A Pair of Swans
Her eyes, holding candlelight within them, flickered faintly. Something seemed to well up as if about to overflow, yet what it was remained unknown.
“No, nothing.”
Baek Yeo-eun, who had been moving her lips over and over, finally swallowed her words. From the weakly trailing end of her sentence, a bitterness resembling resignation seeped through.
But Kang-hyun had no intention of prying into whatever lay behind them. He was not that curious about the woman.
“I’m fine. Just go by yourself if you want.”
He offered it offhandedly, as though it were nothing worth fretting over.
That would probably have been the best choice—for Baek Yeo-eun, and for him as well.
Unfortunately, she shook her head.
“No. I don’t want to go either.”
She had been sparkling with interest only moments before, yet her surrender came surprisingly fast. He wondered if she was sulking, but there was no real displeasure in her face. The clear features, wiped clean of expression, gave nothing away.
Not that it was any of his concern either way.
“Suit yourself.”
The conversation ended there. They neither discussed how to fill the emptied schedule nor made any attempt to ease the awkward atmosphere that had settled between them.
“If you’re done eating, let’s go.”
Kang-hyun cast a cursory glance over the cold food and called for the check without waiting for a reply. Baek Yeo-eun, who had set down her fork long ago, rose and followed him without a word.
Leaving the restaurant, the two of them walked the path that led to the lobby, keeping a careful distance. Night had deepened over the resort, lending it an atmosphere entirely different from the day.
Whenever the torches spaced sparsely along the walkway flared in the wind, their two long shadows stretched toward each other as if to touch, only to fall apart again. The crash of waves breaking far out at sea was muffled and distant; the cry of insects at their feet was starkly, almost indecently clear.
Perhaps it was that unbalanced gap, or the silence that kept deepening between them. His senses gradually sharpened to a keen edge, and the base of his neck grew stiff.
Kang-hyun kneaded the nape of his neck and quickened his pace, gaze fixed straight ahead.
“...”
“...”
The suffocating quiet held all the way up in the elevator until they reached the top floor.
At the door of their assigned suite, Kang-hyun tapped the key card. The lock released with a cheerful electronic chime, and he shoved the door open with impatient hands.
He strode straight through the living room—only to stop dead in front of the bedroom, as if some mechanism inside him had seized.
“What’s wrong?”
The footsteps approaching from behind with that puzzled question also halted. Silence returned at once.
On the vast bed, a pair of swans folded from towels nestled affectionately, beaks touching. In front of them, red rose petals had been scattered with painstaking care into the shape of a heart. It was, quite literally, a spectacle.
“...”
Kang-hyun did not look back. He therefore had no way of knowing what expression the woman standing just over his shoulder wore as she took in the same scene. The silence stretched, precarious.
Then, abruptly, the sound of her swallowing her breath cut nakedly into his eardrums.
In an instant the density of the air changed. Despite the cool breath of the air conditioner, a hot flush climbed his spine. For some reason the woman’s scent had thickened, raising the very density of the room.
The air, pulled taut as if it might burst at any second, pricked unpleasantly against his skin. And even if he did not want to know what might burst, any healthy man would know.
“I’ll wash first.”
In the end Kang-hyun turned toward the bathroom first, as though declaring surrender.
The suite consisted of a living room and a single bedroom; the bathroom was attached to the latter, so there was no way through without crossing the bedroom.
He passed the torturous bed, stepped into the bathroom, and stripped off his clothes in a single motion. Still not enough, he twisted the shower lever all the way to cold.
Ice-cold water struck his overheated skin without mercy. One hand braced against the wall, he took the full force of it and forced his breathing steady.
Fortunately the sticky tangle of thoughts that had clung inside his head began to wash away. Even so, that damned flower scent lingered like a hallucination, circling the tip of his nose.
Kang-hyun scrubbed roughly at his face. Whether from the irritable touch or something else, his skin burned as if scalded.
After a shower several times longer than usual, he finally stepped out. He meant to cross the bedroom at once, but the altered scene stopped him again.
“...”
