#035
Ding dong-
“You’re here? It’s been a while.”
It was their first face-to-face meeting in about 4 months, but instead of a happy greeting, Shin Gihyeon scrunched up his face.
Lee Yeonwoo didn’t stop brushing his teeth as if asking what the problem was.
“What’s with brushing your teeth in front of someone?”
“What can I do about the timing? Then do you want to stand in front of the door until I finish brushing my teeth?”
“……”
He quietly took off his shoes. Even if they tried to have an emotional reunion or something, it would be cringey so they wouldn’t do it, and just like friends who saw each other daily, they lightly skipped greetings. Shin Gihyeon’s hands were full of stuff.
“Did you come to set up house?”
“These are housewarming gifts.”
He had hastily made plans yesterday and hurriedly went to the mart to buy them.
“Premium tissues, toilet paper rolls, kitchen towels, wet wipes… Are you a tissue enthusiast?”
“Do you think such an enthusiast exists in this world? I didn’t know what was needed, so I ended up buying daily necessities.”
Shin Gihyeon also became conscious of what Lee Yeonwoo said and blushed with embarrassment at the items he had brought.
‘…Did I buy too much tissue?’
But daily necessities were good to have plenty of.
“This is a scone.”
“Thank you.”
Lee Yeonwoo politely received it with both hands while holding his toothbrush in his mouth.
“But is there anywhere open at this hour?”
“I bought it from the dessert shop next to the mart. I bought it yesterday. …More importantly, wipe off some foam.”
In the end, he gently put down the paper bag containing the scone and headed straight to the bathroom.
While Lee Yeonwoo went to rinse his mouth, Shin Gihyeon looked around and swallowed his saliva.
26-year-old Shin Gihyeon. Living a successful fangirl life. He had visited the house of the star he admired.
Since it would be embarrassing to show it in front of Lee Yeonwoo, he suppressed his trembling heart as much as possible while unpacking the items he had brought one by one. Even while doing so, his gaze was constantly and quickly scanning the interior in all directions.
“I’m done. Let’s eat the scone.”
“You should eat a meal first before eating that.”
Lee Yeonwoo, who had successfully finished brushing his teeth, rubbed his rumbling stomach. He couldn’t understand Shin Gihyeon’s words.
“Does eating a scone prevent you from eating a meal?”
“…I couldn’t buy milk though. Do you happen to have any?”
“I’ll look for it. Hyung said I could take out and eat anything.”
Shin Gihyeon followed behind Lee Yeonwoo as he headed to the kitchen. He secretly wanted to look around the kitchen too. And in his hand was a small shovel.
“Oh, you bought some? Thanks.”
“I did buy it, but what’s this for?”
“There’s a garden on the terrace. I want to grow lettuce.”
“…How long are you planning to stay?”
Lee Yeonwoo hesitated as he was about to open the refrigerator door.
“Well. Should I spend all the appearance fee I received last time here?”
“In that time, go to the hospital.”
Yesterday, when Shin Gihyeon received the house address via text from Kang Dojun, he also briefly heard about Lee Yeonwoo’s current condition.
“Why are you being so stubborn?”
“I’m not being stubborn, I just don’t feel the necessity to go.”
At Lee Yeonwoo’s confident words, Shin Gihyeon opened his eyes wide in surprise as if looking at a huge fool.
“That’s what being stubborn is.”
Lee Yeonwoo anxiously cast his gaze into the air, then in a flustered motion, forcefully opened the refrigerator door. He failed to execute the simple rule of stepping back when opening the door and smacked his face hard against the door he had opened himself.
“Ack, fuck.”
The corner of Shin Gihyeon’s mouth twitched as he watched from the front row.
“…You were about to laugh at me, weren’t you?”
“Not at all? You’re hurt, so why would I laugh at you?”
Right, he hadn’t laughed. He was just holding back the laughter that wanted to escape.
Lee Yeonwoo found that even more annoying. He was even concluding that the reason he hit his face on the refrigerator door was because his mind was sick.
But embarrassment hit him harder than that. And pain hit harder than embarrassment.
“I didn’t break my nose bone, did I?”
“Such dramatics. Is there milk?”
