All the time he had spent with him looked different. The sex with him, during which he had felt liberated from norms and morals as if he had become a completely different person, even feeling a grand sense of freedom. The deep reassurance, as if they had shown each other their very bottoms and been understood, which had made him marvel at how he could feel a deeper intimacy with his partner even after spouting words so explicit they made his face flush red just thinking about them again after the sex was over.
All of it was a delusion. For him, sex with him wasn’t just that. It was an act with a different purpose, or at least one that included another purpose.
“I did it….”
“……”
“I asked for it… for him to knot me, that I wanted it… so many times….”
“That’s not it. It’s not your fault!”
In-woo shouted in an agitated voice, shaking Yeehyeon ’s shoulders. He hadn’t said it to mean it was his own fault, but he didn’t even feel the need to correct In-woo’s misunderstanding.
“Liu Weikun is just a son of a bitch, you were a victim who knew nothing. You shouldn’t blame yourself in the slightest.”
“……”
He felt as if he were drenched in rain, just like that day his grand-uncle had visited. Foolishly, he missed the warmth of Liu, who had jumped out of the car that day and held him first without asking a single question. Even though he was the one who had driven him into this coldness… to want to be warmed by his body heat….
At the thought that his love had probably been dependence and entrustment, Yeehyeon ’s eyes welled with moisture. Not wanting to be emotional, he raised his hand to wipe it away without a moment’s delay, and at that instant, In-woo’s head tilted down deeply.
“……”
His tongue didn’t enter, but it was a deep kiss, their lips pressed together firmly. While the frozen Yeehyeon blinked slowly two or three times, In-woo twisted the angle of his lips slightly, lightly rubbing the inner membrane before slowly pulling away.
“……What is this?”
His body stiff as if someone were pointing a gun at his back, Yeehyeon asked without the slightest movement, moving only his lips. Taking his hands off Yeehyeon ’s shoulders, In-woo showed his palms as if in surrender, then rubbed the back of his own neck and forced an awkward smile.
“Getting a new shock… didn’t the shock of the changing disappear, even for a moment?”
He was pretending to have pulled a bad prank with his usual lighthearted attitude, but In-woo’s eyes were shaking unsteadily, and his lips were twitching. At Yeehyeon ’s gaze, which looked straight up at him as if demanding a proper answer, he soon gave up his flippant act. He let out a heavy breath between his clenched lips and stared at Yeehyeon as if piercing him with eyes that had been sharply scratched by something.
“I can’t stand to watch.”
“……”
“I know that to you, I’m just another bastard involved in this. But at least I’m not the one who changed your body like that bastard. I backed off because I thought he genuinely wanted and cherished you, but if it weren’t for that….”
“What’s the use of such a hypothetical?”
As if In-woo’s hypothetical, along with the kiss just now, held no meaning for him, Yeehyeon ’s voice was neither cold nor hot.
“I know that you must be in great shock over this too, hyung.”
As Yeehyeon tried to conclude it like that, a frowning In-woo strode forward.
“Don’t try to pretend you don’t know like that. As you’ll remember, I was the one who showed my interest first.”
“Yes, I remember. And I also know that even if it hadn’t been me there, you would have done the same thing, hyung.”
“……”
In-woo’s initial attitude, hitting on him at the end of every sentence as if he wanted to go on a date or sleep with him just once, had been regarded as nothing more than the habitual behavior of a typical playboy, devoid of any sincerity. Since he hadn’t tried to cross a decisive line beyond that, Yeehyeon had left him be and shown no reaction.
Even if the potential for it to develop into a deeper emotion had been latent behind his seemingly frivolous attitude, bringing up that possibility now was a meaningless act.
If his father had reacted differently then, if his mother hadn’t been in an accident then, if they hadn’t changed restaurants then, if the truck driver had gotten his vehicle inspected on time…. What meaning could such hypotheticals have?
“You must be very confused too, hyung… I’ll just think of it as a momentary mistake.”
As Yeehyeon spoke in a weary voice, suggesting they end the matter here, In-woo’s eyes stared at him, filled with resentment.
“You don’t even feel confused about me.”
“……”
“You can deal with me this calmly.”
He couldn’t handle In-woo, who was trying to throw another problem at him at this particular moment. Whether his feelings were sincere or not, he didn’t have the confidence to bear even the weight of a single feather right now.
“I’m… going to sleep somewhere else tonight.”
