ITDW 27

He lowered his upper body. With one hand, he roughly pushed Jaeri’s collapsed shoulder, forcing him to straighten his back. The hand that had been holding his ankle also lost its grip and was pulled away limply. He gripped the shoulder he had pushed, painfully. With his other hand, he forcibly lifted Jaeri’s lowered head. He made eye contact.

“I asked what you did wrong. You know my personality, so why do you make me ask twice?”

That voice was terribly gentle. The shoulder he held trembled faintly.

“…Liking… you, hyung… and… getting horny… for you… was wrong….”

Jaeri said so. And then he closed his eyes. Tears continued to flow from his closed eyes. There was no sound of crying. They were tears that could not be controlled by will at all, tears that in a way could be seen as mechanical.

The shoulder, gripped with enough force to crush the bone, hurt a lot, but the pressing pressure disappeared in an instant. As the pain in his shoulder vanished, it felt as though he alone had been left behind from the time they had shared. With his eyes closed, Jaeri could not find any other sign of him in the darkness.

He was bewildered. Why… does it feel like hyung is not here?

Jaeri opened his eyes. He was alone in the living room, kneeling. He blinked several times.

Jaeri’s lips quivered, quivered like a child’s. The child’s body collapsed forward again. This time, almost prostrate, Jaeri cried like a child who had lost his mom and dad.

Hyung just left. I told him it was wrong that I liked him….

The tears consoled Jaeri. As his emotions painfully ran wild, stirring things up and making a mess inside him, the tears poured down a flood as if to tell them to be quiet now. Shut up, all of you. My inferiority complex, my sense of defeat, my shame, my self-loathing, my loneliness, my resentment, all of you shut up…. Just shut up and be submerged in water.

Thanks to that, he could no longer tell why he was crying.

And Jaeri consoled Jaeri.

‘It’s okay, Jaeri. It will be okay, I can endure it. Jaeri, I love you. This strange me, even if everyone hates me, I love you, Kim Jaeri. That’s enough… it’s okay.’

Jaeri wrapped his arms around himself. It was a desperate act.

A soldier, stripped of his armor on the battlefield, stood naked and smeared mud on his own body. He did a ridiculous thing to survive. So that it might block, even a little, the spears and swords that would soon descend upon him.

That self-love was a ridiculous thing. It was something that many people would mock, saying, what good is it to love yourself all alone, you should just hate yourself too. But to Jaeri, it was not ridiculous.

His tears subsided. ‘I will be okay….’ he repeated to himself. Jaeri pushed his prostrate body up. He wiped the tears remaining on his face with his sleeve. When he opened his eyes, a sudden flood of light poured in, making his eyes sting. Jaeri once again saw himself, left all alone in the living room.

Pretending to be okay, he got up and went to his room. He locked the door. He sat at his desk, dazed. Too many things had happened and he had heard too many words. Jaeri looked back on what had happened today.

He had his hair cut short, was scolded at the dinner table, received sex education, and was caught liking his hyung while trying to clear up a misunderstanding. Could it have been avoided? If he had just kept quiet after the sex education. What kind of severe misunderstanding was it anyway.

Jaeri took out the ‘Hypomania Utilization Plan’ from a corner of his desk drawer. Three items were checked.

1. Kiss hyung while he’s sleeping V (Tried licking his lower lip too.)
2. Kiss hyung while he’s conscious V

4.2 Touch hyung’s thing while he’s sleeping V (Touched it during sex ed. It’s big.)

A laugh escaped him at its explicitness. A wave of self-loathing washed over him. Getting all excited by himself, so ridiculously.

His hyung had said to him. ‘The problem is you getting horny for just anyone and then getting fucked by just anyone.’

Jaeri bit his lip.

The hand holding the paper trembled. He wanted to tear it to pieces right away.

But the plan was a piece of his unadorned self. How much he had cherished this plan. No matter how ridiculous and dirty its contents were, it was what he had written of his honest desires. It was something he should have kept only in his head, but because he was so desperate, he had made it visible. He had trembled with joy every time he checked something off, happy like such a fool.

Jaeri did not tear the paper. He traced over the check marks with his finger, then pushed it deep into the desk. Using his finger, his overused thumb and index finger from before announced their soreness. Hyung kept telling me to squeeze, so my fingers hurt.

Lying prostrate on the desk, he quietly watched the tears fall onto the desktop. Droplets were added one by one to the small puddle that had already formed, creating a slightly larger puddle, and then an even larger one.

Jaeri drew a line through the middle of the puddle with his finger. A waterway was created. He split the end of the waterway into many branches, and then split them again, drawing a tree.

Will Yoonjae noona accept me, will Father accept me, …can I live alone?

The tears that became paint did not dry. The tree grew larger and larger. Thankfully, the pain was just enough to bear. Thanks to the tree drawing that had temporarily blocked his deep thoughts. Thanks to the ridiculous self-love that said, I love Kim Jaeri.

But he didn’t know when the immense misfortune called loneliness might block even his narrow windpipe and suffocate him. He was afraid. Even if I’m okay now, I don’t know how I’ll be just 10 minutes from now.

Jaeri fell asleep for a short while, lying prostrate on his desk.

Clunk—.

The door tried to open, but caught on the lock, making a clunking sound. Startled by the sound, Jaeri, who had been in a light sleep, woke up and shot upright. He hastily wiped away the tears that still weighed heavily in his eyes with his sleeve. A voice was heard from outside.

“Kim Jaeri.”

“……”

“Who said you could lock the door.”

“……”

It hurts, so I wanted to be alone.

“Are you not going to open the door?”

Anger was laced in his voice. His heart dropped with a thud in fear at that voice, but on the other hand, a feeling of defiance arose. This is my room, here. Jaeri firmly shut his mouth.

