Because I Like You
Cha Seeun's room, which I was forbidden from entering without reason.
My own room, empty and bare, into which I'd been banished on the grounds that sprawling around the living room was getting on her nerves.
Right. This was the room that had been given to me.
Idling. Lounging. Killing time.
I was deeply absorbed in the profound work of breathing life into this inhumanly spotless, hollow room.
Rolling across the floor and flinging lint into the air. Counting how many symmetrical pairs of patterns were printed on the wallpaper.
Walls, floor, ceiling — and one parasitic human on the brink of dying of boredom, occupying the space between them.
Maybe Cha Seeun had banished me here to grant me some kind of enlightenment through wall-facing meditation?
Having lost my memories, my heart felt hollow. Perhaps this emptiness was the first step toward nirvana. Or something like that.
"Honestly, she could at least hand me a phone…."
It wasn't a serious complaint. She'd brought me here, fed me, put me to bed, and slept… beside me.
Without thinking, I fretted at my lips, then dropped my hand.
Where else in the world would you find someone who would go this far for you?
If the roles were reversed — if I were Cha Seeun and someone like me had been in my life?
The moment I heard about the accident, I'd have poured out a memorial drink and forgotten the whole thing.
Or even if I hadn't — even if I'd gone to the trouble of bringing him home — the second he kissed me without permission, I'd have borrowed the full power of the civil service, cleaned out every last won in his bank account, and thrown him out on the street.
But Cha Seeun had let it slide like it was nothing.
Instead of shoving me through the iron bars of a cold holding cell, she'd generously handed over an empty room.
Going this far for me….
Every one of these questions ultimately sprang from the same root: I didn't know who I had been.
If I'd really been the pushover Lee Junho described, the way I'd managed to charm a woman like her seemed anything but ordinary.
"Ugh."
No point stewing over it. I could force the issue and dig around if I wanted to — but I didn't want to wreck the life I had now.
I was still leaning on whatever goodwill Cha Seeun had felt toward my past self, after all.
I sprang up from the floor and boldly shoved the door open. I walked down the hallway and knocked on Cha Seeun's door.
Knock-knock.
A quick glance outside told me it was early afternoon.
Come to think of it — where was the lunch that should have been set out for me by now?
"At this rate, I'm going to get hurt feelings, Seeun."
I muttered the kind of thing I would never say to her face and waited for an answer. Nothing came.
Don't tell me her interest in me had already dried up?
Or had I become a nuisance — the guy who crawled up and kissed her, who talked back?
"…."
I couldn't just sit alone in that empty room scraping at the floor. Waiting around like that would make me no different from a pet.
Which meant I needed to make something clear to Cha Seeun. That I was the kind of man who only got more troublesome if you left him alone.
Thud-thud!
"Seeun! Emergency! Emergency!"
I hammered on the door and shouted at the top of my lungs.
It was pure impulse — I hadn't planned anything further.
But Cha Seeun, who wore the three words immaculate, perfect, ice-cold like weapons — what would make a woman like that jump the hardest?
"There's a cockroach in the living room right now!"
I put on a full theatrical panic and kept pounding. Not too hard — I eased off the force, worried I'd overdo it.
The door was so solid my fist bounced back with a dull thump-thump.
Still, it didn't open.
So that's how she wants to play it?
Having already committed, there was no backing down.
This was a kind of reconnaissance. A battle of wills, put another way.
I was the type who used to fold the moment someone so much as raised an eyebrow at me. But now that we were living together, I needed to assert a certain presence of my own.
"Seeun!"
The doorknob turned smoothly under my hand. Through the crack, the interior was dark.
"Seeun…?"
I held my breath and stepped inside.
Curtains fitted flush to the windows. A silent space. A faint, delicate fragrance hanging in the air.
The owner of this room was on the bed — a bed so large that even two people lying side by side would still have room to spare. She lay there neatly, as if she'd only just drifted off.
It looked as though someone had carefully smoothed the blanket over the sleeping Cha Seeun and then vanished. All while she slept with earplugs and an eye mask already in place.
"I didn't think you'd be asleep… are you actually out?"
I quietly took up a position beside the bed and gazed down at her.
I had no intention of another sudden kiss or anything of the sort.
It was simply a rare chance to properly look at the face of a woman who was usually so busy dodging me the moment our eyes met.
She looked exactly like a doll. Pale skin. Completely still.
That wildness — or was it aggression? — that sometimes surfaced when she was awake, that air sharp enough to cut if you got too close, had all gone quiet and docile.
"You're this pretty."
I watched her, entranced, until a strange sense of wrongness made me reach out. The moment I carefully lifted the eye mask—
"…Are you awake?"
"Mm."
"Since when?"
Under a gaze that seemed to ask whether knowing would somehow erase my crime, I hastily lowered the eye mask back over her eyes.
Hmm. Maybe my nights had gotten better simply because Cha Seeun was more terrifying than whatever haunted them.
The chill hit me late, and I shuddered hard. Cha Seeun removed the earplugs and eye mask and sat up.
I couldn't shake the thought that if my life were a movie, the genre would be horror.
"Shin Ian."
She adjusted the open front of her top and checked the time.
I'd been bracing for a scolding. I hunched my shoulders and waited for whatever came next.
