Silence and Lies

The front door opened, and cool air spilled out from inside, as if a refrigerator door had swung wide.

The room was already cold enough, but Juhan, who had opened the door, wasn't wearing a shirt.

"Just come in with your shoes on. It's Western-style."

Wearing black skinny jeans ripped in various places and chunky worker boots, he turned first and went into the room, stretching broadly. Water droplets clung to the ends of his hair — he had clearly just finished a shower.

"Honestly, I'm just too lazy to sweep and clean often, so I live like this."

He added that with a chuckle as he glanced back at me.

For a place to paint, I wanted wherever he felt most comfortable, and the place he chose was, perhaps inevitably, his own home.

The officetel overlooked the Seosomun overpass connecting Chungjeong-ro and City Hall. It had an unusually wide-open view for Seoul, and even during rush hour, it was only about a thirty-minute commute to Phantom.

"Director Liu gave this to me as accommodation when I became a full-time Phantom employee. Baek Yuni lives upstairs, on the 23rd floor."

He pointed to the ceiling with his index finger. His apartment was on the 21st floor.

"You said you wanted to look around, but I told you not to come because I didn't want to interrupt your work. Let's see... drinks... I only have beer. Want some?"

He peered into the refrigerator, which looked completely empty at a glance, then turned to me. Standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, I said it was fine and slid the bag off my shoulder.

The sound of him popping the tab on a beer can rang cheerfully.

"So, what do I need to do? If I have to hold a pose while you paint, I should stretch first."

"Just... do whatever you normally do. I want to sketch various poses until the image I'm after becomes clear."

Fiddling with the piercing on his lip, he looked around the narrow room and grabbed one of the two guitars carefully kept on stands along the wall next to the bed. Not a speck of dust on either of them — he clearly cared for them deeply.

"Then I'll just play guitar for a bit."

It wasn't a very large studio-type one-room, but the absence of bulky furniture kept it from feeling cramped. A curtain-style two-tier hanger took up one entire wall, a single bed faced it, and a round table placed in front of the panoramic window completed the furnishings — if you could call them that. Even without frequent sweeping, the simplicity of his belongings kept it from looking cluttered.

"Do you want to sit there and paint?"

He placed a small amplifier — maybe a handspan in each direction — on the table by the window and connected the guitar to it, then gestured toward the bed with his chin.

"Or I can play on the bed while you paint here? The conditions for painting are a bit cramped."

He looked around the narrow room with a puzzled expression.

"Today I'm just doing quick croquis sketches, so it's fine. I can bring an easel next time if needed. Whatever's most comfortable for you."

"Working around the model's comfort — you're a peculiar kind of artist."

He chuckled, opened a clear file of sheet music, and began tuning the guitar. I pulled out my sketching tools and perched on the edge of his bed.

Looking around his room again, there wasn't a single torn magazine photo or poster on the walls. Considering his punk band past and the way he dressed, I had imagined his place would be something else entirely, but the room gave off almost no sense of personal taste or lived-in feeling. It was different from simply being clean. It felt strongly like a space just for sleeping and leaving.

"Come to think of it, is this the first time we've been alone like this?"

He spoke without looking up, his long, thin fingers adorned with more than five rings pressing down the chords, gaze fixed on the guitar.

"Outside of work, I think so."

"Makes me think of when we first met."

Perhaps reminiscing about that first encounter, he shrugged his bare shoulders and laughed. I laughed too, remembering how he'd startled at my sudden appearance and cursed without realizing it.

Back then, I had no idea I would officially start working at Phantom, let alone become one of Phantom's resident artists and start painting again.

I met Suki Kim, and then Morae nuna and Yeehan hyung left Korea. I started liking someone, and pushed myself into a relationship that was complicated to define.

Only early spring to midsummer — and yet it struck me freshly how much had changed.

Electronic sound filled the room as his fingers moved. It was the first time I'd heard an electric guitar up close. The delicate trembling layered onto the inherently melancholy tone of the strings was quite captivating.

Whatever the song was, it wasn't punk. The slow, languid resonance filling the space expressed something beyond simple emotions like joy or sorrow. The song contradicted my expectation that his playing would be more aggressive, cleaner, more instinctive. Complex notes built into tension, and then a bell sound cut through. His phone.

"Can I take it?"

