Orange Fanta-Flavored Lips
Did that kid not even register that he was younger than me?
“Just say it straight. Is it that we can’t because I’m still a minor, or is it that you don’t want me because it’s me?”
I couldn’t choose either answer. Every option he’d thrown at me was the wrong one.
“What the hell does age matter? We didn’t do anything else.”
Hyun-jin pressed me as if he were the one being cornered.
He was right. To claim it was off-limits because he was underage felt ridiculous when all he’d done was nuzzle his cheek against the nape of my neck like a lost puppy that had finally found its owner.
He couldn’t even wait out the few seconds I spent hesitating. His rough lips struck my forehead and cheeks in scattered, clumsy hits.
“W-wait a second.”
“I won’t do anything weird. I’ll only do what you did, okay? Lee Na-hee.”
In the end he found my mouth too, only to pull away almost at once. Neither of us knew the first thing about technique; we were that green.
After that honest first kiss came a slower second. The firm press of Hyun-jin’s soft lips made me jerk my head aside.
“I-I don’t like it… It’s my first time.”
“Who said it was my second? It’s my first too, fuck.”
Even while he huffed and growled, he clung to me with pitiful desperation.
“I won’t do anything else. I really won’t. Okay? Na-hee, just the lips…”
Na-hee, please, Na-hee…
He sounded like a lost child calling for its mother. Out of sheer pity I gave him my mouth a few more times, then twisted away when I couldn’t take any more; the moment I did, Hyun-jin hounded me with sudden ferocity.
“Fuck, that’s why I said we should get home already!”
He was practically Jekyll and Hyde. By the time I had soothed the raging version of him and gotten him seated beside me again, every drop of alcohol had burned out of my system.
While I wrestled the kid who was thrashing like a wild animal, our fingers somehow ended up laced together.
“Na-hee, when I turn of age. Okay?”
“When you… what…”
“Don’t play dumb, huh? Promise me. Just promise.”
Hot breath burrowed under my chin. I stretched my neck long, trying to escape the ticklish heat.
“S-stop it. You’re still a kid and already this shameless…”
The scolding after I’d already given in only made him grin sheepishly, embarrassed.
“This really is your first time?”
“I told you it is.”
The boy who claimed he wasn’t cold had been scarlet-faced for a while now.
“When I become an adult, Na-hee. We…”
Even flushed with shyness, Hyun-jin was relentless.
“Just wait one year for me. Okay? Promise.”
“…Why do you keep demanding some promise?”
He was frantic to wring an intangible vow out of me by any means.
That day a year from now, when he would finally be of age. There was no concrete plan—no place, no act spelled out. Yet we both knew exactly what the promise meant.
“You promised, Lee Na-hee.”
“What promise did I ever make?”
“Midnight, December thirty-first next year. Promise.”
Pinkies hooked, seals stamped. Even a promise without a single scrap of proof—if I refused, the look in his eyes said he would never let me go home.
“…We’ll do it. That day.”
An unspeakable hunger burned in those pretty eyes. Sparks leapt between us. Suddenly mortified, I dropped my gaze.
Hyun-jin’s still torso rose and fell in deep swells, as if he were sprinting in place. Such a beautiful face, and yet the heart underneath was pitch-black.
“Just listen for once…”
“When have I ever not listened to you? I do every damn thing you tell me, like a dog.”
That wasn’t wrong either. Left with nothing to say, I bit my own lip; he lifted our joined hands.
“Just wait one year, Lee Na-hee.”
With eyes that smoldered, Hyun-jin pressed his mouth hard against the back of my hand, stamping the vow into my skin.
We sat side by side in the back of the taxi and climbed out in front of the art museum. From there we walked home hand in hand—very slowly, matching each other’s unhurried steps.
The entire way, Hyun-jin never once loosened our laced fingers.
“Be honest, Lee Na-hee.”
“About what?”
“I’m your type. You kissed me first and everything.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re nowhere near my ideal type… about a light-year off, actually.”
