"Still... isn’t that better than the two of us sharing nothing at all?"
I’d avoided speaking because I thought it would hurt if I got nothing back from my father—but once I started, it wasn’t as painful as I’d imagined. Enough that I wondered why I’d been so afraid.
Watching his nonreaction, Ihyeon wet his lips with his tongue.
"I..."
His voice shook.
"Even if I’m... becoming an oga... you’re still not going to say anything?"
Father’s gaze, which had been fixed on the open sea, dropped closer—to the waves breaking against the rocks below the cliff—but there was no other response. Faced with his silence, Ihyeon’s head actually cleared. Pressing his right palm down, pointlessly, against his thigh, he mocked himself.
"They say I’m half oga. Which ans, said another way, half not oga. Half beta, and the other half not beta..."
Hearing his own words sound like sophistry, he let out another weak, airy laugh.
The fact that he had crossed that sea and another continent with the man; that every mont and emotion they’d shared... all of it felt like so wild fantasy he’d indulged so deeply he’d co to believe it was true. Like a lie no one would ever believe.
This ti it was Ihyeon’s eyes—not his father’s—that slid out to the horizon.
"He told , Dad..."
"..."
"The first person I’ve ever... loved in my life..."
His vision was slowly blurring. He tipped his chin to keep the tears from falling, but he couldn’t stop the tremor in his voice.
He tried to be calm and couldn’t; he felt anger rise in the face before him, but that wasn’t all. If it had only been anger—if the only clear conclusion had been a cold "I can’t stand the sight of him"—it might have hurt less.
"I... I don’t know what to do."
He couldn’t forget the look on the man’s face or the sound of his voice when, with no justification or excuse, even seeming guilty to et Ihyeon’s eyes, he’d touched his own face as if he had no right to look—and, as if bowing before a vast truth, finally forced out that single word: love.
"I want to forgive him... and I can’t... I can’t forgive him, and still I want to... so I don’t know what to do."
It felt absurd that he was confessing the most urgent kind of forgiveness to the person he could forgive least of all—the person he’d walled off with the first, stoniest silence—but this ti he couldn’t even manage a bitter smile at the irony.
With his unresponsive father beside him, Ihyeon closed his eyes. Because his head was tilted, the tears rolled from his temples down to his ears. They burned hot at the corner of his eye, but by the ti they reached his ear, they were already cold.
■ ■ ■
The model—mid-fifties, a choreographer and professor since retiring from the stage eight years ago—moved with a grace worthy of an active dancer.
On the ten-pyeong set the studio had built, she traced lines and dotted points into three-dinsional space; she drew ascent and descent, rapture and despair. With nothing but her body—no prop, no tool.
In that mont she was absolute master of her body, and the dominance she released into the space, the hold she set on it, overwheld everyone.
Even if it’s limited to the body, it’s close to impossible for a human being to fully govern themselves. Your self may be the one thing you command less than any other. At least when it ca to himself after eting Ihyeon, Lau had to admit that much.
So as not to interrupt the work, Lau stood behind the staff and Shushu, back against a wall the lights didn’t reach. He held his breath like a viewer absorbed in a film with massive pull, braced his folded arms. He couldn’t take his eyes off her—or off Shushu, who crouched to catch her breath, climbed the stair for a shot, lay flat on the floor to create another breath. Off the extra rhythm made as their breaths tangled and separated.
"Wild energy, right? It’s a recent choreography of hers—about an hour and twenty. Today’s the third shoot."
Shushu’s assistant sidled up and murmured. Like soone shaken awake too early, Lau had trouble responding—he was still inside the spell.
"You know best yourself, Director, but the artist... isn’t the type to rush a project to et an exhibition schedule. Still, if two or three pieces would do, I think we could hit that..."
He seed to think Lau had co because of the joint fall exhibition.
"After Chicago I thought he’d rest a while, but he’s been on fire lately."
Until now, Shushu had mostly used several models, proposing poses aligned with a plan he’d drafted beforehand. Working with a single model, capturing the world the model expressed—this was a first. In a single image, carving out presence or dinsionality would be trickier than before.
Lau didn’t know what had stoked Shushu’s zeal and inspired him, but without Lau even noticing, Shushu was slipping free of the old shadow of a timid, fragile youth and steadily piling on challenges and growth as a fine-art photographer.
"Since it’s your last exhibition before you leave, I think he really wants to show sothing."
Lau uncrossed his arms, slid his hands into his trouser pockets, and gave a thin laugh.
"That’s not it."
The assistant, who’d worked with Shushu for years, shot him a curious glance at the unexpected answer, but didn’t ask aloud.
When the hour-plus piece ended, the dancer held a poised stop, like she was about to shoot forward, shoulders and back subtly rising and falling as she brought her breath to heel. It wasn’t a conventional finishing pose for dance, which only sharpened the sense that the unspent kinetic energy could spill sowhere next—that it would.
Even after the dancing ended, Shushu kept moving her through locations and poses and pressed the shutter a while longer. Then he approached her, hand to her shoulder, thanked her—it was a wrap.
Like actors who can’t shake a scene even after the director’s OK, both dancer and Shushu kept their words to a minimum, holding down the quiver that still ran through them.
Catching sight of Lau and freezing for a beat, face closing, Shushu saw Lau’s signal—he’d wait in the private room—and Lau stepped away.
Shushu ca about thirty minutes later.
"Our staff were worried—asked if sothing happened to you. You look like hell."
From the desk by the door, well away from the sofa where Lau sat in the back of the room, Shushu flipped through stacks of photo books.
