Wasn’t it because of guilt? Wasn’t it to atone for the sin of Changing by becoming an alpha bound to me? For a moment, he felt the urge to confirm it, but Ihyeon soon erased the question himself. Because he already knew the answer.
He would have probably resolved to live such a life even without the influence of pheromones. Ihyeon knew that its meaning wasn’t necessarily an extreme sacrifice of erasing his ego and choosing a life of subservience.
“I’m… going to try to become a Golden.”
Liu gave a slight nod, as if he had expected Ihyeon’s decision.
“It probably won’t be that difficult for you. I’ll help with whatever I can.”
For a long time, neither of them spoke. But they didn’t turn their gazes to the surrounding scenery either. With their bodies turned toward each other, they communed without pheromones from behind their sunglasses. They looked at each other as if looking at themselves.
Liu’s lips, once cold long ago, turned toward Ihyeon, warm and unconcealed.
“I don’t know if it’s an unavoidable inferiority complex toward betas, but….”
“……”
“I wanted to sleep with you without pheromones. What that would feel like… I was always curious.”
Ihyeon felt like he vaguely understood what those words meant.
Once the Changing was over and he became a complete omega, he would be able to control his pheromones, whether through a Golden’s regulation or through suppressants. If so, the pheromone-free sex that could never once be achieved between Ghost and Diamond Dust might become possible.
Gently stroking the back of Ihyeon’s hand with his thumb, Liu took off his sunglasses. Though he was so surprised his breath caught for a moment, Ihyeon soon calmed his agitation and focused only on him.
“Still… even after I become an omega, I want to keep changing under the influence of your pheromones. I want to change.”
Meeting Liu’s white eyes, likely exposed to the bright sunlight for the first time since birth, Ihyeon recalled the day his great-uncle had visited.
I want to change completely. That night when they had revealed their inner thoughts to each other with only roundabout metaphors.
He felt he now understood a little. That in order to live the life he wanted and become the person he wanted to be, he had to break the silence himself and let his voice ring out.
He would fill in the sharply clawed gaps, and he would restore trust and build it up even more solidly. In that regard, at least, he trusted him.
Putting the sunglasses back on him as he squinted from the glare, Ihyeon said,
“Actually… there’s a place I’d like A-wei to go for me.”
The high-pitched laughter of a child drifted up from the bottom of the hill. The muffler wrapped around his neck felt a little constricting. The feel of the air was definitely different from midwinter. Slowly but surely, without ever losing its way, the season was changing.
■ DONG-HAE ■
His eyes opened before the alarm went off. After lying still for a while listening to the sound of the waves, Liu got out of bed and pulled a T-shirt over his head. He walked over to the shabby minibar, brewed a cup of coffee with one of the provided hand-drip coffee bags, and went to the window. The area around the horizon was beginning to be tinged with a piercing blue and violet, just before the sun rose. Though the weather was cloudy, the light seeped through the gaps between the clouds all the more intensely.
The ability to watch the sunrise over the East Sea from the room’s window was about the only merit this old hotel, which looked to be at least twenty years past its completion, could boast.
Slowly finishing his cup of coffee, Liu waited for the yellow sun to rise completely above the water’s surface. There was plenty of time.
He had grown up moving between various cities around the world, and perhaps because of that, or thanks to it, he wasn’t the type to be particularly moved by unfamiliar places, but his heart stirred before this sea that connected to the Pacific Ocean.
This was the place where a young Ihyeon, unable to absorb the shock, had been moved by the adults’ decision. It was a place where he’d had no choice but to protect himself by responding to silence with more silence, and it was also a place he had turned his back on and fled.
With one hand stuck in the pocket of his sweatpants, Liu tilted his cup and recalled another point in the past connected to the sea before him.
It was also the sea he had come to in order to meet Ihyeon, who had found out about the Changing. His own ugliness, helplessly letting his hands drop and having no choice but to make a belated confession in the face of a truth that had been laid bare with nowhere left to retreat. The sea that had witnessed it all was unfamiliar yet familiar, and at once familiar and something he wanted to look away from.
