The Reason? - Yoon Jeonghan

Chapter 26

"So," Jeonghan's dad started saying when the tea was brought forth and each of them had a little cup in front of them, steam escaping from the open surface. "Are you two 관계?"

Jeonghan nearly choked on his tea at his father's words, having not even thought about how it must have looked to his parents.

"관계?" Ophely asked, not sure to understand what his father meant by those words (relationship).

"Dating." Ophely's eyes widened, by themselves they clearly meant that they weren't and that she hadn't even thought about it.

"Ah, no." She said, quickly closing down that idea. "We are not dating, he is too old for me." Ophely didn' mean her words to act like a jab to Jeonghan, but it did just that. He felt like an old man at that moment. 'Too old.' he repeated to himself while his parents looked even more appalled by Ophely.

"Too old?" His mother asked her incredulously, what did that mean? Her son wasn't very old, just twenty-three years old. "How old are you?" She finished by asking the young girl who was drinking her tea.

"I am seventeen years old." She said.

"Eighteen." Jeonghan rectified. "Korean age." Hoping that that would make it less worse for his parents.

It didn't seem to help much, because he had the two questioning gazes of his parents on him.

"I'm coming to it." He said as he finished his cup of warm tea and served himself another one. "Why did I come here with a foreign eighteen year old high school girl when I am not dating her? I know." That was perfectly what his parents were asking themselves. What were they, as a duo, here when her son could have come on his own without any issue? "Ophely, here, is French. And she arrived in Korea about less than a month ago, when Soobin came to visit me in Seoul." He gulped down the tea he was drinking, and waited for his parents to do the same. "She came to Korea in my body." His mother didn't seem to understand what he meant, and his father much less. "And I found myself in her body in France. We don't know how that works." He finished by saying.

"And we swap back to the wrong body from time to time."

"And how do you get back to the 'right' body?" His father asked more calmly, seemingly having grasped the concept slightly.

"Skin touch." Ophely immediately answered, but immediately backtracked "That sounded wrong. Didn't it?" She asked no one in particular, though looking at Jeonghan from the corner of her eye.

"A bit." He said back.

"But, wait." His mother cut them all off in that slightly awkward moment. "Did you say that you come from France?" Ophely nodded. "Such a beautiful country isn't it? I have always wanted to go there, you too Jeonghan? You have yet to go there with your concerts ... How beautiful is that country? Please tell me about how your home is over there?"

"Uhm - different?" Ophely managed to reply to the onslaught of questions, looking at Jeonghan for some potential help, she had no idea how to react to his mother. It seemed that neither did he. "I can't compare it very well to Korea because this is the first time that I actually left Seoul." But these questions were all that was needed for the atmosphere to be joyous again. The older woman was back to serving tea to everyone, even bringing out some biscuits to enjoy too.

-

"I'm home." The young girl called out as she removed her shoes and slipped on her house shoes. She stopped moving when she put her second one on, not hearing the usual answer that she used to have when coming back home. "Anybody there?" She called out louder. As an answer, this time, she heard banging and someone cursing from upstairs. And then a girl coming down the stairs wearing her old slippers, holding onto her elbow. She must have hit it.