Nunbi muttered it. At that, Woonjeong tilted the umbrella back and let his face show. Then he grinned.
“Caught me?”
A cool wind blew. In the rain hammering down along the eaves, Nunbi felt something like dark green tendrils winding around his ankles. Their eyes were locked together.
Right. There’s no way that’s normal.
“….”
“….”
Nunbi learned for the first time that a summer night’s silence could feel cold. A boy of upright character could do nothing against a nature this perverse. A boy who carried so much gratitude and so much guilt could not hold his own against a Woonjeong who seemed to feel neither. Woonjeong liked it when Nunbi was hurt. When Nunbi’s mood was ruined and he couldn’t even show it. When Nunbi was caught reading the room and flinched. He enjoyed having him in hand to do with as he pleased. To Nunbi, who had so many things to watch out for and worry about, a Woonjeong who was held back by nothing was like a stain — one that spread easily and wouldn’t come out clean. There was no predicting or avoiding behavior that followed no rules and no common sense. Nunbi was simply being tossed around.
“Keep trying to hold me back.”
At that, Woonjeong said something ridiculous again.
“What?”
“Every time I do what I damn well please and act like an animal — keep scrambling around frantically trying to stop me. Keep it up.”
Has he completely lost his mind? Nunbi was so thoroughly dumbfounded he clenched his fists and shook.
“Fine, go! Do whatever you want. Follow the lanterns straight down and you’ll hit the highway — trip and fall or get into whatever mess you want, that’s your problem.”
And then Nunbi slammed the side room door shut and went inside. He gripped the handle and breathed hard. Then, not even a few seconds later, he crashed the thin door back open and came flying out under the eaves.
“But you’re not actually going, right?”
Mercifully, Woonjeong was still standing exactly where he’d been. Those eyes fixed on Nunbi and stared straight through him. That bright, fine face was full of laughter.
“If you — if you are going, just play around a bit and come back quickly. Promise me.”
Nunbi was gasping and completely at a loss, and Woonjeong stopped even trying to hide it and broke into a full grin. The boy went sullen and shut his mouth. I should’ve sent him toward the forest. Let him get lost and run into a mountain animal — that would’ve wiped the smirk off his face. But Nunbi wasn’t capable of being that rotten.
“Stop laughing!”
Even as the boy flushed and snapped at him, Woonjeong didn’t stop grinning. Unable to properly stop him, unable to say to hell with it and egg him on, unable to ignore him or be cold — the only one stuck in this impossible position was Nunbi.
“What do you do, being so disgustingly kind.”
Woonjeong smiled with his eyes curved thin. The very Woonjeong calling Nunbi disgustingly kind had the face of an angel. The smile he pulled up at the corners looked like it might stay suspended in the air long after he was gone. Those eyes in the dark, flickering with a strange light. Eyes that folded bright and easy in sunlight and then hardened in an instant into something frightening. A serpent’s gaze. A transparent gaze. Woonjeong was really….
“What exactly are you doing with me, honestly?”
Woonjeong had no interest in anyone else at the temple. They said he hadn’t once greeted the devotees in the nearly week he’d been here. Nobody knew where he’d come from or what he’d done to end up being dragged here. They said to be careful. Everyone was talking about Woonjeong behind his back. I just want to help. I was only worried. So why—
“Why me, of all people? Why are you doing this to me?”
His head was spinning. At the question, Woonjeong tilted his head slightly. Then he regarded Nunbi for a long quiet moment.
“Do you actually want to know? Then be honest with me.”
“Stop playing around.”
“Why do you keep calling it playing around. Do I look like I’m playing around right now?”
Nunbi went quiet. And with that, silence fell on all sides again. No sound of insects. Only the steady pour of rain. Woonjeong, who had been rooted in place, suddenly closed the distance between them.
“…!”
