She said this visit was a gift more precious than anything to her and Marcus, and with her thanks she kissed my cheek. It felt like too much gratitude for someone who’d done nothing but receive his love, but I smiled back at her.
He was in the room putting his things in order. I tried to help, but he said he was almost done and nudged me toward the bathroom to wash up first. When I came out from the shower, everything was finished and even the lights had been dimmed to make it easy to sleep. Heading into the bathroom himself, he said it was fine if I fell asleep first, but instead of lying on the bed I sat at the table by the window and opened my sketchbook.
I had snapped a few photos on my phone, but I wanted to leave a sketch of the impression this room gave me. Next to the sketches I’d made last night and this morning, I added fragments of the street seen from the window: the interlaced dry branches of the street trees, the old buildings of red brick, the gentle glow of the gas streetlamps that are like Beacon Hill’s emblem—scenes that made me feel as though I’d time-traveled to the early twentieth century.
Moving my pencil as I imagined his thirteen-year-old gaze looking out on this street from this very spot about twenty years ago, he came back into the room.
Fresh from the shower, he wore thin loungewear on the bottom and nothing on top. When he came close, I felt the chill of water on his skin.
“Not tired? We have to get up early tomorrow.”
Standing behind me, he lowered himself as the hand that had been lightly kneading my shoulders slid down to my chest. Resting his chin on my shoulder, he looked down at the sketch, then turned his head and pressed his lips to the nape of my neck. They were cool for an instant at the touch, then soon grew warm.
“What are you thinking about so hard?”
I stroked the firm arm around my chest and glanced back at him.
“Just... what Awi was like when he lived in this room. That kind of...”
He gave a dry laugh by my ear. Keeping one arm looped around my neck, he knelt on the floor to my left, beside the chair I was sitting in, and with his other hand stroked my lower belly and chest in a gentle caress.
“Feels like you heard enough from Marcus and Ellen over the past two days.”
But there was nothing about the things you can’t say with a smile. Those aren’t the sort of stories you bring up at a dinner table with someone precious who’s visiting for the first time in years and staying just two days.
“Here... you trained with Marcus to become a Golden alpha, didn’t you?”
“......”
In the dimmed room he looked up at me without a word, exhaled deeply, then rose and dropped into the chair across from me.
“Yeah. I stayed here with my mother for two years. Too many big changes hit at once, and I was the classic rotten teenager who expressed discontent and confusion with silence and refusal.”
He gave a little snort in my direction as if he’d told a silly joke, but I couldn’t laugh. Watching me, he shifted, leaned his back to the window frame, and pushed his fringe back.
“As you’ve seen, Ellen and Marcus are good people, and Jonas took to me, so it isn’t all bleak memories... but if you leave relationships out of it and look only at what was going on inside me, I’d say it’s when the groundwork was laid for the annoyingly twisted personality I have now.”
With his right arm slung over the back of the chair and his left resting on the table, the back of his head against the window, he looked over at me and smiled again. Then, when I still didn’t smile, he quietly turned his eyes toward the dark interior of the room.
“Some people want to be special. They want to be set apart from others by an uncommon ability or a striking individuality... and, further, to be above them. When the ego is just forming, that urge tends to stand out more. But when that ‘specialness’ isn’t just excellent ability or a unique quirk—when it becomes something beyond—then for some people specialness is just another word for loneliness. Like being pushed outside the border, separated from the group and cut off...”
Without realizing it, I set down the pencil I had been gripping, and wiped the sweat pooled in my palm on my pants. He picked up the pencil I’d put down, gripped it in his left hand, and twirled it deftly.
“Just as being born into a violent home isn’t a child’s fault, being who I am isn’t somebody’s mistake or sin... and yet, no matter how I tried to think that way, when everyone around me kept saying that from now on I had to control myself strictly... my thoughts ran negative, no matter what. On top of that, my parents—who respected and loved each other perfectly well—ended up divorcing because of me, so a thirteen-year-old was bound to start hating himself.”
“May I ask... why your parents had to divorce?”
He lifted his head from the window and looked at me a little longer.
“...Why?”
“I never thought the day would come when Seo Ihyun would be the first to ask. I’m glad to know you’re that curious about me...”
Glad—and, and what else? He left the knot untied, smiling ambiguously as he tapped the tabletop with the eraser on the end of the pencil.
“It was something like a preemptive measure against things that hadn’t happened yet.”
“......”
“My father’s maternal family is quite a grand house in the UK. My father’s maternal grandfather held a ducal title—back then there were only around thirty left in Britain—and now my father’s maternal uncle, that is, the elder son of my great-grandfather, has inherited it. Modern noble ranks are mostly ceremonial, but a duke isn’t always just that. In European society, including the UK, and in high society worldwide, it still works as an attraction, and in fact my father’s maternal family, thanks to maintaining that title, was able to amass tremendous wealth and wield influence.”
Now he was rubbing the table with the eraser as if there were something to erase. At a turn I never would have imagined, I just stared at him, lips parted, even forgetting to blink.
“To put it briefly, you can think of it as divorcing to protect my parental rights and custody from them. They wanted to make the most perfect alpha—‘a special alpha’—into the family’s heir. And they were cold-blooded enough to push that through regardless of the will of me, the person concerned, or of my parents.”
Until he came of age, to protect him fully from them, his parents had decided to divorce; and to entrust custody to his mother, his father’s “infidelity” became the official ground for divorce. Of course, his father had never cheated; it was all a strategy the two parents agreed upon.
