Just because humans share the same ground as chickens doesn’t mean they can hold a conversation with them. Regrettably, Haeshin was the same. He couldn’t. If he could, he would have become a vegetarian.
“Neither.”
Haeshin kept his expression clean and plain, and shook his head with quiet sincerity. Just then, the Little Mermaid on the screen Yujin was watching broke into song and began talking to the fish. The timing kept being bad — relentlessly, spectacularly bad.
“Let’s say you really are a mermaid. Isn’t that a little cruel then?”
A sigh escaped him. What was cruel about it this time, he wondered.
“You catch fish and dry them, and you eat steamed crayfish like it’s nothing. Don’t you feel bad for your sea friends who live in the same water as you?”
By that logic, humans eat pigs, chickens, and cows too. Living on the same land and all — don’t they feel bad?
Haeshin was almost on the verge of tears now. His inner world, which had been reasonably dry right up until last night, was soaked through and in shambles, like something that had been caught in heavy rain.
He had lived his whole life as a simple, guileless island boy on Samsam Island. At the same time, he had worked tirelessly to keep the fact that he was a merman from being found out. Because being different was the same as being feared.
And yet, now that he was actually about to reveal it with his own mouth, that was no easy thing either. Was proving yourself to someone always this hard?
“What, are you crying?”
Hwichan caught the reddened, bloodshot look in Haeshin’s eyes and tilted his head slightly.
“I’m not crying. I’m just flushed because I’m frustrated and angry.”
At that, Hwichan picked up the long-cold steamed crayfish sitting at the edge of the table and started to peel it open with clumsy hands. He soon skillfully pulled out the tail meat and held the thick piece of crayfish right up to Haeshin’s mouth.
“Then just show me your mermaid tail. Show me and I’ll actually believe you. Oh, wait — is it the top half that’s the fish, not the bottom? That’d be a fresh take, actually kind of interesting.”
The sarcasm was unmistakable. By this point it seemed he no longer particularly cared whether Lee Haeshin was a mermaid or not — he was only curious about where this ridiculous self-directed mermaid performance was headed.
Haeshin pressed his lips together and looked away. But Hwichan kept nudging the plump crayfish meat toward his mouth. He finally opened up and took it, and chewed with a sulky, begrudging expression.
“I don’t want to just show my tail to anyone. It’s the same as taking off your underwear in front of a stranger, so don’t go around casually asking to see something like that. W-would you like it if I asked you to strip down and show me your bare body?”
The mermaid’s tail. There was one inconvenient problem with it. Haeshin was not skilled at bringing it out or putting it away. To even get the tail to appear, he had to be submerged in seawater for at least an hour, and to shift back from tail to legs, he had to spend nearly three days doing nothing but lying down.
“Oh? There’s a clause for that too? So it’s not that you have no tail to show?”
“I can’t bring it out here. I need to be in water.”
“There’s a bathtub here. Should I fill it up for you?”
“A-actually, even when I’m in water I have a hard time bringing it out……”
“Ah, that answer’s a little lacking in originality.”
Whether this was the mermaid average or something unique to Haeshin, there was no way to know. His mother — the only other mermaid Haeshin had ever known — had already left this world long ago, and he had never formed any connection with her siblings or kin.
But until now, Haeshin hadn’t particularly minded that fact. Once a year was enough to let the tail out, and unless he was planning some grand swim from Samsam Island all the way to the mainland, he simply didn’t need it. He could dive and work the water perfectly well with two legs instead. Besides, he had never been fond of looking at his own tail to begin with.
What he had never imagined was that he’d end up actually missing it.
“So what would it take to see the tail, then?”
Hwichan said it with a faint curl of amusement at the corner of his mouth, as if watching to see how far this would go, and went back to peeling the crayfish.
“I don’t know. Not telling.”
Just as Haeshin had kept offering cabbage wraps earlier, now it was Hwichan holding out piece after piece of peeled crayfish to Haeshin’s mouth — but Haeshin stuck out his lower lip and shook his head.
“Not eating?”
“Not eating.”
“Then let’s talk more about the mermaid thing. It’s entertaining.”
“No.”
“Why not? Maybe if I keep hearing it, I’ll actually end up believing you.”
Hwichan dangled the crayfish tail back and forth like he was luring an animal.
Unable to resist, Haeshin took the crayfish tail with a show of reluctance, and after staring off to the side for a long moment, slowly opened his mouth.
“The merfolk of Samsam Island summon storms.”
“Storms?”
“Yeah. Storms.”
This time even Hwichan’s eyes lit up with what looked like genuine interest.
“When the merfolk living on Samsam Island fall in love with someone from the mainland, a storm hits. Lightning strikes out of a clear sky, and the wind blows so fierce it sends trees flying.”
Hwichan raised one eyebrow.
“Ah. Like yesterday?”
It was meant as sarcasm, but it hit the mark dead center. Haeshin pushed aside the feeling roiling inside him — as if he’d swallowed something burning — and nodded.
“Yeah. Like yesterday.”
At this point, it might have been better to just go with the strategy of saying ‘actually I was thinking about dying, but when I saw you I felt like I wanted to live.’ Yeah, that would’ve been smarter.
Somehow he’d laid everything out, and yet it felt like he’d collected all the shell while leaving the most important kernel untouched. Like circling endlessly just outside the destination instead of reaching it.
“Anyway. I was in a rotten mood this morning, but you gave me a bit of a laugh.”
“Ha…… forget it, forget it. I’m done trying to explain myself.”
If there was any consolation, it was perhaps that even the faintest bloom had appeared on the face of this infuriating, graceless boy.
You really are something — pretty and strange at the same time. That fierce, and yet you crack a smile so easily over the smallest things.
Haeshin muttered the words inside himself alone and clicked his tongue. Watching Haeshin with his obvious look of defeat, Hwichan laughed softly. A low, pleasant tone of voice brushed past his ear like a breeze. At that sound, Haeshin’s heart gave a sudden, sharp thump.
Well. Laughing like that — even like this — is better than looking like he’s about to cry.
They’d known each other barely a full day. Just one day — so why was his mind so relentlessly, restlessly full of him? He was nothing, and yet why did it keep turning into a storm?
Haeshin questioned his own inner world. This wasn’t the kind of interest that could be brushed off with some laughable phrase like aesthetic sensibility or neatly shelved under the convenient, evasive word preference. There was something about it that didn’t quite fit the light and easy word crush.
“If I ever see you getting into the water on a rainy day again, I won’t let it go.”
“What about when it’s not raining?”
“Clear days too.”
“Diving is how I make a living.”
“Doesn’t matter. Still no.”
Hwichan said it with a deliberate sternness and lifted his eyes.
Their gazes met, and Haeshin thought quietly to himself. You couldn’t swim, and yet you wanted to save someone you thought was going to drown. You could have drowned alongside them, but you couldn’t just leave them there.
Turning it over in his mind — the fact that someone who couldn’t swim at all had thrown himself into a stormy sea — that was no ordinary thing.
I think I’m genuinely drawn to Shin Hwichan because he’s kind. No — not kind. Fragile, maybe.
Lee Haeshin had always been helpless against people who carried this kind of shadow.
Sharp-tongued and bitter, graceless and rough-handed — and yet, when it came to another person, someone willing to throw himself into the sea. There was that much goodness in him.
Before Haeshin had even noticed, Hwichan had returned to his usual composed expression and fixed his gaze on the Little Mermaid animation playing on the screen that Yujin was watching.
Watching that profile, Haeshin’s heart began to beat. It was clearly a different quality from the simple flutter he felt whenever he saw a pretty face.
