Chapter 113
The quiet of the concrete-and-glass pavilion became an absolute vacuum. The ambient warmth that had lingered from the hot tub entirely dissolved, replaced by a cold, heavy stillness that seemed to press down on Haru's chest.
Raiven bit his lower lip so hard a faint white line formed beneath the skin.His dark eyes danced frantically around the room, tracking the shadows on the wall, the grain of the dark hardwood floorboards, anything to avoid the steady, gaze of the man standing before him. The unyielding certainty he had carried on the terrace just moments ago had completely collapsed, leaving behind the raw, jagged edges of a man who suddenly found himself cornered by his own history.
"Is there something I should know?" Haru asked softly.
He didn't demand. He didn't let the sudden wave of anxiety tightening its grip around his ribs alter the steady, grounding cadence of his voice. Step by step, his long, bare feet sliding silently over the heated wood, Haru closed the physical distance between them. He sat down on the edge of the low wooden sofa, his posture straight but welcoming, offering himself as a safe harbor in the middle of the gathering storm.
He kept his posture open, his voice welcoming and deliberately devoid of the sharp accusation that his flaring pride had carried moments before. He was trying to offer Jae-wook a safe harbor.
Instead of taking the offering, Raiven abruptly stood up. The sheer mass of his frame seemed to tower over the room, but his broad shoulders were hunched, his posture defensive. His eyes absolutely couldn't meet Haru's. He ran a large, trembling hand nervously through his damp, silver-white hair, scattering a few stray droplets of water onto the floor as he paced a short, frantic line across the concrete floor.
"Raiven, if you don't… if you can't tell me…" Haru started, his voice trailing off as he watched the visible agony rolling off his boyfriend.
"No, it's fine," Raiven cut him off fiercely, though the edge in his voice was directed entirely at himself. He stopped pacing, his back still turned to Haru, his large hands clenching into fists at his sides. "I guess… I guess it's been long overdue. I should have told you before. Before we ever got to this point. Before I let you get this deep into my mess."
Haru stayed entirely silent. The analytical, observant side of Sunghoon's soul took absolute control of his features. He didn't press, he didn't demand, and he didn't interrupt. He simply sat perfectly still in the dim light of the pavilion, waiting for him to continue, giving him the psychological space to express a truth that was clearly tearing him apart from the inside out.
Raiven swallowed hard, his jaw tightening until the muscle twitched beneath his sharp skin. "I had a relationship before."
Haru's expression didn't waver. "You told me you had one serious relationship during your rookie years. I know that, Jae-wook."
"After we broke up… I tried," Raiven continued, his voice dropping into a raspy, strained register that sounded entirely foreign coming from a global artist used to controlling every note. "I tried to date. I tried to find something normal. But... they never seemed to work out. Every single one of them felt hollow. Forced. So eventually, I just gave up. I accepted the isolation. I told myself the industry had just made me incapable of normal human connection."
"It's understandable," Haru reassured him, his tone softening with genuine empathy as he reached out a hand, though he didn't touch him yet. "It was your first love, Jae-wook-ya. Your first real relationship while navigating a brutal industry. You are bound to try, and sometimes you fail to move on properly. It just makes you human."
"No, Haru, you don't understand," Raiven said, finally turning around. The vulnerability bleeding from his dark eyes was terrifying; he looked insecure, exposed, and stripped of every piece of armor he had. "The reason they failed wasn't because I couldn't move on. The reason they failed is because he always came back."
The words struck the quiet room like a physical blow. Haru felt as if the entire supply of air in his lungs had been violently sucked out by a vacuum. The gentle, understanding expression on his face instantly froze. The distant thrum of the Jeju ocean waves suddenly sounded deafeningly loud against the basalt cliffs outside.
"He came back…?" Haru repeated. He didn't intend for his voice to drop into that thin, hollow whisper, but the words felt heavy and sharp, scraping against his throat as they left his mouth.
"Yes, and…" Raiven checked his movement, his gaze dropping to the floorboards again, completely unable to witness the shift in Haru's eyes. He looked remarkably small in that moment, despite his stature.
The silence stretched, agonizing and thick. Haru felt his pulse begin to execute a frantic, irregular rhythm against his ribs. "And… what, Jae-wook?"
"And… I always went back."
Raiven's voice was so small, so completely devoid of its usual resonant power, that it barely carried across the short distance between them.
Haru's breath hitched sharply. The words replayed in his mind with clinical, brutal clarity. I always went back. It wasn't just a past relationship that had ended and lingered as a memory; it was a revolving door. It was a cyclical tether that Jae-wook had repeatedly allowed to pull him away from the rest of the world.
