I don’t know why I came here.
This wasn’t a judgment made in a normal state, weighing outcomes and aftermath. My steps toward this place—a place I’d only been once—were steered by the unconscious.
Like an ant or a moth that senses a cruel finger closing in to crush it and instinctively turns toward safety. I’d walked in a frenzy, desperately, and here I was.
It hadn’t been two hours since we’d parted at the bus stop across from the church, which meant he would be in the thick of round two with the others—something I realized only after I reached the tightly shut, heavy gate.
I stepped under the little brick awning above the gate, propped my umbrella in a corner, and rubbed my shaking, wet body with my arms, hugging myself. I’d clearly used an umbrella to get here, yet my hair and my whole body were drenched. I must have been gripping the handle on reflex, without even thinking to actually keep off the rain.
I took my phone out of my jeans pocket and made the call. If I’d been in a normal state, I wouldn’t have come to this house, and having shown up without notice, I wouldn’t have dared to call.
But the fingers that dialed the “Director” as I palmed the water off my face held no usual hesitation and made no room for polite pretense. Corner a human being and, to save himself, he skips courtesy and can act in any number of out-of-character ways.
Courtesy, the personality I think of as “me”—none of that was the solid form and content that made me.
And that isn’t the only part that’s flimsy and full of gaps.
However much I pretended to be even-tempered, I wanted to savagely mock and curse myself for the social and mental frailty that, in the end, always left my safety and calm at risk from outside intrusion, left me reeling.
I’d mistaken the blandness of nothing happening for peace.
Growing dull is a completely different concept from growing strong.
I hadn’t known that until now.
I told myself I’d chosen to be defensive rather than aggressive, but in truth I was hiding my body in a situation where aggression itself was impossible, where nothing was happening. How can you defend if there’s no attack.
My daily life rested, at best, on an endlessly unstable thin glass floor that could hold only if nothing happened.
I was no different from the me at sixteen—left exposed and unguarded to outside attacks, tossed around, and marked. The metallic cold of the thick iron gate against my back felt like it would freeze me to the bone.
I don’t know how long passed. It could have been five minutes; it could have been a horribly long time.
From the alley below where it met the road, headlights came in, cutting through the rain. Before the car that had come straight up without turning could stop properly in front of the gate, I heard someone hurry out.
I lifted my head slowly.
Before I could even raise it all the way, a figure dashed under the awning and swung his jacket around my shoulders. Before he asked anything, before any greeting.
The thin summer jacket covered my wet shoulders, and he pulled me in without a word.
A presence with nothing uncertain about it, unmistakable beyond doubt, caught hold of me. The firmness and heat of his chest and shoulders pulling me away from the cold at my back told me of his solidity—of the condensed hours of solitude in which he’d trained himself.
As he opened the garage with the remote and asked the driver-for-hire to park, I muttered over and over in his arms that I would paint, that I needed help. Like an unknown actor coming to an audition with a single line, no talent, only desperation.
He kept pulling the jacket tight around me and held me harder. The arm around my waist, the hand that came across my back to my shoulder, was like a rope cinched tight to keep me from dropping any farther into unproductive self-loathing and sentimental self-pity.
I squeezed my eyes shut as I felt the boiling panic subside just from his low, muttered curses as he pressed the back of my head so my face would rest on his shoulder.
I’d called him out of the blue, saying I was out front; I must have made him curious and startled him. But all he did was drive the cold out of me with his body heat. He asked nothing.
Still holding me, he paid the driver, then pulled the jacket tighter and led me through the gate. I felt the driver’s curious eyes flick over us, but I didn’t care.
His garden, dark under the downpour, smelled like the air and moisture of a deep forest. It felt like a different place from the garden where Yuni, Juhan, and I had played at a picnic, like the March Hare and the Hatter.
We crossed the bleak grounds where it seemed a slicker-clad figure might spring from the black shrubs any second. The air inside the entryway was unmistakably different—soft.
He knit his brows with an “ah, damn” look and bit his lip.
“Wait here a second.”
As he hurried toward the living room, I knew what he was worried about. At first I thought he was going to grab a towel, but the defeat on his face said otherwise. The painting. He was going to move Alienation.
I caught the side of his shirt near his ribs as he was stepping up into the entry hall and shook my head.
The painting itself wasn’t the problem. The reaction I’d shown then had been to the whole chain of past events the unprepared sight of that painting had conjured.
“It’s okay. Now it’s... really okay.”
“......”
Even with my whole body soaked, my voice was dry and raspy.
He stopped and looked down at me. Then, with a hand gentle to the point of caution, he covered my shoulders again and soothed me like a child.
“Then let’s go to the study. It’ll be warmer there.”
Water dripped from my T-shirt and jeans, and my wet socks printed the clean wood tiles, but he tugged my shoulder and told me not to worry about it.
Upstairs, he took me not to the study but to the bathroom—the one off his bedroom I’d used before.
First, warm up, he said to me, stiff in the doorway clutching the hem of his jacket like a lifeline.
“You don’t have to soap up. Just soak in hot water a bit.”
He bent, lightly swirled the filling bath with his fingertips as if to test the temperature, then looked back and added,
“When your core temperature drops, it won’t come up quickly unless you do this.”
I didn’t want ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) to impose any more than this, but I didn’t want to make him worry either. I nodded.
Instead of a foaming bath bomb, he sprinkled in bath salts with a faint scent, then dimmed the bathroom lights with the dial and gently slid the jacket from my shoulders—the jacket I’d been gripping like it was a lifeline.
