2.2 | A Lifetime Of You ✓

chapter 8

As the days of winter blended into spring, the task force committee neared its end. There wasn't much time left before Joon would have to transfer back to the Sales department and work tirelessly as a team leader again. He wouldn't be able to be in such close proximity with Cyan ever again, in all his working years. 

That somehow made him determined to show his feelings to the man. 

Especially when they were close enough to have a few lunches over at Cyan's place. He didn't invite anyone else, it was just him, his raccoon daughter and Joon. 

Cyan's daughter was like any other child with two parents. She played around, had childish whims, had friends, and had weird mud eating habits. It was Cyan who was the abnormal one. Sometimes on Sundays, when he would drop by Cyan's house with a box of chocolates and he would walk him and his daughter to the nearby park to play. 

Often, Joon saw her as his own daughter. He felt happy when she brought home her drawings (raccoon drawings, mostly), played the keyboard for them in the evenings, and blabbed endlessly about Yang. 

Lala had lots of friends. And everyone liked her. Joon could see the traces of a future class representative in her, and if he was dreaming big, perhaps a prosecutor or a judge. She had that commanding tone of voice, and all the little kids hid behind her when a large dog went by. 

But neither she nor her friends were the problem. The problem lay in the friends' mothers. Who used to sit together in one corner of the garden and chat obnoxiously, sometimes pointing fingers and wayward sneers at Seo Cyan. 

Joon knew what they were talking about. They considered it inappropriate for a daughter to grow up alone without a mother, general trash talk about Cyan's personal life and now the sparkling rumors of him being gay because Joon was often seen with him. Joon hated the last one the most. He could see disgust towards himself and Cyan when a woman came by their way, and practically barked at Cyan to let his daughter come to her son's birthday party on Wednesday. 

"Why do you let them walk all over you?" Joon hissed, unable to contain his vexation when the woman hmphed at Cyan and walked away. 

"If I say anything, they would say that I am uncharacteristically rude. If I don't say anything, they would question my masculinity. Choose any one." 

Joon fell silent. Pick your poison. The least dangerous one. That made it seem like Cyan really had a choice — between the lesser of the two evils. 

"Why the heck can't a father raise a child alone?" Joon scoffed loudly, turning his face and glaring at the group of women as hard as he could. 

"I wouldn't blame them, Joon-ah," Cyan sighed and turned away. His daughter was waving to him, hands covered in sand from the castles she had been building with a few girls. "Someway or another, the reputation we have is largely our fault." 

Joon's heart raced. For an outlandish, almost funny reason. Cyan had called him like an old friend. A crack in his outward exterior. Thinking about it, Cyan never talked about his feelings. But his actions, by and large, were extremely big. Joon was the only one who could approach him, act like friends, call him informally, have dinners together, close enough to pick up his daughter from daycare a few times… 

Didn't that mean Cyan liked him too? 

______

"Ahjussi," Lala said to Joon one evening. She was sitting in the back of Joon's car, the two of them alone because Cyan had stepped out to get his laptop back from the repair shop on the way. 

It was the first time the racc— child had said anything to Joon. 

"Hm?" 

"Ahjussi, you're Appa's friend, right?" 

"Right." Joon's fingers curled around the steering wheel tightly. 

"Then please don't talk bad about him." 

"Eh?" 

"All the ahjummas keep saying that Appa is a weird man. They say bad things about him." 

"W-Why do they say that?" Joon's heart fell. There was an innocence in that request. And also a fear. But behind it, the most of all, Joon realised that Lala could see through Cyan's facade. Just like he could see through his parents' lies. 

"Because Eomma is not with us," Lala said without blinking. 

Joon didn't know what to say. And he couldn't even say anything. Cyan came back before that. 

"Did I take too long?" He asked before opening the door on the front and taking the seat beside Joon. "There was quite a big line back there." 

"Nothing," Joon said, eyes fixed on the road as he started driving again. He didn't know how to form words. Eomma. Of course Lala had a mother, that was the way of nature. Just who he was, thinking of taking a place that could never belong to him. 

"Nothing at all," he said. 

________

Lost in his own despair and restlessness, the feelings of butterflies Joon got whenever he was near Cyan soon faded away into something deeper, and more painful. He wanted Cyan to let him in, use him as a shoulder to cry on, just… love him back. 

He had thought that as the days of the task force would pass by, he would bid adieu to the fleeting enjoyment he had and return back to his normal life but now, he didn't want that task force to end. 

He had come to love the presentations, interdepartment exchange of ideas and proposals, field workshops and Cyan. Just the mere thought of being away from him was unbearable to think. 

Ah, that was what love felt like. 

Joon had no time to sit still and end up thinking like nostalgic old people. He didn't want to be one of them — people who were too afraid to have lived and loved when there was still time, and then fondly reminisced their youth because they had nothing else to do. 

"What was your wife like, Cyan?" 

That question came out of a silent anger, and a burning curiosity. What kind of a woman Cyan liked, who was she, and why the heck hadn't her shadow left Cyan. 

"I never had a wife," Cyan said with a somber smile. 

"Then…" 

"Out of wedlock." Cyan finished the hanging sentence. His expression was more solemn, and his posture stiff on the backrest of the chair. They were alone in the conference room, and before then lay the data for the  market of the new smartphones in northern Europe. 

"It's a long story," Cyan chuckled and looked away, taking his hands off the table so that Joon couldn't reach out and caress the back of his palm. His dismissiveness, one moment warm and the next cold was confusing. 

"I have time." 

Cyan sighed. Of course, that wasn't a conversation he wanted to have. But Joon wanted to know. 

"I told you, I was never a very expressive person. Never told anyone what I felt, you know." Cyan had his eyes fixed on the whirring fan in one corner of the room. "Haesun was really… bold, lively, cheerful, everything that I wasn't." 

There was an intermittent sadness between them. And at that moment, Joon realised that probably Cyan had moved on, or at the very least, wanting to move on. 

"I love Lala." he slumped on the chair, his forearm pressed over his eyes. "I love her so much that," his shoulders shook as he spoke those words, "sometimes… I am afraid to love someone else."