"I said I wanted you to... to knot , that I wanted it... how many tis...."
"That's not it. This isn't your fault!"
Inwoo grabbed Ihyeon's shoulders and shouted, voice rising. He hadn't ant it as if he were to bla, but he couldn't even feel the need to correct Inwoo's misunderstanding.
"Rao Weikun is the bastard here. You were an unsuspecting victim. You shouldn't bla yourself at all."
"......"
Like the day his uncle ca, he felt as if he were drenched in rain. Stupidly, he missed Rao’s warmth—the way Rao had jumped out of the car that day and hugged him without asking anything first. Even though Rao was the one who had shoved him into this cold... he still wanted to be ward by Rao’s body heat....
As the thought ca—maybe his love had only ever been dependence and entrusting himself—moisture welled in Ihyeon’s eyes. Not wanting to act emotional, he lifted a hand to wipe it away at once, and Inwoo’s head dipped in deep.
"......"
There was no tongue, but the kiss pressed so deep their lips overlapped hard. While Ihyeon, frozen, blinked slowly two or three tis, Inwoo shifted the angle of his mouth, lightly rubbed the inner mucosa with the edge of his lips, and then slowly drew back.
"...What was that."
Body rigid as if a gun were aid at the small of his back, Ihyeon didn’t move a muscle and only worked his lips to ask. Releasing the hands that had gripped Ihyeon’s shoulders, Inwoo showed his open palms in surrender, rubbed the back of his neck, and forced an awkward smile.
"If you take a new shock... maybe it makes the shock of the chaining disappear for a mont?"
He pretended, as usual, that it was a crass joke tossed off lightly, but his eyes wavered, and his mouth twitched. Confronted by Ihyeon’s direct gaze demanding a real answer, he soon gave up the swagger. He let out a heavy breath between pressed lips and stared, as if sothing inside had been scraped sharp, jabbing Ihyeon with his eyes.
"I can't watch # Nоvеlight # this."
"......"
"I know that to you I’m just another bastard entangled in this ss. But at least I’m not the one who changed your body. I stepped back because I thought he truly wanted you and cared for you, but if it weren’t for that...."
"What good are hypotheticals?"
Ihyeon’s voice was neither cold nor hot, as if both the what-ifs and the kiss from monts ago ant nothing to him.
"I know this hit you hard too."
As Ihyeon moved to end it there, Inwoo strode in with a grimace.
"Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll rember—I'm the one who showed interest first."
"Yes, I rember. And I also know that even if it hadn’t been there, you would have acted exactly the sa."
"......"
Back at the start, when he acted like he wanted to go on a date or sleep together once, the way Inwoo laced a co-on into the end of every sentence had seed like nothing but a habitual move from a typical playboy without a shred of sincerity. Because he hadn’t tried to cross a decisive line, Ihyeon had left him alone and given no response.
Even if there had been a possibility that it could develop into sothing more behind that light attitude, bringing up that possibility now was aningless.
If only his father had reacted differently then; if only his mother hadn’t had the accident then; if only they’d picked a different restaurant; if only the truck driver had gotten the vehicle serviced on ti.... What aning is there in such what-ifs.
"You’re just too shaken... so I’ll take it as a brief mistake. Let’s think of it that way."
Saying in a tired voice that they should end this here, Ihyeon drew Inwoo’s resentful gaze.
"So you don’t even feel confusion about ."
"......"
"About , you can stay this calm."
He couldn’t handle Inwoo throwing yet another issue at him now. Whether Inwoo’s feelings were real or not, he couldn’t bear even the weight of a feather.
"I’m... going to sleep sowhere else tonight."
Without jacket or bag, with no plan at all, Ihyeon turned toward the entryway—so Inwoo’s hand caught his shoulder and spun him back, firm this ti, not careful.
"There’s no need. Like you said, it was a aningless, impulsive mistake."
"......"
"But."
"......"
"Even a mistake has its timing, I guess."
Shoving the shoulder he gripped toward the living room, hard enough to hurt, Inwoo tipped his head at a slant.
"Maybe it’s better than living as a coward who grins on the surface and never tries anything... to risk a once-in-a-lifeti mistake that costs everything."
He muttered behind him in a bitter, self-mocking voice. When Ihyeon, pushed along toward the living room, looked back, Inwoo kneaded his shoulder twice in encouragent and flashed the usual teasing smile.
"Never seen you before. Who are you? New boyfriend?"
At the Phantom entrance, in front of Rao’s car, the first ti they t, he’d said that—eyes bright with curious interest. The Inwoo from then overlapped with the one before him now. And yet, like a spot-the-difference puzzle, sothing was subtly out of place.
As if telling him not to look, Inwoo softly pushed Ihyeon’s cheek forward with his hand when Ihyeon kept glancing back. He gave a snort of a smile.
