Pull Out

The fifty-something model, who had retired from the stage eight years ago and was now active as a choreographer and professor, moved with such grace that she could easily be mistaken for a dancer still in her prime.

On the studio's roughly thirty-square-meter backdrop, she drew lines and placed points in three-dimensional space, tracing ascent and descent, elation and despair — with nothing but her own body, without the aid of a single prop or tool.

In that moment, she was the absolute master of her own body, and everyone present was inevitably overwhelmed by the dominance and control she exerted over the space.

Even if limited to the physical body, mastering oneself was nearly impossible. Perhaps one's own self is the thing harder to control than anyone else. At least regarding himself — since meeting Yeehyeon — Liu had to admit that much.

To avoid disturbing the work, Liu leaned his back against the wall in the area behind the staff and Shushu, where the light didn't reach. He held his breath, arms folded tightly across his chest, like an audience fully absorbed in a gripping film. He couldn't take his eyes off Shushu — who kept lowering his stance, climbing onto the photography steps, then lying flat on the floor to capture her breathing and create another rhythm in response — or off the interplay between the two of them, their rhythms tangling and separating.

"Her energy is incredible, isn't it? This is a piece she choreographed recently — about an hour and twenty minutes. This is the third shoot today."

Shushu's assistant approached Liu and whispered. Like someone roughly shaken awake from a deep sleep, Liu found it difficult to break out of his immersion and respond.

"As the Director knows best, Shushu isn't someone who rushes work just to meet an exhibition schedule. Still, if you say two or three pieces would be fine, I think we could manage that."

He seemed to assume Liu's visit was related to the joint exhibition in the latter half of the year.

"I thought he'd rest for a while after returning from Chicago, but his drive lately has been extraordinary."

Until now, Shushu had mostly worked by directing several models according to poses he had prepared in advance. This was the first time he had worked with a single model, attempting to capture the world that model expressed. It was inevitably more demanding than before — revealing the presence and dimension of an artwork within a single photograph.

Whatever had given Shushu this drive and inspiration, without Liu even noticing, he had stepped out of the shadow of his former self — a timid and fragile young man — and was steadily pursuing challenge and growth as a fine art photographer.

"It's probably because this is the last exhibition before you leave, Director. He must really want to feature in it."

Liu unfolded his arms, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and let out a short, dry laugh.

"That's probably not the case."

The assistant, who had been working alongside Shushu for several years, glanced sideways at Liu with a flicker of curiosity at the unexpected response, but said nothing.

When the performance — which had lasted well over an hour — finally ended, the dancer froze in a pose that looked as if she were about to sprint off somewhere, her shoulders and back subtly heaving as she caught her breath. It was a posture far removed from any typical finishing stance, and precisely because of that, it stirred imagination and anticipation about where and how that unspent kinetic energy might flow next.

After the dance concluded, Shushu continued pressing the shutter a while longer, shifting the model's position and angles, before approaching her, placing a hand on her shoulder, and offering quiet words of thanks — marking the end of the shoot.

Like an actor unable to leave a scene even after the director calls it, both the dancer and Shushu remained still for a moment, carefully restraining their still-pulsing emotions.

Liu caught Shushu's eye — he had gone stiff the moment he spotted Liu — and gestured that he would wait in the private room, then walked away.

Shushu arrived about thirty minutes later.

"What is that look on your face? Our staff were worried, asking if something had happened."

Shushu spoke from the desk near the entrance, flipping through stacks of photo books, keeping a careful distance from Liu, who was sitting on the sofa deeper inside the room.

Over the past few days, he hadn't been able to eat or sleep properly, and even the act of standing before a mirror to check his appearance had felt absurd and pointless. But compared to the wreckage inside him, his outward appearance was, relatively speaking, holding up.

Liu skipped responding to Shushu's comment and brought up the question that had been tormenting him for the past few days.

"Tell me everything — what was said that day, and what kind of reaction Seo Yeehyeon had."

A smirk slowly surfaced on Shushu's expressionless face as he set down the books and turned toward Liu.

"I didn't expect you'd want to talk about this. Isn't it a very unfavorable story for you?"

"It might be, where Seo Yeehyeon and I are concerned — but why would it be unfavorable to me in your relationship? If anything, it would be unfavorable to you."

Liu rose from his seat and walked slowly toward Shushu.

"Why did you tell him?"

"Why didn't you tell him?"

Liu's frame cast a shadow over Shushu's face, and the atmosphere from his fierce blue eyes was oppressive — yet Shushu seemed to be waiting for exactly this, closing the distance and stepping right up to him.

