The back of Seonha’s hand that Hongdan struck swelled up red immediately. Seonha stared down at it blankly. Then he raised his head again at the sound of the wheels of the leather chair he’d personally chosen rolling.
Hongdan was already coming around the desk to Seonha’s side. That clear face that Seonha usually delighted in was mottled with anger.
He didn’t like it.
Though of course it didn’t come close to the betrayal Hongdan was feeling right now.
“Do you fucking think I can eat right now? And sitting across from you nicely at that? Does this make any sens…!”
“What can’t you do?”
“What?”
Seonha gave an answer difficult to understand by Hongdan’s common sense. It was absurd enough to make Hongdan’s steps stop immediately.
Instead, this time Seonha closed the distance. Though Hongdan had taken four or five steps toward Seonha, for him it was merely one stride. Even that resembled the charity Seonha always gave to Hongdan.
“What can’t you do, I said. You think I’m not uncomfortable sharing a meal with you in this situation? I’m making an effort too, right now.”
“What the hell kind of effort is that!”
“What kind of effort? The effort to keep getting along well.”
“You think that makes sense in this situation right now….”
“No, that’s not it. Even if it doesn’t make sense, we have to make it work.”
“What?”
Seonha straightened his head that he’d been shaking in lamentation and stared at Hongdan.
“Choi Hongdan, are you confident you can live without me? Sure, I paid off all your debts, but what can you actually do on your own right now? Do you have some great certification, some career? What have you done besides graduating from college? Or what, that scribbling you do? You’re going to beg for food and survive on just that? Do you even know what the average annual income of a writer is? Did you at least look that up before doing this? You must want to leave me over this little thing and go back into that cesspool.”
Every single one was a rotten sophistry and a wrong answer.
If a passerby had heard, they were outrageous statements that deserved getting slapped with a rice scoop and drenched in water without being able to make a peep. Hongdan’s reason said so.
But even though his judgment reached this point, he couldn’t easily point it out. Because if you excluded the context and dismantled the collected words one by one, nothing was actually wrong.
It was just assembled incorrectly, not that the parts themselves were flawed from the start.
Right. In the end, Seonha was right again.
Like all his choices that had involved Hongdan’s life until now, Seonha was rarely wrong. It was the same when he first saved him from violence, and the same when he threw a punch without hesitation at Hongdan’s father who said he wouldn’t send him to college.
So this relationship was tilted to one side from the beginning.
Setting aside the childish love talk, Hongdan first of all wasn’t confident he could live without Seonha, and didn’t know how to do anything.
Thanks to his ambiguous talent, he could wield a pen a bit, but as he said, it was woefully insufficient to live while taking care of just himself with that. But going back to those shabby days was also disgustingly unpleasant. That’s why he married Seonha, throwing away all his pride, wasn’t it?
Hongdan couldn’t break up with him.
“……”
That he wasn’t qualified to was a more accurate expression.
Hongdan’s head, having accepted reality, was buried straight into the ground.
Then Seonha’s large hand rose onto Hongdan’s shoulder as if it had been waiting. It was a warm touch, as always.
“I’ll understand that you’re not in the mood to eat dinner. I was hasty about that, sorry.”
Seonha pulled Hongdan into an embrace like that and pressed his lips to his smooth forehead like before. Because his skin was so pale and delicate, a red mark was left immediately.
A satisfied smile hung on Seonha’s lips, which had left his mark like a stamp. But before Hongdan could notice, he pressed down and erased the corner of his mouth. Instead, he tapped Hongdan’s cheek as if it were his own.
“I’ll go out and grab something quick, so in the meantime you calm down a bit. Think rationally about what I said.”
“……”
“Hm? Choi Hongdan, did you understand what I said?”
When no response came back from Hongdan, Seonha tilted his head and forcibly met his gaze. His black pupils seemed to waver for a moment, but what mattered was that Hongdan didn’t avoid him.
Soon the small head shook up and down a couple times in Seonha’s view.
“Alright, then.”
Only then did Seonha let go of Hongdan’s body.