"Because then at least... sothing will happen."
The voice from behind was no longer smiling.
■ ■ ■
Among the many books Morae owned was a work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. (3) He had borrowed various books from her, regardless of genre or subject, and killed ti reading them—at the ti, no matter how great a book was, for Ihyeon it was nothing more than a tool for killing ti—but now the mory of how he ended up choosing that particular one, so roughly edited and rife with mistranslations, had gone blurry.
Because he had chanically stuffed lines of type into envelopes of ti, and when one was full, thrown it away and opened the next to cram in more type, the elegance of the sentences or their readability hadn’t mattered to him then.
Even in that unfriendly translation he’d had to stumble through slowly, like reading French in the original despite it clearly being in his native language, there was a sentence worth bringing into his own life.
"The one who gives a gift must not expect a value in return or hope to be rembered by the recipient. Nor should he leave it in his own consciousness as a symbol of sacrifice for the other."
Back then, that passage made Ihyeon think of Morae and Ihan.
He ate, slept, went to school, served in the military... and lived quietly without ever causing trouble, so the elders in his family accepted him as a boy without problems. In truth, he was rely carrying out assigned tasks chanically.
When an exam schedule was posted, he prepared diligently, but not because he desired a high score. He never rebelled after “that,” but not because, as the adults liked to think, he was a deep child who had fortunately overco everything well.
He was only numbing his inner self so he wouldn’t feel violent shock and confusion, resentnt or sorrow. A state where human desire and emotion were completely dehydrated, where he couldn’t laugh sincerely or get truly angry, was a quiet death, a passive death.
Keeping such a person close and not being buried in that lethargy with him was harder than one might think. The light and energy that let him keep living, even in that numb state, could not have sprung up from nowhere.
Even if his father turned away from him along with the world, it wasn’t true that the entire world turned away. At least he had Morae and Ihan.
That—nothing else—was the gift.
A gift that fully t the condition Derrida proposed: expecting no equivalent value in return, not even wanting the other to recognize it.
While discussing that book, Morae had also ntioned another of Derrida’s definitions.
"If we say we will forgive what is forgivable, the very concept of forgiveness disappears. Forgiveness is only the forgiveness of the unforgivable."
While a simple motorcycle part was being replaced, sitting with Morae on the worn sofa of their usual repair shop and drinking barley tea the owner served, Ihyeon had thought of his father.
If he had possessed the maturity to forgive what cannot be forgiven... he wouldn’t have needed to protect himself by anesthetizing his feelings. He could not forgive, and he did not know how to forgive, so he had tried simply to beco numb to it.
So that his eyes wouldn’t go red and wet when he saw his father; so that he wouldn’t pour out sharp words and exhaust his emotions; so that he could look at his father with no feeling, like looking at a washbasin by the tap or a broom in the yard—hardening the surface of his heart was the best he could do then.
In a taxi creeping up the slope toward Phantom, looking out at Samcheong-dong in the evening glow with its warm lights, Ihyeon was thinking of Rao this ti.
Was what he had done unforgivable?
Like his father’s silence?
Having moved to a fishing village right after middle school, living in a narrow, monotonous world with almost no contact beyond Morae and Ihan, Phantom had been a new world for Ihyeon—vital, dazzling, unpredictable, and yet a place where passion and respect for art coexisted.
The first day he followed Chief Han to help prepare an exhibition, the feeling he’d had in the taxi leaving Phantom was still vivid. If the car turned back around, it felt like the spot where "Gallery Phantom" had been would be overgrown with weeds—an unreal sensation. Or like the daze after waking from a dream so real it felt like life.
At that ti, behind his strangely skewed sense of reality, Ihyeon had felt a "desire." He wanted Phantom to be real, to remain just as it was there.
Even if you block out the light and withhold water until it dries to a crisp, light will still leak in and water will seep in, and soday desire will grow in a human chest—proof of that was how faithfully he’d multiplied his desires afterward.
On the night he hyperventilated because of , he hadn’t rejected Rao climbing onto the bed. He had made clear his desire for Rao—saying he didn’t want kissing and sex and knotting with anyone else but him.
And Rao... had pursued his own desire through . There’s no guarantee that the one I desire will desire back in the sa way.
Quietly mocking himself for having cautiously believed that this ti it would blossom and bear fruit, that it would lead to a harvest—and for having summoned notions like future, hope, and overcoming—he turned his gaze out the window.
Even on a Monday evening, the streets lined with trendy cafés and shops were lively with people trying to savor the brief flavor of autumn. As he looked closely at each face he’d unconsciously labeled beta and passed by until now, like gazing at the faces of old friends, the Phantom building ca into view. Ihyeon clutched his sweaty, empty hands tight against his thighs.
To be continued in Diamond Dust, Volu 6.
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