“I’m really sorry, but I... I don’t have anywhere to go tonight. It’s not that I don’t want to be with you and Yuni... it’s just... my head is a mess right now....”
“Ihyeon, you don’t have to explain. Let’s just go.”
Laying a gentle hand on his shoulder, Inwoo cut off his rambling.
“......”
But Ihyeon couldn’t follow the pull toward the car; he stayed rooted to the spot. Taking the small shopping bag from Ihyeon’s hand into his own, Inwoo let out a soft breath.
“I won’t... tell Wikun.”
Only then did Ihyeon slowly lift his head and meet Inwoo’s eyes, and this time he let himself be led.
While driving, Inwoo kept sneaking glances at the passenger seat, but he didn’t ask anything. Even sensing his gaze, Ihyeon pretended not to, staring blankly out the window and worrying at his dry, cracked lips. He mocked himself for the very him-like thought that it would be nice to run away somewhere far where he wouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone, wouldn’t have to face the problem at all.
Just like he’d once said at a Phantom party, the view from the living-room windows of Inwoo’s apartment on the thirty-second floor was literally Seoul’s nightscape spread wide underfoot. Thinking it had a different character than the view from the second floor or the rooftop of Rau’s house, Ihyeon pressed himself close to the floor-to-ceiling glass and poured out admiration, not wanting to let even the smallest thought tied to Rau rise up.
“I’m glad you like the view... but put the bag down. What, you got treasure in there?”
Coming from the kitchen with two glasses, Inwoo met his eyes through the window and snorted a laugh. Embarrassed, Ihyeon slid the backpack off his shoulder and accepted the glass. Inwoo’s was whiskey over ice, but Ihyeon’s was warm milk. Like what Rau had brought him that summer night of pounding rain when his uncle showed up, sitting him in the tub while he trembled.
“Um, if it’s okay... I could....”
“Ah... I don’t have any beer at home right now....”
“I can drink whiskey.”
Realizing he was acting like a kid who, by stubbornly insisting he can do everything adults do, only ends up showing how green he is, Ihyeon clamped his lips shut. Watching Inwoo ruffle his hair with a faint laugh and disappear toward the kitchen with the milk, he felt a late pang of regret, but didn’t call him back.
He was just as thrown by his own string of out-of-character words and actions. The way unforeseen behaviors popped out, breaking past inertia and control, reminded him of whack-a-mole. Only, he had no will to lift the mallet and whack at the moles as they popped up to taunt him.
Turning his head as he scrubbed his face, he stopped at the mess of an easel and art supplies in the corner where two walls of windows met.
The canvas looked more than half painted. The style—bold colors, cheerful cartoon strokes with a faint twist of eeriness—was far from Inwoo’s usual touch.
It was much more daring and direct. And yet it held richer story and feeling than usual. It didn’t feel like the usual intent of diluting inner weight with a joking tone. On the canvas, the desperate movements of a naked man writhing in the open, as if fed up with feigned ease masquerading as avoidance and denial, grabbed the eye.
“Ihyeon, over here.”
Between the sofa and the kitchen, at a long, wide dining table that looked like it could host a comfortable banquet for about ten, Inwoo lifted his glass and called him over.
“Were you... working on that painting?”
“I’m the type who can draw just fine even with someone staring, but when I think it’s you watching, I get shy for no reason.”
“I didn’t know you painted at home.”
“I’m not someone who’s staked everything on painting to the point I need a separate studio. Like someone else would say.”
Setting the tray of glasses from the kitchen on the table, Inwoo flicked only his eyes up at Ihyeon and smiled. He had a feeling he knew exactly who “someone” was, but Ihyeon only tugged up one corner of his mouth and gave no other reaction. He sat, accepting the glass with a few cubes of ice and whiskey poured over them, and took the seat across from Inwoo.
“The work feels... a little different.”
“When it comes to pictures, you’re a real fortune-teller. Like someone else would say.”
He had the sense Inwoo was deliberately repeating references to Rau, so this time he couldn’t follow him into a laugh. He dropped his gaze, stroked the glass in his hand, and let the liquor slide into his mouth slowly, like hot coffee.
“Maybe it’s because in front of a painting you’re honest—so whether the artist put it in consciously or unconsciously, you catch the truth melted into it so well. With art like literature or music, the more you study, the more you see, and your range and depth of interpretation widen and deepen accordingly—that’s true. But the limit of seeing a painting only as a target for academic interpretation isn’t something you fix just by studying hard. That’s what I think.”
He lifted his eyes to look at Inwoo. Lounging in his chair with his upper body relaxed, Inwoo rubbed the back of his neck and laughed, as if embarrassed by his own long, serious spiel. Maybe the change in him wasn’t confined to the paintings.
Everyone was moving somewhere. While he, afraid of change, stayed hardened in a shape twisted by trauma and hurt, people who had chosen differently were drawing in even shock and transformation as nourishment and absorbing them.
For them, the wound itself was personality. Like Rau said...
But without paying a price, the wound itself can’t become personality. It’s a radiance granted only to those who face their wounds with their own power and pass through the time of pain with no discount, with their whole body.
He bit down on his lower lip until it hurt, and the taste of liquor lingered on it.
“I appreciate you saying that, but....”
The harshness of the whiskey Rau often drank made him think of kissing him. Even this morning before he went out, they had kissed deeply, but now it felt distant and hazy, like recollecting a past life.
Clenching the hand holding the glass and the teeth worrying his lip, he stared holes into the ice and went on.
