“Thanks for the drink. I’ll head out now.”
It could have been deleted long ago.
Yet Kwon Wookyung had held onto my number all this time, even though he hadn’t reached out in years.
The confusion swirling in my head suddenly felt like it had been wiped completely clean. Every question I had wanted to ask, every word I had wanted to say — all of it vanished, and the only thought left was that I needed to get home, no matter what.
“Hold on.”
Wookyung stood up after me and suddenly reached out, brushing the corner of my mouth with his hand.
Huh. The short breath I had drawn in froze solid.
It was because the moment his hand touched my lips, I felt his pheromones sink into my skin in one warm rush.
Only then did I properly register the faint scent drifting through the house.
Wookyung had been an alpha for a long time now, so his pheromones must have always lingered around him… but from where I stood — not having known that — there was somehow a different kind of distance between us than before.
Was he always like this……? It felt strange, the way he came close like a grown man wearing cologne.
Then again, Kwon Wookyung really was a grown man. He was twenty-four.
I stood frozen, rolling my eyes over to look at his hand.
The thumb that had gently rubbed the corner of my lower lip came away with a smear of white milk on it.
“What. You could’ve just said something.”
Doing something like that at our age — that’s elementary school behavior.
Embarrassed for no real reason, I scrubbed at my lips harder than necessary.
“……You can stay longer if you want.”
Wookyung said it without looking at me, wiping his hand with a tissue.
This guy had something about him that always managed to get under my skin.
One moment he’d react so lukewarmly it left you flustered, and then the second you said you were leaving, he’d quietly try to keep you there — that alone was proof enough.
“I’m fine.”
“Then I’ll walk you.”
See? The moment I say I’m leaving, he tries to follow.
Like a stray cat that hisses when you try to get close, then quietly trails after you the moment you turn away — except this wasn’t that!
“I’m fine. It’s not like I’m going to trip on the way there.”
I tried to stop him, but he followed anyway.
It was only next door, and yet here he was walking me home twice now — that was a bit much.
Apart from bowing to the gardener who was busy clearing away the trimmed branches, we walked forward without a word.
Whether it was just my mood or whether the atmosphere had genuinely become strange a while back, I couldn’t tell — but opening my mouth felt awkward beyond measure.
“How’s your body doing?”
It was Wookyung who broke the silence first.
At the question that slipped unexpectedly into my ear, I turned — and our eyes met. It felt like he had been watching me the whole time. I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d seen me fall last time, but it seemed like he’d catch me the instant I stumbled.
Not that I had any intention of falling flat on my face again.
I shrugged and gave my leg a deliberate little shake to show him.
“A lot better. They say once my muscles build up enough that moving freely gets easy, there won’t be much difference from a regular person.”
“Is that so.”
I was confident about recovering my health. Eating well and moving a lot was what I did best.
Wookyung knew that too. And yet he hesitated slightly before asking a different question.
“Your memory……that’s fine too, right?”
“Yeah.”
I’d heard some people lost their memories — compared to them, I was lucky.
I nodded, then a small detail came to mind.
“Oh, except for the accident. I don’t remember that part. The doctor said that can happen.”
It was a relief that I remembered most things, but apparently the day of the accident itself had been wiped clean by the shock of the impact. It was a little frustrating — not being able to remember the day that had swallowed six years of my life.
My mom had explained it to me instead — she said I had been hit by a car that skidded on a rain-slicked road. But beyond that, she didn’t go into detail, and I didn’t press her. Her face had gone very pale while talking about the accident. I didn’t want to keep asking about something she clearly didn’t want to revisit, and… knowing the full details now wouldn’t change anything anyway.
All I could think was that I’d been through something incredibly unlucky, and I needed to be more careful around cars from now on.
“Why? Were you worried I’d forgotten a lot of the old stuff?”
“Well……”
“I still remember you collapsing during freeze tag and ending up in the emergency room, you know.”
“……Why do you even remember something like that.”
“Want me to keep going? There was also the time you helped yourself to all the chocolates I got on Valentine’s Day because you were hungry — and since you didn’t know you had a nut allergy and ate the whole thing, you broke out in a rash all over……”
Mid-ramble, I caught Wookyung’s eyes and let the rest of the sentence trail off.
The moment I realized I had, without even noticing, started running my mouth again — the embarrassment hit me all at once.
Back at his place earlier, I’d had a sudden realization — and with it, I could at least somewhat guess at the feelings behind Wookyung’s cryptic behavior.
