At first, Yumyeong had an expression as if he understood nothing. As if he were hearing the word “Yeong” for the first time. Even though it was a word that existed in his own memories, it was clear he couldn’t connect it with the man before his eyes.
Hakyoung brought Yumyeong’s hand, which he’d been holding, close and placed it on his own chest. Palm facing toward his heart.
Unlike his face, which had settled into composure, his heart was pounding like crazy. His own pulse, felt through Yumyeong’s hand, was beating so fast that it occasionally skipped irregularly. He wanted him to know just how nervous he was.
“The one you’re probably mistaking for a girl.”
“……”
“That Yeong who couldn’t speak—that’s me.”
“That’s… impossible.”
The first words were denial.
Yumyeong’s delicate eyebrows were wretchedly distorted as he forced out sounds from his tightly constricted throat.
Hakyoung had imagined this moment of revealing his identity dozens of times. Of course, among them were scenarios like this where he couldn’t accept it and showed a reaction of denial. So even though this situation was within his calculations, he was hurt once again.
Suppressing his surging emotions, Hakyoung said,
“You can’t believe it? Fine. If you’re suspicious, ask me anything. I can answer everything.”
“……”
“Do you know why I came to like looking at stars? Because you were the one who told me that the universe is beige. I was so amazed that a sky full of nothing but pitch-black stars when you look at it could be that color.”
“……”
“You were also the one who told me that smell and memory are connected, weren’t you? I still have the habit of taking deep breaths when my emotions overwhelm me. You created many of my habits, and I know too much about you.”
While he spoke, Yumyeong’s dark eyes were scrutinizing every inch of his face. Though they were still eyes filled with doubt, with a direct gaze he examined each feature of his face one by one. His forehead and eyebrows, the space between his brows and his nose bridge, both eyes and cheeks, and even his lips… Quietly trembling at the sensation of being caressed by his gaze, Hakyoung waited for Yumyeong’s reaction.
“Ha… Why didn’t I realize?”
As if he’d finally found parts that resembled the face in his memories, Yumyeong squeezed his eyes shut with an expression like he might get dizzy.
“That you were Yeong.”
“Yeah, I’m Yeong.”
What Yumyeong did next, after looking at him for a long while with wavering eyes, was unexpected.
Smoothly, his body approached without a word and leaned against him. As if reenacting the very first thing he’d wanted to do upon reuniting with his first love from memory, Yumyeong desperately pulled Hakyoung into an embrace. Hakyoung, who had frozen stiff at the unexpected action, also slowly raised his arms and placed his hands on Yumyeong’s back.
Their touching chests were hot enough to melt.
“Yeong……”
Yumyeong’s breath touched his neck. Stroking the back of Yumyeong’s head as he rubbed his forehead against him, Hakyoung whispered with trembling breath.
“I’m sorry for not telling you.”
“……”
“I didn’t want to tell you like this either……”
“When did you know?”
“From the beginning.”
“……”
“I came looking for you because I missed you in the first place. Going to America wasn’t my choice, so I wanted to come back now and attend school together with you.”
“But why didn’t you say anything……”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you first.”
At those words, Yumyeong in his arms suddenly pulled away. The hand pushing his chest away made him want to hold on, but when he pushed that away too, he raised his head and let out a sigh toward the empty air. His eyes were full of thoughts.
“We didn’t get along at first, did we?”
“……That’s right.”
“If you’re really Yeong, how could you, at first, to me……”
He couldn’t continue his words and bit his lip. The bitten part of his lip turned deathly white as the blood drained from it.
He understood being shocked by the unexpected fact. But the color of confusion emanating from Yumyeong was a bit different. It felt somewhat hurt, so Hakyoung spoke as if persuading his own heart.
“Yeah, we weren’t good from the start. I’ll be honest. When we met again at eighteen, Shin Yumyeong didn’t seem like the kid I liked when we were young, so at one point I was disappointed. It was so suffocating and painful that my fantasy was shattered, I even resented you… It’s not your fault. It was because my expectations were too high.”
Yumyeong was looking at him silently with his mouth firmly shut.
“But Yumyeong, that’s proof of my feelings. I still fell for you again despite that. You too, you did too. You even came to like me without knowing who I was.”
“……”
“How can this be just a passing feeling?”
Hakyoung lifted Yumyeong’s palm and made it cup his face. When Yumyeong hesitated because of the hot breath and slowly moving soft lips he felt within his hands, he buried his face in them again as if begging him not to let go.
The humid clouds finally began to drop rain. Plop, plop. Thick raindrops touched his forehead and skin. Yumyeong, who raised his eyes, squinted one eye as rain fell on his eyelid. A quiet voice flowed from his mouth.
“Yeong… I really missed you.”
“Yeah, that’s why I came like this.”
