Perhaps finding her own question absurd, my noona chuckled before I could even answer.
“I truly never imagined I’d be asking you a question like this about the CEO.”
She explained the reason for her laughter as she propped her legs up on the bench, resting her arm on her raised knee. She then put the sunglasses she was holding to her lips and shook her head.
“No, that’s not it. The problem isn’t that it’s you. It’s just that I had no information whatsoever about who the CEO was dating, or if he was even dating at all. But he’s definitely not the type to play games with someone like you. You two are officially dating, right?”
“……Yes.”
When Juhan-hyung warned me to stop liking him because I would never get what I wanted. Even then, I had a certain degree of confidence in our relationship. But at the time, we were at a cautious stage that could only encompass the two of us, so I couldn’t tell my Hyung that we liked each other, that it wasn’t just a one-sided crush on my part.
But now… I was admitting to my noona that we were in an ‘official relationship.’ I had hesitated a little before answering, but it wasn’t because I lacked conviction.
At my answer, my noona grinned and reached out, playfully shaking the temple of the sunglasses I was wearing.
“These are the same as the CEO’s, aren’t they? To think that man would want to claim ownership by buying you the same pair he has.”
Laughing as if in disbelief, as if to tease me, she took a sip or two of the coffee she had set down next to the popcorn.
“I did think he was unusually fond of you, but he’s also someone who takes meticulous care of all his artists, and you’re not the type to be disliked by anyone. I just figured he naturally doted on you because you were young and endearing, and then you even became one of his artists. He might seem rude at first, like he never wants to see you again as long as he lives, but he’s not the type to ignore the good qualities a person shows over time.”
That was exactly right. He might not be a polite person, but he also never held arbitrary expectations of others only to be disappointed. He clearly recognized and acknowledged a person’s strengths, and he was also someone who looked after those around him to an extent I could never have imagined from my first impression of him as an arrogantly cold man.
It was hard to see him providing an officetel for my noona and Hyung, supporting them with English tutoring, and creating a comfortable environment for business trips as mere consideration from a boss.
It was just that I had never met that type of person before. Thinking back on it now, he wasn’t a cold-blooded man who wouldn’t bat an eye at someone suffering from a panic attack. Even if it hadn’t been me, he was the kind of person who would have shown the kindness of administering first aid and letting them rest in a comfortable place. Though, he wasn’t the type to caress and bring just anyone to orgasm in order to calm them down and help them sleep.
After we looked at each other and chuckled, I stirred the ice in my cup with the straw and thought back to this morning.
Since he was scheduled to attend Chloe Kent’s luncheon with Shushu, my noona and I had promised to go sightseeing together today, our last day in Chicago, and I had woken up first to get ready.
To avoid waking him, I had showered in the master bathroom and finished getting ready quietly. Then, finding the sight of him sleeping fascinating, I sat beside him and watched him for a little while. Just as I was about to get off the bed, he had grabbed my wrist.
「You’re just going to watch, and leave without even a kiss?」
He’d said that, but he was so tired he couldn’t even open his eyes properly. It was understandable, since fatigue must have been building up from a lack of sleep since Seoul. I turned back, hugged him, and planted a peck on his cheek and lips.
Only after I asked if he had taken his medicine and heard his answer did he let go of my wrist and bury his face in the pillow again. As I was about to leave the room, he had apologized once more to my back for not being able to keep his promise.
But I really didn’t care about the sightseeing. I was worried because it seemed like so many difficult things had hit him all at once since we came on this trip. Of course, most of them were problems that had been pressuring him since Seoul, and I just hadn’t known about them.
“So… have you heard anything about why the CEO is suddenly rushing this New York branch business?”
My noona, who, like me, had been lost in her own thoughts while silently gazing at Lake Michigan, asked in a subdued voice. I shook my head.
“Even if you did know something, it wouldn’t be right for me to ask you to spill what he told you as his lover.”
My noona glanced my way and smiled. Then she turned her gaze back toward the lake, whose breadth was impossible to gauge, and thus was as good as infinite to our eyes.
“Around the time I left home, I was completely filled with spite. I was smart, I was resourceful, I was good at everything… I was full of the hubris that I could build my life however I wanted, without having to follow the course my parents set for me just to get their financial support… but in reality, I was just a high school graduate with no experience, so I ended up at the bottom rung of a gallery, my labor exploited for a ridiculously low salary. There was a line of people willing to work for even less, so those who wanted to build a career had no choice. The fact that I was smart, resourceful, and good at everything… didn’t seem to matter much to those people. The virtues demanded of a subordinate weren’t those things, anyway.”
My noona smiled bitterly and took a few sips of her coffee.
“Someone who valued those qualities recognized me, and while striking a balance between compromise and conviction… he also taught me how to conduct myself to get what I wanted from the world. That if you only try to push your convictions, your dream will remain just a dream, and if you only try to compromise, your dream will disappear.”