He’d once told me he couldn’t help but feel guilty about his parents’ divorce. I couldn’t help looking back on that old story anew. He had said he had asked himself over and over whether he was someone worth all that—and the words still felt as vivid as if I’d heard them yesterday. Knowing this was the backdrop, no one could dare demand happiness of him.
When he spoke again, after seeming lost in his own thoughts for a while, that detached tone of a man relaying someone else’s experience was gone.
“Showing yourself—and knowing the face others keep for the world and what’s behind it—are bothersome, burdensome things, so I chose to be alone, but the truth is...”
He gripped the pencil so tight the veins on the back of his hand stood out more clearly, and lowered his voice.
“I was probably afraid.”
As if he couldn’t believe the words he himself had let out, he gave a thin snort and shook his head. Even so, in a voice so dry it seemed it might go out any second, he added with difficulty:
“Because I felt that I, an outsider beyond the border, different from everyone else, couldn’t be accepted by anyone.”
Everyone admired Golden alphas and Golden omegas. Even betas did. In films and dramas they were always treated as a charming privileged class. But as he said, for some people, specialness might simply be loneliness. Specialness is, in the end, a relative value, and the sense with which people receive it will inevitably differ.
If I hadn’t heard Marcus’s story, I might not have understood even half of what he was saying now; that thought made my head bow.
“Didn’t your CEO say before... that you’d have things you want to talk about again.”
The gaze that had been on his own hand holding the pencil slowly shifted to me.
“It’s true I was young, and I’m still young... and that a chain of events was too heavy and overwhelming for me to bear... I felt pressed flat, so I couldn’t put up any resistance. I resigned myself to the idea that a barren, inhuman day-to-day where I only barely kept breathing was my life to come, «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» and I accepted it.”
I drew in a deep breath, my chest swelling. Under the table I clasped my hands tight. In the alley, so still that not a single car had passed since I came into the room—no dog barking either—a man and a woman walked by, talking gently. Their voices, approaching from the east, drifted westward, fading behind my back where I sat. When their footsteps had grown faint, I spoke again.
“But meeting people in Phantom and learning about their different lives... strangely, just that alone made the weight pressing me feel lighter.”
It still wasn’t easy for me to give shape to thoughts in words, and I worried I was rambling, but I didn’t stop. As far as I knew, he had great patience in conversation. At least with me.
“That cliché about how the best way to comfort someone else’s wound is to show your own—before, it just sounded like self-serving relief, like ‘I’m not the only one suffering,’ but now... I can take it as something about empathy and encouragement.”
“You mean you want to handle wounds. With your drawings.”
At his concise way of going straight to the point, I let my shoulders loosen and gave a soft laugh. Then I slumped a little more and rubbed the back of my neck.
“But... right now I’m someone who can’t even face my own wounds properly. What I really need to draw isn’t Juhan hyung, or the striking landscapes I encountered on the trip... and yet right now, I don’t think I can draw anything beyond that.”
Sitting sideways, head slightly tilted as he listened, he stood up. He rummaged in the Boston bag where he’d stowed his things, took out cigarettes and a lighter, and offered me one. I looked up for a moment at him standing there, seeming larger in the dark than usual, then took a cigarette from the open pack and put it to my lips.
He cracked the window so the smoke could escape, then sat back where he’d been, in the same posture. I watched his profile for a while as, unlike me, he lit his cigarette with practiced ease. I tried to imitate his breath—drawing the smoke in short and deep, then making a tiny slit with my lips to let out a thin stream—but it wasn’t easy.
Drawing the smoke in so his cheeks hollowed more sharply than when we first met, he hooked the cigarette between his fingers and said:
“Whatever Seo Ihyun thinks of himself, you’re someone who, however slowly, tries in good faith to face yourself and what’s around you. So... don’t talk like painting has to ‘break through’ an assignment.”
“......”
“It’s fine even if you haven’t overcome anything. Prod the wound. Wounds are like fingerprints—different for everyone—so a picture that touches that wound can’t overlap with anyone else’s. Instead of waiting for a wound to heal on its own, keep picking at it, make it fester, translate it into another form that can be seen or heard, and show it. Isn’t that the role of art? No matter how the times change, no matter if serious inquiry isn’t the only meaning of art anymore, I believe it isn’t the destruction of form or mockery of tradition that ultimately hits the deepest place inside people and forces them to expose and face what they don’t want to see.”
When he tapped his ash into the small decorative plate we were using instead of an ashtray, a dimple-like groove formed along the edge of the muscles of his bare shoulder.
Turning his body at last to face forward, he propped an elbow on the table and, with the hand that held the cigarette, brushed above his eyebrow.
“The wounds and flaws we most want to hide and deny... might be the very individuality and identity that make us unique, independent beings identical to no one else.”
“......”
In the quiet, we smoked slowly and traced each other’s eyes and lips with our gaze. He was the first to look away, dropping his head with a heavy little laugh.
“In this room... I never imagined there would come a day I’d have this kind of talk with someone I love. If you told the me from back then, he wouldn’t believe you.”
The September night breeze blowing in through the open window in Boston wasn’t altogether gentle. He stubbed out his cigarette, stood, set a hand on the back of my chair, and bent over me. Taking the cigarette still burning between my fingers, he killed the ember and then kissed me. His lips were dry, but the tongue that parted my lips and filled me inside was hot and wet.
Right here, thinking of him at thirteen, buried in the loneliness of being special, the estrangement of not being ordinary, I cupped his cheek. Someday, may I give him a comfort deeper than Solitude. May I realize enough maturity to accept a wound as soon as an individuality. If not for me, then for him.
