“Is this our place?”
A luxury villa in Seoul overlooking the Han River. Even though they’d moved here about three years ago to escape the crowds and find a quiet neighborhood, Cha-hyeon looked around as if he were stepping inside for the very first time.
Closing the front door softly and following him in, Se-min watched his back. A faint heaviness pressed on his chest. He’d thought he’d made peace with Hyung’s memory loss, but seeing him forget even the home they’d shared hit harder than he’d expected. It was touching that he’d found a house with him in mind… but still.
After peering around like everything truly was unfamiliar, Cha-hyeon suddenly let out a small laugh. He pointed at something by the entryway.
“A couple item for you and me, Se-min?”
What was he talking about? Following his finger, Se-min spotted two pairs of matching indoor slippers and wanted to squeeze his eyes shut. The faint gloom vanished in an instant.
A couple item? No way. If anything, it was stranger that Cha-hyeon would read the slippers that way when they’d never given them a second thought.
“No…!”
He’d bought the same design and color so the entry wouldn’t look messy if it wasn’t unified.
…Or was that not it? He’d denied it on reflex, but a late-arriving shard of memory made him pause. When he’d chosen those noise-dampening slippers on a social-commerce special, he might’ve thought, “I should get the same ones as Hyung.”
“……”
Se-min glared at the poor, blameless slippers he’d put to good use all year. Slipping on the larger pair, Cha-hyeon walked into the house as if it were second nature.
Hurriedly changing into his own slippers, Se-min followed. Though it was his first time seeing the place, there was no hesitation in Cha-hyeon’s step as he explored.
He set the duffel bag off his shoulder onto the sofa and moved to the window. Gazing out at the distant Han framed by the hilltop, almost-isolated terrain, he murmured,
“That’s curious.”
He turned slowly and looked at Se-min, who’d come up behind him. Then his eyes drifted over the house itself, the way a backdrop sits behind a subject.
His head tilted slightly. Overall, the interior matched his taste, yet here and there sat things that didn’t, the mix giving off a faint dissonance.
His gaze soon landed on the console opposite the sofa. In the small framed photo on top were Sung Cha-hyeon and Se-min—and an elderly man he didn’t recognize. It was obviously a studio-shot family portrait… and his head tipped a little farther.
“…Hmmm.”
Catching the glint of curiosity in Cha-hyeon’s eyes, Se-min asked carefully,
“Looking around—does anything come back?”
“Of course not.”
For a moment, the crisp reply almost sounded like good news. Se-min’s brows had arced with premature hope; realizing his expectations had missed, he dropped his gaze, crestfallen.
As if the sight amused him, a faintly mocking curve touched Cha-hyeon’s lips and faded. But since Se-min didn’t catch that fleeting sneer, he quickly smoothed over his gloom and asked brightly,
“Want me to give you a tour? The doctor said we should keep up steady stimulation…. I’ll show you what’s where.”
“Okay.”
Thankfully, Cha-hyeon answered without fuss. His cooperative attitude—keeping his promise to help recover his memory—lifted Se-min’s spirits a little.
For two people, the place was arguably on the large side. Of the five rooms, the two deeper in past the living room were used by Cha-hyeon, and the one by the entry belonged to Se-min.
“Your rooms are in back. You use the master and the study, and we share the dressing room. My room’s here. Uh, and….”
It felt a little awkward explaining the house to its owner. Doubling back toward the entry, Se-min showed the guest room first. The moment he opened the door, a peculiar chill drifted out.
“This is… the guest room.”
“Doesn’t look like a house that needs one.”
Taking in the bare interior—pretty much just a bed—Cha-hyeon asked, suppressing a smile. Sheepish, Se-min offered a defense.
“You originally told me to use this room too, but I figured we should keep at least one room for guests, just in case, so I left it aside.”
“Have we ever had a guest?”
“…No. But you never know….”
Cha-hyeon let out an incredulous laugh. For some reason, he felt like parents convinced their outsider son—who’s ghosted the world—will someday make a friend. Even more abashed, Se-min quickly shut the guest room door.
