It was true. Since when had Yoonjo lived while being particular about such things? Even so, what made it difficult to approach easily was the trivial reason that the man was actually Yoonjo’s favorite actor, Ki Seonwoo.
He wore a black baseball cap pressed down low and even had his mask on meticulously, but those eyes and the small mole below his left earlobe were clear indicators of who the man was.
It was puzzling why Seonwoo, who hadn’t been exposed to the media even once in five years, was here, but Yoonjo decided to cover up such detailed circumstances for now.
He could do something shameless like going up to him and asking for an autograph saying he was a fan, but the reason he didn’t was because of his rough guess that there must be a reason why the man called Ki Seonwoo had disappeared.
He wanted to know why he was staying all the way out in this countryside and what his relationship was with Grandma Sunja, but sometimes it’s better to leave questions as just questions.
Watching Yoonjo who was just blankly picking melons while groaning, Yoonjo’s grandmother lightly tapped her young grandson’s bottom and laughed cheerfully.
“Grandma secretly picked a watermelon. Cut it up and eat it with that Seoul guy. Today, do this much and go home.”
“Grandma…”
“Go on, will you?”
At his grandmother’s encouragement, Yoonjo’s round eyes sparkled with faint tears.
“Grandma… Then I’ll be right back.”
“After you finish talking with that Seoul guy, you have to come home quickly, okay?”
Yoonjo smiled brightly, hugged his grandmother tightly, and hurriedly left the melon field. His steps were quite light.
The first thing Yoonjo did when he returned home was to find and prepare the watermelon his grandmother had said she picked. It wasn’t about making it pretty or anything, but he cut it into chunks with as much care as possible to make it easy to eat. The thick watermelon rind was cut in one go under the sharp blade.
“Good thing it’s a seedless watermelon…”
After trimming it into squares, bite-sized pieces, Yoonjo carefully placed the cut watermelon into an airtight container and jumped up from his seat. Then he paused for a moment.
It seemed shameless to go with just this. After pondering, he grabbed a bottle of citron tea preserved last winter from the kitchen and a container of blueberries picked yesterday, then hurriedly headed to the house next door.
“Whew…”
It was a familiar doorbell to ring, yet why was it so nerve-wracking? Yoonjo huffed out breaths and pressed the red button firmly. The buzzing sound rang out, but there was no sign from inside.
As Yoonjo was about to press the bell a few more times, he recalled that he hadn’t seen even a shadow resembling a person moving in this house for the past three days.
Rolling his eyes around, Yoonjo slightly lifted the gate, turned the handle, and pushed it open. There was Grandma Sunja’s previous instruction to open the door that way to check even if something happened, so he knew how to open the door.
However, having opened the door, Yoonjo hesitated for a moment. If he went inside and Seonwoo was walking around perfectly fine and got reported again for something like trespassing… how embarrassing would that be to live with?
After standing in place for a while and peering inside with his neck stretched out, Yoonjo discovered a person’s shadow under the wide picture window. Before he could even think “huh,” he set down what he was holding on the ground and carefully approached. What was sprawled on the floor was Ki Seonwoo.
“Ahhh, ahhh…!”
Panicked, Yoonjo opened the back door (his grandmother had taught him how to open it before) and kept shaking the shoulder of the man collapsed in the living room. His slightly long hair was scattered messily on the floor. His forehead was even damp, as if he had broken out in cold sweat.
“Excuse me! Excuse me! Ac… no wait, ajeossi!”
A haggard face, dark circles extending down to his chin. Anyone could see it was the face of someone who had collapsed from starvation. How in the world could a person starve? And in this place where there was an abundance of food if you just went to the fields and did a little foraging (*you shouldn’t do it. If you do, you’ll really die)!
Yoonjo shook Seonwoo’s shoulder vigorously, then jumped up from his seat. Opening the front door and gate wide, he hoisted Seonwoo onto his back and immediately started running. Due to the height difference, Seonwoo’s toes dragged on the ground, which should have been burdensome, but the complexion of Yoonjo, who was actually carrying him, didn’t change one bit.
Thinking he needed to hurry to the hospital, Yoonjo quickened his pace.
Befitting the only clinic in the town center, Daeo Clinic was busy today as well. It might have been because there was only one doctor, Kim Daeoh, so they were short-handed.
He finished a consultation and came out of the small inpatient room while massaging his shoulders. Right in front of him was Ji Yoonjo, whose face he’d seen since childhood.
Yoonjo’s face was contorted as if he was about to cry any moment. The way he fidgeted looked like a puppy that needed to go.
“Daeoh ajeossi!”
He said he was going to Seoul, so he must’ve become a Seoul guy. There wasn’t a trace of dialect in his way of speaking. Daeoh muttered to himself inwardly and responded languidly.
“He got heat exhaustion.”
“So… I mean, a person becomes like that just from heat exhaustion?”
Seoul guy canceled. At the dialect that came out naturally when flustered, Daeoh giggled and smacked Yoonjo’s back.
“I’ve been doing this for many years here! Don’t curse at me and get out. Yoonjo, don’t be like this in this cramped hospital room, go outside and wait, and when he wakes up, I’ll let you know.”
