CEL 56

He opened his eyes feeling disoriented. Darkness had settled outside the window, and only a few indirect lights gave off a glow inside the officetel.

…When did I fall asleep on the sofa?

He murmured in confusion as he looked at the clothes different from what he remembered and the blanket spread over his body. Then a cup of warm tea suddenly appeared in front of him.

He raised his head. A person who should not have been there pressed a mug into his hand with a calm face.

“…Hamin-sunbae?”

“Drink.”

“When did you come? You should have woken me.”

Hamin looked at him with a strange face. He looked a little upset, and he looked a little flustered. Jaeha wondered why he looked like that, and as he glanced around, he froze at the sight of the scattered drawings.

His gaze traced the pictures. The use of color and the shape of the lines looked like his work, yet he had no memory of drawing them.

He hastily grabbed his phone and checked the date. It should have been Wednesday, but it was Saturday dawn.

His heart pounded. He forced himself to search his memory. Soon fragments of the forgotten time returned little by little.

His face immediately paled. Anger and shame that had no target overwhelmed him, and in the end despair that he had been exposed covered his whole body.

“…Why did you come here?”

His cold voice slashed like a honed blade. This was the most miserable and wretched outcome among all the possibilities he had imagined.

“Are you satisfied now? Now that you know, do you feel relieved?”

The heart that once could not handle how much it liked Seo Hamin turned entirely into hatred. The feeling that once floated like a cloud dropped to the ground in an instant and rolled across a heap of trash.

“I did not start drawing because I liked it. My mother chose it because she wanted my father’s attention.”

“…..”

“From the start, I never had a life of my own. I only did what I was told, and I only followed orders.”

His hand trembled without end, and he hid it behind his back.

He did not want Seo Hamin to see it. The excuse that he had no choice but to live like this dulled in front of him. Seo Hamin was someone different from him. He was someone who would never understand him for his entire life.

“Do you know what that woman told me to do later? She told me to paint with her own blood. She handed me a bowl full of blood… Do you know what I did when I saw it?”

He buried his face in his palm and whispered.

“I just painted.”

“…..”

“The brush reeked of blood, and my stomach kept heaving, but I never once said I hated it.”

Han Jaeha hunched his back completely. He looked as if he believed that if he did so, he would grow smaller and finally vanish from the world. He continued curling himself in a ball.

“If she wanted attention that badly, she should have at least kept some integrity, but she ended up like that because she got in a fight with her adulterous lover and had an accident. Funny, right?”

Seo Hamin could not say a single word to him.

“Strange…. There is no one now who yells at me to paint, yet I still live like this.”

Unable to find any reply, he only looked at Jaeha’s back. His broad back sagged and even the rise and fall stopped.

“But maybe I can really let it go now. In the past, it was only red that made me like this, but now I feel like I will vomit just from seeing paints.”

Lawyer. Do you know why I only draw in black and white?

The answer to the question he had evaded with countless excuses until now came in the cruelest way.

Dozens of situations where Han Jaeha could have avoided suffering like this without needing to answer passed through Hamin’s mind. All of them were the outcome he had created.

Han Jaeha slowly raised his body. He stared with hollow eyes, and he showed a self-mocking smile.

It was a smile so cold that at a glance one could mistake it for crying.

“What did I do? Why does everyone not just dislike me but hate me?”

“……”

“It is so… tedious I feel I could die.”

Han Jaeha’s hand shook so hard it was visible to the naked eye. Hamin saw him fail to brush aside the sweat-damp hair over and over, and he pulled his trembling shoulders into an embrace.

He still did not know how to console, so he gave him no help. Yet though he knew that, he shared warmth until Jaeha calmed down, and he rubbed his back. The body that had shivered like a quaking tree gradually quieted.

After a long time, Hamin whispered.

“You are not strange.”

“…Not strange?”

A crooked sneer hung on Jaeha’s lips.

He believed that the moment a person recognized life was the moment he felt he was different from others and that no one could ever become him. In that sense, he had never once been alive. Nothing of himself existed in what made him.

Now he could not even draw properly. He felt like the most useless thing in the world, and that misery consumed him.

“This is the worst. I have never felt like this before.”

The words came strained from his throat, and they sounded muffled.

“Will you leave now?”

Han Jaeha pushed him away. He broke the arms that had encircled him and pulled his body apart first.

His dull eyes, that held no expectation, fell to the floor. Hamin looked at him and gently lifted his cheek in his palm.

It had always been Jaeha who first found courage. In the past, and now. Always. That was why only at his side he could be himself completely. Whoever he might be, Han Jaeha… Han Jaeha alone told him it was all right.

Responsibility-less pity was repulsive. Empty words brought no result, and shallow righteousness or compassion only weighed a person down more.

Hamin still did not know if this proposition was right or wrong. He could not even know if letting someone into his life was truly the right choice. From the start, he doubted if the word ‘take responsibility’ could ever include a person.

“I told you once before.”

Yet Hamin did not want to lose the warmth in his palm.

To the wounded eyes that faced him, he wanted to speak irresponsible words that said it would be all right.

He pushed against the body that resisted falling apart, and he fixed his gaze on him. The eyes drifted without anchor and wandered without finding a place.

“I like your drawings.”

His light brown eyes twitched, and they moved toward the clumsy heap of sketches.

Han Jaeha had never once in his life liked his own art. Especially work born from feelings like this. That was his ruined past, and his wretched present, and in the end it was himself.

So there could be no one in the world who would like them while knowing everything about him. Especially if that person was Seo Hamin….

“I like your drawings.”

If it was Seo Hamin….

“I like them very much.”

Heavy streams fell down his cheeks. He felt something crumble inside his head.

Did Seo Hamin know what those words meant? Or was it even right for him to understand it that way?

As if he had understood his heart, Hamin kissed him gently.

“A lawyer never says words like ‘must, without fail, absolutely’ that he cannot take responsibility for.”

“If you ever need a lawyer later, tell me. I will surely win for you.”

He recalled those words Hamin had whispered in earnest on a day not long after they first met.

Words he whispered with a face unlike a student made him feel that anything would be all right.

His head was in chaos. He collapsed faster than when he saw his arm bleeding, faster than when he faced his mother who had seized his arm and screamed fiercely.

At a moment like this, saying words like that was foul play.

“I like you.”

Han Jaeha hated Seo Hamin.

He hated him to the point of madness, because he weakened a person and made him wretched, yet in the end he was the one who lifted him back up.

“Enough that I want to add an uncertain adverb in front of it.”

So Seo Hamin had to take responsibility for him. After turning him into this, things could not be left as they were.

“I think it will be the same from now on.”

Han Jaeha lunged at him like a predator hunting prey. He buried his face in Hamin’s chest and heaved his shoulders as scalding tears poured out of his eyes.

Hamin also held him tightly in his arms.

The self from the past who thought anxiety came from uncertainty passed through his head. Unlike the days when no matter how much air he blew in nothing ever inflated, he now felt fuller than ever.

He thought perhaps people did not live by forcing wounds away or hiding them, but by learning how to soothe the places scarred.

So life urged him to surround himself with those who breathed courage into him.

It told him to keep beside him those to whom he could show his wounds without fear.

Then one day, even cruel scars might not appear as debris of pain but as a picture carrying meaning. That was what life told him.

He closed his eyes. What he had searched for all this time was not an answer to the questions Hamin had left behind.

What he really wondered was….

“I will never let you go now. Even if later, sunbae… huuhh… even if you regret it.”

The answer was always near, and it came close with nothing more than a small handful of words of courage.

“Yeah, do that.”

And Hamin gladly welcomed the answer Jaeha had at last discovered.