Hey! What Is This? (2)
— 15 —
Dinner was a simple affair, quickly over. I ate less than I'd expected, and Suho ate far more. It was almost hard to believe he was the same person who'd ordered all that food and promptly packed every bit of it into the fridge — astonishing enough in itself — but the more astonishing thing was my own body. There was no way that amount should have been enough, and yet before long I was stuffed.
Turns out this body is more cost-effective.
Feeling full off barely a single serving at the dinner table was a novel experience.
"Ahh, I'm stuffed. Did you eat enough?"
"Yes. Oh — Noona, I'll take care of the dishes, so have a look around the rooms and think about which one would work best as your workspace."
"Sure."
I was planning to make him do the dishes anyway, so that works out. No — hold on.
Come to think of it, I'd probably have to teach him to wash dishes separately, too. The whole reason I'd spent hours scrubbing was that the dishes that man had washed, standing right there at the sink, were nowhere near clean.
"Suho, come look around with me. If you do the dishes, they'll end up coated in duck grease again."
"Pardon?"
"Hurry up. The homeowner's supposed to give the tour — that's just how it works."
"...Yes."
The rooms I needed were two: my workspace, and a bedroom to share with Suho. That had been Han Yeji's opinion as well, and honestly, I couldn't see the point of buying a new bed. The one I'd written off as modest, sitting out in the living room, turned out to be a queen-size and quite large — so all we had to do was move it into a room and set up the bedroom there.
—Creeeak.
"How long has this door gone unopened for it to make that sound...?"
Whether or not the room had simply gone untouched by human hands for a while, it was spacious — hinges shrieking the whole way in.
...It was just big.
"....There's nothing in here.."
"Of course there isn't. It's an unused room."
The size of the room startled me, and then the cleanliness startled me all over again. The hinges had plainly sworn that no one ever came here, yet the room's interior, neat as if someone had tidied it, welcomed me.
"Still, it's cleaner than I expected?"
"I dust it now and then."
"Then what's that?"
A few boxes sat in the middle of the room. I wandered over and flipped one open, and it was stuffed to the brim with things that had no business being here.
What was that again...
Song Gaon had asked for a tour of the rooms, so he'd had no choice but to walk her through the house — and now she'd fixed her interest on the pile of boxes. He was fairly certain there were things inside that he should never be showing her, but the boxes in her hands were already prisoners of war, captured and held fast.
"Noona. What is that?"
If only he could remember what they were, he might have stopped her, or claimed they were something else and turned her attention elsewhere — but the room held nothing but those forlorn boxes, sitting in solitary storage in a space he cleaned regularly.
I'm pretty sure there's something in there Noona isn't supposed to see...
"Hey. You're the one who's supposed to know..."
Song Gaon had a point. It was his house, after all — naturally the homeowner ought to know what was in it. How would the person who'd lived there for all of two days know better?
"Hold on — hey! What is this!?"
Only when Song Gaon hauled an armful of bound paper volumes out of the box and demanded answers did Lee Suho finally remember.
Ah. So that's what those were...
Novel World, the site where Song Gaon had serialized her novels, offered a service: own every episode of a series, and they would bind you a custom collector's edition and ship it out. Lee Suho had read every word she'd ever published, and hoping it might be of some help to her, he had bought it all and received the bound volumes, series by series.
Song Gaon herself, for her part, turned them over as though seeing them for the first time, then slowly looked back at Lee Suho and spoke.
"These titles... they seem familiar... Ah! Aren't these the novels I wrote?"
She's going to get creeped out, isn't she? What kind of reaction will I get?
He was worried. Doing his best not to betray the fear that she might start looking at him like some kind of freak, he answered calmly, as the person she knew him to be.
"Yes. They're the collector's editions I had made to keep."
"What the..."
Contrary to Lee Suho's expectations — that she'd blow up at him, or start recoiling from a man with this level of obsession — Song Gaon broke into a remarkably sunny smile and waved the bundle of paper at him.
"You could've told me you had stuff like this! Ahh~ it's been ages since I read an actual paper book."
"Pardon?"
"Well, I'll have to read them all anyway if I'm going to pick the story back up."
"That's true."
Faced with such an overwhelmingly positive reaction, Lee Suho stared at her blankly for a moment before nodding and answering.
"Hmm... Then I'll take this room."
"I'm sorry?"
"My stuff was in here all along... so this room and I are fated. Obviously."
"...Yes. Go right ahead."
A room that flooded with brilliant light in the early morning and at dawn. The crisp, wide-open sky spreading beyond the window glass. It was the perfect room for her — a room from which many stories would have to be born.
"Noona, are you sure about this one? You picked the first room you saw without even looking at the others."
"Eh, what does it matter? We live together — if another room turns out better, I'll just move, won't I? Hehe."
His worries utterly wasted on her, Song Gaon laughed with evident delight, papers fluttering in her hand — looking, if anything, as pure and guileless as a child younger than himself.
