I watched Hyung’s back as he connected the piercing next to his eyebrow and his lip piercing with a thin chain, then I dragged my gaze down to the phone in my hand. His message, saying he would arrive in front of the officetel in about 10 minutes, appeared on the screen with a light vibration.
“His speech is eloquent, his manners are refined, and honestly, his looks are… well, fantastic. I admit the CEO has a charm that bewitches people, but.”
After fastening the chain to his ring-shaped lip piercing, Hyung turned around.
“Isn’t someone more stable and embracing more your type? Or what. Were you also swayed by Liu Weikun’s external qualifications in the end?”
And then, as if to lighten the mood, he came closer and playfully shook my shoulders.
There was a time I found it strange how Hyung and Noona could be so close to him and not fall for him. I had even imagined that they might be nursing a fierce, one-sided love in secret.
But with this, it became clear that at least Juhan-hyung was not in love with him.
If he had been in love with him, and thus had the chance to observe him more closely, he wouldn’t have been able to describe him as an un-embracing and unstable person.
Without any particular reaction, I just smiled vaguely, letting myself be shaken like a limp doll. Hyung let go of my shoulders, sighed, and plopped down next to me. The mattress of the narrow bed swayed, bouncing under his weight.
“Hey, I’m really not the kind of guy who gives unsolicited advice on other people’s love lives. I’m more the type to watch with my arms crossed and chuckle when things start to go sideways. But you… you’re not the type to get drunk on your emotions and enjoy shooting a drama while calling it love. I’m saying this because I’m worried you’ll get your heart broken and have a hard time…”
As if confessing a heavy secret, Hyung hesitated before continuing with difficulty.
“If you’re still just at the stage of feeling fluttery and your heart pounding, you should get your feelings in order, if you can.”
Compared to his hesitation with the previous words, his advice to get my feelings in order was so clear and unhesitating it sounded almost like an indirect command.
It felt strange.
Whether I was past the stage of feeling fluttery and my heart pounding over him or not, I couldn’t even tell that much, for starters. The restless stirring I felt just thinking of him could be called a flutter, but coexisting with it was a sinking feeling, like missing a step from a high place and plunging down.
Besides, I didn’t have enough experience to collect various cases of how feelings of love develop, find a consistent pattern among them, and organize them into stages.
I hadn’t wanted encouragement like, “It seems like he likes you too, so you should give it a try,” or “You two look good together,” but hearing such clean advice to sort things out from someone who knew us both, my thoughts turned to an outside perspective on our relationship for the first time.
It seemed that… we probably didn’t make a very good picture.
While I was debating whether I should explain to hyung the recent changes in my relationship with him, hyung stood up from the bed, roughly rubbing his short hair, and took a new beer from the fridge.
“To you, it probably looks like Baek Yuni and I are really close to the CEO, right?”
“……”
Downing the beer as if drinking in anger, hyung roughly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“But we know almost nothing about the CEO. The same goes for his private life. But we do know that he hasn’t been in a proper relationship since we started working together. He might be picky about who he lets in, but he definitely doesn’t hold on to those who leave. You’d be better off not expecting a serious relationship.”
After saying that, Hyung, who swallowed several gulps of beer at once, looked like a man forcing himself to say something he didn’t want to.
Hyung’s assumptions were partly right, and partly off the mark.
The old me would have probably agreed with hyung’s assessment of him. But if the version of him hyung was describing now was a laziness that sought to avoid clearly defining and taking responsibility for a relationship, then I myself hadn’t been much different on the path to this point.
In bed, he had prioritized my pleasure over his own desires, and through long, devoted foreplay, he had awakened not just my genitals but every corner of my body to pleasure. Afterward, an aftercare followed that was almost more blush-inducing than the sex itself, and his kisses were sweet enough to create illusions.
There was nothing that made things difficult for me. That was why I was able to be a coward for so long.
Even while liking him, I had postponed responsibility in an ambiguous state without clearly conveying it, and I had even felt a kind of comfort in it.
That if he just continued to treat me as he did now, without causing me any pain, without revealing himself sleeping with someone else or treating someone else specially… that it would be good enough if this state just continued.
So the evaluation of being irresponsible had to be applied to me as well.
Every time Hyung, sitting next to me, brought the beer can to his lips, the metallic clink of his lip piercing hitting the can sounded out. I thought about asking for a can of beer myself. I also wanted to smoke a cigarette for the first time in a while. But I didn’t ask hyung for either. I just fiddled with the phone in my hand.
“The way I go around… you know, meeting older men and having relationships that are just physical, the CEO knows all about it. But he never touches on it. He talks like he’d hold Baek Yuni back if she were to study abroad, but when that moment actually comes, I bet he won’t say a single word like ‘do this’ or ‘do that.’ What I mean is, he has a pathological aversion to getting involved in other people’s lives. The CEO, he’s kind and affectionate. I’m very grateful for that, too. But… he never tries to enter the truly deep places, and he never lets you in either. That’s who Liu Weikun is.”
