Small Enough to Hide

He had been burning the stress out of his body—the endless hamster wheel of work and ordinary days, and Chairman Cha, who watched his every move—in physical pleasure. Where instinct was concerned, he was thoroughly faithful to it.

Even so, this was not something you did to someone who was ill.

When Seol-woo’s fingers drew near those luscious eyes, Yeon instinctively shut one of them.

“If I touch, there’s no taking it back, is there.”

“What?”

“So what happened when they ran into each other three years later.”

“Oh—ohh. They meet again, and even after he loses his memory he falls in love with the same person. The male lead’s real name is Han Seo-jun, apparently. He was admitted to Ward A8, and he’s about as tall as Ethan.”

“You met him?”

Meeting someone else he might have let pass. But she knew the man’s name?

Seol-woo’s brow slowly drew tight.

“Ah, well—earlier I was on my way back from looking at the terrace and I fell asleep in the hallway. He caught me, they said.”

“And what was Ethan doing. Don’t tell me you went out alone.”

As she kept explaining this and that, words she should never have said to Seol-woo slipped out of her mouth.

The moment Yeon realized her mistake, her face crumpled.

“It was only for a second.”

“You went out alone, wandered around, fell asleep, that man caught you, the two of you got acquainted—and that’s why you’ve been watching this drama all day?”

Seol-woo rubbed the back of his neck in irritation, then shot to his feet and strode to the bed.

“Get up, Ethan.”

“Ah, what the—… When did you get here?”

“I gave you time off to look after her properly, and you let someone else’s hands take her? You trying to get yourself killed?”

He had been poking Ethan; now he yanked the blanket Ethan was clutching away without mercy.

“Hyung, I just stepped out to Felice for a minute and— no. Forget it. Yeah, this one’s on me. I’ve committed a crime worthy of death.”

Ethan had been about to plead that Yeon had wandered off on her own, but the moment he caught the pitiful droop of her eyes, he shut his mouth.

He couldn’t throw that fragile little puppy to the wolves just to save his own skin.

Just beside the hospital-room door, at the sink outside, Seol-woo stood knotting his tie with easy habit.

Yeon, who had eaten nothing since the evening before, sat on the bed and stared blankly at him as he bustled through getting ready for work.

“You were supposed to be good at going hungry. Why are you this weak.”

Seol-woo came over, sat beside her, and rubbed the peach-flushed curve of her cheek.

“I had a dream.”

Yeon’s gaze landed on his mouth.

At the edge of his swollen lower lip, a wound redder than its natural color stood out.

She had prayed it wouldn’t be real. Faced with a reality she didn’t want to admit, she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

“What kind of dream.”

Watching her deepen from peach to strawberry, Seol-woo leaned a little closer, a teasing smile tucked into his face.

“You… you already know.”

“I don’t, actually. Oh—this. I woke up and it was just there. It still stings.”

Yeon drew in a breath and turned the dream back over.

The kiss between Won-woo and Ha-jeong in the drama The Day We Met Again. It was definitely a scene from the show she had been watching before she fell asleep.

The man and woman swallowing each other’s lips had become her and Seol-woo in the space of a heartbeat.

She had seen him, wrapped her arms around the clean line of his jaw and the neck that fell straight beneath it, and pushed her mouth against his without a thought.

It had been her. She was sure of it.

Seol-woo’s quiet voice rang through her head. That memory was the last of it.

“I guess I shouldn’t have watched the drama.”

“Biting and sucking—you were a complete mess.”

Seol-woo tapped the lip that still bore the mark. Tap, tap.

“I’m sorry. Let me at least put some ointment on it.”

“No. Don’t touch it. I’ve already had a taste of where my patience ends.”

He straightened the angel pendant at her throat and drew well back.

He was playing it cool, but the sunken register of his voice and the sleep still sitting in his eyes told her he hadn’t slept deeply.

Sending Ethan and Chen to Felice yesterday had been a mercy.

“It wasn’t for long, was it?”

“And how was it in your dream.”

“I don’t remember. Except for me doing… that, to your lips, Oppa. Oh! I remember this, too. You touching first is against the rules.”

Around the time Yeon fell asleep, Seol-woo had taken the folding chair beside the bed and kept watch.

It was while he was looking at her, asleep with a fairly peaceful face, that she pushed herself up, eyes half-open, and laid her lips over his.

Startled stiff, he soon reached for her waist.

She was as sweet as he had expected. She tasted good.

Even knowing she was not in her right mind, he could not, in the end, refuse those soft, yielding lips.

