Meanwhile, the person who was most shocked to see Mateo’s article following HS’s was none other than Sarah Stewart.
[ Composer HS causes a stir after challenging composer “Mateo” to a digital performance showdown via his personal SNS. ]
[ Mateo responds to the controversy: “HS? Who is that?” ]
In just a single day, during which she had gone to visit her mother’s grave to clear her head, the news section had become completely plastered with the names HS and Mateo.
“Wh-what on earth is going on?”
Unable to hide her bewilderment, Sarah bit her lips hard.
First of all, judging from the contents of the articles, it looked like HS was the one who had provoked things first, but you never knew.
‘Dad might have taken a jab first…’
HS was a weirdo by nature, but this was just too sudden and out of the blue.
Ah. Wait, could Austin have told HS that Mateo was looking for him?
‘HS had definitely asked Austin to make sure no one told him about it.’
Sarah picked up her phone at once and was just about to call Austin to grill him when—
‘Hold on…’
A fragment of a memory she had forgotten suddenly came back to her.
Not long ago, HS had contacted her asking to borrow her SNS account. Then instead, he suddenly created his own SNS account and left something like a challenge letter to Mateo there…
Which meant…
He had been preparing to contact Mateo from that moment on.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Sarah Stewart deleted the numbers she had started to punch into the keypad, then entered a new number.
Riiing.
It was always fastest to ask the party involved directly.
The person Sarah Stewart called was HS.
“Hel…”
“I do not need the account anymore.”
Before she could even greet him, a flat voice came through.
Honestly, he was always so impatient.
“Good. That saves me the trouble. Why did you ask me to lend you my account?”
“I had someone I needed to contact.”
“Was that someone Mateo, by any chance?”
“Yeah. But I made my own and contacted him.”
“Did he reply?”
Even as she asked, Sarah felt her guts twist with nervousness. Surely, they had not already made contact?
What if…
If by any chance they had already gotten in touch, and her father had revealed she was his daughter or demanded to know what she was to him and made things awkward… What would she do then?
“No, not yet.”
At HS’s toneless reply, Sarah let out the breath she had been holding and stroked her chest in relief.
“But why? Do you know Mateo?”
“N-no. I do not know him.”
“Yeah? He’s done an interview about me, and he read the message I sent, but for some reason he is not contacting me.”
“You sent him a message?”
“Yeah. But he has not replied. Guess he got scared.”
At those words, Sarah finally relaxed completely.
To be honest, she did want to keep the two of them from contacting each other at all, but she wanted even more to stop them from having a digital showdown.
Even if she hated her father….
As a composer he had a natural-born, no, awe-inspiring genius.
Her own talent for composition had probably come from him.
In any case, there was nothing good that could come from a rising figure on Billboard like HS going up against someone like that.
Right.
No matter how much of a genius she personally acknowledged HS to be, there was no way he could match her father.
Even if you assumed they were both geniuses, her father had years of experience and a long-built reputation that HS did not.
Cruel as it might sound, that was reality.
‘I cannot let him become a laughingstock for nothing.’
Clenching her fist, Sarah spoke.
“Anyway, do not get yourself tangled up with Mateo any further. There is nothing good in having people talk about you together with him.”
“For someone saying that, why are you not denying the dating rumor?”
HS’s question caught her off guard, and Sarah shouted, face flushing.
“T-that is…! And you… you are not denying it either!”
“Me? I am waiting and letting you deny it first.”
“Since when have you ever been the type to be considerate of other people?”
“Then should I put it out first?”
For some reason, Sarah could not bring herself to answer that and bit her lips.
Oh, right.
She had been using the dating rumor as something like viral marketing for her track.
Yes, that was it.
“D-do as you like.”
After hanging up, Sarah felt her mood sink strangely.
Having finished his interview with CNC, Mateo closed his eyes and tried to meditate in an effort to keep himself calm.
But his peace of mind did not last long.
“No, but….”
