Kwon Hyunjo had never once dreamed that he would meet someone who truly loved him. People would blush after looking at his background and his face, but the moment they saw his nature, they all ran away. The ones who did not run were only those who had approached him in the first place for his money, not for him.

So when Lee Chaegong appeared, shyly blushing as he looked at him, the child nestled inside Kwon Hyeonjo laughed as if it were all too familiar. Anyway, this kid would get tired of me soon enough too. If I didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d leave at once.

But even as Hyeonjo’s attitude grew more distant, Lee Chaegong never left him. It wasn’t because he had nowhere else to go. The excitement in that omega’s eyes was still the same. That only made him stubborn. Even like this, you like me? Even like this? Perhaps that was what he was thinking.

He was going to leave someday anyway. Or so he thought, but even Hyeonjo himself did not know. He did not know that Lee Chaegong’s steadfast affection had been slowly soaking into Kwon Hyeonjo’s heart without him realizing it.

I thought you’d stay by my side forever. I thought you’d cling to me and look at me with the same eyes for all time.

His stomach churned, and his head throbbed with tears. If you were going to leave like this, you should have gone sooner. You should have gotten angry the day I first reached out my hand. If you were going to get tired of me someday, you should have left quickly instead. Selfish and rotten-tempered Kwon Hyeonjo blamed everything on Lee Chaegong once again. But his heart did not feel any lighter.

Hyeonjo did not want to know Lee Chaegong. He did not want to understand him, and he did not want to empathize with him either. He only wanted to forget him without knowing a thing. But while he was distracted by trying to calm the turmoil in his insides, that clever mind had gone ahead and found the answer on its own.

The reason Lee Chaegong had hurt himself, and the reason he had ultimately run away. As Hyeonjo frowned, the tears pressed beneath his eyelids slid down his temples, and then his vision cleared. But what he wanted to see was no longer here.

He wanted Kwon Hyeonjo’s attention. Just like back then, when he had watched his grandfather’s moods and tried to win his attention. In the end, just as he had resented his grandfather and turned away from his grandmother, Lee Chaegong had simply grown tired of that attitude and left. It was familiar, and there was nothing surprising about it.

By now, even a strangled, choking sound had started rising from the back of his throat. His stomach hurt, and his throat hurt. The finger wrapped clumsily in a bandage hurt too. But of them all, his chest hurt the most.

Fingers cut countless times by a sharp kitchen knife. A palm pierced by shards of glass. Knees scraped raw until they bled, and at last a ring finger broken. Who drove him into that? …Me. Kwon Hyeonjo.

After Chaegong left, Hyeonjo truly felt nothing. Because being abandoned was not all that rare in his life. But why was he, someone so used to being left alone, crying so miserably?

Stupid bastard. Idiot. Even so, he went and rolled down the stairs? Crazy bastard. If he survived the fall, he should have just gotten treatment quietly, so why leave? A bastard with nowhere to go. If he hated me that much, he should have stayed long enough to steal some money and run. Or gone to the reporter and hit me from behind. At least cursed me out once before leaving. Spit and say living with you was really fucking miserable.

Why did that kid leave without doing anything, only to make Kwon Hyeonjo cry in the end? Why did he do nothing at all and then vanish just because he wanted a handful of Kwon Hyeonjo’s affection? Was that why he made sure Hyeonjo could never forget him, could never fold up his heart and resign himself to being hated?

If this was revenge, Hyeonjo felt like applauding it as brilliant. To give something and then snatch it away. It was a vicious, devious tactic. That was what Hyeonjo, the one who had done the same to Chaegong, thought.

✿ • ✿ • ✿

“You took it?”

“What?”

At the abrupt question, Hakjo stopped short. Tilting his head as if to say what are you talking about, he narrowed his eyes. Hyeonjo, standing motionless before him, opened his mouth again.

“You stole it, didn’t you?”

Hakjo, looking at the dark shadows around his eyes and his deathly pale cheeks, straightened his back and replied.

“Sorry, but whatever you lost, it wasn’t me.”