"Of course, move around as you like."

"Such a generous artist."

He smirked, got up, and picked up his phone from beside the sink. The corner of his mouth twisted into a mischievous smile as he checked the caller ID. A villainous smile.

"Yeah. I'm modeling right now. No, not photos — a painting."

He returned to the chair, dropped into it, and drained the beer on the table.

"Today? That's sudden... What time?... I think I can make that... but if I come, what are you going to do for me?"

His expression grew more subtle. Whatever he heard from the other end made his shoulders shake. I watched him without moving my hands.

This was completely different from the Juhan I knew at work, or when it was just the three of us with Yuni nuna, or when he was with the other Phantom staff. This was literally his private life. Expressions he never wore with us, a voice he never used around us.

I had asked him to model because I thought I knew him better than I knew nuna. But even that might have been a hopelessly fragmentary assumption, and I was beginning to suspect it.

As proof, the sketch was barely progressing. Since entering this house, I had lost direction entirely — what to paint, who to paint.

"Ah... work's been killing me lately, so you're lucky, old man? I'll be right there."

He finished the call with a light laugh and tossed his phone onto the mattress. Then he picked up the guitar again and glanced at me.

"You look shocked."

"No, not really... You told me about it before."

"Ah..."

Recalling the night we'd met at a bar in Hongdae that had a cat, he laughed awkwardly and rubbed his recently cut hair.

"That punk had barely met you and was already going on like that — you must've been pretty surprised."

It was the opposite.

"I was actually glad, because I felt like I was getting to know you and Yuni a little better... I'm not very good at talking about myself."

I'd clearly felt goodwill toward Yuni nuna and Juhan hyung, but given the situation — having to be cautious around strangers at the time — and my own introverted nature, I probably hadn't made any real effort to nurture that goodwill. I was grateful they had approached me first.

He looked at me for a moment, shrugged, and looked back down at the sheet music.

"It's a story without much meaning. Something I could tell a stranger on the street. I have a loose mouth."

Maybe so.

Since he wasn't like me, he could probably confide in anyone about that incident — which seemed like the most horrific form of conflict possible between a parent and child — as easily as recounting a random street brawl he'd gotten swept up in.

But just because his tone was light, or because he'd told it with a light heart, the events themselves couldn't be light. At the very least, through that story, I felt I understood Kwon Juhan as a more concrete individual.

He seemed about to start playing again, but instead took a sip of beer, hugged the guitar, and began to speak with some hesitation.

"This is a bit of a pathetic story, but... I actually felt a kinship with you at first."

"......"

"Everyone at Phantom is talented in their own way. The artists we meet through work too, and a lot of our clients are especially creative people. Gifted, brilliant, impressive... Being surrounded by people like that all the time can honestly make you feel a bit small."

His unexpected words froze my hand completely. Because to me, hyung was also one of those shining people.

Sliding his fingers smoothly down the guitar strings to make a pleasant sound, he continued.

"But you seemed like just an ordinary person my age, so when you showed up, I felt relieved. You and I were normal, I thought, and the others were just excessively gifted. I had something to stand on."

He took another sip of beer and placed his fingers back on the fingerboard. Then he gave me a sideways glance, playful.

"But in the end, you turned out to be talented too. Traitor."

"No, I haven't... shown anything yet. I'm not even sure I can live up to expectations in the future. You're far more — handling Phantom work so well and running Old Future on top of it — "

"I only started at Phantom because they offered room and board, and honestly, Old Future is really Yuni's. I'm just a sleazy punk who got lucky meeting good people and ended up in a role way cooler than he deserves. And you were handpicked by Director Liu. Trust me, if there's one thing he has a real talent for, it's spotting potential. He's built up the gallery discovering artists like that countless times."

A sleazy punk who got lucky meeting good people and ended up in a role way cooler than he deserves. I hadn't known that hyung, who seemed so self-assured and unguarded, would judge himself so harshly.

From that angle, I was nothing more than a coward who had been given opportunities by chance, fortunate enough to have met the right people. Before, Morae nuna and Yeehan hyung had sustained me. And now... including Juhan hyung before me, so many others, and one special person.

I was the one who had always felt my own insignificance among solid people like Director Liu, Manager Han, Yuni nuna, and Juhan hyung. Hyung seemed like someone who didn't need to feel such things, but I knew better than anyone what that feeling actually was.

