Though it was merely a gaze with no physical substance, I held my breath and watched their eyes meet cautiously in mid-air, as if their stares were weapons that could inflict a fatal wound. It occurred to me then that perhaps the man’s past partner wasn’t him, but Shushu.
If the tension that had crackled between him and the man at the entrance was close to animosity, the atmosphere between Shushu and the man now was far more complex, far more peculiar. He, on the other hand, stood behind the man with his arms crossed, feeling like a third party who had taken a step back from the situation. Though his expression was quite grim…
“What are you going to do? Catch up and have some tea, ask each other how you’ve been?”
He asked, looking at Shushu over the man’s shoulder. His tone and expression carried a subtle pressure, implying that there was no need for them to talk like this.
But Shushu couldn’t answer right away, his lips merely parting and closing several times. The man, too, just stared at Shushu, gnawing on his lower lip, unable to get any words out. Neither could step forward to close the distance, nor could they turn away. In their place, he stepped in.
“Hong Seon-woo, do you have any more business here?”
At his urging, which carried the nuance of ‘think carefully’ about whether he had any business, the man turned to look at him. And when he looked back at Shushu, who was standing in front of the sofa, his gaze wavered violently.
The man pressed his lips together firmly, then spoke slowly in a dry voice.
“Congratulations on the exhibition. Well then…”
And even as he turned completely around, the man never took his eyes off Shushu. Shushu said nothing.
As I watched the man disappear toward the entrance, his retreating back, and Shushu’s dazedly frozen form, an inexplicable tension transferred to me, making my body and mind feel stiff. I couldn’t even breathe deeply beside Shushu.
He soon returned to the living room. Thinking it would be better to give them space, I gathered the beer bottles Shushu and I had drunk, took them to the kitchen, and headed for my room. I sat back down at my table, but there was no way I could draw.
Seon-woo.
It was only once, but Shushu had definitely called the man that, and he had called the man Hong Seon-woo.
It might have been an excessive delusion, but the memory of the painting I had viewed with him at the Hong Kong Art Fair, ‘Lovers on a Bed’, overlapped with the present.
At the time, his reaction in front of the painting had been so striking that I had mulled over the artist’s name to remember it. It was definitely SEONEW. A Korean artist in his twenties. Affiliated with a gallery in New York.
Back then, he had acted as if there was something he wanted to hear from me about the painting and the artist. It didn’t feel like he was simply asking for my impression of a piece that had happened to catch his eye. I even got the feeling he was goading me, urging me to criticize the painting more honestly and scathingly. He himself had offered a cold assessment, saying the bubble would burst in a year or two and the work’s value would drop by more than half.
“He’s a guy I used to know… he paints.” —Adding his explanation from the entrance hall just now, it seemed my delusion might not be so far-fetched after all.
But even if that man was the SEONEW of ‘Lovers on a Bed’, there was nothing more I could deduce from that. I could search for more information, but I was reluctant, as it felt like prying into the private lives of people close to me, like him or Shushu.
I must have been lost deeper in thought than I realized, because when I heard a knock, I was so startled I shot up from my chair.
“Yes.”
After my stiff reply, the door connecting to the living room opened quietly.
“Can we talk?”
He spoke while standing in the doorway, not entering the room. It seemed like a signal to come out to the living room, so I nodded and started walking.
Shushu had already left. On the coffee table in front of the three-seater sofa, opposite the set of single-seaters where Shushu and I had been sitting, a bottle of whiskey, an on-the-rocks glass, an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter were scattered about messily.
He had me sit on the long, calm ivory-colored fabric sofa and asked if I wanted more beer. I didn’t want to get drunk, but I did need something to drink. I nodded, and he brought a bottle of beer from the kitchen. Then he pulled a dining chair from the dining area between my room and the living room and sat down, angled toward my right.
He fiddled with the glass in his hand, which was about a third full of whiskey, and spoke.
“The mood suddenly got a little weird… You must have been wondering what was going on. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t answer, simply waiting for the story that would follow. His face, gazing at some point on the table decorated with an antique gold-colored edge, hinted that the stories I was about to hear would not be pleasant. Condensation was quickly forming on the surface of the beer bottle in my hand, but I couldn’t even bring myself to wet my throat with the liquid inside.
“I know that learning this story… might be a burden for you, Seo Yeehyeon…”
His gaze still fixed on that spot on the table, he swallowed a sip of whiskey.
“But I hate the idea of you misunderstanding Shushu… or that bastard from a little while ago, Hong Seon-woo, even more. So I’ll tell you.”
He had been leaning forward with his arms on his knees, but he lifted his head to look at me. His face was not so much calm as it was bloodless, devoid of all emotion.
“Do you happen to remember the painting we saw together at the Hong Kong Art Fair, ‘Lovers on a Bed’.”
My heart began to beat a little faster at the thought that my clumsy guess might not have been an excessive delusion after all. I unknowingly tightened my grip on the beer bottle and slowly nodded at him.
