# Chapter 121
“Haah… I’ve been suffocating.”
Shin Dael removed her mask and hat, brushing back her chin-length hair. Her already small face looked even more skeletal, with her facial features so close together it was surprising they fit. She had lost weight so drastically that one could tell at a glance that something was wrong—she looked emaciated rather than like someone who had dieted and maintained herself beautifully.
“What’s with that face? And why did you come to the hospital?”
“For a health checkup. The CEO pays a lot of attention to the health of his actors, so he sends us regularly.”
Though the question was directed at Shin Dael, the answer came from the manager who was turning the steering wheel and driving out of the parking lot. However, when Tae Igyeol fixed his gaze on Shin Dael, the real reason soon came from her own lips.
“The main reason is insomnia. I also have symptoms of depression, so I want to get mental health care early.”
“Dael…”
“Oppa, it’s okay to just tell Igyeol. He probably knows more about me than you do, right?”
Something was definitely going on with Shin Dael. At her playful remark, the manager briefly made eye contact with Tae Igyeol through the rearview mirror. Whether trusting Shin Dael’s judgment or considering Tae Igyeol trustworthy as the CEO’s son, the manager kept quiet and focused on the road ahead.
“Manager, you don’t need to drop me off separately. I’ll go to the company too.”
Though he wasn’t particularly curious or interested, talking with someone seemed better than being alone. It would have been most comfortable if that someone were his grandmother or Ban Hajun, but he didn’t want to worry his grandmother any further, and Ban Hajun needed to stay with Mo Eunje. At the moment, the tight-lipped Shin Dael was the perfect candidate.
Upon arriving at the company, Tae Igyeol went up to an empty practice room on the upper floor with Shin Dael. He had thought about stopping by Café Ila to buy drinks, but Shin Dael suggested using the coffee machine in the company’s break room. While Tae Igyeol prepared espresso capsules, Shin Dael got hot water from the water purifier and steeped an herbal tea bag.
The two sat facing each other at a table in the practice room. Now that they were in a situation where they could speak freely, Shin Dael didn’t open her mouth and just killed time dipping and removing her herbal tea bag. She wasn’t gesturing as if asking him to inquire about what was going on, but though she was physically sitting in front of him, her mind seemed to be elsewhere. He had kept quiet since it was obviously a sensitive issue to ask about first, but seeing how seriously unwell Shin Dael looked, he took the trouble to cautiously broach the subject.
“What’s going on that words like insomnia and depression are coming up?”
“…I broke up.”
It was an absurdly unexpected topic. If it were anyone else, he might understand, but he thought Shin Dael would even marry that boyfriend of hers. They had been together for ten years, monopolizing each other’s most beautiful and youthful periods—how could they have broken up? It was as incomprehensible as an unprovable supernatural story.
“I thought you were going to get married.”
“He said he tried to imagine what married life with me would be like, but no matter how many times he imagined it, he didn’t think he’d be happy because of my job.”
“Now he’s using your job as an excuse…”
A bitter laugh escaped him. Since this was someone who had stayed with Shin Dael through her long period of obscurity even before her debut, he couldn’t use the common excuse that he’d wanted to date an actor but after actually dating one, found it different from what he’d expected and disliked it.
“What kind of half-hearted excuse is that?”
As soon as the words left his mouth, a thought occurred to him unwittingly. What if Mo Eunje, when thinking about a future with him, felt they wouldn’t be happy due to the various restrictions they’d face for being the same gender?
“I thought last year was the turning point in my life, you know? I transferred to Ila Actors, successfully changed my image by cutting my hair short, got my name known as the movie did well, and thanks to that, I shot many commercials and made big money for the first time.”
“Now everyone knows who Shin Dael is. What nonsense—not appreciating being with such a talented person.”
“Actually, we started fighting frequently when I began doing well. For me, the career results now feel like a stroke of heaven-sent luck, so I’m genuinely grateful and happy, but as I got busier, he seemed to feel that I was neglecting him.”
Having only heard one side of the story, it was difficult to jump to conclusions, but in this industry, it wasn’t anything special—rather, it was all too common. When rookie actors date each other and one starts to do well, accumulated feelings of inferiority and superiority damage their emotions, the relationship gradually grows distant, and eventually ends in catastrophe. Such incidents happened quite frequently, just not publicly. Of course, Shin Dael’s boyfriend was an ordinary person, so this situation didn’t fit precisely with those happenings.
