…Had I looked like that? I was at a loss for words. Come to think of it, in my early twenties, I had always been so preoccupied with money because of my mother’s hospital bills. I had to get scholarships and earn money, so I had no time to pay attention to those around me, let alone myself.
But even though I had scraped by like that, life was not easy. Around the time I graduated from university, if I hadn’t managed to contact a man called my father and borrow money for the surgery, my mother probably would have passed away eight years ago without even getting the surgery. There were far too many things in this world that couldn’t be done through effort alone.
“My arm isn’t as bad as I thought, so I don’t need surgery, just a cast. And my knee, well… it’s pretty messed up, but they said the surgery went well for now. They said there won’t be any aftereffects either… but I have to be able to believe that. I can’t move right now, so I feel anxious too.”
Having said that much, U Jiheon suddenly looked at me with a serious expression and made a random request.
“Teacher.”
“What?”
“Quick, scratch my thigh right now. I’m suddenly so anxious. Let me check if I’ve become a eunuch.”
…I couldn’t tell if he was joking right now or really asking me. If a nerve was damaged, wouldn’t they know immediately after surgery? Are there cases where something goes wrong later? I was puzzled, but since I couldn’t be sure, I reached out to his thigh as he requested. But I couldn’t tickle his injured body hard, so when I gently grasped it with my palm, the muscles in the guy’s thigh instantly hardened and an exaggerated reaction burst out.
“Puhak, that tickles. Why are you touching me so ticklishly? Aack, my ribs, my ribs hurt, damn it, I can’t even laugh with my guard down. Haah….”
“….”
U Jiheon had been laughing, then suddenly bent over as if his ribs hurt, making a fuss about dying. I couldn’t understand why he was showing such an exaggerated reaction when I had only touched him with my hand. What was certain was that his nerves seemed perfectly intact with no damaged areas.
“Did you have back surgery too?”
“No. Just my knee?”
“Then why is your thigh… haah, never mind. Just try to calm down for a second.”
“…You think that’s easy? Hoo, hoo. I’m going crazy. You only touched me, but my thigh muscles are trembling. What did you do to me?”
I was the one who wanted to ask why he was overreacting so much. Besides, it wasn’t like he had injured his waist, so what was all this eunuch talk? But even as I thought that, his smiling face was so pleasant to look at that I didn’t scold him. It seemed a lot of time had passed. U Jiheon’s face, which I had previously thought of as simply fierce, now exuded such a charming atmosphere when he smiled that even I, a man, couldn’t help but linger my gaze on him. Perhaps because he had exercised steadily for a long time, his broad, straight shoulders and the firm chest visible through his patient gown also caught my eye.
It felt truly ironic that inside the body of U Jiheon, grown like a perfect specimen of an adult male, was a mischievous eighteen-year-old brat. As I gazed at his face smiling handsomely, I found myself unknowingly searching for traces of eighteen, of a high schooler, when the guy who had barely calmed down spoke to me in a low voice. The playfulness had vanished from U Jiheon’s face before I knew it, and a chilling air now lingered there.
“Why aren’t you asking?”
“About what?”
“The reason I looked for you the moment I opened my eyes.”
“….”
I was at a loss for words. I had thought that to U Jiheon, I was his first love, and that he had wanted to see me based on that emotion. That was also why I had been reluctant to meet him even more. But when I heard him say earlier that he felt more comfortable having me wash him than a stranger, I felt puzzled. If it wasn’t because he liked me, I wondered why on earth he had tormented me so persistently for a month by sending his cousin brother after me.
“What is it? The reason you said you wanted to see me again.”
“You promised me. That if I rose more than thirty ranks in the entire school grade, we’d watch a movie together on the weekend.”
“…Did… did we make such a promise? Even if we did, when on earth was that….”
“Ah… maybe we already watched it? But I don’t remember. The movie I booked back then, I already paid for it to watch with you, Teacher.”
“….”
