The price of drinking after a long time was harsh. The nightmares I had all night were proof of that. No. Actually, it was a dream too calm to call a nightmare, yet somehow filled with unsettling emotions that felt alive.
“…What, what more, can I, do.”
“Answer me, hm? Answer me! I said answer me! I’m begging like this….”
In the dream, I was lying face down on a mattress littered with liquor bottles, spewing words I couldn’t even understand myself, resigning myself, then repeating the cycle of drinking more alcohol and butchering my mind.
No. Honestly, I could no longer call that “me.”
Bloodshot eyes and pale skin. Hands full of hangnails and limbs covered in wounds.
The name of that man with an appearance that was far from normal was not Jang Woohyun but Nam Heejae.
“Swallow it, swallow it! You have to keep your promise.”
His two hands, severely convulsing, forcibly grabbed someone’s jaw and pried it open. Many pills were administered into the obediently opened mouth.
When the owner of the jaw chewed and swallowed the medicine, a smile spread across Nam Heejae’s face as well. Making strange laughing sounds like heuhah, hahaha, with his facial muscles trembling, he was different from the Nam Heejae I knew.
Then is this an illusion I created alone? Perhaps my memories from the night before, when I was drunk and found those mysterious pills, got mixed up and created a phantom.
But thinking about it again, another hypothesis filled my mind.
Maybe…, could this be Nam Heejae’s frontal lobe showing me his past? What if this bastard Nam Heejae had committed some unspeakable crime? Looking at him, doesn’t he have the appearance of a criminal?
While pondering in the hazy unconsciousness, day eventually broke and I woke up with a start.
“…What? Where did he go?”
Whether fortunately or unfortunately, Baek Sahyun wasn’t in the spot next to me. Seeing how cold the bed had become, it seemed he’d left his spot a long time ago. Clutching my churning stomach, I staggered to the shower room.
A few minutes later, when I went down to the kitchen, I could face the disappeared Baek Sahyun.
For a rich young master, he paid terribly meticulous attention to housework—he was already wearing an apron and making brunch.
Smelling the golden-brown toast, I awkwardly sat down in front of the table. At the same time, I asked.
“Is your stomach okay?”
My words trailed off unintentionally. The current peaceful atmosphere felt quite threatening to me. I worried whether he might have noticed the dogshit I’d tried to pull yesterday. For example, things like confinement, or confinement, or acts like confinement.
Baek Sahyun answered.
“So-so? The problem is I blacked out.”
Baek Sahyun glanced back with a faint smile.
‘He blacked out?’
I didn’t know if he was being sincere or if it was a ploy to reassure me, but I had no choice but to believe him and move on for now.
I tried to erase my anxious expression and started eating the brunch Baek Sahyun offered.
However, perhaps because of the unsettling dream, I had trouble properly concentrating on the meal. The meaningful pill bottles I’d obtained yesterday also bothered me just the same.
The sense of déjà vu was too strong to dismiss as just a random dream. From experience, there were severely many settings that weren’t revealed in text. Just like how Baek Sahyun and Nam Heejae weren’t an equal friendship.
Then couldn’t this also be some kind of signal? For instance, that Nam Heejae had committed a crime. As I was listlessly stabbing at bread with my fork, Baek Sahyun smiled loosely.
Realizing that his gaze had been lingering on my face all along, I swallowed my dry saliva.
Baek Sahyun asked.
“Why did you abandon a perfectly fine bedroom and use the storage room?”
“…Huh? Ah. That? I just did because the stairs were right in front. I told you. You were too heavy.”
My voice trembled throughout the lame excuse. I was afraid my impure intentions would be exposed immediately. However, looking only at the conclusion, it was a fairly decent excuse, so I composed my expression and brought the bread to my mouth.
Baek Sahyun nodded with a smile.
“Is that so. Well, humans do have a homing instinct too. You might have felt it too, Heejae.”
Homing instinct.
Even someone with a head as empty as a tin can like me had heard of and knew this concept. So I asked back.
“I’m asking just in case, Sahyun-ah.”
“Yeah.”
“Honestly, you can see it too, right? That my memory is…, slightly not intact.”
“Well, you’re possessed by a ghost, so it can’t be helped.”
“……”
“It also seems like it might be multiple personality disorder, but that’s for a doctor to diagnose.”
Whatever he was spouting, I carefully started speaking again.
“…Did you ever confine me there?”
The fact that Nam Heejae felt a homing instinct to that somehow eerie storage room—didn’t that mean it was a place he frequented enough to become familiar with it?
When no answer came back, I suddenly lost my nerve and coughed while lowering my gaze. Though I’d treated Baek Sahyun like trash countless times, this was the first time I’d thrown such an aggressive question at him.
Organizing my thoughts, I asked again.
