CTL 20

The moment he saw Yoongeon’s face, Seohwi, crying his eyes out like a child, hugged Yoongeon tightly and clung to him. He could feel Yoongeon’s surprise at the sudden embrace, but Seohwi did not let go. He could not let go. Yoongeon, who was saying “Just a moment,” realized he would not let go and shifted into a very uncomfortable position while still being held.

“Regret, ……I didn’t want to have regrets….”

“……”

The words Seohwi mumbled were indistinct, mixed with the sound of his crying. He could not hide his sorrow. He was sobbing and grieving. But he thought. Ah, still, what a relief. That my voice is coming out now….

“That I, that I feel the same as you….”

“Seohwi.”

“That’s why I was happy, I was trying to say that, but. …I, the words just wouldn’t come out……”

The only one I have ever given my heart to in my entire life is you, so do not be sad, I wanted to say that. It was agonizing that he could not say it in the end.

The words he could not say to the man came pouring out, resentfully, as soon as he woke from his sleep. Seohwi poured out a sorrowful confession, and Yoongeon listened quietly.

Even while holding him, Seohwi could not easily stop crying. His grip on the body he held tightly was excessively strong, but Yoongeon showed no sign of pain or discomfort and simply remained silently in his embrace. He just waited for Seohwi to calm down.

“……”

Then, when he suddenly came to his senses, Seohwi was startled and shot up from his spot. It was because Yoongeon, who should have been in his arms, was not there. He was sure he had been holding his hand, had been hugging him.

It was just as the startled man was about to rush outside. The door opened, and someone came in and pushed him back down.

“Are you awake?”

Seohwi, who had been struggling, unable to calm down, froze for a moment. It was Yoongeon’s voice. He was holding a glass of water.

“You seemed to be waking up, so I got some water. Drink it.”

“……”

“You had a high fever. I asked my mother to give you an IV, but if it really hurts, we can go to the hospital right now. If it’s not that bad, you can sleep some more.”

“I had a fever?”

“Yes. You still have one now. It was 38 degrees when I checked your temperature earlier.”

Yoongeon let out a small sigh and placed a hand on his forehead. The cool hand felt good, and Seohwi breathed a sigh of relief.

As his anxiety subsided, Seohwi, finally aware of his own condition, laboriously rolled his eyes. Judging by his hot breath, it seemed the story about the fever was true.

“Rest today.”

At his words, Seohwi shook his head. He was not so sick that he had to be bedridden.

“Since it’s Friday anyway… I’ll go to work and rest starting tomorrow.”

Seemingly very anxious about his intention to go to work, Yoongeon clicked his tongue.

“You were fine until yesterday, so why are you suddenly like this. If you get sick after having sex once, what am I supposed to think of that.”

“……No, it’s not because of that.”

Yoongeon was having a strange misunderstanding. Seohwi hurriedly added an excuse.

“It’s just that I’m like this sometimes.”

“Suddenly?”

“Yes, …it often happens after I have a dream. I get sick for no reason… it happens.”

At first, his parents, not knowing why this was suddenly happening, took him to the hospital, but they only heard that there was nothing wrong and he had just come down with a bout of sickness. He did not tell his parents at the time, but Seohwi actually knew the reason. Whenever he had a sad dream about that man, Seohwi would get severely ill. So, it was probably the same this time as well.

“……”

Yoongeon did not ask what kind of dream he had. He just sat beside him and wiped the anxious Seohwi’s forehead with a wet towel. For some reason, Seohwi felt at ease with his attitude, which seemed to say he already knew why he was sick. At home, whenever this happened, everyone would worry and ask him what on earth was wrong. But he is quiet. Seohwi liked his silence.

“Sleep more.”

Yoongeon said after wiping the sweat beaded on his forehead for a long while.

“…What time is it.”

“Now? Right now… 4 o’clock.”

Yoongeon, who said it was 4 in the morning, had a face that showed no trace of sleepiness. Seohwi looked at his tired-looking face. It seemed he had woken up early because he looked sick.

“…You didn’t sleep?”

“I did.”

“For how long.”

“I didn’t count, so I don’t know.”

He said he was fine. At his words that he was wide awake now anyway, Seohwi looked at his hollow eyes. What a ridiculous thing to say. Seohwi told him to lie down next to him. Yoongeon said it was fine, but Seohwi was stubborn, saying it’s not fine and to lie down quickly. After bickering for a while, Yoongeon finally let out a small sigh and lay down next to him.

Seohwi quietly stared at the ceiling. He thought it should be a little brighter at 4 in the morning and looked to the side, but the blackout curtains were drawn. The only light was what seeped through the gap in the curtains. He stared blankly at the ceiling and said.

“Go to sleep.”

