# Chapter 17
Jaei excitedly shrugged his shoulders. After receiving an official confession of love from Jaei to commemorate their first kiss, Doha blinked his large eyes quietly. He organized words of love to return to Jaei in his mind, and calmly spoke them aloud.
“I’m never going anywhere. Because I like Jaei the most in the world.”
“Wow, really? You really like me the most in the world?”
At Doha’s bold confession of love, Jaei was overjoyed, clasping his hands together and smiling brightly. He didn’t ask the childish question, ‘You like me more than your mom, right?’ Doha, who had actually come to like Jaei a little more than his mother, nodded his head and prepared for the potentially unfortunate future that might come to them.
“Even if the day comes when I can’t live with you in your house anymore, I’ll always live with the goal of returning to your side.”
Jaei opened his eyes sadly with an expression that seemed to say ‘ah, that’s right.’ Whether Jaei’s parents asked him to leave, or Doha’s family situation improved and he had to leave this house, there was no guarantee they could continue living together. But Jaei soon put away his gloomy expression and giggled. Judging by his parents’ character, the former possibility was unlikely, and the latter would mean Doha had become happier.
As expected, Doha had much more concern about the future than he did. During his growth, Jaei had received an enormously significant mental gift from Doha, but he had experienced considerable heartache because he had nothing to give in return. So he acknowledged his position and decided to do the best he could.
“Doha. If your family situation is still difficult when we grow up, I’ll take responsibility for you.”
“……”
At Jaei’s declaration, Doha kept his mouth shut and gave no answer. Jaei couldn’t read what Doha was thinking from his expression, but he had no intention of taking back his words.
“If you marry me, I’ll become an actor and earn lots of money, and I’ll give all the money I earn to you.”
“Um…, Jaei.”
Doha looked at Jaei with a puzzled expression and responded. Jaei thought his statement might have hurt Doha’s pride due to its childishness. However, that thought didn’t last more than 3 seconds.
“I’m good at cooking. And I’m good at physical work too. I can do anything Jaei tells me to do.”
Doha, who had suddenly received not only a confession but now a proposal from the prince of Haesung-dong, answered with sparkling eyes. Though Doha always wanted to show his cool side to Jaei, he wasn’t unnecessarily prideful.
Of course, he didn’t actually mean he would live depending on the money Jaei earned. As the eldest son of the Ryu family, he would do his best to raise up the household. What mattered was that Jaei had shared the heavy responsibility that rested on his young shoulders. Jaei’s single sentence had opened his airways.
Moved by Jaei’s proposal, Doha asked worriedly with tears welling up in his eyes.
“But what if your parents oppose it? In dramas, all the adults oppose it.”
Young Ryu Doha, who had been imagining a future of marriage with Jaei whenever he watched dramas, was suddenly at the moment of announcing their marriage to both sets of parents. Worrying about the difference in family wealth, he completely forgot the fact that he and Jaei were the same gender. Jaei stroked Doha’s round cheeks with his palm, as if telling him not to worry.
“We can get married secretly, silly.”
“I see. I thought we absolutely had to tell them and get permission.”
“We’ll just keep telling Mom and Dad that we’re friends.”
“Got it. Jaei, just trust me. I’m good at acting, you know.”
Doha interlaced his fingers with those of his reliable future spouse, young Lee Jaei, and nodded.
* * *
As soon as they crossed the boundary between thirteen and fourteen, a series of big changes occurred. They went from children to boys, entered middle school and started wearing uniforms, their bodies began to grow quickly, and their aspirations toward future dreams intensified. That year, Jaei moved to a high-end newly built large apartment complex called Haesung Winners Castle. It was a place flooded with promotional articles saying that famous celebrities, film directors, and composers would be moving in.
There was a special purpose for the move. The detached house they were living in now was twice as old as Jaei. The reason Jaei had feared everyday noises since he was young was because of the aged plumbing, electrical wiring, and window frames that had reached the end of their lifespan.
Since they planned to repair and remodel the entire house, they needed a place to live during the construction period. The temporary residence was precisely the Winners Castle that his father had acquired for real estate investment purposes. When his father first brought up the topic of moving, Jaei immediately opposed it, thinking he wouldn’t be able to go with Doha.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Doha and Doha’s mother would also move their belongings with Jaei’s family. The topic of the family meeting held right before the move was the distribution of rooms. Even excluding his parents’ bedroom, dressing room, study, and Jaei’s room, there was still a guest room and an extra room left in the new house. The adults suggested that Doha, whose body had grown, should use a separate room.
