At Choi Seol’s appearance, Hae-sook noona lowered her hand, which had been left hanging with nowhere to go, and accepted his greeting in a daze.
“Hello, Choi Seol. How’s your health doing?”
“Getting better, thanks to you. By the way, please speak casually with me. I’m Yeoreum’s friend too.”
“Hm, should I? Then I’ll drop the formalities.”
Just listening to the exchange, both of them sounded so polite it was almost like mistaking them for entirely different people. Caught awkwardly between the two of them, Choi Seol spoke up again.
“So what brings you here today?”
“Oh, I figured I’d feed Yeoreum some meat and ask him something while I’m at it. Today’s the big house-cleaning day, right?”
I’d completely forgotten. I nodded.
“Yeah. Are you here to help?”
“Happens to be my day off. I’ll bring oppa along too.”
“Hoon-hyung’s here?”
“He came to visit with the kids the day before yesterday. I stopped him from barging straight over to you. Figured it’d be uncomfortable to show up out of nowhere with a guest around.”
“Well, it is a bit—”
“I’m fine with it, so feel free to come by whenever’s convenient for you.”
As if cutting off what I was saying, Choi Seol gently pressed down on the shoulder he was gripping. It didn’t hurt, but something about the pressure made me shut my mouth without realizing it. Meanwhile, their conversation kept going.
“With as much as I owe Yeoreum already, I can’t go imposing further. Same goes for you, Officer.”
“Oh, please, what imposing. Don’t worry about that, just make yourself at home here.”
“It’s kind to hear you say that. I’d been anxious enough losing my memory with nowhere to turn, but Yeoreum and you, Officer, helping me out like this has been a lifeline.”
“Oh my. Yeoreum, look at how nicely your friend talks.”
An expression of pure admiration rose on noona’s face.
“We’re grateful too. Out here in a countryside full of nothing but old folks, having such a flower of a young man show up has even the village elders all delighted. For reference, looks aside, Yeoreum here has been absolutely no help at all.”
“Yeah, yeah. My deepest apologies.”
The kind of grumbling that hadn’t come out while the two of them were warmly going back and forth over someone else’s house came pouring out smoothly now.
Anyway, when is this guy going to let go? Our bodies weren’t fully pressed together, but with the distance this close, it was hard to ignore the presence I could feel behind me.
To make matters worse, the memory of this morning’s water incident kept surfacing, leaving my mouth dry over and over. Reacting to just this much was proof my immunity to men had really dropped. The moment I’m back at school, I need to find myself a well-built boyfriend ASAP, I was desperately resolving, when an unexpected sentence dropped from Choi Seol’s mouth.
“By the way, I don’t think we’ll be able to do the big cleaning today. Yeoreum’s not feeling well.”
“Yeoreum is?”
“Me?”
At the pitch I’d unconsciously raised, noona shot me a puzzled look. As if brushing that look aside, Choi Seol calmly added an explanation.
“He must be tired from taking care of me all this time—he barely managed to eat this morning. So I think it’d be better for him to rest today.”
“Yeoreum not being able to eat, that really is strange. This kid’s always made sure to have rice no matter what, even when grilling beef.”
“He puts his spoon down the moment the rice is gone, even if there’s a tasty side dish left.”
“Right, exactly that. Guess being friends means you really know Yeoreum well.”
“Of course, I know him well.”
The grip pulling on my shoulder grew even stronger. Before I could even go whoa, pulled along by that force, the moment my back touched his firm chest, my body stiffened on its own. Soon, a soft voice came again from above my head.
“I’ve always been watching him, after all.”
For a moment, my breath stopped. Standing there frozen, unable to show any reaction, Choi Seol took the bag from my hands.
“Thank you for the meat, we’ll eat well.”
“Sure. If Yeoreum’s sick, he won’t have the strength to chew meat anyway, so you eat plenty instead. Take good care of yourself too, patient-sshi, and call if you need any help.”
The part about telling Choi Seol to eat meat seemed sincere, but whatever she said to me sounded completely soulless. Noona even flashed me a teasing grin before personally closing the inner gate behind her and leaving.
“I get the feeling noona doesn’t believe I’m actually sick?”
Noona had sharp instincts. Some of that might be honed from her job, but given she’d been watching me closely for the past year, it would’ve been stranger if she hadn’t noticed my actual condition. Still, maybe she’d played along out of satisfaction at having gotten to hand meat over to Dolsoe. I really had clearly just been the bonus, then.
“She’s a police officer, so of course she’d catch a lie that small. But she probably figures I had a reason for lying. She knows my situation well too.”
The ladies of the house really should’ve also checked the character of the Dolsoe they were feeding meat to. I stared, dumbfounded, at Choi Seol calmly adding commentary to his own lie. Since he still had one shoulder gripped, I had to tilt my head back to even meet his eyes.
“Then there wasn’t really any need to lie in the first place.”
“Grandma used to say even refusals need manners and sincerity. Using my own circumstances as an excuse when I’m not even the homeowner felt a bit off.”
That was true enough, but something still felt off. To be precise, I felt a strange sense of unease coming from Choi Seol saying things like that.
“You’ve changed a bit.”
“……”
At my words, Choi Seol made a puzzled expression.
“Changed how?”
