“Hyung, you’re drooling.”
“Huh?”
I hastily wiped my mouth at his words, and Yang Garam burst out laughing at the sight. When I finally realized I’d been tricked and glared at him with fire in my eyes, Yang Garam apologized with a pure, clean smile that was impossible to hate.
“You were staring so intensely, I got embarrassed.”
Put that way, I had no comeback since I was partly to blame. Jeong Seyeon had quite a body too, but the tiger tattoo on his back was so striking that the rest was a blur in my memory. In contrast, I hadn’t been thinking about Yang Garam at all, but whether intentional or not, he undressed so slowly that I casually looked and then felt suddenly drawn in.
“What kind of exercise do you do? Why is your body so good?”
Being an Esper with enhanced physical abilities was separate from having a toned body. In that sense, my body wasn’t built through exercise like Jeong Seyeon’s or Yang Garam’s. Rather, I had a slim physique with almost no visible muscles. My skin was also pale, so people who first heard I was an S-class Esper were often surprised.
“I’m a physical education major, you know.”
Yang Garam said, sounding a bit hurt, and I had to question my own memory, wondering if he had ever told me this.
“I texted you yesterday that I’m in the Taekwondo department, and I even sent you a photo with the gym in the background after practice.”
‘Honestly, I didn’t really look at that, Garam.’
Unable to admit the truth, I just nodded and avoided his eyes, feeling guilty. By chance, my gaze fell on his pants, which he hadn’t taken off yet.
“You need to take off your pants too.”
Yang Garam, dressed in jeans, suddenly stiffened at my words. He gulped once and began unfastening his belt. Even at a glance, his tense hands had visible veins, and his fingertips were trembling slightly.
I discreetly raised my head to look at Yang Garam’s face. With his head bowed low, his ears and even the nape of his neck were red.
‘He must be really embarrassed.’
Thinking it would make him uncomfortable if I kept staring, I picked up the shirt I had dropped on the floor and shook it out. Then I put it on and started buttoning it.
“Um, hyung.”
Yang Garam, now down to just his underwear after removing his pants, called out to me.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you getting dressed?”
Without stopping buttoning my shirt, I drew out a “Hmm…” before continuing.
“It’s not like we’re taking a bath, so why the rush for two people to shower together? If it’s just a shower, you can wait ten minutes, right?”
Yang Garam’s face contorted in confusion. Seeing that he seemed to quickly understand what I was saying, I skipped the roundabout way and got straight to the point.
“I’ll wait outside, so wash up as quickly as possible and come out. Your hyung is specially giving way to you because you’re Garam. Got it?”
“Hyung, wait…!”
And I fled through the bathroom door before he could stop me. I heard Yang Garam desperately calling “Hyung!” from behind, but I pretended not to hear.
‘Surely he wouldn’t come out in just his underwear?’
My prediction that Yang Garam, already undressed, wouldn’t be able to chase after me was right on target. A moment later, I naturally made my way to the living room, listening to the sound of the shower coming from behind the bathroom door.
‘Garam, you really won’t find a hyung like me. Actually, I gave way because I was worried you’d be embarrassed if you cried.’
I smirked, recalling the face of Yang Garam sniffling as he hugged me, so at odds with his large frame.
‘At twenty years old, he’s still a baby.’
“Still, I’m glad the things I was worried about didn’t happen.”
Yang Garam’s attitude remained unchanged, making my serious concerns and hesitation about showing my body seem pointless. At first, his expression was so bad that I felt a little upset, but once I realized it wasn’t because of my body but because he wanted to Guide me and couldn’t, I felt better. He even shed tears over not being able to Guide me. How could I dislike him?
“He’s cute, really.”
Thinking that I didn’t need to worry about showing any side of myself in front of Yang Garam, I flopped down on the living room sofa. The baseball cap and duffel bag that Yang Garam had thrown there were scattered messily. I gathered them together and pushed them to the corner of the sofa.
Jeong Seyeon, who was just finishing cooking, noticed me and asked, seeming surprised:
“Weren’t you going to wash up?”
“I told Garam to go first.”
As soon as he heard my explanation, he immediately offered a solution.
“There’s a bathroom on the second floor too.”
It didn’t really make sense for a house with five people to have only one bathroom. I brightened at his words and immediately went upstairs. Unlike on the first floor, I easily found the bathroom right next to the stairs.
‘Since I’m up here, should I look around the other rooms?’
