Perhaps because he choked, Chahyun met Yiyoung’s gaze with a bright red face. Chahyun hesitated for once and asked carefully:
“……What if I said yes?”
“I wonder.”
He’d just been curious and hadn’t asked with any intention, so there was nothing else to say in response. Since he’d been asked the question, he did think about it.
If even the slightest glimpse of his former self had been visible, he would have refused immediately, but with the Chahyun beside him now, it didn’t seem impossible.
No, if a completely different person who just looked exactly like Chahyun had asked, he might not have agonized so long. He just hadn’t deliberately sought it out, but Yiyoung didn’t have so little dating experience to be shocked at one-night sex, and he felt Chahyun sensually at every moment. That much was the same even now.
More than anything, once the goal was achieved, Chahyun would also lose interest in Yiyoung.
‘Then he’d stop tormenting me too.’
And perhaps for Yiyoung too, it could be a way to sort out his feelings about Chahyun. Once the regret of not being able to spend the night together disappeared, his lingering attachment to him would likely subside. So that’s why some people say goodbye with sex.
Yiyoung unconsciously lowered his gaze toward the floor, seriously agonizing.
“I don’t know.”
Yiyoung felt strangely restless for reasons he couldn’t understand.
Of course, there was nothing more foolish than sleeping with Chahyun at this point, so it was actually an unproductive worry. Given Yiyoung’s personality, after sleeping with him, rather than sorting out his feelings, he’d only be disturbed and depressed.
While spacing out lost in idle thoughts, before he knew it, the walk had ended and they’d arrived in front of his house.
Yiyoung looked back at Chahyun while opening the front gate. Only then did he notice Chahyun looking at him anxiously with a restless expression. It seemed he was still waiting for Yiyoung’s answer. However, since Yiyoung had already answered that he didn’t know, there was nothing else to say.
“Thanks to you, I had a good walk. It really was weather too nice to just stay home.”
It was sincere. He hadn’t been able to concentrate on work at all since morning, but after walking and getting some air, his head had cleared considerably. However, he also added what he’d firmly resolved to say to Chahyun since earlier.
“But from now on, I’d like to only see you on days we’ve arranged. I’m uncomfortable with Chahyun-ssi suddenly showing up without contact.”
Yiyoung entered the house, leaving behind Chahyun whose face had immediately hardened coldly after having an expectant expression.
***
Chahyun glared at Yiyoung’s front gate, his lips bubbling with anger.
Soon he turned sharply and strode toward the empty lot where he’d parked the rose gold pearl-colored Rolls-Royce. Even after getting in the car, Chahyun fumed for a while without starting the engine.
“I wonder, I don’t know?”
Chahyun recalled the answer Yiyoung had given him and exploded with indignation.
“No, is it that easy?”
His attitude was as if he could do it if Chahyun wanted. At the very least, it was certain he’d considered it.
Of course, Chahyun had also been curious about whether he and Yiyoung had gone as far as sleeping together. But that was merely an inevitable question that arose in the process of reasoning why he couldn’t shake thoughts of Yiyoung.
In contrast, Chahyun had at most only schemed about kissing Yiyoung. That much was more than sensual enough for Chahyun. He didn’t know what his twenty-eight-year-old self had been like, but the current Chahyun had no intention whatsoever of sleeping with a man he’d date for just two months before breaking up.
To such a respectable gentleman, Yiyoung had suddenly thrown out a sensational question and remained nonchalant.
“Does he have a lot of experience? Did he date quite a bit before meeting me?”
Unavoidably, an image was drawn in his head of Yiyoung dating an unremarkable ordinary man. As the content of the imagination became denser, Chahyun’s breathing gradually grew rougher until he finally banged the back of his head against the driver’s seat headrest and covered his eyelids with one palm.
“I’m so pissed off.”
Unable to suppress his resentment, Chahyun suddenly raised his head and picked up his phone to compose a message to send to Director Jin Gicheol.