At the desperate voice, Yumyeong laughed weakly. That deflating laugh was ominous.
He hoped it wasn’t because the result of that waiting was disappointing.
Hakyoung was overcome with fear.
Looking at the darkening sky, he withdrew his held hand and lowered his head.
“I believed in Yeong. That Yeong was on my side……”
Those words of unknown meaning pierced deep into his heart. Hakyoung tried to look at his face, asking “Yumyeong?” But Yumyeong wouldn’t easily raise his lowered head. In the meantime, the raindrops grew thicker and began to pound the ground noisily.
“It’s raining. Let’s go inside.”
He embraced his shoulders soothingly, but Yumyeong slipped out of that embrace emptily. Then, so he could avoid the rain that had suddenly started pouring, he pushed Hakyoung beyond the rooftop door.
“Go in first.”
“Why? You come this way too……”
“No, let me be alone for a bit.”
“……”
“Please……”
And then he closed the rooftop door.
The last glimpse of Yumyeong’s face through the door gap had complicated inner feelings floating transparently on it. It was a face where deep confusion was visible in its entirety.
“Yumyeong!”
He tried turning the closed door handle click-clack, and pushed the door, but whether he was bracing against it with his back on the other side, the door wouldn’t open easily.
Yumyeong, who had been leaning against the door for a while, slowly sank down to that spot only when the presence knocking behind him had gone. A crude tin sheet that couldn’t even be called an eave barely covered above his head, and rain relentlessly poured at his feet. Fog was thick on the gloomy mid-mountainside.
His face watching the precariously swaying long-haired trees had no expression.
***
Ten days before vacation ended.
“Yumyeong, Mom can’t give up on you.”
It was a phrase he’d wanted to hear so badly, and at the same time, a phrase that strangled him.
After being forcibly brought home, Yumyeong was locked inside the house. The familiar family home he’d lived in since childhood became a well-decorated prison.
“Why did you grow your hair like that? How slovenly.”
To Yumyeong, who had been waiting with a tense face for his father to come home from work that day, his father left just one remark and passed by. Even though they were seeing each other for the first time in almost a year, even though he’d suddenly returned during vacation, that was all he had to say.
“……I’ll cut it tomorrow.”
His father, with a displeased face, clicked his tongue in place of an answer.
During the dinner that followed, his father’s treatment of him as invisible continued endlessly. The only one who seemed happy about his older brother’s return was his much younger, naive little sibling.
During the tense meal, Yumyeong’s cell phone suddenly started ringing.
“Put it away during meals.”
At his father’s uncomfortable voice, Yumyeong answered quietly.
“……Yes.”
He couldn’t bring himself to answer the call, but he could move one hand under the table to secretly send a brief reply. The moment he was putting his phone in his pocket, his eyes met his mother’s anxious face.
Messages kept arriving from Hakyoung. Wanting to reply quickly, in his impatient heart, Yumyeong barely ate his meal before getting up and heading to his room.
However, even before they could exchange a few words while sitting in front of his desk, with ghostly timing his mother came in carrying fruit.
“Yumyeong, do you want dessert?”
A clean wooden tray without a drop of moisture and well-peeled fruit, carbonated water with syrup. It was a familiar snack menu. It seemed to show his mother’s obsessive personality, having wiped away even the condensation on the ice-filled glass.
Even after setting down the tray, his mother didn’t leave the room. His mother, who had been fidgeting behind him, soon spoke to Yumyeong carefully.
“Do you need anything else?”
“Ah, I’m fine.”
“You kept looking at your phone. If you want to listen to online lectures or something, Mom will prepare them for you.”
“……Ah, it’s nothing much. A friend contacted me.”
“A friend? What friend?”
His mother’s face as she confronted him was firmly hardened.
Only then did he realize. The snack was an excuse.
In those wavering eyes, he could feel the determination to cut Yumyeong off from the outside world by any means. It seemed she thought that if given the slightest opening, he would use any method to meet Hakyoung again.
Seeing his mother’s eyes like that, strangely, rather than feeling suffocated, he only felt sad. All the more so when he saw eyes filled with fear that her son might really go down a strange path.
Afterward, his mother took Yumyeong’s phone when she left the room. Though his only means of contact was taken away, somehow he thought what was bound to happen had happened. Having lost the energy to resist, Yumyeong just lay on his bed in resignation.
Lying alone in a room full of silence, naturally Hakyoung’s warm embrace and the city lights visible behind him came to mind. The countless stars he’d seen for the first time in his life, Hakyoung’s romantic eyes searching for constellations, his voice, expression, body heat as if he didn’t know what to do because he liked him so much……
He could somehow pull himself together from his loneliness. He just worried about Hakyoung, who would be waiting for his reply.
Wanting to find a way to contact him somehow, he turned on the laptop in his room, but whether measures had already been taken, the internet didn’t work with it.
