After reading the entire novel without a moment to breathe, Cheonghyeon lay blankly on his bed and stared only at the ceiling, trying hard to pretend he did not notice his pounding heart. This kind of literature was truly a first in his life.
He had had a fiancée, and he had even learned bedroom techniques for his fiancée. But after those lessons, his heart had not pounded like this, nor had he looked forward to the night they would spend together.
Now was different. He did not know what was different, but it was clearly different from back then. Lying there blankly, Cheonghyeon clicked on another “Cheongfes” novel.
| A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss – Part 1 I have been rolling my whole life. Round and round. I debuted before I even graduated high school and got a taste of society, then went to the military right when everyone else did. Celebrity Gi Cheonghyeon. Ordinary person Gi Cheonghyeon. I did everything I had to do and everything I wanted to do. And all by my mid-twenties. How long do I have to keep rolling? Into my life, where I had been busy rolling while only looking ahead, one patch of moss came to me. It is strange. I had always only been dizzy and lonely, but one day, that tiny patch of moss changed everything about me. Now, no matter how much I roll, I do not get even a single scratch. Thanks to that moss, even today, I do not worry about a rocky slope full of jutting stones. Instead, I roll faster. Soft and deep green, he wrapped around me…… |
“Cheonghyeon-ah, I haven’t been able to reach you lately. Should hyung order you pizza? Do you want to come over?” 12:21 PM
Even at Seoan’s affectionate text, Cheonghyeon could not bring himself to reply. But there was a limit to deliberately not reading his messages, then checking them late at night and saying, “I was busy, so I couldn’t see it.”
Cheonghyeon slowly sent a reply.
“Yeah, Rich Gold.. I’ll come now.” 12:23 PM
His body was light, but his heart was heavy as stone. He had no face to see Seoan.
The contents of the novel kept coming to mind, and without meaning to, he had ended up avoiding Seoan.
He had even paid for and read all of NamNamDol, the original work it was based on.
Perhaps because the situation was similar, the protagonist Hyeonseong and Seoan kept overlapping in his mind, leaving him deeply unsettled.
After the last drinking session with Yeonha, he had not even properly thanked Seoan, yet somehow, he had even started avoiding his calls.
Feeling terribly sorry toward Seoan, who must have been waiting for him without knowing anything, Cheonghyeon hurried outside and caught a taxi.
“You’re here?”
Seoan greeted him with a smile, no different from before. Because of that, Cheonghyeon felt pointlessly guilty and hesitated before entering the house.
He had not noticed it before, but the inside of the house was filled entirely with Seoan’s scent.
With his cheeks faintly red, Cheonghyeon went inside and waited hard for the pizza to arrive, thinking that he hoped the strong smell of hot pizza would quickly cover this scent.
A little while later, as he ate the pizza that arrived and talked with Seoan, his tension gradually faded. Seeing Seoan act no different from usual made him feel embarrassed about how hard he had been avoiding him all this time.
But crises always appeared when one let one’s guard down. Seoan seemed to remember something and brought over his laptop.
As he moved his fingers over the trackpad and typed, the contents of the novel Cheonghyeon had read a few days ago naturally rose in his mind.
| “Imagining those white, long hands that he could now picture even with his eyes closed made heat surge up again….” |
“Cheonghyeon-ah?”
“Huh? Uh?”
Like a thief startled by his own guilty conscience, Cheonghyeon jerked his head up and pulled his gaze away from Seoan’s hand.
When he unconsciously turned his face toward the sound, his vision filled entirely with Seoan.
He had thought he had grown used to him after meeting him often, but seeing Seoan’s face from this close made his heart pound like it had on the day they first met at the signing event.
No longer confident he could look Seoan in the eyes, Cheonghyeon lowered his gaze slightly, and Seoan’s red lips entered his sight.
They were the lips the fans had praised so extravagantly. On his face, where even his hair, eyes, and skin were all pale in color, his lips were the one place with especially high saturation.
In front of this stimulating appearance, there was nowhere he could put his eyes. Cheonghyeon exaggerated his movements on purpose and rubbed both eyes, pretending something had gotten into them.
“Stop rubbing your eyes. What if you scratch them?”
Even at the low voice that rang softly, the contents of the novels he had read kept popping into his mind.
Cheonghyeon newly felt that his fans were incredible. How had they written while picking out his features so perfectly without even knowing Seoan’s face…?
Once he became conscious of it, this man’s appearance was full of all kinds of stimulating traits. He felt like he understood why the fans had chosen Hyeonbaragi over Hando, Yoonwoo, and Sikyung.
When the atmosphere turned strange because of his odd behavior, Cheonghyeon hurriedly blurted out a question he had usually wondered about.
“Hyung, are you a foreigner?”
“Hm?”
“No… It’s just that your hair color seems really light. It doesn’t seem dyed either.”
Thinking about it, perhaps the reason he had first felt fondness for Seoan was also because of his light hair color.
