Chapter 2

My grandfather threatened to kill Yeehan.

He slammed the yard with a long pole he kept propped up on one side, screaming that he had to beat to death the bastard who didn’t know his place and ran wild, smearing shit on his parents’ faces.

“You little shit… How dare you covet, how dare you!”

Grandfather wasn’t Seo Yeehan’s grandfather, but more like Lim Morae’s grandfather.

“Dragging around Mr. Lim’s daughter, you… where have you been going? Did you want to see this old geezer groveling like a criminal in front of Mr. Lim, you son of a bitch!”

The pole slammed the ground sharply once more.

“Who’s dragging who? Which bastard is spreading that kind of rumor? I’ll tear his mouth apart!”

Yeehan hyung wasn’t docile either. Even sitting in his room, I could picture his face, veins bulging as he screamed.

“Can’t you shut up? Your mouth, dragging a precious daughter to a motel, deserves to be torn apart, you bastard!”

Morae and my Yeehan had been dating since middle school, and around high school, Morae’s family, hearing the rumors, began to apply pressure.

Perhaps thinking they were still young and would date for a bit and then stop, the pressure remained at the level of occasionally expressing displeasure. But after Yeehan was discharged from the military, it slowly changed its nature into concrete and practical threats.

A few days ago, after surfing, I had parted ways with them and returned home first, and Yeehan had come home late at dawn. It seemed someone had seen them going into a motel and told Morae’s father.

In this small fishing village, such love stories were still interesting gossip. The town was full of scandals about who was having an affair with whom, who had abandoned their children and ran away.

“Taking his only daughter to a motel, and it caught people’s eyes… How do you think Mr. Lim feels, you damned fool? No matter how much you struggle, Mr. Lim will never give his daughter to you! Don’t you understand that yet? You’re bound to become a dog staring at the roof, so why are you chasing a chicken you can’t catch!”

I wasn’t there, but I knew without seeing it that Yeehan hadn’t dragged Morae there, but that they had gone together. The conclusion that they went to a motel might be the same, but the two expressions clearly implied completely different meanings.

“Who asked that man to give me Morae? Is Morae his property? If she’s his child, can he just give her away?”

“Stop talking nonsense! Do you think a family like that would give their child to the likes of you?!”

Grandfather thought the reason Morae’s parents opposed them was because their family was declining, but in reality, it was a more complicated issue.

Grandfather and the other adults didn’t know that Morae was an alpha. In this village, besides Morae’s family, only Yeehan and I knew she was an alpha.

Alphas, who make up about one in every 1,000 people in the country, were mostly concentrated in areas with high income and education levels. According to statistics, there should be about 30 alphas in this small port town of about 30,000 people, but in reality, there seemed to be only two or three at most. And even those were just ‘biological alphas’ who weren’t much different from betas.

Ordinary people could go their whole lives without even seeing an alpha with strong pheromones, dominance, and reproductive ability like the golden alphas depicted as protagonists in dramas and movies. Even if such an alpha was born here, they would leave for the big city to succeed by taking advantage of their favorable conditions.

In this small fishing village, where the proportion of betas was absolute and the average age was high, they were not friendly to alphas or omegas. The discrimination against female alphas and male omegas was especially extreme. To them, female alphas and male omegas were just disgusting mutants.

That was why Morae’s family had been hiding the fact that she was an alpha.

I didn’t know exactly how much alpha power she had, but generally, pregnancy between an alpha and a beta was difficult. Almost impossible.

Because of that, Morae’s family wanted her to meet an alpha male and have children. They were against Yeehan, who was a male beta, and if she were to pair up with a female omega, it felt like one of her family members would stage a suicide attempt.

As a family, they wanted her to live a ‘smooth life without any flaws in the eyes of others,’ and I could understand how they felt.

The problem was that she herself wanted a ‘life with Seo Yeehan’ more than a ‘smooth life without any flaws in the eyes of others.’