“I’m really wide awake. I have documents to look at right now too….”

“Sleep.”

Talking about documents.

“If you don’t sleep, I’m not sleeping either.”

“Haah….”

It was a completely ridiculous threat, but Yoongeon just let out a deep sigh. Then he said nothing more. It seemed he was trying to sleep as he was told. He knew he was acting childish himself, but he did not want to fall asleep alone in this wide bed.

He held out for about 30 more minutes, and around the time he thought Yoongeon had fallen asleep, he closed his eyes again and thought that he had held on quite well. Then, when he thought about an hour had passed, he opened his eyes again.

“……!”

But this time, he was frightened for a slightly different reason and shot up from his spot. It was because the phone he had casually picked up showed the time as 10:03.

10:03? That cannot be right. He was sure he had only slept for an hour. His mind went blank at the completely absurd time.

“Oh my, Mr. Yoon Seohwi. Lie down, lie down.”

“Uh….”

The person who pushed him back down as he was about to jump out of bed without realizing it was none other than Yoongeon’s mother, Choi Minjung. Come to think of it, he seemed to have heard Yoongeon say earlier that he had asked his mother to give him an IV.

“He told me not to let you go to work. The IV was taken out in the morning. How are you feeling?”

“Ah, thank you. …I’m feeling fine now.”

So when he said he would go to work now, Choi Minjung shook her head.

“It’s alright, just stay in bed. You’ve probably already been marked as absent at the company, so what’s the point of going, what a waste. Ah, no. On second thought, since it’s 10 o’clock, it would be better to get up and eat something. Wash up and come out.”

She left without even waiting for Seohwi’s reply. When he hurriedly got ready and went out, the table had already been set. Feeling sorry, he went closer to help with something, but he was only told that the patient should sit down.

“I’m not sure if it’ll suit your taste? Still, there were a lot of side dishes in the fridge. Did your parents give them to you?”

“Yes.”

“…I’m a little worried. Can the two of you eat all of this?”

Seohwi thought for a moment and then nodded. There were many types of dishes, but the amount of food was not that large. His parents, who knew well how much he ate, had controlled the portions, so he had already finished about half of them.

“Eat all of it. You need to eat well to take your medicine.”

Seohwi bowed his head awkwardly. When he said he would eat well, she smiled, saying she had not prepared much.

“Your parents are very skilled. Every single dish is delicious.”

“They run a small restaurant.”

“A restaurant? Oh my, so that’s why all these side dishes are so delicious. Mr. Seohwi, you’re blessed.”

Seohwi smiled awkwardly at Minjung’s praise, and she tilted her head.

“But the taste is so familiar…. How can it be so perfectly to my liking?”

She pondered for a long time, saying the taste of the food was unusually familiar. But in the end, she could not figure out why. It was something he often heard because his parents ran a restaurant, so Seohwi did not think much of it.

While they ate together, Choi Minjung asked him many things. Mostly, she asked about his upbringing. She asked how many people were in his family and how he grew up, then she observed Seohwi quietly with eyes full of wonder. When Seohwi looked at her, not knowing why she was doing that, she smiled after finishing the meal and handed him water and medicine.

“I’m sorry. But I was so curious. About what kind of person you are to have moved our Geon’s heart like this.”

After Seohwi took the medicine, Minjung took the water glass and put it in the sink, saying.

“My son worries about you a lot, Mr. Seohwi. To be honest, I felt a bit strange because of that. Would you like some fruit? Ah, there are tangerines.”

Minjung handed him a tangerine and sat across from him, continuing to speak.

“Geon is not interested in other people. ……Though he wasn’t like that when he was young.”

“When he was young?”

“Yes, he was so adorable back then.”

Minjung told him about his childhood with a bitter expression.

When he was young, Yoongeon loved being held by adults. He was a troublemaker who caused a lot of mischief, giving Chairman Ko Sanghyun a hard time for a while. This was because he would often run around the house, fall, and get hurt, and he would refuse to eat because he was too busy playing, to the point where they had to chase him around to feed him.

“One time, he didn’t eat all day because he was running around, so his dad had to hold him down while I forced him to eat.”

It was so difficult back then that Minjung even went into her room alone and sobbed, she said with an embarrassed smile.

“When our Geon was little, the yard never had a peaceful day. He was always out there, digging with his hands, turning everything over…. We had someone who took care of the garden back then, and one day he came to my husband and shouted that he couldn’t do it anymore, that he was so mad he just couldn’t stand it, so my husband had a tough time calming him down.”

“Why the ground….”

The more he heard, the more… surprising it was. Who would look at the Yoongeon of today and imagine a childhood like that? Seohwi tried his best to hold back a laugh that was about to burst out and asked.

