“Th — then what should I call you?”
Seowoo’s blank question left Lee Hyeon momentarily at a loss for words.
“Never mind.”
He turned sharply and headed for the front door. It seemed clear enough that he intended to walk with them, so Seowoo followed without a word. Dano, little yellow backpack on his shoulders, came along too.
* * *
After dropping Dano off and securing the stroller in its designated spot, Seowoo walked back out — only to find Lee Hyeon still standing in the daycare yard with no intention of moving. Coming closer, Seowoo found his eyes lit with something vivid.
“Lee Hyeon?”
“They really painted this entire building yellow, didn’t they.”
“Yes.”
“Even the roof?”
“……Yes.”
Seowoo answered with a puzzled look, thinking, why ask something so obvious.
“Ah — I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.”
“That’s fair. If you go around that side, the yellow continues all the way until you hit a chick’s face painted on the wall. A sprout illustration starts there and runs all the way around, and then the hall building in the back is painted entirely in light green.”
“Oh, is that so. It’s lovely. Shall we go.”
For someone who had been looking at it with such fascinated eyes, as though he had never seen anything like it in his life, the response was rather flat. Seowoo had explained it with some enthusiasm and now felt a little deflated.
There was no department store in the small town, so Seowoo led Lee Hyeon to the only SPA brand shop in the area. He had done so out of a lack of options — but Lee Hyeon followed along without much complaint and began looking around inside.
Even so — how does someone come all the way down here without a single change of clothes. Sure, there’s nothing a card can’t handle, but common sense says you pack at least one or two things to wear right away.
With nowhere to look thanks to Lee Hyeon’s t-shirt clinging to every ridge of his abdomen, Seowoo grumbled quite a lot on the inside. Just then, Lee Hyeon bent his elbow and nudged him.
“Pick something out. Something I can wear.”
“……”
“You don’t want to?”
“No, it’s fine.”
He had heard that morning, in passing, what Lee Hyeon had offered Donghyeok as pay. He had casually asked about working hours and then proposed five times the standard hourly rate. Seowoo had given up trying to understand why he was going this far — so he set that aside, and reasoned that having heard the amount, the right thing to do was to be fully present for the time he had agreed to give.
Seowoo made a loop around the shop with Lee Hyeon trailing behind him. Small as the store was, it still carried all the new season pieces. The problem wasn’t finding something suitable for him to wear — it was whether Seowoo could keep his eyes off him long enough to choose anything.
“For now…… shall we start with a top, pay for it, and have you change into it?”
He pulled something reasonable from the front display and held it out — and Lee Hyeon reached past Seowoo’s hand and picked up a different color.
“Something with a bit more color, if we’re choosing.”
“You’re going to wear light pink?”
Lee Hyeon nodded as though that were obviously the right answer.
“It’s spring, after all.”
Leaving a slightly flustered Seowoo behind, Lee Hyeon went right ahead and picked out bottoms as well. He paid for the clothes and followed a staff member to the fitting room. Even the sight of him tearing the tags off brand new clothes to wear immediately felt unlike the Lee Hyeon he had known. Wasn’t this the man who only ever wore clothing that had been laundered by staff and set out without a single wrinkle? Seeing him emerge in a light pink knit and white cotton trousers felt even more unfamiliar.
“What’s next?”
“……How about this one.”
“Hmm, blue?”
“Yes. And then this one too.”
“Not black.”
“Really? Why?”
“I’m tired of dull things.”
Truly baffling. He remembered a person who wore nothing but neutral colors.
He kept saying each color out loud as though confirming something, then looking at Seowoo’s eyes — repeating the pattern over and over. Seowoo had thought the problem was the tight-fitting clothes, but really, it was that face and those lips that were the biggest problem of all. With nowhere safe to look, Seowoo swept clothes off the racks faster than anyone, his hands less than confident. He was clenching his brow so hard trying to keep his expression in check that his facial muscles were on the verge of cramping.
Once all the shopping was loaded into Lee Hyeon’s car and Seowoo climbed into the passenger seat, he checked the time — barely an hour had passed. He was already this drained, and the thought of spending the rest of the afternoon together made his breathing go unsteady on its own.
“Why are you so tense?”
“……I didn’t think you were this kind of person.”
“What kind of person am I, then.”
The car had barely started moving and Lee Hyeon was already striking up conversation — Seowoo was caught off guard again. He missed his window to respond while deliberating over what to say, and by the time he surfaced, the car had already left the town center behind.
When the view outside the window shifted to a soft pink blur of flowering trees, Seowoo asked lightly:
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
It was the black compression bandage wrapped around his right hand that had been on Seowoo’s mind since earlier. Lee Hyeon turned his head at that.