The next problem was that her family was convinced that she would regret her current choice.

To be able to make such strong convictions and guarantees about someone else’s future, not even their own. I can’t even say a single word about myself, about anything.

“Look at your uncle. He insisted on a marriage that both families opposed, and look what he’s become now. Huh? Why waste your energy on something that won’t work? You don’t have a good enough fate to be wasting your energy on that! Don’t you care about your grandfather, who’s getting old and struggling to lift the nets, or your father?”

I covered my ears at the sudden mention of my father, but it was no use. Grandfather was dredging up other family wounds in a completely unrelated matter.

“Why are you bringing up my uncle here? Goddamn it, you have to be able to communicate!”

Yeehan kicked something, whether it was a washbasin or a bucket, and swore.

“You idiot, listen carefully to what your grandfather says.”

Grandfather’s tone, which had been boiling over until now, suddenly changed. Unlike before, when he was screaming at the top of his lungs, regardless of whether the neighbors heard, his voice was choked as if someone was squeezing his throat. As if this was the real point from now on.

“If you don’t, you don’t know what Mr. Lim will do to you, you bastard! For his daughter’s sake… he’s the kind of person who would cripple someone like you without a second thought. The reason he’s left you alone until now is because he was worried about making his daughter cry, not because he couldn’t do anything to you! Listen to your grandfather. Break it off completely today. If you can’t bear to see her, go on a deep-sea fishing boat for about a year. Listen to me, you son of a bitch!”

Mr. Lim.

Morae’s father, who was called ‘Mr.’ in this area, even though he wasn’t a teacher and didn’t have expertise in a field or receive respect equivalent to it.

It was different from before, when he was just getting angry without any context. Having heard something from ‘Mr. Lim’ behind the fisheries cooperative building, Grandfather was terrified and muttered like that.

The commotion subsided only when Yeehan ran out of the house. But we were no longer young enough to not know that this was just the beginning.

They won’t stop.

Mr. Lim will try to separate Morae and Yeehan, and Grandfather and my uncle will try to get my Hyung on a boat. Because that is the ‘human thing to do’ in their minds, and that is what they think is ‘happiness’ for Lim Morae and Seo Yeehan. At least, because they believe it is a way to avoid ‘unhappiness.’

Left exposed to Grandfather’s continued curses and the argument between Grandfather and my uncle, blaming each other, I sat blankly in my room.

When I first came here, this room was a mess. Clothes, comic books, surfing magazines, and the like were scattered haphazardly, and textbooks and workbooks that were never opened were precariously piled on the low desk.

Like one of those burdens, I had been quietly tucked away in a corner, but a few days later, I opened the window and started cleaning the room.

I arranged the magazines and comic books in chronological order and folded the clothes by season and color and put them in the drawers. I also organized the textbooks and workbooks in Korean alphabetical order. When Yeehan messed it up, I cleaned it up again.

The only thing in this room that I hardly touched was a photo that Yeehan had put on the wall.

It was a photo of two people surfing on the red sea behind exotic palm trees backlit by the sunset, taken so small that they looked like fingernails. Yeehan had torn that photo out of a magazine somewhere, and it had been in that spot since I came here five years ago.

Yeehan used to say as a habit that he would go and live in a place like that someday. He didn’t say who he would go with, but Morae was naturally with him in my Hyung’s future. It was a naturalness that didn’t even need to be mentioned separately. They were two people who had never even imagined anyone other than each other in their lives.

I tried to focus my consciousness on that photo, which had curled corners and faded colors.

Bali…. I pronounced the name of that exotic place that Yeehan had taught me.

Grandfather’s curses were shifting to our father and son, saying that we were heartless for not even looking in on the family, even though this mess was happening in the house.

I was worried about Morae, but I couldn’t even send her a message, fearing that my family would use it as an excuse to pick a fight.

○

“Seo Yeehyeon. Seo Yeehyeon, wake up.”