Yeon, who didn’t know the proper way and only kept biting and sucking—and Seol-woo, who took her place, rolling his tongue into a deep kiss—he let her go only after he realized his body had heated like a dog in heat.

Dream or sleep-talk. You were the one who started it. I was the one who wanted it.

“Let’s call it one foul each.”

“I didn’t commit one.”

“Right. You were unconscious, so you’re the exception. I’ll take the warning alone.”

“What foul did you commit, Oppa?”

I nearly swallowed you whole while you slept.

“That’s a secret. Ethan will be here soon, so get your tests done properly. Listen to the doctor. You don’t have to listen to Ethan.”

“Okay. I will.”

“You’ll be able to eat this evening, so let’s go have something good.”

A gentle hand settled on her head.

Seol-woo smoothed her hair once or twice as she nodded hard, then walked away on reluctant feet.

At Ethan’s relentless insistence Yeon sat in a wheelchair, glanced back yet again, and muttered. She hadn’t even hurt her legs. She had no idea why she was being hauled along on wheels.

“I can walk just fine.”

“No. You haven’t eaten anything since last night, so you’re worn out. The tests are more or less done, so let’s finish the consult and get something in you.”

“Seol-woo oppa said we’d eat something good this evening.”

“And when exactly is hyung showing up. Eat something simple, at least.”

“I’ll eat when Oppa gets here.”

“Stubborn. Fine. We’ll do it your way.”

Ethan, who had been focused on pushing the chair, stroked the crown of her head—the girl who, despite having fasted clean through for the exam, was digging in her heels to wait for Seol-woo.

She’d been frightened of him for a while. Seemed they’d gotten fairly close now.

“Oh! It’s Won-woo.”

“Huh? Who’s Won-woo. Since when do you know anyone here…”

“Wow, you recognize him today? Yeah, that’s right. This is that Won-woo.”

Running into Seo-jun and Min-jun again outside the counseling room, Ethan creased his brow as if the sight displeased him.

Seol-woo’s nagging—that he hadn’t looked after Yeon properly—was still circling his ears.

“Did you watch it?”

“Yes. I watched it for two whole days and it was so much fun. Do you have anything else? Recommend something.”

“How was I. Do you think I act well?”

“I’m not really good at judging things like that. But it feels like Won-woo is standing right in front of me.”

Because she was in the wheelchair, Seo-jun crouched so he could meet the eyes of Yeon, seated far below him.

“Thank you for enjoying it. Will you give me your number? I’ve got a whole string of fun dramas at my fingertips. I’ll recommend them.”

“My number?”

“Yes. Your phone number.”

Seo-jun held out his phone as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Give him Ethan’s number.”

“No. I’ll go find the fun dramas myself.”

“What should I do. I don’t have a phone.”

“You don’t have a cell phone?”

Behind them, Min-jun came closer, thoroughly startled.

“No.”

No smartphone, in the age of 5G.

She looked about the age to live with a phone glued to her hand. The age that liked to eat good food, step into pretty cafés, capture it all on camera, and show it off on social media.

It struck Seo-jun as strange that a woman lying in a room that cost a fortune by the day didn’t even own a phone worth half that much, and he looked up at Ethan.

“What. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“It’s nothing. Then at least give me your number.”

Seo-jun did not want to let go of his tie to Yeon.

He wanted to keep meeting those clear eyes, so unlike the tens of thousands of gazes that looked at him.

“Step aside, would you. We’re past the appointment time.”

As if he had not the slightest intention of obliging, Ethan looked Seo-jun up and down and started pushing the wheelchair again.

“Hyung, give me a business card.”

“A card? For what. Didn’t you see the day before yesterday? That tall brat with no manners snatching her off.”

“She watched my drama. She’ll take it.”

Seo-jun wrote his number on the back of the card he had taken from Min-jun and called out to Yeon, who was just then going into the counseling room.

“It’s my number.”

“Hey, listen—”

“Ethan, stop. Can’t I take this?”

“What for. Hyung’s going to hate it.”

She hesitated a little at the words that Seol-woo would hate it, but Yeon glanced at Ethan’s face and accepted the card Seo-jun held out.

“You’re also the first person I’ve met who isn’t one of my oppas, and more than anything the drama was really fun. Won-woo was cool, and Ha-jeong was pretty, too. So I just want to take it.”

“Fine. All right.”

Ethan nodded in the end.

Making a new friend wouldn’t be so bad. The man was an actor whose face was known to the whole world; he was hardly going to have some other motive.

