Having to bring up something this practical in the middle of all this felt shameful, and he couldn’t bear to face Haejeong — but Munyeong knew this was his reality. No home, no footing, not a single penny to his name. A complete beggar. What did someone like him think he was doing…….
But he swallowed the humiliation and spoke with detachment.
“I’ll pay back the debt little by little….”
Reality was never kind. Even if Haejeong had been an ordinary person, someone like him pursuing anything with him would have been a crime. Even by the standards of ordinary people, someone with his circumstances was the worst possible match. Rep. Chu’s voice kept echoing in his ears.
“How could someone like you… with our son….”
That face — the absolute disbelief written all over it — floated vividly before him. The shock, the horror, the undisguised look of having witnessed something unspeakable.
He was so tired of those reactions. Even though they were familiar, he was starting to wear down under these situations, this kind of treatment.
He wanted it all to stop.
**
Beep.
The mechanical click of the door closing rang out, lonely, behind Haejeong’s back. Step by dragging step. He trudged slowly down the hallway and arrived at the living room, where only darkness had settled in. Haejeong swept his eyes quietly across the wide, empty house, his gaze lifeless. It was always this quiet. He’d lived alone for well over ten years, and had been alone throughout his time in America too, so this still, silent atmosphere was anything but unfamiliar. If anything, it was routine.
And yet, despite it being routine, he felt an emptiness he had never felt before — not like this. It had only been a matter of days since Im Munyeong had been here, yet the apartment felt desolately, cruelly lonely. Just this very morning, they’d been together. The living room light had always been on bright, like the way people actually lived — the kitchen always smelled of food, and there was conversation passing back and forth between them.
Haejeong walked slowly toward the bedroom where Munyeong had stayed. It was clean, without a trace of anyone having lived there, not a speck of dust. And Munyeong — along with every one of his belongings — was nowhere to be found. He sure hadn’t wasted any time. Haejeong’s deeply sunken eyes swept slowly across the room. His chest ached at the space where nothing remained, and he scrubbed a rough hand over his face.
He had been forcing himself to hold on all this time, but now there was no longer any justification for doing so — and he no longer had the right to, either.
“I… did like Haejeong… but…… I’m not asking for anything more than that.”
The image of Im Munyeong trembling as he said those words wavered before his eyes.
Disgustingly honest, and disgustingly without greed.
He says he wants nothing.
Even when humiliated because of me, even when hurt because of me, even when wounded because of me.
He says he wants nothing.
That’s exactly why it was driving him even more out of his mind.
Because he wants nothing, he has no idea what he’s supposed to do.
If only he wanted something, he could at least try begging for it.
A hollow laugh from Haejeong drifted quietly up toward the high ceiling. He rested his arm over his eyes and turned his mind to a memory that had just risen to the surface.
“I’m telling you, his face was so swollen from how badly he’d been beaten, you couldn’t even recognize him.”
The words of the young officer who had witnessed the scene at the time grew clearer, surfacing from the blurred far end of his memory.
“His face all torn up, bleeding…. God. And in that state, he’s going on about being worried about the student, screaming for someone to call an ambulance — everyone watching felt their hearts break.”
When the officer had said he couldn’t remember the boy’s actual face because of how swollen it was, Haejeong had thought at the time: how do you get a useless cop like that. But looking back on it now, he could feel it intuitively — just how badly the boy must have been hurt for someone not to recognize his face, and just how desperately he had saved him. And knowing the Im Munyeong he knew… no matter what the situation had been, he would have saved him desperately, with everything he had. That thought came to him naturally, on its own.
“Haejeong.”
After all that — how could he still call his name that gently?
Haejeong’s face twisted with incomprehension as he shot upright and drove his fist hard into the area around his own chest. The sharp, stinging pain made it difficult to breathe.
“Thank you, Haejeong.”
After all that — how could he still say thank you to him.
“I think I can’t help but fall for you again.”
After all that — how could he still fall for him again.
How stupid, how foolish he was.
And how pathetic, how pitiful he himself was.
Finding out only now wasn’t even enough — he was in a situation where he couldn’t even hold on to him, and it was so laughable he couldn’t even manage a bitter smile. Haejeong’s face contorted grotesquely as he kept driving his fist into his chest until it ached to the bone. As if that still wasn’t enough, he kicked the glass table in front of him, grabbed the decorative golf club nearby, and swung it at everything in sight — smashing and breaking things one after another, letting the burning inside him rage outward in its place.