“Sahyun-ah. I’m really okay, so don’t hide it and answer me. Did you…, torture me there often?”
From the moment we arrived at this villa until now, Baek Sahyun had been pretending to be affectionate while subtly covering up the past. But even for the sake of this body’s owner, I had to get the facts straight. Because the perpetrator directly admitting their crimes and not doing so are quite different matters.
A suffocating silence descended continuously. Only the humming sound of the ventilation fan barely filled the stillness.
I couldn’t even dare to move the tableware at the tense dining table. I was just breathing quietly with my gaze fixed on Baek Sahyun’s lower face.
At that moment, Baek Sahyun’s long lips parted and burst into loud laughter.
“Hahahahaha!”
He laughed heartily enough for his body to shake.
Engulfed in an indescribable sense of discord, I could only be dazed. The strange giggling sound echoed over the dining table for quite a while.
Baek Sahyun, who had barely collected himself, said in a gentle voice.
“Heejae’s completely lost it.”
He was so confident that I really felt like I’d become insane. Even though it was Baek Sahyun who had flustered me with that maniacal laughter.
“You can’t come at me like that and make the listener feel wronged, Heejae-ya.”
“…If I said something wrong, don’t laugh it off and answer properly.”
I immediately retorted. I could no longer endure Baek Sahyun’s characteristic ambiguous manner of speech.
If he felt wronged by my speculation, all he had to do was firmly say no. But the fact that he kept delaying his answer was proof that he wasn’t confident about this part.
Anger slowly boiled up in my queasy stomach. I knew he was a despicable bastard, but even at this moment when the answer was obvious, I found it disgusting how he packaged his position with pretense.
When I glared without budging, Baek Sahyun gradually scanned me.
“You’re holding the answer, so what. Don’t you kind of get a feeling by now?”
“……”
“If you can’t figure it out even after seeing that, you’re an idiot.”
The place where his gaze stopped was above the pants pocket containing the pill bottles. Sweat instantly dripped down. Even though I’d only picked up something rolling on the floor, my heart felt a chill like someone caught stealing.
The gaze scanning my lower body was persistent. The weight of the pill bottles I hadn’t been conscious of until just now was heavily pressing down on my leg. Did I pick up something I shouldn’t have? I trembled my leg at the feeling of carrying a time bomb in my pocket.
Should I just confess? It might be better to honestly reveal the circumstances and hear an explanation of the situation. After all, it would be impossible for me to figure out the exact purpose of the medicine alone anyway.
Watching me seriously agonizing, Baek Sahyun let out a sound like he was holding back laughter.
“Heup.”
Though he belatedly covered his mouth and pretended to be well-behaved, it only looked like pure pretense.
“What are you grinning about….”
Vrrrrrrr.
Just as I was about to rebuke him, a cell phone vibration suddenly rang.
「Seo Jeongmin.」
The caller was a familiar name I felt I’d heard somewhere. As I was fumbling through my mind for the vaguely formed face of the man, Baek Sahyun, unable to hold back, interrogated.
“Seo Jeongmin?”
“Huh?”
“Looks like you’ve been in contact quite regularly? Getting calls from morning.”
At the endlessly cold voice, I suddenly recalled Seo Jeongmin’s identity.
Come to think of it, there was one crazy bastard who’d been hitting on me at the boat party. That bastard who threw advances like saying my pheromones were light, wanting to roll around with an alpha.
What face does this bastard have to call me? Moreover, Baek Sahyun was glaring with eyes like someone afflicted with jealousy, making my uncomfortable feelings grow even more.
What, regularly in contact? Isn’t that a tone as if I’m having an affair with another man?
“This bastard is one-sidedly…, no wait. Forget it. What does this have to do with you, Baek Sahyun?”
I hurriedly attempted to explain, but by the end, I exploded in frustration. Come to think of it, isn’t Baek Sahyun not in a position to interfere with my contacts? The fact that this bastard was trying to control my private life was absurd.
“It’s relevant, Heejae-ya. Because you’re too easy a type.”
“What?”
“If someone offers to buy you drinks, you’ll follow around whether it’s a molester or a suspicious person. That’s your nature.”
Unlike his soft speech, traces of crookedness were visible all over his face. His twitching eyebrows and twisted lips were examples. Baek Sahyun spat out coldly.
“As an old friend, how can I just let that be? I at least need to control you from the side. Right?”
It was getting worse and worse. Watching him act beyond common sense yet shamelessly justify himself was becoming increasingly unbearable.
After suppressing my rising anger with a deep sigh, I calmly pressed him.
“Why are you really acting like this yesterday and today? We were supposed to build trust between us. Was the trust you mentioned treating people like idiots and putting them down?”
I’m truly disgusted. I could no longer accept this bastard’s hypocrisy of luring people with all kinds of decorated words, then trying to scheme when he didn’t feel like it.