“……”
“The CEO and the Director… to me and Kwon Juhan, they’re like second parents… I think that’s what they are.”
Having watched from the side, I fully understood what she meant, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that I knew.
That day, in the elevator after the after-party, my noona had apologized to him for confusing their professional and personal lives, but she, he, and even I knew that their relationships, centered around Phantom, were not clearly divided into public and private spheres.
“The Director might not, but the CEO would be appalled if I said this, asking why he would be our parent.”
The image of his tone and expression was so vivid that I smiled along with my noona.
“Please keep what Reed offered me a secret from the CEO and the Director for now. I think I need some time to think about it quietly on my own. You, too, should try talking it over with the CEO. Especially if you two… are in a serious relationship.”
My mind wasn’t going to change. So I didn’t answer and just gave a vague smile.
“You’re going to tell… Juhan-hyung, right?”
Yuni reached out and ruffled my hair with a laugh. Her laugh, too, was ambiguous.
“Let’s get going. It’s getting too windy. What if the CEO docks my business trip bonus for letting you catch a cold?”
Yuni put her sunglasses back on, dusted herself off, and stood up. She hadn’t even finished half of the popcorn she had been so eager to eat, but she tossed it into a trash can without a second thought on our way out of Navy Pier.
Shushu and my noona to Seoul, he and I to Boston. The next day, we left the Windy City, Chicago, the city of winds that blows everything away and mixes everything up, heading in different directions.
○
It took about two hours to slowly look around Harvard University. In the clear mid-September autumn weather, the two of us leisurely walked here and there inside the campus, which felt more like a pastoral village than a university.
There were, of course, many people who looked like students, but it wasn’t uncommon to see local residents out for exercise or a walk. Thanks to a structure where the university and the outside world weren’t precisely demarcated by fences or walls, it had a rather community-friendly atmosphere, contrary to the authoritative and solemn image that the title of a world-renowned university might evoke.
After having breakfast with Marcus and Ellen, we left their house around 11 a.m. We appreciated the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, including Edward Hopper’s ‘Room in Brooklyn’, then took the number 1 bus across the Charles River to Harvard.
That’s right. We took a bus together. To give me a more familiar form of travel, he had deliberately not arranged for a car in Boston.
Although we had taken a private jet from Chicago to Boston yesterday.
A trip using a bus and a private jet.
He said that since American domestic flights often lacked not only first-class but even proper business-class seats, he usually used a private jet when traveling within the US.
He had tried to reassure me by saying that chartering private jets was quite common in the US (like the rental car companies stationed at every airport, according to him) and not ‘as expensive as you’d think.’ His explanation was that he would have taken a private jet even if I wasn’t there, and since the rental cost was the same for one person or two as long as it was within the standard capacity, there was no additional expense for me, but that didn’t make the situation feel any more comfortable.
Anyway, after arriving at the airport, he and I took a taxi straight to a neighborhood called Beacon Hill. The house where he had lived while being homeschooled from age thirteen to fifteen, the home of the mentor who had guided him to become a near-perfect Golden Alpha, was right there.
Marcus, a world-renowned authority on pheromones, especially alpha pheromones, who had researched and taught students at a Boston university for many years, had been living in that house with his wife, Ellen, for 30 years.
Marcus and Ellen were as kind and affectionate as I had imagined—no, even more so. They weren’t just being polite or sociable; they were genuinely happy to see him. Their words of complaint about him not visiting for several years were, conversely, an expression of their happiness at seeing his face after so long.
They showed the same warm welcome to me, whom he had introduced as his lover. Just as Jane, who had heard him describe me as ‘my precious person,’ had given me a gentle smile as if looking at her own son.
Our accommodation in Boston was not a suite in a five-star luxury hotel, but Marcus and Ellen’s house. The room he had used as a teenage boy, which they had left just as it was, the very last room on the second floor overlooking the alley in front of the house.
Yesterday, we had arrived in the afternoon, enjoyed a meal that Marcus and Ellen had prepared for us with good wine, and spent the time in lively conversation. And today, I had until dinner time to go sightseeing with him. A single day given to just the two of us.
Perhaps because of his clothes—not the stylish suits or smart casual wear he usually wore in Seoul—or perhaps because he wasn’t gripping the wheel of a luxury sedan or sitting in the back seat, he looked much younger than usual, and even a little… roguish.
Dressed in black pants, black shoes, a black t-shirt, and a leather jacket, with his hands stuck in the back pocket of his pants or the pockets of his jacket, or with his arm slung over my shoulder, even his gait and expression were slightly different from usual.
When he told me about the superstition that touching the toe of John Harvard’s left foot would ensure one’s descendants get into Harvard, and as I touched the statue’s toe, which was worn down to a polished shine, he brought his lips close to my ear and made a mischievous joke, saying, ‘Once we get back to Seoul, I guess we’ll have to start working hard on making those Harvard-bound descendants.’
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