Letting My Guard Down (3)
A stifling pressure so intense it felt like my chest would burst filled every corner of the spacious house.
Yeom Junhyuk. That violent beast sat there with an expressionless face, radiating a quiet hostility that made every hair on my body stand on end in a tingling wave of dread.
How much of my conversation with Serena had he overheard? Had he caught the part where I said his personality was a bit rough? The chill stiffening the back of my neck made getting caught badmouthing a senior in the military feel like nothing by comparison.
I fretted for a long while over what to say first, then forced myself to sound casual.
“Want a glass of wine too?”
Junhyuk stared blankly at the bottle on the table for a moment, then slipped off his shoes, walked over slowly, and sat down.
“Sure.”
I hurried up from my seat, fetched a wine glass, set it in front of him, and picked up the half-finished bottle.
The stream of wine trembled visibly as I poured—my hands were shaking that badly.
I held my breath without meaning to, half-expecting him to splash the wine in my face and hurl the glass aside any second.
“That’s too much.”
I snapped back to myself with a start.
The wine was overflowing the glass.
“Ah—sorry.”
I dashed back to the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and wiped up the wine spreading across the table.
I was about to tear off a fresh sheet to clean the wine from his hand when Junhyuk raised a hand lightly to stop me.
“I can just wash it.”
“Uh… yeah. Sorry.”
Junhyuk roughly wiped the wine dripping like blood from his fingertips onto his clothes, went to the sink to rinse away the sticky residue, then returned to the table and sat down again.
He brought the glass—filled so full it was on the verge of spilling—to his lips and drank until it was safe to lift without risk.
“Tastes good.”
“R-right? I heard this is a pretty decent wine. Way better vintage than the one I had with Serena earlier.”
Obviously a lie. The sum total of my wine knowledge was that, shockingly, white wine existed in the world alongside red. Spending time fretting over grape varieties when I could just crack open a bottle of soju was far more economical and practical…
But was offering him a drink even a good idea? The sudden thought made my lips tremble.
“Have some steak too. It’s gone cold, but still.”
“Okay.”
He was already chewing. I’d blurted it out without thinking, and only afterward realized he might get angry about being offered leftovers—thankfully he didn’t seem that picky.
“How long have you been here?”
“A few minutes.”
“Why’d you come?”
At that, Junhyuk looked straight into my eyes. Had I asked too much like an interrogation? I should have used a gentler tone. I was stuck replaying that useless regret when—
“I didn’t want to be alone.”
Junhyuk tossed the words out and brought the wine to his mouth again.
For some reason, hearing that made my heart drop hard.
I’d completely forgotten—he’d said both his parents were dead.
“You could’ve at least texted that you were coming…”
“You told me not to call at night.”
His quiet, completely flat reply left me speechless.
Talking to a wall or a machine wouldn’t have felt this arid. Earlier too—if he was annoyed, why not just get annoyed instead of making people this uncomfortable…
Wait a second.
It was a thought that only came from forcing myself to understand him, but it seemed plausible enough that I decided to ask.
“Junhyuk… are you holding back right now?”
“Holding what?”
“Getting angry. Are you suppressing your feelings as much as possible so you don’t get worked up?”
At the question, Junhyuk looked straight at me the same way as before and nodded like an idiot.
“You dummy.”
The sheer absurdity of that loyalty made the words slip out before I could stop them.
He didn’t want to be alone, but I’d told him not to meet at night, so he’d just stand outside and watch in silence? The idea was staggering on so many levels.
A deer standing before a tiger couldn’t possibly understand the tiger’s feelings, but still—
Apparently the tiger had done his absolute best not to threaten the deer.
Now that I knew the tiger had no intention of baring his fangs, I decided to be a little bolder myself.
I downed the remaining wine in my glass in one go and decided to step into the inner world of Junhyuk, who was still staring at me with that blank, clear gaze.
“Hey, so…”
“Yeah.”
“You could just meet other people, right?”
“……”
“Is there any reason you have to stand outside secretly watching someone who won’t even see you?”
At the question, an emotion I hadn’t seen in a very long time flickered across Junhyuk’s face. Thankfully it wasn’t anger or disgust.
Unfortunately, the emotion was loneliness.
“There aren’t any people like that around me.”
“Why? Everyone busy?”
“No. They all left.”
“…Why?”
When I asked carefully, Junhyuk confessed in a voice like a child admitting a mistake.
“Everyone drifts away from me after a little while. I don’t really get it, but it must be my fault.”
He emptied the glass that had somehow filled to the brim again and poured himself a fresh one.
“Junhyuk. I don’t remember, so… don’t take this the wrong way.”
“What.”
His tone was a little sharp, but if he was holding back compared to usual, I decided not to get scared ahead of time and just go for it.
“Your parents… how old were you when they died?”
Junhyuk’s hand, which had set down the wine bottle and started cutting the steak, paused for a moment. He seemed to dig through fairly old memories, then resumed slicing.
“Nine. Fighting monsters.”
“What happened after that?”
“Went through a bunch of relatives. Ended up in a foster facility.”
“Foster facility meaning…”
“When heroes die fighting monsters, their kids become orphans. It’s an institution that takes those kids in. A fancy orphanage, basically.”
His parents had died young, and it wasn’t as if he had no relatives. Yet he’d still ended up growing up in a foster facility.
He’d been abandoned.
Junhyuk’s lament didn’t stop there.
“You have to leave when you turn eighteen. They give you a five-million-won support grant and tell you to settle wherever. I got scammed out of it. While looking for a place to live.”
I swallowed hard without meaning to.
I was stunned that the game’s worldbuilding could be this miserable.
In this world, monsters were basically disasters that snuffed out lives without warning.
And the child of a hero who protected people from those disasters had been refused by relatives, then scammed out of the only independence grant he’d managed to get.
I was so appalled I couldn’t speak.
“Are you scared of me too?”
Junhyuk’s question sent a huge ripple through my chest.
Before I’d possessed into this world, there was a TV program that analyzed troubled kids and guided them toward healthier growth. One professor on that show had said:
Kids with violent tendencies usually aren’t unable to control their anger—they simply don’t know how to express what’s in their hearts.
And inside those kids’ chests sits a vague, unresolvable anxiety.
I still didn’t know Junhyuk. I couldn’t rashly declare that none of it was his fault. But—
“I’m not scared.”
I could at least say that much.
I pulled my chair closer to Junhyuk and slowly drew him toward me.
His large, solid frame settled into my arms as obediently as a child.
I stroked his head and told him.
“I get it now. That wasn’t how you really feel.”
He wasn’t a monster that transformed at night, nor a starving predator.
Just a slightly oversized, fierce-looking, lonely hunting dog.
“How am I supposed to believe that.”
Junhyuk, still nestled against me, gripped my shoulders and asked.
“Even the people who said they liked me eventually left.”
“I…”
“You’ll run away in the end too, won’t you?”
The night he’d carried my drunk self home, Junhyuk had said:
—No matter what it takes, I’ll make you mine again.
People who always ran. And Junhyuk, who tried to possess them.
Maybe the sadistic nighttime behavior of game-Junhyuk had been the twisted expression of that possessiveness.
A process of chaining people down so they couldn’t flee, because he hated being abandoned again by those who approached him.
“I’m not running.”
“You just can’t, right?”
“No. I won’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
It might be a risky bit of meddling, but after hearing a story like this I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t.
“Then…”
Because I knew that loneliness well myself.
“If I… let you touch my horns, will you believe me?”