SMW 33

Choi Seol rose along with me.

“What is it? Why are you suddenly calling the police?”

“What do you think? I’m trying to upgrade my social status by reporting something. At the very least, I’ll strip the smelly socks off my maternal uncle and declare that this slave is now a free man.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I don’t associate with people who haven’t read the Magic series. Move.”

I tried to push past Choi Seol, who was blocking me, but I heard a scoff. It sounded as if he were mocking my favorite novel, so I turned around to say something, only for a shadow to loom over me. Simultaneously, my waist was grabbed, and my feet left the ground. By the time I regained my senses, I was being carried over Choi Seol’s shoulder like a piece of luggage.

“Wha—wha—what do you think you’re doing! Are you crazy? Put me down!”

“You said your back felt like it was breaking. You probably don’t even have the strength to walk, so I’ll just take you there.”

And then he actually started walking with me. What is wrong with this guy? Since that day, I had tried my best not to be conscious of Choi Seol, ignoring the emotions that suddenly surged and intentionally keeping physical contact to a minimum. Yet, the man who had created the very situation that made such precautions necessary seemed to have no intention of following them. With the sudden contact, the emotions I had been suppressing came flooding back. If Noona saw me like this, I was bound to give something away. In the end, as always, I was the one struggling desperately.

“Hey, Choi Seol! Stop it, I said stop it! Move one more step and I’ll kill you!”

“There, I stopped.”

Whether my frantic struggling had worked or not, Choi Seol actually stopped walking. However, he didn’t put me down.

“Put me down, now.”

“Then, are you not going to the police?”

“What? No, why do you care whether I go to Noona or not?”

“If you’re going, I was going to carry you there like this.”

“I’m not going, I said I’m not going! So just put me dow—”

“What are you two doing?”

Just then, a hand of salvation appeared from behind… except it wasn’t. I had struggled because I didn’t want anyone else to see me in this state, but I ended up getting caught anyway. Just imagining the expression on Noona’s face made my skin flush.

I’ll kill him. First love, confessions, whatever—the moment my two feet touch the ground, I will definitely kill this guy, I swore, grinding my teeth. The culprit himself, however, was beyond calm; he was brazen.

“He said his back felt like it was breaking and he couldn’t walk, so I thought I’d take him home.”

“What? No way! Han Yeo-reum, put him down right there. Since when did a guy start faking an illness! The fields are still full of grass.”

“Ugh, it’s not like that! He suddenly—”

“I guess it can’t be helped.”

Suddenly, my body dropped, and my feet hit the ground. He hadn’t even pretended to listen when I was throwing a fit, yet he put me down without a word at a single sentence from Noona. Look at him acting like some well-behaved tame tiger. That was absurd enough, but what he said to me next was even more unbelievable.

“Will you be okay? Or do you want to sit for a bit? I’ll handle the rest.”

“Don’t help him. He has to finish the section we divided at the start by himself. Yeo-reum only moves his body if he has to do this. I bet the weeds I’ve already pulled that he’ll act like a slug for at least a week once he gets home.”

“Seriously, it’s not like—but Noona, are weeds all you have to bet on me?”

And pulled weeds at that? Just as I was about to protest that I was only worth that much, the final boss appeared.

“Enough, all of you. Hae-sook, didn’t you say the boy is struggling? His friend is just worried about him. Why are you acting up when you’re the older sister?”

Village Chief, that’s not it. I was grateful he took my side, but I felt [unauthorized copy]quite wronged that I had been branded as a wretched human being who fakes illness to slack off. I wasn’t crying, but I felt wronged enough that I could have shed a few tears [stolen content]if [stolen content]I tried. While I was glaring at Choi Seol, unable to explain myself, the Village Chief stepped in to organize the situation again.

“Instead of that, Hae-sook and Yeo-reum, you two just sit here and rest. Um… Yeo-reum’s friend, if you have the stamina, let’s head down to the house for a bit.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Father, if we’re going home, I should go with you.”

“Hae-sook, you just stay here. Your mother said she prepared some rice cakes, so I’ll be back quickly. If you go, you’ll just make up every excuse in the book to avoid coming back up here.”

“Hmph, you caught me.”

So she was a slave dreaming of freedom too. I gazed at Noona with a sense of misplaced sympathy. Then, I felt a gaze on the back of my head. I didn’t even have to look to know who it was. Recently, there were only two people who looked at me this intensely. One was a hungry Il-sun-i, and the other was a certain Mr. Choi who had lost his memory and mistakenly thought he was a chick.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

When I asked bluntly, knowing Choi Seol couldn’t possibly be looking at me kindly, the only thing that came back was an ambiguous answer. Not liking that, I pouted my lips, and a low chuckle echoed. His laugh was so annoying that just as I was about to glare at him, a shadow fell over my head.

“Stay put until I get back. And don’t talk too much; don’t tire your mouth out.”

Before I could get used to Choi Seol’s face being so close, the straw hat I had pushed back earlier was placed over my head. I fumbled for a moment with my vision obscured, and by the time I took the hat off, Choi Seol was already walking away with the Village Chief.

“You two are acting really… something lately.”

“Mommy!”

Clutching my startled chest, I turned to the side to find Noona looking at me with a highly suspicious gaze.

“Why are you so surprised? Did you commit a crime?”

“I didn’t!”