The gaudy decorations had already been cleared away. At the edge of the now-empty bed, Baek Yeo-eun sat perched precariously, both hands wrapped around a white mug stamped with the hotel logo, staring blankly out at the sea beyond the balcony.
Kang-hyun watched that defenseless back for a moment, then deliberately let his footsteps sound as he moved.
Only then did she notice his presence. Her shoulders flinched; she turned her gaze aside at an angle.
“Finished washing?”
She spoke as if nonchalant, yet her fluster was obvious. Fidgeting in nothing but a hotel bathrobe, as though she had nowhere safe to rest her eyes, was almost laughable.
Was she trying to play the innocent now, of all times?
He had not the slightest intention of doing anything, yet looking at that restless face made him feel sordid, as if he had been caught mid-crime.
“Use the bathroom.”
“Ah—okay.”
“You take the bedroom too.”
At the offhand addition, her eyes finally found him again. Whether the thing flickering in those transparent depths was relief or something else, there was no reason to dig for it.
“Then you…”
“I’ll sleep in the living room.”
Business finished, Kang-hyun passed her without lingering and stepped out into the living room. He made certain to close the door, sealing the spaces completely apart.
He let out a shallow breath and headed for the veranda. The cigarette he had been craving all evening went between his lips; once the flame caught, the nerves that had stood on end finally loosened into a lazy calm.
“...”
Listening to the regular crash of waves from far away, he drew the smoke in leisurely. White stains bloomed into the black void, then scattered, again and again.
He crushed the spent filter into the ashtray, returned to the living room, and roughly pulled on the clothes he had brought. He meant to fall asleep before the hard-won composure could break again.
A sofa cushion for a pillow, a thin blanket tossed across his stomach—bedtime preparation was that simple.
The sofa was narrow enough that his legs snagged on the far armrest, but he was not the sort to be particular about sleeping places. As long as there was somewhere to rest his head, he could manage.
Then a rustling sound beyond the door scraped sharply across his eardrums. Not long after, the rush of water began to pour. She had finally gone in to wash.
Kang-hyun’s closed eyelids twitched. The water sound beyond the wall, forever on the verge of stopping yet never quite stopping, seeped into his ears.
At last he sat bolt upright.
“Ha…”
He swept a glare around the darkened living room, spat a vicious curse, and shoved himself off the sofa. Sleep was clearly out of the question; he needed another solution.
Phone and wallet only, he left the room, half-hoping that strong liquor might shut his brain down completely.
The elevator carried him down. He trudged toward the bar in the lobby lounge.
Even the hotel bar in Hawaii stood open on every side. Soft jazz wound itself into an exquisite harmony with the night-sea waves; couples leaning into each other’s shoulders clinked cocktail glasses and whispered sweet nothings.
Kang-hyun turned his back on every last one of those people overflowing with love and happiness and took a seat at the bar.
“Would you like to order?”
The bartender asked with a kind smile, addressing Kang-hyun as though he were a solitary island adrift alone.
“Whiskey. The strongest you’ve got.”
“Of course.”
Even the bleak order that refused all conversation failed to rattle the man; he simply took down a glass with practiced ease, as if he already had a fair idea of the story behind a lone man hunting hard whiskey in a resort famous for honeymoons.
Moments later a crystal tumbler of amber liquid sat before him. A fierce scent rose from the round ice.
Kang-hyun lifted it without hesitation and knocked the liquor back. A burning that felt as if it were scorching his esophagus white-bleached his mind for a brief instant.
The effect lasted only that long. The full-moon night sea, the affectionate laughter behind him, the sweet flower scent, the sea breeze brushing his skin—all of it still existed in reality.
The one who felt alien here, almost unreal, was him. He might as well have been an uninvited guest who had barged into a happy movie scene.
What the hell was he even doing in a place like this?
To empty the head that self-mockery had already begun to colonize, he signaled the bartender again.
After several more glasses, around the time the tension he had not even noticed in his shoulders finally loosened, the phone lying on the table suddenly vibrated with noisy insistence.