“…You check. I need to go to the bathroom.”
Lee Yeonwoo rushed to the bathroom to immediately check on his nose’s wellbeing.
He looked at himself reflected in the mirror. Other than his nose and forehead being a little red, there didn’t seem to be any particular problems. Then warm liquid trickled down from his nose.
At that moment, Shin Gihyeon was leisurely looking around the refrigerator.
‘Wow, barley tea.’
Was this why his star maintained that honey voice?
‘…Should I start boiling and drinking barley tea too?’
While he was having peaceful thoughts as he found and took out the milk located in the corner, Lee Yeonwoo appeared with urgent footsteps.
“Hey, hey… Hey hey! Shin Gihyeon! I… I, I!”
He was so urgent that although it was definitely Korean, it was incomprehensible.
“Yeah, is your nose doing wel…?”
When he closed the refrigerator door and turned his gaze, he discovered Lee Yeonwoo with blood dripping from his nose.
“You… you, youyou…!”
Lee Yeonwoo hastily covered his nose with his hands, but the liquid continued to flow down and wet the floor. Shin Gihyeon, who grasped the situation, quickly found tissues in the kitchen and held them in front of him.
“The kid who went to the bathroom! If you saw your nose bleeding, you should have thought to stop it first. What are you doing just running out blindly!?”
Like Hansel and Gretel, small and cute round bloodstains were found at regular intervals along the path Lee Yeonwoo had taken.
Despite Shin Gihyeon’s nagging, Lee Yeonwoo couldn’t come to his senses and just blinked his big eyes while his body remained stiff. It wasn’t a lot of bleeding, just a little, but he was startled.
“…This is my first nosebleed.”
“Being sturdy is something to brag about!”
“Gihyeon.”
“Don’t talk and just properly block your nose.”
Shin Gihyeon pulled out several more tissues and handed them to him. Lee Yeonwoo made a dejected expression while blocking his nose.
“I think I’m really sick.”
Soon, chicken-poop-like tears dripped down from his gentle eyes. That soon became a wail. After uttering the fact that he was sick out loud, once the crying started, it burst out to an uncontrollable degree.
“Should I go to the hospital… *sob*, should I go to the hospital?”
Lee Yeonwoo trembled slightly, going “hiccup, hiccup” to hold back his leaking tears. It didn’t stop easily.
People around him kept saying to go to the hospital, he pathetically hit his face on the refrigerator door, and he cried over something trivial.
The more he cried, the more pathetic he became, and the more pathetic he felt, the more he wanted to cry – it was a vicious cycle.
Yesterday’s incident was the same. What was there to be scared of about something like an elevator, making innocent Kang Dojun worry? Pathetic and pathetic again.
Past incidents were like that too. Who was that Ber person to come all the way to the countryside to torment him…, no, before that, when outsiders came…
The more he recalled past incidents he had brushed off as insignificant, the more the lumps of emotion he had hidden deep in his heart burst out as tears and wet Lee Yeonwoo’s face.
“Fucking hell, if they came to have fun, they should have left quietly. Why did they buy eggs and put them in Grandma Kyeong-i’s chicken coop? *sob*. What did grandma do wrong? Bastards scarier than ghosts… *sob*.”
Shin Gihyeon stared at Lee Yeonwoo with blank eyes. His face was covered in blood and tears. As if he had held back a lot, he sniffled what might have been snot or nosebleed and poured out his grievances.
“Right? Did I do something wrong? How did those crazy bastards find their way here and… tell me to be grateful that they bought eggs for me! Should I be grateful? Fuck, is that right?”
“There really are such bastards in this world.”
“Right? Hah, and they expect alcohol not to go down when this is happening.”
From the first episode of the broadcast, with alcohol bottles packed full in the refrigerator, it was clear he had always liked alcohol. But Shin Gihyeon didn’t pick a pointless fight with the current Lee Yeonwoo.
As he quietly listened to Lee Yeonwoo’s grievances and agreed with him, he seemed to calm down a bit, and his crying gradually subsided.
“Actually, it was hard for me after appearing on the broadcast.”
“I thought it would be.”
“…I’m hungry.”
“Let’s eat the scone.”
