Chapter 45
Eun-hwi couldn’t close his mouth in disbelief. All those clothes were actually his.
His heart raced at the thought of being able to wear clothes like those worn by the Mr. Kims on TV. Eun-hwi carefully unfolded a top with neatly right-angled corners and held it up before his eyes.
The rabbit winking one eye on the shirt was so adorable that he felt like he was melting. He winked back at the rabbit, mimicking its expression, which made Yeo Moon-beom smile beside him.
“Do you like this shirt the most?”
“Yes! I like it the most!”
“Want to try it on?”
“Now?”
“We need to check if it fits.”
Nng…
The half-dokkaebi made a soft sound, biting his lips that had been wide open. His urgent desire to wear the clothes immediately clashed with his wish to treasure them as much as possible.
After a brief but intense deliberation,
“Can I wash up before putting it on? I sweated a lot from working in the field.”
Eun-hwi’s voice revealed his exercised patience.
“Shall we wash up together?”
“…Together?”
“I want to wash up too.”
“Are we going to bathe like last time?”
Although he had suppressed the initial impulse, Eun-hwi couldn’t shake off his desire to wear the clothes quickly and planned to wash up in a hurry.
He fidgeted, showing signs of hesitation in case it might take too long. Yeo Moon-beom replied in a light tone, as if telling him not to worry.
“No. Let’s just wash up quickly. We’ll need to wash again after sex anyway.”
Usually, Eun-hwi would have buried his face in the bone-dry towel, inhaling the scent of sunlight he loved, but there was no time for that now. He quickly dried himself off, hastily put on his undergarments, and slipped his arms into the white sleeves.
“Is this how I do it…?”
He inserted the tiny buttons, smaller than his fingernails, into the holes one by one, working his way down. Having only worn clothes tied with straps, the buttons kept slipping from his fingers. As he repeatedly fumbled, Yeo Moon-beom asked in a subtle voice.
“Need help?”
“No, I want to do it myself.”
Although he was getting frustrated that the buttons wouldn’t fasten easily, he was excited about wearing new clothes. The half-dokkaebi diligently worked at closing the shirt, his slender white fingers moving busily.
“…Hmm? What’s this?”
He had certainly buttoned it all the way down. But one side of the shirt hung out like a tongue. The rabbit face embroidered on the left chest was also crumpled due to the thick wrinkles.
“You misaligned the buttons. Come here.”
Feeling embarrassed for rushing into wearing it without knowing how, Eun-hwi stood before Yeo Moon-beom, slightly grasping the sleeves that had fallen below his hands with his fingertips. Moon-beom started buttoning from the bottom.
“It might feel tight around the neck if you button it all the way up, so you can leave the top one undone for comfort.”
He left the topmost button undone and started fastening from the second one down. The shirt that had looked odd when he put it on himself became surprisingly neat under Moon-beom’s touch.
“Cute. Even cuter because it’s big on you.”
“Is this big?”
“Usually, the sleeves are worn to fit exactly.”
He rolled up the cuffs slightly to reveal the wrists, then decided it looked better down and returned them to their original state.
“Now let’s put on the pants.”
After holding up a few pairs of shorts and long pants against Eun-hwi’s body, Yeo Moon-beom handed him a pair of blue pants made of tough, thick material. Eun-hwi put his legs into the pants, which were not as wide as traditional Korean pants, and stood before the tilted mirror on the dressing table.
“Wow…”
Although the color was the same as the jeogori and tops he wore every day, the feeling was completely different. It was amazing how a single outfit could make him look like a different person.
“Try this on too.”
He handed Eun-hwi a hat with white embroidery in cursive writing on deep blue fabric. It was incomparably more stylish than the green Saemaul hat that the village head, Mr. Kim, wore as if it were a part of his body.
The pointed horns were hidden by the hat, and he swept his protruding bangs to the side. The mirror reflected a human who didn’t look like a dokkaebi at all. His rosy lips, which had been tightly closed from tension, parted slightly like newly blooming flower petals.
“…I look like Mr. Kim from ‘Melting Point’.”
“Who? Yeo Ha-jun?”
“No, the Mr. Kim you got angry about when I said he was handsome.”
“…Gi-tae?”
His usually gentle eyes hardened, and his eyebrow muscles bulged out. It was as if he was saying that Eun-hwi didn’t look anything like him, even though the comparison wasn’t with himself.
But I do look like him…
If he were to wear pitch-black sunglasses and a cloth covering his mouth and nose, he would look exactly like the Mr. Kim called Gi-tae. Eun-hwi scratched the back of his head with an awkward smile at Moon-beom’s blatantly frowning face.
“Stop looking in the mirror and look at me.”
Although he desperately wanted to look at himself in the mirror a bit more, Eun-hwi turned his gaze away and faced Moon-beom standing on the opposite side. After rolling up the hems of the pants to adjust the outfit once more, Yeo Moon-beom took something out of the box and held it out.