There must have been a passage that wasn't quite right, because he kept repeating the same short melody. A melody that touched something deep.

"And actually, I liked that painting too. Your piece hanging in Director Liu's living room. I got into the Western painting department, but only because my parents paid for entrance consulting to get me into a Seoul university, so I had no real interest in art. Abstract work especially — it always seemed like pretending to be profound without any real substance. But that one... looking at it, I felt comforted. Like, slightly, you're not the only one struggling in this world, hang in there — that kind of feeling?"

At the end he briefly lifted his head and grinned at me. Then that same melody repeated again.

Whatever his own assessment of himself, to me, hyung — who could confide these stories so honestly, without embellishment — still seemed brilliant.

His long, thin fingers moved quickly and precisely along the fingerboard, pressing down the strings. His hands were the most beautiful thing to me, but those hands were also so thin that the movement of the bones was visible beneath the skin on the back of them — and there was another kind of charm in that.

They looked dry and cold, but moved with delicate precision, a fragility that seemed to quietly plead for connection... something like that.

Perhaps it's not only art but music too that is closer to poetry than to a novel. Even as an outsider with no way to explain it logically, listening to his playing, I knew. He wasn't a shallow, lucky person with nothing underneath, the way he described himself.

I abandoned the full-body croquis, switched to a harder pencil, and focused entirely on sketching his hands as the practice slowly became a performance.

The phrases he had broken into pieces and repeated one by one now connected into a smooth, flowing melody, taking on a consistent color and forming a single current. Whether he had imbued the piece with that feeling or whether it was the song's original nature, I couldn't say — but even with just the melody and no lyrics, it seemed to paint a story.

I stopped and asked.

"This... what's the title?"

"It's called Cause We've Ended As Lovers. I'm fumbling through it like this, but originally it's an absolutely killer piece."

He answered with the most animated expression I'd seen since entering his room.

"Jeff Beck — one of the three greatest guitarists in the world. Well, opinions vary on who the top three actually are, but anyway, it's his song."

Flushed with excitement, like a child talking about dinosaurs or cars or favorite anime characters, he even sent me the guitarist's name, the album title, and the song title directly through messenger.

"Download the album and give it a listen. If you like this one, the other tracks should be good too. Make sure to hear the original recording."

There were still about two hours until the agreed six o'clock, but during that time, all I could do was sketch his exterior. Shell sketches, no different from still life. The same as the drawings in the notebook I'd shown him. I had thought I knew him a little, that I could paint him — but the Juhan I had come here to paint wasn't in this room.

When six o'clock arrived, he tossed a T-shirt over his head and preened in front of the mirror, suggesting we head out together. He was gradually transforming into the Kwon Juhan I recognized — a punk full of confidence and cheerful defiance.

Standing at the mirror and adding more piercings to his ears, he asked,

"Director Liu said he was coming to pick you up?"

"......Yes."

"A date?"

The unexpected question caught me off guard, but I told myself it was just my own conscience pricking me and tried to appear calm.

"He just mentioned an exhibition he wanted to recommend..."

"Isn't meeting up alone on a weekend evening for an exhibition a perfectly typical date? Not that I know much about typical dates."

He shrugged and gave me a sly look through the mirror.

"Lucky you, Seo Yeehyeon."

"......"

He said it like he knew something. I didn't know how to react and just stood there biting my lip. Hyung turned to face me with an even more bewildered expression.

"Hey, your reaction is making me flustered. Was liking Director Liu supposed to be a secret?"

He didn't even need to confirm whether it was true. Juhan hyung was completely convinced.

"How... how did you..."

"How? What do you mean, how? On the day of the barbecue, every time I touched Director Liu, you made a face like the sky was falling. That's how I knew. But... now that's a truly sky-has-fallen expression."

Yuni nuna was in a position where she couldn't see my face, so she wouldn't have known — and Manager Han is a bit oblivious when it comes to romantic matters, so she probably hadn't caught on either. Hyung tried to console me with that. But at the same time, he pinched my cheeks where I sat on the bed and stretched them sideways, adding that I had been far too blatant for someone trying to hide anything.

"I thought you were broadcasting it to the whole neighborhood. Like, I like Director Liu. Director Liu is mine! So Juhan hyung, stop touching him!"

