# Chapter 67
After speaking, Lee Hwan felt a bit stung. He should have appeased him and moved on, but had he just scratched the wound deeper?
Yet despite hearing that outburst, Taesung turned his eyes away without any response. That was unexpected, and therefore more frightening. Because he couldn’t tell what Taesung was thinking.
Like Lee Hwan, Taesung’s attitude had been wildly inconsistent lately, making him impossible to read. He was often like a fire about to explode, then instantly subsided and turned cold. It was always impossible to know what had heated him up and what had calmed him down.
The one thing Lee Hwan clearly realized now, however, was that while Taesung had been speaking sharply, he had been staring at his arm the entire time. Lee Hwan followed his gaze and lowered his head briefly. Under the loose short sleeve, reddish handprints remained visible on his white skin.
When he looked back, Taesung’s eyes caught the soft light, taking on a strange glow.
“Did you work Kang Dongha the same way?”
“…What?”
“Casually dropping formalities, hanging around.”
An unexpected question. It felt like someone had hit the back of his head with an iron pan with all their might. He was so dumbfounded that his mouth automatically trembled.
“Wor… Huh? Work him, what?”
Lee Hwan stammered his question. Retracing what he’d just heard in that low voice, checking if it wasn’t his imagination or a dream.
‘Did I… drop formalities?’
Come to think of it, he might have unconsciously shortened his speech endings at the thought of Kang Taesung. After dreaming about him and seeing an unexpected side of him, he’d suddenly become familiar on his own. From Taesung’s perspective, it must have been confusing to see someone who had been formal and respectful until he collapsed suddenly becoming casual.
But he hadn’t expected it would bother him this much. His thorny words scraped at Lee Hwan’s heart.
“Why did you approach me? What’s your reason for lurking around, even mobilizing that idiot Kang Dongha?”
“Because I’m goddamn friends with you someday?”
“If you’re going to say such deranged things, I think you can just leave now.”
“I was trying to, but someone started talking to me.”
Though he countered every remark without yielding, he somehow felt like he’d lost. In the end, he was the one who got entangled.
Lee Hwan turned away with his insides boiling as soon as he finished speaking. If Taesung disliked him that much, there was no need for him to stay either. He’d been trying to leave anyway, so this was actually for the best.
However, before Lee Hwan could even take a step, his arm was grabbed and his body was sharply pulled backward.
“Ugh!”
Taesung, who had risen at some point, grabbed him and threw him down. Then a large hand pressed against his chest, and Lee Hwan’s legs gave out as he landed with a thud on the sofa where Taesung had been sitting. Even in this chaotic moment, the sofa, still warm from Taesung’s body, enveloped Lee Hwan, giving him a strange sense of security.
“What are you doing…!”
Lee Hwan was about to burst out in protest but hesitated and stopped. Taesung had bent over and come very close to him. A pale face turned toward him from a precarious distance where their noses might touch if he moved a little closer.
“…”
What kind of situation was this? He didn’t even feel curious. It was as if the oxygen around him was depleted, leaving him breathless. He simply struggled to steady his shallow breathing.
A strange silence flowed as neither of them spoke. Sitting right next to the standing lamp, with one side too bright and the other dark, Lee Hwan felt as if his vision was swirling.
Lee Hwan received a subtle, penetrating sensation from Taesung’s face, half in shadow. Under slightly disheveled hair, those piercing eyes again. Though he didn’t know what part had irritated him so much, he was angry. That much was clearly perceptible.
He had never seen Taesung so quietly furious. Even more so with those eyes, like flickering blue flames, directed straight at him. That gaze seemed both scorching hot and freezing cold at once.
Those dark eyes slowly traced down Lee Hwan’s neck. Only then did he realize that Taesung was observing him with all his senses alert. Was it because he felt threatened? There was a ticklish sensation wherever his gaze touched. When their eyes met, his left pupil, gleaming in the light, constricted.
It was strange. In this tense situation where anything might happen, Lee Hwan felt an incomprehensible, peculiar relief. Even in this unstable state, with the other firmly holding his arm to prevent him from escaping, while fixing his eyes on him.
As he gradually traced the roots of this all-too-familiar feeling, sadly, it was a similar emotion to the miserable satisfaction he gained from his imagination.
The fantasy of Taesung regaining his memories and returning to him. Imagining those eyes always directed at him, and him casually brushing it off with a grin.
‘This is…’
As if on cue, Taesung’s nose tip gradually came closer. With those eyes filled with heat, Lee Hwan kept hearing his heart pounding in his ears. Was it the lingering effect of his dream that made this volatile situation feel not so bad?
Disconcertingly, Lee Hwan felt his previously cold insides slowly filling up. As he realized this, the inside of his chest gradually warmed.
