“Did you sleep well?”
“Uh, uh… Wonha. This is…”
“You don’t need to explain.”
Suddenly, he felt a warm embrace. Wonha, who hugged him tightly, whispered in a calm voice.
“It’s okay.”
“…”
“Later when you want to talk, you can tell me then.”
“Wonha…”
“I don’t want to be a burden to you. I hope you feel comfortable when you’re with me.”
Sangho didn’t answer and hugged Wonha tightly together. Should I confess everything? It was such a kind and warm tone that he desperately felt that way. Holding back tears and burying his face in Wonha’s chest, Wonha lightly pressed a lip stamp on his forehead and said.
“Let’s sleep together tonight. Got it?”
“Mm…”
***
Sangho, who went to work in front of the dormitory, ran into several colleagues he had eaten with the day before and greeted them. Today’s staff cafeteria menu is good. After exchanging such trivial stories, he went up to his assigned area.
Sangho, walking down the hallway pushing a large trash can, discovered Nam Dohyun standing in front of a dormitory room. To move to the next area and clean, he had to pass through this hallway, and Dohyun was knocking on the door with a slightly frowning face. Sangho hesitated wondering what to do, then timidly pushed the trash can past.
When Dohyun glanced at Sangho as he got closer, Sangho became even more nervous. But Dohyun, who gave a silent bow without saying anything special, spoke to the student who came out opening the door. He had turned his body slightly so Sangho could pass.
“There’s someone in the room, right? There was a report yesterday evening. I told you outside visitors aren’t allowed.”
“Ah, senior. That’s not it…”
Sangho felt awkward for being nervous at the behavior that seemed not to care at all. Sangho, who quickly passed the hallway, moved to the next area without looking back.
The dormitory work was easy as expected, and the worrisome encounter with Nam Dohyun was less significant than expected. Even when he occasionally ran into Nam Dohyun working on his laptop in common areas, possibly doing assignments, he treated Sangho as if he didn’t exist. It was the same as how ordinary students regarded janitors they encountered on campus, literally like part of the campus background. All day that day, the only words Nam Dohyun said to Sangho were a passing remark to Sangho, who was struggling to carry trash bags collected from the 3rd floor lobby.
“The emergency staircase elevator is closer than that side.”
The emergency staircase elevator really was much closer than the central elevator from the lobby.
Even that, once it passed 10 AM, Nam Dohyun completely disappeared from the dormitory. Since Nam Dohyun said this semester was his last, he probably went out to attend classes. The second day at the dormitory ended so anticlimactically.
‘What is this. Does he really not know me?’
On the bus going home, Sangho leaned his head against the window and fell into thought. Sangho had given up even his studio apartment and stuck to Kyungoh’s apartment because of Nam Dohyun alone. Since Kyungoh said ‘alpha pheromones were sprayed’ in the room, that probably wasn’t a lie. But, there was no solid evidence that it was Nam Dohyun’s.
“Kuung…”
His head felt like it would explode. Thinking about it, when he first entered ‘Sangho’s’ body, ‘Sangho’ had written a tremendous amount of texts describing Nam Dohyun as a truly terrible monster. Next to Wonha’s photos plastered all over the room, the photos with faces cut out or defaced with marker were probably Nam Dohyun’s. Because those hate-filled writings were attached to the photos.
‘Wonha also remembered me. If stalker Sangho knew Nam Dohyun, Nam Dohyun should know me too. Why is he pretending not to know?’
However, to ask outright, the man named Nam Dohyun was too dangerous a person. That’s because, in that BL webtoon, when Nam Dohyun killed ‘stalker Sangho’…
How did he do it?
Suddenly, all kinds of terrible scenes flashed through Sangho’s mind. A scene of his face beaten to a complete pulp, a gleaming skewer, begging please spare me, gasping in pain while being strangled with blood dripping from his nose, his whole body tied with rough rope with pale lips twitching. And… a large cage.
“…Huuk, huk…!”
“Hey. Are you okay?”
Sangho, who had hyperventilated with a feeling like his chest was suddenly tightening, grabbed his head and staggered. The passenger in the next seat was surprised seeing Sangho swaying and shook his shoulder. His hands and feet were tingling and sweat seemed to pour from his whole body. In suffocating fear, Sangho exhaled deeply and barely muttered.