"I naturally assumed... that you would..."

Shushu's eyes, which had flashed sharply for a moment, trembled slightly. He let out a sigh, scratched his forehead, and paced in place, looking frightened.

"How could I have possibly imagined... that you were doing something like that without saying a word to him?"

Liu grabbed Shushu's shoulder as he bit his lower lip and turned him around.

"You're the kind of person who wouldn't breathe a word about someone else's private affairs, even if you knew them. So why... did you act completely out of character that day?"

Shushu shoved Liu's hand off his shoulder — the grip that had been threatening to crush it. He dropped his gaze, as though regretting having inadvertently let the secret slip, and the venom in his voice softened.

"I was just saying how fortunate you were to have found someone you could show your ultimate solitude to — and that it was Yeehyeon, you're a ridiculously lucky bastard. That's what we were talking about. I wasn't deliberately trying to expose anything."

"......"

Liu's shoulders sagged, his fists clenching around nothing. A hollow laugh escaped him, as if the target he had been aiming all his blame and despair at had simply vanished.

Not knowing what to do or where to begin — how to rebuild what had collapsed. Hating himself. He had endured the past few days by clinging to the idea that he could pour all the blame onto Shushu, that Shushu had ruined everything. Now he felt that madness draining out of him.

Shushu, looking down at the cluttered desk buried under photo books, portfolios, and notes scrawled in barely legible handwriting, quietly opened his mouth.

"No. Let me correct that. Even if I had known you and Yeehyeon hadn't agreed to the Changing, I might have told him anyway."

He offered that conjecture in a voice calm enough to sound settled, then picked up a book from the desk and placed it down in Liu's direction, almost like a throw.

"Was this really the only way you could do it?"

Liu looked down at the book with steady, unreadable eyes. It was an October issue of an art magazine.

"I told you I wouldn't ask for your help — that I'd handle it myself. So isn't this a matter between Hong Seon-yu and me now? Something that no longer concerns you?"

"How can you compare that to this?"

"What's different?"

Liu clicked his tongue, his expression one of disbelief, and wet his lower lip with his tongue.

"Ah. Right. It is different." A pause. "Much more horrifying."

"......"

"Several times more horrifying than what Hong Seon-yu did to me."

"You don't know everything that happened between Seo Yeehyeon and me."

At Liu's firm declaration — his attempt to cut the sarcasm short — Shushu burst out laughing. But his face was contorted.

"Liu Weikun. Hearing you talk like that, you really must be in love. You used to be so blunt and realistic it was almost unpleasant — you weren't someone who said things that were this wrong. But I suppose even you can't help it when you're blinded by love."

"......"

"After pulling something like that... you're telling me I don't know everything that happened between you and Yeehyeon?"

Shushu's lips twisted grotesquely.

"And you? Do you know everything that happened between Hong Seon-yu and me?"

"......"

As if he had been lightly struck on the back of the head, Liu's lips parted instinctively — then pressed firmly shut, as though trying to hide the reaction.

The line he had drawn so firmly between the two — that what had happened with Shushu and Hong Seon-yu was an entirely different matter from what had happened between himself and Yeehyeon — felt as though it had been carelessly smeared away with a single swipe of a dirty shoe.

Rubbing the lower half of his face roughly with his palm, Liu turned and braced himself against the edge of the desk. In the long mirror mounted above it — like a dressing room mirror backstage — a man in crumpled, wrinkled clothes, unshaven, stared back at him with filthy eyes.

"I haven't forgiven everything Hong Seon-yu did, and I haven't fully recovered from it. And I certainly have no desire to see him again or do anything. It's just that... a lot of time has passed. Now I can step back from the aftermath and look at it from a distance. And more than anything..."

Shushu met Liu's gaze through the mirror.

"...I can now see that Hong Seon-yu also suffered."

Liu lowered his head, keeping his mouth shut. His usually neat hair fell heavily, covering his forehead and eyes. His brow furrowed as he looked down at the sharply protruding veins and knuckles on the back of the hand braced against the desk.

The fact that he had not once been at ease throughout the entire process of Changing Yeehyeon.

He wouldn't deny that, as an Alpha, his blood had surged with something he could only call elation each time he registered Yeehyeon responding — becoming Omega. But for the vast majority of that absolute time, he had suffered pain and terror unlike anything else, as though trapped in a room with no exit, the walls bristling with dense needles closing in from all sides.

As long as he expected Yeehyeon to take that into consideration, he had no grounds to stop Shushu, who was trying to lighten the weight of his own past for similar reasons.

