As I hesitated and tried to step back, he slowly reached out and grabbed me. His grip was so weak that I could have easily shaken him off if I wanted to. But the sheer listlessness of his gesture, the complete absence of anger, made it harder to push him away. I barely managed to find my voice and called his name.
“…Yoo Jay.”
He didn’t respond to my call. Instead, he quietly rolled up my sleeve and looked at the marks on my arm. Seeing Jay’s eyes, which had been lifeless from the start, sink even deeper, I felt a tightness in my chest and instinctively lowered my gaze, almost as if trying to escape.
Lee Hwayoung, who had been silently watching the two of us, said, “I’m going to talk to the manager”, and left the room. After that, a suffocating silence filled the air.
And then, almost as if he was speaking to himself, a faint voice escaped from Jay’s lips.
“This happened because I talked about Yuseong-hyung, didn’t it?”
“…No.”
When he asked the question, sounding guilty, I hurriedly denied it. The head resting on my shoulder trembled slightly before a faint, bitter laugh followed,
“Lies.”
As the quiet sound of Jay’s breathing brushing against my ear continued for quite a while, I started to feel a growing anxiety. But I knew I couldn’t act rashly and risk provoking him. He was someone who often showed signs of instability. I had no way of knowing how he might react if I wasn’t careful.
The one small relief in this situation was that Jay didn’t know the full details of what had happened. As far as the Prism members were aware, all they knew was that I had disappeared after hearing about Seo Yuseong.
Finding a sliver of comfort in that, I decided to let Jay speak first and waited for him to say something.
“…….”
After I regained my composure and contacted Jay again, I had considered various possible scenarios.
For example, things like Jay or the members bombarding me with sharp questions.
“Hyung, how can I believe what you say? I still don’t know why you died or why you left the group. No, do you even have any intention of explaining it to me?”
They were bound to have a lot of questions. Questions that could easily corner me, like, ‘Why did you leave us behind?‘ and ‘Why didn’t you contact us all this time?’. I owed it to Jay and the rest of Prism to somehow explain the situation in return for the worry I’d caused them.
“Seungbeom-ah, are you okay?”
“Hyung! Please say something…….”
I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake again.
So, I thought long and hard about the best answer I could come up with; one carefully wrapped in lies to avoid hurting the members. I thought I had prepared myself well enough.
“…Let’s go back.”
But after a long silence, the first thing Jay said wasn’t a demand for an explanation, but simply, ‘Let’s go back.’
“I’m hungry. You disappeared like that, so I couldn’t eat or sleep, hyung.”
“…….”
“You look really tired too, right, hyung? You’re so skinny, like you haven’t had a single proper meal. Before, you still had a bit of baby fat left … I told you, you can’t live like you used to with that body. Your old body was the weird one.”
Taken aback by the unexpected turn of events, I lifted my head. But Jay simply kept his eyes closed for a long moment, mumbling in a sluggish tone, like a child whining for something.
As I absentmindedly listened to the softly spoken words pouring into my ears, I soon realized—his gaze, quiet and still, rolled toward me in stark contrast to his childish whining.
‘…He’s checking my reaction. He knows I’m not in a good state right now.’
This behavior was nothing more than an action driven by pure rationality and calculated thinking.
Contrary to what people assumed, Jay was not born with a lot of cuteness or a bright personality. So, no matter how tired he was, it was impossible for him to suddenly start acting spoiled or for his perfectly refined pronunciation—something he had corrected to near perfection out of habit—to falter.
In other words, everything he was doing right now was an act.
“So, let’s go back. Let’s go back and get some proper rest…….”
All Jay wanted right now was to return to his peaceful everyday life with me completely intact.
Jay, thinking solely about that goal, chose to expose his own weakness rather than pressure me further when I was already at my limit. He deliberately guided the situation in a way that would make it difficult for me to refuse, knowing how weak-hearted I was when it came to the members. He had calculated that this approach would give him the highest chance of achieving the outcome he wanted.
This was just like when he, already over 180 cm tall right after graduating middle school, jokingly claimed, “The way to and from school is scary“. Jay had probably realized back then that I was the kind of person who, despite knowing what he was up to, would just pretend to fall for it and let him manipulate me.
‘…It’s getting worse as he gets older.’
To be completely honest, if Jay had come to me before the Pantheion members—before things somehow cooled down after Choi Jeokhyeon’s mess—his little trick might have been quite effective. If Jay had been the first person I saw when I woke up, I probably wouldn’t have panicked the way I did in front of Pantheion and would have quietly gone back with him.
‘To put it nicely, he was being considerate of my condition, and to put it badly, he was just disturbingly good at deception.‘
“…Okay. Let’s go back.”
I felt a slight chill in the back of my neck, but I knew that if I showed it, Jay’s efforts to be considerate of me would be wasted. Pushing aside the uneasy feeling, I lightly patted Jay’s neck with my palm and asked as casually as possible.
“But how did you get here so fast? You didn’t drive recklessly, did you?”
Then, out of nowhere, he picked up a strand of my hair and rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. My hair, which felt a little coarser than usual, made a dry, brittle sound as he did so.
‘…What is this?’
Even though I had asked the question, he seemed distracted by something else. When I tapped his arm, his previously expressionless face softened into a faint smile as he belatedly replied.
“…Chise-hyung.”
“Lee Chise?”
His answer was too brief to make sense of the situation, so I tilted my head sideways and silently watched him. Then, in a quiet voice, he gave a longer explanation.
“Chise-hyung said we should start searching around here just in case, so … it was nearby.”