“You can’t call someone honest in front of a painting when he’s the one who abandoned it.”
“You’re painting again. You couldn’t bring yourself to throw it away completely. That’s what matters.”
Before Inwoo had even finished, Ihyeon emptied his glass in one go and declared himself with ruthless finality.
“Thankfully... I’m painting again. Thanks to someone else’s help.”
Feeling like, no matter how many corners he turned and how hard he ran, he was trapped in a maze that led him back to the start—that he couldn’t avoid ending up at Rau—he gave a bitter smile and stood. He fetched the shopping bag from the sofa, brought it back, set it on the table, and slid it a little toward Inwoo.
“This....”
“......”
Inwoo’s eyes widened a touch, asking what was inside.
“They’re Starbucks City Tumblers. This one’s from Chicago, and this one... from Boston....”
As he took them out one by one and explained, his hands and words slowed. He let out a weak laugh and scrubbed his face.
“I should’ve at least wrapped them. I’ve got no sense....”
“Picking these shows good sense, what are you talking about. For a Starbucks City Tumbler, these are really pretty. I didn’t expect you’d get one in Boston, too. You two barely had time to... be cozy together. Thanks. Honestly... I figured you wouldn’t remember.”
Turning the orange Boston tumbler in his hands like he was appreciating it, Inwoo let a faint smile touch his mouth, lost in thought.
In Boston, when he’d said he wanted to stop by Starbucks for a second to buy a tumbler as a gift for Inwoo—Rau’s furrowed brow showing his jealousy, the boyish, whining tone. And the feel of Rau’s arms cinching him from behind, tugging his waist as he tried to choose, the warmth against his back... all of it came back with a single tumbler in front of him.
But like this morning’s kiss, it skimmed the edge of his senses without adhesion, as if it belonged to a fictional person from a movie or a novel.
From the way Inwoo unconsciously slowed down at “cozy together,” Ihyeon could tell. Inwoo had already guessed that today’s sudden call had to do with Rau.
Well. What would be left if you subtracted Rau from him lately? No need for some grand deduction; it was simple.
Now that he’d been forced to stop, looking back he saw that not just day-to-day living but the entire architecture of his life was tied to Rau.
The other person’s influence steering his life itself.
Depending on whether he was there or not, everything—from the near stuff like food, clothing, shelter, to the far stuff like the direction of his life—literally everything changed.
Can you call that love with your chest out? Isn’t it dependency, a placing-in-trust?
Like his father’s love, after losing his mother and turning his back on the world—had he been loving in the very way he feared most? To shake off the new fear that thrummed like a faint vibration in a person’s gut when a tsunami born far offshore touches the beach, he swallowed more liquor.
“When we were in Boston, there was this really great Starbucks near Ellen and Marcus’s place. It felt like a distinctive, traditional local café more than a franchise chain... Oh—do you know Ellen and Marcus? You probably do, right? You’ve been friends with the boss for ages... They’re really good people, and when I went—”
“Ihyeon.”
Leaning forward from the backrest and dropping his big hand onto the table with a soft thud, Inwoo stopped the uncharacteristic babble.
“You don’t have to force yourself to chatter—I’m not going to ask anything. Of course... if you want to talk, I’ll listen anytime.”
“......”
Ihyeon’s gaze, fixed on Inwoo, slanted down to the tabletop.
From the moment he selected Inwoo’s name in his contacts, he’d meant to ask for help. He’d meant to diffuse the shock through him. But in the process of confirming the inside story, he was sure he would take on bigger damage... he was only delaying because he was afraid of turning it into a settled fact.
Wetting his lips with whiskey whose harsher alcohol hadn’t yet fully evaporated, he fixed his eyes on the glass, not on Inwoo, and opened his mouth as if someone else were manipulating him.
“Today, Shushu came to the house.”
“......”
“I think he had something to say to the boss, but the boss’s schedule is packed through Friday, so he’d gone out today too. I had time before going to meet Yuni and Juhan, so we waited together....”
Trying to say out loud what Shushu had told him, he let out a hollow laugh—it felt like a child about to tell some absurd story about meeting an alien or talking to his toy.
For someone who had lived only aware of ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) a world made of betas—with no ties to a golden alpha, not even much to ordinary alphas or omegas—the ‘ghost’s ability to turn a beta into an omega’ was even less sensible than talking to a doll, closer to a legend or a ghost story.
Rubbing his face hard with the hand not on the glass, he let it drop and propped his chin on the table.
“Do you... happen to know?”
Not knowing how to go on, he veered and threw the question at Inwoo. Propping his heavy chin as if bracing a collapsing body, eyes down, Ihyeon looked spent.
“Phantom, ghost... why the boss is fixated on those words.”
“......”
Inwoo’s mouth set hard, but his eyes wavered, unstable. Seeing that, Ihyeon’s eyes narrowed. A sinister, chilling premonition he didn’t want to believe seemed to ice through his whole body. Over the frozen body, someone lashed a whip mercilessly. His breathing broke in an instant, shoulders jerking; even after he swallowed and slicked his lips with his tongue, his mouth felt sandy, as if he’d filled it with grit.
He’d asked if he knew, but that was only the form of a question. He hadn’t imagined he’d get back a reaction that said he did.
“Then... the other things... you knew those too?”
The hand holding the glass and the lips voicing the ominous guess trembled apart from his will.
Inwoo’s face—lips parting like he might say something but refusing to let the words out, clamping shut as if he wouldn’t say a word about the question, eyes dropping with bitter weight—was an answer in itself.
“I guess... you did.”
