Perhaps it was because they’d parted only an hour after meeting. After Seowoo left, his condition dropped steadily as time went on. Focusing on his painting was out of the question, naturally. He tried drawing a few lines, but they felt worse than the scribbles the child had left behind.
Maybe I should just sleep. That wasn’t easy either. His senses, sharpened to a fine edge, chased after nothing but the faint trace of Seowoo’s pheromones lingering in the air. Watching them scatter moment by moment, blending with his own — it felt like stress was building up in layers.
The moment he saw the lights of Blue Giraffe go out and the closed sign light up, Hyeon was overtaken by an emotion he couldn’t understand even in himself. He wanted to run downstairs right then, stop Sangoh as he left for the day, and demand to know where Yoon Seowoo had gone.
What is this, exactly.
Had the pheromone neurosis rotted so deep that even his mind was starting to deteriorate? At this rate, he began to doubt whether either he or Seowoo’s condition would ever get better. He felt ridiculous for thinking he’d found a breakthrough — a solution.
“……”
All at once, a heavy heat rose beneath his lower abdomen. Hyeon opened his closed eyes and braced one hand against the tile wall.
He tried to ignore the unnatural warmth at first. He told himself it was because his senses were on edge after that unpleasant encounter earlier — that Seowoo’s pheromones had simply felt more vivid by contrast because of it.
The sweet scent soaked beneath skin that had been flushed and warm. The faint tremor he’d felt when he buried his face in the side of Seowoo’s neck, and the small voice barely let out. The pale face he’d seen just moments ago in front of the studio.
But the aftershocks of the night before only grew sharper the harder he tried to ignore them, and his body’s reaction refused to subside. If anything, the only thought that kept surfacing was that Seowoo was sitting just one door away.
If he just opened the door——
Hyeon bit down hard, irritation flaring.
“This is going to drive me insane.”
The low murmur dissolved into the sound of the water.
The hand braced against the wall tightened, and the breath he tried to suppress kept turning rougher. Behind his closed eyelids, in the reddish haze, all he could see was Yoon Seowoo.
The pale nape of his neck. The collarbone glimpsed briefly. The eyes that had tried to avoid him even while drunk. Even the hands pushing him away had been a provocation. The fragments stacked upon each other, swelling hot and full.
Hyeon grabbed himself with something like spite.
Inside his wet palm, the hardened flesh gave a jolt. Already wound up tight, his skin was hot and oversensitive. Just gripping and stroking loosely was enough to send a sharp pull through the base of his spine. He gritted his teeth and bowed his head, and the force of the water rushed down over his face.
Yoon Seowoo. Seowoo. He ground the name through his teeth, and his erection seemed to swell even fuller.
“Ha……”
A rough breath slipped out through wet lips.
Hyeon tightened his grip and dragged it slowly up, then down. The lukewarm water mixed with the slickness already there, adding to the sensation. With every upward stroke the tip trembled with sensitivity, and each time he pulled back down the muscles of his lower abdomen drew taut.
His breath cut short. His inner thighs tensed, and the tension spread all the way to his toes pressing into the tile floor. Hyeon swayed against the wall and let his head fall back.
“Yoon Seowoo……, ngh.”
A suppressed groan tore free from somewhere in his throat, and a lukewarm climax washed over him. The milky white spilled out, caught in the water, and ran down the drain.
In the same instant, a clear realization crashed through him. The fact that he recoiled so viscerally from unfamiliar pheromones — and yet with Yoon Seowoo, he could come undone like this.
***
Seowoo had been sitting quietly on the sofa when the sound of the water from the bathroom went on longer than expected, and he began to feel mildly restless.
With no one watching, the tension’s probably eased up. He set the tumbler he’d been holding onto the table and carefully got up from his seat. Moving around someone else’s space without permission still felt presumptuous — but he knew the difference between what Hyeon had said he could look at and what he hadn’t.
The first place his feet took him was, naturally, the work space. Seowoo admired Hyeon as a person, but more than anything, he loved his work.
