Confession

Since even standing still felt like too much effort, refusing his offer to clean me up afterward would have been nothing but stubbornness.

While he gently swept through my insides, I tried to hold on to the showerhead pole to keep myself upright, but it wasn't easy. "Don't fight it — just lean on me," he said in a voice full of pity, kissing my temples and cheeks several times while his skilled hands did their work.

Despite how much had already leaked onto the bed, the volume of murky fluid streaming down the drain under the shower was staggering. It was nearly wondrous to me that my body could have held that much.

Only after the cleanup was finished and I was sitting in the bathtub did he start his own shower. He toweled off quickly, wrapped himself in a robe, and came back with two cold cans of beer.

He settled into the spot opposite me and offered me one.

"This is the first time we've bathed together in this room."

It was also the first time we'd had sex down here, in the unit I was using. Though smaller than the bathroom upstairs, I liked this one — all its walls, floor, and ceiling finished in tiles in various shades of blue. There was also something quietly enjoyable about watching him move awkwardly in the compact tiled tub, his range of motion restricted in a way it wouldn't have been in a large whirlpool.

"I know this might sound persistent, but — "

"……."

"What did you talk about? With Choi Inwu."

He seemed embarrassed to bring up the question himself, unable to look me in the face.

"Just… the painting."

"About handing over Seo Yeehyeon's first piece to another man so readily?"

He leaned his elbow on the edge of the tub and tilted his head, twirling a strand of hair around his finger. His dissatisfied expression looked like that of a teenage boy — I thought I'd like to capture this exact look in a photograph, but my phone, with its nearly dead battery, was on the bed.

"He said he wanted to buy it, but I told him I didn't think it was at that level yet. For now."

He let go of the hair and straightened his head.

"Then you must have felt wronged when I said earlier that it would be a problem to formalize any kind of reservation."

"Wronged isn't quite — "

He said he worried about me getting hurt outside because I seemed too gentle, too accustomed to keeping my mouth shut even when misunderstandings led to being taken advantage of.

But I wasn't the gentle, kind kind of person who stayed silent out of goodness. I was simply a coward — more accustomed to resignation than most, conditioned to avoid situations where problems might surface. A coward who, instead of telling the person I liked who I really was, silently drank beer and endured his worried gaze.

"The wine Choi Inwu brought. Do you know it's one often ordered when people are trying to seduce someone?"

Earlier — when I'd come downstairs — he'd been reading the label. Was that him checking? Wiping the water droplets running over my eyelids with my hand, I shook my head.

"There was no seduction. Nothing like that."

"I know. And I know that even if he had tried to seduce you, you would have been firm."

His voice left no room for doubt.

"If I knew all that — why couldn't I control myself?"

He said this and took several long swallows from the beer he'd set on the edge of the tub, as if embarrassed by his own jealousy. The sound of rain still came through the small window hung high near the ceiling.

He set the can back down and spoke.

"About Chicago."

"……."

"Earlier, because I said it while we were knotted, it might have sounded like something impulsive. I want you to know it wasn't."

I remembered the sensation of possession — of fulfillment — I'd felt when I first called his name, and the moment that had followed like a confession in the form of an invitation. My mouth was dry, so I drank more beer.

"Actually, I've been thinking about it on my own ever since you moved in and started painting again. Watching Kwon Juhan's painting nearing completion made me start hoping, more concretely — even at some informal party setting, it would be wonderful to have a chance to introduce your work during this trip. And beyond artistic achievement, travel can be stimulating. Experience is the most essential material for a creator."

He smiled faintly and brushed back the clumps of hair scattered across his forehead. Then, as if recalling something amusing, he let out a soft laugh into the empty air.

"To be even more honest, since you've seen all my less-than-perfect sides."

Despite the bashful tone, his eyes — when they shifted to meet mine — were intense without hesitation. They made it clear he had no reservations about his feelings.

"It's also because I don't want to be apart from you. Even if it's only for a few days."

He said it with conviction, then lowered his head and smiled. Watching his long, solid neck as he swallowed his beer, I took a couple of sips of my own.

It wasn't only him who lacked confidence about a separation of just a few days. The anxiety I felt about his impending absence was instinctive — deep enough that I'd been actively trying not to think about his business trip, even feeling a vague, formless dread about it. This wasn't just the selfish desire to stay close and not be apart. I had never imagined that even once I liked someone and started something with them, I would want such an intimate connection. That he said it first was, honestly, a relief.

"After the last exhibition, I said something."

His gaze turned toward me.

"That a lie is better than silence."

I placed the beer can on the edge of the tub, scooped water with my hands, and splashed it over my face. I wiped the running water away with my palm.

"Maybe that's because I'm someone who stays silent."

"……."

I pressed my lips together once, then continued.

"Because I hated my silent self."

