The forced meal — worse than chewing on gravel — finally came to an end, and Donghyeok proceeded to pick Dano up and push ahead with getting ready to go out.
Having lived as close as family ever since Dano was born, Donghyeok had no trouble dressing the child and gathering everything needed for the outing. Getting his shoes on and having him standing at the front door happened in an instant. Seowoo had run out of the energy to stop them and simply stood there with his hands on his hips.
Then Lee Hyeon stopped the two of them as they were heading out the door.
“Oh — little one, just a moment.”
Dano looked up, understanding he was being called, and Lee Hyeon pulled a Blue Giraffe plush toy from his pocket and held it out. Dano’s round eyes went wide at once, and he shot a finger straight up into the air.
“Oh! That’s Dano’s!”
“You dropped it and left it behind. I brought it back.”
“……Thank you.”
“Fank you!”
Seowoo said thank you, and Dano immediately echoed him. He stopped himself mid-reach for the toy, folded both hands together at his belly button, and gave a polite little bow. Then he hurriedly gathered his giraffe plush into his arms and hugged it tight. Even Lee Hyeon couldn’t help but smile at that.
“I thought so last time too — this little one is really well-mannered.”
“Fank youuu!”
Realizing it was a compliment about himself, Dano gave another little bow.
Yes, it was clearly a kind thing to say. And yet Seowoo couldn’t bring himself to smile brightly. The reason he couldn’t take pure joy in it was that every time Dano and Lee Hyeon exchanged something — even just a feeling — a heavy stone settled deeper in his chest.
The two of them had left, and the space had clearly grown larger — and yet the moment the front door clicked shut, Seowoo felt like he couldn’t breathe. Lee Hyeon had always had a commanding presence to begin with, but knowing he was hiding something made the pressure feel even greater. Whatever it was he had come to say, he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet — and already Seowoo’s heart was beating wildly and cold sweat was gathering on his back.
Seowoo steadied himself and brewed some tea. He knew well that Lee Hyeon didn’t particularly enjoy coffee. As though the entire universe had known this moment would come, a tin of high-quality tea leaves that Min Sangoh had recently given him as a gift happened to be sitting in the cupboard.
“Here.”
“Thank you. It has a lovely fragrance.”
Seowoo sat down across from him without much of a reply. The relentless gaze that had persisted through dinner continued still. The longer he dragged it out, the more tangled his thoughts would become — so Seowoo spoke first.
“How did you find out about this place?”
He had clearly refused the assistant position, so it couldn’t be that he had come all this way to say the same thing again.
“Is that what you want to know?”
“……No.”
He already knew — unless there was no reason to look, finding someone was easy enough if you wanted to.
He wasn’t unaware that the hospital belonged to Lee Hyeon’s family — the Haein Foundation. But there were patients as countless as grains of sand, and the truth was there was no reason for Lee Hyeon to go digging through his records. If he hadn’t run into Lee Hyeon there that day, none of this would have happened. And since there was no one at that hospital to connect the two of them, he had been careless about it.
The courage he had barely managed to scrape together dissolved entirely with that one reply, and Seowoo dropped his gaze away from Lee Hyeon’s dark eyes.
“Then why did you com——”
“I came to visit.”
“Pardon?”
“Vacation.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Lying is what Seowoo does.”
“When have I ever——”
Seowoo’s head snapped up and he bit down on his lip. It was because Lee Hyeon was wearing an expression that said, see?
It had already been strange and out of nowhere when Lee Hyeon suddenly proposed the assistant position at their first meeting in three years — but the idea that he had come on vacation to the town where Seowoo lived was even stranger than that.
“Wh — when have I ever lied.”
“Is that so?”
“……”
He had wanted to seem unruffled, but that wasn’t going very well. He didn’t have the nerve to press back and ask what exactly he was lying about. He had no way of gauging how much Lee Hyeon knew, or what.
“Well, if that’s not it, fine. The point is — I’m asking you to spare me some time.”
“What kind of time?”
“Time to spend with me. Hire a part-timer for the shop. I’ll cover the cost.”
The shop — how does he know about that too, Seowoo was about to ask reflexively, but once again he only bit down on his poor lip. It felt as though Lee Hyeon had him sitting in the palm of his hand, tightening and loosening his grip as he pleased.
“……Part-timers aren’t so easy to come by, and if you need a guide, Chief Han would be far more capable than me.”
“I need Seowoo specifically. And Chief Han is on leave — he’s not available.”
“……”
Seowoo lost the will to respond. He could tell that no matter what he said, it would be meaningless against someone this unyielding. How do you stop a person who has come fully prepared to have a tantrum? Refusing had never been an option from the start.
