His eyes fixed on mine, he leaned against the wall, moving closer. We ended up standing side-by-side in a dark corner the lights didn’t quite reach, leaning against the wall and looking out at the pub’s main floor. I turned my body slightly toward him, and he toward me.
Leaning the back of his head against the wall, he reached out his right arm and tucked my long hair behind my ear. A group in the back of the pub let out a rowdy cheer and burst into laughter. It seemed they were making some kind of bet. But I didn’t take my eyes off his face.
“I don’t remember ever showing goodwill to anyone, so how did I end up meeting an angel like this?”
Was he being sardonic, or was he sincere? It was hard to tell from his expression and tone alone. But I could tell that even if his words were twisted, their sharp edge was aimed not at me, but at himself.
He slowly scraped the inside of his cheek with his tongue, pushed himself off the wall, and drank his beer. Watching his profile, I opened my mouth, my words heavy.
“Yuni-Noona and Juhan-Hyung both rely on and respect you as their boss and their senior. And… they think of you as the benefactor of their lives.”
“……”
“I’m sure… you already know that, though.”
My gaze fell to the hand that was fidgeting with my beer bottle, a belated anxiety creeping in that I might have overstepped by commenting on a relationship they had shared for much longer than I had.
Leaning his folded arms on the table, he had been casting a meaningless gaze into the pub, but now he roughly swept his hair back.
“Whatever I did for someone else, whatever I gave them, it was all just shallow kindness, done within a line that wouldn’t affect me or my life. I’ve lived my whole life that way… You’re the only one for whom I can tear down every last boundary.”
His eyes turned to me again. They were no longer calm, but stirred like a tempestuous sea. He straightened up from the table, reached out, and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, pulling me in. Our lips crushed together with enough force to feel bruised. We had held hands, hugged, and even shared a peck while wandering around Boston today, but this was different from the brief kiss we’d shared coming down the museum stairs. This was a real kiss.
“It’s fine. They’ll probably think we’re an Alpha and Omega couple.”
Sensing my stiffness from being conscious of our surroundings, he whispered quickly, our foreheads pressed together.
“And it doesn’t matter what else they might think.”
He added, and pressed his lips to mine again. He didn’t use his tongue, but it was a deep kiss, using his entire mouth to lick, to rub our flesh together, to press against me from different angles.
I didn’t know how he interpreted my stiffness, but I simply wasn’t bold enough to engage in such intimate skinship so casually in front of others. It wasn’t that I, either, cared what people thought of us.
When the kiss ended, his hand left my neck, slid down my shoulder and upper arm, and pulled away from me. He gnawed on the lips that had just been kissing me and tapped the tabletop with his index finger.
“But, no matter how much I resolved myself… I found there was nothing for me to sacrifice for you.”
“……”
“Money, time, affection. Even if I pour those values into you, if I don’t incur any loss from it, people don’t call that a sacrifice, do they?”
I couldn’t say anything to him as he shrugged and drank his beer. If I didn’t consider the time I spent with him or the affection I gave him a sacrifice, then I couldn’t insist that what he gave me was a sacrifice either.
And money.
If the money he spent on me was an amount that had no effect on his finances… then regardless of how large that sum was to me, it was true that it couldn’t be called a sacrifice for him. At the very least, I had no grounds to refute his belief that it wasn’t a sacrifice.
He let out a heavy breath without opening his mouth, maintaining the cynical attitude of someone deliberately keeping his distance from the problem. Then, gripping the neck of the beer bottle on the table, he looked at me.
“No matter what I’m giving you, no matter what I’m doing, you don’t have to worry about me or feel sorry. In fact, you don’t even need to be grateful. Because I’m not sacrificing anything.”
With his long, straight fingers, he stroked the beer bottle. His gaze followed his hand downward, and the delicate shadow of his eyelashes fell across his cheek.
“In Chicago, I acted all relaxed and said we had plenty of time to think… but the truth is, I never had any intention of leaving you behind and going to New York in the first place. Even if you’re part of the equation in making a decision, the final motive for that decision is, if anything, cunning and selfish.”
He clicked his tongue in a laugh, took his hand off the beer bottle, and looked me straight in the eye.
“So, Mr. Seo Yeehyeon.”
“……”
“That you’ll go to New York with me. That’s the only answer I want.”
His eyes seemed full of conviction and confidence, but it was an entreaty so strong that it only appeared as such.
I, of all people, had no lingering attachments to my life in Korea or Seoul. The results of my passion and effort weren’t there, and Morae and Hyung were no longer there either. If I were to look for something precious, it was only the handful of relationships connected to Phantom. The Director, whom I’d met again, Inwoo-Hyung, Yuni-Noona and Juhan-Hyung, and Liu Weikun.
If his residence was changing to another city, and he wanted me to be with him, I had no intention of refusing his offer and remaining in Seoul. It was just that, like Yuni-Noona, I was worried about his motive for rushing the New York branch opening, to the point of tearing down his established policies.
Noona’s words, telling me to discuss Reed’s offer with him, surfaced faintly, but that had been excluded from consideration from the start. All the more so if he was going to New York; there was no reason for me to be in Paris, away from the person who understood my art most deeply.