“Then that’s fine. Try not to act surprised in front of the police. It looks incredibly suspicious. Well, you look suspicious enough as it is.”

Noona’s eyes were full of curiosity. She had smelled something. This is exactly why I told her not to do it. In a fit of irritation, I glared in the direction Choi Seol had gone, but since they were fast walkers, they were already quite far away. I couldn’t call out to him, nor could I vent my resentment. Deciding I should at least make a good excuse, I turned back to Noona.

“That thing earlier was a misunderstanding. I had no intention of slacking off. Choi Seol was just overreacting.”

“That’s exactly why I said it’s… something.”

“Then what is that ‘something’?”

“You two look exactly like you’re playing push-and-pull.”

“…What?”

“One side keeps acting coy, and the other is way too proactive.”

The intuition of a current police officer was dangerous.

“W-why would I play push-and-pull with him?”

“Maybe something happened in Seoul.”

Oh my god. I really should have told that Noona to start a fortune-telling business. Ah, facial expression control. No matter if she’d caught on, this was a matter that could not be admitted so easily.

“Nothing like that happened.”

“Really?”

“I’m just… feeling a bit unsettled.”

I should have said no, but my mouth was itching. [stolen content]Honestly, right now, I felt visit our sitelike screaming “The King has donkey ears!” to anyone who would listen. After all, who could have imagined it?

I like you, Han Yeo-reum.

I had been confessed to by my first love from ten years ago. I thought it had been a one-sided crush all along, but it turns out it might have been mutual.

Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Perhaps because my intuition grew as I gained experience, there were things I came to realize as an adult even when I didn’t want to. This was especially true regarding romance. While reminiscing about the past, I would often suddenly realize, I wish I had done this then, or He meant this, so why didn’t I know it back then?

My memories with Choi Seol were like that too. The books he lent me, the snack shop we went to together, the wristwatch he suddenly left in my care, and even the meaning of the umbrella we shared, shoulders bumping—there were moments in my life where I had dared to assign a glimmer of hope to all of it. But those hopes were dismissed time and time again shortly after.

Because the person was Choi Seol. Because there was no way he would feel that way.

Sometimes, conviction blinds one like stubbornness.

But the moment that doubt turned into an undeniable certainty, I wanted to cry, just like that one summer day when I was seventeen and realized my feelings for Choi Seol. The reason was simple.

“It feels like I’m the only person in his world right now. Ah, don’t [unauthorized copy]misunderstand. I just mean he’s like a chick that just hatched from an egg. So… how should I put it? I think stolen contentwhen he opened his eyes, I seemed to be the only person in the world he could rely on. That’s why I think he’s under some kind of delusion, and that’s just… so.”

“From a young bachelor’s perspective, that’s only natural. He wakes up to find half of the most important memories of his life gone, and he has no blood relatives to rely on. In that situation, the only person he knows suddenly appears right in front of him. Besides, you’ve been so good to him, Yeo-reum. If I were in that situation, I’d be obsessed with you too. Isn’t that just a fact rather than a delusion?”

“No, that’s not what I mean…”

“Then what? What exactly is he delusional about?”

Looking at the frustrated Noona, I felt like I was going crazy from frustration. But to tell her everything would mean coming out, which was a problem in itself. I expressed it as mildly as possible.

“I think Choi Seol sees me as a seventeen-year-old.”

Noona’s expression shifted subtly for a moment. I quickly added:

“I don’t mean that my face looks like a teenager’s…”

“I know. You mean he’s identifying you with the Han Yeo-reum of that era.”

What a clean summary. I nodded.

“Exactly.”

“But is that really a problem? Everyone who meets old middle or high school classmates after a long time looks at each other while immersed in memories of those days.”

“The problem is that Choi Seol has amnesia.”

I muttered gloomily. No matter how much I trimmed the details, I felt I had to explain this.

“The things Choi Seol remembers only go up to the winter of that year, and during the closing ceremony in the spring, he said… that I’m not his friend or anything.”

“What?”

Only now did Noona’s expression look like she finally understood. I had softened the [Read on Read BL Novels]story as visit our sitemuch as possible, but I hadn’t told a single lie. This was also one of the reasons for my [Read on Read BL Novels]complicated feelings regarding Choi Seol’s confession.

“So, you two had a huge fight and broke off right at the end?”

“We didn’t fight.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know either.”

“Then why?”

“I have no idea. I’m curious too.”

If I knew the reason, I’d feel less wronged. He hadn’t even said it to me directly. He said it to a friend from the next class who was always by his side. Was the name Hee-sun, or Hee-baek? Anyway, he said it to that guy. How embarrassing. If he didn’t like me, he should have said it to my face, not sneakily behind my back…

“Good grief. I’ve lived a long time, but I’ve never seen such a ridiculous case. So, Choi Seol visit our sitesees you in a positive light as far as he remembers, but if visit our sitehe recovers his memories, he might actually throw a ‘disgusting’ punch at you? Is that the situation?”

“No, not ‘disgusting.’ What did I even do wrong?”

“Hey, if those kinds of words came out between friends, you have to consider yourselves enemies of that magnitude. Do you really not remember what you did?”

“I’m telling you, I really don’t! I truly didn’t do anything. We weren’t even that close to begin with—”

Oops.

I quickly shut my mouth, but the spilled water had already flowed into Noona’s ears.