His hand that had been turning pages stopped at the soft breathing sounds. Gi Siyoung looked down at the bottom of the bed. Seungun, who had placed his head in the shadowed direction, had his eyes gently closed. Soft breathing sounds came from his slightly parted mouth. The hand he’d left outside the blanket was still wrapped in bandages.
It looked uncomfortable at a glance. Gi Siyoung compared that hand with his own. The wound he’d gotten on set was nothing compared to that one. Compared to his own past when he’d made every kind of fuss, Im Seungun was a true man among men.
“Fuck, pathetic.”
He muttered briefly and roughly laid the script down beside him. He stretched out his arm and turned off the reading lamp. Soon after, the room was soaked in darkness. Not long after, the sounds of deep sleep became entangled in syncopation.
Gi Siyoung usually makes an effort to sleep deeply. As there are many all-night shoots and dawn shoots, whenever there’s a day he can sleep on time, he always makes an effort for quality sleep. However, most of the time it doesn’t cooperate, and whenever that happens, he suddenly opens his eyes at dawn.
Everyone has such moments. When your eyes suddenly pop open even though no one woke you. Each time he experienced it, it was truly a strange thing. Gi Siyoung, who had suddenly opened both eyes wide, turned toward the window in his sleep.
The dawn light from the Han River dimly covered his vision, and before that, all the nerves in his body stood on end. His mind and body keenly captured the strangeness. The air behind his back was different from when he’d fallen asleep. The soft breathing sounds had stopped early on.
“……”
Before his vision could adjust to the darkness, his joints stiffened. An ominous feeling suddenly assaulted him. It felt like someone was clearly staring at him in the darkness. He wanted to reach out and turn on the light, but his body felt bound by something strange. It was like waiting for a monster that could jump out from under the bed at any moment.
Gi Siyoung gulped down his saliva and slowly turned his body. He stopped breathing and gripped the blanket. He almost screamed. Glossy eyes were floating in the air. Anyone would get goosebumps if they witnessed someone blankly staring at them in the middle of the night. Im Seungun was standing beside the bed, quietly looking down at him.
“Im Seungun-ssi?”
Gi Siyoung carefully called his name. But there wasn’t even a slight movement. Rather, his eyes opened even wider. Gi Siyoung instinctively checked Seungun’s hands first. Perhaps his purpose might be to harm him. Fortunately for his misfortune, there was nothing in Seungun’s hands.
“Im Seungun-ssi, what are you doing standing there? Are you uncomfortable somewhere?”
“……”
But he still says nothing. What went wrong? When the fear disappeared, suspicion arose for a moment. When he raised his upper body, Seungun’s body moved one step.
“Why are you standing there like that?”
As soon as Gi Siyoung’s words ended, Seungun’s body collapsed with a thud onto the soft bed. Siyoung inadvertently caught his body. Soft breathing sounds came from his nose buried in the blanket. Gi Siyoung let out a sigh of relief from deep in his core.
“What a damned sleep-talking episode.”
The creepiness of discovering Seungun standing and staring at him in the middle of the night still clung unpleasantly. He couldn’t drop the human who had collapsed onto the bed back down to the floor either.
He grabbed and pulled Seungun’s body. He comes along easily without much effort. He put down the script that had occupied the side spot onto the floor and laid him down properly there. Seungun, who had fallen into slumber, was perfectly fine as if he’d never acted like a madman.
As he silently stared at that face, the closed eyelashes trembled slightly.
***
Morning had dawned. Seungun bolted upright. He tidied the messy bed and went outside. The sound of handling dishes came from the kitchen. The smell of toasting bread was strong. Gi Siyoung was standing in the kitchen peeling boiled egg shells. Seeing his usual life that he would do on a leisurely morning felt unfamiliar. Seungun asked while watching the white eggshells falling into the bowl.
“When did you wake up? Of all times, I overslept…”
“……”
“I’m much obliged for last night.”
“……”
“Oh right, there’s no particular schedule today. PT is scheduled for 1 PM.”
“How’s the schedule?”
“Pardon? I just told you.”
“I mean Im Seungun-ssi’s, not mine.”
“I’m going to try going to work at the company.”
“Myeongwoo hyung told you to rest yesterday.”
Seungun moved his injured hand back and forth.
“The wound isn’t even that big. Rather, if I stay home I get bored and antsy.”
Gi Siyoung set down plates with toast, boiled eggs, and fruit on the dining table.
“Looking at you, Seungun-ssi seems like someone who wants attention too.”
“Why would I?”
“Aren’t you going to the company to advertise that you’re injured this much? You also want to hear some lip service worries and consolation from people.”
“How is Gi Siyoung-ssi so twisted about everything?”
Seungun asked crookedly.