Gazing into his deep-set eyes, I slowly nodded. He smiled with his lips only, without showing his teeth.
He wrapped an arm around the back of my neck as if to cradle my head, swept my bangs up, and pressed his lips to my forehead. Then he kissed my eyelids and my cheek, and then our lips met. Ignoring the awkwardness and embarrassment of letting others see us kiss, I closed my eyes and responded to his lips.
Just as he’d said, they might just think we were an Alpha and Omega couple. And it didn’t matter what else they might think.
○
At Marcus and Ellen’s house, dinner preparations were in full swing. Not only Margaret, who handled their housework in place of the busy couple, but Marcus and Ellen themselves seemed to have joined in the kitchen work. They were genuinely delighted by the visit of the man who was like a second son to them (and yet older than their first). Even if it was a short trip, having arrived yesterday and having to leave tomorrow.
When an apron-clad Marcus opened the front door, the smell of cooking that had been wafting all the way to the front of the house grew even stronger. Since he and I had left the onion rings at the pub almost untouched, the scent of food lightly stimulated our appetites.
Ted, Marcus and Ellen’s nine-year-old chocolate Labrador Retriever, came to the entryway with Marcus, wagging his tail and welcoming us home.
“Not much to see in this neighborhood, is there? It must be boring for young people.”
“I thought it was a quiet and peaceful place, very nice to live in.”
I replied with a smile to Marcus, who was worried I might have been bored. It wasn’t an exaggeration or a lie, but my honest impression of Boston. And thinking that this was the city where he had lived, even for just two years, made every landscape I passed seem meaningful.
At my answer, Marcus smiled, forming handsome wrinkles around his eyes, and patted my shoulder.
“A Wei, give Jonas a call. He was making such a fuss when I told him you were here. You’re going to have to hear him complain about you not keeping in touch, too.”
Marcus said to his back as he started toward the kitchen, then gave me a wink.
He and I stopped by the kitchen to greet Ellen and Margaret and ask if there was anything we could do to help, but they said the preparations were almost finished and practically shooed me out to the drawing room.
While he was in Marcus’s study talking to Jonas, I waited in the first-floor drawing room, sipping a glass of wine Margaret had poured for me. I looked at the family photos decorating the room, which was carpeted with a thick rug.
“That’s a picture from Kun’s thirteenth birthday party. He was already unbelievably handsome at that age, wasn’t he?”
I turned to see Marcus smiling at the entrance of the drawing room, pointing to the frame I was holding.
“He was so popular, even though he was so sullen.”
At Marcus’s words, I looked down at his expressionless face in the photo and smiled silently. It was hard to believe that he, too, had an unripe, green teenage phase, but the boy in the photo was unmistakably him. A slightly bluer, sharper-featured Liu Weikun than the man he was now.
“May I borrow Kun for a moment before dinner? I have something to give the boy, and I don’t think I’ll have time otherwise.”
I answered, “Of course,” and Marcus disappeared into the study after telling me to make myself comfortable. In the cozy atmosphere of the drawing room, which looked out onto the darkening alley, I leisurely examined the rest of the photos. Among the family pictures, there were quite a few of him as well. Not just photos from his boyhood days spent here, but as if to prove the close bond they had maintained through continuous meetings thereafter, the photos clearly traced the trajectory of a boy growing into a man.
During the dinner last night, which had lasted over four hours, Marcus had told me his childhood nickname was ‘Never Smile.’ The boy who never smiled.
Marcus and Ellen spoke of it lightly, as if it were all in the past, and he, too, had simply laughed it off, letting their teasing slide. But as someone who had also lived through a boyhood where I couldn’t smile, I couldn’t help but feel my heart go out to him, wondering why he had to be the ‘boy who never smiled.’
Even if one wasn’t the type to laugh at the mere sight of a falling leaf, as someone once put it, suppressing laughter during a time when one should be feeling and expressing emotions most richly—be it laughter or tears, awe or anger—was a bad sign in any case.
Recalling his story about how his parents had to get a divorce they didn’t want for his sake, I picked up another solo photo of him, next to a picture of a younger Marcus and Ellen on a white boat. It was a photo of him dressed smartly in riding clothes, standing with a magnificent horse with a glossy coat. In a time I didn’t know, a version of him younger than I was now was speaking to me with a defiant gaze.
“Diamond Dust.”
“……”
At the calm voice from behind me, I slowly turned around. The thirty two year old him was standing at the entrance to the drawing room. I couldn’t tell what he had called me. Perhaps he hadn’t called me at all, but had just pronounced a word. Still holding the picture frame, I turned my body more toward him and smiled.
“I didn’t quite hear you. What did you say?”
“Diamond Dust… Have you ever heard of it?”
His monotone voice was parched. After speaking, he swallowed dryly, as if with great effort.
“I know it as a phenomenon where ice crystals glitter in the atmosphere when hit by sunlight…”
“……”
Leaning his shoulder against the wall of the doorless entryway, he nodded.
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