Though I was about to wash up, curiosity took over as I observed the second floor’s simpler layout compared to the first.
I opened one of the two doors besides the bathroom, starting with the one located deeper into the second floor. The door didn’t open fully, stopping halfway as it caught on something. Peering through the gap, I could see what was blocking the door.
‘That’s my luggage!’
If my luggage was here, this must be my room. I squeezed through the half-open door and quickly looked around the entire room.
‘It’s bigger than I thought.’
Though not as large as the first-floor living room, it was a very large room for one person. I pulled in my luggage that was by the doorway, set it aside, and examined the room in detail. The first thing I noticed was the blue sky visible through the wide window. There were curtains on the windows, but they were visibly thin and flimsy, allowing sunlight to pass right through, seeming only useful for preventing people from looking in from outside.
“There’s a tree here too.”
When I fully drew back the half-drawn curtains, the outside scenery was completely revealed. I also discovered that the large tree in the yard was positioned very close to my window.
Thinking that it would be easy to reach the branches by just stretching my hand a little from the window, I shifted my gaze from it.
Then I saw the bed located opposite the window. It looked very soft at first glance. I sat on the bed, ran my hand over the sheets, and looked around the room. A navy sofa and wooden table next to the window, bookshelves filling the wall, and something covered with cloth placed in a corner of the room where sunlight didn’t reach.
Though it was covered with cloth, its silhouette was so familiar that I walked towards it as if entranced. And slowly pulled the cloth.
“A piano.”
A pure white grand piano, at that.
I let go of the cloth and traced the white surface of the piano as if hypnotized. Suddenly, memories from the past came flooding back.
‘Dad, play this for me!’
‘Does our Jeongjae want to hear this song?’
‘Yes!’
My father, who passed away when I was young, was a music teacher before becoming my mother’s dedicated Guide. Among instruments, the piano was the one my father handled best.
But after my father died in an accident, my mother cleared away all things related to him, and in that process, the piano disappeared too.
I understood why my mother made that decision. When she looked at my father’s belongings, the light disappeared from her eyes. Those empty eyes seemed so painful that it would have been better if she had just cried, so I thought it was for the best that my mother decided to clear away my father’s belongings.
Ding.
When I opened the lid and pressed a key, a clear sound rang out. I resembled my mother so completely that one might wonder if I was really my father’s son, but there was one thing I inherited from him—musical talent. When I would play the piano, following my father, he would say it was like seeing himself as a child and was very proud of me.
In those moments, I felt a deeper bond with my father than my brother did, and I loved that praise very much.
‘Our Jeongjae, do you enjoy music?’
‘Playing with Dad is fun!’
‘This is a secret from Mom, but Dad hopes Jeongjae doesn’t become an Esper.’
‘Why is that a secret?’
‘Shh, Mom might hear.’
I found out later that my father wanted me to grow up normally and healthily like other children. And he wanted me to do whatever I wanted in life. Even if it wasn’t music.
Snapping out of my memories and back to reality, I wondered how I ended up sitting in front of the piano and then remembered my real purpose for coming upstairs.
“Oh right, I need to shower.”
Reminiscing about my father, who had been gone for over 10 years, could wait until after I washed up. I wiped my teary eyes with the back of my hand and gathered underwear and clothes from my luggage. Before entering the bathroom, I realized I hadn’t checked one of the doors on the second floor, but decided to think about that after dinner.
The warm water felt like it was washing away all my fatigue. Always carrying a high runaway risk value, my life had been a series of tensions rather than leisurely moments, but now I found myself even humming a tune. I was in the best condition, so much so that I completely forgot that I had just completed my first mission.
“…”
It didn’t seem like I had taken that long, but when I went downstairs after washing up, the first floor was filled with delicious smells, unlike before. As they say, sparrows can’t pass a mill, I headed to the kitchen clutching my hungry stomach. When I had arrived home, he was just preparing ingredients, but now completed dishes were already on the table. Even though I hadn’t cooked them myself, I felt proud and moved.
“Please sit down.”
With my mouth already watering, I didn’t refuse Jeong Seyeon’s invitation and immediately pulled out a chair and sat at the table. Every dish looked appetizing with vibrant colors.
If just seeing and smelling them made me this excited, how delicious would they taste?
While thinking this and mindlessly looking at the side dishes, Jeong Seyeon brought the last main dish and set it on the table. It was duck meat, my favorite.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
