“Hey, hey!”
He tapped the cheeks lightly, but there was no response whatsoever. Startled, he pressed his fingers beneath the nose — thankfully, he was still breathing. He’d nearly had to arrange a funeral on the spot.
“Phew, you scared me……”
Looking at it now, the whole scene felt like something straight out of The Little Mermaid.
The story goes that you fish out a descendant of the royal family from the water, give them a few pats on the cheek, sing one song, and they wake right up on their own. Would that work here too, he wondered.
“I can’t sing, though.”
A certified tone-deaf person had to consider other methods. CPR, for instance.
But if someone’s already breathing fine, is CPR even necessary? Or is it? Would it be alright to try anyway? A shameless ulterior motive lifted its head, completely oblivious to the mood. As if to interrogate that very thought, thunder cracked down from the sky again. Rumble.
Right. Let’s not go pressing lips together with someone who’s breathing just fine for no reason.
Haeshin squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, as if resigning himself. Then his slender-boned hand gave the limp young man’s cheek a light pat. A delicate face, mismatched with that door-frame of a build, had gone pale white and was giving off a forlorn atmosphere.
“Wake up. Hey?”
First it was light taps, then firmer ones, then full-on slaps.
Just as the slapping was about to turn into something harder, Hwichan — one cheek flushed red — painfully dragged his eyes open. A faint groan slipped out from between pale lips.
Haeshin breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of him stirring and breathing normally. Hwichan, coming back to his senses, spotted Haeshin’s unscathed face — and immediately forced himself upright. And then——
“It’s freezing out, and you can’t even swim — what possessed you to come all the way out here……”
Crack. A merciless slap across the face. And on the same spot, twice in a row.
Haeshin’s head whipped sharply to one side. The force was so strong his whole body swayed.
Even someone as good-natured as Lee Haeshin wasn’t the type to just smile through a slap to the face. But given the circumstances, he felt more baffled than genuinely angry.
The Little Mermaid rescued a prince and never once got slapped for it. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, who had their first kiss stolen while unconscious, never slapped their princes either.
At least if he’d actually kissed him, there would’ve been something to feel wronged about. Lee Haeshin hadn’t even managed to attempt a kiss under the pretense of CPR. If he’d known it would come to this, he might as well have just gone for it.
“Ah……”
A dazed sound escaped him before he could stop it. What on earth had he been hit for? If it was retaliation for the slapping he’d done to wake Hwichan up, he was at least somewhat willing to accept that.
But what came out of the other’s mouth was a flat-out tirade with no reason given for anything.
“Are you out of your mind? First time I saw you I thought you were just a dumbass, but did someone drill a ventilation hole in your head?”
His voice was cracking with what sounded like boiling anger. Slapped, then berated out of nowhere — Haeshin blinked and slowly turned his head back to face forward.
Why did you hit me? What’s the problem? I saved you — shouldn’t the first thing out of your mouth be thank you?
And of all things — did someone drill a ventilation hole in your head. The accusation landed so clearly and squarely in his ears that Haeshin found himself instinctively reaching up to feel around his own head a few times. Fortunately, no holes found.
His head was full of things he couldn’t say, yet his mouth, utterly without pride, just kept fumbling uselessly.
“……Wh, what?”
“What? Now that you think about it, does something seem off to you?”
“Why did you suddenly hit me——”
“Anyone going into the water at this hour is one of two things. Either a water ghost, or someone about to become one.”
So my true form isn’t a merman — it’s a water ghost. The shoreline, which had been filled with nothing but wind and the sound of waves, now hummed with the reverb of Hwichan’s voice.
Haeshin rubbed his stinging left cheek with his palm and looked up at Hwichan standing before him. Up close like this, he could see the guy was a full half-head taller than him.
He was still wearing the same white shirt and jeans from earlier in the day. His feet were blotchy with dried blood, as if he’d scraped them somewhere. His lips had turned a shade of violet, and even while cursing, his eyes were dazed and unfocused.
The anger Haeshin had been ready to hurl back died on his face and was replaced by alarm. It looked like the symptoms of hypothermic shock.
“The one about to become a water ghost isn’t me — it’s you! You got in the water wearing nothing but a shirt and jeans in this weather? And what happened to your feet?!”