[Pull a list of people Bae Yiyoung has dated so far and submit a report with their personal information]
9:14 AM
Of course, he didn’t send it. It was because, thanks to his big sister, he knew all too well how unpleasant it was to have one’s privacy invaded. Because of that, even before meeting Yiyoung for the first time, Chahyun had only investigated simple personal information at the level of supplementing his lost memory.
Chahyun took a deep breath and pulled himself together.
‘I can’t sink to the level of stalking.’
What Chahyun lacked was decency, not common sense and intelligence. Even if he was an unlucky bastard, he didn’t do the ignorant and gloomy act of digging into someone’s private life behind their back. No matter how goal-oriented he was, the great Moon Chahyun couldn’t become a stalker.
Just for this moment, he really wanted to abandon his refinement.
But it was difficult to go against his innate dignity after all. Chahyun let out a long, heavy sigh, deleted the text message he’d just written, and tossed his phone onto the passenger seat.
As he calmed his excitement, his conversation with Yiyoung naturally came back to mind.
‘……By the way, he doesn’t know?’
Not that he dislikes it?
He’d been acting like he’d rather die than date Chahyun, so he’d naturally expected him to shriek in refusal at the mention of wanting to sleep together. But sex was apparently okay.
Perhaps for Yiyoung, sleeping with someone he wasn’t dating wasn’t such a big deal. It was an utterly promiscuous way of thinking, unlike his innocent and pure appearance. The fact that it felt strangely mature and alluring on one hand made him even more angry.
Now Chahyun seemed unable to think of Yiyoung and sex separately, and that alone felt like the purity he’d nobly maintained until this day and age had been defiled.
In any case.
“So he’s thought about sleeping with me?”
Chahyun suddenly got a throbbing headache and resolved while gripping the steering wheel tightly with both hands:
“I should study up in advance.”
Just in case, if by any chance the atmosphere became one where Yiyoung wanted that, he didn’t want to fumble and disappoint. He should at least watch some gay porn.
Chahyun shook his head side to side to snap to his senses and started the car.
***
Mom had said so. That love doesn’t confuse you.
Mom said she realized that fact the moment she gave birth to Yiyoung at twenty and held him in her arms. At that time, she said all her love for other men who had passed through her life until then felt fake. Yiyoung only understood Mom’s words a little after meeting Chahyun.
Monday, today there was no performance, so it was the quietest day of the week at the whisky bar.
In the shop, there were only three or four tables of customers chatting quietly to lively bebop as background music. In an atmosphere where no one was looking for an employee, Yiyoung stood inside the empty bar counter and looked at his phone. And he read again the text message that had been sent to him at a number that no longer existed.
[(Unknown User):
I love you]
10:16 PM
With a complicated expression, Yiyoung tapped the text content each time the phone screen was about to go black.
‘I should stop doing this too.’
That is, the act of missing Chahyun.
It was fortunate it wasn’t a number he could call. If the number had been active, at this moment Yiyoung wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to hear Chahyun’s voice. And it seemed he would have clung forever to an imaginary figure created based on fantasies about romance and love.
Just then, the small bell on the whisky bar’s door rang.
Yiyoung raised his upper body from the bar table where he’d been leaning on both elbows to prepare to greet a new customer. Seeing Chahyun in neat formal wear approaching him, he immediately became sullen.
‘Coming even to where I work?’
Though he glared discontentedly, Chahyun sat down at the bar counter seat facing Yiyoung. Chahyun looked around the shop as if visiting for the first time, then said to Yiyoung:
“Aren’t you taking my order?”
Chahyun had an attitude as if he’d come as a customer of the bar. Since there was no way to kick out a customer, Yiyoung asked while showing his displeasure:
“What would you like?”
“Do you have Macallan?”
At the familiar order, Yiyoung hesitated then soon looked back at the back bar with a nonchalant gesture. Chahyun had always drunk Macallan 18-year on the rocks here. When he took out the liquor from the back bar, poured it into a glass with a round ice cube and handed it over, Chahyun smiled broadly as if satisfied.
“Seeing how well you know my taste, you really were my lover.”
Yiyoung let the word lover go in one ear and asked sullenly:
“How long will you be staying?”