After being informed of the meeting topic, Jaei and Doha returned to their room and seriously discussed this issue while eating ice cream. It was true that a problem had arisen in the roommate life of the newly teenage Lee Jaei and Ryu Doha. Although the room in the new house they were moving to was big enough for both of them to live in, the problem wasn’t the size of the room.
Jaei, who was eating strawberry ice cream with a spoon, chewed his mouth and spoke shyly.
“Honestly, I was really embarrassed then.”
It happened two days ago when he and Doha were holding hands tightly and pressing their lips together, kissing like baby chicks. Jaei was extremely surprised at the sudden change in his body and ran into the bathroom screaming, hiding. With a feeling of shame, he locked the door to avoid Doha and sniffled. Although Doha knocked on the door from outside saying, ‘It’s okay, please open the door,’ Jaei didn’t listen.
Recalling that day, he fanned his hot, flushed face with his hand.
“Aren’t you affected at all when we kiss? When I kiss you, I feel strange. I guess it’s because I’m sensitive. I feel like I’m the only weird one. You don’t seem affected at all.”
He honestly revealed his feelings, risking embarrassment. To prevent the atmosphere from becoming awkward, he scooped a spoonful of strawberry ice cream and put it in Doha’s mouth. Doha, who opened his mouth like a baby bird to eat what Jaei gave him, spoke calmly as if nothing had happened.
“No matter how dull I am, I also get like that when I hug you at night. You just don’t know because you fall asleep first.”
He was conveying that since they were the same gender and the same age, in the same position, they shouldn’t feel embarrassed or disgusted by whatever happens to them in the future. Upon learning that Doha was experiencing the same thing, Jaei was so flustered that he accidentally ate a scoop of mint chocolate.
“Ah, what is this!”
He spat what was in his mouth into the plastic bag next to him and quickly washed his mouth with cheesecake flavored ice cream. To end the suffocating atmosphere, he quickly wrapped up the meeting.
“So should we keep using the same room after we move?”
Without answering, Doha nodded and then suddenly kissed Jaei’s lips while holding mint chocolate in his mouth. After separating his lips, he smiled mischievously with a face full of playfulness. Jaei glared at Doha with a disgusted expression. Clenching his fist toward Ryu Doha who was testing his love, he firmly held Doha’s hatefully cute face with both hands. Closing his eyes tightly, he showered Doha’s lips with kisses. Something as trivial as food that didn’t suit his taste couldn’t stop his love for him.
* * *
Doha and Jaei, who first met at 130cm and 129cm, were steadily growing at a similar pace. At age 14, Doha was 172cm and Jaei was 170cm, much taller than the average for their age group. From childhood, they had flaunted shocking cuteness, and by wearing school uniforms, they successfully added “coolness” to their pretty faces. However, since they were still young, they weren’t extremely cool, but moderately cool.
Doha and Jaei, who stuck together like a one-plus-one combo product, gained fame at school from the beginning of the semester thanks to their appearance. For Doha, who had been the most popular child in the entire school for all six years of elementary school, this popularity was expected. Jaei, who had once been demoralized due to his lack of popularity among friends because of his hypersensitive personality, finally began to live up to his looks in the upper grades of elementary school, and his popularity soared when he became a middle school student.
Doha and Jaei both had no interest in studying and weren’t good at it. Despite attending two more hagwons than Doha, Jaei recorded terrible grades and was in the midst of wasting money, while Doha was relatively saving money by attending only one hagwon.
In any case, they clearly had no talent for studying. It wasn’t relative incompetence, but absolute incompetence. Jaei pleaded to reduce his hagwons to one like Doha, but his mother didn’t grant that request.
Of the two, Doha definitely had more worries. The eldest son, Ryu Doha, didn’t have the intellectual ability to raise the declining family fortunes. Idiot No. 1 Ryu Doha, whose abilities were concentrated in his face and physique, thought that the fastest way for him to raise the collapsed household was to become a celebrity.
As long as he could make money, he didn’t care whether he became a singer or an actor, but since he liked dramas, becoming an actor seemed best. He hadn’t thought specifically about how to seize the opportunity yet.
Idiot No. 2 Lee Jaei, who had debuted as a baby formula model, formally learned acting at a young age, and was steadily preparing for his debut by building various artistic qualities, had dreamed of being an actor since birth. Although he occasionally received calls from directors who needed child actors or from actor management companies, due to his mother’s belief that he shouldn’t be exposed to the public at too young an age, his official debut was postponed.
