Lee Hae-rin's Le: Holding Hands
In the quiet woods of Silverbrook, Virginia, there stood a mansion. It belonged to Lee Kyung-moon, and it was where Lee Hae-rin lived. Both of them had come from Korea.
Kyung-moon had once been married to a Chinese woman named Wang Yu-rin, but they had divorced long ago, and he lived alone now. He had an adoptive daughter: Hae-rin. Before the divorce, he and Wang Yu-rin had gone to Korea, taken Hae-rin from an orphanage in the Seoul capital region, and brought her back to the United States.
These days Cha Yoon-kyung—a Korean friend of Hae-rin's from Horizon House Academy, the school Hae-rin attended—was at Kyung-moon's side. A full twenty years stood between them, and they were promised in marriage. If Yoon-kyung and Kyung-moon married, Hae-rin would have her friend Yoon-kyung for a stepmother. Yoon-kyung would take her friend Hae-rin as a foster daughter.
Wang Yu-rin, Lee Kyung-moon
Yoon-kyung sat on the mansion's terrace with a weakly brewed coffee, reading the last installment of Dawn at the Garrison Port, the novel Hae-rin had written for her. She had already gone through those pages again and again.
Something nagged at her, and she asked.
"Hey—you know Ryu Sian, in this story. What are they actually doing? All that talk about masters and slaves."
"Ah... that. It's what they call BDSM. Power is easy to turn into a story, so I put it in. Writers love that sort of thing, don't they? Once I started, it just came out that way. And it's a war story, too."
She stood at Yoon-kyung's side, filling her cup.
Hae-rin had been letting her hair grow out a little of late. The very short cut had lengthened until it was beginning to look something like a bob, and she was glad of it—not because she particularly preferred a bob, but simply because she was leaving behind the hairstyle her adoptive father, Kyung-moon, had forced on her.
The attention he had once poured over her was turned on Yoon-kyung now. Hae-rin felt sorry for that, and grateful, too.
She doesn't know yet, does she. The true nature of Lee Kyung-moon—the man she mistakes for love, the man she's thinking of marrying.
Thinking that, she went on, laying more words over for Yoon-kyung.
"You know those novels grown-ups only read among themselves? The dirty ones. The intense ones. Haha. So many of them take BDSM for their material. So I tried it, too. You wanted something erotic, something that would get under the skin. And once I put it in and kept writing, I found I was having fun with it myself."
She heaped sugar into Yoon-kyung's cup. Yoon-kyung liked sweet things.
Hae-rin added, "We're adults now, aren't we. Not children anymore, not really. So you can get married now, too."
Yoon-kyung took a sip and winced.
"I'm only drinking it because it's here. Honestly, I like cola. And cold water."
Hae-rin smiled. "Same as me. Though all of a sudden I'm missing sikhye—that sweet Korean rice drink. Cola's everywhere in America, but sikhye's rare. Even when you find it, it's mostly the canned kind."
At that, Yoon-kyung clapped, and Japanese slipped out of her before she thought.
"Wow, I think so too!"
Hae-rin shot back. It was Japanese as well, but slow, the pronunciation stiff.
"Wouldn't you miss Calpis more than sikhye?"
Hearing Hae-rin speak Japanese, Yoon-kyung startled.
"Oh, wow! Hae-rin, your Japanese is really good. Since when have you been this good?"
Hae-rin turned shy.
"Good? Please. Japanese just pops out of you sometimes. I heard it, got curious, and studied. That computer you asked Dad to buy me—I'm using it all the time. It's such a help when I study. That's how I learned. Korea, computer game, daruma, Calpis, Yakult, juice, slave... like that. Just a little?"
She laughed, pinching the air between thumb and forefinger as if to lift out something very small.
Ryu Sian
Yoon-kyung smoothed the pages that held Dawn at the Garrison Port and said, "In this story of yours, that's how it goes, isn't it? Being a master is truly dangerous. A slave is safe. When war comes, the masters die first. They go out to the battlefield. The slaves stay in the rear making food, safe and sound, and when their masters die they pass to whatever other master killed them. No loyalty in it at all. So a master may look like someone who never works and spends a whole life eating and playing, but the moment danger comes, they're the first onto the field to die. That's how you wrote it, in this story you gave me."
Hae-rin answered with a short, sharp smile.
"That's only because I wrote it that way in my novel. Reality isn't like that. Look at history—nobles and royalty mostly lived long lives. Healthy ones. All while they exploited the common people to their hearts' content and shoved the young out onto the battlefield."
Yoon-kyung's eyes went round, and she nodded.