“I mean, obviously your body’s… no, not that, your personality, I mean. You weren’t really this polite of a guy before.”
“As far as I know, I wasn’t some terrible delinquent either, though.”
“Still, I don’t think you used to put on this much of an act.”
Had the word “act” even suited him to begin with? Choi Seol used to be the type to show his moods exactly as they were at school. If he was in a good mood, he’d let anyone approach him that day; if he was in a bad mood, he’d openly threaten everything around him. He even did that to teachers. No telling what he’d been like outside school, though. He’d seemed kind to elderly people, now that I thought about it.
“Then I guess I’ve changed.”
For a while, Choi Seol just looked at me without any response to what I’d said, then leaned his head down further and spoke indifferently.
“Maybe I’m like you, then. Like you said, ten years have passed, after all.”
He had a point. Over ten years, I had changed. There was no rule saying Choi Seol couldn’t have changed too. And yet, why had I assumed Choi Seol would stay exactly the same? Even without the memories, maybe the changed personality had stayed in his body. Thinking that, the person in front of me suddenly felt very unfamiliar. And my throat hurt. Even amid all that, it struck me as funny that the height difference between the two of us hadn’t changed one bit from ten years ago.
“Will you let go of this now?”
I wanted to get out of his grip soon, but the hand still resting on one shoulder showed no sign of moving. Just as I was debating whether to simply break free myself, Choi Seol abruptly threw out a question.
“What’s your relationship with the cop?”
I didn’t immediately grasp what he meant by the question.
“What relationship. Like I said before, she’s the neighbor noona.”
“You two seemed pretty close.”
“Sort of? Maybe because we played together a lot as kids—even though we barely saw each other after growing up, it’s just not awkward between us?”
“Close enough to let her touch you?”
“…Noona touched me?”
“She touched you earlier. Like this.”
The hand gripping my shoulder finally let go. But instead, I became even more unable to move. The freed hand rose and slid into my hair. With the long fingers moving as if engraving each individual strand, my thoughts went blank as I had no choice but to take in every bit of it.
I came back to my senses when those fingers slid down to the back of my head and brushed against the nape of my neck. Startled, I scrambled out of his hold.
“Wh-what are you doing!”
“Recreating what the cop did to you. Looked like you’d forgotten.”
Recreating, my ass. What noona had done was on the level of dusting something off, but this was on a completely different plane. Feeling the heat rising at the nape of my neck where Choi Seol’s hand had brushed past, I opened my mouth.
“That’s something I allowed. We’re both careful not to go past a light touch with each other.”
“Why’d you allow it?”
“Because… we’re close. We’ve known each other since we were kids too.”
“Then I should be fine with that much too. We’ve known each other since we were kids too.”
Oh my god. Is that really the Choi Seol I know?
Thinking about it, he’d always kind of been like this. The type to casually drop unexpected remarks that fluster the other person while staying completely calm himself. The moment that thought crossed my mind, something suddenly surged up inside me.
“To begin with, isn’t it a bit different between you and noona?”
At my words, Choi Seol’s brow furrowed.
“What’s different?”
“You and I weren’t friends.”
At that, all expression vanished from Choi Seol’s face. The thought that I’d messed up flashed through my mind instantly. Still, there was no taking it back. It was the truth, after all.
“Friends… right, that’s true, we weren’t.”
A brief, heavy silence passed, and Choi Seol murmured quietly. I’d known that. Even knowing it, the moment I heard those words from his mouth, my chest gave a lurch. To still react like this, even now. I’d already been through this once before, yet it seemed time didn’t resolve every feeling after all.
“Let’s go. You said we need to clean, right?”
And yet, the way Choi Seol, who’d been so persistent just moments ago, turned away without any lingering hesitation left me strangely bothered. It felt exactly like I’d made some kind of mistake.
Compared to other historic noble family estates, this one was on the smaller side, but cleaning an entire hanok by oneself was no easy task. That’s why they’d normally borrowed help from the Village Head’s household, who managed this place, but since Choi Seol had turned that down this time, the scale of the cleaning naturally had to shrink.
Either way, the house would need cleaning once more before Chuseok arrived. Figuring there was no need to go looking for extra trouble in this sweltering summer, I decided to just wipe down the dust that had piled up around the house with Choi Seol, and we split up the areas. Up to that point, things went smoothly.
But then…
“Ugh, seriously! This keeps bugging me.”
I stopped mid-wipe on the floor and abruptly stood up. My gaze automatically drifted toward what had recently become the two of us’ shared bedroom—my room.
Ever since the incident at the front gate, Choi Seol hadn’t even made eye contact with me except to ask where the cleaning supplies were. After I told him where they were, watching him coldly turn away with the supplies in hand, I had to chew over the word “mistake” all over again.
Was the “we weren’t friends” comment really that shocking to him? But it was true, wasn’t it? Even more so, it was Choi Seol himself who’d first brought that up. Of course, I’d heard him say it the following spring, so there was a good chance the current Choi Seol didn’t even remember it.
Wait a second. Don’t tell me that’s why he’s sulking?
It was entirely possible that up until that winter, Choi Seol had still considered me a friend. That would explain why he was acting so hurt by what I’d said. Once that thought crossed my mind, I really did feel like I’d messed up. It seemed like I should probably talk things through with him.