"Yes. Well, if you say so. Oh, but Noona — why didn't you buy a bed?"
"Hm? We're going to sleep together... aren't we? I didn't buy a separate bed because I figured I'd be sleeping with you?"
Some other thought must have seized her for a split second, because the answer came tumbling out of its own accord — and it was more than enough to fluster him.
"Wh-what?!"
Does she have any idea what she just said?
Song Gaon, blissfully unaware of what it does to a man's heartstrings when a woman announces she plans to sleep with him, cheerfully carried on.
"Han Yeji said it'd be fine if we slept together too... didn't she? Why...?"
A secretary whose instincts were far too sharp, and a noona with none at all. Thanks to the deranged collaboration these two women had cooked up between them, he clutched at his swimming head.
Yeji-noona definitely knows how I feel about Gaon-noona...
It would have been stranger not to. How many people could readily swallow the story that he'd summoned a woman out of nowhere, introduced her as his fiancée, and that she'd simply fainted the moment he proposed? Han Yeji, his secretary no less, had been watching him for years. And she knew that seizures struck at the moment of ASCS gender transition — he had given her the broad strokes himself.
And knowing all that, she still egged Gaon-noona on.
He stole a glance at Song Gaon, who had already buried herself in the books, then lowered his head and let his thoughts run on.
That noona is beaming away, with no idea what situation she's actually in...
A grown man and a grown woman, living under one roof. True, the woman stood about a head taller than the man — but still. A man and a woman, sharing the same roof.
At first, he had planned to shut her inside a cage and tame her the way one keeps an animal — doling out food little by little until she grew used to the bars. Lee Suho, who had meant to lock her in his home and raise her slowly, had allowed her to come and go outside for one simple reason: she now thought of this place as her own home.
And that's exactly the problem — she's gotten far too comfortable, like it really is her own house...
She cooked in nothing but an apron over bare skin. She brushed her teeth — "this is how you do it" — by flopping down right in front of him, the neck of her stretched-out box tee gaping so wide her fair skin was all on display, and pulling her mouth open with one hand to show him.
He was fairly sure none of it was deliberate, but he was starting to wonder how much longer he could stand by and watch behavior that looked, if anything, like outright seduction.
Living with a man she didn't know — and not even a fellow man anymore, at that — Song Gaon still unconsciously carried on with her old way of life. Let out of the house on her own, she'd be no different from a child set down at the water's edge.
He could feel, in everything she did, that she saw him as a child — and yet in his own eyes, Song Gaon was the more dangerous of the two.
The furniture arrives tomorrow morning, and Noona's things come by courier in the afternoon — I'll tell her to take delivery and get everything put away...
Having calculated that tomorrow, at least, he could keep her cooped up indoors, Lee Suho called out to Song Gaon.
"Noona, read the books tomorrow once the furniture's set up. How about getting some sleep now?"
"Huh? Hmm... Can't I just finish the one I was reading?"
Song Gaon sat sprawled on the floor, peering up at him — and though she herself had no idea, the sight was enough to send something dark and unwholesome rippling through him.
Maybe that's simply how she is. Or maybe she knows, on some level, that she's become a woman — and is rejecting it without realizing.
His brief analysis of Song Gaon concluded, Lee Suho walked over, rested a hand on her shoulder, and spoke.
"Noona. Let's sleep together."
"Huh...? U... okay."
Like a child whose favorite toy had just been confiscated, Song Gaon deflated on the spot. For all that she'd fussed over him like a toddler — brushing his teeth, wiping his hands — her own feelings now played across her face as plainly as any child's.
"Read them tomorrow, Noona. Your things arrive tomorrow, remember? If we take the furniture in the morning and put it all together, we'll have to mop the floors too, won't we?"
"Mm... I suppose... Fine. Let's sleep together."
Song Gaon slipped in a bookmark — where she'd even found one, who knew — set the book down on the floor, and grabbed Lee Suho's hand.
"Come on, let's go to bed. You're tired, aren't you? You don't look so good."
"...Yes."
It carried less weight, coming from the very source of his exhaustion — but still, there was nothing bad about it.
He hadn't known, back when he slept alone night after night. You have to know what loneliness is before you can suffer it, and the Lee Suho of the past had never had the room to feel such a thing.
Last night, when her scent had drifted over from behind him, sleep had come a little harder — but to drive out the loneliness he had only now, dimly, come to recognize, he needed her scent.
As Lee Suho, gazing down at their clasped hands, tried to draw her toward the bed, Song Gaon dug in her heels and stopped him.
"Hey. You still have to brush your teeth. Where do you think you're going, straight to bed?"
"Yes... Let's go to the bathroom."
"Good."
He, for his part, found every moment with Song Gaon a delight — but watching her go on beaming that same sunny smile even now, Lee Suho breathed a sigh into the bead of toothpaste on his brush.
Before long, in the pitch-dark room, he lay down beside her in the same bed and closed his eyes.