The Calls He Never Missed

Won-young felt Lee-kyung's warmth. Even drawing only this close, the heat of him reached her.

That winter.

That season—why had she spent the whole of it convinced his heart was cold?

"Seonbae."

"Yeah."

"There's something I want to ask."

"Ask."

"Are you really not uncomfortable? Seeing me every day, now that I've come back like this."

He looked at her. His gaze swam, unsteady, as if he were staring into a warped space.

"Do I look uncomfortable?"

"I can't tell."

"I'm not uncomfortable with you. What would there be to be uncomfortable about?"

He looked straight down at her and smiled, light and easy. Ryu Lee-kyung stood six foot two; Noh Won-young barely cleared five foot three. The distance between them felt as vast as the gap in their heights.

Won-young bit down hard on her lip.

"...Why did you pick up every time I called to whine at you?"

"..."

"You didn't have to. Do you know that, Seonbae? For nine years, you never missed a single one of my calls."

She had never thought it strange. Given the way he was, it was easy enough to assume he simply answered whatever rang, with no particular meaning behind it. Still, she had wanted to ask, just once—why he had never refused her, not even once.

His answer caught her off guard.

"It was fun."

"What?"

"Your calls. They were fun. I was shut up in the studio all day doing nothing but paint, and you told me plenty of interesting stories."

"They were fun?"

"Yeah."

"That's all?"

As if he were looking at a child, Lee-kyung let out a short laugh, bent at the waist, and gave her forehead a light push.

"What, did you think I still had some lingering attachment to you? Noh Won-young, get a grip. It's nine years. And the Ryu Lee-kyung you know was never the type for some pure, lifelong devotion."

He turned to go back to his painting, and Won-young hurried after him. She didn't know why, but it felt unfair. That was all? Fun? Fun?

"Hey. Ryu Lee-kyung. You dumped me, and I got drunk and called you crying. And now you're telling me that was fun?"

"It was fun. How wouldn't it be? The girl who threatened me—said never to call her again, said she'd kill me if I tried—then not even a few months after she left for Japan, she came scurrying back to the phone. You think that wasn't entertaining?"

"What the hell. How can a person be like that? That was fun to you?"

"Yeah. It was funny. Very you, I thought."

"Then were you ever sorry? To me? Not even once?"

That was when the mouth that had been curling in mischief pressed shut. His expression went cold in an instant, and Won-young closed her own along with it.

A brief silence fell. His reaction was edged, just as it had been back then. Whenever she wanted to hear what he really felt, he retreated into his cave and shut the door on her from the threshold, perfectly composed. He was never serious. He only joked, and never told her a single thing that actually mattered. And then a moment like this would come, and he would act like someone else entirely.

You. Only this far.

I told you not to come any closer. It felt exactly as if he were saying that.

Regret seized her almost at once. She shouldn't have brought it up. She'd soured the air for nothing. A faint shadow settled over Lee-kyung's face.

"What am I supposed to be sorry to you for? What exactly are you expecting from me?"

"Seonbae, that's not what I meant..."

"Did you forget? You were the one who said we should break up. Not me."

"..."

"You want to keep digging through what's already passed? Keep going red in the face over all the awkward parts?"

She had lost completely. All at once she understood it: raking over the past would do neither of them any good. She stood looking at him for a long while. His gaze traveled slowly down from the crown of her head—eyes, nose, mouth. Her throat ached and burned, as if something were caught there. Won-young shook her head.

"No."

She had been sulking at him with her eyes, but she decided she would rather just draw, the way he had said. Quietly she stepped past him into the space where he had been working. Unable to say anything more, she took up a pencil in silence, dragged a chair over, and sat beside him as he squeezed paint onto the palette.

Thinking it over, it wasn't so unfair after all. After she and Seonbae broke up, it was true she had managed to love without getting hurt. What had settled into habit was this: when she loved someone, she never gave them all of her heart. She always kept half of it back—a kindness for the person she had left behind, and for herself. And so all five of the partings since had been healthy ones. They had been able to become people who sincerely wished each other well going forward, and that was nothing like the breakup with Seonbae, when she had hurled curses and sworn she would kill him.

To untangle the feelings knotted up inside her, Won-young changed the subject at once.

"What's that?"

Aside from the space where Lee-kyung worked, a wide stretch beside it bore the traces of someone's underdrawing. It felt similar to what he had been painting all this time, and yet different.

"Is that yours too?"

Lee-kyung answered as if it were nothing.

"There's a student who comes to learn painting. She drew it."

"Ah. Oh Se-hyung?"

Lee-kyung's eyes widened, and he rubbed his forehead. The look said she knew entirely too much.

"Ryu Ji-an told you everything?"

"Yeah. I know more about you than you'd think. If I ask, Ji-an answers pretty much anything."

"What else did you hear?"

"The nine-year history of Ryu Lee-kyung without me."

Lee-kyung, who had been holding a brush and layering color, reached again for the paint. He tended to use a great deal of red, and the piece he was working on now was unusually heavy with it. She couldn't tell whether he actually liked the color. She knew almost everything about his tastes, but the version of him that faced a canvas was somehow unfamiliar, and she couldn't read a single feeling in it. Most painters poured the emotions layered inside a work out like a waterfall. She had looked at his paintings on countless days, and still she had never been able to tell. Seonbae and Seonbae's paintings felt strangely separate, as if they belonged to different worlds. Of course she loved every painting he had made. The reason was simple. They had come from the tips of his fingers.

Won-young watched his movements for a moment, then went on.

"I heard that right up until you graduated, some well-off family was sponsoring you. You used to say you'd rather die than take anyone's help, but still, it was good that you—"

"I'll go make some coffee."

Cutting her off mid-sentence, Lee-kyung stood and irritably stripped off his work smock. Won-young had no choice but to stop talking and stare blankly at his back.

There it was again. The moment the talk turned to something he didn't want to hear, he chopped a person's words clean off. She wasn't asking him to take her into his cave. She had only come back because she wanted to be beside him. Only that. Because she wanted to stay at his side.

A little later he returned with the coffee. It had to be the same coffee, and yet the scent was different. It had always been that way. The coffee he drank tasted better and smelled better than hers. She was laughing at how pathetic she was when he turned.

"What'd your boyfriend say."

"Huh?"

"Your new younger boyfriend. Does he know you drop by my studio this often?"

Ah. Her boyfriend. So he had been curious about that after all.