By Zephyria “Is it… about your parents?”
“……”
Yoon Joo-ho remained silent. His long eyelashes, blinking slowly, looked down. He focused his gaze on a spot in front of him, lost in thought, and then spoke in a voice tinged with fatigue.
“The day I first took you to Seo-hae Hyung’s bar. We talked about your friend, remember?”
“I remember. Though I blacked out after getting drunk…”
The longing for Choi Hong-seo and the shadow that incident left on him. The guilt that still prevented him from visiting his memorial altar. It was a special moment for Song Hyun-soo too, the day he confessed all of that to Yoon Joo-ho.
“Do you also remember mentioning Lee Seo-kyung’s name when you told me that story?”
“……”
Song Hyun-soo’s face instantly turned cold. His hand, which had been stroking Yoon Joo-ho’s hair, froze as if petrified.
“Lee Seo-kyung, Myung Do-hoon. I can’t forget those bastards, even in death.”
“After I was discharged from the military, I failed three consecutive projects. You’d remember that too, of course.”
“Who failed? Compared to the hit projects, the ratings were just… a little, a tiny bit lower.”
Yoon Joo-ho chuckled lowly and bitterly, his cheek pressed against Song Hyun-soo’s chest. The vibration from his slight tremor was transmitted directly to Song Hyun-soo’s body.
“Unfortunately.”
“……”
“My parents didn’t think like you.”
Yoon Joo-ho slowly sat up. His body, heavy with water, seemed to struggle to lift itself. He looked like a ghost from a swamp. For a moment, Song Hyun-soo saw him that way.
As he got off the bed, Yoon Joo-ho added in a monotone voice,
“It was like people who had heard a prophecy that Yoon Joo-ho’s acting career was over started to go wild.”
He walked to the minibar, opened a sample-sized whiskey, and poured it into an on-the-rocks glass. Song Hyun-soo, his gaze fixed on Yoon Joo-ho’s back, who was still wearing his robe, slowly sat up from his semi-reclined position. Even when the atmosphere in the director’s room was so good, sunbae didn’t drink even a sip of beer…
Yoon Joo-ho, his back to him, downed half the whiskey and began an unbelievable story.
“It’s natural that my blood was drained. Whether this situation is my fault or yours… they fought endlessly.”
His tone suggested he was sick of thinking about it. Shaking his shoulders, Yoon Joo-ho stood leaning against the minibar, staring intently into the mirror in front of him.
“They said it’s better to die than to be called washed up. One day, my mother held a knife to her own throat.”
“You… you mean, in front of sunbae?”
“It was a show for me to see.”
“……”
“My father said I was the one who made my mother like that, and that we should all die together.”
At the end of his bitter sarcasm, Yoon Joo-ho brought the remaining whiskey to his lips.
“After over a year of this crazy tantrum, the solution they came up with was Lee Seo-kyung.”
At that moment, Song Hyun-soo couldn’t guess the meaning of those words. He held his breath, not daring to move a finger, his entire attention focused solely on his voice.
“They said Lee Seo-kyung was very interested in me?”
Hearing that, his shoulders hunched with an ominous, sickening premonition.
Before he could even fully grasp the meaning of his words. Song Hyun-soo involuntarily covered his mouth. He pressed so hard against his face that he couldn’t get a breath of air through his nose or mouth.
“
“……”
“That’s my payment for selling my body to Lee Seo-kyung.”
Song Hyun-soo’s own breathing sounded excessively loud in his ears. He sounded like someone gasping for air, lacking oxygen. After panting like that for a moment, he realized he was holding his nose and mouth too tightly.
“Why, why do you say that?”
His voice, laced with resentment, trembled.
“Because it’s the truth.”
In contrast, Yoon Joo-ho’s reply was chillingly calm and even.
He put down the empty glass and turned to face Song Hyun-soo.
“You said it earlier, didn’t you?”
“……”
“Someone operating within the bounds of normal thought processes can’t commit murder. Hearing that, I really agreed.”
Leaning loosely against the minibar, Yoon Joo-ho gave a small laugh. Song Hyun-soo couldn’t understand how he could laugh, even with a hollow, bitter smile.
“By then, I had a ‘whatever happens, happens’ attitude. I felt like I could do anything if it meant stopping those tiresome fights.”
Yoon Joo-ho ran his hands over his face, then put his hands in his robe pockets and shrugged as if it were nothing.