Without his jacket or bag, Yeehyeon was about to turn toward the entryway with no plan at all when In-woo grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. This time, his hand was not cautious, but firm.
“There’s no need for that. Like you said, it was a meaningless, impulsive mistake.”
“……”
“But.”
“……”
“It seems even mistakes have their timing.”
Pushing Yeehyeon ’s tightly gripped shoulder toward the living room, In-woo tilted his head askew.
“Rather than living as a coward who just smirks on the outside and never tries anything… making a life-or-death, once-in-a-lifetime mistake… might be better. That’s what I’m thinking.”
In-woo muttered from behind him in a bitterly self-mocking voice. As Yeehyeon , who was being pushed toward the living room, looked back, In-woo squeezed his shoulder a couple of times as if in encouragement and smiled playfully like his usual self.
「Haven’t seen you before, who’s this? A new lover?」
He overlapped with the In-woo from back then… the one who had shown curious interest, saying those words when they first met in front of Phantom, in front of Liu’s car. But like two pictures in a spot-the-difference game, there was a subtly discordant part somewhere.
Gently pushing away Yeehyeon ’s cheek as he kept looking back, as if telling him not to look, In-woo let out a smirk.
“Then at least… something will happen.”
The voice from behind him was no longer smiling.
○
Among the many books that Morae had owned, there was a work by the *French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He used to kill time by borrowing and reading several of her books, regardless of genre or content (at the time, any great book was nothing more than a tool for killing time to Yeehyeon ), but the memory of the process of how he had come to choose that particular book, which was unpolished and rife with mistranslations, was now hazy.
It had been a mechanical act of filling a temporal envelope with print, discarding it when full, then opening the next envelope and stuffing it with print, so the elegance of the sentences or readability had not been an issue for Yeehyeon at the time.
Even in that unkind translation, which he had to read haltingly as if reading the French original despite it being in his native language, there was a sentence worth bringing into his own life.
‘The giver of a gift must not expect to receive something of corresponding value in return, or to be remembered by the other. Nor should they leave it in their own consciousness as a symbol of sacrifice for the other.’
At the time, Yeehyeon had thought of Morae and Yeehan through that passage.
The adults in the family had accepted Yeehyeon , who outwardly ate his meals, slept, went to school, and even completed his military service… who lived quietly without ever causing a single bit of trouble, as a child with no problems. But in reality, he was merely performing his given tasks mechanically.
When the exam schedule was announced, he prepared diligently, but not because he desired a high score. He didn’t rebel even after experiencing ‘that kind of incident,’ but it wasn’t because he was a ‘deep child who fortunately overcame everything well,’ as the adults thought.
He was just making his inner self numb so as not to feel intense shock and confusion, resentment or sadness. A state of being unable to genuinely laugh or get genuinely angry, with human desires and emotions completely dehydrated, was the same as a quiet death, a passive death.
To be beside such a person and not be buried along with them in that lethargy was harder than one might think. The light and energy they shone to help him maintain his life, even in a numb state, could not have sprung up from somewhere on their own.
Even if his father, along with the world, had turned his back on him, not all of the world had turned its back on him. At least there were Morae and Yeehan.
Not something else, but that was the gift.
A gift that fully met the conditions of a gift as argued by Jacques Derrida, one that did not expect to receive corresponding value in return, that did not even wish to be acknowledged by the other.
While discussing the contents of that book, Morae had also mentioned another of Jacques Derrida’s definitions.
‘If one were to forgive what is forgivable, the very concept of forgiveness would disappear. Forgiveness is only the forgiveness of the unforgivable.’
While drinking the yulmu tea the owner had served, sitting on the old sofa of his regular repair shop with Morae as a simple part of his motorcycle was being replaced, Yeehyeon had thought of his father.
If he had possessed the maturity to forgive the unforgivable… he would not have needed to protect himself by anesthetizing his emotions. He couldn’t forgive, and he didn’t know how to forgive, so he had just tried to become numb to that as well.
So that his eyes wouldn’t redden and well up when he saw his father, so that he wouldn’t exhaust his emotions by pouring out sharp words, so that he could look at his father without any feeling, as if looking at a washbasin by the tap or a broom in a corner of the yard—hardening the surface of his heart was the best Yeehyeon could do at the time.
In the taxi slowly climbing the hill to Phantom, looking out at the warmly lit streets of Samcheong-dong in the evening, Yeehyeon was now thinking about Liu.
Was what he did an unforgivable act?
Just like his father’s silence?
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