"Now that you say it, that's true, isn't it? In the story you wrote, the masters were all strangely honorable. Not cowardly, the way nobles were in real history. Haha. The world you wrote is the finer one. And if being that honorable is what a real master is, then I want to be a master. Even if it's dangerous. I think I could bear it."
Hae-rin said, "But there's the weight of having to choose. It isn't a light thing."
Yoon-kyung smiled, and recited a line from the novel Hae-rin had written for her.
"Choose wrong, and you die! That is a master."
Hae-rin smiled too, and chimed in with a line of her own from the novel.
"If the master's choice is wrong, every one of their slaves dies too!"
They laughed together. The quiet grounds of the mansion filled with the laughter of two young women.
Yoon-kyung asked, "Then the master's place ought to go to someone smart, who knows a lot, who's had experience? Someone like you."
Hae-rin shook her head.
"No. Not that."
Yoon-kyung looked surprised.
"Then what?"
Hae-rin looked steadily into her eyes. Her voice was serious.
"A master is already decided. From birth. You don't become one by being clever, or strong, or rich. A master has to have an animal sense. Someone who can judge a split-second situation, decide boldly, and has the depth to bear that decision. Someone daring enough to stake their own life on the choice—and other people's lives as well, hauled in and laid on the line. That person is a master. But in the world we have now, people with no right to the place go around playing master. When that happens, the world is bound to warp. And civilization is what sets those unqualified people up as masters. They have money. They're smart. They were simply born into a house like that. For reasons that don't fit. So it's worse than the primitive age. That's how it looks to me."
Yoon-kyung could not readily follow the words Hae-rin poured out so fast. As always, she let the difficult talk pass with a smile. Taking Hae-rin's words as something precious mattered to her. She thought it was all right even if she could not grasp every part of them. She trusted Hae-rin that far.
Still, there was one thing she wanted to ask. It seemed a waste, that someone like Hae-rin should not be the one.
"Even so, shouldn't a person like you be the master? You study well, you speak well—if you graduated, went out into the world, and stood where a master stands, I think you could do so much."
Hearing that, Hae-rin rose from her seat without a word.
Kyung-moon had gone to work. Yoon-kyung's guardian, Yoo Jae-hee, who had come to the mansion in Yoon-kyung's wake, was in the living room watching television. On the terrace there was no one but the two of them.
Hae-rin's words filled Yoon-kyung, soft and full.
Yoon-kyung would remember those words for the rest of her life.
Hae-rin slowly bowed her head. She bent at the waist, and then, drawing both knees demurely together, she knelt on the cold floor. The skirt of the white dress she wore spread wide across it, as if unfolding.
Yoon-kyung thought the sight was beautiful.
Hae-rin did not stop. She kept her face lowering, bringing it down.
Yoon-kyung sat in the chair with her legs comfortably crossed. Her left foot rested on the floor; her right hung in the air.
With both hands Hae-rin gently took that raised right foot—the black loafer, glossy and smooth. She had bought the pair for Yoon-kyung. She set her lips to the toe of the shoe.
Yoon-kyung was a little flustered. She leaned forward for a moment, meaning to make her stop, and a strange feeling caught her.
Huh? This is cozy?
Before she knew it she had settled back as she had been, her back eased against the chair. Something felt as if it had found its place again. The thought was vague, but it was so.
Hae-rin's eyes were modestly closed, so her lashes showed plain—unusually dense, neat, and long. Yoon-kyung loved the look of those eyes. Beneath them sat Hae-rin's small mouth, set so prettily: the mouth that smiled for her, the mouth that spoke warm words to her, the mouth that pouted when Yoon-kyung teased. Those soft lips rested, devoted, against the toe of the shoe.
Her lips parted just slightly, and her tongue came out. As if caressing the shoe, she wet it with her tongue and licked the dust away until it was clean. The dust was filthy, but Hae-rin did not seem to mind.
Her tongue and lips worshipped every part of Yoon-kyung's foot. The toe of the shoe, the vamp, the sole, and the heel.
Yoon-kyung looked down at it in silence and felt that coziness. She could not name it as anything else. A place recovered. Exactly that—coziness.
Once again, Yoon-kyung asked Hae-rin for a story that would be secret, and funny, and known only to the two of them.
"Write whatever you want to write. Something I can enjoy reading, too."
Hae-rin lowered her eyes and answered quietly.
"Yes."
Cha Yoon-kyung, Lee Hae-rin
Hae-rin went straight to her room. A little more than an hour later she came back, six sheets of A4 paper in her hand.
As she had the time before, she laid one more sheet on top and wrote a Korean title there. In her own hand.
Hae-rin knelt demurely before Yoon-kyung. She bent forward until she was bowed to the floor, and, as if offering them up, held the pages out with both hands.
Yoon-kyung took them in one.
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