Sin ||KookV||

4

I rubbed my hands together and put them into his shirt to help warm his abdomen up. He curled up like a shrimp and buried his head in my shoulder. He peered at me with one eye, "Have you finished writing your self-reflection?"

To others, my hyung was a successful person who stood by his word. Throughout the nine years since our parents' divorce, he had never made himself look pitiful. I kissed his brow bone and told him to call me hyung; I'd take care of him today.

He laughed as he patted my head, "You're taking advantage of me when I'm in suffering?"

I wasn't as knowledgeable as him, so I just left the hot water out until it cooled to a suitable temperature and fed it to him because I loved him and he was my hyung. I only had this one hyung. In the future, when we grew old, I would also only take care of him.

When he fell asleep, I helped him to smooth out his tightly creased brows. He was so good-looking that I suddenly wanted to abuse him.

When I saw how he was in so much pain that he turned into a little weakling, the left side of my chest suddenly felt very unbearable.

My hyung had attended university in Busan. It was the kind of university that we would boast about when teachers asked us about our dreams as kids. He had a national scholarship that could cover not just his school fees, but also part of his living expenses. He would often work part-time jobs as well. For the first two years after we ran away together, we lived in a basement apartment that only had one room, the kind where the bed was right there once you opened the door. It was close to the middle school I was temporarily studying at, and the monthly rent was 1500 won. The bowls we ate out of had ants in them. In the past, I could still study in Busan without being a registered resident of Busan, but now that was definitely not possible.

My mum would give him 1500 won worth of living expenses every month while my dad didn't care about me at all. I didn't know how my hyung lived when he gave me 2000 won worth of allowance every month.

Every weekend after working, he would come home and squeeze in the same small bed as me. In winter, the heating was bad, but if I turned on the electric blanket my throat and head would hurt, so my hyung froze in the cold with me.

In the past, I didn't know that my hyung had a gastric problem. My hyung's tummy was the warmest. I would often bury my hands under his clothes once I got home to warm them. He never avoided it either; he just turned the heater fan around to warm me.

Afterwards, he didn't go on to take a postgraduate course. After he graduated from his undergraduate course, he immediately went to get a job with a monthly salary, then thought of a way to start a business with his friends to get money to raise me. He somehow got lucky and became the boss after a few years and now our residence was in a third-tier city near Seoul. We had a 200-square-meter villa in a school district, and our days were quite comfortable.

At night, my mum called to scold me because the lady who had been on a date with my hyung had left in anger because of me. My mum was fuming as she insulted me, saying that I was a burden on my hyung and that I should screw off.

I hung up and lowered my head as I stared at the phone screen, aimlessly switching between apps. An arm rested on my neck. Hyung came over and said 'I love you' to me.

I lowered my eyelids and turned my head to touch the tip of his nose with mine. Separated by a distance that was more intimate than family yet was not quite amorously ambiguous, I said 'I love you too'.

Then we kissed, lips pressed to lips. No tongue, because he didn't do it so I didn't dare to.

We would kiss sometimes. If something at school had made me angry, or if hyung's company had given him some trouble, we would kiss. It wasn't much different from male wolves licking each other's wounds. But we wouldn't kiss deeply. That could only be done between lovers, my hyung said.

At first, I only kissed my hyung because he was always scolding me. My two hands were busy trying to catch his wrists to avoid getting hit, so I could only use my mouth to stop his words and bite him. Later, it became more casual. Sometimes when my head was fuzzy with sleep, I'd kiss him. There wasn't any reason. My hyung loved me so he would let me do whatever I wanted to him.

So I was quite afraid that in the future he would only kiss his wife, and not kiss me anymore.

For him, I stayed up to finish writing my thousand-word self-reflection and complete my worksheets. The next day, during the exercise time between classes, I went to the speaker's platform to read my self-reflection with dark eye bags under my eyes (my school's rule was that even students with temporary suspensions had to come back to school to read their self-reflection. Afterwards their parent or guardian would take them home). On the platform, I actually felt very uncomfortable. The only thought in my head was when I could go down.

Muddle-headed, I read out my reflection. When I read to the end, my form teacher personally ran up to the platform and hauled me off.

I realised that at the end of my reflection, I had written 'Jeon Jungkook' one hundred times. Just now my mouth had run on its own and I had accidentally read until the twenty-fourth one.