Into The Thrill

"Since it's mine, I'll handle it. If I’ve given it to you once, stop interfering. Don't meddle crudely."
"There will be nothing of yours in our house from now on."
"What do you mean?"

Haewon bristled and glared at his father. As he picked up the golf ball that had rolled to his feet, his father pretended to be indifferent as he cleared his throat. He set his stance and carefully aimed to place the white ball into the narrow hole.
"The officetel is in my name, so it's mine."
"I'll change it to Haejung's name."

"...What did you say?"
"Your stepmother caused such a fuss, and there's nothing I can do for her, but I told her I’d change it to Haejung’s name, and she quieted down."
"You’ve got dozens of them, not just one! Why are you giving away mine?!"

Haewon jumped up.
"You insist on having yours. If not, you say you won't live here, and you say you'll hide away somewhere with Haejung. What am I supposed to do then? The only children I have are you and Haejung, but you’re already a grown-up, and I’ll just live to see Haejung grow. You can only do so much. No matter how pretty Goryeong is, she costs money, and my strength is failing, so I can't keep doing this anymore. I'm getting old, you know."
"..."

It was intentional. Haewon had insulted his stepmother not long ago.
"Didn't you also set up house with my father when my real mother was alive, and get this far? What’s the fuss about now?"
Haewon had insulted his stepmother with words like these. She had set up a new household with his father when his biological mother was still alive and had a child, insulting Haewon’s biological mother. His stepmother didn’t have the right to get upset about that level of insult. She didn’t have the right to be offended by it, nor did his father.

His stepmother was trying to make Haewon submit with money. She was making him despise himself in a contemptuous way. Using his father’s wealth.
It was unbearable humiliation. The officetel that his father said would be transferred to Haejung was a place he didn't want to go to, even if he had nowhere else. Haewon barely suppressed his rising anger and spoke.
"Then give me something else. I need a place to live, don’t I?"

"Come back home. Your stepmother promised me that she would take good care of you. She said she wouldn’t stimulate you, that she’d take care of you well. Haejung likes you too. It’s not like you have to live in a single room with your family. You can rent this floor as your own, what’s so bad about it?"
He spoke as if he couldn’t understand at all. Haewon clenched his fist. There was a limit to being oblivious. His father acted as if he had completely forgotten what he had done to Haewon’s biological mother.
"Do you think I should eat breakfast every morning with the woman who had an affair with my father while my mother was still alive? Do you forget how my mother died? What kind of idiot forgets that? You should forget, not me."
"...You little shit."

His father’s face hardened as he stopped joking. Haewon gritted his teeth and stood up from the sofa. Ignoring his father shouting at him, he slammed the office door behind him. The secretary, startled by the sound, looked back at him with wide eyes. Haewon passed by the secretary, who stood up and bowed politely, and stood in front of the elevator. His clenched fist trembled with rage.
Haewon’s biological mother had been a beautiful woman. She had met his father when she was a music major, studying piano. His father had fallen in love with her at first sight when she played piano at a high-end restaurant. His father visited the restaurant every day to eat steak while she worked there.
They had a relationship. When Haewon was conceived, his mother gave up her studies. She had always played piano when she was pregnant with him. She wanted to share the beautiful music with him. She often played songs by Elgar and Schumann, who sang of love. Schumann had loved his wife Clara all his life, and all of his compositions were love confessions to her.

For a time, they were happy. His father’s business prospered day by day, and his mother was a graceful and elegant lady of their large house.
Having a happy family couldn’t stop his father from being unfaithful. He wasn’t Schumann. He was a rotten man. His father had frequent affairs.
One day, while silently enduring his father’s affairs, his mother left the house without a word. Haewon was in his first year at the Yewon Academy, beginning his serious violin training. He was fifteen years old.

His mother left without leaving any trace or letter. She didn’t take anything his father had given her. Neither did Haewon. She left on her own, unburdened by his father.
Haewon didn’t think of it as abandonment. He thought that if it had been him, he would have done the same. Haewon respected his mother’s decision to live her own life, free from being bound by his father, even though she had abandoned him. He supported her choice.
The first time he saw his mother again was when he was about to graduate from university, as he was considering applying to Juilliard for graduate studies. His mother was in the hospital. She had lung cancer. His father, who didn’t know anything, had set up house with a new woman. When the woman gave birth to a child, his mother’s condition worsened to the point that she had to be moved to a hospice ward.

