Chapter 22

With the lump sum I’d earned from the subterranean nest expedition, we packed up and moved two floors up in the very same villa building. Ji Gyu-hwa was an eighth grader now—an age where a growing boy needed a bedroom with a door of his own—and by a stroke of luck, a twenty-one-pyeong two-bedroom unit had just vacated upstairs. Because I always greeted the landlady with a bright smile and carried her heavy grocery bundles up the hill whenever we crossed paths, she happily handed over the keys for cash rent without asking for a formal lease or an ID card.

Since neither of us owned much beyond our clothes and bedding, hauling everything upstairs took barely two hours on a Saturday morning. Even so, the moment the last box hit the linoleum, my body demanded full union compensation for heavy labor, and I collapsed flat on my back in the middle of the empty living room.

Boiling water for ramen felt like climbing Everest, so I thumbed open a delivery app on Gyu-hwa’s phone and ordered a housewarming feast from the local Chinese restaurant. Thirty minutes later, when the doorbell buzzed, Gyu-hwa—already thoroughly broken in as the junior member of our two-man unit—sprang up to answer it before I could even roll onto my side.

Setting down a family-sized sweet-and-sour pork, two spicy bowls of jjamppong, four portions of platter jjajangmyeon, and three domes of fried rice on our folding floor table, the deliveryman glanced around the empty foyer and remarked that the rest of our moving crew must have stepped out for a smoke. When I told him the entire spread was just for the two of us, he laughed as if I’d cracked a joke. Twenty minutes later, we had scraped every plastic platter clean.

Having worked for two hours and eaten enough carbohydrates to sedate a bear, we spent the afternoon in glorious, unrepentant sloth. After stacking the rinsed delivery bowls outside the front door and brushing our teeth, we sprawled out like twin starfish across the center of the living room floor, where the winter boiler pipes ran hottest under the linoleum.

Nothing on earth beats roasting your spine on a piping-hot ondol floor in the middle of winter.

Baking like a strip of pork rind over the radiant heat, my limbs turned to warm wax, and before I knew it, I had drifted off.

When my eyelids fluttered open again, the windows were already stained deep amber with the setting sun. Blinking away the grogginess as I wondered where the entire Saturday had gone, I realized I couldn’t roll onto my left side—because thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa was curled up fast asleep, plastered flush against my ribs from shoulder to knee.

Before nodding off, I could have sworn I’d told him to go into his new room and finish his weekend homework, yet at some point he had abandoned his books and crawled over to press himself against my side. Not having the heart to lecture him about studying while I was loafing around on the living room floor myself, I reached over and tugged a quilt up to his chin.

As the blanket settled over him, Gyu-hwa let out a tiny, unconscious sigh through his nose and burrowed his forehead deeper into the crook of my arm.

Out of sheer reflex, my hand rose to nudge him back to a proper distance—and stopped in midair. For months, keeping an invisible tripwire between us had been my ironclad rule: first so I wouldn’t grow attached, then so he wouldn’t grow dependent, and finally so he wouldn’t learn my face. Now that every single one of those defenses lay in ruins, what was I still guarding against?

Letting my arm settle around his narrow shoulders, I smoothed down his sleep-rumpled hair. Warmed by the heated floor, the boy smelled faintly of baby powder and clean soap instead of the sweat and teenage hormones an eighth grader ought to have had. Am I losing my mind, or is this kid actually getting cuter by the day?

Suddenly, a raw, cracking voice from some unplaced corner of memory echoed inside my skull:

“You’re the one starved for affection!”

I frowned into the amber twilight. Growing up in a warm, stable home with parents who adored me and an older sister who bickered with me over the dinner table, I had never once considered myself starved for love. Yet if there was one period in my life when I had chased someone’s approval like a half-starved fledgling begging to be fed, it was the six months I spent on Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa’s team.

Aside from my late father, Jaguar was the only man I had ever looked up to with such absolute, breathless reverence. Every time I threw myself into the breach or took the point position in a subterranean tunnel, part of me had been desperate to hear that low voice say ‘Not bad’—to prove I was worthy of standing beside him. Perhaps the reason I couldn’t bear to push this thirteen-year-old boy away was that when he looked up at me, I saw the exact same quiet, aching hunger in his eyes that I had once carried toward his future self.

Tsk. How did a kid who curls up like a housecat in his sleep ever grow into a two-meter apex predator who bares his fangs at the whole world? Then the thought caught in my throat. Wait. Now that I’ve torn up his past, the Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa I knew won’t ever exist again, will he?

Squeezing my eyes shut against the sudden, sharp ache behind my sternum, I held the sleeping boy a little tighter until evening fell.