“That wasn’t me. It wasn’t, me.”
Sangho, who had been bowing his head and taking deep breaths for a while like that, felt his mind gradually returning. He had passed two or three stops from his destination.
“Student. Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“N-no. I’ll get off.”
The bus driver, sensing something was amiss, stopped the car and turned back to ask. Sangho roughly brushed it off and jumped up from his seat and got off the bus.
Sangho, who returned to Kyungoh’s apartment, curled up on the sofa and lay down, then trembled at the constantly attacking anxiety of unknown origin. Sangho, who normally didn’t even think of opening Kyungoh’s closed room door, brought a blanket from Kyungoh’s room to the living room and plopped down, covering himself with it. The sunlight scent wrapping his body calmed him down a bit, but still the anxiety didn’t go away.
Eventually, Sangho, who also carefully entered Wonha’s room, dragged out the blanket Wonha had covered himself with and things like the coat he wore and piled them up in the living room. When blankets and clothes piled up like a round grave, Sangho dug into it and hid. When the two people’s scents mixed and permeated his nose, Sangho finally felt some sense of security, curled up his body, and closed his eyes.
“Hyung, I’m ho—”
Until late afternoon when Wonha returned to the apartment, Sangho had been lying with his eyes closed inside the grave-like pile of clothes. When Wonha saw it, he hesitated, then went back outside and made a phone call somewhere.
“Yeah. Right now he’s made a nest out of clothes and stuff. You didn’t do something weird yesterday, did you?”
Wonha, who stood holding his phone for a while, spoke coldly.
“No. If that’s it, you don’t need to come. I’m better at that than you.”
Wonha, who pressed the phone end button with a tap, carefully approached the living room where Sangho was again. Sangho was still curled up quietly inside the clothes grave.
“Hyung.”
“…”
“Will you come here? I’ll hold you.”
When a quiet, gentle voice rang out, Sangho stirred inside. When his messily disheveled hair popped out from the clothes grave, Wonha soothed Sangho in an even lower voice.
“It’s okay. I won’t do anything.”
Sangho poked his head out slightly with a gloomy face. Wonha carefully extended his hand and placed it on Sangho’s cheek. When Sangho, feeling the warm warmth, slightly leaned his face against the hand, his thumb gently rubbed his cheek. Ah, right. You always stroked me so gently like this. A sigh of relief flowed from Sangho’s nose. And Sangho, who gradually came out of the clothes grave, crawled into Wonha’s arms.
Suddenly.
“You came at the right time. Hyung, you’re really warm. Right?”
“Mm…”
“Were you napping?”
“Mm.”
“You must be hungry. What should we eat?”
“…I’ll eat later.”
Sangho, buried in Wonha’s arms, hid while rubbing his face against his chest. Wonha just patted Sangho and hugged the small body for a long while.
Sangho, who had been held in Wonha’s arms for a moment, gradually began to feel embarrassed about acting like a child. Even though nothing special happened today, he couldn’t understand why he was so anxious.
‘Because I keep running into Nam Dohyun at the dormitory. Actually, he was the person I should avoid most…’
And those strange, terrible scenes that came to mind on the bus. Were such scenes in the BL webtoon? It was like a fog that couldn’t be grasped clearly. He wondered if such things would happen to him in the future, but so far the situation hadn’t flowed according to that webtoon either.
But he couldn’t just leave this situation alone either. He needed more information.
‘Wonha should know Nam Dohyun.’
Wonha, who was hugging him tightly, was continuously stroking his lower back and soothing him. Certainly, Wonha was a safe person, both in that webtoon and now. At the very least, he seemed like he would talk honestly about what he asked. After agonizing for a long while, Sangho carefully began.
“My assigned cleaning area changed.”
“Oh yeah? Where to?”
“To the dormitory. The work is super easy too. I thought you helped me…”
“Hmm? I didn’t. Well, you had a big incident not long ago too. Maybe they made some internal adjustments?”
“I guess so. They said the person in charge of my area is a Computer Science TA.”
At Sangho’s last words, he felt Wonha hesitate.