His eyes, watching me, seemed to already know what I was about to talk about — perhaps a story he had been curious about since the time I'd suddenly started hyperventilating in his living room. Yet he had waited without asking, and I was grateful for that consideration.

His calm, still blue eyes conveyed that he was ready to listen.

I realized I didn't need to gather my courage or manufacture the right moment to talk about the past. I only hoped that what I was about to say would become an expression of my feelings toward him. Because I was now sure that between him and me, even the smallest details about each other became precious secrets.

"It was a collision — the cause was a brake failure in the perpetrator's truck. No one broke any traffic laws, and no one with a terrible motive was involved."

He set down the beer can he'd been holding and drew his arm back from the edge of the tub.

"My mother was the victim. But having a cause for the accident yet no perpetrator — no one with cruel intent to curse, hate, or resent — someone who had done it deliberately. That's what made it hard. The suddenness of it, the emotions — I think I didn't know what to do with any of it."

My father had been waiting for my mother at the Thai restaurant when he got the news by phone and ran out like a madman, giving no explanation. My maternal grandparents made their own inquiries everywhere to confirm what had happened to my mother.

And I went home alone in a taxi and trembled in anxiety and confusion until my father returned the next morning before dawn, looking like a ghost — having refused to attend my mother's funeral.

What kind of accident had happened to my mother, how she had died instantly at the scene, whether there might be a correction article saying the earlier report was wrong, that she was actually alive — I spent the night searching for news articles over and over. It was horror — like waiting for a second death sentence from inside a grave, a damp shadow of death slowly covering my skin.

The accident was reported not only on internet news but on TV as well. In today's world, a traffic accident wasn't major news. But a massive collision in the middle of Seoul that left five people seriously injured and three dead was another matter.

At the end of the report, the anchor added, "It is truly an unfortunate incident," with a suitably somber expression — which vanished quickly from his polished face as the segment transitioned into a related report about the importance of thorough vehicle inspections.

Whether the cause was the perpetrator's neglect of vehicle maintenance or a defect in the vehicle itself was the core of the case, they said — but that was only the interpretation from the perpetrator's side. His life depended on what the cause of the brake failure was determined to be.

As soon as my mother's death was confirmed, my maternal grandparents prepared the funeral immediately, and a simple three-day service was held. Setting my father aside — locked in his studio with his mouth shut — my grandparents had me attend the funeral. My maternal grandfather was the chief mourner. No contact was made with my uncle's household.

When I returned home still in mourning clothes after the funeral was over, my father still hadn't come out of his studio. I didn't know what to do alone, so I called Yeehan hyung.

My mother died in a traffic accident. My father won't come out of his room, won't eat anything, won't say a word no matter what I ask. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared. So scared.

Talking to hyung, my words became increasingly emotional and incoherent. Sitting on the bed with my knees drawn up, wearing a black suit that didn't fit me, I cried in a way I couldn't stop. It was probably the first time I had cried while truly understanding that my mother was gone.

Until then, because of the too-sudden accident and the surrounding circumstances that demanded I play a role without explanation, I hadn't been able to fully grasp the reality of her death.

Two days later, when my grandparents came to the house, they stood before my father — who showed no reaction — and said they were severing all ties. Given everything, they said, they had no lingering attachment to life in Korea and planned to spend their remaining years doing their work in Europe. They would handle all legal and documentation matters related to the accident, including the settlement with the perpetrator. Before leaving through the front door, their eyes — as they looked at me — held a brief, complicated light. But they turned away more coldly than that.

It was a sudden death, and no one had been prepared for it. Everyone was in chaos; everyone was desperately trying to find some version of realistic balance in their own way.

Everyone except my father.

Days passed, and my father showed no signs of improvement. When I brought him a meal I'd clumsily prepared, he would eat a little plain rice — but he still wouldn't say a word. My worry and fear for my father had even blocked the ability to grieve for my mother.

"Back then — I wasn't sleeping well anyway, but if I woke up at night, I would get up and open the door to his studio. Sleeping next to my father — who had become a completely different person — was frightening. But I was also afraid he might… end his own life. That he might be suffering and dying somewhere I couldn't see."

I tried to sound calm, but my voice couldn't help trembling. I rubbed my wet hands over my face to hide the moisture gathering at my eyes.

"To my father, a world without my mother is essentially worthless. So I thought he could easily have such feelings. That's why — when my uncle came and I moved to my grandfather's house — I was actually relieved. Thinking that I wouldn't have to carry all of that weight alone anymore."

When my father's condition showed no improvement, my uncle had no choice but to leave his work and come home. Because my father flatly refused to go to a hospital, we had to pull strings and spend extra money to bring a doctor to the house.

The doctor diagnosed my father with psychological aphasia.