The two of them first wiped up the small amount of blood on the floor. While they were eating the scone, the sushi they had ordered for delivery arrived.
He thought he had eaten it to the point of being sick of it on the deep-sea fishing boat, but eating it after a long time stimulated his appetite. Lee Yeonwoo chewed the sushi while muttering with reddened eyes.
“It was the pain of breaking a nose bone.”
“I’m sure it was. You even bled. It’s not actually broken, right? Should we go to the hospital?”
He touched his slightly sore nose bridge. He pressed it down to make a pig nose, but it didn’t hurt that much.
“I think it’s okay now…, am I red?”
“Not really.”
“Then it should be fine. I’ll never buy a refrigerator like that even if I die.”
He glared fiercely at the kitchen and grumbled.
“You don’t have money for that anyway.”
“…I’m eating the salmon sushi.”
“You already ate salmon earlier, didn’t you?”
“Instead, you eat all the flounder.”
Shin Gihyeon, who liked flounder better than salmon, decided to coolly reach an agreement.
While doing so, he tapped his phone with one hand.
「Hello, sunbae-nim. This is Shin Gihyeon. Are you currently filming? I’m currently at sunbae-nim’s house eating ordered sushi with Yeonwoo. By the way, I drank some of the milk in the refrigerator, and I’ll visit again later with milk… (omitted) …Oh, and Yeonwoo decided to go to the hospital. I’ll inform you of the details later. I’ll end my message here. Good work.」
“What are you touching your phone so much while eating?”
“It’s nothing.”
After Shin Gihyeon drank water, he glanced at Lee Yeonwoo, who still had tears slightly welling up, and asked.
“If you get treatment at the hospital, will your stay in Seoul be extended?”
“I’m a strong person, so I’ll get better quickly.”
It was a thoroughly wrong self-assessment.
“A person who calls himself strong drinks like that? That’s dependency.”
After that, with Shin Gihyeon’s continued fact-bombing, Lee Yeonwoo, who had nothing to say, quietly nodded his head. Of course he wanted to argue back, but everything said was correct.
Even though they hadn’t turned on the TV, the living room was filled with Shin Gihyeon’s voice, giving his ears no rest.
As he was inhaling sushi like a soulless person, at some point there was nothing to pick up even when he moved his chopsticks.
As Lee Yeonwoo was neatly organizing the plastic containers, Shin Gihyeon asked once more.
“When will you start tending the garden?”
“Not now, I’ll have to buy seeds or seedlings later and plant them. I’ll need fertilizer too.”
“Yeah, at least grow those. They say looking at plants purifies the mind.”
Lee Yeonwoo thought of Grandpa Jongsu who used to farm.
“That’s not necessarily true.”
He chuckled while unconsciously thinking of the rural village people. He wondered if he should make a phone call to see if they were doing well without him.
Just then, a phone actually rang. He secretly wondered which elder might have called because they missed him and looked at his phone, but unfortunately, the call had come to Shin Gihyeon’s phone.
For some reason, Shin Gihyeon pressed the call button with a slightly nervous expression.
“Hello!”
“Who is it?”
Without answering Lee Yeonwoo’s question from beside him, he said “Ah, yes. Yes yes. I’ll do that. Ah, now? Yes, yes! I understand,” while bowing his head toward the non-existent other party and answering politely.
After Shin Gihyeon hung up, Lee Yeonwoo said with a worried expression.
“Did you borrow from loan sharks?”
“…How do you come up with such ideas?”
“Your phone-answering behavior is exactly like that.”
Did it look like that? Shin Gihyeon was shocked. He had just answered with respect in his heart, but was it a bit too much?
“It was Kang Dojun sunbae-nim. He said he’s coming now after finishing filming.”
“Hyung?”
“Yeah, he finished unexpectedly early.”
Lee Yeonwoo glared sullenly at his phone that hadn’t rung. He even checked if it was on silent mode, but that wasn’t it.
‘Why?’
He didn’t know the reason, but that annoyed him and he frowned. Lately, there are feelings he doesn’t understand about himself.
Lee Yeonwoo fiddled with his phone that wouldn’t ring and muttered.
“I should go to the hospital quickly.”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