Before completely leaving the study with slow steps, he didn’t forget to remind the other person of his role once again.
“See you tonight, wifey.”
Creak- thunk.
The study closed firmly as if nothing had happened. With no sound coming from within, the house became perfectly peaceful.
Seonha liked that silence. The dinner he’d enjoy alone wasn’t planned to be very long.
***
But the relationship that had been forcibly pieced together like that ultimately scattered again.
‘You called me a slut and whatnot, but in the end you’re not so different either, are you?’
‘Why am I so strict only with you? Didn’t you get angry at me because of that? You threw a fit and even raised your hands. Do you even know how much money I spent to placate your mood? And you still say only I’m strict.’
‘Why would we even need a paternity test when it can’t possibly be my child? Don’t you know about vasectomies? I’ve been tied up for over four years. I was a eunuch bastard long before we got married. Why would someone who never indulged in luxuries try to waste money on useless things? What, did you bribe some genetics lab you know well?’
‘Trust between people is originally the most fragile thing. It breaks for even more trivial reasons than this. But you shove that scrap of a photo in my face and what? In an instant? ……You’re not seriously trying to fuck with me.’
‘Why did you marry me, for that matter? The reason you took my hand back then—did you really think carefully about it? And you still don’t know what mistake you’re making right now? Hongdan, you’re a smart kid.’
Seonha hadn’t come home for a week since that last fight.
For the first two days, he at least made two or three calls. All that came back was the call rejection guidance, and after that he didn’t call anymore either. He just sent a daily text asking if Hongdan was eating properly. Of course there was no reply, but he hadn’t expected one anyway so it was bearable. The other things were more of a problem.
If not for the child in his belly, Hongdan would have just lain listlessly in bed too.
Just to keep alive this thing that had only grown to the size of a grape, he forced down meals and moved his body dutifully. With no appetite because of Seonha, and morning sickness that got progressively worse as time passed, swallowing even a single grain of rice was as arduous as chewing grains of sand for Hongdan.
To avoid throwing up what he’d struggled to eat, he’d go into the dressing room and hide for a while among the piles of Seonha’s clothes before coming out. There was no helping it since the bastard who was supposed to be the dad calming these raging hormones had suddenly run away.
While alone smelling his pheromones in that gap, the anxiety that had encroached on his entire body also felt like it gradually faded. Sometimes that place felt more comfortable than the mattress worth tens of millions of won. He was grateful, at least in those moments, for the fact that the guy was a slob who couldn’t control his pheromones even at twenty-eight.
Hongdan was passionate about prenatal care too.
Worried that his negative thoughts might have a bad influence on this grape that hadn’t yet fully formed a brain or ears, he played classical music he had no appreciation for and even read several highbrow books. He never missed the unbearably childish goodnight greeting of “Still, your daddies love you” before bed.
Hongdan was that desperate for this small life.
Every time he faced Seonha’s coldly frozen gaze, he kept getting the illusion that the past three years of married life were just a fantasy. The child in his belly was one of the few pieces of evidence reminding him that those times weren’t lies.
Even if not love, Hongdan thought it proper that he wanted to cling to this so much because it was the only fruit that Yeon Seonha and Choi Hongdan had created while wanting only each other.
Seonha too, though he was currently raging that it couldn’t possibly be his child, why should he play dad to a cuckoo chick—once seven and a half months passed and he held it directly in his arms, he’d realize it immediately. Hongdan believed so.
When that time came and he held this lump of flesh in the delivery room, he’d say the eyes and nose resemble me, and the small mouth and clear skin are just like you, our child. If it was the Seonha he knew, he was firmly convinced he would definitely do so.
That’s why he was enduring. Imagining that scene countless times, though it felt like he’d collapse many times, today too he stood firmly in that place. Hongdan had been waiting for his one and only husband Seonha, and planned to keep waiting afterward.
He really intended to do so.
“Ahh……!”
If not for the extreme pain that suddenly came to his lower abdomen.
“Aah! Ah!”
If not for the hot, unpleasant fresh blood flowing down his groin.
