Chapter 161

After a long time of pouring out her inner thoughts, Jin Seo-hye lifted her head again with a face that showed no relief at all. She had thrown up a lot, but it seemed like she was still in pain.

“I thought it would be easier if I said it.”

“It’s not an easy thing.”

“You’ve changed.”

“….”

“If it were the old you, you’d have dismissed that kind of talk, saying it was none of your business. You were that kind of person.”

“I wouldn’t deny that.”

In truth, I was that kind of person. I would have spat it back.

“I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“If you become the good person all by yourself, I’d just be the awful girl for the rest of my life.”

It was a ridiculous reason for anger. Yet, I could understand.

“Don’t get the wrong idea. The reason I brought this up is just to repay the advance for the toll.”

“I don’t think the payment is over yet.”

For Jin Seo-hye, I was probably the worst person she could confess to. But at the same time, I was the only one.

Jin Seo-hye seemed perfectly fine on the outside, but more than anyone else, I knew that looking fine on the outside didn’t mean that she was actually okay.

Her job was essentially gone, and at least there would be no media company willing to accept her now. The only family she had, her grandmother, had passed away not long ago. Meanwhile, I, the cause of her distress, was living just fine.

I didn’t even think of myself as the cause of that incident, nor was I living all that well, but that was completely irrelevant to Jin Seo-hye.

Jin Seo-hye was at her breaking point. Maybe it would have been better if she had broken down earlier. Pretending to be normal, acting like everything was okay, only signified that she was destined to crash harder, more violently, and more pitifully.

This meeting was purely coincidental, but it had prevented Jin Seo-hye from breaking down.

I didn’t know what that meant.

I was someone who could never actually like Jin Seo-hye. I could say I disliked her too. Yet, because I had come here, Jin Seo-hye could hold herself together.

Was I wishing for Jin Seo-hye to break down? That wasn’t it. Nor did I particularly wish for her to succeed.

The space that Jin Seo-hye occupied within me had shrunk so much that it was no longer visible; if one were to put it this way, she was a person without any significance to me. Just another person.

But for some reason, I felt a sense of relief that Jin Seo-hye had not fallen apart. It was a ridiculous thought. To feel relieved that someone I considered an enemy had not broken down.

I wasn’t some saint.

Was it a sense of kinship from being orphans? It couldn’t be that. I didn’t even know the reasons behind our orphan status. It could have been due to the death of parents, or it could have been that they abandoned us; either way, she had her grandmother.

Right now, I might be feeling pity for Jin Seo-hye.

Emotions were strange things. Even though they were mine, I couldn’t understand them at all. That’s what made us human.

It took a long time to resume the conversation. Each of us needed time to harvest our emotions.

Jin Seo-hye still did not look well, but eventually, she opened her mouth again.

“Anyway, Muk Ha-neul knew that I was dating Kang Seong-hye. I don’t know how, but I have my suspicions.”

“Suspicions?”

“Yoon Sua. She’s a lesbian.”

…A name I never would have imagined came out. Yoon Sua. Muk Ha-neul’s closest friend in college who absolutely hated me. And she was a feminist.

Not to the extent of being radical, though. She was just a shallow girl pretending to be tough and didn’t have the courage for anything extreme.

However, I never thought she was a lesbian. Perhaps it made sense that she always stuck around Muk Ha-neul, almost like a mother figure taking care of her…? I couldn’t say, but it felt oddly fitting.

“She was a lesbian, and while we didn’t exactly introduce ourselves as such, it was obvious. So she must have realized that we were both lesbians a long time ago, right? And she must have told Muk Ha-neul about it. If she hadn’t, there would be no way for her to find out.”

Could it be that Yoon Sua had interviewed Muk Ha-neul? Muk Ha-neul liked me, so if Yoon Sua liked Muk Ha-neul, Muk Ha-neul wouldn’t have been able to reciprocate that love. Could that be the reason for her grudge? Yet, Yoon Sua didn’t seem to strike me as someone bold enough for that.

Anyway, it wasn’t a question with an immediate answer, so I moved on to the next topic.

“So what was the reason for the fight in the end?”

“She started it first. She asked how it felt to be dumped like a piece of trash by your ‘girlfriend.'”

I couldn’t picture Muk Ha-neul saying such things. But now, it didn’t seem like Jin Seo-hye would lie. Everyone has aspects of themselves that others don’t know. It just felt a bit strange that Muk Ha-neul would say something like that.

Well, there was also a possibility that Jin Seo-hye’s memory was inaccurate.

“So I asked if she really liked a pathetic loser who ran away,” she said.

“…Could it be…?”

“Who else could it be but you?”

…Well, that seemed reasonable. We weren’t close then or even now. Still, at least she didn’t call me an orphan. It was probably a self-inflicted wound in any case.

“And then it turned into a brawl. We fought by pulling each other’s hair, and afterward, we behaved like enemies until Seong-hye committed suicide, and then I just lived in a daze until I graduated. After graduation, I got lucky and found a decent job, but then I met you, and my life went straight to hell.”

I thought that incident was a hundred percent Jin Seo-hye’s fault, but I kept that thought to myself. I needed to remember that I would probably get hit for sharing this story. It wasn’t a good idea to provoke anger in order to get hit a little less when that time came.

Jin Seo-hye seemed to be struggling more and more. Her speech was fluctuating between formal and informal, and she seemed not to be aware of it herself.