When Jay, still keeping his head down, vaguely mentioned Lee Chise’s name, I let out a quiet “Ah”, finally grasping the situation. Lee Chise had probably calmed down a panicked Jay, pieced together the fact that I had reacted strangely to the mention of Seo Yuseong and then disappeared the moment they took their eyes off me. From there, he must have deduced where I was likely to be.
‘Seriously, Lee Chise, there’s never a moment to let my guard down with that guy.’
As I roughly pieced together the situation and nodded, I noticed Jay’s nose and hands were red from the cold. He looked like he was gonna catch a cold any minute. Clicking my tongue at the sight, I draped the coat I had in my hands over his shoulders and scolded him.
“Why were you just standing here without ringing the bell? Have you been wandering around in this weather wearing such thin clothes?”
“…I thought you might not come out of the room if you knew I was here.”
So, his plan was to just stand here in silence until I came out, and then catch me when I was off guard? What a wonderfully healthy idea.
‘As expected, this guy seems pretty weird too.’
Compared to Choi Jeokhyeon and Seo Yuseong, his behavior was pretty cute, but seeing him act like this again made me think—just a little—that Yoo Jay wasn’t exactly normal either. If anyone other than me said the same thing, I would probably snap at them, though.
“Why wouldn’t I come out? You came all the way here.”
“You’ve done that before.”
“…Oh, I’m sorry.”
But after a short but vicious exchange of questions and answers, I realized that it was all my karma, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. I swear I caught Jay’s eyeballs rolling a little bit, but let’s pretend I didn’t see it.
At first, Jay let me wrap the coat around him as if he were used to it, but when he caught the heavy scent of perfume lingering on the fabric, he seemed to realize it wasn’t mine. He drew back slightly and rejected it.
“Is this Lee Saehwa’s?”
“It is, but what’s the big deal? It’s just a coat. Mine’s too small for you to wear anyway.”
“I hate it. I’ve never liked Lee Saehwa. I know he’s always manipulating Cha Woon, secretly stealing information, and scheming behind our backs. That person, he knew everything this time too, but he didn’t give us a single heads-up…….”
As Yoo Jay muttered with his eyes suddenly wide open, I hurriedly clamped a hand over his mouth. Then, I quickly gestured toward the room, signaling that someone was inside. He was about to grumble, “Let him hear”, but before he could, my hand silenced him again. Frowning even more, he bit at my palm in protest.
I casually shook off my hand, accustomed to it, then naturally looked around for the Prism members.
“Where are the other members?”
Ding!
The moment I asked that question, the elevator doors opened with a cheerful ding announcing its arrival. A bunch of tall men with tiny faces, wearing masks and hats in various states of disarray, came rushing out.
“No, he ran out quite some time ago, so why haven’t we heard from him? What if something happened to him too?”
“Calm down. He’s almost thirty now. I’m sure he found the room just fine.”
“Who cares if he’s thirty, Yoo Jay is Yoo Jay!”
“Shhh, be quiet.”
As the saying went, even a tiger appears when spoken of1. They were the members of Prism.
‘…Is there even a point in covering their faces?’
Anyone could tell they were celebrities—Prism, no less—so it struck me as remarkable that they had made it this far without trouble. Even when alone, they stood out like a sore thumb, and now that they were clustered together, it was hard to tell if this place was a broadcast station hallway or a hotel corridor. As I watched the spectacle with slightly cold eyes, my gaze met Cha Woon’s, who had been the first to step out and scan the hallway.
In just 0.1 seconds, Cha Woon’s face turned pale before he rushed toward me at an incredible speed and grabbed me by the back of my neck.
“Heh, huff … Got him!”
He shouted, as if he had captured a beast that had escaped from its cage.
And while his hand gripped the back of my neck firmly to keep me from escaping, his warm lips started spilling words of concern toward me.
“Hyung, are you okay?”
“Your face feels really warm? Do you have a fever?”
As he kept kneading my face and arms, making me feel increasingly dazed, I finally opened my mouth and spoke briefly.
“Let go of me.”
Cha Woon’s body shuddered, then he stiffened up and carefully set me down on the floor. Then, with trembling hands, he nervously grabbed the hem of my clothes. As I silently watched him, he stammered, “Hyung, hyung … you ran away first! And you didn’t even answer your phone!”. His voice, though meant to sound sharp, was so weak that it barely had any impact.
As I pressed my fingertips against my throbbing temple, Lee Chise suddenly pulled me into a tight hug. Talking over the phone the whole time must not have made the reality sink in, but now that he was seeing me in person, he seemed quite emotional about the fact that I was alive.
“It’s really you, hyung!”
“Ugh…….”
Given that this guy had superhuman strength, being held by him with full force made me feel like my internal organs were about to burst. As I hunched over, feeling a bit nauseous, Nam Yihwon smacked someone on the back and shoved him toward me.
“Say hello. Don’t just hide in the back.”
And then, I heard the voice I had missed so much.
“…Seungbeom-ssi.”
It was Jo Inchan.
What kind of expression should I make when I look at him?
How should I explain the situation to him?
Feeling both fear and anticipation at the same time, I kept my mouth shut and slowly lifted my head.
But the moment I took in his appearance with my own eyes, my face drained of all color, and I instinctively grabbed the collar of the clothes Jo Inchan was wearing.
“…You, what is this!”
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Translator’s Corner:
Danbi, take notes … this is the full privilege of being Seo Yutae’s youngest…..
No but it’s so funny, imagine
Yutae: Jay is so weird
Woon: Agree
Yutae: Don’t say mean things about our maknae
Like once Yutae’s baby, forever a baby …..
Anyway, Prism full group reunion, who’s excited : 3
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