As they were leaving, they tried for another boisterous high-five, playfully pushing the freckled man forward to get him to high-five me. Perhaps he too was acting out with an exaggerated playfulness fueled by alcohol, but the way he rejoiced, as if he’d just shaken hands with a celebrity he’d always admired, was striking.
It was probably because no one, regardless of gender, had ever shown such direct and honest affection for me. Inwoo-hyung was like that to some extent, but he was always joking around. In reality, it was probably more than half a joke.
After they left, Noona and Hyung also got down from their stools to have a smoke. Indoors was non-smoking by default, but the atmosphere anywhere in Hong Kong was such that smoking outdoors was rarely restricted. Having just finished a cigarette, he joined Noona and Hyung and lit a new one. And he gripped his camera and took a few steps back to take their picture.
It was the exact scene I had seen in the ‘Old Future’ post.
The background was different, and Hyung and Noona’s outfits were different, but the situation was identical to that photo, the one marked ‘Photo by. Kun’.
The two of them, blending naturally into the streets of Hong Kong’s SoHo, enjoying the moment in their own comfortable way, and him, capturing that moment just as naturally in a photograph.
Suddenly, all the surrounding noise faded away. There were no boundaries between us, and it wasn’t as if he was putting up an invisible glass wall toward me like he had at first, yet the mere few steps between us felt like a distinct dividing line, separating those who shine on their own from someone like me, who does not.
Just as I was reaching for my beer out of bitterness, his lens abruptly turned toward me.
And before I had a chance to turn my head away, the shutter clicked. He immediately checked the picture he’d taken of me on the LCD screen. I watched him bring a cigarette to his faintly smiling lips, then got down from my stool and approached them.
Noona laughed and threw an arm over my shoulder.
“Seo Yeehyeon, your popularity is international.”
Hyung laughed at Noona’s teasing words. But he only looked down at me as he smoked, not smiling.
“I… want to try smoking too.”
“……”
All three of them stopped smoking and focused on me. Wondering if I’d said something I shouldn’t have, I studied their expressions one by one. I looked up at his face last. He had been bringing the cigarette to his lips, but he paused, then slowly moved his hand again and drew on the filter. The gray embers flared red at the tip of his lips.
Noona tilted her head slightly and grinned.
“Can I ask why you want to try?”
“Before… when I saw your post about Hong Kong on the ‘Old Future’ site. I thought… that if I ever went to Hong Kong, I’d want to try it at least once.”
I added with a shrug.
“I didn’t know I’d be coming to Hong Kong so soon, though.”
Noona unwrapped her arm from my neck and nodded.
“Well, it wouldn’t make sense for us to tell you it’s bad while we’re sitting here smoking.”
Then she looked up at him and asked.
“Can I give him one?”
“Why are you asking me for permission? Is there anyone here who isn’t an adult?”
Noona smirked, as if to say, ‘I knew you’d say that.’ Then she rummaged in her back pocket. As she handed me a cigarette and a lighter, she chuckled.
“Ah, why does this feel like I’m doing something bad? You’re twenty-two, right?”
Noona and Hyung were the kind of people you could barely even call smokers. So I could fully understand why they wouldn’t want to encourage me to smoke. Instead of launching into a long-winded explanation that I had no intention of becoming a smoker, I just smiled, and Noona smiled back, ruffling my hair. Then she and Hyung dashed into the pub as the music changed.
I watched the two of them, who must have loved the song, get excited in an instant and disappear into the crowd, then put the cigarette in my hand to my lips.
The whole process—flicking the lighter, holding the flame to the tip of the cigarette, and taking a drag—felt clumsy even to me.
Contrary to how he’d spoken as if it were no big deal, he was now staring, almost embarrassingly so, at every single step of my clumsy first attempt at smoking. Then he picked up his camera.
“Don’t… take a picture.”
I pulled down his wrist as he adjusted the lens toward me and turned my head away.
“Why not?”
His voice was tinged with amusement as he asked.
“It won’t be interesting.”
“Are you saying the pictures I take aren’t interesting?”
“……”
Even knowing he was joking, I didn’t want him to misunderstand, and my gaze wavered as I looked up at him. He seized the moment of hesitation, and the lens was on me again. The shutter clicked in an instant.
“At least, the Seo Yeehyeon I take pictures of seems interesting to me.”
Satisfied, he lowered the camera and placed a hand next to me on the railing I was leaning against. His chest and shoulder were right in front of my eyes as he stood angled toward me. I wanted to use the buzz from the mix of tequila and beer and the dizziness from my first cigarette as an excuse to lean against him.
