A Forbidden Gift
"Did something upset you today?"
The piano teacher, who always arrived on the dot, was frighteningly perceptive. Now past fifty, with her gentle face, she had a knack for divining Lee-seol's mood just by watching her run through Hanon exercises to loosen up her fingers.
Granted, they'd known each other for over five years, but it was still uncanny.
Once, Lee-seol had asked her how on earth she read her mind so well. The teacher had only smiled and said it was easy enough if you simply watched someone's expression over the sheet music, or the way their fingers pressed the keys. Lee-seol hadn't understood a word of it, but she'd shrugged and let it go.
She rubbed the back of her neck and gave an awkward smile.
"I've been grounded."
"Oh, dear. That's too harsh of her, isn't it? You're at the very age when you want to be out having fun."
Without knowing any of the particulars, the piano teacher defended her in that mild voice of hers.
In truth, considering the rhythm of Lee-seol's life until now, staying indoors for a week was hardly anything remarkable. If she simply kept quietly at her tasks, a week would slip by before she even registered the passage of time.
And yet — Granny had gone out of her way to forbid it.
There was something sweetly poisonous about the word forbidden. It made you conscious of what you'd never noticed, and made you want to slip free of chains you hadn't even known were binding you. A rebellious urge to go outside surged up in her, hot and sudden — like a belated adolescence.
This is strange. It's all so strange...
Lee-seol found her own emotional swings profoundly unfamiliar. Life at Sehwawon had always been peaceful and dull. Almost nothing happened there that could stir up real turmoil — and that placidity had become Dongbaek's great weakness, plain and simple.
But now she found herself reflecting on herself over and over, in a way she never had before. She hated to admit it, but the wellspring of this change was one person.
Woo Tae-shin...
Awkward one moment, oddly pleasant the next. However she tried to put it into words, it came out clumsy — something she couldn't possibly say aloud in front of anyone.
"Teacher, you lived in Seoul for a long time, didn't you?"
"I did. Why do you ask?"
"Just... why did you move from Seoul to Eulju-ri?"
The piano teacher, who had once played with a municipal orchestra in the capital, was a Seoul native born and bred. Around a decade ago, she'd come down to Eulju-ri with her husband and settled into a pretty two-story Western-style house with a lovely garden.
She ran a small piano academy downtown, teaching mostly elementary and middle school students, and in the evenings she gave private lessons like this one.
Lee-seol had grown curious. Was there really a reason compelling enough to abandon life in Seoul and put down roots here?
"This is the first time you've ever asked me something personal, Lee-seol. Oh — not that I mind."
The piano teacher broke into a smile, looking inwardly delighted.
"It's my husband's hometown, you see. I was curious what kind of place it was, and once I came to see it for myself, I liked it even more — so I just settled right in."
"...Don't you regret it?"
Living as an orchestral pianist in a major city must have meant glamorous, dazzling opportunities. Her income then would have been beyond comparison with now. What possible reason could there be to hand all of that back and shut herself away in a quiet place like this?
Even having lived in Eulju-ri her whole life, Lee-seol couldn't understand it.
Or perhaps — precisely because she'd lived here all her life, she couldn't.
"Nine out of ten people ask me that when they hear this story."
Smiling softly, the teacher rummaged through her bag as she spoke, and Lee-seol felt a flicker of embarrassment.
"Well. I'm very happy with my life now, you see. I love places that smell of people. Cities just wear me out."
"..."
"Enough chit-chat, then. Shall we work on this piece today?"
The teacher laid the score she'd brought onto the music stand. It was Beethoven's tenth sonata. She'd chosen it because she found the interpretation charming — the left and right hands carrying on like a conversation between a man and a woman. Lee-seol had performed it a few times, though it wasn't yet fully under her fingers.
The smell of people.
Slowly nodding to herself, Lee-seol placed her hands on the keys.
The lesson ended before long. After seeing the piano teacher out, Lee-seol quietly returned to her room on the second floor. Her schedule for the day was finished, which meant it was time for her secret work.
