It might be excessive conjecture, but the painting I’d viewed with him at the Hong Kong Art Fair—Lovers on the Bed—overlapped with the present.
Back then, because his reaction in front of the piece had struck me, I’d repeated the painter’s name to remember it: SEONEW. A Korean artist in his twenties. Represented by a gallery in New York.
At the time he’d seemed to want to hear something from me about the painting and the artist. It didn’t feel like he was just asking for an impression of some random work that had caught his eye. I even felt like he was urging me—hesitant as I was—to be more candid and scathing in my critique. He himself had offered a cool verdict: the bubble would burst within a year or two and the value would drop by more than half.
“Someone I knew a long time ago... he paints.” —Adding that explanation from the entryway hall a little while ago, it didn’t seem like an utterly absurd fantasy after all.
But even if that man was SEONEW, the painter of Lovers on the Bed, there was nothing more I could infer from that alone. I could search for more information, but it felt like prying into the private lives of people close to him, like Shushu, and I didn’t want to.
Maybe I’d sunk into thought without noticing, because when the knock came I startled so hard I sprang up from the chair.
"Yes."
After my stiff reply, the door connecting to the living room opened quietly.
"Shall we talk?"
He spoke from the doorway without entering the room. It felt like a cue to come out to the living room, so I nodded and went.
Shushu had already left. On the table before the three-seater opposite the pair of single chairs where we’d been sitting earlier, whiskey, an on-the-rocks glass, an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter were scattered in a mess.
He seated me on the long fabric sofa in a calm ivory tone and asked if I wanted more beer. I didn’t want to get drunk, but I needed something to drink. I nodded, and he brought a bottle from the kitchen. Then he dragged a dining chair from the eating area between my room and the living room and took a seat to my right, near the corner of the table.
He lifted the glass with about a third of its whiskey left and turned it in his hand.
"The vibe got... abrupt. You must’ve wondered what was going on. I’m sorry."
I didn’t answer, just waited for what would follow. His face, staring at a spot on the table rimmed in antique gold, suggested that what I was about to hear would not be pleasant. Condensation was beading quickly on the beer bottle in my hand, but I didn’t even dare wet my throat.
"I know learning this... could be a burden to you, Seo Ihyeon, but..."
Still staring at that one spot, he took a sip of whiskey.
"I’d hate it even more if you ended up misunderstanding Shushu or... that bastard from earlier, Hong Seonyu. So I’ll tell you."
He had his elbows on his knees and his torso bent forward; he lifted his head and looked at me. His face was bloodless, not so much calm as emptied of feeling.
"Do you remember the painting Lovers on the Bed that we saw together at the Hong Kong Art Fair?"
My heart sped up at the thought that my guess might not have been wild fantasy. I tightened my grip on the bottle and slowly nodded to him.
"The man who came just now is Hong Seonyu. He painted that work."
After dropping only that brief fact, he couldn’t go on for a while. He’d said he would tell me, but he seemed unsure whether laying everything bare for me was truly the wisest choice.
Rubbing my thumb over the un-sipped bottle’s damp surface, I said to him,
"If it’s not something I absolutely need to know—meaning, if it doesn’t directly affect our relationship—then... you don’t have to. Other people are involved..."
His gaze returned to me in silence. I met it quietly and waited for his decision. His lips, drier than usual, slowly parted.
"Hong Seonyu was... Shushu’s lover, and he was the one who set off the decisive accident that made Shushu quit dance."
"......"
"And before that, he was a man I dated."
"......"
At those last words I inhaled without meaning to—and then stopped breathing. I knew my round eyes were baring all my confusion to him, but I couldn’t gather myself.
He took in my reaction, but he remained steady. The face of someone who’d expected—or at least braced for—this response.
"It’s laughable to even call it dating... like all my other past entanglements, it didn’t last half a year and it was an attachment-less physical relationship. But, anyway, there was something. It was when I’d finished the H.M.I.S. program in Hong Kong and moved to London for university. I was a third-year—senior, in the UK system—and he was a first-year at the Royal College of Art. His father’s business took the family to London when he was in middle school, and when things went well he turned into a very confident, arrogant kid. He was young. And I was young enough then to see that as a kind of charm."