A cold, bitter weight settled deep in Haru's stomach. "How many times?" Haru asked. He tried with everything in his power to keep the logical, unshakable composure of Sunghoon intact, but his raw, vulnerable heart won the battle. His voice broke on the final syllable, a fragile, fractured sound that echoed painfully off the concrete walls.
Raiven closed his eyes tight, as if bracing for an impact. "Four."
Haru looked at Raiven, his mind completely blanking out. He didn't know what to say. His long, elegant fingers curled tightly into the fabric of his loose shorts.
It was an incredibly hard pill to swallow. To find out that the man who had spent the last months mapping out every inch of his body with absolute devotion, the man who wore a matching handmade black ceramic ring on his finger, had a love in his past so immense, so completely consuming, that it rendered every human interaction after it obsolete. It instantly triggered a toxic, suffocating wave of self-doubt within Haru's chest. He found himself asking, with an agonizing pang of insecurity, if he was truly enough. If what they were building over these past few months was nothing more than another temporary distraction before the cycle repeated itself.
Was he worthy enough for Jae-wook to actually choose him when this person inevitably decided to walk back into his life?
"Do you…" Haru started, his throat so tight and dry that he had to swallow hard just to force the air out. "Do you still love him?"
The question felt entirely suffocating to even utter. He could feel his heart racing violently, a chaotic hammering against his ribs as the words left his mouth, hanging like a death sentence in the space between them.
"No!" Raiven counteracted immediately.
The word exploded from him with an absolute, terrifying conviction. In a single, fluid blur of movement, Jae-wook crossed the room and dropped to his knees right in front of the sofa, crashing his massive frame down onto the hardwood floorboards at Haru's feet. He reached out with frantic urgency, grabbing Haru's hands in his warm palms, gripping them so tightly their rings clicked sharply together in the quiet room.
Haru looked down at the silver-white hair spilling over his forehead, down at the desperate grip on his hands, before he felt a sharp sting behind his eyes and looked away, staring blankly at the dark kitchen counter where his phone lay face down.
Raiven didn't let him escape. Slowly, with an immense, trembling gentleness, he raised his larger hands to frame Haru's face, his thumbs brushing against the sharp line of Haru's jaw, forcing him to look down, forcing their eyes to lock.
"I love you," Raiven said, his voice thick, cracked, and completely saturated with an unyielding sincerity. "I love you, Haru, only you. What I feel right now… what we have here… I have never felt this in my entire life. Please."
Haru looked into those dilated, dark pupils, but the protective walls of his pride were already slamming shut to guard against the panic in his chest. "Did you tell the others you loved them too?"
The words left his mouth before his conscious mind could stop them, full of a bitter, defensive poison. He couldn't help it. Up until five minutes ago, he hadn't truly cared about the previous relationships. But now, discovering that this history was a living, breathing cycle that could actively pose a structural threat to the foundation of what they had built,he was genuinely terrified. And Raiven's sudden, heavy silence did absolutely nothing to reassure him.
Jae-wook's hands remained on Haru's cheeks, but his thumbs froze against his skin. The silence stretched for three agonizing heartbeats before he finally spoke, his voice dropping into a flat, painful whisper. "I told one other person before. Only her. But it was different...."
Haru didn't wait for the justification. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled his face back, removing himself from Raiven's hold, and stood up from the sofa. He needed to breathe. The air inside the pavilion felt completely contaminated.
His long strides carried him across the dark hardwood floor, sliding open the massive glass door and stepping out onto the open balcony. The cool midnight wind of the Jeju interior instantly hit his bare skin, shifting through his damp obsidian hair, but it did little to cut the burning sensation in his chest.
He gripped the cold metal bar of the balcony railing with both hands, leaning his weight forward as he forced himself to take a deep, stabilizing breath of the salt-thick air.
Raiven followed him out, but he stopped a safe, respectful distance behind him on the stone terrace, his large shadow blocking the light from the living pavilion.
"How long…" Haru started, his eyes fixed entirely on the dark, frothing whitecaps of the distant sea below. He couldn't help but ask. The analytical side of his mind demanded the data, even if the data was going to cut him deeper. "How long were you in a relationship with him?"
"Two years," Jae-wook said from behind him.
Haru nodded his head slowly, the cold metal of the railing biting into his palms as his grip tightened even further. Two years of history. Four times returning. It was a decade of interconnected gravity. Compared to that, what did he and Jae-wook have? A few months of secret encounters, a handful of stolen nights in Seoul, and a getaway on a secluded island. The math was terrifyingly unequal.
"I would never do that to you," Raiven's raspy voice broke through the sound of the wind, laced with a sudden, desperate panic.
"Haru, look at me. I swear to you, I would never do that to you."
Haru remained completely silent, his eyes tracing the line where the dark sea met the star-dusted sky.
"With you, it's different… you are entirely different… everything about this is different," Jae-wook pleaded, his voice cracking against the wind.