“Do you want to drive?”
“……No.”
Does he know about my situation — that I can’t drive — and is saying that on purpose? Should I explain? Seowoo was mid-thought when yet another question hit him. What a strange person, wanting someone who can’t even drive as an assistant.
Even when Seowoo glanced over with that question in his eyes, nothing could be read from Lee Hyeon’s expression. He simply looked ahead and picked up speed.
The place Lee Hyeon stopped the car was a quiet bridge, slightly out of the way. Along the edges of a shallow stream — its water level low from drought — flowering trees grew dense, and low hills enclosed the area on all sides. The secluded terrain, combined with the jumbled mix of flower tree varieties, seemed to have kept it off tourists’ radars.
And yet — how did he find a place like this. Seowoo murmured a quiet sound of admiration as he set up the camera tripod at Lee Hyeon’s direction. The scene through the viewfinder held an unexpected, otherworldly quality he hadn’t anticipated.
Mist that had drifted down from the hills had pooled, making the trees look as though they were submerged in clouds. Was there a way to capture in the lens the way sunlight filtered through the white veil in between? He was adjusting the ISO, deep in thought, when he heard Lee Hyeon murmur quietly beside him.
“The light moves like waves. Just like the surface of the sea.”
Seowoo nodded in agreement — but felt a flicker of puzzlement. For someone who seemed to have encountered every beautiful thing this world had to offer, and who was himself more beautiful than this landscape, the tone was far too sentimental.
“You seem to understand it better than I do. The fact that you found a place this wonderful……”
“It’s been three years since I’ve seen color like this.”
“Is it really that striking.”
Well — post it on social media and it would be a hotspot overnight, so it wasn’t an exaggeration. Lee Hyeon took the camera from Seowoo’s hands and began taking photographs himself.
Once again, Seowoo was an assistant in name only with nothing to do, and stood around like a spare post watching Lee Hyeon. It felt rather like being a bodyguard standing watch at his side. He still couldn’t quite understand it — but if this was what was needed, he saw no reason to ask. He seemed to occasionally become a subject in Lee Hyeon’s photographs, but he didn’t stop that either.
After a simple lunch of sandwiches, the tour of the scenery continued. As his tension gradually eased, Seowoo found himself, in the end, enjoying it a little. He had lost all track of time in the open air when the alarm for Dano’s pickup snapped him back to reality.
“I…… need to go pick Dano up now.”
“Has it been that long already?”
“If it’s alright, could I head out first?”
At Seowoo’s careful question, Lee Hyeon looked up. The man who had been immersed in a flood of color came back to himself quickly at the sight of Seowoo’s expression — hesitant, watching for a reaction.
“Let’s go.”
Without another word, Lee Hyeon accompanied him on the pickup walk, and followed Seowoo right through the daycare entrance as though he were a parent. Apparently quite taken aback at the sight, the daycare teacher asked a question she would never normally ask.
“Oh my…… Excuse me, who are you?”
“He’s arrtist.”
It was Dano who swooped in with the answer.
“Hmm? Cookie?”
“Arrtist, not cookie!”
On the way home, Lee Hyeon left the car and chose to walk with the two of them instead.
“Once you pick the baby up, what does the rest of your day look like?”
“Well — we eat a fairly early dinner, and then I head back out to the shop and work until closing. It’s only possible because Sangoh is very considerate.”
“Hyung-a likes meat. Roaar! Dano doesn’t like it.”
“Dano needs to eat plenty of meat too, so you can grow big and tall.”
“Dano is a kitty cat. Meow. Appa is meow too.”
“Appa likes doggies, though.”
“Nooo-meow. Meow.”
Dano, riding comfortably in the stroller and kicking his little legs, had barged right into the middle of the conversation. There was no logic to it whatsoever, but Yoon Seowoo gave answers to every bit of it. Lee Hyeon had no intention of joining in — and truthfully, there was no opening to join in.
Pushing the stroller’s handlebar, Yoon Seowoo was smiling the entire way. He was still smiling even in the moments when his eyes weren’t on the child. It struck Lee Hyeon as remarkable — that he laughed out loud over nothing remarkable at all, like a latch coming undone — and the pure, uncomplicated affection, something Lee Hyeon knew he could never replicate, felt almost otherworldly.
I don’t think Yoon Seowoo used to smile this easily.
What was it about this tiny child that made him smile so brilliantly. Perhaps that was what had left him speechless. Because after three years, he could see color again — because the scenery all around was shining too vividly, too beautifully. It wasn’t solely because it was Yoon Seowoo.
Surely.