Mateo snapped his eyes open and furrowed his brows.
It was true he had been going around prying about HS, but he had not expected HS to contact him first.
On top of that, it had never crossed his mind that he would reach out like this.
○ G_HS
There can’t be two suns in the sky.
♥
Liked by rmftmddl and 86,579 others.
○G_HS: Shall we settle this with digital performance? @mateo
He had not, even in the slightest, imagined HS would provoke him like this.
“Hm…”
Had the outlets he had poked around passed the contents on to HS, and was HS picking a fight on purpose?
He could not know for sure, but it certainly seemed that way.
Otherwise, there was no way some brainless composer would just tag him out of nowhere, telling him to settle it with digital performance.
Besides that, there was not a single composer in this world who would challenge him to a digital showdown.
Sometimes, there were idiots who wanted to ride his name for popularity.
Apparently, HS was one of those idiots.
In the end, just like that idiot wanted, the SNS post spread far and wide and became an article.
Honestly, the fact that he, Mateo, had received a challenge from a ridiculously young junior composer was shameful enough all by itself.
The mere thought of the whole world watching that made the shame burn through him.
In reality, he had no chance of losing a digital showdown, so all the shame magnified by people’s attention would end up being HS’s share.
That was that, but…
[ Hi. ]
[ 010-XXXX-XXXX ]
[ call me. ]
What kind of half-hearted contact was this supposed to be?
To swallow down the anger boiling up again, Mateo took a deep breath and let it out, over and over.
“Hooo…”
Normally he would have ignored it, but he could not just endure when a brat who held a grudge had provoked him.
So he contacted a CNC reporter he was acquainted with and did a phone interview himself.
In less than thirty minutes, his interview article had gone up. He was a little worried his daughter might see it, but….
It was already done.
Right.
By now, the childish war of nerves between him and HS must have been spreading through people’s eyes and ears and mouths.
There was no undoing it, no taking it back.
In that case, would it not be better to go ahead and throw the whole thing over?
“Ha…”
Mateo entered the number HS had left him on the keypad then hesitated.
“Ah, damn…”
His finger just circled above the call button without actually pressing down.
Right.
Barely ten minutes ago, in the interview article that had gone up, he had acted as if it were no big deal, saying this was the first he had heard of HS and writing it off as youthful bravado….
Was it not going to look pathetic if he called right away like this?
No.
So what if he looked a little pathetic. For his daughter’s sake, he had to meet him.
Tap.
Soon Mateo firmly pressed the call button.
“Hello. Is this HS’s cell—”
Just as the call connected and he was about to confirm if this was HS,
“Mateo?”
came a voice from the other end.
“Ah, so it is you.”
Even HS’s low, smooth voice rubbed him the wrong way, and Mateo knit his brows.
Maintaining a calm tone, Mateo spoke.
“You sent me a message.”
What would HS say?
If he now said he had never thought Mateo would really call and tried to flatten himself, that would be very troublesome.
Of course, if the things he had dashed off in his post were his true feelings, that would be ridiculous in its own way too.
But what he heard through the receiver was neither of those.
“But I am busy right now, so please call again later.”
With those words, the noisy clamor he had heard at his ear vanished all at once.
“…fuck.”
Only Mateo’s curse echoed quietly around the room.
At last, moving day came for Hyunseung and his family.
“Why are there so many calls today of all days.”
With a look of annoyance, Hyunseung shoved his phone into his back pocket.
Of course, the person who had just called, whose call he had cut off, was the “Mateo” he had been waiting for, but for now, the move came first.
Ah, it’s not that moving was especially complicated. The movers would pack and transport everything anyway.
They were moving into a fully furnished, full-option penthouse.
All they had to do was load their bodies into the car.
“H-hang on a second, o-oppa, is this r-really the place?”
“Why? Is there a problem?”
“N-no, it is just, i-is this r-really where w-we are going to live?”
“Why are you stuttering?”