“He said he was looking for bugs. When he found a bug, he would bring it and put it in his dad’s shoe, in the glass of alcohol he was drinking, in my vanity drawer… for a while, I was really going crazy. I cried back then too, of course.”

It was truly a world of difference from his own childhood.

“Were you like that too, Mr. Seohwi?”

Seohwi shook his head.

“No.”

“Oh, your parents must have been so happy…. I learned what it means to get sick from anger while raising a child when I was raising our Geon.”

At her words, which seemed so full of sincerity, Seohwi could no longer hold back and broke into a bright smile. He could not resist because the childhood version of him was so ridiculously cute.

“Haha…!”

“Oh my, your whole atmosphere changes when you smile. I don’t know whose son you are, but you’re very handsome.”

Minjung said, smiling brightly along with him.

“You should smile a lot. The young ladies will like it.”

“Haha… Yes, thank you….”

The comment about young ladies liking it made him self-conscious about last night’s events. Seohwi gave a vague answer, but fortunately, Minjung did not seem to have noticed anything.

“Still, I think my younger brother was a bit similar to Executive Director.”

Seohwi, feeling a pang of guilt, started rambling uncharacteristically. It was because the things he had done with her son the previous night were poking at his conscience.

“Oh my, what about your brother?”

“Well….”

Unlike Seohwi, who quietly accepted everything without resistance, his younger brother Seoyoung was a stubborn child who would absolutely not do anything he did not want to do. When Seohwi told her about his brother and his friend Baek Cheongha, Minjung burst out laughing, with tears welling up in her eyes, saying that their parents must have had a hard time too.

“Hearing that Mr. Seoyoung ran away from home reminds me. One time, I came back from a quick trip to the bathroom, and our Geon was gone. No matter how much I searched the house, I couldn’t find him, so I checked the CCTV, and what do you know, the kid had opened the door and gone out by himself. From then on, I rushed outside and wandered the whole neighborhood crying… and there he was, squatting under a telephone pole in the next neighborhood.”

Minjung, who had thought for sure she had lost him then, suddenly lost all her strength and collapsed in front of the child. When she asked the child, who did not even glance at her despite his mother’s arrival, what he was doing, he had smiled and replied, ‘I’m playing with ants.’

“Then he lifted his head and said, ‘Mom, why are you crying?’ I couldn’t even scold him for fear of startling him, I really….”

That day, Yoongeon was scolded so hard he cried his eyes out by Chairman Ko Sanghyun, who had rushed out of work upon hearing that the child was missing. But because Yoongeon, terrified, cried and clung to his father’s arms, he could not even be properly scolded in the end, Minjung said with a laugh.

She looked extremely happy talking about the past. Seohwi watched her with a sense of wonder. His own parents’ eyes would light up just like that when they talked about his and Seoyoung’s childhood, and it was exactly the same. He thought a chaebol family’s madam would be a bit different, but he was glad to see her love for her child was the same.

“Oh my, I’m sorry. I’ve been talking to a young person about his company boss’s childhood. It must not have been interesting… I’m being foolish. I’m sorry. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I got excited without realizing it.”

Minjung, who had been excitedly talking about her son, suddenly snapped to her senses and apologized. Seohwi shook his head.

“No. It’s interesting.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

Thinking his words were just a polite courtesy, Minjung smiled sheepishly, but her expression softened when Seohwi repeatedly said he enjoyed it.

“Just looking at him now, you wouldn’t guess he was like that as a child….”

“Haha, right? I think so too. He used to laugh so much when he was little. ……Do you want to see a picture of my son? He was so cute when he was little….”

When Minjung asked very cautiously, as if testing the waters, Seohwi nodded. As he listened, he became curious about what he was really like. At his permission, Minjung, full of excitement, opened her phone and showed him a picture. Seeing the photo of Yoongeon’s childhood, Seohwi’s eyes widened in surprise.

The child in the photo was smiling so brightly that it was impossible to think of him as the Ko Yoongeon of today. His eyes were full of mischief, his cheeks were bright red from being in the wind a lot, and they were even chubby. In the hands of the clearly mischievous-looking Yoongeon was a worn-out tiger doll, which Minjung said was his comfort object. Ko Yoongeon having a comfort object, Seohwi found it so absurd that he burst out laughing.

Seohwi slowly flipped through the photos. In the photos, Yoongeon was always smiling. The unique happiness of a young child was fully captured in the pictures. The photos were varied. In front of fully bloomed azaleas, he had his eyes squeezed shut as if the light was too bright, and there was also a photo of him being held in Chairman Ko Sanghyun’s arms in front of the company building, giving him a kiss. In that photo, Chairman Ko was smiling very happily. As he looked, he noticed there were particularly many photos of him being held in the arms of loving adults.