“The man who was here just now is Hong Seon-woo. The artist who painted that picture.”
After laying out just that short piece of information, he couldn’t continue for a while. It seemed that although he had said he would talk, he wasn’t sure if telling me everything was truly the wisest choice.
Rubbing the surface of the beer bottle I hadn’t taken a single sip from, I spoke to him.
“If it’s not something I absolutely have to know… I mean… if it’s not directly related to our relationship… you don’t have to tell me. Other people are involved, after all…”
His gaze once again fell on me in silence. I, too, quietly met his eyes and waited for his decision. His lips, which looked drier than usual, slowly parted.
“Hong Seon-woo… was Shushu’s lover, and he was the one who caused the decisive accident that made Shushu quit dancing.”
“……”
“And, before all that, he was the man I was dating.”
“……”
Hearing that last addition, I unknowingly sucked in a breath and then held it. I knew my wide eyes were revealing all of my shock to him, but I couldn’t seem to compose myself.
Taking in my reaction, he, in contrast, was calm. It was the face of someone who had expected or perhaps braced for this kind of response.
“It’s laughable to even call it dating… like all my other relationships before, it was just an attachment-free physical relationship that didn’t even last half a year… but it’s true that we were seeing each other. It was when I had finished the H.M.I.S. program in Hong Kong and moved to London for university. I was a third-year, which is the final year in a British university, and Hong Seon-woo was a first-year at the R.C.A., the Royal College of Art. His family had all moved to London when he was in middle school for his father’s business, and the business did well, so he was a very self-assured and cocky bastard. He was young, too. I was young back then myself, so I suppose I saw that as a charm in its own way.”
He smirked, one corner of his mouth lifting as if mocking his younger self.
“Of course, I had absolutely no leeway or tolerance to accept and embrace that kind of insolence.”
He downed the remaining sip of whiskey, refilled his glass, and continued.
“I was a person with no time or emotional capacity to pour into things like romance or love, and as a final-year student, I was already overwhelmed with my own problems, so I thought of him as just a partner to occasionally meet and relieve sexual desire. I knew he had several other partners besides me, but I didn’t care at all.”
He paused there and glanced at me.
“Telling you about this kind of past… probably won’t score me any points.”
Based on his story just now, Juhan hyung’s speculation about his past dating life seemed to be somewhat correct. In my case, however… it was harder to imagine his lackluster love life, focused only on himself.
“Just as there were never any words like ‘let’s date’ or ‘let’s be a couple with a commitment to each other,’ when we broke up, we just drifted apart as contact dwindled… Then, when I was debating whether to stay in London and build my own career or return to Hong Kong and learn the ropes at my father’s company as he suggested, he suddenly contacted me out of the blue. He said his father’s business had run into difficulties and his family, except for his father, was leaving London to return to Korea… and asked me to let him stay in London. Saying that feeding and educating one person like him would be nothing for me.”
He clicked his tongue and laughed, as if the memory was still absurd.
“The courage it took for someone with such a strong sense of pride to come find me, a past fling, and ask for such a favor was commendable in itself, but the way he came at me as if he were collecting a debt I owed him made whatever affection I had left for him completely vanish. His obsession with success was always strong, but once his financial backing disappeared, it seemed all that was left was a vicious drive to succeed, with no pure passion for art or anything else, so he had no charm left whatsoever.”
His jaw tightened and he frowned, swirling the on-the-rocks glass in his hand before wetting his dry lips with whiskey.
“After that, Hong Seon-woo had no choice but to leave London, so I thought that was the end of it. He was just one of those people I had erased from my memory, thinking I would never see him again, until Shushu, who was living in Seoul, introduced Hong Seon-woo to me again as his lover.”
“Ah…”
A groan like a sigh escaped me unintentionally. But he looked at me and smiled crookedly, as if that wasn’t all.
“I knew Shushu was deeply in love with someone even before the introduction, but to think it was Hong Seon-woo. When he saw me at the introduction, he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. And why wouldn’t he.”
He stared into the air, his calm tone breaking as he spoke with force in his lips.
“Shushu is an Omega, and that bastard Hong Seon-woo… as far as I knew, was a gay man who was a bottom to the bone. A bottom with more than double the average person’s greed for sex, at that. But a guy like that with an Omega?”
Give me a break. He added, as if Hong Seon-woo were right in front of him, as if he were berating the man before his eyes.
“Of course, not all Omega men prefer to be the receptive partner in sex, but most Omegas’ instincts lean that way. That’s because sexual instincts are much more dominant in Alphas and Omegas than in Betas. And Shushu was someone who had grown up accepting his instincts and fate from the moment he presented as an Omega. If you were to compare Shushu and Hong Seon-woo to two Beta gay men… it was like two bottoms whose preferences could never change dating each other, so from my perspective, knowing Hong Seon-woo’s nature, it was just absurd. It’s not like two grown men were going to have a platonic love affair. It made no sense for the two of them to be in a relationship that included a sex life.”
Leave a Reply