Chapter 103: Latent Subroutines and Boundary Reset

Na Eun-hyeok’s casual composure managed to temporarily halt the endless downward spiral of my negative thoughts, but it didn’t completely put my mind at ease. Knowing his usual character, I had a feeling that even if I had committed some unforgivable, horrific blunder, he would still graciously play it off with perfect politeness. Please tell me I didn’t make a complete fool out of myself. Waiting for him anxiously with a parched throat, Na Eun-hyeok soon reappeared carrying a glass of water.

“Here, drink some.”

“Thanks.”

I took the glass from his hand. Our fingertips brushed lightly against each other, and I almost dropped the cup right then and there. Forcing strength into my fingers at the last second, the water inside the glass sloshed violently from my trembling. I practically poured the cold water down my throat to forcefully drag my scattered sanity back together.

“I’m really sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have kept drinking past my limit……”

“It’s fine. It happens.”

“I didn’t say anything weird, did I? If I did, I’m incredibly sorry.”

“You didn’t say anything weird at all. Don’t worry about it.”

The corners of Na Eun-hyeok’s long eyes crinkled into a soft line. Looking at his unrealistically handsome face, my heart violently thumped against my ribs. I resented my tactless, clueless heart for racing at such an inappropriate time, but then again, failing to get a racing heart after looking directly at a face like this would be definitive proof that something was physically broken inside me.

“If I had known you had such a low tolerance, I would have stopped you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from that.”

“No, why are you the one apologizing? You did nothing wrong.”

“Here.”

Na Eun-hyeok handed me a small green bottle containing a hangover cure. As I cracked it open and forced the liquid down, his gentle voice continued to wash over me.

“Eat some breakfast before you leave. It’s only seven in the morning anyway.”

“Ah, n-no. I’m okay. I really shouldn’t impose on you any further……”

“I already ordered food.”

Ah. He had already ordered.

Since the food was already on its way, refusing to stay felt entirely wrong. He had obviously ordered a 2-person portion, meaning any leftover food would be destined straight for the trash bin. As a fellow student living alone, wasting food was an absolute sin that could not be tolerated. I shamelessly fabricated the excuse to justify my stay.

“Aren’t you curious about what I ordered?”

When I remained quiet, Na Eun-hyeok initiated the conversation first.

“Ah, well. I’m sure you ordered something good.”

“Since it’s so early, there weren’t many places open. I ended up getting soft tofu stew and spicy stir-fried pork.”

“Soft tofu stew and stir-fried pork?”

“Yeah. Do you not like it?”

“No, I love it.”

My slightly awkward reaction was purely because the menu felt so incredibly hilariously jarring for someone like Na Eun-hyeok. Soft tofu stew and stir-fried pork? I had always unconsciously pictured Na Eun-hyeok existing on a strict diet of high-end pasta and luxury steaks. Even though we had literally eaten standard school cafeteria meals together before, my rigid preconceptions of him were apparently deeply rooted. I felt a wave of self-reflection for treating him like some kind of non-human entity.

The morning sunlight cutting through the window framed his profile, simultaneously casting perfect highlights and deep shadows across his face. Staring blankly at his radiant, practically sacred face, I forcefully turned my gaze away. Despite my self-reflection a moment ago, I was still treating Na Eun-hyeok like a transcendent being. Looking directly at his face felt akin to committing a blasphemous sin against a deity.

“If you’re still tired, you can lie back down for a bit.”

“I’m fine.”

Following my stiff response, a heavy silence settled into the room.

Maybe acting like a broken robot in front of him was actually a saving grace. Between finding out that I viewed him as a sacred deity versus finding out that I secretly resented him, which option would be less psychologically burdensome for Na Eun-hyeok?

The emotion of love was truly an irrational thing. He was a human being entirely no different from myself, yet I continuously sought out traces of divinity within him. Love was an act of worshiping every single quirk an individual possessed, to the point where even the most mundane, ordinary details were rendered entirely extraordinary. Just as the root of a miracle can never be truly traced, the source of deep adoration remained entirely unanswerable.