It was true that I'd envied that physical closeness between them that day, but I'd genuinely never imagined that hyung was conscious of my gaze the entire time. Realizing I was that transparent with my feelings was, well... a bit of a shock.

Or maybe it was just that, when it came to my feelings for him, I couldn't hide them. Even Yeehan hyung occasionally couldn't stand my impassiveness and would get angry.

"But wait — you're seriously in love with him? Not just some distant admiration, like for a celebrity?"

Seeing my reaction, which was obviously stunned, hyung's expression also grew serious. He ruffled my hair, crossed his arms, and let out a light sigh.

"Well. You probably don't even know what it feels like to like someone lightly."

Because I had never liked anyone before, I had been oblivious to what I was feeling toward him. I didn't know what state I would be in when I liked someone, what I would want from the other person — the absence of that information made everything more confusing.

And yet hyung, who was an outsider, could simply say what he thought I was like. I almost felt like asking him instead — how does someone like me like a person?

"But I never thought you would even consider someone like Director Liu as a romantic prospect. I'm genuinely surprised."

"......"

I asked the reason silently through my expression as he turned back toward the mirror.

"Director Liu, as a boss and as someone older — he's comfortable to be around, holds no grudges, takes care of things without making a show of it. There's a lot to learn from him. But honestly... he doesn't seem like someone who takes relationships seriously. So I figured if anyone, you of all people would never fall for him."

My gaze dropped to the phone in my hand as I watched hyung's back, connecting the piercing near his eyebrow to his lip piercing with a thin chain. A message floated up on the screen with a light vibration — he'd be arriving in front of the officetel in about ten minutes.

"Smooth talker, refined manners, and his looks are... well, honestly, fantastic. I'll give him that. Director Liu has a charm that draws people in."

Hyung finished threading the chain and turned toward me.

"Isn't someone more stable, more patient — isn't that your type? Or what, did you cave to Liu Weikun's externals after all?"

Perhaps to lighten the mood, he stepped closer and playfully shook my shoulder.

There had been times I found it strange — how could hyung and nuna not like him? I'd even imagined they might be silently nursing passionate one-sided crushes.

But this made one thing clear: at the very least, Juhan hyung did not like him.

If he had, and if he'd had more chances to observe him closely, he wouldn't have been able to describe him as someone lacking tolerance and full of anxiety.

Hyung let go of my shoulder — I had just been swinging limply like a doll without much reaction — and with a sigh, dropped down heavily beside me. The narrow mattress bounced with his weight.

"Hey, I'm not the type to butt into other people's relationships. I'm more the type who crosses his arms, watches, and starts snickering when things start going sideways. But you... you're not the kind of person who just gets drunk on emotion and calls it love while enjoying the drama. I'm only saying this because I'm worried you'll get hurt."

Like someone confessing a heavy secret, hyung paused and continued carefully.

"If you're still just at the fluttering, heart-racing stage... you'd be better off sorting your feelings out."

Compared to his hesitant lead-up, the advice to sort things out came without the slightest pause — almost like a roundabout command.

I felt strange.

Whether I had even passed the fluttering stage with him — I couldn't tell that much first. Just thinking about him sent an uncontainable restlessness through me, and while that could be called excitement, it definitely coexisted with a gut-dropping sensation, like missing a step from a great height.

Besides, I didn't have enough experience to gather various cases of how affection develops, find consistent patterns, and organize them into stages.

I hadn't wanted encouragement — he seems to like you too, so give it a shot, you'd make a good pair. But hearing such clear-cut, sorting-out advice from someone who knew both of us made me consider, for the first time, how outsiders might see our relationship.

Perhaps... we didn't make a very fitting picture.

As I debated whether to explain the recent subtle changes in our relationship, hyung rubbed his short hair, got up from the bed, and pulled a fresh beer from the refrigerator.

"From your perspective, do Baek Yuni and I seem very close to Director Liu?"

"......"

Hyung gulped the beer like someone drinking to numb themselves and wiped his mouth roughly with the back of his hand.

"But we know almost nothing about Director Liu. The same goes for his private life. What we do know is that he hasn't been in a serious relationship since we started working together. He might be selective about who he lets in, but he definitely doesn't hold on to people who want to leave. Don't expect anything serious from him."