He lifted one corner of his mouth in a short, derisive smile, as if laughing at his younger self.
"Not that I accepted or coddled that cockiness."
He tossed back the last sip of whiskey, refilled the glass, and continued,
"I was someone with neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth for things like romance or love, and as a senior I was overwhelmed with my own issues. I thought of him as someone I met occasionally to take care of physical needs. I knew he had several partners besides me, and I didn’t care."
He paused there and glanced at me.
"Talking about the past like this... doesn’t seem like it’ll earn me any points."
From what he’d said so far, Juhan’s guesses about his romantic past had been on the mark. In my case... it was actually harder to imagine his frictionless, self-centered “romance.”
"Just as there had been no talk of ‘let’s date,’ ‘let’s be exclusive,’ when we stopped it was simply that the contact thinned and things petered out. Then, during a period when I was debating whether to stay in London to build an independent career or go back to Hong Kong and learn my father’s business, he suddenly reached out. Said his father’s business was in trouble and everyone but his father was ending their life in London and returning to Korea... and asked me to let him stay in London. Said feeding one person and putting him through school would be nothing to me."
He clicked his tongue and laughed, as if it still left him speechless.
"For someone that proud to come to me—a fling, and one that was already over—and let those words out... the sheer nerve was admirable, but the way he lunged like a debt collector there to collect what he’d left on deposit made the last of my remaining fondness fall away. He’d always had an obsession with success, but when the financial backing vanished it felt like all that remained was the drive to win—any pure passion for painting was gone. Even the scraps of appeal were gone."
With his mouth set, he knit his brow, turned the on-the-rocks glass once in his hand, and wet his dry mouth again.
"After that, he had no choice but to leave London, and I thought that was the end. I cleared him out of memory—one of the ones I figured I’d never meet again—until I was reintroduced to him by Shushu, who was living in Seoul, as his lover."
"Ah..."
It slipped out—more a sigh than a word. But he looked at me and crooked his mouth, as if to say that wasn’t all.
"I knew before the introduction that Shushu was head over heels for someone, but to think it was him. When he saw me at the introduction, he made a face like he’d seen a ghost. And why wouldn’t he."
He stared into the air and, dropping his even tone, spoke through pressed lips.
"Shushu is an omega, and that bastard... as far as I know, he’s a beta gay man through and through—a bottom to the bone. Greedy about sex—twice as much as most. And a guy like that with an omega?"
Say something that makes sense. He added it like he was speaking right at Hong Seonyu standing before him, blaming him to his face.
"Of course, not every omega male prefers being the one who receives, but most omegas’ instincts lean that way. The sexual drive is much stronger in alphas and omegas than in betas. And Shushu, from the moment he presented as omega, was someone who grew up accepting his instinct and fate. If you insisted on comparing Shushu and Hong to two beta gay men, it would have been like two bottoms who’d never switch, dating each other. Knowing his nature, it was ridiculous to me. It’s not like two grown men were going to have a purely platonic love. The idea that those two would have a sexual relationship as part of their romance made no sense."
He paused and asked if he could smoke. Instead of answering, I picked up the pack and lighter that were nearer to me and handed them over. A bitter scent rose with the smoke. He exhaled a long ribbon to match the depth of his inhale and said,
"When I heard they were going to study in New York together, I could guess the gist of his aim... but the problem was—"
His brows drew tight; he pressed hard on his eyelids like his head hurt. It wasn’t hard to infer that the study funds had come from Shushu.
"I couldn’t tell Shushu that I’d been involved with him in the past, that I knew what kind of man he was, and that his boyfriend was going to use him to get ahead."
None of that is an easy thing to say to an old friend. He ran a hand down his face, drew deep on the cigarette, and straightened in his chair.
"You’re an omega. There’s no future with a beta man... Those sorts of empty lines—I tried to coax him with them. It had no effect."
They’d already been seeing each other over a year, and to break them up completely he would’ve had to reveal every detail of his entanglement with Hong and shock Shushu. But in front of the face of a friend who was happy, deeply in love, trusting his partner—that choice could never be easy.