Ethan had appointed himself her guardian, but he did not have the right to shut out the people she chose to meet.

“If you get bored, call me.”

“Okay. I will.”

Yeon vanished with a bright smile and a wave, and Min-jun, who had followed Seo-jun at some point, shook his head.

“She’s bewitching. Completely bewitching. That kid puts a spell on people.”

“Don’t even think about pulling her this way. She doesn’t fit.”

“She isn’t even stepping forward herself—how am I supposed to pull her in. And look at her being here. Look at the guard stuck to her side. You can’t sweet-talk kids like that into debuting. I am a little curious what’s wrong with her, though.”

Min-jun slung an arm over Seo-jun’s shoulder.

Seo-jun’s counseling results were on the mild side. It was a problem that often turned up in entertainers who lived on attention.

Perhaps because he had been told that, so long as it was managed well, it would not progress into depression, the two of them—faces bright—watched Ethan’s back, which had completely hidden Yeon, for a moment, then walked on.

Looking up at the high ceiling of the first pretty room she had ever had, she thought it.

If the real Sun Woo-yeon appeared, what would become of her?

Chen, and Ethan, and Seol-woo oppa too. They were probably only giving their affection to her, who resembled that woman, in place of the woman named Sun Woo-yeon.

She was afraid that if they found that woman, she would lose any place left to go.

She knew it was greed, but she did not want to leave this house. She did not want to leave her room. That useless anxiety, hers alone, surfaced somewhere she had never expected.

“She’s not there?”

“Not there.”

“I couldn’t find her either. Where did she go—she didn’t go outside at dawn, did she?”

“I told security to check the cameras.”

The third day since she had come home after being discharged.

The days that had passed in peace, without a single notable symptom, might as well have been the calm before the storm. It was a morning on which Yeon had vanished without a trace.

Ethan and Chen, back from turning over the second-floor rooms, the basement, even the garage, shook their heads with the same expression as Seol-woo.

Sometimes she turned up in another room, but this was the first time they had failed to find her for so long, and the hand Seol-woo kept raking back through his hair trembled in fine little shakes.

Felice, excessively vast, was almost something to resent.

“Yes.”

“Yes. Understood.”

A sigh of relief escaped him on its own. She hadn’t left the house. Thank heaven for that.

“She’s inside. Let’s look again.”

Seol-woo soothed the burn in his gut with cold water and was heading back toward Yeon’s room when he stopped dead.

Chen and Ethan, their path blocked along with his, halted in turn.

“What.”

“Drawers, closets—open every space Yeon could fit into.”

The words were barely out before Seol-woo ran to the dressing room and flung open every door of the wardrobes that filled both walls.

“Damn it. Where the hell is she.”

The dressing-room wardrobes were easily large enough for Yeon to climb inside, but she was nowhere to be seen.

He knew she was in the house, and still he could not see her, and his heart slammed hard with no sign of settling.

Having overturned his own room, Yeon’s room, even the linen closet, Seol-woo headed for the study.

It was still quiet, so Chen and Ethan seemed to be coming up empty as well.

Past shelves crammed with more books than he could count, he opened the wall closet that appeared there, and platinum-blonde hair carrying the scent of flowers spilled down before his eyes.

The head that had been leaning against the door lost its place and dropped limply against his abdomen.

Finding Yeon wandering through a dream in a crumpled posture no one could possibly sleep in, a twitch ran through the corner of Seol-woo’s eye.

Had she still not adjusted to this house?

He wondered why she sought out a bed like this. Whether she disliked wide places and went looking for narrow ones, or whether a soft mattress was unfamiliar and she slept on the floor.

At the stir of him moving to lift her and carry her away, Yeon blinked. Her eyelids, swollen from not sleeping properly, were pitiful to see.

“Oppa?”

“Oppa?”

Together with a memory buried for a very long time, the image of her as a child flickered past. Overflowing with love, she used to call him with a face that was always shining.

“Oppa, Seol-woo oppa!”

“Yeah.”

“Is this a closet?”

“It’s the wall closet in the study. We don’t even use it.”

No matter how small her frame, it was a space so cramped she had barely managed to fold herself in.

On the thin knees of Yeon, who had hidden in a place where it would not have been strange to crack her head on the divider dozens of times, a purple bruise had already settled.

“I think being tied up is better after all.”

“What?”

“At first I wondered why they went that far. Before I went into the hospital, Mom tied me up, too. So I didn’t really know—only that I was supposed to stay tied. Now that I have freedom, and I’m actually looking at myself, I’m a little scared.”