Seeing U Jiheon speak so confidently about a reason that made no sense at all, I felt a strange emotion. I should have confronted him, asking if he had tormented me for a month over such a trivial reason, but I simply couldn’t open my mouth. I had a hunch that if I dug deeply into U Jiheon’s feelings, it would only lead to a difficult situation.
“Can I ask you something?”
“…What?”
“…Why didn’t you want to meet me?”
“….”
“No, why did you suddenly agree to meet me? I’m so curious what wind blew for you to even be my caregiver for a month, Teacher.”
I couldn’t give any answer to his question for a while. Inside the suddenly quiet hospital room, only the sound of rain tapping against the window could be heard serenely.
…The truth was, throughout my life, I had often thought of U Jiheon.
At twenty-three, I had been flustered by his sincerity, and beyond feeling burdened, I had even felt rejection. I had been frightened to hear that another man saw me as a sexual object. And understandably so—nineteen-year-old U Jiheon had no fear in his eyes. He had always had an unhesitating personality, but after defining his feelings for me as love, he had become completely unstoppable.
Back then, I had been afraid that U Jiheon would do something to me with his childish impulses. I had even felt that he was fully capable of doing anything he wanted. On the surface, I was his private tutor, but the economic and social gap between us was too great. No matter how much I held the upper hand emotionally, I knew it was a relationship that could be overturned at any time depending on U Jiheon’s whim.
Looking back on my memories, the guy had always been frantic like a puppy wanting to be loved by its owner. Wanting to receive even a little of my attention, wanting to be together.
But the whole world had condemned his first love. Even I, the person in question, had.
Whenever I thought of him from time to time in life, guilt always followed like a shadow. Having said countless cruel things to shake off a mere nineteen-year-old was not a good memory for me either. In short, U Jiheon was an uncomfortable past that I didn’t particularly want to remember. I had tried to forget, and I thought I had, to some extent. At least until I heard from U Jaemin that he had attempted suicide.
Last night, after impulsively cutting my wrist, I thought of U Jiheon like homework I had been putting off. As I looked at the red blood slowly seeping between the open wounds, I suddenly wondered if the guy had hurt like this too. He must have. They said he fell from the seventh floor, so there was no way it hadn’t hurt.
People have died jumping from the same height, so it would have been painful enough to die. Convinced that merely cutting my wrist wouldn’t be enough to kill me, I leaned my body out the window to jump from the seventh floor, just as my mother and U Jiheon had done.
But to get straight to the conclusion, I failed to die.
Paradoxically, inside me were intertwined desires to die and to live. Those contradictory emotions, which seemed impossible to coexist, made me unable to die or to live, rendering me miserable. Then suddenly, I thought that since I was going to die anyway, it wouldn’t be bad to meet U Jiheon at least once.
Lacking both the courage to die and the courage to live on, I had given myself a one-month reprieve from my own death.
But I couldn’t say that to U Jiheon, so I chose my words carefully in my head. Various reasons came to mind disjointedly, but I couldn’t spit out any of them. Because to explain the reason I had come to see him, his “suicide attempt” had to be the premise.
I thought it would be far better for him to live resenting a nonexistent perpetrator than to remember that he had committed suicide. Of course, there was a possibility that U Jiheon’s memories would return, but that was a problem to think about when the time came. After a brief silence, I presented the most plausible answer.
“It’s because of you. Do you know how much I suffered because of U Jaemin for a month? He called me like a stalker, even came to my house, it was crazy.”
But after hearing my answer, U Jiheon stared at me for a while and then saw through my lie far too easily.
“…Why are you lying?”
“What?”
“Teacher, you’re definitely not someone who changes your mind just because someone bothers you. …Did you feel sorry for me? But that’s strange too.”
“…What’s so strange?”
“Honestly, you’re rather cold-hearted… your relationships are cut and dry, and you don’t have even a speck of sympathy… ah, of course, I’m not dissing you right now. It’s just the facts.”
I was at a loss for what to say. I felt his assessment of me was harsh, but at the same time, it was also entirely correct. I had thought he was just a brat who put his own feelings above everything else in the world… the fact that this guy understood me this deeply was both amazing and bewildering.