"Get out."
"…What?"
My heart dropped through the floor and bounced back up.
I nearly dropped to my knees on pure reflex — but a sharper sigh stabbed me in the chest first.
"Seeun…?"
I looked at her with wet, wounded eyes that asked how she could possibly do this. She waved me off as if it were nothing.
"I said get out so I can change."
"Ah."
"That guilty look on your face. At least you know you did something wrong."
I hurried out, shut the door, and sheepishly scratched my chin.
Not long after, the door opened.
Black slacks. A white shirt. An outfit that ruthlessly killed any hint of personality — and yet, on Cha Seeun's clean proportions and spare frame, it only sharpened that distinctive, cutting impression of hers.
Even without any obvious effort, my eyes kept finding her.
"Put this on."
She tossed a coat at me. I caught it on reflex and shrugged it on.
"It's short?"
The sleeves stopped above my wrists, and the length sat at an awkward mid-point.
"Don't like it, then go out like that."
"Should I?"
Wandering around in adorable character pajamas. Or walking beside her while wearing them.
Which of those would be more humiliating, exactly?
"…."
She was not a good person to test curiosity on.
"I'll wear it, so stop looking at me like that. But where are we going?"
"Oh my, welcome. Valued… customer?"
The moment we stepped into the store, the clerk's eyes locked onto me and refused to leave.
A fair reaction. If a full-grown adult man showed up at my workplace in character pajamas under a coat that didn't fit, I'd have been ready to run for it myself.
I knew. Which was why I fled into a fitting room at top speed.
Soon, with the clerk's help, I was handed the clothes Cha Seeun had picked out herself.
"Finally…!"
From hospital gown to character pajamas — and at last, actual, normal everyday clothes.
Once I'd changed, the face in the mirror strangely felt a little more like me.
"Hah. Handsome."
The only man I roughly knew was Lee Junho. Compared to him, this was definitely a good-looking face.
"Seeun! Seeun!"
In high spirits, I burst out of the fitting room. I threw both arms wide in front of Cha Seeun, who was waiting after finishing the payment.
"Well? How do I look?"
"Eh. Not bad."
I knew that lukewarm response meant she was satisfied, and I couldn't help smiling.
It felt like receiving a gift for the first time in my life. And if I actually tallied it up, that might not have been far from the truth.
I hurried ahead of Cha Seeun, worried she might get blocked by the heavy glass door, and held it open for her as I spoke.
"But Seeun. Aren't you hungry?"
Before she could answer, I clapped my hands together.
"Great. We missed lunch together, so I'll make dinner myself."
Cha Seeun's brow furrowed by a fraction. I decided to believe it was the smile of a woman who hadn't yet learned how to smile.
"Do you have to?"
Before those pretty lips could spit out something sharper, I hurried my steps toward the basement.
"H-hey? If you don't come, I'll get lost? I'll have them page for Seeun over the loudspeaker?"
"Haa…."
The food hall in the basement was already crowded with people in the early evening.
Everyone was shopping with smiles on their faces, even in front of price tags that, by my limited knowledge of the world, felt completely unhinged.
A newlywed couple pushing a cart. A family with a child in tow. A pair of lovers clustered at a sample counter.
Everyone a family. Everyone a couple.
I wonder if we look like that too.
Like an ordinary, pretty couple who'd come out to shop together, all affection. I hoped that was how we looked.
But Cha Seeun, who'd been dragged along because of me, was simply waiting with a blank expression.
Suddenly my steps, basket in hand, slowed.
For a moment it felt as if I'd dunked my head in ice water — my mind went rigid and hard.
"…."
The buoyant feeling sank. The corners of my mouth, which had been rising without thought, went cold.
The dissonance I was feeling now — my eyes, searching for its cause, stopped on Cha Seeun.
"What is it."
A question asked out of obligation, as if she didn't actually want an answer.
Why was that?
I slowly rewound my memories.
"Well, you see…."
I thought back to that first day in the hospital.
There was no way I could have already forgotten that cold beauty who had come to me — a man who'd been thrown into the world as good as newborn — and pressed her lips to mine.
And now?
"Seeun."
The Cha Seeun of then, and the Cha Seeun of now. What had changed was the distance between us.
The expression she used to wear for me. The temperature in her voice when she said my name. Both had shifted.
It's because of me, isn't it.
Because I didn't know the me from before I lost my memories. Because the Shin Ian everyone had liked no longer existed in this world.
"…."
It was a cruelly simple reason.
Which meant I could guess what Cha Seeun was thinking, too.
She must also be weighing things on the scale every single moment.
Whether the Shin Ian she had known and the me standing here now were the same person. The more she measured, the less she could erase the sense that we were different people — and so the distance kept growing.
Before she could drift any farther, I held out my hand.
"Shall we hold hands?"
Then I'd just have to charm her.
So she wouldn't need to wonder. So she wouldn't even have room for thoughts like that.
I snagged the hand of a Cha Seeun who looked uncharacteristically flustered.
I laced our fingers together so she couldn't slip free.
"Just in case — don't get the wrong idea."
A low breath, trying not to show any agitation. I stepped in closer and whispered.
"I'm doing this because I like you, Seeun. That's exactly why."