Even after that, when Yoonjo fidgeted and paced around the entrance, Daeoh stuffed two thousand-won bills into his hand and kicked him out, telling him to buy ice cream or something. The narrow clinic was actually bustling with people who had come for consultations.
After loitering near the entrance, Yoonjo eventually followed Daeoh ajeossi’s words and bought a cheap popsicle from a nearby supermarket and crouched down in front of the clinic. The milk-flavored ice cream was quite sweet and delicious. After enjoying the sweetness lingering on his tongue tip while sucking on it for a while, Yoonjo suddenly realized.
“Ah… I forgot to tell Grandma before leaving.”
Fumbling to make contact, Yoonjo rummaged through his pockets and realized he had come out without his phone or anything. Hmm… She must be worried. He immediately went into the clinic and borrowed a phone, but there was no one answering, as if both of them were still at the field.
Yoonjo chewed on the wooden stick and wandered around the area but was soon caught by Daeoh and kicked out again.
After spending exactly an hour like that under the shade, fanning himself with a stiff flyer as a substitute for a fan, Yoonjo was able to hear that Seonwoo had woken up.
“Um… Where is… this…”
With his pale face and glucose IV drip attached, he looked quite pitiful. Yoonjo stood at the edge of the narrow hospital room, looked at the man, and opened his mouth.
“I brought you out after you collapsed at home. This is the town center about 20 minutes from the village. Um… You just need to finish getting this IV and come with me.”
“…I’ve been a burden to you.”
His dry lips that had turned blue, whenever he tried to force a smile while looking at Yoonjo, the area under his eyes trembled, but the unique beauty that Ki Seonwoo possessed didn’t disappear. Yoonjo stared intently at his face.
Really… unlike seeing him on screen, the real thing was much better. This was why people went on and on about celebrities. It was hard to even imagine how he played a serial killer and a dirty-tempered gangster executive with that delicate face.
How does a person’s face have eyes, nose, and mouth all fitting within that small area… His face is the size of a fist. Why are his eyes so big? He felt like a different species altogether. They said it had been 5 years since he appeared in the media, but his beauty seemed to have ripened even more than before. Even though he was an ajeossi much older than Yoonjo…
“Excuse me. Excuse me?”
“…Yes?”
His words came out a beat late. It was because he had been looking at Seonwoo’s face broken down into nano units one by one. He’d been blatantly caught staring, but for some unknown embarrassment, Yoonjo’s eyes widened greatly and then soon rolled around as if they’d been waiting. It was such a clear change that you could hear the sound of his eyes rolling.
Seonwoo slowly observed Yoonjo. When he first saw him, the corners of his eyes were sharply raised so he looked quite bad-tempered, but seeing him now, that wasn’t quite the case.
Well, how vicious could a kid living in the countryside be? The directors and actors behind the screen are more vicious and nasty. Having reached that conclusion, Seonwoo relaxed his body and settled comfortably into the bed.
“Thank you.”
As soon as Seonwoo woke up, the diagnosis he heard from the elderly doctor was heat syncope. When he asked how that was possible when he’d been inside the house the whole time, the answer that came back was a supplementary diagnosis that it was due to malnutrition.
When he had his Samoyed Dongtae, he ate together while taking care of that child’s meals, but once he was left alone, he naturally started skipping meals. It happened without even being aware that he was hungry.
‘If Woojin finds out, there’ll be chaos.’
Imagining his manager’s face that would go into a frenzy, Seonwoo looked at Yoonjo who had a strangely anxious expression and said.
“…I’d like to rest, so could you leave for a moment?”
“Oh, yes! Yes! Of course! Yes yes!”
It was hard to gauge exactly how many times he repeated the same words. Even after that, Yoonjo, who still had an anxious look on his face, stayed by Seonwoo’s side for a moment before leaving.
Only after Yoonjo left could Seonwoo close his eyes.
He could hear murmuring, chattering voices, but Ki Seonwoo’s name didn’t come up anywhere. Seonwoo was deeply immersed in that unfamiliar situation.
After finishing the IV drip and getting up, Seonwoo had to go to a soup restaurant in a corner of the market due to Yoonjo’s fuss that he absolutely had to eat. The menu was just one thing—ox head soup. Because he didn’t prefer eating rice soaked in soup, Seonwoo hesitated for a moment.
“Is there a home-style meal restaurant nearby instead of here…”
“Uh… oh yeah… That would be better. Ajeossi might not like soup! Do you want to go somewhere else? Um… if we go just a little further from here, there’s a home-style meal place. The grilled croaker there is really delicious. Super tasty. There’s a place my grandma and I stop by every time the market opens. Actually, I like the soup here better than the set meal there. Grandma is on the set meal side and Grandpa is on the soup side, so when they come together, they fight. Ah! But I eat both well. If I had to say, I’m on the soup side like Grandpa…”
“Let’s just eat soup. You can eat it separately instead of mixing rice in the soup.”
Leaving Yoonjo behind who was rattling off information he didn’t want to know, Seonwoo opened the door to the soup restaurant and entered. Even after entering, until the food came out, Yoonjo chattered ceaselessly. It clearly started with the history of the soup restaurant, but before long it had moved on to stories about the citron tea Yoonjo had made.