“Oh, Dano’s drawings……”
On the work table, Seowoo found something unexpected.
The scribbles Dano had left behind that morning hadn’t been thrown away — they’d been neatly gathered together. Without even realizing his lips had curled into a smile, Seowoo turned the papers over one by one and looked through them. The drawings, tangled masses of colored lines and blobs, were honest and guileless in a way that was purely Dano.
Next his gaze moved to Hyeon’s collection of sketches and the canvases leaned up together. It felt a little like peering at a secret — but he had already been given permission to look once before, so he gathered his nerve.
Back then I was too drowsy to really look……
As Seowoo flipped through the paintings stacked together one by one, a question slowly surfaced in his mind.
Something about several of the pieces felt strangely off. The first time he noticed, he thought it was simply unfamiliarity. Three years had passed between them, and the studio had changed too. Maybe Hyeon was trying new approaches for the series he’d mentioned. Or maybe Seowoo just wasn’t grasping the context of these works.
But the more he looked, the more distinct the sense of wrongness became.
It wasn’t a change in style, and it wasn’t the kind of sloppiness you’d expect from a beginner’s mistake. There was a discord that couldn’t be explained. Like answers deliberately made wrong.
Seowoo’s brow furrowed.
It was like——
“Like he painted it with his eyes closed?”
The moment the thought slipped out of his mouth, a chill ran down his skin for no reason. It was an outrageously rude thing to think. There was no one watching, no one to hear it — and yet he turned his head and glanced around the room.
“……”
Even trying to tell himself it couldn’t be that, the strangeness remained. Each and every painting clearly carried Hyeon’s distinctive texture and force — and yet inside that, there was an inexplicable tremor embedded. Yes. It was exactly like walking a familiar road blindfolded.
Seowoo lifted a painting and tilted it at different angles, examining it from every direction. He felt an urgent, almost desperate need to find the answer to the riddle.
Just then — click. The sound of the bathroom door opening.
Seowoo startled and spun around. All his confident justifications for looking vanished in an instant, and he fumbled to put the painting down like a child caught doing something wrong. Then he dashed back to the sofa and picked up his tumbler, taking a sip of cold coffee as though nothing had happened. His heart felt like it might leap right out of his throat and splash into the tumbler.
Did he see? Did he see me looking at the paintings?
But Hyeon emerged from behind the partition after changing his clothes, his expression unbothered. He towel-dried his damp hair carelessly as he walked straight to the refrigerator.
He pulled out a large can of beer and, without even closing the fridge door, cracked it open where he stood. Then he started drinking straight from it. His long, straight throat bobbed in a steady rhythm — once, twice, several times — and when the can was empty, it crumpled in his grip with a crushing sound.
He pulled out another one. Only then did he turn toward the sofa where Seowoo was sitting. Tsst — the pull tab lifted and the carbonation hissed out cleanly. Hyeon started drinking the second can, and Seowoo instinctively glanced up at the clock on the wall.
It isn’t even noon yet, and he’s already drinking……?
Before he could even finish the thought, Hyeon was right in front of him. He dragged over a wooden-legged armchair with one hand and sat down facing Seowoo, close enough for their knees to almost touch.
A wide-necked white plain tee that left his collarbones completely exposed, loosely fitting indoor pants in the same relaxed style, a towel around his neck and damp hair — there wasn’t a single thing about him that was easy to look at.
“So…… how are we doing it today?”
Seowoo asked carefully, and instead of answering, Hyeon set the remaining beer down on the table. Droplets beaded on the cool aluminum surface and ran down in a slow trail. He dragged his finger slowly through the condensation, wiping it away.
He looked like he was choosing his words, and Seowoo’s eyes couldn’t help but drift to those lips. When their gazes finally met, Hyeon parted his mouth.
“I’ll be direct.”
He sat with one leg crossed over the other, long fingers interlaced and resting on his knee. Over the taut muscle of his forearm, blue veins pulsed like living rope beneath the skin.
“What do you say we sleep together?”
