OMLN | Chapter 7

A scribble of writing on the side, with a small drawing that could be a triangle or something of the sort.

Kang Yebon had to squint three times before realizing that this was supposed to be a cake. He chuckled weakly. The cake looked like it had been stepped on five times by someone.

Kang Yebon glanced at Cha Hyuk and quietly slipped that scrap of paper into his pencil case.

Cha Hyuk looked at him as if to ask why he was putting that into his pencil case. Kang Yebon mumbled softly.

“It’s a coupon.”

Cha Hyuk chuckled, only to get a not-so-subtle reprimand from the professor. Everyone in the lecture hall must have felt the professor’s voice trembling.

Perhaps because Cha Hyuk was sitting next to him, time seemed to pass unusually fast today.

The professor took a sip from his tumbler and glanced at the clock at the back of the lecture hall before flipping to the next slide.

A page with ‘Week 4 Assignment’ written in large letters appeared, and shortly after, sighs of frustration could be heard near Kang Yebon.

Kang Yebon couldn’t help but frown slightly as well.

Form groups of two or three to research a philosopher each from absolutism, relativism, and nihilism. Discuss their thoughts, organize your own opinions, and the opinions of others, and submit them to the online lecture room.

!Impossible to do alone, must be done in groups of two to three, include the names of group members!

!No copy-pasting, we will check!

!Submission after the deadline is not possible!

!Formatting incorrectly will result in deduction! Please do the basics!

No team projects, they said.

Kang Yebon scanned the lecture hall with his eyes. He didn’t know a single person here.

Well, there was one face he knew, but he had never talked to him. And he already seemed to have a partner, sitting and chatting with someone else.

As Kang Yebon hesitated, the professor declared the end of the class, and the one familiar face left without looking back, chatting with his new partner.

Kang Yebon turned his head stiffly to the side and met Cha Hyuk’s gaze. Cha Hyuk was smiling.

“Do you have another class after this?”

Kang Yebon bowed his head slightly, feeling a sense of despair, then shook his head.

“Do you not want to do it with me that much?”

Kang Yebon looked up at Cha Hyuk, hesitating for a moment.

Honestly, he didn’t dislike Cha Hyuk. It was just the situation of being with him and the secret he knew that made Kang Yebon uncomfortable.

To be frank, whenever he saw Cha Hyuk, Jung Woochan came to mind.

Since their first meeting happened to be when he got dumped by Jung Woochan.

While Kang Yebon struggled to answer, a guy and a girl who were whispering at the front of the lecture hall approached Cha Hyuk and Kang Yebon.

“Hello!”

The greeting was lively, but it was directed at Cha Hyuk, not Kang Yebon.

Cha Hyuk gave them a glance and nodded slightly. The guy, with a cheerful grin, said:

“We were in the same group during the freshman orientation, remember? Park Minchan! But I guess you don’t remember.”

Cha Hyuk looked Park Minchan up and down, raised an eyebrow, and quietly said, “Ah, I think I remember.” Park Minchan’s face brightened at that.

“If you don’t have anyone to do the project with, would you like to join us? This is my friend from another department; she doesn’t have anyone either.”

The girl behind Park Minchan shyly stepped forward, bowed, and mumbled her name.

Kang Yebon watched the scene with trembling eyes.

With Cha Hyuk and these two, that made three – the group was already full.

To repeat, Kang Yebon knew no one in this class.

Ah, Cha Hyuk briefly glanced at the two and turned his gaze to Kang Yebon. His eyes seemed to be asking, “What will you do?”

Kang Yebon had no choice. He grabbed Cha Hyuk’s hand resting on his knee, fixed his eyes on him, and said:

“I don’t mind at all.”

The two seemed unaware of Kang Yebon’s presence until then, showing signs of tension when they finally noticed him. Cha Hyuk, with a broad smile still fixed on Kang Yebon, said:

“He wants to do it with me, sorry.”

His smug expression didn’t look sorry at all; rather, he seemed excited.

The two quickly said it was fine and left in a hurry. They glanced back at Kang Yebon as they turned to leave.

“Let’s go.”

“…Yes.”

Cha Hyuk hummed a tune as he crossed the threshold of the lecture hall, and Kang Yebon followed with slumped shoulders.

Cha Hyuk walking ahead naturally drew people’s attention. Kang Yebon walked a few steps behind, observing his back.

He would probably look too if someone like Cha Hyuk walked by.

‘Wearing a long shirt and long pants on such a hot day is one thing, but why…’

Why does he always slick his hair back with wax, or maybe it’s hairspray, given how firm it looks?

Under that dark shirt, his broad back seemed like it could have a dragon or a tiger staring back.

Despite promising not to judge by appearances, Kang Yebon was again looking at Cha Hyuk’s unseen parts with a skewed gaze.

“We have hazelnut chocolate cake today.”

This was whispered by the cafe worker when Kang Yebon was choosing his cake.

The fact that the worker remembered him and how he must have looked that day made him suppress his embarrassment and quietly thank her.

They sat at the most secluded table in the cafe.

Kang Yebon opened his laptop and looked at Cha Hyuk sitting opposite him. Only a phone was on Cha Hyuk’s table, and Kang Yebon’s eyebrow twitched.