“You didn’t mention any of this before.”
“What’s the point of badmouthing someone I’m with? I’m telling you now that we’ve broken up, just to get it off my chest.”
Not only did Shin Dael resemble Mo Eunje in atmosphere and image, but her mindset and values were similar too. Yet neither of them seemed to notice their similarities.
“He said he preferred when I was doing theater. He misses going on dates outside when no one recognized me, and he’s tired of only meeting at home to keep our relationship secret.”
“What were your hat and mask for then? You were covering up just fine earlier.”
“When I went to the convenience store with my face covered like I was at the hospital, he asked if I’d caught the ‘actor disease’…”
“Huh. That guy’s completely crazy.”
Seeing Shin Dael’s self-deprecating smile, Tae Igyeol didn’t hold back his curse. One might say such things to a stranger they don’t know well, but not to someone they love.
Mo Eunje once said that no matter how intimate and close a romantic relationship is, one should maintain respect and appropriate distance. Well, honestly, Tae Igyeol didn’t understand why distance needed to be maintained or why there should be personal space even between lovers. But regardless of what one thinks, one should be able to distinguish between words that can be said and those that shouldn’t. Tae Igyeol had learned these things from Mo Eunje.
“What upset me most was that he asked why I couldn’t introduce him to my friends, and if I really loved him…”
“That means he wants to date publicly. He wants to hear ‘I’m Shin Dael’s boyfriend.'”
Of course, if Mo Eunje accepted him, Tae Igyeol would also want to boast to the whole world that he was novelist Mo Eunje’s boyfriend. But having the desire to show off your lover and doubting your partner’s feelings because you can’t fulfill your desire for self-display are issues of different dimensions. There were reasons why even top stars vehemently denied their relationships until marriage. He had never seen celebrities who didn’t regret going public with their relationship after breaking up.
“But I’m not blameless either. I used my career as an excuse, asking him to understand because it was an important time for me, being inconsiderate and only thinking about myself.”
“Can’t you make that much of an excuse when you’re in love?”
Everyone has some degree of selfishness as a human. However, even Tae Igyeol, who considered himself extremely selfish, hadn’t spared any understanding, consideration, or respect for Mo Eunje’s career. Mo Eunje hadn’t even asked, but because Tae Igyeol loved him, he had acted that way on his own. In Tae Igyeol’s common sense, that was natural.
“The conclusion is, he said that even if we got married, the future wouldn’t be happy, so he wanted to stop wasting time.”
“What marriage at twenty-seven?”
Even as he said this, twenty-six-year-old Tae Igyeol would be more than willing to get married tomorrow if only Mo Eunje would allow it.
“We fought a lot about that too. He wants to get married around thirty and have a baby right away, but I wanted to focus on work and building my career until my mid-30s.”
“Not even worth discussing further. Good riddance. I thought you were dating a decent guy, but who have you been dating all this time?”
“I know… Everyone at the school where he works—teachers and students alike—knows that his girlfriend is Shin Dael. The sister from our company’s web department even found several pieces of evidence online.”
“Hey. Didn’t that bastard sign a contract promising to keep your relationship secret and take money from our company?”
“…Yes, he did. At first, he was happy about getting a large sum, but as time passed, he fumed, asking how much money I made from one commercial and why he only got that much.”
There are various reasons why people change, but the most common one is money issues. Living in a capitalist society, it’s impossible not to be greedy for money, and people think more money is always better. When a large sum of unearned income comes into one’s possession, it’s easy to get blinded by the idea that money can be made without difficulty.
That’s why he introduced Cha Hyunwoo to a job rather than lending him money. Additionally, Tae Igyeol always took care not to lose his judgment by becoming blinded by money while investing in stocks.
“The company will probably sue for breach of contract.”
“The CEO asked for my opinion first, so I begged him not to. As much as I’d like to see him suffer, it wouldn’t do anything good for my image. If I get into a mud-slinging fight, I’d get dirty too.”
It was amazing how even the flow of her thoughts ran along the same lines as Mo Eunje’s.