To Haeshin, the sea was a playground made of his homeland’s water. Being a merman by birth, he wouldn’t freeze to death even in a winter sea at twenty below zero — but ordinary humans were different. Jumping into the winter ocean without proper diving gear could, in a worst case scenario, bring on cardiac arrest.
He’d seemed so sharp on the outside, but turned out to be a complete disaster underneath. Haeshin retrieved the puffer jacket that Hwichan had flung aside and which had ended up sprawled in the sand, and draped it back over the pitifully trembling shoulders.
“You have hypothermia. Cover yourself with this, quickly.”
“I’m fine, you can——!”
“Stop arguing and put it on! If you don’t want to die, stay still and keep the jacket on! You want to have a corpse to deal with on this island?”
There’s everything on this island except a funeral home. Haeshin’s shouting voice wavered slightly, but the scolding was stern enough that Hwichan’s persistent ferocity finally deflated a little. Only then was Haeshin able to get a proper look at the other’s face.
Despite the way he’d been carrying on, Hwichan had clearly been crying for a while — tear tracks ran down the corners of his eyes and along his cheeks, and his irises were red and bloodshot.
He’s the one who hit me, and he’s the one who cried. Was he scared by the cold water?
Well, fair enough — if you’d swallowed enough water to lose consciousness, it made sense to lash out blindly the moment you came to. Especially for someone from the city whose entire ocean experience probably amounted to floating around on a tube during summer vacation.
Haeshin let out a quiet breath and pulled the still-trembling figure — puffer jacket and all — tightly into his arms. This time, the intention was genuinely just to comfort him, with no ulterior motive. Even someone as self-serving as Lee Haeshin wasn’t shameless enough to let personal feelings creep in while someone was shaking and distressed. Even if he was the kind of person whose conscience had rotted just enough to seriously consider a CPR-as-excuse kiss.
“Were you scared? Let’s go inside for now. Hypothermia is serious — if you stay out here, you’re going to be in real trouble. There’s no big hospital on this island.”
“……You.”
“Hm?”
“I asked if you’re alright.”
The address had shifted from the informal you to the more distanced you. The scolding from a moment ago seemed to have had some effect.
“I’m fine. I go into the water a lot, so I’m used to it. Were you worried about me in the middle of all that? That’s sweet of you……”
Haeshin gave a perfunctory show of being touched and patted the other’s back. And then — Hwichan, his face gone even whiter than a blank sheet of paper, suddenly yanked Haeshin close and began breathing roughly, unevenly. He seemed to be on the verge of tears. There was a dampness in his breathing that hadn’t quite been contained.
Haeshin, caught off guard by the reaction, gripped Hwichan’s shoulders firmly. The chest pressed against his own was solid and warm, but his heartbeat was so fast that Haeshin found himself short of breath in turn.
“Hey? What’s wrong, what’s wrong? Were you really scared? Are you too cold? Are you about to lose consciousness?”
“……hk, hh——”
“I — did I scare you by yelling just now? I’m sorry. Let’s go inside quickly. Can you walk? Where are your shoes?”
Haeshin stood on the dark shore and held tightly to the unmoving Hwichan’s back. With their hearts pressed together like this, it felt like the cold gnawing at him would subside soon enough.
It was quite a while later before Hwichan finally managed to stop crying. Gradually, the warmth of Haeshin’s body seeped into his skin and took the edge off.
In the end, the two of them decided to warm up at the small house where Haeshin lived alone.
***
Of all the old houses on Samsam Island, Haeshin’s was the newest and most well-kept.
“Newest” being a relative term — it amounted to having a bidet on the toilet and an actual bathtub. But in this neighborhood, even a bidet was as much of a luxury as a sports car.
“This is my place. It’s humble, but come on in.”
With that token phrase, he let the stranger through the door. Hwichan hesitated for a long moment. His expression was that of someone who could level a person flat, but his manner was that of a child being dragged reluctantly into someone else’s home.
Watching those hesitant feet finally step onto the linoleum floor, Haeshin went and turned on the boiler to warm the place up. The sight of that pale-faced kid drenched in cold saltwater and shaking all over — it pushed any sense of excitement clean out, leaving nothing but a parentlike worry in its place. He’s all size and no substance. Just a kid, really.
A moment later, Haeshin returned with a large bath towel and draped it over Hwichan’s head. Like he would for the little ones from the island village after they’d come back from swimming, Haeshin ran slow, careful hands through the dark blue-black hair.