After saying that, he drained several more gulps at once, looking like someone forcing themselves to say something they'd rather not.

Hyung's assessment was partly right and partly off.

If it were the old me, I might have agreed with his read of him. But if the version of him hyung was describing — unwilling to clearly define or take responsibility for a relationship — was laziness, then I hadn't been much different from that myself, all the way up until now.

On the bed, he had prioritized my pleasure over his own desires, and through prolonged, attentive caresses, he awakened not just my cock but every corner of my body to pleasure. Afterward, the aftercare was so careful it was more embarrassing than the sex itself, and his kisses were sweet enough to make me delusional.

Nothing he did caused me pain. That was exactly why I could stay cowardly for so long.

Even as I grew fond of him, I deferred responsibility, kept things ambiguous, never clearly expressed myself — and even found a kind of comfort in that.

As long as he kept treating me the way he did, never causing me any pain, never revealing himself with someone else or treating another person as special... maintaining this state would be enough.

So, the charge of irresponsibility should apply to me too, in fairness.

Every time hyung lifted the beer can to his lips, the metal of his piercing clinked against it. I thought about asking for a can myself. I even wanted to smoke, for the first time in a while. But I didn't ask for either. I just kept fiddling with the phone in my hand.

"I live the way I live — meeting older men, keeping things purely physical — Director Liu knows all of it. But he never touches it. He might say he'd stop Baek Yuni if she tried to go abroad, but when the actual moment came, he wouldn't say a word about what she should or shouldn't do. They say he has a pathological aversion to interfering in other people's lives. Director Liu is kind and warm, and I'm genuinely grateful for that. But... he never tries to get into someone's real depths, and he doesn't let anyone into his own. That's Liu Weikun."

As he drained the last of his beer in one go, hyung's profile looked less like he was talking about my feelings and more like he was voicing his own. It seemed like a complaint about Liu Weikun — how he never tried to enter the real depths of others, and never let anyone enter his.

Turning his head, hyung wore an expression like a young child who had grown exhausted and hurt from craving the attention of parents or teachers.

When Director Liu had told me that Yuni nuna and Juhan hyung didn't know Suki Kim was his mother, I had found it unexpected and a little startling. Perhaps that was part of the cool distance hyung was describing. But the way Director Liu behaved around nuna and hyung couldn't be dismissed as simple kindness.

Hyung saw a version of me, I saw a version of Juhan hyung, and hyung saw a version of Director Liu — all of us were seeing illusions slightly misaligned from reality. Or distorting parts into the whole. I had done the same with him before. Maybe I still was.

But I wanted to know more. I wanted to see him closer to who he actually was.

And at the same time, I wanted to show myself to him, to these people. Even if my reality was a coward who tried to protect himself by severing his connection to the world, even if that was all the current me could show.

I didn't want to close my mouth like my father and sink into that enclosed world. I had to struggle, at least in my own way. For the people who had silently stayed by my side, and for the one who told me to break free, to use my voice again like before.

"Hyung."

"......"

"For the next sketch... could you do it... nude?"

Hyung's eyes widened. Partly, no doubt, because I had suddenly changed the subject.

"Nude?"

"Yes, if you're okay with it, hyung."

He fiddled with the empty beer can, gnawing his lip piercing with his upper teeth. His face was lost in thought.

"I want to paint it... in Director Liu's garden."

Then he let out a small laugh and looked at me askance.

"Outdoor play, even?"

I laughed along with him.

"Looks like the artist has an image in mind. He's a kid whose parents have disowned him — there's nothing he can't do. It's for art, not obscenity. Let's do it!"

Slapping his palm against his thigh, he completely crushed the beer can. He seemed more alive now than when he'd been talking about his favorite guitarist.

He no longer brought up Director Liu's unsuitability as a romantic partner. As if that conversation had never happened, he chattered excitedly about the concept and poses for the next sketch.

Walking out of hyung's officetel side by side, I suddenly remembered the day of the barbecue, when hyung had raised his voice unusually high, saying it was heartless if Inwu hyung's interest in me was genuine.

Maybe back then, hyung had wanted to talk about my relationship with Director Liu, using Inwu hyung as an example.

"Hey, I think I might really not be normal."

In the elevator, he slung an arm over my shoulder and chuckled.