“I-it is just, this looks like the kind of place you only see in movies….”
Staring at the wide living room spread out beyond the inner door, Hyuna was utterly dazed, not knowing what to do with herself.
It was not just the little sister who was surprised.
“Son, this is not a house, it is a palace, is it not?”
Their father’s eyes were wide as he waved his hands. You could feel his fluster in that gesture alone.
“They are all just homes people live in. You will get used to it.”
Hyunseung answered his father firmly. Of course, he knew very well that his father found this kind of house burdensome.
Even in his previous life, his father had refused all of the Han River view apartments owned by Hyunseung and chosen to live in a modest villa instead.
However, with his face now out in the open, this had been an unavoidable choice. It was not as if they could live separately.
If they did, it would be no different from repeating his previous life.
This time, in a new nest, he was going to build new memories with his family.
If possible, only good and happy memories.
To do that, he had to prepare as safe a nest as possible for his family…
And of all places, this was the most perfect one. He had once lived here in his previous life.
“Come on, both of you, inside now.”
Soon, he herded his sister and father into the house.
Swept into the living room, Hyuna craned her neck to look up at the dizzyingly high ceiling.
And suddenly, a thought came to her.
How many battles must her brother be fighting out there for them to live in a place like this?
She remembered the cans of caffeinated drinks strewn across his desk the last time she had gone to his studio, and her eyes prickled for no reason.
Whip, whip.
Seeing Hyuna vigorously shaking her head to dry her tears, Hyunseung did not just pass by.
Smack.
He reached out and flicked her lightly but precisely on the crown of her head.
“Why are you acting like you are possessed by a ghost?”
“Ow! Why would you hit me for that!”
“Does it hurt that much?”
Looking at his sister glaring at him with reddening eyes, he felt oddly sorry and ruffled her hair.
“I figured your skull was so thick it would not hurt.”
“Geez, even if we move into a new house, the person does not change!”
Just as Hyuna, even more offended now, was stomping off toward what would be her room…
Ding-dong!
The sudden chime of the doorbell rang through the house, and Hyunseung headed for the intercom to check.
The movers and the building management had already come and gone. Who could it be now?
At that moment, Hyuna, who had been about to go to her room, suddenly ran toward the front door and shouted.
“They must be here!”
What on earth was “here” that made her that excited? Wait, regular deliveries could not even come all the way up here….
Step, step.
Finding it odd, Hyunseung followed his sister to the entryway.
“Please bring it inside!”
Big, strong men came in past Hyuna, carrying something wrapped in cloth into the house.
Judging by the size, it did not look like a simple decorative object.
“Hey, what is all this?”
At his question, Hyuna planted a hand on her hip and answered with great bravado,
“Just wait and see!”
“Thank you, you have worked hard!”
After seeing the men out who had left the mysterious object in the living room, she finally came back in.
“Tada!”
Then she grabbed the first drape and whisked it up into the air.
“Ah.”
It was a family photo. The one they had taken on their first family trip to Japan.
Just placing that single family photo there made the previously empty-looking living room fill with a gentle warmth.
“I told you I wanted to put up a family photo, remember!”
Seeing his little sister lifting her chin like she wanted to be praised, Hyunseung reached out and gently patted her hair.
“For once, you did something nice.”
“Ahem! This is not all, you know!”
Looking absolutely thrilled, his sister gripped the cloth covering a rectangular object placed beside the family photo.
“Curious about this one too?”
“Yeah, I am curious.”
“That so?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
She dragged out the moment, trying to build tension, but only for a short while.
Flaaap!
At last, the cloth came off and its identity was revealed bit by bit.
“It is a high-resolution preview I got from your fansite master!”
Hyunseung raised his hand and covered his face.
“Ah, damn, this is embarrassing….”
To be precise, he covered his eyes.
[ If you are curious about Hyunseung’s preview, then ☞ ]
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T/N: In this life, FAMILY IS FIRST. 👏
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