Haru couldn't prevent the heavy, suffocating lump from forming in his throat. The romantic, devoted version of Haru wanted nothing more than to turn around and throw himself into those arms, to believe every syllable without question. But the cold, logical side of Sunghoon's soul the side that had lived through betrayal, the side that understood the brutal, transactional realities of human nature was screaming at him to protect himself before he was utterly destroyed.
"Please believe me," Raiven stated, his long strides finally closing the distance between them. He reached out, his hands settling on Haru's shoulders and slowly, gently turning his frame around until they were face-to-face in the midnight draft.
When Jae-wook looked down and saw the absolute sadness and raw fear clouding Haru's usually bright, glittering eyes, he visibly flinched. It was as if he had been struck squarely in the chest with an arrow, his features contorting with a profound, visceral guilt.
"Raiven," Haru said, his voice entirely steady now, the clinical composure of Sunghoon completely taking the wheel. "You are the first man I have ever been with. I have given you my body... I have given you my heart. I have crossed every single boundary I set for myself because it was you."
He paused, swallowing against the tightness in his throat, the logical, survival-oriented side of his mind dictating his next words.
"But I know the risks of entering a relationship like this. If you feel like you can't be with me anymore..... please just tell me beforehand."
The logical calculation was clear in Haru's mind. They were only a few months into this relationship. The roots, while deep, were still fresh. If he was going to be abandoned
he needed to make it clear now, while his soul could still survive the fallout.
"Haru… don't say that. Please," Jae-wook choked out.
"Please!" Haru breathed, his composure finally shattering as a single, solitary tear escaped his lashes, running down his flushed cheek in the starlight.
Raiven didn't hesitate. His thumb flew forward, catching the damp track and wiping the tear off with an immense, trembling reverence.
"I don't ever want to let you go," Raiven stated with a fierce, absolute finality.
Before Haru could offer another logical counter-argument, Jae-wook stepped in completely, wrapping his arms around Haru's waist and pulling him flush against his chest, burying his face into the side of Haru's neck.
The sheer warmth and solid, unyielding weight of the man enveloped him entirely. For a few seconds, Haru held his breath, his body rigid against the embrace, but as the smell of cedar wood and saltwater washed over his senses, the last of his defenses collapsed. He melted completely into Raiven's arms, his own hands coming up to grip the fabric of Jae-wook's shirt as if he were a drowning man clinging to a lifeline.
Later that night, the psychological storm seemed to settle into a fragile, exhausted truce. They lay cuddled together in the center of the plush, king-sized bed, the white duvet pulled high against the cooling night air. Jae-wook's arm was wrapped securely around Haru's midsection, his large hand flattened against the small of his back in that same possessive, grounding grip he had used since they arrived. He was fast asleep, his deep, rhythmic breathing vibrating softly against Haru's shoulder blades.
But when the digital clock on the marble counter soundlessly shifted to midnight, Haru's eyes cracked open.
Completely clear and entirely devoid of sleep. Every time he closed his eyelids the sleep that had claimed Jae-wook refused to come for him. His mind was a chaotic, hyper-vigilant arena, the numbers four years, two years, and one other person rotating through his consciousness in a relentless loop. The internal security he had felt while cooking breakfast hours before had completely vanished.
Carefully, with fluid, practiced caution, Haru slid out from under the heavy comforter. He ensured Jae-wook's arm dropped gently onto the pillow, minimizing the shift in weight so as not to disturb him. The cool air of the bedroom hit his bare chest as he padded silently out of the master suite.
He didn't have his cigarettes with him, he had intentionally left them behind in Seoul as a silent promise to his health and his new life. Needing something to numb the sharp, agonizing edge of his current anxieties, he settled for wine instead.
He moved into the high-end kitchen, his movements silent and deliberate in the dark. He bypassed the panoramic windows, not wanting to look at the beautiful, silver-lit sea that had brought him so much joy earlier that day. He reached into the dark wood cabinet, pulling down a heavy, crystal wineglass and a bottle of deep red local vintage that the estate manager had left behind.
With a soft, metallic click, he uncorked the bottle and poured a generous amount of the dark liquid into the glass.
Haru didn't return to the bedroom, nor did he step out onto the balcony. Instead, he pulled a lone wooden stool into the darkest corner of the spacious pavilion, completely removed from the faint celestial light filtering through the glass walls.
He sat alone in the pitch black, his long legs drawn up slightly as he swirled the dark liquid in the crystal glass. The rich, bitter aroma of the wine filled his senses as he took a slow, heavy sip, letting the alcohol burn a track down his throat.
In the complete silence of the Jeju midnight, with the distant, muffled thrum of the ocean waves mocking his desire for a normal life, Haru stared blankly into the dark, trying with everything inside his soul to get his racing mind back into order before the morning sun.