Diamond Dust Novel - Chapter 21

He tried to shut Inwoo Hyung up, telling him not to overreact over something so trivial, but he was wearing the most visibly flustered expression I had seen on him.

Why was the fact that I was a Beta, that I wasn’t an Omega, that he had mistaken a Beta for an Omega, so shocking to him?

Was it merely because, as Inwoo Hyung said, his record of identifying Omegas more accurately than genetic analysis had been tarnished?

Even though I didn’t know why, if my aim was to fluster him, revealing the clear fact that I was a Beta seemed to have been more effective than my ridiculous false declaration of being gay. Perhaps his reluctance toward my moving into the teacher’s house was due to his mistaken belief that I was an Omega.

In any case, the current cause of his furrowed brow and rapid consumption of wine was me.

Perhaps it was due to the wine I had enthusiastically consumed, but my body felt like it was swaying on a wave. To hide the relentless heat, I needed more wine.

“Oh, I apologize.”

The guard I had been carefully maintaining broke down, and my foot accidentally bumped someone’s leg under the table. I immediately pulled my feet back under my chair and apologized to the Phantom Director.

His face, still bearing a fierce expression, turned toward me, and then Inwoo Hyung tapped the edge of the table across from me.

“Yihyun-ssi, that was… my foot.”

Inwoo Hyung brought his wine glass to his lips, watching me with a steady gaze. He looked back and forth between the Director and me. Very slowly.

“I apologize.”

I offered another apology to Inwoo Hyung, unsure if it was for stepping on his foot or for confusing the object of my apology.

My throat was dry, knowing that Inwoo Hyung must have realized who I was nervous about, just from my reaction moments ago. The only thing left to do was drink more wine.

The drinking party continued past 2:00 AM. Five of us finished six or seven bottles of wine, and I alone drank slightly more than one bottle. Everyone was buzzed, and Inwoo Hyung, Yuni Noona, and Juhan Hyung were more excessively excited than usual.

“Di-rect-orrrr, I love you.”

“I don’t. Why are you clinging to me? Go away.”

The Director of Phantom was smiling even as he pushed away Juhan Hyung’s face, which lunged forward for a hug and a kiss. Although his face wasn’t flushed and he wasn’t speaking excessively, I could tell that he, too, was pleasantly relaxed.

I was also tipsy from the wine I was drinking for the first time. My body felt hazily uplifted, my focus blurred, and I was looking down at my feet, slowly blinking, when a hand grabbed my wrist and gently shook it. I lifted my head.

“Yihyun-ssi, where’s your house? I’ll drive you.”

It was Inwoo Hyung.

“No, no, Teacher, you drive us home. The Director will drive Yihyun.”

“Hmm… why can’t the reverse be true?”

Inwoo Hyung stroked his chin and narrowed his eyes at Yuni Noona, who was shaking her index finger sideways. His playful expression made me chuckle.

“If you search your heart, you’ll quickly find the answer. Now, let’s go. Our designated driver is here!”

Juhan Hyung, who looked as energized as if he had drunk an energy drink, snatched Inwoo Hyung’s wrist and started running toward the car parked by the roadside.

“Director, please take good care of Yihyun!”

As they waved wildly and drove away in Inwoo Hyung’s car, the bustling street instantly grew quiet. Only then did I notice that most of the surrounding shops had already closed, and there were no passersby on the street.

The Director, who had also called for a designated driver, checked his wristwatch and said, “Director Han’s house is where I should take you, right?”

“I’m not… that drunk. I can take a taxi.”

He looked down at me without speaking. I lowered my gaze, overwhelmed by his stare, where he stood with his hands stuffed in his pants pockets and his head tilted slightly.

I looked down at his firm wrists beneath his rolled-up shirt sleeves, his finely colored, naturally wrinkled pants, and his high-quality leather loafers.

I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t control my body. I had merely swayed my upper body back and forth and momentarily lost my balance, just a slight stagger. But he seemed to have judged that I was in a state where I couldn’t accurately assess my own level of intoxication.

He quickly approached and grabbed my swaying arm. With a faint sigh, he pulled me closer.

“Let’s go.”

After yielding the driver’s seat to the designated driver, there was no notable conversation on the way home as we sat side-by-side in the back seat. The entire conversation was limited to him asking for permission to smoke a cigarette and my response.

The gentle breeze coming through the slightly opened window felt pleasant. I chuckled as my hair, constantly blowing around, tickled my face, and he turned to look at me. I continued to smile back at him. I simply felt like laughing. Then I laughed again at how silly I was being. He was probably quite bewildered.

I wondered why the driver was heading down to the underground parking lot instead of dropping me off at the apartment entrance, but he got out of the car after me and sent the driver away.

“Can I come up for a moment?”

“……”

“I need to grab something from Director Han’s house.”

Since he said so, there was no reason to stop him. Though I was living there, it wasn’t my house.

I clutched my backpack straps tightly in the elevator to keep my loose grip on reality.

He stepped out of the elevator before me and entered the apartment after punching in the door lock code as if it were his own home. He then put on the guest slippers and went straight to the kitchen, humming a low tune, and took out an ion drink.

He shook the bottle of the drink he was drinking toward me, who was standing blankly in front of the dining table, raising his eyebrows as if asking if I wanted some. He was drinking straight from the bottle. I would have thought he was meticulous about personal hygiene, but it seemed that wasn’t entirely the case.