“You don’t have a laptop?”

“Nope, do I need one?”

When he responded so confidently, Kang Yebon had nothing to say. It was an unexpectedly assigned task, after all.

“It’s not due right away, so it’s fine. Let’s each pick a philosopher, do our research, and share it later.”

“Okay.”

The vibration bell rang. Cha Hyuk naturally stood up, brought back two slices of cake and an iced Americano on a tray, and set them down.

He took one iced Americano and pushed the rest towards Kang Yebon.

Kang Yebon silently looked at the homemade cake filled with cream in front of him.

They chose their philosophers, but to discuss, they needed to do some research.

When Kang Yebon was about to move next to Cha Hyuk with his laptop, Cha Hyuk stopped him with a light gesture.

Then he moved over to Kang Yebon’s side. Kang Yebon shifted his hips awkwardly.

Because of Cha Hyuk’s size, there was barely the space of two finger joints between their forearms.

Kang Yebon’s back straightened involuntarily, and his palms grew sweaty. The sweet scent of the dessert cafe mingled with a heavy, cool fragrance that swept through his nose.

Cha Hyuk crossed his arms, looking down at the laptop screen, then turned his dark eyes to Kang Yebon.

Their eyes met, and Kang Yebon quickly averted his gaze.

“…Who should we start with?”

“In order of selection.”

Then it would be Nietzsche, and surprisingly, it was Cha Hyuk who suggested him first.

Discussion was hard, but even just talking about it seemed overwhelming.

‘How do you feel about Nietzsche?’

It felt strange, like some kind of current affairs program. And to express his opinion – Kang Yebon didn’t know much about Nietzsche in the first place.

However, Nietzsche was certainly a bit tricky for Kang Yebon. Even those who didn’t know him well would know the one line, “God is dead.”

For Kang Yebon, who grew up in a world where his mother believed in a living God, Nietzsche was quite a rough character.

God is dead? That’s blasphemy. Though it wasn’t something Kang Yebon could say.

Cha Hyuk was watching Kang Yebon, who was staring intently at the laptop screen. His dark eyes had a soft glow.

“Why did you suggest Nietzsche?”

Kang Yebon, throwing away all the sophisticated opening lines he had thought of, just said what came to mind. And oddly, it felt liberating.

“I used to go to the library every weekend. There was only one book I read, and it was about Nietzsche. It was a borrowed copy, but there were some surprisingly good sentences in it that I couldn’t forget.”

“What sentence was that?”

Instead of answering right away, he pulled the laptop in front of Kang Yebon towards himself.

His hands went over the keyboard, and Kang Yebon thought it looked unusually small under those hands. The keys were silent thanks to the keycaps, and his fingers moved quickly.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

It was an unfamiliar sentence, making him think, “He said this too?” The cursor blinked repeatedly after the last letter.

Kang Yebon slowly turned to look beside him. He met Cha Hyuk’s dark eyes, as if they had bloomed from the shadows.

Unfathomably deep, those black eyes reflected Kang Yebon.

Kang Yebon asked without thinking.

“Who is the monster?”

Cha Hyuk answered.

“Me.”

At such close proximity, Kang Yebon was reflected in those black eyes.

Neither of them was laughing.

Even though Wednesday was supposed to be the only day Kang Yebon met Cha Hyuk, the project ended vaguely yesterday, so Kang Yebon was in the cafe early.

To be precise, Kang Yebon had run away, saying he had something to do.

Today, instead of cake, there were two small madeleines and one chocolate cookie with a melted marshmallow in the center. The cookie was a service from the staff.

With the laptop open and taking a sip of cold café latte, Kang Yebon stirred the plastic straw in circles, making a clinking sound of ice against ice.

The last page of the HWP document on the laptop screen still had traces of Cha Hyuk.

After some time, Kang Yebon became curious.

‘Why couldn’t Cha Hyuk forget that sentence? What was so striking about it?’

At the same time, he remembered Cha Hyuk calling himself a monster. If Cha Hyuk was the monster, who was fighting him?

This sentence now seemed unforgettable to Kang Yebon as well.

Ding-.

The cute sound of a bell rang, and the person who entered was anything but cute.

Today, he wore a navy shirt, the only difference being a pair of black sunglasses hanging from his neck.

Doesn’t he have any other clothes?

“Did you wait long?”

Spotting Kang Yebon immediately, he sat down opposite him.

“Not really. I ordered yours already. Iced Americano, okay?”

“Oh, Yebon has some sense. I was dying of thirst.”

He took out the straw and gulped down the coffee. The small ice didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Kang Yebon watched him closely, worried he might choke on ice.

His hair, slicked back as always, was slightly tousled today, with beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Did you come from work?”

Cha Hyuk noticed Kang Yebon looking at the sunglasses hanging from his neck while he chewed on a big chunk of ice.

“I just went to a shiny place for a bit.”

A shiny place?

Kang Yebon naturally thought of stars, but it was bright afternoon. Unless they went to the other side of the earth, they wouldn’t see stars.

So, what could be a shiny place where Cha Hyuk would go?

Kang Yebon furrowed his brows.

“…A nightclub?”