"Even if I laid it all out... maybe I could have stopped him from flying off to New York right then, but he would still have had to weather the shock of betrayal. Add to that the blow of learning that his precious first love had been his close friend’s former partner... Back then he was far more fragile than now—would his mind have withstood it?"
He shook his head, eyes on the cigarette tip smoldering over the armrest. Then he brought it back to his lips.
"At the time I was only in Seoul on a short break and had to return to Hong Kong; once I was back to my routine, there were even more limits to trying to dissuade him long-distance from another country."
Now he lowered his head like a guilty man.
"In the end that was it. I was too afraid of the shock he’d take in front of my eyes, and that fear kept me from stopping him more forcefully."
It was a voice of self-reproach. Suddenly he lifted the glass and swallowed several mouthfuls of whiskey without ice, then drew on the cigarette. It was like punishing himself indirectly with things bad for the body—alcohol and smoke.
I’d thought that learning his lover had once been involved with him would lead naturally to the story of Shushu breaking up with that lover. But it was more complicated.
It seemed he’d ultimately chosen not to tell Shushu about Hong’s past and true nature, which meant that wasn’t the reason they split.
"They went to New York as planned, and amazingly, even there they lived together for another two years."
He took another sip and gave a small snort. Now his words drifted like a private recollection.
"Not that we can know whether those two years were really devoted to each other. Who knows—maybe the cheating kept right on going and just didn’t get caught."
His mouth curled in a cold line; the cigarette, now short, he crushed out in the ashtray with a rough motion.
"Shushu had reconstructive surgery on his Achilles tendon for an injury from practice. He was going to the center regularly for rehab. At that point the surgery outcome was perfect and the chances he could continue dancing were very high. Nothing to worry about. But one day his therapist had to leave early for family reasons, and since Shushu had a hard time with strangers, instead of working with another therapist he rescheduled and went home much earlier than planned."
From the phrase “that business” he’d used earlier, I could guess what came next. Even so, my mouth felt scorched; for the first time I lifted the bottle and drank. The beer had already gone lukewarm.
"In the bed where he and his lover—at least the man he believed was his lover—fell asleep together every night and began every day together, he had to witness his lover with another man’s penis up his ass, so deep into sex—crying out so loudly he didn’t even notice the bedroom door open. He had to see his lover panting in bliss in someone else’s arms, in a way completely different from when he was with him..."
My face twisted hard, like I too had become a witness to the scene. I set the bottle on the table, covered my head with both hands, and bowed. It was a dreadful story.
"After that... it was a complete disaster. I only heard the broad strokes from him, so I don’t know the details. Shushu ran. The bastard chased him, not even bothering to put on underwear, naked. In the scuffle on the apartment stairs, Shushu—wailing like someone half out of his mind—missed a step and suffered the same injury again in the ankle he’d had surgery on. He said at the time he didn’t even feel the pain... that’s how out of his mind he was."
Even if something worse had happened, he probably wouldn’t have felt it. One year after I was introduced to Hong, two years after they left for New York. Even that alone—three years together—then to discover infidelity like that... No one would keep their composure. I... if it were me...
I found the bottle again and gripped it. The lukewarm beer was more bitter and the fizz had gone flat, but I swallowed mechanically.
"That ended Shushu’s life as a dancer—and their relationship too. Of course, Hong could no longer live off Shushu. I don’t know what tricks he pulled after, but he took about a year off and eventually did graduate."
He spoke of Hong’s epilogue like it hardly mattered ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) now, and refilled his glass. Draining it in small sips, he kept on, pained.
About a year after the incident, he opened Phantom in Seoul with the director, and it took another year to put a camera in Shushu’s hands and drive him to focus on photography hard enough to mount a first solo show.
In the midst of that, he confessed the guilt he’d felt watching over Shushu. I had nothing to offer in return.
"If, now, with everything over with Hong, he were to learn about my past with that bastard—and that both of us kept quiet about it—then this time it would be beyond repair. He’d think every suggestion and word I’ve given him all this time was pity born of guilt. He’s someone whose thinking naturally runs negative."
Why he’d been hostile about that piece and its painter in front of Lovers on the Bed. What it must have felt like when Hong Seonyu reappeared before his eyes—
