More than all the time I couldn’t see him, in this moment of looking at him, I realized the true weight of my longing. Even while suffering a severe, body-aching sickness, I had endured the situation by consciously downplaying its severity.
I had missed him so much all this time, but even the concept of ‘so much’ was less than the actual longing.
In the absurd fear that he would disappear the moment I blinked, I tightly gripped the arm he was using to wipe the tears from my cheek.
“Don’t go….”
The words slipped out on their own.
Liu’s hand slowed to a stop, then he cupped my entire face with both hands and pressed his forehead against mine.
“I won’t go anywhere until you tell me to.”
Liu moved to my side and wrapped an arm around my shoulders as if to support me. I followed his lead, clutching the hem of his coat. Before we had taken more than a few steps, he stopped in front of a typically old Parisian apartment building. He pressed a code on a pad installed on the wall next to the double doors, and the entrance opened. We got into a cramped elevator that looked like it could hold only two or three people and headed to the 6th floor.
Our shoulders were touching and our hands were clasped, but we only stared straight ahead, unable to turn and look at each other.
Getting off on the 6th floor, Liu took a key from his coat pocket and opened one of the three doors. From inside the neighboring apartment, the sound of music and people’s laughter could be heard.
Once inside, Liu closed the door and turned Yeehyeon around. The tears had stopped. But as the reality that the person before him was truly him grew clearer, his emotions churned even more than when they had first met. Right now, all he wanted was to see, to hear, to touch… to keep confirming his presence.
As if to check the gap that a little over a year had created, his blue eyes meticulously traced Yeehyeon ’s face. His lips parted as if he were about to say something, but unable to find the right words for the moment, he gently bit his lower lip. Then he came closer and wrapped his arms around Yeehyeon ’s shoulders.
Yeehyeon slipped his arms inside the open coat and wrapped them around his waist, over his shirt. He buried his nose and lips in his shoulder and rubbed his face against the nape of his neck.
Except for when they had sex, he didn’t think he had ever been this proactive in initiating skinship with him. He had been a fool. Why had he held back?
They just held each other for a long time. It felt as if nothing else was needed. Leaning his back against the door, Liu would occasionally lower his head and press his lips to Yeehyeon ’s hair, forehead, and temple.
The noise from the apartment next door, likely from friends having an early Christmas party, would seep through the wall from time to time.
He gently stroked my hair, tilting his head to look down at my face.
“Are you… calmer now?”
It was his voice.
“Say… something more.”
“……Huh?”
“Anything is fine, I just want to hear your voice more.”
I said it a little demandingly, rubbing my face, which had been buried in his shoulder, against the nape of his neck. I had always tried to be mature in front of him before, but now… in this moment granted at the end of passing through more than a year, I wanted a small reward.
Perhaps a little flustered by the request to say anything just so I could hear his voice, he stroked the edge of my shoulder and thought for a moment, then suddenly began to sing softly.
It was the first time I had heard him sing. I pulled away from his chest and looked up at his face. Leaning the back of his head against the door and looking down, he stopped singing.
“What song is that?”
“Um… It’s a song called ‘Fica Tudo Bem’. I don’t know much about the artists. Only that it’s a duet by male and female singers from Brazil.”
“Is it Portuguese?”
He nodded.
“I think it means something like, ‘everything will be okay.’”
“You can speak Portuguese too?”
This time, he shook his head and smiled. Every reaction he showed was new, and I didn’t want to miss a single one. With a faint, barely-there smile on his lips, his eyes, as he looked at me from an angle, were as sharply etched as someone about to part, not someone who had just been reunited.
I knew that the shadow in his eyes was not something that could be lifted in an instant just because we had reunited. The same was true for the accumulation of time that had built up inside me. I had no intention of rushing.
Pressing my chest against his again, I rested my chin on his shoulder and said.
“Will you sing more?”
I liked his song, which was like a low whistle, on the verge of breaking off. My eyes closed as he sang, humming through the parts where he didn’t know the lyrics.
Even after the song ended, we leaned against each other in silence for a long time. Like people afraid they would ruin something important if they moved rashly.
“Is that… perfume?”
“……”
At his careful question, I pulled away and reflexively lifted my arm to smell it.
“At the department store earlier, the clerk… asked if I wanted to… try a spritz….”
I wasn’t the one who had done anything wrong, yet I found my own excuse-making suddenly ridiculous and dropped my arm with a small laugh.