The appearance of people from the Empire of Masilburg was close to a mix between the Easterners and Westerners of this place.
Most of them were tall and had light hair and light skin.
Since he had come from a place where black hair was uncommon, he wondered if that was why Seoan had felt even more familiar to him.
“My maternal great-grandmother was foreign. My mom and sisters all have black hair and black eyes, but I’m the only one like this.”
“Ah…. Could I maybe touch your hair just once?”
When Seoan laughed softly and nodded, Cheonghyeon carefully touched Seoan’s scalp and combed his fingers through his hair.
The fine hair tickled between his fingers like slime and settled softly and smoothly.
He had thought his own hair was fairly nice, but Seoan’s hair was the softest hair he had ever felt.
“Hyung is going to get busy now, so I probably won’t be able to contact you much.”
While Cheonghyeon was quietly stroking his hair, an unexpected bombshell dropped. When Cheonghyeon looked at him with an unconsciously disappointed expression, Seoan gave a small laugh.
“My thesis passed, so hyung is graduating now. I have to prepare for professor appointments too, and there’s a lot to get ready before I start lecturing. Once the semester starts, I’ll get even busier. Of course, there’s still a while before the semester starts, and I haven’t been appointed yet either. So I wanted to meet often and hang out before that, but our celebrity here is just so terribly busy.”
At those words, Cheonghyeon wore an awkward expression.
It was because he remembered how he had avoided him like his life depended on it. Then he suddenly felt regret over all the time he had wasted by not answering Seoan’s calls.
Saying they should go have fun together as much as they could before Seoan became truly busy, Cheonghyeon opened his calendar app.
Not noticing Seoan watching him with a sunken gaze as he finally escaped the novel’s influence and returned to normal, Cheonghyeon diligently matched Seoan’s schedule with his own.
After returning to the dorm, Cheonghyeon lay on his bed and quietly sank into thought.
Did he like Seoan? Or was he mistaken?
While Cheonghyeon was quietly fiddling with his phone, a notification rang, saying that a new post had been uploaded to the novel blog he had bookmarked.
Wondering if it was a new Cheongfes work, he entered, then found a familiar name.
| Kang Yeonha x Kwon Ino, Welcome to Dreamlight House, Afterward. |
From the look of it, people also wrote creative fiction like this about actors who had appeared in dramas together. Cheonghyeon thought deeply about something, then called Yeonha.
—What? What’s this about?
“No, I got curious about something. Do you have time right now?”
—The drama’s over, so I’ve got plenty of time. Why? But I’m not drinking with you.
Did I cause some drunken trouble? Cheonghyeon tilted his head at Yeonha’s firm tone, then brought up the main point.
“Then let’s have a cup of coffee. At that cafe below the company.”
—Forget it. What kind of cafe is a popular guy like you going to? I’ll send you the address, so come to my place.
“But why so suddenly?”
Just as Cheonghyeon was wondering how to start, Yeonha spoke first, so Cheonghyeon hurriedly let out his curiosity.
“Do you ever look at things like internet reactions?”
“Why would I look at that? If it’s something important, my manager will tell me anyway, and when it comes to acting, advice from the director or the other actors around me is much better. It should be the same for you too, right? Though I guess idols are a little different since they have fandoms.”
At Yeonha’s answer, Cheonghyeon let out a disappointed sigh. From the look of it, Yeonha did not seem to know that fans were pairing him with another actor.
“Then you don’t know when fans, like… ship you with people?”
“Ah, the bromance with Kwon Ino-ssi? Of course I know that. Your company doesn’t make you do it? What was it called again? BGP?”
BGP? At the word he had never heard in his life, Cheonghyeon tilted his head. Yeonha thought for a moment, then shouted as though he had remembered.
“Business gay performance. So basically, pretending to be gay even though you’re not. With idols, the fanfic culture of pairing members with each other is so strongly established that I heard companies even designate pairings outright sometimes. You can’t ignore the size of that fandom either. Even dramas and movies are desperate to deliberately insert those kinds of elements, so imagine how it is for idols. Don’t you have that? For us too, there were so many scenes where they sent me and Kwon Ino-ssi out together to catch the bromance fandom.”
Cheonghyeon shook his head. He did not know what kind of orders might have been given to the old Cheonghyeon, but at least after he had awakened, the company had not demanded anything like that from him.
And on top of that, the person he was paired with was not a member, but Hyeonbaragi.
Cheonghyeon, who had been downcast when Yeonha said he did not look at internet reactions, grew interested when Yeonha seemed to know much more about fanfiction than he did and poured out questions.
“Then is this common? I mean, um. I’m a man, but being paired as a couple with another man like this….”
“What’s the big deal? Fans get jealous if you’re paired with women, so they pair you with men. If you’re not popular, it doesn’t even happen. And do you know how helpful being paired like this is for an entertainer?”
When Cheonghyeon stared at him with an expression that said he did not understand, Yeonha added an explanation.
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