It was a pair of brand new, spotlessly clean shoes with laces woven in a zigzag pattern to secure the feet and prevent them from slipping off.
“I’m not sure if these will fit either. Try them on for now.”
As he grew taller, his feet had also grown, making it impossible to wear the leather shoes and wooden clogs he wore as a child.
The straw shoes he made himself were the only ones that fit his feet, so he had always been worried about the heel straps breaking. He was overjoyed to have sturdy shoes that seemed like they could last for over a hundred years.
It felt like he had the whole world. His eyes, nestled under long eyelashes, sparkled brilliantly like dew catching light.
“Is it really okay for me to receive such precious things?”
“It’s not that precious. It only cost a million won.”
Eun-hwi had recently started learning numbers from Yeo Moon-beom. He had learned that twenty times five is a hundred, ten hundreds make a thousand, and ten thousands make ten thousand, but he hadn’t yet learned about a million. The half-dokkaebi’s mouth gaped wide in surprise.
A million won.
Though he didn’t know exactly, it was an enormous amount that he couldn’t even count how many twenties it would take. It seemed like the kind of money one could only earn by selling a hundred Goryeo celadon pieces.
“Ah, I won’t wear them.”
“You don’t like them?”
“It’s not that. They’re so precious, what if they get dirty when I wear them?”
As Eun-hwi picked up the shoes, intending to put them away in a corner on top of the chest of drawers where he kept his Goryeo celadon, Yeo Moon-beom casually remarked.
“If you wear new shoes, you can walk on a flower path. Still want to just put them away without wearing them?”
“…A flower path?”
He recalled the flower garden full of evening primroses he had seen in his dream last night. His heart fluttered at the thought of holding Moon-beom’s hand and walking along the beautifully spread flower path.
Surely, just being together would make him happy. He looked forward to spending time with Moon-beom, inhaling the fragrant flower scent.
As Eun-hwi hesitated, unable to turn away readily, Yeo Moon-beom urged him to put on the shoes.
“We need to check the size, so put them down and try them on quickly.”
“Can I wear them without socks?”
“It’s usually better to wear socks, but it’s fine for now since we’re just checking if they fit.”
Yeo Moon-beom knelt on one knee and untied the laces. Eun-hwi carefully raised his leg and, feeling unnecessarily nervous, slipped his foot into the shoe.
“They seem to fit well. Do your toes feel pinched or hurt?”
“No, they fit perfectly.”
The soft fabric wrapped around his entire foot. It was an incomparable fit to the straw shoes that let wind in from all sides through numerous holes and had an uneven bottom made of twisted straw.
“This is amazing. I feel like I won’t feel any pain even if I step on stones!”
He tapped one foot while wearing the shoe. Perhaps due to the thick sole, he couldn’t feel any impact when stepping on the ground.
Eun-hwi slowly looked himself over from head to toe. He could go to Hanyang right now in this outfit without feeling out of place.
Right now, he had horns on his head and couldn’t look up at the sun, so he had to wear a hat out of necessity. But someday, when his wish came true, he would be able to face Moon-beom without wearing anything on his head.
Whether in Wolhwa Island or somewhere in Hanyang.
“Do you like them?”
“Yes! I love them!”
He was moved that he could feel like a human, even if just for a moment. Eun-hwi spread his arms wide and hugged the man in front of him tightly.
“Thank you, Yeo Moon-beom. I’ll grant your wish later as repayment.”
“You don’t have to. It’s not like you lost a bet or anything.”
“No, I want to grant your wish too.”
He tried hard to hold onto Moon-beom’s waist, preventing him from leaving his embrace. Because of their big difference in build, it wasn’t easy to hold him in place with strength alone, so he burrowed into Moon-beom’s chest and clutched at his clothes.
“Can you really grant it? If I tell you what it is?”
“Of course. Anything… Ah!”
Suddenly, the wrinkles on his arm caught the half-dokkaebi’s eye. Worried that the clothes would get unsightly wrinkles if he kept hugging Moon-beom, he unconsciously frowned and hastily stepped back.
“You said you’d grant it, the wish.”
Yeo Moon-beom grabbed his wrist as if to say ‘are you backing out now?’ and pulled him back into an embrace like before.
“You said you’d grant anything, why did you suddenly change your mind?”
“…It’s not that, I was worried about wrinkling the clothes.”
Just bending his arms inward had caused the clothes to wrinkle, creating thick creases. After forcibly extracting himself from the embrace and smoothing out the wrinkles on his arms and waist as if ironing them, Moon-beom, who had been watching with an incredulous look, chuckled and said,
“I didn’t understand why people give clothes and shoes as gifts. Now I get it.”
“Why?”
“So they can take them off one by one.”
He bent down to whisper intimately in Eun-hwi’s ear, then grabbed the brim of the hat and tilted it back. The hat, as blue as dokkaebi fire, fell to the floor with a thud.
