The Pink Aura's Secret Scent
In the process, the hem of Dong-oh's white sleeveless shirt sleeve brushed lightly and smoothly against Jung Seo-yoon's delicate shoulder as her cardigan slipped.
The instant his firm shoulder touched hers, Seo-yoon shrank her upper body in a tiny, almost imperceptible way, freezing her body as if her breath had stopped for a moment.
Right at that split-second moment, Dong-oh's ability flared open once more in front of his eyes.
Between the warm, translucent golden aura that had been quietly wrapping around her body, a thin mist-like pink stream began to rise in an undulating swirl.
The pleasant scent emanating from Seo-yoon's body reached Dong-oh's olfactory nerve along the quiet classroom air, close enough to make the back of his neck tingle.
It was not artificial or strong makeup fragrance.
If they had been sitting a little farther apart facing each other, he would never have noticed it.
That was why, at this distance, her scent stimulated his nerves even more, heightening his tension.
Dong-oh opened his eyes wide and desperately twisted his brain to focus on the sociological sentences on the laptop screen, but the messy words floated up without readability and refused to sink into his mind.
The ends of Seo-yoon's long hair, pressed close beside him, swayed gently at the right edge of his vision every time she breathed.
Her small, white fingertips resting on the mouse and the side profile of her moist lips, slightly biting her lower lip as if deep in thought while staring at the screen, filled his view with far more detail than he ever saw in a regular lecture hall.
'...... It appeared again, that pink aura.'
Now he could perfectly guess the meaning of the golden aura.
Trust, happiness when meeting, and a sense of comfort.
But defining the pink mist that tickled his chest with clear words was extremely difficult.
When she looked at him in the cafe yesterday and laughed out loud playfully.
When she gently praised him on the bench in front of the library today, sweeping up and down his outfit.
And right now, in this closed classroom with no one else around, sitting so close that their shoulder hems touched.
No matter how he thought about it, there seemed to be a clear emotional common thread running through these three unusual situations, yet his timid brain refused to spit out the word.
'...... Is it possible that the emotion the pink aura means is.'
Dong-oh pushed the fleeting hypothesis that crossed his mind deep into the depths of his heart, shaking his head and denying reality.
He had not yet perfectly and objectively verified the color meanings shown by the ability, so imagining and interpreting it as excessively favorable to himself was dangerous delusion.
The pink aura might simply be the natural physiological embarrassment, momentary tension, or awkwardness a junior feels when sitting too close to a senior in a quiet space where they are the only two people.
However, it was too rational to run away because the pink aura's ripples that gently wrapped around her body were far too warm, comforting, and sweet.
'...... Senior?'
Seo-yoon, who had been watching Dong-oh's silence for a long time, turned her head slightly and looked at the Dong-oh beside her with cautious eyes.
'Eh? W-what?'
'How is the material looking? I went through it all...'
Dong-oh did not understand the point of her sudden question and just blanked out like an idiot for a few seconds.
Because he had been analyzing her secret soap scent and pink mist around her body the whole time, he had not read even 1% of the material on the laptop screen.
'Ah... sorry. My eyes were a bit blurry for a moment, so I couldn't see it well. Can you scroll up to the top once more for the introduction part?'
'Did I explain it weirdly?'
A faint gray stream, the color that appeared when confidence dropped in his result, seeped in beside the pink mist on Seo-yoon's shoulder. Dong-oh hurriedly waved his hand to dispel her misunderstanding.
'No, it's not that. I'll open my eyes wide and look again properly.'
To clear up the misunderstanding, Dong-oh boldly stretched his upper body toward the laptop, placing his large right hand on the mouse touchpad.
In the process, Dong-oh and Seo-yoon unintentionally got even closer.
As Dong-oh moved his fingers to operate the mouse, his forearm muscles and thick tendons moved dynamically under his sleeveless sleeve.
Seo-yoon's clear gaze lingered silently on his firm and rough right hand and the clear vein marks on his forearm instead of his face, as he manipulated the touchpad.
At that moment, the pink mist swirling around her became much clearer and filled the surrounding space with a bright, high color than before.