On top of that, I’m someone with something to hide……
Seowoo blinked, his thoughts stopping there.
“The more I listen to you, it feels like you’ve already decided I’m going to say yes to everything.”
“You will, won’t you.”
Lee Hyeon tilted his head and smiled.
“Or are you going to run away again by making up some excuse about a spouse that doesn’t exist?”
“That’s——”
“You remember that painting you loved — the one we worked on together for my exhibition.”
Seowoo had been bracing to push back, half-expecting Lee Hyeon to keep toying with him — but he flinched.
Dano (丹梧). He hadn’t expected him to bring up that painting.
Surely he hadn’t come already knowing everything about the baby. A wave of fear turned his stomach so badly he couldn’t even respond — but Lee Hyeon continued right away.
“As it happens, that same painting was hanging in the hospital where we met again. I’m thinking of doing a series based on it. I was hoping Seowoo could travel around with me and help collect photographic reference material.”
“Photographs.”
“I’ve seen a lot of the photos you took while you were working at Suryeon. Don’t bother saying you can’t.”
Going back and forth between ice-cold water and scalding heat this fast would give anyone a heart attack. The relief of learning it wasn’t about Dano washed over him — but at the same moment, a certain point in the past surfaced without warning, and there was no stopping it.
“You’ll do it, won’t you?”
The eyes Lee Hyeon wore as he said that were just as beautiful as they had been back then — and Seowoo, caught off guard, missed his moment to refuse properly.
* * *
It had been a long and grinding fight. The man who was a father in name only had claimed even his mother’s death for himself, and had not allowed Seowoo even a handful of memories. To call it a fight was generous — they weren’t even in the same weight class. He had been too young, with nothing to his name. It was more accurate to say he had simply endured until he finally fell apart.
“If you want it that badly, go sell your body.”
The day he was robbed of ‘Suryeon’ by Yoon Kangwoo — his half-brother who shared nothing with him but a surname — and was humiliated, Seowoo had tried to burn it down.
The legal owner of the gallery was his father, Yoon Hyuntae — but the one who had built that place, which had been nothing more than a building, into ‘Suryeon,’ was entirely his mother’s talent and effort.
‘Suryeon’ was a space where his mother’s touch reached every corner — the exhibition hall, the studio, even a single blade of grass in the garden. Suryeon, soaked through with her traces, was also a memory Seowoo had wanted to protect. He had decided it was better to burn it all down himself than to see it destroyed at Yoon Kangwoo’s hands. He felt no need to think about what would become of his life after.
The helplessness and defeat that had occupied him for so long, combined with the early signs of a heat cycle that arrived at just the right — or rather, worst — moment, fanned a destructive urge inside him.
After the sun had fully set and darkness had fallen, Seowoo quietly returned to Suryeon alone. The space that had just finished hosting Lee Hyeon’s exhibition was so still it was impossible to imagine the warmth of the day.
Seowoo entered the room that had once been his mother’s studio and opened a bottle. He twisted out an aged cork and poured a sharp, heavy liquor down his throat without any particular order.
By the time he’d lost count of how many bottles he’d emptied, his body temperature had risen to an abnormal degree and his vision was beginning to blur. Strangely, as the sense of reality faded further away, he felt braver for it. Seowoo rummaged through the desk drawer and found a lighter.
“……Seowoo?”
The voice that cut through the air made Seowoo stop dead — he had been in the middle of lifting a glass bottle filled with turpentine.
Lee Hyeon had appeared.
It was Lee Hyeon who broke the stillness between them as they stood frozen like statues. Without letting go of the gaze that had locked onto his, he slowly stepped one pace further into Seowoo’s space.
“A studio is quite the atmosphere for drinking, I suppose.”
Lee Hyeon’s eyes swept the room. The scattered bottles. The remnants of his mother’s belongings that Seowoo had been digging through. And finally, they settled on the flushed, feverish face twisted with heat.
The sound of his footsteps approached Seowoo like a countdown.
Seowoo looked away first and stared quietly at the tips of the shoes that had come to a stop before his feet. Even as his head swam, the sleek silhouette of the leather shoes — unmistakably Lee Hyeon’s taste — looked strangely cold. In contrast, the warmth of the hand that reached over and took the glass bottle from him was burning hot.
“You can’t drink this — put it down.”
At the measured, admonishing voice, Seowoo jerked his head up. Whenever he met with Lee Hyeon, he had always tended to look downward rather than hold his gaze. Part of it was his position — professionally, he had always been the one below — and part of it was intentional avoidance, since looking directly at Lee Hyeon’s face had a way of stealing his senses.
So this eye contact, right now, was a kind of recklessness born from alcohol and the desperation of his situation.