They were brothers, identical twins at that, but unlike their nearly identical faces, their personalities were 180 degrees apart. Hyeonjo knew Hakjo was not very skilled at lying. Even so, he could not easily let go of his suspicion and kept studying that face until, at last, he nodded.

Usually the one who would have needled him by asking if it wasn’t him was now agreeing so readily and passing by at his side, which was strange. So Hakjo shouted at his back, which was already getting farther away.

“Don’t know what it is, but serves you right.”

There was no need to answer. He still remembered the dog that had been buried beneath the ginkgo tree in the wide yard.

Hyeonjo wondered just how wrecked he looked. Five people had already asked him if something was wrong. Starting with whether he was sick, all the way to whether he should go to the hospital. But Hyeonjo had already been to the hospital several times. Not for his own treatment, though.

His stomach was still churning. It felt like the spoiled cake had already all been thrown up long ago, but maybe there was still a little left. Hyeonjo, clutching the toilet as he vomited only yellow stomach fluid, sank down onto the cold tiles. He sat there for a long while because he wanted to spit something out, but nothing would come.

As he staggered to his feet, Hyeonjo suddenly noticed the lined-up plastic containers. One of them caught his eye. Not long after Chaegong came into this house, he had said in passing that he really liked the scent of this body wash.

From that day on, that body wash was always kept in the bathroom in the living room. Though the label said cherry blossom scent, Hyeonjo had never once thought of it that way. Contrary to what had been said, he did not especially like that faint scent that rose whenever he held Chaegong in his arms.

Now that the only person who used it in this house was gone, there was no reason for it to be here either. He opened the plastic cap and turned it upside down over the sink, and the sticky liquid slowly dribbled out. The sudden burst of fragrance was not especially welcome.

And yet, why did Hyeonjo not empty it completely and put it back? If he hated the scent, why did he close the cap on the half-full bottle and place it back where it had been?

When he closed his eyes, he could feel the other senses sharpen. The scent brushing past his nose grew thicker. While breathing in that smell, he stretched out his hand, only to find nothing to hold, and so Hyeonjo sank down in front of the toilet again. He opened his mouth, but the sweet cream he had expected did not come out. Only stifled sobs leaked out instead.

Lee Chaegong had left. He had left the house where he had lived for three years. In truth, since Chaegong had moved in not long after Hyeonjo came to live here, it could be called their home. That was the house the guy had left. Hyeonjo knew better than anyone that he would not be coming back. Because no matter how many days he waited, no one knocked on the door.

In other words, Lee Chaegong was gone now. And yet he was everywhere. On the sofa, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. Even in the corner of his own closet, Lee Chaegong had seeped in. That kid who always kept his shoulders hunched and moved quietly was, damn it, still in this house.

He was left behind on the cushion he often hugged, and on the apron he wore when cooking. Hyeonjo, curled up on the sofa, staggered to his feet and headed for the kitchen.

When he lifted the apron hanging over the dining chair and buried his face in it, he caught a faint oily smell mixed with a dim floral fragrance. It was a faint, delicate scent you would only catch from flowers that had already withered away. As Hyeonjo quietly breathed it in, his face twisted.

Somehow, hurried footsteps headed toward one room. Hyeonjo yanked the door open. In truth, he might have hesitated a little. For the first time since Chaegong left, Hyeonjo opened his door. Beyond the door, opening neither too quickly nor too slowly, were very plain pieces of furniture.

A super single bed, a white wardrobe, and one desk with only a couple of books on it. That was all. There wasn’t even a chair. Thinking of it, he remembered the time he had kicked it in a fit of anger and broken it.

He opened the wardrobe, but there was very little inside. The clothes hanging on the hangers did not carry even the faintest floral scent. Those clothes, packed full of that dim fragrance, must all have been torn to pieces and burned already.

Hyeonjo stared blankly at the neatly folded blanket on the bed, then flopped down onto it. Whenever he shared a bed with Chaegong, it had always felt cramped, but looking at it now, it really wasn’t so small after all.