I wanted some cool water more than an ion drink, so I filled a glass from the water purifier. Since he was sitting at the table with the ion drink, I had to sit in the seat across from him instead of going into my room to change clothes and shower.

“Director Han will probably come home having drunk quite a bit tonight. There’s a group of people he gets along with among those who gathered today. Please take good care of him in the morning.”

“Yes, I will.”

The teacher was also a smoker, and there was always an ashtray ready on the coffee table in the living room and the dining table. He asked for permission to smoke, and I nodded, then got up to open the kitchen window.

“How tall are you, Mr. Seo Yihyun?”

He asked, staring at me as I returned to my seat, flicking his ash. Many people were asking about my height today.

“About 181 [cm].”

“Taller than I thought.”

It was the complete opposite of what Yuni Noona and Juhan Hyung had said. But he looked uninterested, even though he was the one who brought up the topic.

The vertically long dining space, where the table was placed, was located between the living room and the kitchen. He, who had entered the house before me, had only turned on the lighting directly above the dining table, so the light in the large interior was concentrated on the table alone.

It looked like a space designed more for enjoying drinks and conversation with close company than for meals, and the teacher had chosen a warm, cozy orange-hued lightbulb for the dining area.

Because of the long, low-hanging light fixture, which looked like I might hit my head on it if I suddenly jumped up, deep shadows fell across his face. He drew on his cigarette with a somewhat anxious movement and looked at me sideways.

“Can I see the paintings you said you drew before?”

“……”

Unlike his indifferent reaction after asking my height, his question about the paintings was sincere. I had never expected that the one thing he would be curious about me, who he treated with indifference bordering on hostility, would be my art.

“No… I don’t have any with me…”

“You don’t even have pictures of them?”

I shook my head.

I shook it several times, gripping the water glass in front of me tightly.

The faint humming sound of a phone vibrating, wum-wum, penetrated the air during his cigarette breaks. His phone, which was placed on the dining table, was still. He flicked his ash and jerked his chin toward my bag.

“Answer it. It’s fine.”

The caller ID showed Inwoo Hyung.

He said he had just arrived home after dropping off Yuni Noona and Juhan Hyung and asked if I had gotten home safely. I thanked Hyung once again for the enjoyable evening and hung up. It took less than a minute.

“Did you two develop a relationship where you call each other already?”

He said this, grinding out the quickly burning cigarette in the ashtray. There was no trace of sarcasm in his tone.

“No… not really, not like that… We exchanged numbers earlier today…”

“You said you were gay, but you don’t seem entirely uninterested in Choi Inwoo, Mr. Seo Yihyun?”

Since my declaration of being gay was a lie, or at least an unverified, impulsive statement, I didn’t know what to say in response.

He fiddled with the ion drink bottle, opened the cap, and took another sip.

“You haven’t had much dating experience, have you?”

“……”

It was a relief that he didn’t bring up the topic of painting anymore, but dating wasn’t a comfortable subject either.

He crossed his legs, leaning back loosely against the chair, and tapped the tabletop with the drink bottle, looking at me. From what I had observed so far, he wasn’t particularly known for good posture.

“Choi Inwoo is not a bad guy as a friend, but I can’t say he’s a good guy as a romantic partner.”

Did he like me enough to worry about me getting hurt by a bad person? Thinking that, I stared blankly at his eyes, which were still mysterious to me, who was accustomed to black eyes.

Perhaps he interpreted my lack of a clear reaction as a failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and he leaned forward over the table, adopting a more serious expression.

“You, as a novice, are not at a level to handle him, Mr. Seo Yihyun. It looks like you value taking things slowly, getting to know each other, and mutual understanding… but that kind of relationship is far from his style.”

“What about you, Director?”

“…”

He frowned, as if he hadn’t expected me, sitting right in front of him, to react to his words.

Whether it was the power of the alcohol or my own brand of ‘twitching’ that allowed me to be somewhat impertinent toward him, I was, in any case, asking a question I considered bold.

“Then are you a good man as a man?”

He looked down at the table and smiled. He lit a new cigarette. Exhaling a long stream of smoke from the first drag, he said:

“Is there… such a thing as a good man? I’ve never seen one.”

His tone suggested he had been severely wronged by a bad man. Or that he categorized himself as an utterly bad man.

I couldn’t ask for the details, however. The very next moment, the self-deprecating smile had already vanished from his face.

“Since you met Choi Inwoo while working at Phantom, I feel something akin to responsibility, so I’m saying this. Don’t take everything that bastard says to heart. Well… even so, if Mr. Seo Yihyun is drawn to him, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

If that was the meaning of his warning, then it was, as he said, merely ‘something akin to responsibility.’ Not an active effort to break us up, but a thin protective barrier he was putting up to alleviate the uncomfortable feeling of tragedy being caused by me, should things become complicated.

As if he had discussed that topic enough, he pushed back the hair that had fallen onto his forehead with the back of his left hand, which held the cigarette, and changed the subject.

“I would like you to start working at Phantom officially. Lately, the number of our affiliated artists has increased, and the frequency and scale of our exhibitions have grown, so the staff were already struggling. I knew we needed to hire more people, but I’m a bit… particular about people, so I was giving the kids a hard time. I would like Mr. Seo Yihyun to come and work for us. That’s what I came up here to talk about today. I’ll relay the details through Director Han.”