“Then what is it? Choi Kyung-hwan?”
“Choi Kyung-hwan who—wait, you mean Assistant Manager Choi?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re insane. Do you know how many years older he is?”
Assistant Manager Choi did have a wholesome air about him. Still, he was less country policeman and more the cunning village headman’s son.
“Then Kim Chang-jin?”
“If you keep bringing Chang-jin into this, I’ll hit you…”
“Go ahead. Hit me.”
Hyun-jin guided my hand to his cheek. Or rather, he pretended to—then crushed it against his own lips instead.
“I wanted to know what it felt like to get hit by you, Lee Na-hee.”
He stared straight at me and bit down hard on the back of my hand.
“Ah!”
I yanked free and smacked him. He only grinned wider, as if the blow had delighted him. Suddenly I felt like the bigger idiot of the two.
“You’re like a snowman.”
The muffler hadn’t been enough; Hyun-jin had wrapped me in his own coat as well. The sleeves swallowed my hands completely, and the hem dragged along the ground.
That was me today: the snowman he had built. From the tight clasp of our hands, his uniquely fierce heat poured into me without a single gap.
Someday I might simply melt away in that warmth.
Even knowing it, I couldn’t bring myself to let go of Hyun-jin’s burning hand.
For all his talk, Hyun-jin returned to the apartment. He never even crossed the main house gate. In the CCTV blind spot he simply held me, laughed without pause, left a long—impossibly long—kiss on my forehead, and sent me inside.
I stood watching him descend the hill path for a long while before I finally went to my room.
I washed, changed, and lay down in the darkened room with the blanket drawn all the way to my chin.
Sleep did not seem likely to come. My heart hammered like mad. Hyun-jin was the blacksmith pounding at the red-hot metal of my chest.
Every time I replayed those kisses I melted inside the furnace he had lit, only to be reshaped again and again in his hands.
Before long, loud, raucous voices rose from the garden.
“Look here, Mrs. Jang—you need to lose some weight! Our fortune-teller says your late-life luck is absolute garbage. Soften that rotten temper of yours!”
Chairman Kwon had returned from his gathering. His thoroughly drunken voice thundered through the quiet mansion.
“Manager Lee, you raised that daughter of yours well. When she graduates, tell her to come work for us!”
My mother’s embarrassed laughter followed, joined by the madam’s and Mrs. Jang’s voices.
“Our chairman’s in a fine mood tonight. You’ll really take Na-hee into Kwonjin Construction?”
“Of course! Make her study hard. Graduate her quick—I’ll even play matchmaker!”
A gale of cackling laughter burst out.
Blink. Blink. I lay there like a corpse, eyes simply opening and closing. Against the pitch-black ceiling I redrew every moment of the day.
The tandem bicycle. Hyun-jin’s eyes narrowing to slits. The laugh that had exploded as if the whole situation were absurd. The alcohol-laced carbonation sliding down my throat. His broad shoulders as he knelt in front of me to tie my sneaker laces. The rainbow music fountain blooming under the full moon.
Hyun-jin’s shadowed eyes, the thick-knuckled fingers tangled with mine, the wet lips that had fretted beneath my chin, the sparse, scorching breaths…
All of it felt like a distant fantasy—so remote it might never have happened to me at all.
Terrified that sleep would erase everything as though it had never been, I stayed awake for a very long time.
Chapter 5: Orange Fanta-Flavored Lips
As the year turned, Kwon Hyun-jin threw himself fully into entrance-exam preparation. An academic grind that had never been written into his fate now kept him busy from dawn to dark.
Even so, he attended the chairman’s seventieth-birthday banquet.
Manager Lee had been too worn out to host at home, so this time it was held at a hotel in Jangchung-dong. Hyun-jin performed the full ceremonial bows wishing his grandfather long life and, by all accounts, was quite attentive throughout.
“Looks like once he inherits President Kwon’s shares, the chairman’s will be transferred soon after.”