"Why did I suddenly get so excited when you asked for the nude? When you said you were coming over to paint today, it felt completely vague. But now I feel interested, like my blood's actually flowing — that kind of feeling?"

Perhaps hyung's change was a perfectly natural reaction. From the beginning, I had been uncertain about what I was supposed to paint. And now... it had become clear.

As we stepped out into the lobby, his sedan was immediately visible, parked on the street in front of the main entrance. Spotting the car, we slowed our pace, and he stepped out from the back seat — in a casual shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans, and teal loafers.

Just seeing him was enough. That feeling like all the blood in my body was rushing toward him — in hyung's words, excitement, a racing heart. At the very least, a sensation very close to those things.

Watching him relax the muscles of his face as he looked my way, I could feel that he probably wasn't so different from me right now.

"Dressed up like that — where are you headed at this hour?"

He greeted hyung first.

"To seduce an old man."

And he laughed warmly at hyung's reply.

"Don't go too far. You'll get stabbed again."

"I already had it out with my own parents — where else is there left to get stabbed? I've got no more relationships to be disowned from, so I might as well enjoy myself."

At hyung's unfiltered remark, Director Liu subtly tightened the corners of his eyes and glanced over at me.

"Yeehyeon knows too. That I got stabbed and kicked out."

He shook his head as if he couldn't stop him.

"I'm curious — when you're older than those older men you date now, will your preferred age range shift up too, or will men the age they are now still be your type?"

At the joke, hyung tilted his head and laughed. But perhaps because I had just heard his story, the laugh didn't look entirely playful the way it usually did.

"Well, I'm still a vibrant youth for whom thirty feels like a distant dream. Haven't thought that far ahead."

With a deliberately annoying expression as if teasing him, hyung tapped my shoulder and stepped back.

"I'm off. Enjoy the... exhibition."

He then glanced at Director Liu's face and shot me a quick wink. It was hard to tell whether hyung was worried about this situation or simply amused by it.

"The exhibition runs until 8:30. Shall we get moving too?"

He checked his wristwatch and opened the rear car door. Watching hyung cross the crosswalk and flag down a taxi slowly approaching from the opposite direction, I nodded and climbed into the back seat.

The driver who had brought me here a few hours earlier was in the front seat. I'd never owned a car, but being driven somewhere felt even stranger than any of that. It probably always would. Even taking a taxi had been a luxury until recently.

In contrast, he had always accepted the presence of someone in the front seat as perfectly natural. Unlike in Hong Kong, where the sedans came equipped with sliding blinds between the driver and the back seat, there was no attempt at deep kissing or anything else — but he also didn't seem particularly aware that the driver could see and hear them at all.

Except for SUVs, almost all the cars he owned were strongly chauffeur-driven in character, built around the comfort of the rear seat. Cars for people who handed the driving over to someone else so they could either rest completely or, conversely, carve up the travel time for reviewing decisions.

The difference between us was stark in that alone.

Me, for whom walking ten bus stops was a perfectly normal part of daily life — and him, who accepted the back seat of a luxury sedan as comfortably as his own private room.

Our car merged into the dense procession of taillights filling the weekend evening roads. A violin concerto played at a moderate volume. Tchaikovsky's famous piece.

"Did the painting go well?"

He asked, shifting his body slightly toward me.

"...Yes."

The session hadn't been very productive, but it wasn't something worth reporting in detail, so I nodded.

He looked at my face with a smile he made no attempt to hide — the enjoyment of having this time alone written plainly across it.

It's different from just looking. Lately, he often looked at my face this way. Head tilted slightly, eyes observing the interesting and admirable thing unfolding right in front of him with quiet satisfaction.

When I faced this expression of his, I wasn't anxious. If he truly wanted to draw a line, as Juhan hyung had said, there would be no reason to put on a look like this.

The easing of my anxiety hadn't come only from that inference.

It must have started the day of the housewarming barbecue.

That day, in his study, we had been strangely, almost violently, more excited than usual, and in the confusion caused by that overheating, we had revealed to each other a desire for possession and restraint. It was clearly different from the simple sexual remarks we'd exchanged in bed up until then. The fear of being rejected by him hadn't controlled me that night.