His mother, waiting to die, no longer resembled her former beauty. Her vitality had faded, and her body was becoming like a mummified corpse. Her skin was rough, like plastic. Holding his mother’s hand, Haewon could do nothing.
His mother, enduring the pain with narcotic painkillers, was mentally faint. Her consciousness, once lost, wouldn’t return easily. Unable to breathe on her own, his mother didn’t die from cancer; she suffocated from the fluids building up in her respiratory system.
After losing her hair and weight due to chemotherapy, his mother didn’t want to show herself to his father in that condition. She had told his father that she was alive and dying from cancer, but his father didn’t visit her.

It wasn’t because he disliked her, but because he was afraid. He only wanted to keep the memory of her as the young music student playing piano in that restaurant he loved. A selfish and cowardly man, he couldn’t face the sins he had committed.
His mother died like that. After his mother’s death, Haewon abandoned his plans to study abroad. He no longer had the desire to learn or practice. He quit preparing for graduate school and competitions. In truth, he hated living by effort. He continued playing the violin, persuaded by his professors, but since his mother’s death, he had withered in every way.
That was why Haewon couldn’t live with his father and stepmother. That was why he couldn’t be part of their family. He couldn’t live with them until they realized the pain of suffocating from the mucus building up in their lungs.

∞ ∞ ∞
For a few days, he stayed at a hotel, then at the house of an unknown man. He had never had savings or emergency funds. As his father said, Haewon had always spent money but didn’t know how to save or earn. He had never felt the need to save.
After paying for four days of hotel accommodations with the money he had, Haewon was left with nothing—no more than ten thousand won in his pocket. The violin slung over his shoulder was a burden. If he sold it now, he could get ten billion, or maybe even more, if he was lucky. He never imagined that the day would come so quickly when he’d have to sell his violin.

Haewon didn’t answer his father’s or stepmother’s calls. Every time their calls came in, he wanted to throw his phone on the street.
He headed toward the officetel. It had been his home, but now it belonged to Haejung. Ironically, he felt no hatred toward Haejung, unlike his father or stepmother. Haejung was an innocent child. The space that had once been his was now his half-brother’s, but he didn’t feel the intense resentment he might have expected. It seemed to be because it was Haejung.
If it had been his stepmother or father’s name on it, he would have destroyed everything valuable in the officetel and ruined it. It was his own fault for not knowing how to flatter or fulfill others’ needs, a foolish mistake.

He opened the officetel door where Kim Jaemin had stayed last. Haewon froze. He imagined that if it had ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) been in his stepmother’s name, she would have ruined the officetel, but the sight in front of him was different.
"...Fucking bastard."
I did not expect such a lowly act from him, but the officetel was truly a mess. It looked like a thief had come in, everything was a disaster, and even the closet and drawers were left wide open, looking exactly like a scene from a few minutes before the whole place fell apart. For someone as indifferent as Haewon, it was hard to believe that he could leave such a filthy mess behind as a way to vent his frustration.

Haewon closed the door and went inside. He walked into the living room with his shoes on. It was such a mess that he didn’t even know where or how to start cleaning.
This really was the end. He decided to take comfort in the fact that it was over between them. Kim Jaemin had made this childish and dirty mess, which clearly meant he didn’t plan to show up again.
Haewon sighed and started picking up the clothes lying at his feet. If his father or stepmother saw the state of the officetel, they would definitely think that Haewon had done this on purpose.

It was a place he had to leave anyway. He vaguely started tidying up, separating things to throw away. While he was busy cleaning, the intercom rang. It was the security office.
"Yes."
―"Please pick up a package for 2205. It had been piled up in the corner and I didn’t see it until now. You can come to the security office to collect it."

"I don’t think I ordered anything. Is it really for me?"
―"It’s a package for 2205. The name... Is it... Mun Haewon? Is that you?"
"Yes, that’s me. I’ll come pick it up."

It seemed like something Haewon had ordered long ago and forgotten about while being away from home. He went down to the security office and absentmindedly took the package handed to him, only to freeze when he saw who the sender was.
...It was from Lee Taeshin.
Haewon took the package back to the officetel.

Taeshin's phone number, his name, and the building he had lived in were all on the package. When Haewon opened it, two pictures and a notebook fell out. The pictures were of Taeshin, standing awkwardly next to an object at an exhibition, smiling a strange smile.
He flipped through the notebook. There were some sporadic diary entries and sketches of the mocking images that came to mind at the time—ideas for objects, it seemed. Even after everything, Taeshin had sent him something like this. It was so typical of Taeshin’s awkwardness.
He hadn’t answered the phone, nor had he read the messages Taeshin sent, instead deleting everything at once, but now Taeshin, even after his death, was still annoying him to the point where it made Haewon’s chest burn with frustration.