Dong-oh was so busy using his brain capacity to decode the screen letters that he did not notice the shift of Seo-yoon's gaze and the meaning of the exploding pink mist.
*****
Seo-yoon felt her heart pounding wildly and tried to hold her breath quietly because she was afraid of making any sound.
The fact that she was sitting so close to the senior in an empty classroom on a weekend made her entire nervous system tense.
To review the assignment slides together in large letters, sitting tightly beside him at the long conference table was extremely normal and efficient.
It was definitely not that the senior deliberately approached to get close, nor was there even enough space between them for another chair.
Yet every time Dong-oh senior leaned his upper body toward her to point out a specific sentence on the screen, an inexplicable feeling of closeness and excitement dominated her whole body.
'...... I hope I don't smell gross like library dust or sweat. I'm so nervous I can't stand it.'
Seo-yoon desperately recalled the memory of having showered with clean soap that morning.
She had even sprayed the sweet fruit-scented layering perfume she usually treasured twice to be sure about her collarbone.
But all morning she had sweated while sitting in the stuffy library study room, and her body temperature had risen while walking from the department building hallway where sunlight poured down.
The extreme anxiety that the smelly body odor, to which her own sense of smell had already gone numb, might reach the senior's nose was overwhelming.
In embarrassment, Seo-yoon fiddled with the ends of her long hair using her white fingertips.
Then she glanced at the senior's jawline while he sat beside her staring at the screen with serious eyes.
The senior she met on the weekend looked completely different in visual atmosphere from the tired expression on the weekday school hallway.
Usually during the semester he wore loose large over-hoodie or gray training jumpsuit, so she had roughly estimated his physique, but today's white plain t-shirt, which he wore without caring on the weekend, honestly and intuitively revealed the senior's masculine, firm build without hiding it.
His shoulders spread out like the Pacific, the firm thick forearm muscles without a single gram of fat subtly showing under the sleeveless sleeve.
The wild vein marks that stood out like snakes on the back of his hand and wrist every time he operated the laptop touchpad.
'...... He must exercise a lot.'
The comment that came out subconsciously when she had stared blankly at his forearm at lunch was because the senior's physique was visible at a glance.
She had just mumbled and run away because she was embarrassed about saying something obvious, but she had apparently peeked too much at the senior's body and outfit.
Seo-yoon forced her gaze back to the laptop screen to hide her blushing cheeks.
'...... But why is this blunt and cold senior being so kind to me?'
The situation of just the two of them sitting in the classroom felt like a dream.
Sending the difficult Professor Kim's material from last semester via messenger was already something a junior would be grateful for.
Yet he had come all the way to school on a precious weekend, sat in an empty classroom with no one else, and kindly looked at the assignment for a single meal.
The kindness he showed her now was far too excessive and unusual for a senior who was rumored to be an emotionless as* in the department, known for cold personality and narrow human relations.
Dong-oh, the senior rumored among classmates and juniors, was a cold iron wall man who ignored human beings so much that he would pass by without expression even if greeted in the hallway.
Yet this difficult person had been steadily kind and reliable to her alone, without getting angry even once since the joint project of last semester until now.
Even on the night before the deadline of the hellish team project last semester.
When her data analysis layout for the part she was in broke due to a computer error and she was about to cry while staring at the monitor alone at dawn, the senior fixed his slides by hand until past 3 a.m. and uploaded them to the assignment window.
At that time she had thought it was just to prevent her score from dropping since they were tied in the group.
But now that the class had ended a long time ago and this semester they were not even in the same group, let alone taking the same course, the two of them were in a perfectly private, unrelated state.
'...... Is the senior originally someone who can't refuse well and helps everyone as a senior?'
Contrary to the rumor of a vicious as* who hates trouble, maybe he just had a kind personality who couldn't refuse a request and was merely showing mechanical goodwill to her.
She was the one who had first brought it up and asked to see the assignment on the weekend herself, and the senior had only kindly accepted it out of gentle senior duty without any private meaning.
But the Dong-oh senior sitting in front of her eyes now had an atmosphere completely different from the emotionless senior she had passed by in the school hallway.
Whether it was because of his neatly dressed white t-shirt and jeans or because they were sitting so close in an empty closed classroom was unclear.