Only after he had turned the entire apartment into a wreck did he drop the golf club, breathing harshly and ragged. Unable to work off the fury and the heat burning through him, he went on a rampage several more times before finally staggering toward the bedroom.
The phone he’d thrown somewhere was ringing without end. Still in his clothes, he flung himself onto the bed and forcibly switched off the phone screen that wouldn’t stop lighting up. This was the worst. He had never felt like this before. His whole mind felt like it had fallen into the mud. A bleakness that was almost frightening. A helplessness where he couldn’t do anything. For the first time, Haejeong felt like garbage. The accomplished, brilliant version of himself felt like something beneath even the lowest of lowlifes.
Haejeong lay stretched out on the bed, letting the wretched feeling run through him in full. As if he were drowning in water and simply letting himself go without even trying to save himself, Haejeong forced his eyes shut. Glass shards were lodged in the soles of his feet, and blood was seeping through his socks — but as though none of it mattered even slightly, he closed his eyes and stole what breaths he could.
**
As dawn began to break in the darkened sky, the figure buried under the covers stirred. Slowly rising, he stared out the window with the dazed face of someone freshly woken, watching the light gradually grow brighter. It was a morning that had been repeating for about a month now.
A month had passed since he returned home.
Since coming home, Munyeong had been waking up every day around the time dawn broke. When he was working at the company, he’d wake even earlier — but even now that he had no reason to, his eyes opened on their own. In short, sleeping soundly was difficult. Even after exhausting days of hard work, he couldn’t fall asleep easily.
That day that had felt like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky was already a month ago. Even now, it still didn’t feel real. Looking back on it, it was like a scene out of a typical drama. The situation where money envelopes had passed hands after meeting a man’s parents — only now, a month later, did it feel like something distant. Munyeong acted as though that day had never happened.
For a while, he’d gotten through it all in a daze. He needed to earn money right away, so he dove headfirst into delivery work and designated driver shifts, day and night without distinction, taking on whatever came at him. He had to earn rent, and he also had to repay the debt to Haejeong bit by bit. With money now going out in two directions, it wasn’t nearly enough no matter how hard he ran his body into the ground.
He needed to work more. More. Munyeong clung to work with near-obsessive tenacity. As obsessive as his focus was, that’s how thoroughly he wrecked his body. The way Munyeong threw himself into it — enough to worry the people he worked with — made him look like someone who had lost a part of his soul somewhere.
Back then, the situation had been too overwhelming and he’d run from it, but as time passed, the memory of Haejeong that day grew clearer and clearer. The bloodshot eyes, the way he had pleaded, the voice swallowing back tears. Sometimes it even invaded his dreams, and Munyeong would wake drenched in cold sweat like someone who’d had a nightmare.
It felt as though he had been the one to cause the hurt. Was it because of his soft-hearted nature? The fact of it kept catching in his chest in a way he couldn’t shake. When he was alone, his thoughts grew deeper. He had more to brood over, and he found himself more and more often staring blankly up at the sky.
Events from a full month ago felt like his own delusions. Having lived together in his apartment, having heard his confession — all of it felt like a lie. And for good reason — there had been no contact after that. As if waiting for the signal, Haejeong had cut off all contact and never showed up. He himself had wanted that too. He’d wanted it…. but his feelings were complicated. Returning to everyday life felt both comfortable and not. Those deep, dark eyes of his that had filled with tears kept haunting him.
“Hey, young man, table seven!”
The kitchen aunt’s booming call from the kitchen made Munyeong blink his eyes wide open as if snapping back to himself. There were times he even forgot when exactly he’d come into work. He’d open his eyes and it would be morning, and when he came back to his senses he’d be at his new workplace, and when he came to himself again he’d have arrived home with his body completely spent. He was living without a moment to breathe, yet his mind still seemed to be stuck back there.
“Yes.”
Munyeong placed two steaming bowls of gukbap on a tray and served them. During the day, he worked at a gukbap restaurant near the market; in the evenings, delivery; and in the early hours of the morning, designated driving or working at places like entertainment establishments. These were things that had practically been his routine before he’d started working at the company. His body suffered for it, but it was the only way he could earn money.
“Here are your orders. Please enjoy your meal.”
He set them down in front of two office workers sitting side by side and turned to go — and at that moment, through the large glass window at the front of the restaurant, the overcast sky came into view. There had been signs of it since morning, but now even past lunchtime the sky had grown even more oppressively gray, and it looked like rain was about to pour down at any moment.
“The weather’s absolutely miserable today.”
