I sat with my knees bent, my hands loosely clasped in front of my ankles as I continued my story. I hesitated, then lifted my gaze to look at him, hoping he wasn’t looking too pained.
“……”
“Hmm……”
Contrary to my hopes, his face looked like he was struggling to control emotions that threatened to erupt at any moment. Seeing this, I let out a soft sigh.
His tense shoulders slumped as he bit his lip.
“I never… would have thought… you stopped painting for a reason like that.”
He roughly scrubbed a hand over his face, which had dried while I spoke, and shook his head.
“No, I just… hoped that you… had somehow… found playing with friends more fun as time went on, that painting had started to feel childish… that you’d naturally drifted away from your brushes as a whim of adolescence… I hoped it was something like that. Just in case…”
“……”
“Because I was scared I might hear a story like this.”
His tone implied he couldn’t forgive himself for trying to ignore my reality by holding on to such a wish. Even though there was no part of this story where he was at fault.
I gently stroked his calf, which was stretched out loosely to my right, and managed a faint smile.
“It’d be a lie to say it doesn’t affect me at all… but it doesn’t feel like I’m going to die anymore. I haven’t overcome it, but it has become duller.”
“……”
He looked at me as if to say, how can you say that?, but he was restraining himself, thinking that such words wouldn’t help me at all and would only be an unrefined outpouring of emotion he would later regret. I could read his thoughts from his expression alone.
The bathtub, made by filling the gaps between bricks with cement and laying tiles over it, was big enough for one person, but not long enough for him to stretch his legs out completely. I massaged his long, awkwardly bent legs and looked down at the meager foam that had now mostly dissipated.
“I painted ‘Isolation’ before the accident, and back then, the emotions I felt between my parents weren’t at a fatal level. I don’t know about other people, but I… didn’t necessarily only paint things of great intensity. It was just… like how other friends at that age wanted to escape their parents’ interference and were dissatisfied with their parents’ educational methods for their own reasons… I, too, as an extension of that, felt a childish jealousy toward my parents’ bond. That was all it was…”
His face showed that he finally understood how a painting drawn from such a self-centered emotion, typical of adolescence and common in any family, had come to incite a fear so great it could cause hyperventilation. But he didn’t look relieved.
Resting one arm on my raised knee, I swept my hair back while kneading his ankle with my right hand.
“In that process, the emotions I failed to properly deal with… probably twisted me into an unnatural shape. And I… had been neglecting myself, letting myself harden in that state…”
“……”
He couldn’t speak easily. Complex and varied emotions surfaced and vanished in the eyes that looked at me.
I knew that hearing such a story would become a burdensome task for people, making them wonder how they should react to the person involved. In front of a friend whose personality had changed due to the shock of her parents’ divorce, everyone used to be careful not to bring up that kind of topic, even by mistake. Whether out of consideration or discomfort.
“Feeling something, forming relationships with my surroundings and experiencing emotional changes within them, was frightening and made me cautious. What I wanted… was for peaceful days to continue, with no pluses or minuses. I thought that was the best way to protect myself.”
I lowered my head further, resting my chin on my knees. Morae, Hyung, Yuni-noona, and Juhan-hyung. I couldn’t help but think of my own pathetic state in the face of their struggles to break through the obstacles in their lives.
“But I think I’m starting to realize… what I was pursuing wasn’t peace or safety, but blandness. That it was just another form of silence, different from my father’s. I was gagging myself with my own hands…”
The paths they chose might not be the only, absolutely correct answer. Their present states weren’t perfect either. Behind every choice I saw and heard, someone’s sacrifice had to remain. The important thing was that I felt shame at their choices and their efforts to take responsibility for them.
I couldn’t bring myself to like the path I had chosen. I couldn’t say it had been for the best. If my father was extreme silence, I was a more diluted ‘lesser silence.’
“Back then, you were…”
Though he seemed to be trying to maintain his composure, his voice, for once, trembled slightly.
“You were only sixteen. An age where you need someone’s care to process and sort through a situation like that. It’s the fault of your father and the adults around you who abandoned that duty. You were someone who should have been emotionally and environmentally protected and guarded.”