The past few days, he hadn’t really eaten or slept—let alone stood before a mirror to adjust anything. But compared to the ruin inside him, the exterior was holding up.
Skipping any reaction to Shushu’s jab, Lau put the question on the table—the one that had gnawed at him for days.
"Tell everything you said that day, and exactly how Seo Ihyeon reacted."
A slow sneer gathered on Shushu’s blank face as he let the books fall and looked back at Lau.
"Didn’t expect you’d want to talk about that. Isn’t that... very bad for you?"
"It would be, if it were only about and Seo Ihyeon. But how would it be bad for between and you? If anything, it’d be bad for you."
Lau rose and walked toward him, unhurried.
"Why did you tell him?"
"Why didn’t you tell him?"
Lau’s body lood so large the shadow fell across Shushu’s face, and the blue glare in his eyes was oppressive—but Shushu leaned in as if he’d been waiting for the collision.
"I obviously... I thought you..."
For an instant Shushu’s eyes flashed sharp; then they trembled fine. He sighed, scratched his brow, paced a small circle like a frightened man.
"How was I supposed to imagine... that you’d be doing sothing like that without saying a word to ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) him?"
Lau caught Shushu’s shoulder and spun him.
"You’re the guy who doesn’t repeat other people’s private business even if you know it. So why... why’d you do the thing you never do that day?"
Shushu knocked away the hands squeezing hard enough to crush bone. He lowered his gaze, dialed the venom out of his voice, as if he did regret the fact that he’d spilled a secret at all—however unintentionally.
"I was saying... you were lucky to have soone you could show your final loneliness to, and that it was Ihyeon, and that made you a lucky bastard. It ca out in that. I wasn’t trying to expose a secret on purpose."
"..."
Lau’s shoulders sank, fist empty at his side. A hollow laugh leaked out—like the target he’d ant to pin the bla on and dump his despair into had vanished.
He didn’t know what to do, where to start rebuilding a collapsed bond... and he loathed himself. For days he’d held it together by telling himself Shushu had ruined it, that he’d pour all the bla into him—and now the mania of those days felt like it was slipping out of him.
Staring down at the ssy desk buried in photo books, portfolios, scrawled notes in an almost unreadable hand, Shushu spoke quietly.
"No. Let correct that. Even if I’d known you and Ihyeon hadn’t agreed to the changing, I might have told him anyway."
In a voice flat enough to sound calm, he made the guess; then he picked up a book and all but tossed it down in front of Lau.
"And you—was this the only way you could do it?"
Lau looked down at it without a flicker. An October art magazine.
"I told you I wouldn’t ask. I said I’d handle it myself. So that’s between and Hong Seonyu now, not you."
"How do you compare that to this?"
"What’s different?"
Lau clicked his tongue, dragged his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, wearing an expression of disbelief.
"Right. It’s different. It’s worse. Much worse."
"..."
"It’s several tis more awful than what Hong Seonyu did to ."
"You don’t know everything that happened between and Seo Ihyeon."
At Lau’s hard cut to stop the sarcasm, Shushu burst out laughing—but his face was furrowed.
"Lau Wikun. Hearing you talk like that—so you really are in love. You were a guy who, for all your blunt, realist bite, rarely said sothing flat-out wrong. But looks like love’s made you just as blind as anyone."
"..."
"After what you did... and you’re telling I don’t know what happened between you and him?"
Shushu’s mouth twisted ugly.
"And you? Do you know everything that happened between and Hong Seonyu?"
"..."
Lau’s lips parted—like he’d been clipped on the head—then clamped shut, as if to hide sothing.
The hard line he’d drawn—Shushu and Hong Seonyu on one side, himself and Ihyeon on the other, two entirely different things—went blurry with one lazy rub of a shoe.
Lau turned, scrubbed the lower half of his face with his palm, and leaned on the edge of the desk. In the long mirror running along the tabletop like a dressing-room station, a man in rumpled clothes, not even properly shaved, glared back at him with dirty eyes.
"I haven’t forgiven everything Hong Seonyu did, and I’m not all recovered from it. I don’t want to get back together, not even close. It’s just... a lot of ti has passed, and now I can get far enough out of the undertow to look back at it. And more than anything..."
Through the mirror, Shushu t Lau’s eyes.
"Now I can see that Hong Seonyu suffered, too."
Lau dropped his head without a word. His hair, unkempt unlike usual, sagged heavy, veiling his brow and eyes. The veins and knuckles pushed hard up under the skin on the back of the hand he’d planted on the desk; his brow pulled tight.
He hadn’t been remotely at ease while he was changing Ihyeon. He wouldn’t deny that, as an alpha, his blood had leapt with joy whenever he registered Ihyeon reacting as he beca oga—but most of the absolute ti besides that, he’d been racked with pain and fear, like being trapped in a room with no exit, the walls sewn with needles closing in from all four sides.
As long as he was hoping Ihyeon would take that into account, he had no standing to block Shushu from lightening the weight of his own past for a similar reason.
In the mirror, Shushu’s reflection moved back and crossed to the coffee maker. He poured from the half-filled carafe and spoke.
"Back then I was sunk in my own pain, and that’s all I could see. I told myself I’d feel better if I did—that Seonyu’s pain was only the rightful price of his own choices—and I tried to look away... but it wasn’t like that."
Lau squinted up from a furrowed brow, like soone staring into glare, and watched Shushu’s back in the glass.
"Facing the fact that while he was lying to he was suffering at least as much as I was—maybe longer—and trying to imagine how deep that ran... that helped steady up and stand. In the end, isn’t it the thought that I’m the only fool, only I was hard, only I’m struggling—that thought is what tears a person apart?"
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