Seo-yoon tried to calm her heart about to burst by glancing at his firm sleeveless forearm once more.
At that moment Dong-oh pointed to a specific sociological sentence on the screen with the tip of his thick tendon-protruding right finger and opened his mouth straight.
'Seo-yoon, in my opinion, the complex theory sentence in the second paragraph of the main body here doesn't need to be displayed in full on the slide. Just pointing out one sentence verbally in the introduction part should be enough.'
His deep, calm low voice, echoing like from a cave, flowed into her ears from the very close distance beside her.
Seo-yoon felt emotional stimulation making goosebumps all over her body and bit her lower lip tightly inside to hide her blushing face.
'...... No, why is the voice explaining the assignment so unnecessarily good? And why does the muscle and vein mark under the sleeveless always stick in my vision? I can't concentrate.'
Her heart, hidden deep in her chest, started beating rapidly as if out of control.
To never let the senior notice the overwhelming excitement and tension, Seo-yoon pretended not to care and nodded vigorously while staring hard at the monitor.
'Ah... yeah! Now that I think about it, you're right, senior. Then this lengthy text part should be boldly deleted from the slide, right?'
She forced her voice tone to sound as casual and natural as usual, but her breath had become a little quick and her ment breath leaked out without her realizing.
Luckily, the senior did not notice the fine tremor in her voice while analyzing the letters on the screen and answered silently.
'...... Ah, what should I do. I seem to be feeling way more excited and nervous about this senior than I thought.'
When she cleanly admitted the honest private affection and excitement she had buried deep inside, embarrassment and shame exploded instead.
It had only been a weekend promise to receive feedback on the extremely stiff assignment material.
Yet now, consciously realizing the unusual situation of sitting close to the senior in the quiet corner of an empty classroom on a nice Saturday afternoon, the air flow above the table itself did not feel as normal between senior and junior as before.
Seo-yoon hurriedly scrolled the slide down to the next page, fiddling with the mouse pad to hide her face about to burst.
'T-that next part is right here, senior. It's the graph part of the smartphone interface exclusion statistics for the elderly generation...'
And continuing her mechanical assignment explanation in a trembling voice while pretending to be a perfect model junior with no emotion.
*****
The mysterious pink mist aura that had been wrapping the beautiful body of Seo-yoon like a ghost and swirling did not seem to fade or disappear even after time passed.
Rather, as their conversation deepened and silence flowed in the classroom, the pink aura bloomed thicker and more beautifully than before.
Dong-oh beside her was so distracted by the nature of that pink mist that kept messing up one side of his vision that he was going mad.
The more he strained his eyes to focus on the assignment content, the more the pink mist aura that gently undulated around his vision scattered his concentration.
Every time Seo-yoon leaned her upper body closer to him to show a specific graph on the laptop screen, the faint sweet body scent that he had felt before pierced the tip of his nose clearly, and the pink mist aura spread beautifully like waves in all directions according to the movement.
His heart began beating much more roughly and quickly than when he exercised normally due to this unrealistic stimulation.
Dong-oh swallowed dry saliva and forced his trembling gaze to stay fixed on the letters of the laptop screen.
'...... This graph data itself was found very well by a reliable institution and placed well. But the text information I was trying to explain in one slide is too dense and many.'
'Ah, you see it that way too, senior? Because I put everything in without leaving any out, it became too much.'
'Yeah, Professor Kim doesn't like things with poor readability. The total time given for the presentation is only about fifteen minutes, so it's much more advantageous to score if you compress the core message of the main body you want to convey to about three lines per slide.'
He went through the unnecessary sentences placed in every corner of the slide that lowered information transmission power one by one with his fingertip and cut them precisely.
Seo-yoon admired his sharp advice and moved the Sharp pen busily in her notebook beside him to memorize the feedback content earnestly.
While looking together at the narrow laptop monitor screen, it brushed lightly and smoothly many times unintentionally.
Every short moment when skin and collar touched, the pink mist aura around Seo-yoon's body became a little thicker.
While accumulating data while watching this phenomenon, Dong-oh finally reached the final conclusion that it was impossible to dismiss it as simple eye disease or lighting illusion and accidentally ignore it.