She opened her old laptop and launched her manuscript program. Everything went smoothly up to that point — and then came the trouble. The cursor had been blinking for ages with no progress to show for it. Her hands sat frozen stiff, and her mind was hopelessly congested.
"Hah."
It would have been lovely if the words flowed in proportion to the hours she kept her bottom glued to the chair, but today's session was clearly a lost cause. She was just running a hand through her hair and closing the laptop when—
Knock, knock.
Who could that be? Lee-seol glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty at night. The only person who ever came to her room at this hour was Tongyeong-daek, who sometimes brought up freshly cut seasonal fruit as a late-night snack. Rising from her seat, Lee-seol quietly opened the door.
Tae-shin stood in the hallway. Why is he here? Unprepared for the sight of him, she tilted her head.
"What brings you at this hour...?"
"I had something I wanted to give you."
What he thrust out without preamble was a shopping bag. She looked back and forth between the bag and his face, silently asking what this was.
"A phone. Use it on the sly, and don't get caught."
"...Why all of a sudden?"
"For the tour I gave you today."
He gave his wrist a little shake, the bag dangling from it, as if to say why aren't you taking it?
"If that reason doesn't suit you, shall we call it payment for listening to your piano playing?"
"...You heard all the way to that part?"
"You were quite good."
He smiled. Lee-seol could only stare at the shopping bag with a stricken expression.
Ordinarily she would never have accepted a gift from him. The fact that he'd gone out of his way to get something for her was one thing — the item itself was another. Granny had never permitted her to own a phone.
But circumstances had shifted, just slightly. This came right on the heels of a stinging humiliation — one that made all those hours she'd racked her brain, supposedly for Granny's sake, feel like wasted effort. An unfamiliar rebelliousness was bubbling up inside her.
She had to want it most of all at exactly this moment — and here he is. That was what Tae-shin's easy expression seemed to say. What a dangerously clever man. Lee-seol nearly clicked her tongue.
Her deliberation was brief. She quietly accepted the bag he held out.
"This is a secret between the two of us."
"A bit dramatic, isn't it?"
"Would you prefer a simpler word?"
An insufferable way with words. The kind that coaxed the answer out of her instead. Shooting him a sharp look, Lee-seol turned primly on her heel, half away from him.
"...Good night."
He gave her a small wink, cast a brief glance around her room, and turned cleanly on his heel — as if that really had been his only errand.
The door closed with a soft click. Lee-seol stared down at the white shopping bag.
She'd received it with such bravado, but now that he was gone and she stood alone with it, she felt oddly at a loss. What if Granny found out? The image of Yoon-hwa's furious face flickered through her mind and scattered.
...Maybe she just shouldn't have taken it at all.
It wasn't as though she had anyone she needed to be in close contact with — all she'd gained was one more weight on her heart. And yet she couldn't exactly hurl the expensive thing in the trash, either.
No — what's the point of agonizing over it? Shaking off the useless thoughts, Lee-seol perched demurely on the edge of her bed and slowly began unwrapping the package.
Inside the neat square box gleamed a brand-new phone, glossy white and the latest model.
It must have been around middle school when the other kids started getting phones one by one, and she'd envied them in secret.
The flip phones named after whatever celebrity was popular that season, the oddly shaped imported models. She remembered her friends showing off their phones in a competition over whose was prettier, and a small laugh escaped her.
When she powered the phone on, the brand logo bloomed across the black screen. She worked through the basic setup as instructed until the home screen finally appeared. She was poking around at everything, marveling, when a text message came in.
A short, curt message that didn't even bother to identify its sender. Only one person in the world could be contacting this phone.
Tap, tap. She typed the number in, saving it under Woo Tae-shin's name. It was only right, after all — her duty to the man who'd given her something so expensive.
And so the contact list held exactly one entry, sitting there forlornly: Tae-shin. She glared at the single lonely name for a while, then flopped backward onto the bed.
Staring up at the pattern of the wallpapered ceiling, she drew in a long, deep breath. Something in her chest felt tight and restless.