“Really? If you can see the twist, you must know how to untangle it. Do you know how to untangle it?”
“Gi Siyoung-ssi doesn’t seem easy.”
“If people change easily, they’re dead.”
“……”
“Eat breakfast.”
It was a conversation with a strange conclusion. Seungun pulled out a chair and sat down. The round, flat plate held all appetizing colors. Seungun drank a cup of water and poked the boiled egg with a fork. Gi Siyoung picked up his plate and sat across from him.
In the middle of the table were olive oil, pepper, salt, various flavored jams, and butter. Siyoung sprinkled olive oil in a circle on the crisply toasted bread. Seungun scooped up strawberry jam, the easiest option, with a knife and spread it on the bread. As soon as he chewed, chunky fresh strawberry flesh was crushed in his mouth.
“By the way, did you have a bad dream yesterday?”
Seungun shook his head while biting bread.
“Mm. No. I don’t particularly remember…”
“……”
“Ah, did I talk in my sleep? I didn’t wake you by snoring loudly, did I?”
“No.”
Gi Siyoung agonized over whether he should tell him the fact that last night you stood at my bedside like a ghost and stared at me intensely. However, seeing the face with eyes opened wide in front of him, he decided to just let it pass. He couldn’t interrogate someone who didn’t even remember what they did in their sleep.
Whether Gi Siyoung’s answer was somehow unsatisfactory, Seungun’s fork movements noticeably slowed. He tapped bread crumbs with his fork while glancing at Siyoung’s mood. Gi Siyoung took a sip of coffee and opened his mouth.
“Do you have something to say?”
“Do you know about night terrors?”
Seungun moved his lips.
“Night terrors?”
“I had that when I was young. It’s not serious and my mom told me it’s a symptom that commonly appears in growing children. If my sleep-talking was bad yesterday, it was probably because I was dreaming. I’ve had bad sleep-talking since I was young when I dream.”
“Night terrors… There’s even such an illness.”
“Then I’ll go to the bathroom.”
“……”
Seungun, who had finished his awkward confession, got up from his seat. When he disappeared from view, Gi Siyoung wiped his hands and looked for his phone. He entered a portal site and searched for the illness name ‘night terrors’ that Seungun had mentioned. Excessive information immediately poured out, perhaps because it’s quite a common illness.
“Suddenly waking up from sleep showing a panic state, a sleep disorder… frequently occurs in young children… accompanied by fear reactions…”
Gi Siyoung also read all the related search terms derived around the search word. It says that even in adults, if sleep deprivation, stress, and anxiety accumulate, they sometimes act as if not fully awake from dreams. Last night, Im Seungun didn’t show representative symptoms of sleepwalking. Rather, it was closer to unconsciously acting as if dreaming.
“That figures. Seeing blood yesterday must have scared him too.”
Despite pretending to be fine, he’s also just an ordinary human who fears blood. Gi Siyoung, whose question was solved, laid his phone face down on the table. At the same time, Seungun, who had firmly closed the bathroom door and rushed in, immediately turned on the sink water. Holding the edge of the sink where water was pouring out, he exhaled a sigh—*huuu*.
“……”
He pressed hard with his palm on his chest that had been pounding all night. Then he glanced back at the bathroom door. Beyond that door, Gi Siyoung eating his meal flickered in his vision like an apparition.
Last night, Seungun had opened his eyes wide and gotten up while Siyoung was asleep.
Gi Siyoung had read the script for quite a while, and he endured sleepiness by pinching his thighs inside the blanket, afraid he might fall into deep sleep before Siyoung went to bed. Only when the bedroom became dim and steady breathing could be heard stably did Seungun quietly raise his upper body.
On the side table next to the bed was his personal phone, exposed defenseless. Seungun took out the bugging USB that President Gu had handed him from his pocket. The ghost application could only be installed and removed through that device. Afterward, there would be no way for the phone’s owner to find the ghost application without the device.
He secretly took his phone from on top of the side table. He took out the device he’d been keeping on him the whole time just in case and crouched like a thief under the bed to install it. When the installation was almost finished, Gi Siyoung rustled. If caught, everything would go wrong.
Seungun had to succeed somehow. He didn’t know when he could get his hands on his phone again. When he barely put the phone back in its original place and stood up, Gi Siyoung had turned around and was looking at him.
‘Im Seungun-ssi?’
‘……’
His heart dropped with a thud.
‘Im Seungun-ssi, what are you doing standing there? Are you uncomfortable somewhere?’
When he realized he hadn’t been caught, all the strength in his body drained out.
Seungun ignored his pounding heart and washed his face vigorously with cold water. His phone vibrates from his back pocket. While wiping the moisture with a towel, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his phone. That day, Seungun didn’t keep his resolution to go to work at the company. Because a summons had come from President Gu.