He had never felt such complex emotions when facing any sea before. The sea had just been an object of appreciation that sometimes enhanced the leisurely mood of a resort, or a backdrop that made a city’s nightscape shine brighter.
He took another sip of the remaining coffee, which had sediment settled at the bottom. He silently looked down at the final moments of the waves that endlessly and uniformly rolled in, seeped into the beach, and disappeared. He couldn’t easily tear his eyes away, feeling as if Ihyeon’s quiet endurance, never raising his voice to complain of his pain, was deeply submerged within it.
Even after the sun had completely risen above the horizon and hidden behind the clouds, there was still ample time left.
After a walk on the sandy beach right in front of the hotel, he filled his stomach with the tasteless breakfast provided at the first-floor cafeteria. He checked out early and placed his travel boston bag in the back seat of the car. Despite not having gotten enough sleep, his mind was clear.
There were plenty of hotels in much better condition along the East Sea coastline. He had chosen this place only because it was the closest hotel to the charnel house. A thirty-minute drive from the hotel would get him to his destination with time to spare.
The sky, which had just been heavily overcast when he was on his walk, was now drizzling. Before leaving the city, he looked for a flower shop in the area that he had searched for the day before.
You couldn’t place flowers, photos, or other items inside the cases or attach them to the glass, so there was no need to bring anything. That’s what Ihyeon had said, but he didn’t feel right going empty-handed.
The flower shop owner, with a practiced customer service attitude, recommended a few typical combinations suitable for a visit to a charnel house. It seemed there were several other charnel houses nearby, so there was quite a demand for memorial flowers. Looking around the small shop, Liu chose Jana roses instead of the recommendations. He asked for them to be arranged simply, with just five or six stems.
“These days, people often choose bright flowers even when visiting the deceased.”
Liu nodded at the owner’s words as she skillfully secured the stems and wrapped them.
He didn’t know much about Korea’s actual memorial customs, so he had asked Chief Han beforehand. She, too, had advised that unless it was for a funeral or a grave-tending visit, there was no required etiquette to follow. Along with the words, ‘They will be happy just that you visited, CEO Ryu.’
Even though he hadn’t revealed who he was going to see, Chief Han had said that. She must have had a vague idea. But Liu didn’t think that person would welcome him. He wasn’t very confident.
He left the city and drove for another twenty-some minutes along a two-lane national road. When he turned south along a small stream branching off from a fairly large creek, the road became narrow and winding. To the west, a low mountain thick with shrubs continued, and to the east, next to the town, not-so-wide rice paddies were divided into patches at the foot of the mountain. It was the end of winter, so the paddies were dry. It was a Korean rural landscape that had become somewhat familiar to Liu from his several trips to and from his mother’s studio in Gangwon Province.
Liu lowered the window about a hand’s breadth. A little rain blew in, but it wasn’t enough to be bothersome. The refreshing air emitted by the damp, green forest felt like it was purifying his lungs, and his breathing deepened on its own.
Because his maternal grandparents had handled the entire funeral, his mother’s ashes had been enshrined in a private charnel facility near the capital area, Ihyeon had said. A year after leaving Seoul, his father had personally moved his mother’s ashes here. The family only found out about it half a year after the move. The man who never opened his mouth had handled it without anyone in the family knowing.
Thinking about the way of love of a man who had turned away from his young son who had no one but him to rely on, who had chosen to be buried in the grief of losing his wife, and who had thus refused to even attend the funeral of the wife he loved so much, Liu gnawed on his lip.
Just as he was starting to get anxious because not a single sign had appeared, the seemingly natural thicket of shrubs ended and an artificial landscape, cultivated by human hands, began. He had arrived at the charnel house.
Liu parked the car in the lot where the office and lounge were located. He briefly considered whether to take out the umbrella that was always in the trunk, but then got out of the car with only the bouquet.
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