Under his eyes on me from head to toe, I still minded the way the wet clothes clung to my body. I tugged the front of my T-shirt to peel it off my skin; he gave a quick snort of a laugh.
“Make sure you warm your head too.”
He ruffled my wet hair lightly and stepped out, closing the door.
I felt baffled, like a piece was missing from my memory—how had I ended up standing in his bathroom?—but it seemed best to just follow his instructions for now. Pride wouldn’t help; without help I didn’t have the nerve to fix this.
I struggled out of the wet clothes, climbed into the tub, and eased in. When my frozen body slipped under water hot enough to sting, my skin prickled. It was a sensation I associated with winter.
I scooped water into my palms and poured it over my face and head. My body loosened into lassitude, but the stiffness in my mind wouldn’t melt. I straightened against the urge to hunch from the threat reemerging, shaking my head, when—knock knock—a short tap, and the door opened about a handspan.
“May I come in.”
The door opened toward the shower stall, away from the tub. I could hear his voice, but not see his face.
I was naked and self-conscious, but I couldn’t make a fuss and ask him to leave.
“Yes...”
He came in carrying a change of clothes and a mug. He set the clothes on the rack by the door and came toward me. I drew my knees up awkwardly to cover myself, and he chuckled low over my head.
“Don’t suddenly get shy on me...”
“......”
My earlobes went hot at the smile in his voice as I took the mug he handed me. Warmed milk.
“Drink some. You’ll warm up, and it’ll calm you.”
“Thank you...”
The mug itself was hot, maybe warmed on purpose, the ceramic radiating heat.
I looked up at him still there after he’d watched me take a couple of sips.
Hands on his hips, looking down at me, he had the expression of an owner with a dog that ran out, worried him, and only dragged itself home after dark.
A dog that came back dirty and scraped from rolling in mud, digging in trash, fighting other dogs—a face that wanted to scold, but couldn’t quite for pity’s sake. If I had to draw the comparison.
Feeling like the runaway dog who has nothing to say for himself, I dropped my eyes again. He let out a long sigh.
“Come out when you’re warm enough. Change into the fresh clothes.”
My early negative impressions and stingy judgments of him felt ancient. Maybe not as much as with Yuni and Juhan, but at some point he’d started opening his kindness to me too. I didn’t know how much the fact that we’d shared a bed affected that, but I knew this kindness wasn’t only because we’d slept together.
When the mug’s warmth had faded to lukewarm, I finished the long bath, dried off, gripped the damp towel, and shuffled out. He was sitting in the armchair in the bedroom with a whiskey. In a lot of ways it felt like the first day I’d come to this room; my mouth went dry.
At my sound, he stood, came close, and rubbed the ends of my wet hair between his fingers, saying I should dry it. He looked like he might do it himself if I didn’t, so I obeyed.
While I sat at the mirror by the bathroom door and dried my hair, he leaned on the wall behind me and watched me through the mirror.
When I thought I’d finished, I set the dryer on the vanity and looked at him in the glass. He unfolded his arms, came without a word, flicked the dryer on again, and worked his fingers in deep, drying carefully down to my scalp. I’d “done it,” but it hadn’t satisfied him.
When he set the dryer down, he left his right hand on the crown of my head and studied me a moment in the mirror. When I met his eyes, he pressed his fingers once, firm, and left the mirror first.
It was a touch like this: annoyed at the unfazed way the runaway dog eats and plays with toys like nothing had churned inside its owner, you give it a pinch anyway.
I rubbed the spot he’d pressed and followed, standing from the mirror.
We moved to the study.
It was the time of year you could call high summer, yet there was a mild warmth underfoot—it seemed he’d turned on the boiler. Even so I didn’t feel hot. I couldn’t tell how long I’d spent shaking with fear and tension, or where in the small hours we were now.
His study, with its heavy mahogany built-ins and weighted palette and furniture, was old-fashioned but not authoritarian. It felt less like a place merely to read and research for fun and more like a small salon for discussion and company.
He gestured me to a high-backed, plush chair, then went to the cabinet arranged like a little bar, flipped on the kettle, and poured whiskey and tonic into glasses.
I sat awkwardly and stared at the dehumidifier purring on low, then, looking at his back as he stood turned from me, I worked up my nerve.
“Um... I’m sorry.”
He turned only his head to look at me.
“For calling out of nowhere and making you come home... I must have startled you.”
He came over with a teacup on a coaster and a rocks glass, and instead of reacting to what I’d said, told me he wasn’t giving me alcohol and handed me a white cup where pale green tea was steeping.
“I need to hear this sober.”
He added it like a stern scold with a touch of play, and sat in the chair opposite. In truth I wanted a little help from the bottle, but I was the misbehaving dog in this scenario, so I nodded meekly and wrapped my hands around the cup’s warmth.
He took a couple of savoring sips, turned the glass slowly in his hand, and spoke in a gentler tone.
“The sudden call surprised me, but I chose to come home after I got it, so there’s nothing for you to be sorry about. If I hadn’t felt like it, I’d have told you to go back.”
The man I was getting to know by experience wasn’t like that, and yet he rated himself as rather cold-blooded.
“I’m glad you say you’ll paint... but I didn’t want you to come looking like someone chased by a ghost and surrender the words.”
He set his glass on the side table by the chair. His gaze, angled roughly toward my shoulder, tracked slowly up to find my eyes.
“You asked for help, didn’t you?”
“......”
“How should I help you. Tell me what kind of help you want.”
I had said that in front of the gate. That I would paint, that I needed help. It had been unconscious muttering, but I knew why I’d said it.
He watched me toy with the cup and twitch my lips without getting a word out, and he exhaled a low, thoughtful hum.