But that was an excessive boldness I couldn’t, and wouldn’t be able to, act on. I was startled by the thought itself and took another drag of the cigarette, as if to erase it with the noxious smoke.
The unfamiliar, acrid air seemed to tighten its grip on my throat. My tongue tingled, and the sensation of injecting a harmful substance into my windpipe and lungs was vivid.
Even when I was more reckless, I’d never thought smoking looked cool. It wasn’t as if I’d suddenly developed a belated sense of vanity about it now. It was just that, as Noona had said in her post, if some people came here to shop, some to tour famous restaurants, and she and Hyung consumed the image of Hong Kong through a single cigarette, then I wanted to share that sensation, just once.
To be more honest, I wanted to get even a little bit closer to the ‘Wonderland’ that included Noona, Hyung, and him. In the end, I let out a hollow laugh at the thought that maybe it was just a childish imitation, like mimicking an actor you admire in a movie.
“It really feels like I’m in Wonderland.”
My voice naturally grew languid as the world spun before my eyes.
I focused on him, who was looking down at me without so much as a furrow in his brow.
“Mr. Rabbit.”
“Rabbit?”
This time, one of his eyebrows shot up. Mr. Rabbit. The words had slipped out unconsciously. I wiped my face with my free hand to clear my head and laughed to myself. Looking back, he really was the Mr. Rabbit who had guided me to ‘Wonderland’.
“I’m sorry. I think I’m drunk. I keep saying strange things.”
Trying to hide the flush rising in my face, I took another drag from the nearly burnt-out cigarette. His hand reached out and covered mine, which was holding the cigarette, and took it from my lips. His touch was incredibly gentle.
I looked up to see him looking back down at me as he took a deep drag from the cigarette he’d taken from me. So deep his cheeks hollowed. Then he let a long stream of smoke escape from between his lips and expertly flicked the ash with his index finger.
“Let’s get drunk, then. That’s what we came out here for.”
He tossed the butt into an ashtray the pub had set out. I was about to follow him away from the railing when someone gently grabbed my arm.
“Excuse me….”
“……”
It was the freckled man. My eyes widened in surprise at the unexpected situation.
The man’s friends were nowhere to be seen. He seemed to have hurried back, his breathing ragged and his face flushed.
“I’m sorry, but I was wondering if we could maybe exchange email addresses.”
Though shy, the man smiled, looking me in the eye.
I could feel a kind of pure energy from his goodwill. It was different from the sleazy come-on from the man at the VIP preview who had rambled on about memories from a trip. The ability to feel such pure goodwill for someone and to express it so honestly and cleanly… separate from the fact that this goodwill was directed at me, it just… seemed so nice.
“Actually, I’m planning a trip to Korea this winter, and I was thinking if it’s okay after we email back and forth, it would be great to meet again in Seoul then…. Ah, please forget what that guy said earlier about having a crush! I just mean, it’s long-distance anyway, and I was hoping we could be friends….”
As he spoke, rubbing the back of his neck, the man kept glancing at him. He was definitely not the type to be clueless about these things, but for some reason, he didn’t step away, remaining there and watching the whole situation unfold.
“Ah… my… boyfriend… doesn’t really like that sort of thing. I’m sorry.”
The man’s confession wasn’t unpleasant at all, and as he’d said, I was interested enough in his background to want to be friends, but I couldn’t deny that my heart was elsewhere.
I was completely unused to being confessed to, and I had no idea how to gracefully navigate such a situation, so I blurted out a clumsy lie I’d seen or heard somewhere.
“I see. So… you do have a boyfriend.”
Smiling bitterly, the man glanced once at his face, and only then did it hit me. I hadn’t meant to imply that he was my ‘boyfriend,’ but I belatedly realized the situation made it sound exactly like that.
“Well then. Have a great trip. It was nice talking to you.”
I felt bad seeing the young face of the man who turned away, not hiding his disappointment. I regretted my pointless lie and my insincere response to his pure goodwill.
“Hmm… I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”
I also felt sorry for him, who had suddenly become my boyfriend. But contrary to my worries, he didn’t seem to mind the misunderstanding at all; in fact, he looked rather pleased.
“You know I don’t.”
The delayed embarrassment of having him witness the entire confession and rejection scene washed over me, and I immediately chugged my beer as soon as I sat down. Noona and Hyung must have gone deep inside the hall, as they were nowhere to be seen.
“I didn’t know. How would I know? Have we ever talked about something like that?”
He was so cheerful, he couldn’t stop teasing me.
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