Silence fell, and after a brief pause a faint laugh came from the other end of the line.
Footsteps, then the sound of someone dropping into a low chair with a soft thud, and after that he spoke in a noticeably looser voice.
[Just teasing. I’ll be a little lonely, sure, but I still have things to do before I go, and I should do them.]
“I’ll come back early tomorrow.”
[You can be a little late. Just come back to me. I’ve monopolized you this much; one day is nothing.]
Smiling at his tone—playfully feigning ease—he ended the call. Lau was right. He wasn’t the type to show it when responsibility wore him down mentally and fatigue wore him down physically; thinking about his recent state made Ihyeon uneasy about leaving him alone, but he also didn’t want to treat his parting with Yuni and Juhan lightly.
After putting everything he needed for the night out into his backpack, he went upstairs to set aside the Boston souvenirs no one had taken last week. Four shopping bags—including one for Inu—stood lined up by one side of the dining area. He was just reaching to grab the bags, thinking he’d swing by and hand Inu’s over on his way home tomorrow, when the videophone chimed.
He couldn’t think of anyone who would come by unannounced—and at a time when Lau wasn’t home. He turned and checked the screen on the wall pad in the living room. Shushu.
“Hi, artist. Want me to open the garage?”
[Mr. Seo Ihyeon... no. I’m fine. I parked out front.]
His face and tone on the screen were a little stiff. As a few possibilities rose in his mind, Ihyeon felt his chest seize all at once. He wetted his dry lips with his tongue, unlocked the front gate, and went out to meet him.
Climbing the steps from the gate up into the garden, Shushu’s face, thankfully, wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. He even showed a faint smile as he looked up at Ihyeon.
“He’s not here with you inside, I guess.”
“No.”
“Mind if I wait inside?”
Taking off his sunglasses as he stepped in, Shushu followed Ihyeon into the living room. Playing host to someone who likely knew this house as well as he did felt awkward, but regardless of his relationship with Lau, he was the one living here now, so hospitality fell to him.
Instead of coffee or juice, Shushu asked for beer and ice, and when Ihyeon came back to the living room with a tray, he was looking up at Exclusion, back on its original spot on the wall.
“I’ll be fine on my own. I’ll make myself comfortable like it’s my house, so you don’t have to fuss over me.”
Shushu said it playfully as he took the tray and [N O V E L I G H T] sat on the sofa, but to Ihyeon it felt rude to leave him. And it wasn’t as if he had anything else pressing. There were still about two hours until the time Juhan had said he’d come pick him up, and his things were all packed.
“Of course, it’d be even better if you stayed with me.”
Looking up at the hesitant Ihyeon, Shushu gave a sly smile. It was a smile that said he understood it would be more comfortable for Ihyeon to stay here than to leave him alone.
Shushu poured beer over the ice in his glass, then handed Ihyeon the remaining half-bottle. Taking it, Ihyeon sat in the single armchair across from him.
They weren’t close, so Shushu didn’t make him completely at ease, but he’d learned well enough in Chicago that Shushu wasn’t difficult to deal with, so he wasn’t especially tense.
After the clink of the ice-tipped glass as he drank, Shushu spoke in his characteristic low, pleasant, gentle voice.
“I get the feeling you grew up in a stable home, loved plenty.”
Because he didn’t seem like someone who would casually speculate about another’s background—even in a positive direction—Shushu’s remark was unexpected, but it didn’t sound like a throwaway line.
“At first I thought you were quiet and introverted, maybe thick-shelled... but watch you a little and you can tell right away—your center is steady. It isn’t fear of being disliked, and it isn’t some intoxicated urge to be a good person—you genuinely have a heart that can think about the people around you.”
When I was young I didn’t judge people well and paid for it. —Adding that, Shushu laughed at himself. The laugh made Ihyeon inevitably think of Hong Seonyu.
“Wikun said the same. That he felt like he’d finally found someone he could trust and was thinking of bringing you into Phantom.”
As he said it, Shushu cut his eyes toward Ihyeon with a slight smile.
Back in Chicago, Shushu had called Lau “Awi.” Feeling a faint discomfort at the change to “Wikun,” Ihyeon drank to wet his throat.
“You know it as well as I do—Lau Wikun isn’t the type to lower his guard easily with strangers. And Phantom is, to him, a lover, a friend, a child-like... something like that, so he was even fussier about bringing people into Phantom. Now the situation has forced him to loosen up—hiring a new recruit, adding a director, that sort of thing.”
With a bitter expression, lips pressed, eyebrows lifting slightly, Shushu drank a couple swallows of beer that had lightened in color as the ice melted.
As for Lau’s firmness toward others, Ihyeon was one of the people with the most vivid experience.