He, too, had surprised me with a bold declaration — that he'd rather I become a fool who knew nothing but sex with him. It was a conversation about sex, but it wasn't really about sex. An impulsive greed born from a possessiveness that surged too strong, too overwhelming, toward the person before him, even knowing the idea was foolish. I didn't dislike it.

"Tired? You're quiet."

"......"

He leaned forward slightly, resting his arms on his crossed legs, and reached out with his left hand to toy with my hair.

"You weren't much of a talker to begin with."

He added that, perhaps feeling he'd said something pointless, and smiled. Then he tucked my hair — which had grown quite a bit since we first met — behind my ear and withdrew his hand.

Maybe I was making a stiffer face than usual because of the conversation with Juhan hyung. I was afraid to put a clear name on this relationship too, and I felt sorry that by offering no rebuttal to what hyung had said about him, I had made him out to be the "bad guy."

"I'm not tired. The exhibition... I'm looking forward to it."

I lifted the corners of my mouth, trying to make my expression prove that I wasn't lying. I said I was looking forward to the exhibition, but what I was truly anticipating was the time I would spend with him this evening.

Perhaps because of my earlier words — I'll do better — lately he had been paying even more attention to me than before. Still worried, he wanted me to contact him before and after going out, and even for short distances I had to use his car, but he hadn't stopped me from going out altogether. Especially in the evenings, he took me out almost every time for a proper dinner.

A few days ago, after finishing an errand at the art supply store, I had timed my arrival to coincide with his leaving work. Even with the driver waiting outside, sitting in the cafe after finishing my business — waiting for him — I had felt a quiet, almost shy sensation, wondering if this was what an ordinary couple's date felt like.

"This afternoon... what did you do, Director?"

He must have noticed my clumsy attempt to keep the conversation going, because the smile deepened around his eyes and mouth.

"My trainer came to the house for a workout."

He trained intensively for an hour or two, two or three times a week, with a trainer who visited his home — focused on muscle training. From what I'd heard, he was also proficient in tennis, horseback riding, swimming. In contrast, all I did was simple calisthenics in my room each day to keep my muscles from going slack.

He had suggested that since painting tends to make life irregular and stamina drops, I should try exercising with him.

"If weight training feels too boring, we could try some other active sports together. I worry about you feeling cooped up at home all the time..."

Ah... so that's why he'd been taking me out almost every evening recently.

I looked at his face — chin resting on his hand, elbow propped on his crossed knee, watching me with a worried expression — and my gaze drifted down to his left hand resting naturally on the seat. After a slight hesitation, I quietly took hold of his fingers.

He sat up from where he'd been leaning, looking a little surprised.

"Hmm... what kind of new service is this? I'm nervous for no reason."

Though he claimed to be nervous, he seemed pleased by my sudden physical contact. My hand, which had lightly caught his middle and ring fingers, was now gripped firmly by his large hand. His hand felt pleasantly cool — probably from the air conditioning.

With an expression like he was forcibly containing a smile that wanted to burst out, he raised our joined hands and kissed my fingers. He didn't pull his lips away immediately, holding my gaze for a moment.

"......"

Then he reached out with his other hand and pinched my lower lip. Our own form of physical affection — a substitute for a kiss.

That alone made my head reel. Lately I had been wanting him with an unusually intense craving. Even now, with just this much contact, heat pooled instantly between my legs and I felt flustered.

As if sensing my arousal, he glanced quickly toward the driver's seat. Then, with an expression tinged with regret, he lowered his voice to a murmur.

"If I'd known you'd show me this face... I should have driven myself. I gave up driving because I was planning to get you something to drink."

Satisfying the desire was of course thrilling, but this restraint wasn't bad either. It just made things difficult when it became a little too hard to bear.

"Ah, maybe we should just go home."

He squeezed my hand harder and sighed, playing at it, and I couldn't help but let out a soft laugh.

Maybe what we needed wasn't a declaration — let's start dating now, or let's be lovers. Even without such a clear benchmark, we had both tacitly agreed that obligations toward each other had already taken hold — the obligation not to date or be physically intimate with anyone else.

When I met his gaze looking at me like this, a sense of certainty settled naturally in my chest. Along with the careful prediction that this might be the right pace and direction for him and me.

I squeezed his hand back firmly. The violin solo in Tchaikovsky's concerto was racing toward its climax.