A phenomenon where a person's hearing becomes paralyzed after experiencing an event that delivers severe emotional shock — despite no physical defects. An unconscious activity in which the subconscious mind preemptively blocks all response to external stimuli. That was roughly what I'd read online after my uncle relayed the diagnosis.

I understood it as a kind of defensive act — a way of protecting oneself.

In other words, for my father, stopping listening and speaking felt safer than listening and speaking and communicating with the world.

Even if that world included his son.

"That night, after the doctor left, my uncle said over a glass of soju in our kitchen: 'There's nothing physically wrong. It's possible your father has simply chosen to close himself off. He can hear everything and say everything — he just decided not to.'"

I think I understood.

Unlike so many people who cannot accept the sudden death of a spouse and can't bear to look at their belongings — watching my father stubbornly refuse to leave the studio where my mother's traces remained untouched, I came to realize: to my father, I was nothing more than a byproduct of the love he had shared with my mother.

When that love was intact and undisturbed, my existence was precious to him as a part of it. But in my mother's absence, my value faded.

It wasn't that my father didn't love me at all. It was simply that loving his remaining son wasn't enough to heal the grief of losing his wife. That grief had swallowed my father's world whole — and I just happened to be included in that world.

After that sequence of events, I stopped painting. There was nothing I wanted to paint anymore — which was the same as having nothing I wanted to say or express.

And I became afraid of love.

If love was something that could turn one person into a monster through the disappearance of another, it seemed like a risk that demanded insurance. But I had already learned — branded into my bones through my mother's accident — that insurance only eases the burden of dealing with the aftermath. It cannot prevent the accident itself.

Before that winter ended, my father and I moved to my grandfather's house. Not only was I unable to handle my father on my own, but also because my father — who had stubbornly resisted every other suggestion — reacted when my uncle proposed returning to that seaside village.

And so, without even attending my middle school graduation, I left the house where the three of us had lived together for so long. My father continued his silence for over six more years after that.

Sitting with my knees drawn up, hands loosely clasped in front of my ankles, I paused in my story and looked up at him — hoping his expression wasn't one of too much pain.

"……."

"Hmm…"

Looking at his face — strained with the effort of controlling emotions that seemed ready to erupt violently at any moment — I let out a quiet sigh.

He slumped his stiff shoulders and bit his lip.

"I never imagined. That's why you stopped painting."

Listening, he roughly wiped the water from his face — which had dried out — and shook his head.

"No — I just hoped it was that you… somehow, as time passed, hanging out with friends got more fun, and painting felt trivial. That you naturally drifted away from the brush through the whims of adolescence. Maybe."

"……."

"Because I was afraid I'd hear a story like this."

His tone implied he couldn't forgive himself for trying to escape my reality by holding onto that hope — even though nothing in this story was his fault.

As gently as I could, I stroked his calf, which was loosely stretched out to my right, and managed a faint smile.

"It would be a lie to say it's nothing — but now, it doesn't feel like I'm going to die from it anymore. I haven't overcome it, but it's become duller."

"……."

He was looking at me as if to ask, is that something you can actually say? — but I could read in his expression that he was holding himself back, knowing such words wouldn't help me and would only pour out raw emotion he'd regret later.

The bathtub — built by filling the gaps between bricks with cement and tiling over it — was large enough for one person but too short for him to stretch his legs fully. I stroked his awkwardly bent long legs as though massaging them and looked at the foam, which had long since mostly dissolved.

"Alienation was painted before the accident — and even then, the feelings I had caught between my parents weren't at a fatal level. I don't know about others, but I… didn't only paint intense things. It was just — like other kids my age wanting to escape their parents' interference, having complaints about their parents' ways of raising them for their own reasons — I felt a childish jealousy toward my parents' bond. Along those same lines. Nothing more."

How a painting born from that kind of self-centered, growing-up emotion — something present in any family — had come to provoke terror strong enough to cause hyperventilation. That mystery seemed to finally resolve itself across his face. But he didn't look relieved.

I rested one arm on my raised knee, brushing back my hair with my right hand while massaging his ankle with the other.

"In that process — the emotions I couldn't properly handle — they probably distorted my inner self into an unnatural shape. And I let myself freeze in that state."

"……."

He couldn't easily open his mouth. Complex, varied emotions surfaced and faded in his eyes as he looked at me.

I knew that figuring out how to respond to someone sharing such things was an uncomfortable task for people. We'd always been careful not to accidentally bring up similar topics around a friend whose personality had changed from the shock of his parents' divorce — out of consideration, or discomfort.

"Feeling anything — forming relationships with the people around me, experiencing emotional changes within them — it was frightening, something I approached with caution. What I wanted was just days of safety, without any plus or minus, continuing on. I thought that was the best way to protect myself."

