My teacher’s careful, gentle voice continued as he gave the back of my hand a light, encouraging pat.
“It might sound like Director Ryu spoke only from the business side, but take it as proof he sees potential in you. Even if he talks like that, he’s not the sort to charge into a brick wall.”
I looked down at my hand, sitting awkwardly near the rim of the teacup, and nodded without thinking.
It was exactly as my teacher said. He wasn’t someone who would invest in a prospect that looked unwinnable. But no matter how perfect he seemed—even as a top-tier Golden Alpha—he was still human. I had the nagging sense that this time his judgment was off. Why me?
“I heard he owns the picture you painted back then—the one that placed in the contest.”
“......”
I slowly turned my head to look at my teacher beside me.
He hadn’t been in Korea then. He would have heard about the award from his sister, my mother’s friend. He couldn’t know what that picture meant to me. Even so, I tensed up. My throat felt so dry it stung.
How much had he told my teacher? That I’d confessed it was my painting, then stared like I’d seen a ghost, couldn’t breathe, and blacked out—had he asked if my teacher knew anything about that?
I looked at him with eyes that must have shown that blend of curiosity and unease. For me, it was a bold move. He sat with his arms folded, watching me, and offered no hint.
“Ryu’s kept that piece a long time. I always thought it was striking. I didn’t know it was yours.”
“That was... a long time ago... I haven’t painted in over five years. And you’ve never seen anything else I’ve done...”
It took effort to gather my wits and force the words out, and still a light snort came from across the table.
“If you need a portfolio with twenty-plus works to gauge an artist’s capacity or potential... you should give up on making a living as an art dealer.”
“......”
“I said it like a jerk, but I mean the one piece was enough. All the more so if it was painted at sixteen.”
As if to erase the crooked cynicism of what he’d said earlier, he added an explanation in a more measured tone.
His praise for Alienation surprised me, and he wasn’t someone who tossed empty flattery around in matters like this, so it didn’t make me feel bad... but a person who hyperventilated just from confronting an old painting was not going to start painting again. It wasn’t the same as doodling in a notebook now and then.
“I took five years off.”
I almost mumbled it, but in that small room there was no one who wouldn’t hear.
My teacher shifted closer, set his free hand lightly on my back, and kept holding my hand.
“I agree with him. I told you before—there’s nothing to apologize for just because you aren’t painting right now, and I meant that. But it’s also true that if the chance comes—if you want to—I’d like you to paint again. Because I know what you can do.”
“Teacher... I’m really grateful you think that way, but... that’s all... too long ago.”
“Oh, ‘long ago.’ How old are you now, Mr. Seo? Fifty? Forty? No, have you at least hit twenty-five?”
For a second he seemed to show patience, then he earned another sharp look from my teacher with that abrasive tone.
In general, he might be right. I wasn’t forty or fifty; I wasn’t even twenty-five yet. Maybe I was too young to talk about “long ago.” If people learned that I was living with a part of myself cut away—rotted, with the blood not circulating, still bound by the cord of the past—they might click their tongues and call me weak-willed, say I’d lost my passion too early.
In truth, there were many people around me who severed a past that tried to destroy part of them, who sacrificed something and bled and moved forward.
I wanted the courage they had. I wanted to live in the light of the present. But every person has a pace. From where I stood, I wanted to move forward at my pace—not put on a performance that only looked like theirs.
“Ihyeon, what he and I want is for you to focus only on whether you have the desire to paint again. If it wasn’t that you stopped wanting to paint but that you decided not to—could your mind change? You can take your time.”
It hadn’t been that I stopped wanting to paint, and it hadn’t been a decision not to paint. At first, it was neither. I simply couldn’t paint anymore.
Looking down at my teacher’s hand layered over mine, I opened and closed my lips several times before I managed to speak.
“I probably... can’t.”
They both waited for me.
“I’ve been away from it too long, and while I let painting go, any affection or passion I had for it... just faded. I’ve spent all this time assuming I’d never do it again, so... I can’t even picture myself painting.”
I had never told either of them the details of my present and of the path that led here. It was the most honest explanation possible under those conditions. If I added anything more, it would either be a lie or a confession—and I wanted neither.
“All right. Thank you for being honest. We didn’t expect you to give us a yes on the spot tonight. It’s a sudden proposal; you weren’t going to change your mind at this table. If you’ve organized thoughts of your own about painting, all the more so.”
My teacher, who had been soothing the back of my hand with his other hand, now clasped both of mine tight.
“But listen, when Ryu brought up the idea that you try painting again... I was, honestly, grateful to him.”
Emotion stirred in my teacher’s expression as he looked at me.
We hadn’t stayed closely connected since my childhood, but I knew what quivered and broke in his gaze wasn’t sentimental pity for a former student’s bleak past. As a child, my teacher and I had shared a secret garden, and he had perfectly understood the world I saw. When I was too young to affirm myself on my own, he helped me expand my world and find ease inside it.