I turned my head, cleared my throat with a quiet ahem, and brought up something entirely different.
“I’ve just been thinking about the past a lot lately. Honestly, I still haven’t adjusted. You’ve been living through all of it, so you probably don’t feel it as much — but for me, so much has changed.”
Some people think first, then act. Others think while they act. I was the type who acted first and thought later — the kind to charge straight in headfirst, crash into things, and only then think, oh, that’s how I should’ve approached it.
This time was the same. I’d just shown up without a second thought because I was happy to see him. It was only after actually meeting him that I realized it. The Wookyung standing in front of me wasn’t the eighteen-year-old I had known — he was a twenty-four-year-old adult.
“You’ve grown up, you’ve become an actor……”
Unlike me, who had skipped straight over everything, Wookyung had passed through nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three — each one in its proper order — to arrive at twenty-four. He had lived through more than twenty seasons I knew nothing about.
Some parts of twenty-four-year-old Wookyung seemed the same as before, but there must be so much that had changed too. Maybe Wookyung and I, with time frozen for me, were no longer friends of the same age. And maybe my clumsiness — unable to catch up to all that time — was a burden to him……
“I keep wondering if you’re really my Kwon Wookyung.”
It was true — he had developed so many more expressions I couldn’t read, and Wookyung had become an adult whose inner world was even harder to decipher than before. But whether or not I could understand every corner of his heart wasn’t what mattered.
The question I really wanted to ask was this.
Are you still my friend?
You, who remembered that I drank milk every day and never deleted my number — surely you must have thought of me at least a little. It was possible you had simply forgotten to delete it… but if that meant I’d been left behind as nothing more than a forgotten piece of your past, that would be a little sad.
I had held back a lot of what I could have said, but Wookyung seemed to understand clearly.
He cast his eyes downward and quietly murmured, “Friend……” — then gave a small shake of his head.
“If you think of me as a friend, then I’m your friend whenever you need me to be.”
There was somehow a strange nuance in that answer. But before I could turn it over in my mind, Wookyung continued.
“That’s what you said from the start, wasn’t it. That I had to be your friend because I was the most handsome and coolest in the class.”
“……You still remember that?”
I had actually said that. When I let out a small, sheepish cough, a faint smile came back at me.
“Wow, you were pretending not to hear and ignoring me the whole time — but you heard every word.”
Back then, when I avoided opening my mouth in front of other kids as much as possible out of fear of being made fun of. Only after carefully thinking it through in my head would I manage to squeeze out one or two words in Korean. It was the same at home — my parents, feeling the urgency over my language problem, had told me to avoid using English at home as much as possible. I, who talked so much, had been dying of frustration.
So beside this guy — who consistently tuned out whoever spoke to him, in whatever language — I would ramble away endlessly in English. I figured he couldn’t understand it, and that he wouldn’t mock me for it either, so I genuinely just let my thoughts spill out stream-of-consciousness — and yet!
“You improved your English because of me.”
“‘Because of’? Say ‘thanks to.'”
“Sure, your Korean is great.”
Laughter crept into that exasperated reply.
Honestly, unbelievable.
With my heart considerably lighter, I arrived at the front gate.
I gave a casual wave.
“I’m going in.”
“Okay.”
Wookyung stood there until the gate was fully closed. Like someone who needed to watch me safely inside before he could move.
I walked through the empty garden and glanced back once.
Something told me that if I opened the gate again right now, he’d still be standing there.
No way.
I let the baseless thought drift away and opened the front door.
Shin Haechan was in the entryway, sweeping the floor. It was the dirt that had fallen off Haeyong’s paws — the adorable, sigh-inducing traces of a dog who had played his heart out and then come barreling inside.
“Where’s Haeyong?”
“The housekeeper took him in to wash up.”
“That must feel nice.”
Picturing Haeyong melting like a marshmallow in warm water, I smiled to myself as I neatly took off my sneakers.
I was stepping inside, carefully avoiding the tracks Haeyong had left behind, when Shin Haechan suddenly spoke up.
“Hey, did you run into someone outside?”
“Hm?”
“You smell.”
“Smell like what?”
Shin Haechan, brow furrowed, came closer and sniffed.
Why is he getting all up in my face?
I backed away uneasily, but my second oldest hyung paid no mind and closed the same distance right back.
“Alpha pheromones, you idiot.”
Shin Haechan muttered to himself, his expression scrunching hard.
“Where have I smelled that before……”