“If I open it, is there anywhere for you to run?”

Jaeri still did not answer, and Jungyoon did not press him further. He brought the master key that could open all the locks in this house, including the medicine cabinet and the wine cellar, and inserted it into the keyhole. Jaeri’s castle fell without putting up a single fight. In the first place, that place was not Jaeri’s castle.

Jungyoon, who stepped into the room, was dumbfounded. The soggy tear stains on the desk, and Kim Jaeri, hiding somewhere.

“Kim Jaeri, come out.”

There was a slight pause. Is he suggesting we play hide-and-seek? Just as a furrow was forming between his brows, a head emerged from under the desk. Jaeri stood before Jungyoon. His eyes were swollen shut.

“What did I say I’d do if you lock the door.”

“…Please let it go just for today….”

Jaeri said in a small voice after some thought. Jungyoon looked into Jaeri’s face. The reddened corners of his eyes, his nose, his lips with dried blood from how much he had bitten them, his shortened hair. And the shallow, divided breaths he exhaled, his two hands held tightly together.

“Why are you acting like this.”

“……”

Looking at Jaeri, who was just standing there without an answer, Jungyoon let out a sigh. He had just come back after calming his explosively boiling anger. Jungyoon spoke through gritted teeth, as if spitting the words out.

“What should I do with you.”

“……”

Jaeri, with his hands clasped in front of him and his head bowed, listening meekly to his words, was resigned, as if asking for any punishment to be handed down now that he was ready.

Still, hyung has a good reason. My parents didn’t have a good reason. And I will become an adult now. So it will be okay. I went through something incredibly painful when I was much younger, too.

“Your tears right now are excessively useless.”

He said, his gaze briefly fixed on the tree drawn with water on the desk.

“……”

“It wouldn’t be difficult if I were to try to understand you. But I’m too angry for that.”

“…Yes….”

He thought that his meticulous hyung would now tell him the detailed plan for how he was to become independent and live on his own. I’m being kicked out.

“Did I treat you, raise you, and teach you like that?”

“……”

He had nothing to say to him. Hyung was a strict guardian, and the standards he demanded were high. He didn’t know exactly what ‘like that’ meant, but hyung probably hadn’t taught him like that.

“Where did you learn such a cheap attitude.”

“……”

The painful words stabbed his heart again. Getting horny for just anyone… frivolous, cheap. Jaeri lifted his head, which was about to droop, and looked at him. He himself knew. He was not dirty. He was not promiscuous. He made eye contact with Jaeri.

“Kneeling first, and begging. What? Don’t throw me away? It was a very good method, a very simple way to fuck with someone.”

Jaeri was perplexed by the unexpected words. Was it wrong to ask for forgiveness?

“…I, I thought that was what you thought was wrong….”

Jungyoon looked down with stern eyes at Jaeri fumbling through his excuse. Is that the only kind of excuse you can make?

The attitude Jaeri had shown at that time was cheap submission. An unconditional submission solely to escape the immediate crisis, without even thinking he was in the wrong at all. A cheap obedience shown to a whimsical powerful person.

That sort of thing, obtained through violence and threats, was fitting for the likes of gangsters or pimps, not what he expected from the younger brother he had raised with affection.

Even though he had controlled Jaeri all this time, he had tried to listen if he had other thoughts, and had pondered what was good for Jaeri.

Above all, he had hoped that Jaeri would accept his control as a form of love. Because that was how he loved Jaeri. And because Jaeri was a person who could understand that.

But the sight of his beloved younger brother kneeling and begging as soon as he found out that fact was not the sight of a child who had grown up receiving love. He felt a sense of betrayal in that moment. In the relationship he had built with his younger brother over the past six years, he could not find the cause that had produced that belittlement.

Jungyoon had never treated Jaeri like that.

The belittlement of the relationship, heedlessly perpetrated while asking for forgiveness, dismissing his own thoughts and feelings as wrong. What am I to you, for you to act like that.

In that situation, Jungyoon felt his own nature, which desired pure obedience, also twisting one by one. It felt like his insides were churning, and he felt unbearably awful.

It was a good thing that he had stormed out. If he had stayed a little longer, he would not have been able to control himself and would have fallen into an even more frustrating situation.

“I told you repeatedly that liking someone isn’t wrong.”

“……”

“And I also told you not to think useless thoughts. Your excuse is not very convincing, is it.”

In the eyes reflected in Jaeri’s, a glaring anger was embedded. Jaeri was flustered that the direction of his anger was different from what he had expected, but feeling him restrain him once more, he was overcome with emotion at the sense of security that soaked into him like rain. He was not angry that he liked him. He was not going to throw him away.

“I didn’t know….”

“You’re just asking for a beating.”

Jaeri was, once again, relieved.

“Hyung….”

Jaeri moved closer to him. He was so close their hands might brush. Their hands would touch if they were about two hand spans apart, but Jaeri barely resisted the urge to reach his hand out a little.

It must have been because he was so surprised that he had found out who his one-sided love was. He was so surprised he couldn’t think at all, and his deepest, flimsy but quick subconscious had responded. A subconscious that had been formed when he was very young and remained in his mind. But if his sophisticated consciousness, which judged situations based on reason and experience, had responded, he would not have responded that way.

“I’m in the middle of correcting your insolent attitude, and you’re not controlling your expression.”

“……”

At his words, Jaeri knelt. He tried hard to erase the expression that looked as if he had received great comfort.

“When did I say you could judge things however you want?”

He said in a sinisterly low voice as he stroked Jaeri’s head. Because of his short hair, his large hand passed over with a rustling sound, catching on nothing. His neatly arranged short hair was messed up haphazardly. Jaeri answered.

“…You didn’t….”