“Uh….”

It was when Seohwi, who had been looking at a photo of him giving his mom a kiss while facing her, swiped to the next screen. At Seohwi’s reaction, Minjung smiled faintly as if she knew why.

“He was seven years old then, our Geon.”

Yoongeon was staring straight ahead. The expression had vanished from the child’s face.

“He suddenly… changed.”

Minjung said bitterly.

“I was scared because the child wouldn’t smile or speak properly. But when we took him to the hospital, they said there was nothing wrong.”

The child who, just the day before, had smiled with shining eyes, calling for his mom and dad, and fallen asleep held tightly in his parents’ arms, suddenly changed into a stranger when he opened his eyes the next morning. When a surprised Minjung called his name, he would only stare at her blankly, not responding at all.

“A child who was so fussy about sleeping if he wasn’t held didn’t sleep with us and just shut himself in his room, not even coming out. Even when I asked what he was doing, he wouldn’t answer….”

Even when a frantic Minjung opened the door and went in, the child would not look at his mother. Even when she held him and tried to soothe and comfort him, his eyes were unfocused, his gaze directed somewhere beyond her. Even when she cried and begged him to please look at his mom, he remained unmoved.

“The child wouldn’t eat or drink water…. He was like that for three whole days. I decided I couldn’t let it go on and was about to take him to the hospital, but then our Geon came out.”

Seeing the child walk out on his own two feet, Minjung cried and knelt, her arms open wide. But Yoongeon just stared at her, not running to her, only walking slowly. As if thinking about something, he walked slowly, then looked at Minjung and said just one thing.

‘Mother, I am sorry.’

It was an awkward thing for a mere seven-year-old to say.

When the child who used to call her ‘Mom’ suddenly called her ‘Mother,’ and the child who used to stumble over the word ‘sorry’ said ‘I am sorry,’ Minjung burst into tears without realizing it. Feeling distant, scared, and strange, she hugged the child tightly. But Yoongeon did not hug her back and just stood there blankly.

“It was strange…. It felt like my son had suddenly gone away somewhere. Even though I knew that couldn’t be possible.”

“……”

Listening to her, Seohwi looked at the photo again. Yoongeon, staring ahead with no expression, looked exactly like the man he knew now.

“From then on, he wouldn’t react to anything, and there were many times he spoke as if he had lived through the whole world.”

At the sudden change in his son, his father suspected a mental illness, but when that too was ruled out, he started to find his son strange and began to avoid him. The reason was that he found him creepy. But Minjung was different. Even when Yoongeon changed into someone else, she always treated her son consistently and tried to give him unconditional love. She said that because of Minjung’s attitude, Yoongeon also became a little more affectionate.

“But, Mr. Seohwi.”

Minjung took his hand. When Seohwi looked at her, tears were welling up in her eyes.

“I was so scared that my child… would live his whole life so lonely, locking himself away, without paying any attention to others. …But my child, he called me in the middle of the night. He said that Mr. Seohwi was very sick and asked for my help.”

Minjung’s lips trembled slightly. Seohwi did not know what to say, so he remained silent.

“My child rarely calls me first unless it’s about Yebin. But he called me because he was worried about Mr. Seohwi. That made me so… happy. Even though it was the middle of the night, my sleepiness completely vanished, and I came running.”

She held his hand and repeatedly thanked him. Even though he was not in a position to receive thanks, Minjung did not stop her greetings. When Seohwi called out, “Mother,” a single tear dropped from her eye.

“I was happy that my son seemed like a normal person. The expression of worrying about someone… it had been so long since I had seen it.”

“……”

At Minjung’s words, Seohwi recalled Yoongeon’s expressionless face looking at him. He was drawing a line, but in the moments he occasionally showed, there was definitely emotion. He had thought that he was being treated specially, and it seemed it was not a misunderstanding. In fact, now that he thought about it, Seohwi was also treating him specially.

He was naturally indifferent, but he could not be that way with Yoongeon. When he saw him, a certain emotion would surge like a wave. It happened when he looked into Yoongeon’s eyes. It also happened when he saw Yoongeon’s back…. No, on second thought, it seems it was just always like that.

But Seohwi knew another person who made him feel such emotions.

That man, whose face he did not even know, whom he could only meet in his dreams.

✧ ✧ ✧

Minjung, saying the tangerines were very sweet and delicious, peeled and ate more than ten of them right there, and only went back when her fingertips had turned yellow. Throughout her meal, teardrops fell incessantly from her eyes, but she looked so happy that Seohwi sat opposite her and silently kept her company.

He thought it was a relief that a person who could be so happy over a single phone call from her son was his mother. It was good that even the lonely-looking Yoongeon had someone who loved him.