“My lower body has been around, it’s not like it’ll rot from one more encounter.”
“Why do you say that? Don’t say that.”
Song Hyun-soo just repeated those words. His voice was only slightly louder than before. Nothing else came to mind.
Why would you speak as if you had no value, as if you deserved to be asked to do such things? That’s all he could say.
Although they were rumors, there had always been unpleasant gossip about Yoon Joo-ho’s parents. Even so, he hadn’t expected it to be this bad…
You must have tasted all the glories of the world thanks to Yoon Joo-ho. Does that mean you have no value to Yoon Joo-ho if you can no longer give him such glory? Is that what parent and child are like? If that’s all a parent is, have I lived my whole life envying children who had parents?
“That role was yours, senior.”
Song Hyun-soo’s voice gained strength.
“If someone other than you had taken it,
Anger surged, and he clenched his teeth, twisting the sheet beneath his hips tightly. His cheeks trembled, and for a moment, his eyes burned hot.
Yoon Joo-ho approached and sank onto the edge of the bed, right in front of Song Hyun-soo.
“Are you angry and resentful?”
He didn’t want to shed tears over people like that. So, he stared back at Yoon Joo-ho, his eyes fixed with bloodshot intensity. Yoon Joo-ho traced Song Hyun-soo’s cheek with the back of his hand.
“If you’re angry and resentful, you cry, don’t you?”
Song Hyun-soo was trembling with shock and hatred, yet Yoon Joo-ho, the person at the center of it all, seemed completely unfazed. As if he were recounting someone else’s story from a book or a movie.
That made him even more upset. He knew now that pretending to be unfazed, pretending to be unaffected, was Yoon Joo-ho’s way of self-protection.
Holding back tears by forcing air through his nose, Song Hyun-soo lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Yoon Joo-ho’s neck.
“You did nothing wrong, senior.”
His tone was firm and certain, like letters pressed hard and written with a pencil held so tightly his knuckles turned yellow.
“How can you say I did nothing wrong?”
“Whatever the law or morality might say, you did nothing wrong to me. Believe me when I say you didn’t.”
“……”
Yoon Joo-ho’s arms carefully wrapped around Song Hyun-soo’s waist. A long sigh escaped his lips. It was a breath that felt like expelling a black, rotten lump of poison from the depths of his lungs, a poison that had festered for too long, corroding his body and mind.
“Do you pity me?”
Song Hyun-soo grabbed his shoulder and pushed him away, looking him straight in the face, his voice sharp with anger.
“Are you saying that now, in this situation?!”
“Who do you think would pity me? I’d tell them to fuck off. But strangely, I don’t dislike it when you pity me.”
Looking into Yoon Joo-ho’s face as he said that, Song Hyun-soo almost cried this time. His nose bridge throbbed, forcing him to look away.
“But is this something you can tell me?”
“Are you going to spread it around?”
“Am I crazy?”
“Then it’s fine.”
“I’m not joking. I may have nothing to lose as an unknown, but you’re different, senior. What if someone uses it as a weakness? Director Bang will surely know. Is there anyone else who knows besides me?”
Yoon Joo-ho’s eyes quietly gazed at Song Hyun-soo in the silence. It was the same shimmering, restless gaze he had seen through the monitor on set today. Does someone else know? Is he aware of someone he shouldn’t be? Just as these worries began to make Song Hyun-soo feel queasy, Yoon Joo-ho’s thin lips parted. He shook his head as he answered.
“No. No one.”
The moment he heard those words, tears inexplicably began to flow.
It wasn’t because he childishly rejoiced that Yoon Joo-ho had shared a secret only with him. It was because of the weight of the secret he had carried, unspoken, for so long.
Before Yoon Joo-ho’s hand could reach him, Song Hyun-soo roughly wiped the tears from his cheeks with his own hand. Then, he pulled Yoon Joo-ho’s shoulder closer and embraced him tightly again.
“Look Planning, you have to find them. Absolutely do not hand them over to those people.”
“Yeah, I will.”
A secret and a weakness he couldn’t tell anyone. His scar, shown only to me. Someone might call it a grotesque, repulsive scar, but I will embrace it.
Stroking Yoon Joo-ho’s head, Song Hyun-soo pressed it firmly onto his shoulder.
Grandma, what am I going to do about the Crown Prince, he’s so pitiful.
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