He was the kind of person who wouldn’t go out of his way to actively explain even if there was a misunderstanding, who wouldn’t expose his consideration or kindness even after showing it. So that night at the Spanish tavern when they all drank wine together—the suggestion that Ihyeon work at Phantom in an official capacity—at the time, he hadn’t known that for Lau Wikun it was the highest recognition of the other’s value.
“When we first met—me and you—I think it was the day my solo exhibition opened...”
As Shushu narrowed his eyes, searching the past, Ihyeon nodded. Shushu smiled faintly, as if an amusing memory had come back.
“I don’t know if you remember, but you hadn’t been working officially very long back then. Because of my shyness, Wikun asked you to give up your spot for a bit.”
“I remember.”
“The way he talks is a little... you know? He doesn’t say anything wildly out of line, but he has no tact. No—rather than not knowing how, he just doesn’t have the idea of using wrapping paper to begin with. Even if the other person seems offended he doesn’t apologize, and even if they seem to have taken him the wrong way he doesn’t explain. He thinks the ones who run their mouths with ‘thanks’ and ‘sorry’ right away can’t be trusted.”
Maybe it’s a personality formed because he had flatterers around him since childhood, Shushu said, staring at a point in the air.
Every word of it was true. Back then, Lau’s remark hadn’t been an exclusion of him; it was simply an extension of the work. Now that he understood Shushu’s sensitivity better, he could understand it better, too.
But if it had been any other time—or something said by someone else—given his personality it wouldn’t have left much impression. The reason his feelings had wavered then wasn’t simply because Lau spoke bluntly without garnish. He realized now that he’d already been conscious of him, and words and actions from someone you’re conscious of land with exaggerated weight.
Rubbing away the droplets on the beer bottle with his thumb, Ihyeon said,
“He apologized then, Director.”
“......”
Shushu frowned as if he didn’t believe it, then gave a small shake of his head and laughed. If Lau were here, he looked like he would have teased him; it was a laugh that seemed to regret missing that chance.
Lau’s camera lens, suddenly thrust in like it would take him apart, slipping into the “Old Future” photo shoot in the garden.
Across that lens, in a tension so tight he could hardly breathe, a line spoken in a voice only Ihyeon could hear.
That it had been a clumsy apology from Lau. That even one short line—if it hadn’t been sincere—he wouldn’t have opened his mouth to say it. The many things he hadn’t known then—he could understand them now. The more he learned about Lau, the newer even their past versions of him appeared; the experience was fresh.
“Come to think of it, maybe people are right—those who are meant to make it, will, no matter what. A guy who wouldn’t let anyone get close, and then in one shot he meets an understanding person like you. His only lack was a fated loneliness, and now he’s got it all. On the unfairness of the world—at least that much, shouldn’t he agree?”
It didn’t sound like words polished to flatter him. It was closer to a mutter to himself, leaving the listener out.
“Wikun hasn’t had much to regret in life. Not just because of money—he was born with extraordinary gifts, and he’s strict with himself, so he never slacked on effort. So he hasn’t had many failures. As far as I know, maybe not even once.”
Having no failures didn’t mean he’d lived an easy life. But it was easy to accept that Lau had lived winning most of what he wanted.
“So he has a strong tendency not to understand the awkward, foolish parts of people. He’s never wanted someone, never loved someone—so of course he can’t understand feelings that pull you off your usual pace and shake you because of another person.”
Ihyeon thought he knew what Shushu was getting at. Since coming back to Seoul, Lau hadn’t given him the details, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that the severed ties among Shushu, Hong Seonyu, and Lau had pushed their way back into the present.
Probably Shushu hoped for Lau to understand the feelings that pull you off your pace—that inescapable foolishness. And probably that hope was sliding toward disappointment.
Thinking that might be why Shushu had come to see Lau today, Ihyeon was quietly tipping his beer when his gaze stopped on the magazine lying beside Shushu.
It was the only thing he’d had in his hand when he got out of the car. Rolled up when he came in, so he hadn’t recognized it—but it was the same magazine whose “Editor’s Review” had made Ihyeon think of Hong Seonyu a few days ago.
Even though he’d been drinking beer just moments before, his mouth felt bone-dry, and he tipped the bottle again, but the beer he and Shushu had split was already gone.
“So... I wanted Wikun to have that, too—someday, when he truly wants someone. To burn with worry over a relationship that won’t go his way, to fight with all the pretense thrown aside, both of them showing each other their dregs... those stubborn, sticky remnants of feeling built up over time that you can’t erase in a single instant as if they never existed.”
That’s not something you learn because someone explains it, but something you only know by going through it.