In the mirror, Shushu moved away, walked to the coffee maker on the other side of the room, and poured from a half-filled glass carafe as he spoke.

"Back then, I was so submerged in my own pain that I couldn't see anything else. I told myself that Seon-yu's suffering was the deserved price for what he'd brought on himself, that thinking that way would give me peace... but it wasn't true."

Liu squinted, as though against a sudden brightness, staring at Shushu's back in the mirror.

"Facing the fact that while he was deceiving me, he must have been suffering just as much as I was — perhaps longer — and trying to genuinely imagine the depth of that pain... that helped me regain my composure and pull myself back together. In the end, isn't it the thought that only I was the fool, only I was damaged, only I was in pain, that truly tortures a person?"

Shushu turned back toward him and offered a wry smile, holding out a cup of coffee. Liu shook his head. What he needed now was alcohol, not caffeine — but Shushu's studio wasn't stocked with anything stronger.

"The things between us that you don't know, that no one else knows... He slept with others and deceived me, but that wasn't everything that happened between us. For a while, because of what he did, I tried to dismiss everything else as a lie and hate it all... but it didn't last. Because deep down, I already knew that wasn't the truth."

Shushu stroked the surface of his mug as he spoke, then wet his lips with coffee and continued.

"Understanding that Hong Seon-yu must have been tormented by guilt and anxiety throughout the entire time he was doing what he did... He chased a moment's pleasure — and because of that brief pleasure he couldn't bring himself to refuse, he had to carry guilt for all the time that followed. I understand that now. As someone with whom I once laid bare the deepest parts of myself, and who did the same for me... I simply cannot look away from his desperate struggle to somehow find his way through."

Either use this as a turning point — accept his position and collect himself — or completely ruin himself through uglier corruption. The choice, from here on, would be Hong Seon-yu's.

Having added that, Shushu took another sip of coffee and turned a calm gaze and voice back to Liu.

"You, who can't understand that — you shouldn't dare hope that Yeehyeon would forgive you."

"......"

He had so much he wanted to say.

Not a single plausible word came to mind that might change Yeehyeon's heart — but harsh words for shifting the blame onto Shushu, for venting every drop of his anger, were overflowing. Once he confirmed that Shushu had deliberately let it slip as revenge for interfering with Hong Seon-yu's activities in Seoul, he had been prepared to unleash every sharp word he had spent days honing.

He didn't know how else he would hold himself together. There was still so much to do. It was too soon to collapse and let everything go. He had to squeeze out a path back to Yeehyeon, even if it meant sustaining himself on the strength of blaming someone else.

But before he could even reach for his weapon, the sight of what his opponent was holding shattered his will to fight. What Shushu had said held up a mirror to his own current state with brutal clarity. Just as Shushu had imagined Hong Seon-yu's pain and shed some of the weight of the past, Liu desperately, achingly hoped that Yeehyeon would extend him the same leniency.

The worst part, though, was that even Shushu hadn't fully forgiven Hong Seon-yu — and had absolutely no desire to start anything new with him. This was a generosity only possible because it was now a distant past, unrelated to him.

Looking at Shushu's calm face, from which even the faintest trace of accusation had vanished, Liu slowly shook his head as though witnessing something he couldn't quite believe. He took his hands off the desk and rubbed his rough jaw broadly.

"You said what I did was worse than what Hong Seon-yu did. Even you — who forgave Hong Seon-yu — have no intention of starting over with that bastard."

"......"

"Don't worry. Seo Yeehyeon won't forgive me either. Rest easy."

He said it as though discarding a useless husk, then roughly swept his hair back and spat out a short curse.

Over the past few days, he had dragged in every person he could find to blame — but in the end, the one he hated most was himself. The Ghost. The Alpha.

He had hated it from the very beginning. Being an Alpha, being a Ghost — he had never once considered it some kind of noble exceptionalism. If it was such a precious privilege, he wished it had gone to someone else who actually wanted it. He had repeated those useless complaints and self-denials more times than he could count.

He had never expected that the time would come again — after he had finally thought he had made peace with his own existence, back in boyhood — to dig all of that up and drag it out again. He had certainly never imagined it would happen because of a longing for another person.

"My belief that what you did was heavier than what Hong Seon-yu did hasn't changed... but you're not me. You said I don't know everything that happened between you two. Where did that confidence go?"

Noticing Liu grinding his lips and fidgeting with a cigarette pack in his jacket pocket, Shushu sighed, approached, and wordlessly set an ashtray in front of him. Shushu didn't smoke, but he didn't enforce a strict no-smoking policy even for visiting smokers.