His voice and expression were unnaturally distorted, like someone trying to suppress their rage.
“Yes… I, too, thought that way for a long time, feeling angry and resentful. The target of my anger and resentment was mostly my father, but sometimes it would expand uncontrollably until I no longer knew where the target even was. But not everyone can get the help they need when they need it… Of course, it would be nice if they could… but I couldn’t…”
I don’t know if sharing a heavy past is an essential part of love. I had also thought that it might be better for only one of them to know about it, rather than for both to suffer. But as I told him, I felt I understood. It wasn’t that I wanted his empathy for the pain of my past.
Gently wrapping my hand around his sleek ankle as if to gauge its thickness, I carefully opened my mouth.
“This might sound presumptuous, and it’s still… far too early to say, but…”
“……”
“Now, just a little… I think I might be able to understand my father. Not completely, of course. I still… have so many questions, and the resentment and hatred are so great that I’m scared to even bring up those questions and hear the answers… but I just have this very vague feeling that I might, just a little, understand…”
Strangely, I felt short of breath. I paused for a moment, taking a deep breath to steady myself.
“The meaning of one person, another person… becoming more important in your life than anything else, perhaps even more than your own child…”
His eyelids crumpled, and his gaze shook violently. He looked like someone who had completely given up the self-control he had been struggling to maintain. To calm him, I fiddled with the ankle in my hand and continued.
“Thank you for asking me to go to Chicago with you. I… wasn’t just answering impulsively in a state of knotting, either.”
Perhaps for me, honestly confessing my feelings in a moment like this, when reason was controlling instinct, was far more difficult than confessing my past. It was certainly true, as much as I had maintained a long silence about my emotions. But now, I wanted a change.
“I want to go. I… don’t want to be apart from you, either, CEO.”
His lips moved as if he were about to say something, but he just whispered brokenly, as if collapsing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“It’s just… seeing you, unable to even cry while talking about this…”
Watching him rub his face as if to crush it, unable to finish his sentence, I reached out and carefully took hold of his fingers, which lay absently on his thigh.
“Because I already cried a lot, a long time ago…”
“……”
“And now, I have Kun… I have A-wei…”
With a splash of water, he came over me.
Wet lips pressed deep against mine, his high nose pressing into my cheek. His large hands covered my cheeks and ears, and the sound of air flowing, normally inaudible, became muffled. The kiss, which consisted of pressing and rubbing our lips together again and again without using our tongues, was more of a comfort than an erotic act.
Hugging his broad, firm shoulders and holding on tight, I finally let my emotions overflow.
“I can think that, right?”
“……”
“That I’m not alone anymore because you’re here. It’s not… a delusion to think that, is it?”
“Should I be honest?”
“……”
My eyes grew hot as I looked up at him, who held my chin to make me meet his gaze.
“I’m angry at your father for abandoning you to such solitude when you were so young… but if I were to lose you and go through the same thing… I’m not confident I could handle it any better than he did. It might be too soon to say this, so you might not believe me, but…”
How could I not believe him? When I, for the very same reason, was beginning to vaguely understand my father.
He didn’t try to comfort me with carefully crafted words or go out of his way to reassure me. After the kiss, he led me out of the tub and dried every inch of my body with a large towel. We returned to the messy bed and joined our bodies once more.
It was more like an act of sensing and confirming each other’s existence than inflicting stimulus on the body, as we touched each other’s faces more than usual, looked into each other’s eyes more, and the time spent in caresses was long and drawn out. It wasn’t as primal and intense as our previous encounters, but it was more viscous. I checked our joined parts below with my hand several times, feeling him fully and without lack.
It was probably the first day since the winter I was sixteen that I had revealed my most fragile weakness and the shame I most wanted to hide, in front of another person, and in front of myself.
The next day, I set a lock on my phone for the first time, a phone that had always been ready to use with a simple swipe of the screen. And about three weeks later, we headed to Chicago together.
End of Volume 4
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