As he led the way toward his own room, Cha-hyeon made a suggestion.
“Rather than waiting around for guests who’ll never come, wouldn’t it be more efficient if you used it?”
In fact, before losing his memory, Cha-hyeon had told him to use that room as a study. He was fixated on keeping Se-min’s life ordinary and often nagged him to study. Though he’d registered as a pair guide, what Cha-hyeon ultimately wanted was for Se-min to get into a big company or take the civil-service exam and land a stable job.
But once he’d entered university, Se-min had completely let studying go—and he had no intention of quitting guiding, which was practically a state job—so he pretended not to hear the words of the brother who’d lost his memory.
“This one’s my room.”
Thankfully, the next room he showed drew real interest from Cha-hyeon. Any impressions of the guest room were clearly gone by then.
Unlike the guest room steeped in chill, a gentle warmth lingered in Se-min’s room. Thanks to the large south-facing window, sunlight poured in, and the space felt like someone had tended to it with real affection and care.
“It smells like you in here, Se-min.”
“…What are you even saying?”
He answered brusquely on purpose. He knew it was a silly comment, but it still got under his skin for no reason.
It’s not a bad smell, right? While Cha-hyeon smiled quietly, Se-min covertly brought his shirt to his nose and sniffed.
Meanwhile, Cha-hyeon looked over the unremarkable furnishings: bed, desk, wardrobe, a PC and a laptop, a headset, a few robot toys with a distinctly boyish taste, and some books on guiding. A backpack that looked recently bought. An all-in-one lotion on the side table and a hair gel that was barely used….
The picture of a typical early-twenties guy’s room. His gaze lingered more than once on the bed—plenty big for the two of them to lie in.
Moving at an easy pace, he stopped in front of the desk. Because he’d been thinking about the study a moment earlier, Se-min tensed up without meaning to and swallowed.
But Cha-hyeon had stopped for a different reason. He looked at the same small framed photo he’d seen on the living-room console, a picture of little Se-min grinning wide, and shots of a young-looking Cha-hyeon and Se-min together; then he picked up the frame with the family portrait.
“Is this from when you were little?”
“Oh, that one?”
Lowering the arm he’d brought to his nose, Se-min stepped closer. The frame looked comically small in Cha-hyeon’s hand. He couldn’t remember what exactly had happened the day they took it, but thanks to a note their grandmother had left, it felt vivid—almost like a memory of his own.
“I think one’s from my birthday, and one after your middle-school graduation. And this one… we took about two years before Grandma passed.”
It was the photo Cha-hyeon had insisted on, pushing hard to mark her eightieth. Back then, as a kid, he’d wondered why they had to take a picture at all…. Now he was so grateful he’d listened to Hyung.
As he traced that hazy nostalgia, Se-min’s expression softened. Quietly, Cha-hyeon watched him. Suddenly, he wet his lower lip.
“There are more than just those. Your album and mine—they should be in my room. If you want, I can go find….”
His words trailed off as he closed his mouth. It was because Cha-hyeon had silently set the family photo down. Not neatly upright, but face-down, the picture turned to the floor.
Eyes dropping to check it, Se-min looked back up at him, puzzled. Without blinking, a faint curve tugged one corner of Cha-hyeon’s mouth.
Silence ushered in a sudden, peculiar tension. Se-min quietly clenched his fists. His palms went damp. The stillness thrummed with a strange charge.
“Why… are you looking at me like that?”
A tightness like fingers at his throat. For Se-min, it was an unfamiliar sensation. In this house with Hyung, he’d never felt anything like it.
“Just because.”
Even with that offhand answer, Se-min found himself swallowing again.
Come to think of it, it was just the two of them here. All at once, that fact struck him—unbearably provocative.
It was strange. He’d lived with his unrequited crush for nearly twenty years. Even after he’d grown up and started seeing Cha-hyeon as someone he could date, he’d only been mildly aware of it, and they’d gotten along fine.
Which was why he couldn’t explain this awkward, nervous thrum. In their straightforward, ordinary routine, the only thing that had changed was….
“By the way… Se-min. It’s just us now, isn’t it?”