There are things people don’t want their parents to see, and things they might show to their friends. Taeshin must have figured it was better to send this to him than to let it fall into his parents’ hands. Maybe, if he had any lingering feelings, he might have even thought it was worth sending this before jumping.
Haewon stared at the foolish face of Taeshin awkwardly smiling in the pictures for a long time.
"...Idiot."

He didn’t want to see it. Haewon stuffed Taeshin’s photo between the pages of the notebook and threw both into the box he had piled up for things to discard.
Taking only what he needed, two large suitcases were packed. Haewon headed to the house of the unknown man where he had stayed these past few days.
He had no money, just ten thousand won in his pocket, and the moment of selling his instrument had finally come. The man approached Haewon, asking if he had a light.

Haewon didn’t smoke. His mother hated it. He wasn’t the kind of person to follow everything his mother said, but he didn’t smoke.
He reminded the man that they were in a no-smoking area and shook his head, indicating that he didn’t have a lighter. Without teasing, the man took out a lighter from his pocket and lit his cigarette. As he inhaled the smoke, he stared at Haewon, looking at his face intensely.
Haewon stared back at him, even as the man smoked and blew out a cloud of smoke.

The man asked who Haewon was waiting for. People standing outside hotels usually had one thing in common.
Most of them were waiting for someone, and there probably weren’t people like Haewon who had no place to go, just standing there. When Haewon didn’t answer, the man laughed. He was dressed like a company employee entertaining foreign buyers.
He was sturdy and tall. His fingers, holding the cigarette, were thick. He looked like he could do judo. He stared at Haewon like he was seeing a stray dog shivering from the cold in the street, as if he was dying to do something for him.

The man looked at the violin case on Haewon’s shoulder and asked if it was a violin or a viola. Haewon didn’t answer and just looked forward.
The man smoked the cigarette halfway, threw the butt on the ground, and stamped it out. He then asked Haewon if he had eaten dinner.
Haewon, who was hungry, shook his head to indicate that he hadn’t. The man smiled. Haewon didn’t understand why it was funny that he was starving, but he didn’t question it. The man asked if Haewon wanted to have dinner with him.

Haewon lowered his eyes to the ground. His feet in the shoes he had worn for so long outside the hotel were cold. It was freezing. He didn’t want to let his father and stepmother get away with making him feel this cold, but in his current situation, with no money or strength, he couldn’t do anything about it.
Haewon didn’t have many options. He could either apologize to his stepmother and kneel down or continue suffering from the cold and hunger until he had to sell his violin for a pittance. His stepmother and father were mocking him for wasting money without saving anything.
Haewon raised his head and looked at the man, whose eyes were sparkling as if waiting for an answer. The man said he would buy something delicious for Haewon. Haewon said he wanted to have dinner at the man’s house. The man looked at Haewon in surprise, but his hesitation didn’t last long, and he nodded.

He stood Haewon up and brought his car. Haewon didn’t hesitate and got into his car. For now, he wouldn’t have to suffer from the cold.
Haewon stayed at the man’s house. He asked Haewon if he had no place to go, and Haewon said he had been kicked out after fighting with his father. The man asked if Haewon was a student, and Haewon replied that he was. He was twenty-eight.
The man seemed to believe Haewon’s words. He didn’t ask for details, only thinking deeply about the reason Haewon might have been kicked out. Kindly, he told Haewon that if he had nowhere else to go, he could stay at his house.

While staying there, Haewon kissed him several times. He sat on the man’s lap and kissed him. The man didn’t demand much. His body was solid, and he had rough hands, like someone who worked in construction, not like a company worker. He didn’t use lotion or cream, so his skin was dry and rough. When he touched Haewon’s body, it felt like being scratched by sandpaper. Haewon didn’t know the man’s name, and he didn’t ask Haewon’s name either.
"Is that all?"
The man, who had let Haewon stay for several days without even knowing his name, asked.

"There’s more, but I just threw it away."
The man brought Haewon’s suitcase into his living room and moved it to the empty room where Haewon was staying. Haewon opened the suitcase and started taking out what he needed when the man came up behind him. His arms wrapped around Haewon’s waist, and his face buried into Haewon’s neck, inhaling deeply. The coolness of his breath against that part of his skin felt refreshing.