alpine CEO’s exceptional pheromone control, Juhan glanced at me, seemingly embarrassed by the lameness of his self-justification.
“What I’m trying to say is, the CEO is just an inherently difficult person, not that he specifically dislikes Yeehyeon. That’s the point. The CEO isn’t being argumentative because he hates someone. He treats everyone that way until he starts to like them.”
Hmm. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be comforting, but it did seem true that he wasn’t tormenting ‘only me’ in particular.
As we both lifted the fully folded table and moved it towards the railing, Juhan added,
“And someone like the CEO could probably use his pheromones to overwhelm a Beta if he really wanted to, right?”
Yuni frowned, leaning against the partition that divided the sections.
“Are pheromones some kind of superhero ultimate move? ‘Use his pheromones to overwhelm’?”
“If he really wanted to use them, they could be an ultimate move, sure. Hey, you know what’s stronger than pheromones?”
Saying that, Juhan looked back and forth between Yuni and me. Neither of us had an answer. Juhan tilted his chin slightly and adopted a somewhat arrogant attitude.
“Taste, taste. Taste is above pheromones. I was a little out of it at first because of the Golden Alpha pheromones, but once I came to my senses, I realized it wasn’t to my taste. My taste is…”
Juhan’s passionate lecture on his taste – a man in his late 30s whose facial features were starting to sag slightly, a man trapped in apathy at the boundary between youth and middle age – continued.
I could guess to some extent from their conversation so far, but it seemed that Juhan’s romantic interests were definitely men. And he didn’t seem to be trying to hide that inclination, even in front of me, who wasn’t particularly close to him. I, too, had no intention of pushing him beyond a certain line in my mind for that reason.
Yuni shook her head, as if she’d heard it all dozens of times. And, as if there was no need to listen, she grabbed my wrist and went down the stairs.
Come to think of it, there was no reason to hate someone I’d only met twice. Like Ms. Han said, like Juhan and Yuni said, it was just that man’s consistent attitude towards strangers.
I wondered what it would feel like to be ‘specially’ hated by him.
I had a feeling that among the people who had come to the exhibition earlier, there were probably many who wanted to be ‘special’ to him, even if it meant being hated.
○
Kwon Juhan. 22 years old at the time.
He was enrolled in the Western Painting department of a pretty good art school, though not one of the top tier ones, but after belatedly falling for the ‘Sex Pistols’, he neglected his school life and devoted himself to the guitar for a year. Eventually, he joined an underground punk band and was living and sleeping in the band’s practice room after leaving home.
The reason he left home wasn’t because his parents, who had changed course early on when Juhan was in middle school to get him into a four-year university in Seoul no matter what, registering him in a famous art academy and finding a talented instructor for private lessons, opposed his band activities.
It wasn’t that there wasn’t opposition to his band activities, with his father smashing two guitars and his mother cutting off his allowance, but that wasn’t the decisive reason why Juhan, who had grown up relatively carefree until then, ended up sleeping on the practice room sofa.
His parents would have been reasonably satisfied if he just got a university degree, whether he played guitar or not. But even his parents, who had almost given up on their son who wouldn’t do as they wanted, couldn’t accept that their son was engaging in perverted homosexual acts.
The instructor he had dated for about a year during his art academy days had been stalking Juhan for several years (even during his military service), and when his proposals to get back together were repeatedly rejected, the other party retaliated by destroying Juhan’s life.
He sent the results of his stalking, which he had been accumulating all along, to Juhan’s parents.
From Juhan’s point of view, it was evidence of stalking, but from Juhan’s parents’ point of view, it was evidence that their son was a homosexual, and a homosexual with perverted sexual tastes that most people would find difficult to accept.
It included photos they had taken together when they were dating, even photos of him engaging in intimate skinship with a one-night stand at a club.
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