I lowered my head further, resting my chin on my knees. I couldn't help thinking of Morae nuna, Yeehan hyung, Yuni nuna, and Juhan hyung — all fighting so hard to push through the obstacles in front of their lives. I felt small by comparison.

"But I think I've realized — what I was pursuing wasn't peace or safety. It was numbness. It was just another form of silence, different from my father's. I was the one who gagged myself."

The path they each chose might not be the one absolutely correct answer. Their present selves might not be perfect either. Behind every choice I'd witnessed and heard about, someone had to sacrifice something. What mattered was that I felt ashamed before their choices and their efforts to take responsibility for them.

I couldn't like the path I chose. I couldn't call it the best option. If my father's was an extreme silence, mine was a weaker, more diluted small silence.

"At that time, you were — "

He seemed to be trying to maintain composure, but his voice was trembling, faintly and unusually.

"You were only sixteen. An age that needed someone's care to process and work through a situation like that. The fault lies with your father and the adults around you who abandoned that responsibility — not with you. You were someone who should have been protected. Emotionally and environmentally."

His voice and expression contorted unnaturally, like someone suppressing rage.

"Yes — I thought that too. I raged and resented for a long time. The target of my anger and resentment was mostly my father, but sometimes it expanded without control until I couldn't even identify who it was aimed at anymore. But not everyone gets the help they need when they need it. Of course it would be better if they did — but I wasn't able to."

I don't know whether sharing a heavy past is a necessary part of love. I'd even thought that perhaps it was better if only one of the two carried knowledge of it, rather than both suffering. But telling him now, I think I understood. I wasn't seeking his empathy for past pain.

Carefully, I wrapped my hand around his slender ankle — as if gauging its thickness — and gently opened my mouth.

"This may sound presumptuous, and it's probably — still too early to say."

"……."

"But right now — just a little — I think I might be able to understand my father. Not fully, of course. I still have so many things I want to ask, and the resentment and hatred are so large that I'm afraid to even ask them and hear the answers. But I do have this vague feeling — that I might understand a little."

Strangely, I felt short of breath. I paused and took a deep breath to steady myself.

"The meaning of one person becoming more important in someone's life than anything else — perhaps even more than their own child."

The corners of his eyes crinkled. His gaze shook violently. He looked like someone who had completely given up on the restraint he'd been fighting to maintain. To calm him, I fiddled with the ankle I held and continued.

"Thank you for asking me to come to Chicago with you. I didn't answer impulsively just because I was knotted."

For me, honestly expressing my feelings in a moment where reason holds back instinct — it was probably harder than confessing the past. Given how long I had kept my feelings silent, that was certainly true. But now I wanted change.

"I want to go. I don't want to be apart from you, Director Liu."

He moved his lips as though about to say something, then stopped, and collapsed inward as if in pain, whispering.

"I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"Just — you're telling me all this, and you can't even cry."

Watching him press his palm fiercely to his face, unable to finish the sentence, I reached out and carefully took his fingers — resting limp on his thigh.

"I already cried enough before."

"……."

"And now — because Kun is here. Because Awi is here."

With a splash of water, he enveloped me.

Our wet lips pressed together deeply, and his high nose pressed against my cheek. As his large hands covered my cheeks and ears, the sound of air moving — a sound I couldn't normally hear — became muffled. The kisses, repeating without the tongue, were more comfort than passion.

I hugged his broad, solid shoulders tight and finally let myself overflow.

"Can I think that?"

"……."

"That I'm not alone anymore — because you're here. Am I… wrong to think that?"

He pressed his forehead firmly against mine, lips tightly shut, and was silent for a moment.

"Can I speak frankly?"

"……."

He cupped my chin and tilted my face up to meet his eyes, and when I looked at him, my eyes burned.

"I'm angry at your father for leaving such a young person in such solitude — but if I were to lose you and face the same thing, I don't have the confidence I'd handle it any better than he did. It might be too soon to say this, and you might not believe it — "

How could I not believe him? I'm the one who might vaguely understand my father for exactly that same reason.

He didn't try to comfort me with carefully chosen words or reassure me with effort. After the kiss, he led me out of the tub and dried every inch of my body with a large towel. We went back to the messy bed and joined our bodies once more.

We touched each other's faces more, looked into each other's eyes more than usual — as if this were less an act of physical stimulation and more an act of sensing and confirming each other's existence. The caresses lasted a long, long time. Not as primal or intense as what had come before — but more substantial. I felt him fully, sufficiently, checking with my hands several times the seamless joining of our lower bodies becoming one.

It was probably the first time since the winter I turned sixteen that I had exposed my most fragile weaknesses and my most hidden shame — both before another person, and before myself.

The next day, I set a lock on my phone for the first time — the one I had previously been able to use just by dragging a finger across the screen. And about three weeks later, we headed to Chicago together.