But the emptiness that had been eating away at him only grew larger. An indescribable emotion swelled, creating a strange sensation.
“When it’s not my home it’s the company, when it’s not me it’s Kang Dongha. Suddenly lurking around with the purpose of wanting to be friends… You expect me to believe that?”
Through Lee Hwan’s dreamy mood, a rather painful observation seeped into his ears. Half-pulled back to reality, he unconsciously nodded. It was unlikely that the person in question would believe a story that even Kang Dongha hadn’t believed, but he wished he would.
“Just clearly state what you’re after. Money? Connections? Are you in the Support Team thanks to Kang Dongha?”
But his expectations shattered in an instant. It was as if his hair had been grabbed, yanking him out of his daydream, and he was once again sitting in the living room of Taesung’s house.
“…Fuck off.”
Abandoned starkly in reality, Lee Hwan spat out the words with a choked voice. Now he too was genuinely upset. Even with this guy right in front of him, he longed for the Taesung from his dreams.
Damn it. He shouldn’t have let that dream slip away so easily. If he had the same dream again, he would hold onto him tightly and not let go. He might even struggle to stay longer, embrace him, and sob.
Thinking like that, his eyes suddenly stung and grew hot. As soon as he blinked, his cheeks grew wet. Lee Hwan didn’t even try to wipe away his tears, just glared at him with eyes full of resentment.
Discomfort gradually spread across Taesung’s face. Tension appeared at his temples, and his well-defined jaw protruded and hardened. Though his eyebrows were clearly furrowed, his previously fierce gaze softened slightly.
Just as a ticklish breath seemed to touch his cheek, Taesung suddenly stood up straight again. The distance between them had widened again, as if they had never been so close.
With long strides making hurried footsteps, Taesung turned and left the living room.
Click, beep-beep.
In the wide and lonely house, the door lock sound echoed through the silence. Lee Hwan, suddenly left alone in a home without its owner, absently wiped away the tears that kept flowing.
* * *
Click, beep-beep.
As the door locked, Taesung was once again left in silence. All kinds of emotions were swirling, threatening to break out from his sternum. His heart was beating roughly every second, and his jaw had hardened as if it might break. Only after leaving the building, getting in the car, and driving for quite some time did his head, which felt like it might explode, finally quiet down.
Brown eyes wet with moisture. Reddened eyes, cheeks, nose, lips. The hand-shaped marks engraved like insignia on those white arms.
Every time Taesung faced him, he felt a deep, dark anxiety. A sense of crisis rushed in like a blade, as if driving a car with broken steering. An ominous feeling from every angle. Because of this, whenever he saw that face, various emotions irritably mixed together.
Déjà vu, anxiety, confusion, and… an indescribable, strange joy. All emotions grew at their own pace, gradually consuming his mind.
Why did he feel pleasure amid anxiety about someone he had never seen before in his life? That question always bred discomfort and nervousness. The occasional déjà vu brought foreboding rather than welcome familiarity.
Looking back on his life, all accidents happened in places he didn’t know about. Especially after entering his dark-hearted paternal family, even more so, on a daily basis. In other words, whenever he missed anything, an accident—no, deliberate interference—always occurred there.
So he always remembered, recorded, and made judgments based on those records. There couldn’t be any unknowns. Even more so, events he failed to notice. Life after awakening had been a continuous series of disasters, always a snowball turning into an avalanche on its return.
But then, one day, the embodiment of all his anxieties suddenly appeared before him.
Joo Lee Hwan. Age 24, Naru Group Supporter.
No guardian, no dependents. Parents deceased in a traffic accident at age 15.
Relatives remain, but none wanted custody, so on the surface, he appears to have lived alone since high school under the nominal protection of his uncle’s family.
Even while looking at the clearly organized records, the itchy sensation that was both familiar and unfamiliar remained unresolved. The feeling that this wasn’t everything, that there was still something significant he didn’t know, scratched at Taesung’s nerves.
‘He can’t be this ordinary.’
He didn’t know why he thought that, but after removing the mask and discovering his identity, his confusion only increased.
Looking back, even their first meeting had been ominous. That bizarre encounter was still vivid in his memory.
At an unfortunately bad timing, “fans” from who knows where had been wandering near his home taking pictures, and scratched their initials on car bodies suspected to be Taesung’s.
Jade caught them and turned them all over to the police. Later he heard they had planned to attach a camera to the entrance to figure out the door lock code and break in. They had given up after realizing the top floor had a separately secured entrance, but afterward, they hid in the parking lot with knives, wanting to leave some sort of mark.
It was questionable why a mere corporate Hunter would have fans in the first place, and he was repulsed by their uniformly creepy behavior…
Just a few weeks later, Taesung discovered another strange man touching the family photo in his living room.