* * *

Some traits are simply carved into a person’s DNA. From what I had seen on the firing line and at home, Ji Gyu-hwa didn’t have a single lazy or complaining bone in his body; if he ever said I can’t, it meant I haven’t mastered the skill yet, never I’m giving up. Because he sat dutifully at the table every evening without a peep whenever I told him to do his homework—and because his sharp, aristocratic features practically screamed valedictorian—I had blindly assumed he was cruising near the top of his class.

I was a shallow, lookist fool.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I said slowly, staring down at the diagnostic evaluation sheet in my hand.

“Yes.”

Not only were his written exam scores hovering near the cellar, even his classroom performance assessments were a train wreck. For three full seconds, I prayed he was pulling an elaborate dry-humored prank on me. Alright, good one, kid—hahaha! Now pull the real report card out of your bag.

Yet Gyu-hwa stood before the sofa with empty hands and his chin tucked into his chest.

“Are they grading your class on some brutal military curve?” I asked, grasping at straws.

“No.”

I was already halfway to sounding like a nagging boomer uncle, and my next question was going to seal my fate, but as his de facto guardian I couldn’t let numbers like these slide. “Then what happened here?”

Biting down on his lower lip, Gyu-hwa stared at his socks. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not scolding you, kid—I’m asking so we can fix the problem. Are the lectures at school hard to follow?”

His shoulders hunched inward another inch, his ears burning crimson with shame. That silent dip of his head told me everything I needed to know.

Sitting a kid down at a table and barking ‘Do your homework’ every night had been the limit of my imagination as a twenty-five-year-old bachelor who had never raised a child. How could a boy who had spent his elementary school years skipping class to hide bruises, washing his own clothes in cold water, scavenging meals, and cleaning up after a violent, gambling-addicted father possibly have built the foundational math and English skills needed for eighth-grade coursework? Honestly, the fact that he hadn’t dropped out altogether deserved a medal.

Recalling the online prep platforms I had used back in middle school, I glanced at the battered, tiny budget smartphone sitting beside his backpack. If he tried watching five hours of algebra lectures on a screen the size of a cracker, he’d ruin his twenty-twenty sniper vision and need bottle-bottom glasses before high school. First priority: buy him a proper study tablet.

“We’re signing you up for an unlimited online lecture pass,” I declared, crossing my arms. “And a private tutor for your core subjects.”

Gyu-hwa’s head snapped up in alarm. “I can catch up on my own! I’ll pay closer attention in class, and if I get stuck on a formula, I can ask the teachers in the staff room—”

It took zero detective work to see he was panicking over the cost. Since an undocumented time-traveler couldn’t open a bank account or swipe a credit card to buy online course packages, everything had to be paid through the debit card linked to Gyu-hwa’s welfare account. Reaching for my wallet on the coffee table, I pulled out a thick wad of fifty-thousand-won bills and pressed them into his chest, raising a hand to silence his protests before he could start.

“Ah-ah—I’m deaf and blind to objections right now. Deposit this into your account tomorrow and buy the full annual pass. Now scram and open your workbook.”

As I retreated toward our newly acquired secondhand sofa—a pristine faux-leather three-seater I’d snagged off Onion Market after failing to find a decent study desk—Gyu-hwa trailed stubbornly behind me.

“I’m going to pay back every won of this,” he vowed, his fists clenched around the cash. “No matter what.”

“Yeah? And how’s an eighth grader planning to do that?”

“I’ll enlist the day I graduate high school. Special-duty units pay hazard allowances—”

“Enlist, my ass!”

I snapped the words out so sharply he blinked. Even though I had just been thinking about his future vision a minute ago, the mere mention of him putting on a combat uniform set my teeth on edge. The timeline was already broken; over my dead body was I letting this kid march into a war zone to pay me back for math tutoring.

“If you want to pay me back, bring home higher test scores on your midterms,” I said, peeling one more fifty-thousand-won bill from my wallet and prying his fingers open to wedge it into his palm. “And use this to go grab tteokbokki with your girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfr—”

“Then take a friend from class. Zip it, never say the word enlist under this roof again, and go hit the books.”

Stretching out on my side along the sofa cushions with my back turned to the room, I flapped a dismissive hand over my shoulder until I heard his footsteps pad reluctantly back to the dining table. A moment later, the quiet, methodical sounds of his backpack unzipping, a textbook opening, and a mechanical pencil clicking twice filled the warm apartment.

Flutter. A crisp page turned. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Graphite glided across paper, paused for the soft rub of an eraser and a light puff of breath blowing away the shavings, then resumed its steady rhythm, punctuated by an occasional tap-tap of the pencil barrel against the wood.