Nunbi inhaled sharply. Woonjeong covered Nunbi’s three paces in a single stride. One step. Two. Three. The courtyard. The stepping stone. The veranda. In that narrow space, Nunbi backed up three paces of his own. The next moment, a long shadow leaned toward him. Woonjeong, with the whole of the rain-soaked temple at his back, was suddenly close as a painting.
“Look at this.”
A voice poured down from above. The smell of soap. And cigarettes. Pressed between the wall and Woonjeong’s body, Nunbi squeezed his eyes shut.
“You’re scared out of your mind and you’re trying to pretend you’re not.”
The voice was smooth. A perverse nature. A stain that held back for nothing. Grinding his teeth made his head throb. His back was cold too. There shouldn’t have been any connection between the two. Nunbi gritted his teeth.
“Move.”
“Why? I need my answer.”
“I said move, I’m done with this!”
He tried to shove Woonjeong hard, but his arm was caught. Below the slightly damp fringe of hair, Woonjeong’s eyes gleamed. Right there, inches away.
“I just — I want you to find me irritating.”
In that instant, Nunbi’s eyes went wide in the dark. Words he couldn’t begin to make sense of. The not-quite-closed door of the side room pressed into his back. His cold fingertips found and gripped the door handle.
“And I want you to be so bothered by me you don’t know what to do with yourself.”
Woonjeong’s gaze was like a serpent. A serpent winding around Nunbi’s neck. Sliding down along his collarbone beneath the loose T-shirt. Trailing along the curve of a slender waist and then, at last, smiling — beautiful and vicious.
“Keep worrying, keep fretting — and then get so confused that you can’t let go of me.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was already happening — but Nunbi shot back with don’t make me laugh anyway. Woonjeong, naturally, didn’t move an inch.
“Why? Instead of all that, let’s just get along. You and me.”
There was a sound somewhere — like scales sliding through the air. Nunbi felt like he was being pierced through by that gaze. He couldn’t breathe.
“The kind of dislike that sticks around — that lasts the longest, you know.”
Woonjeong looked like something that had woken wrong from a dream in the middle of the night and come out distorted. Nunbi went silent. Right. This is Woonjeong. Saying things like that, with that face, that expression, as though it were nothing. Once again, what came rushing back to the nape of his neck was exactly the same feeling Nunbi had been carrying all along.
“And if I — if I said no?”
The truth was that Nunbi was scared half to death.
“No?”
And Woonjeong already knew it. He’d known before Nunbi did.
“Then no matter what I do, don’t have anything to do with me. That settles it…. That’s how you treat someone you dislike.”
And so Woonjeong, smiling pleasantly as he offered that simple solution, had already known what would happen next. That Nunbi couldn’t do it.
“But you don’t dislike me, do you. No. You can’t.”
Something went cold inside him. Facing that inorganic and yet luminous face, Nunbi found he had absolutely nothing to say. He’d been seen through again. Woonjeong smiled. In an instant, the current in the air shifted.
“Alright.”
Nunbi nodded, slowly.
“Fine. Starting now, I’m going to dislike you. I’ll ignore you and avoid you like you said. No more having anything to do with you.”
“Sure. That works too.”
Unexpectedly, Woonjeong’s smile only brightened. Nunbi recognized immediately what expression had taken over that pretty face and made it thoroughly un-pretty. Satisfaction. That was what it was.
“Don’t feel too hard done by over tonight, Nunbi.”
Saying that, Woonjeong stretched his arm out loosely behind Nunbi and caught the door handle. A clunk. The side room door swung open with no resistance at all.
“I had a really good time.”
At that moment — as Woonjeong opened the door and drew his hand back — the back of his hand grazed lightly against the skin of Nunbi’s bare thigh, exposed beneath where his trousers had been pushed up. It might have been a touch. But the situation didn’t call for it, and there was no reason for it, Nunbi thought. Maybe it was the wind? Fine tremors rose across his entire body. The umbrella Woonjeong had tossed down had flipped over beneath the veranda. Woonjeong picked it up, shook it off, and was perfectly composed. As if nothing had happened at all.
“I’ll head out. Sleep well.”