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I was lying curled up on the bare floor in the same clothes I had worn to the harbor.

It was Yeehan who shook me awake. In the darkness, Yeehan’s eyes shone particularly brightly. It was an unusual light.

It was a deep night, with only the light from the sodium lamp hanging above the gate barely shining into the room. In the meantime, the house had become completely quiet, and I could sense that it was raining. There was hardly any sound of rain. Only the smell was different.

“Quickly pack only what you need.”

Yeehan said quickly in a low voice.

“Morae will be waiting at Jaeyun hyung’s office. Let’s go to Seoul in hyung’s car from there.”

Jaeyun hyung was the owner of a surfing school who was close to Morae and Yeehan. Yeehan had been an instructor before he enlisted, and after his discharge, he occasionally went there to teach temporarily and earn money.

It was a plan that we had been making for a very long time, since high school. When it was judged to be the final situation with no room for improvement, with hope extinguished, we would attempt to escape.

It felt awkward that I was included in that escape, which was similar to a love escape, but they had included me in the plan from the beginning as if it were natural.

No one told me to get on a boat, and no one pressured me to break up with my lover, but the fact that there was nothing like that was the reason for my escape. There was no reason to leave, but there was no reason to stay either.

It started as a half-joke at first. Back in high school, when we were lying on the beach and giggling, rattling off absurd plans like in a Hollywood C-grade movie, we didn’t know that the day would come when we would carry it out.

Yeehan and I, choosing luggage to pack in a backpack that wasn’t even that big, were unhesitating. There was nothing here that was so precious that we had to take it with us. I packed a couple of T-shirts and underwear from the drawer, which was full of only stripes.

Finally, Yeehan , who had gotten up after stuffing his favorite comic book into his backpack and closing the zipper, stopped for a moment in front of the photo hanging on the wall. Then he tore off the photo, folded it in half, and put it in his jacket pocket.

The house, where the three-room house faced the sea in a row, had been renovated in a modern style several years ago, but the basic frame was a traditional Korean house. We carefully opened the sliding door and stepped onto the raised wooden floor made of stone and cement.

As expected, it was drizzling. The sea breeze that touched the skin exposed outside my clothes was cooler than usual. It was an ominous coolness that made the back of my neck shrink.

We crossed the yard, getting annoyed by the drizzling rain. Yeehan gestured for us to climb over the wall instead of opening the gate. It wasn’t that high of a wall. It seemed better than making the sound of the gate.

As we were about to move towards the wall next to the gate, the door opened from the main building. It was the sound of pushing the sliding door from the inside to the outside. Reflexively, we stopped and slowly turned around.

It was Father.

In the darkness where only the formless sound of waves could be heard, Father was sitting in the room, holding the doorknob and looking this way.

Yeehan and I were each carrying a backpack in the rain in the middle of the night, well past midnight. Anyone could tell that we weren’t just taking a light stroll around the neighborhood.

How will Father react?

Sweat instantly broke out on my forehead and back. My racing heart felt like it would burst.

At this moment, all my nerves were focused on Father’s lips, more than whether the escape would be successful. It wasn’t because of the sense of dismay at being caught.

The past 5 years. Father’s lips, which had made me give up hope by repeating expectation and resentment and eventually stopping that repetition.

The silence was sickening. And yet, I too was becoming a human being most accustomed to silence, soaked in silence. Father….

“Hyung-ah, let’s go.”

How long had we been standing there getting rained on? Yeehan put his hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t a gesture of urging. My Hyung would know what I was thinking and what I was feeling.

We changed our minds and opened the gate instead of climbing over the wall.

The iron gate, which hadn’t been oiled for a long time and was easily corroded by the sea breeze, opened its mouth with a metallic sound. Yeehan went out, and then I took a step out the door. With a more lingering heart than Lot’s wife leaving Sodom, I looked back again.

Where are you going? Don’t go.

Father didn’t say anything in the end.

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