Liu lit a cigarette and took a hurried first drag.

"He said he's going to Paris."

"Paris?"

And then he told Shushu about the offer from The Hands. He confessed everything — how he had suspected the offer had gone to Yeehyeon and feigned ignorance, and his own reckless obsession with rushing the New York branch development, driven by nothing more than the need to keep Yeehyeon close.

Perhaps, knowing that only a destructive end awaited him, he had been unable to stop once he had taken the first step. Like Yeehyeon's cry — what's the difference between thirty-five percent and fifty percent — once it had begun, no matter when he might have spoken, the weight of it could never have been made lighter.

So perhaps, when Yeehyeon came to him already knowing the truth... somewhere inside him, a quiet resignation had already existed. That what was coming had finally come. That he could end it all. That he would accept whatever punishment followed.

He hadn't had the courage to let Yeehyeon go himself — so perhaps he had been waiting for someone else to stop him. For someone to smash everything and bring this reckless spiral to a halt, even if it meant destroying him in the process.

Shushu listened, his expression complicated, biting his lip and releasing it several times. Then, slowly, the tension left his shoulders. He set down his mug, came up behind Liu, and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"It's true that it's... a remarkable opportunity for Yeehyeon. But the opportunities you can open for him are no less significant."

"Jeong Se-in."

"......"

"Jeong Se-in."

"Yes, I'm listening."

Liu turned to face Shushu and shook his head. His tightly pressed lips and the glassy sheen in his eyes said he had already chosen resignation.

"It's unfortunate for me — but Seo Yeehyeon isn't the type to welcome help from a lover. He's not someone who believes the best thing two people can do for each other is sacrifice their individual lives just to stay together."

"I know that."

"Just because I helped him start painting again doesn't mean he has any obligation to stay by my side at Phantom. In the first place... it was my own base thought, imagining I could tie him down with a sense of debt by pretending to help."

A bitter, short laugh escaped him. Liu took a long drag from his cigarette and turned away from Shushu. He stubbed out what remained, picked up the pack, and turned a fresh cigarette over and over in his fingers.

"Liu Weikun. You can't fool me."

He glanced at Shushu through the mirror and put the cigarette to his lips. The dry skin of his lips caught on the filter.

Shushu placed his hand on Liu's shoulder again. This time, there was force behind it.

"Yeehyeon is the love of your life. It was a serious mistake — too serious to call a simple slip — but if you keep showing him your sincerity, Yeehyeon... his heart will move. You can't let him go to Paris."

Liu, who had been about to light the cigarette, brushed Shushu's hand away with an irritated motion and turned around.

"Why? Because he needs me? Because he's the love of my life, and without him I'm just a Ghost who can't put down roots anywhere — who can't be accepted by anyone — so forgive me, give up the opportunity you earned with your own worth, and quietly accept the fate of becoming an Omega by my side? Is that what you want me to say?"

"......"

"To the love of my life. Just like you said."

Liu looked down at Shushu — who couldn't react rashly — then put the cigarette back to his lips and muttered coldly.

"How is that any different from a second Changing?"

"Going to Paris doesn't have to mean breaking up. Even if you can't meet often — if you went to Paris once a month..."

"Jeong Se-in. Why are you doing this, all of a sudden?"

Liu turned toward Shushu, voice rising. Heat flared back into his eyes.

"Wasn't it exactly what you wanted — for someone like me, trash, to lose the person I love, become miserable, and pay for my sins? Huh?"

Shushu held Liu's gaze without speaking. They knew each other well enough that there was no need to explain these words had been spat out from a place of being cornered. He had condemned the Changing itself — but he had never wanted Liu to lose Yeehyeon.

"Before you were diagnosed as a Ghost and went to the States, you said you'd come back fixed. When I visited you in Boston halfway through, you said you were almost completely better. Awi — that's not an illness. You being a Ghost, this situation unfolding the way it did... I know it's a strange and difficult thing for both of you to accept. But Yeehyeon... you have to hold onto him."

"It might be impossible now."

Liu's body swayed as Shushu gripped his shoulders. He muttered it and lit the cigarette.

"He said he felt like a monster. A monster that was neither Omega nor Beta — nothing at all. How can he forgive the person who turned him into that?"

He added it quietly, staring at his own miserable reflection in the mirror.

"I know better than anyone what it feels like to become a monster... How can I ask him to love me again?"

"Then what are you going to do?"

"......"

Instead of answering, Liu crushed the cigarette — still long, barely smoked — shrugged his shoulders, and offered a smile that was worse than crying. That was all.