Murmuring that, Shushu finished the beer, ice left alone in the glass. Then, looking a little embarrassed, he smiled toward Ihyeon.
“Knowing Wikun is genuinely absorbed in you—I was honestly expecting a lot.”
“......”
“I wanted you to torment him for a good while, make him wait even though he knows it’s reckless, keep him from sleeping at night, and then... to be swept up in the need to be understood exactly as he is, to bare everything, and tremble in fear leaving the judgment entirely in the other person’s hands... I wanted him to experience the very things he himself used to think were foolish and silly, through you.”
Saying that, Shushu tipped the glass and tossed one or two shrunken, melted ice cubes into his mouth. Watching his dark face—like a man feeling stifled in a cramped space—while fiddling with the beer bottle, Ihyeon gathered his courage.
“I don’t know about the Director... but I think that’s what happened to me.”
“......”
“I think I went through those feelings—through the Director.”
Shushu looked at him in silence for a long time. Then he set the glass on the table and smiled faintly.
“I think I know why it had to be you.”
“......”
“I don’t have much to brag about—really clumsy with people—but even so, in front of you, I’m just... comfortable. In Chicago, and now... I’m talking my head off like my shyness is a lie. I understand why, for Lau Wikun, it had to be you. Because you’re that kind of Ihyeon... you could fill even Awi’s only lack, and that too-long loneliness.”
If someone closest to Lau said that, it was a relief. But Ihyeon couldn’t be sure he was filling him as much as Shushu thought. He wasn’t confident. Thinking of Lau these days, holding out while carrying so many problems, he felt it all the more.
Even the “only lack” Shushu had mentioned—he hadn’t gotten fully to the core of him, not enough to pinpoint exactly what it was. He could only vaguely guess it might be connected to what he’d learned of Lau’s circumstances in Boston.
“It’s a huge deal, and... you’re still young, so I worried a little—what if you decided it emotionally, swept up in your feelings for him right now... but... looks like I worried for nothing.”
Shushu smiled, looking relieved, but to Ihyeon the meaning of his words—and of his smile—was unclear.
“You fully understood Awi’s situation and the loneliness he’s carried, and you considered carefully what changes are coming... and then you decided to become an omega, right? You would, Ihyeon.”
“......”
Ihyeon turned his words over for a long time. But no matter how long he thought, it seemed like something he could not understand.
“...Sorry?”
Even after all that puzzling, in the end all he could do was ask Shushu to repeat himself.
“Because being a Ghost—up to now, for Awi—it’s been like a clear brand only he can see, that forces him to separate himself from others. But if at least one person, the most important one, accepts him...”
“No... No, I... I don’t understand what you’re saying at all...”
Shaking his head hard, Ihyeon cut him off, as if to shake off the confusion speeding in like dark clouds from somewhere with ominous speed. It felt like even if he heard more here, he wouldn’t be able to digest a bit of it.
Expression slowly drained from Shushu’s face as he stopped speaking. As people do when they’ve heard something they can’t believe, he blinked fast, several times, with an awkward smile that looked like denial.
“Ihyeon... what is this.”
“......”
“Don’t tell me... you really don’t understand a word I’m saying right now?”
Under his cautious question, the skin beneath Shushu’s eyes and his cheeks fluttered in fine tremors.
“In Chicago—the last day—Awi’s eyes were clearly...”
His words broke off, never making a full sentence. His gaze, wandering all over the air, darted urgently back to Ihyeon.
“You were definitely with Awi that morning, right up until then, weren’t you?”
He was talking about the day before they left Chicago. Lau and Shushu had attended Chloe Kent’s luncheon, and Yuni and Ihyeon had gone sightseeing, just the two of them... Ihyeon tried to summon up the morning of that day. But his head was a mess, and it was hard to fish anything usable out of it.
“That day. Lau Wikun’s eye color—you didn’t see it?”
“His... eye color?”
“You were together until morning. No, it wouldn’t have been only that day... you really didn’t see his eye color?”
“He was very tired that day...”
The one who truly knew nothing was Ihyeon himself; even now he didn’t even know what it was he didn’t know, yet it was Shushu before him who looked more like a man being strangled. His pale face, always white to begin with, had gone even more bloodless and dry.
“You decided to become an omega.”
The one line he hadn’t understood thudded faintly against Ihyeon’s chest from far away, like an ominous drum.
As if they were holding a bomb that would go off the moment they looked away from each other’s eyes, they stared without even blinking.
“How could that...”
Murmuring almost without moving his lips, like a ventriloquist, Shushu swallowed hard, like a man with a needle between his teeth.
“Ihyeon.”
“......”
“Let’s go to the hospital.”