I didn’t need to hear the details of why he felt grateful to the other man. As grateful as he felt toward him, I felt that much sorry toward my teacher.
I couldn’t go on making negative statements. But it was just as hard to speak a positive one. I bit my lower lip and kept my eyes fixed on our joined hands, afraid even a small nod might hand my teacher unintended hope.
In the room, which had been filled only with the sound of the air conditioner, a fine thread of rain joined in. As if on cue, the three of us turned to the window almost at once. In the late evening, now dim, rain streaked the glass.
He was the one who cracked the heavy silence.
“Mr. Seo, try this.”
He pushed the plate of sweets—untouched until then—toward me. My teacher and I both lagged behind his abrupt change of subject.
When I didn’t react, he speared a small square of layered honey pastry on a fork and held it out to me.
“Go on. It’s a multi-layered traditional pastry, made like a flaky pastry by a master. A rare treat.”
“How do you even know words like ‘master’ when you didn’t grow up here?”
My teacher accepted the fork from him and handed it to me in turn.
“When you live away, you fixate. You know how people abroad turn into patriots.”
Spearing another piece on a second fork and passing it to my teacher, he arched his brow and answered with easy shamelessness.
“It’s not even your citizenship.”
“Citizenship is «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» only a legal and administrative status. I’m a quarter mixed, but half my blood is Korean. I only got half from my father.”
When I put the pastry in my mouth and chewed, honey that had soaked between the many layers seeped out and sweetened my mouth. It wasn’t a cloying sweetness that furrows the brow; it was a sweetness that loosened the eyelids.
“Well? You’d have regretted it if you’d skipped it, right?”
Leaning toward me as if thoughts on pastry were now more important than painting, he asked with a careful expression.
Even in the pale gray-blue of his irises and the clearly sculpted planes of his features, there was little trace of an East Asian cast. Only his black hair seemed to insist, quietly but stubbornly, on the truth of what he’d said—that half his blood was Korean.
At his question—“You’d have regretted it, right?”—I nodded.
He showed the deepest smile I’d seen from him yet. His jaw tightened in a vertical line, and a deep groove like a dimple dug into the side of his cheek.
■ ■ ■
Water shed from the restaurant’s loaner umbrella and spattered at my feet, flicking up onto my sneakers and the hems of my jeans.
It wasn’t a hard rain, but neither was it the kind of drizzle you could ignore without an umbrella. A foreign man, hood up on his windbreaker, came toward us with a golden retriever leading the way.
“Hi. Hi.” When the bearded man, his chin shaggy with golden whiskers, came within range to read a face, the two exchanged short greetings.
“Beautiful dog,” he said.
“Every time it rains he insists we go out, so here we are,” the man answered.
He laughed at that.
“Bye. Bye.” As the man brushed past me, he smiled at me, too, and I gave him the faintest returning smile and stepped aside so the man and the dog could pass.
His SUV, which had been out in the external lot, was rolling up toward the restaurant entrance. My teacher’s car had come first; he’d had another work engagement afterward, and about three minutes earlier he’d left, asking the other man to drive me home in his stead.
“Thank you for dinner.”
I tipped the umbrella to avoid the car’s headlights—parked tight to the curb—and addressed him.
“I’ll... walk a bit to clear my head and catch a bus, so don’t worry about what the chief said. Then...”
The umbrella blocked my view, so I couldn’t quite see his expression. And I can’t say I wasn’t avoiding looking on purpose. In front of his black lace-ups—more casual than usual for a Saturday night—I stepped past him and started up the incline where the foreign man had just come down.
“I was thinking of a drink to clear my head.”
I stopped and turned at his voice—echoing my own words back to me. He stood with one hand in his pocket and the other holding an umbrella, looking at me. In the rain, every scent grows stronger. I’d heard somewhere you can go lighter on cologne on rainy days. Like a wave that slides in and wets only the toes before receding, his scent hovered at the tip of my nose and then vanished, slipping away before it could sink deeper into my sense of smell.
“Will you keep me company?”
The inertia of my life told me to refuse and turn back for home, but the new stimulus that sweetly numbed that inertia wanted to inhale the scent and taste it. I didn’t know I had this kind of impulse and appetite in me. If I ever did, I thought they were dead now. His pale irises, which had looked like they might fade away at any moment, looked unusually blue.
■ ■ ■
Maybe he’d been holding back the urge to smoke for a while—no sooner had we taken seats at the bar than he lit a cigarette. Idly flipping through the tall, narrow menu each of us had been given, he said,
“Since it’s raining, how about something strong.”
Fiddling with the bag I’d set beside me under the awkwardness of a first time in this place, I nodded. Honestly, the awkwardness wasn’t about the place—it was about being here, just the two of us.
The bar was a ten-minute drive from the restaurant where we’d had dinner, perched on the uphill road leading to Namsan. The building itself wasn’t tall, but because it sat midway up Namsan it—