“Yes. It was the same one you used to wear… so I bought it.”
In the darkness, lit only by the streetlights and the lights from the building across the street, his eyes spoke of his deep emotion. He pushed himself off the door and gently took my fingertips. Squeezing his hand back, I finally looked around.
“But, where… is this?”
At Yeehyeon ’s question, Liu bit his lower lip, showing his unease. He wiped a hand over his face and opened his mouth with a heavy expression.
“A place I come to stay sometimes.”
“…Here?”
It was a studio apartment where what you saw was all there was, with no need to look around in detail. The long, horizontal room had six windows on the front wall, which suggested it would get good light, and though it was neatly organized, it could by no means be called spacious or comfortable.
To the right of the entrance was a legless, Zen-style bed with a small, three-section wardrobe next to it, and to the left was a table that seemed to serve as both a desk and a dining table. That was all the furniture. Behind the table, a narrow hallway led to a kitchen and bathroom. It was only slightly larger than the room Yeehyeon was using at ‘The Hands.’
It wasn’t as if they had been together for a long time, nor did he know the specifics of his financial situation, but it was unlikely that he had bought a studio in the 19th arrondissement, far from the city center, because he couldn’t afford Paris’s notoriously expensive hotels.
“Since… when?”
Yeehyeon asked, his gaze sweeping over the traces of him throughout the room—the unmade bed, the laptop and documents scattered on the table, the jacket draped over a chair.
“I signed the contract… around this fall. I’d been looking for a decent place in this area for a while before that, but it was hard to find something in the location I wanted….”
Liu hesitated for a moment before adding.
“From here… you can’t see ‘The Hands.’”
I had thought he came here because the painting had arrived earlier than scheduled. But that didn’t make sense. If that were the case, why would he have been loitering in the alley instead of coming straight to ‘The Hands’? If the ‘handsome man occasionally seen at the cafe by the canal’ that Ben had mentioned was Liu, then today was not the first time he had appeared in this neighborhood.
“Ah….”
Perhaps taking Yeehyeon ’s groan in a negative way, Liu closed the distance, stepping in close and gripping both of his arms firmly.
“I know, it’s cheating. At first, I really just wanted to feel like I was close by….”
Yeehyeon shook his head. Whose fault it was, who was more responsible… he didn’t want to talk about that anymore. For someone who had already admitted their fault and was sincerely regretting it, repeatedly reminding them of their responsibility was unnecessary.
Placing his hands on his shoulders, Yeehyeon kneaded and stroked his broad shoulders.
“What’s important is that we met again now.”
The strength in his hands gripping my arms weakened. He tilted his head and exhaled cautiously.
“For the first few months… I couldn’t even go down to the basement.”
“……”
“I thought about moving to a hotel, or another house.”
His tone was dispassionate. It wasn’t an attempt to complain about how hard it had been.
“And then, after those few months passed… I practically lived in the basement.”
Yeehyeon bit his lip. He moved his hands from his shoulders and wrapped them around his neck.
“The one left behind has it harder than the one who leaves…. The places you were together, the people you knew together…. Having to stay in a place where everything remains the same…. It might be even harder than missing someone from a place where there’s nothing.”
He shook his head, as if to say that wasn’t true. We both already knew the meaning of the time that had passed, that he wasn’t the only one who had endured pain.
“It was hard, wasn’t it…?”
He slowly closed and opened his eyes, shaking his head more forcefully.
“I’m… using a room on the fourth floor, and there’s a friend from Hong Kong in the room next to mine.”
“……”
“He showed a little interest in me….”
Watching his eyes tremble, unable to hide his anxiety, Yeehyeon continued.
“I told him I have a boyfriend. I felt I had to draw a line.”
“……”
“Did I… lie?”
The moment we found each other, I felt that no explanation was necessary, but at the same time, the searing pain of facing the problem and the ache of enduring the void still remained in my body, making me fear rejection and hurt.
His face contorted as he tried to suppress the overwhelming emotions that threatened to swallow him, and he shook his head.
His large hands suddenly cupped my cheeks, and his lips crashed onto mine as if lunging. He tilted my head, changing the angle, devouring my lips fiercely before pulling back, pressing his forehead against mine as he struggled to catch his breath. Then he continued with a soft kiss, the surfaces of our lips brushing and rubbing lightly.
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