Pouring it all out would bring relief. That was a lie. Pouring out would only cause past memories to scrape the throat and induce more pain. Still, if we couldn’t digest it, we had to expel it. If we couldn’t go together, we had to endure the pain, even if we had to force it out. What mattered was enduring that pain.

If throwing up could cure everything, then we wouldn’t need psychiatrists.

“Anyway, the story ends here. I have no more to say. The part about Muk Ha-neul being a suicide instructor is bullshit, but she’s a pathetic bitch, treated me like crap, and that’s that. I don’t care who did the interview.”

Yeah, with that, I had gathered all the information I could from Jin Seo-hye. I felt as though I should almost be paying her for this. Of course, that wasn’t to say I wanted to get hit more.

Muk Ha-neul was surely not someone who would become a suicide instructor. I might have been pretending to be sincere, but I wouldn’t say it was wrong. I couldn’t find out who did the interview, but that was not something I was supposed to find out, nor something I should be searching for in Jin Seo-hye’s perspective.

But why had I even tried to confirm what I already knew? Was it to help Muk Ha-neul? There was that justification, but in the end, I had resolved to meet Jin Seo-hye out of my own pure and personal curiosity.

About Muk Ha-neul’s love, about the emotions she felt, about the emotions I felt—I was confused about all of it.

I still didn’t really know what kind of person Muk Ha-neul was. Even so, I…

Let’s admit it. When I was a man, I did have romantic feelings for Muk Ha-neul.

Yeah, what could I do? I was ultimately still a man.

No matter how much I surrounded myself with thorns and armored my body, I couldn’t have felt nothing for a girl trying to embrace me, covered in blood. I simply chose to play ignorant, avoid it, and run away.

I recalled the fundamental reason I took a leave of absence. I had run away. Yes, no matter how I wrapped it, in the end, it was an escape. But from whom? From Kang Seong-hye? Or the gazes targeting me? It was none of those. I had experienced enough of that, and there was nothing left to fear.

The person I ran away from… was Muk Ha-neul.

She had probably run away too, fearing that she would look at me with a face like everyone else.

I didn’t know how significant my feelings for Muk Ha-neul were, whether it could be called love—now I had no way of knowing. But at that time, I was certainly fond of Muk Ha-neul.

And so, I couldn’t respond to Muk Ha-neul’s confession.

And so, I still hadn’t answered Muk Ha-neul’s confession.

I could no longer feel any romantic feelings for Muk Ha-neul. Even though I had memories of feeling those emotions.

But if I were to refuse Muk Ha-neul’s confession, saying that I could no longer feel romantic feelings for her, it felt like even the last trace of what remained would disappear completely. So I had been postponing my answer.

Because I loved myself more than I loved Muk Ha-neul.

~

“Now, I think it’s time to receive my payment?”

“…Ah, right.”

I could no longer just dwell in my thoughts. Yes, I certainly had a payment I needed to make. As the time approached, a sense of dread washed over me. Even if my opponent was a girl, she was bigger than me and an adult. I had no idea what might happen if she hit me with all her strength. At this point, I couldn’t ask for leniency.

Getting up from my chair, I stood there awkwardly, and Jin Seo-hye grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto the couch.

“One more condition.”

“…You can’t just add another one now.”

“Just decline if you don’t want to. I can’t force you.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t close your eyes.”

“…What?”

“I want you to watch until the end.”

I… didn’t really know. I wasn’t sure I could do that.

But I understood the meaning of those words. I opened my eyes wide and looked at Jin Seo-hye. Suddenly, I could see her wrist. The hand connecting from that wrist became an awkward, unfamiliar hand that was prone to hitting.

There was no strength behind that hand yet. At least, not that I could see.

Nervously, I worried about where she would hit me. The stomach, no thank you; but if it’s my face, it would be noticeable… Either way, it was her choice, but I was afraid of both.

“If possible, please hit me somewhere that won’t show much.”

“You have a lot of demands.”

That meant she wouldn’t grant that preference. Still, I had promised, and it was too late to renegotiate now. I kept my gaze on Jin Seo-hye’s fist, tense.

Before I could fully gather my thoughts, suddenly, Jin Seo-hye’s fist flew towards me.

Although she said to watch until the end, I couldn’t do that. Her fist hurtled toward me as if in slow motion, and that only made it scarier. In the end, I instinctively had no choice but to close my eyes.

Moments later,

…There was no pain.

I felt a little cold sweat trickle down. I cracked my eyes open a bit. There, with her head bowed, Jin Seo-hye was in my arms. As I felt no pain, I heard the sound of her muffled sobs and quickly realized she was crying.

Jin Seo-hye’s fist hadn’t reached me. Instead, it had brushed by me, exactly hitting the wall beside my head, and maybe she had hit it hard because her knuckles were scraped, and a little blood was flowing. Only now did I notice how thin Jin Seo-hye’s wrist was.

Jin Seo-hye was crying.

It was different from the quiet wailing that couldn’t even shed tears earlier. It was a truly desperate outpouring of tears.

I didn’t allow myself to think she was crying from accidentally hitting the wall and feeling pain. That kind of thought wasn’t important. Even if that was the case, I didn’t care. No matter how it had all started, she was crying for something she had lost now.

In the arms of the person she hated the most.

Having buried her face in my embrace, I could no longer see Jin Seo-hye’s face. All I could see were the tears she had shed.

So this sound of crying was a tear that only I had to listen to and remember.

I gently held Jin Seo-hye’s head and embraced her carefully.