As he said that and drained the last of the beer in one go, Hyung’s side profile looked as if he were talking not about my feelings for him, but about his own. It was as if he were complaining about his disappointment in a Liu Weikun who wouldn’t try to enter another’s truly deep places, nor let anyone into his own.
Hyung turned his head to look at me, his expression like that of a small child, exhausted and hurt from craving the attention of a parent or teacher.
When he told me that Noona and Hyung didn’t know Suki Kim was his mother. I had thought it was unexpected, and I was a little surprised. Perhaps that part was the cold distance Hyung was talking about. But the way he was with Noona and Hyung couldn’t be described as simple kindness.
I about Juhan-Hyung, Hyung about me, and Hyung about him. We were all seeing a slightly distorted image of the real person. Or we were distorting a part into the whole. And the old me had been the same way about him. Perhaps I still was.
But I wanted to know more. I wanted to see a him that was closer to the real person.
At the same time, I wanted to show myself to him, to these people. Even if my true self was a coward who tried to protect himself by blocking out the sense of connection to the world, and that was all the current me could show.
I didn’t want to shut my mouth like my father and sink into that closed world. In my own way, I had to at least struggle. For the people who had silently stayed by my side, and for… the person among them who had told me I needed to find my voice again, just like before.
“Hyung.”
“……”
“For the next sketch… could you possibly do it… nude?”
Hyung’s eyes widened. It was probably more so because I had changed the subject so abruptly.
“Nude?”
“Yes, if you’re okay with it.”
Hyung fiddled with the empty beer can, gnawing on his lip piercing with his upper teeth. His face was lost in thought.
“In the CEO’s garden… I want to draw it there.”
Then he let out a smirk and looked at me askance.
“Outdoor play, even?”
I smiled along with him.
“Looks like the artist has an image he wants to draw. My parents have already disowned me, so there’s nothing I can’t do. It’s not obscenity, it’s for art. Sure, why not. Let’s do it!”
Slapping his thigh hard with his palm, hyung completely crushed the beer can. He looked even more animated than when he had been talking about his favorite guitarist a moment ago.
Hyung didn’t bring up his incompleteness, which made him unsuitable as a romantic partner for me, anymore. In fact, he chattered on in an excited tone about the concept and pose for the next sketch, as if he’d never even had that conversation.
As we left hyung’s officetel side-by-side, I was suddenly reminded of the barbecue day, when hyung had been unusually loud, saying that if Inwoo-hyung’s interest in me was genuine, it was a shameless thing to do.
Perhaps back then, hyung had wanted to use Inwoo-hyung as a proxy to talk about my relationship with him.
“Hey, but I think I’m really not normal.”
In the elevator, Hyung slung an arm over my shoulder and chuckled.
“Why did it suddenly get so fun when you said let’s do it nude? When you said you were coming to draw me today, it just felt really vague. But now I feel a surge of interest, like my blood is pumping?”
Perhaps Hyung’s change was a perfectly natural reaction. I, the one doing the drawing, had been in a vague state about what to draw, and now… that had become clear.
As we exited the lobby, I immediately saw his sedan parked on the side of the road in front of the main gate. When we spotted the car and slowed our steps, he got out of the back seat, dressed in a casual shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans, and teal loafers.
Just having him in my sight felt good, so good that it felt like all the blood in my body was rushing toward him… This feeling was, in Hyung’s words, a flutter and a pounding heart. At the very least, it was a sensation very close to a flutter.
I could feel now that he, who was looking my way and gently relaxing his facial muscles, was probably not much different from me.
“All dressed up, where are you going at this hour?”
He acknowledged hyung first.
“To seduce some old men.”
And he chuckled at Hyung’s reply.
“Don’t mess around too much. You’ll get stabbed again.”
“I’m already on these terms with my parents, where else is there to get stabbed? Now that I have no relationships left to sever, I might as well enjoy myself to the fullest.”
At Hyung’s unfiltered remark, his eyes hardened slightly as he glanced at me.
“Yeehyeon knows, too. That I got stabbed and kicked out.”
He shook his head as if to say he was hopeless.
“I’m curious about something. When you get older than those old men are now, does the age range of your type of old men go up with you, or will your type still be men who are the age those old men are now.”
At his joke, this time hyung tilted his head and smiled. But perhaps because it was after I had heard hyung’s story, I couldn’t see the smile as purely playful like I usually would.
“Well, I’m still a vigorous youth to whom even thirty feels a long way off. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
After saying that with a deliberately cheeky expression, as if to tease him, hyung clapped my shoulder and took a step back.
“I’m off. Have a fuuun time at your da—exhibition viewing.”
Then, he glanced at his face and gave me an exaggerated, secret wink. It was hard to tell whether hyung was worried about this situation or amused by it.
“The exhibition is open until 8:30. Shall we get going, too?”
Checking his wristwatch, he opened the back door of the car for me. I watched Hyung’s back as he crossed the crosswalk, hailing a taxi that was slowly approaching from the opposite side, then nodded and got into the back seat.
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