To me, even the simple act of Na Eun-hyeok blinking his eyes felt like a holy ritual. My heart loudly reverberated.

“Na Eun-hyeok.”

“Yeah?”

My lips parted slightly, but no sound came out. The realization that his focus, his gaze, and his physical presence were entirely anchored to me suddenly felt completely overwhelming. Inside Na Eun-hyeok’s private house, trapped in a space where it was just the two of us. Even though I logically knew none of this possessed any deeper meaning, a pathetic corner of my heart desperately clawed to assign one.

In that exact moment, Na Eun-hyeok leaned closer.

“Why are you so incredibly tense, Un-ha-ya?”

His whispered voice. His soft breath ghosting past. It was only because the interior of the house was so perfectly quiet that every single detail sounded incredibly loud……

“I’m not.”

“Does being around me make you nervous?”

“No?”

The reflexive answer tumbled out of my mouth in a sharp, blunt tone, causing me to instantly curse my own social awkwardness. And Na Eun-hyeok merely smiled, looking exactly like a person who had fully anticipated my response. It was as though he hadn’t even truly processed my denial.

“I wonder why you’re so tense.”

“Huh?”

“They say people get nervous whenever they’re standing in front of the person they like. Could it be something like that?”

My breath instantly hitched in my throat.

“Though I’m sure there’s absolutely no way that’s the case. Right?”

Haha. Na Eun-hyeok’s light laughter echoed as if it were traveling from a vast distance. If my initial breathlessness had been born from a toxic mixture of wild anticipation and sheer panic, the subsequent knot in my throat was a suffocating blend of crushing disappointment and hollow relief. While my logical brain kept telling me that from Na Eun-hyeok’s perspective, this was a perfectly normal joke to crack, a thick wave of rejection flooded my chest—making me feel like someone who had just suffered a devastating heartbreak without ever having the chance to confess. My hands and feet went icy cold, while my heart stubbornly throbbed at a frantic pace. Clutching my trembling chest, I desperately forced my voice into a stable register.

“Of course not.”

Did my voice shake? I couldn’t tell. Did Na Eun-hyeok notice something? I had absolutely no idea.

I felt like the tragic protagonist of some twisted psychological experiment. Na Eun-hyeok clearly possessed zero underlying intentions, yet I was single-handedly constructing mountains out of molehills and driving myself crazy.

But wait, is that actually true? I slowly chewed over the thought again.

Did he really possess absolutely zero hidden intentions?

To claim he was just a harmless, innocent friend spouting meaningless words, hadn’t there been entirely too many profoundly significant moments between us? Na Eun-hyeok’s voice reminding me that ‘it’s darkest right under the lamp’ was still vividly ringing in my ears. Could I truly be one hundred percent confident that there was absolutely zero meaning buried behind that entire string of remarks?

“What are you thinking about?”

“Just……”

“Are you thinking about me?”

See? Exactly like this. These specific kinds of questions.

“Why do you keep asking me things like that?”

“No reason. I’m just curious.”

“Why?”

Faced with my defensive counter-question, Na Eun-hyeok merely flashed a bright, sunny smile.

“Do you really not remember anything from last night?”

“……Did something happen?”

“I merely gave you exactly what you asked for.”

Dropping his eyelids into a lazy, crinkling smile, his handsome features gleamed with an unreal level of beauty. Somehow, I could instinctively feel exactly where his gaze was traveling. My throbbing lower back, my aching hips, and the sore muscles along my inner thighs twitched violently as if screaming to reveal the truth, but I forcefully shut the realizations down. There’s no way. Absolutely impossible. There’s just no way.

“I…… I made a huge mistake, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Listen, if I committed some kind of horrific blunder, please just be honest and tell me.”

“I’m serious, you didn’t. It was actually incredibly fun. I thoroughly enjoyed myself too.”

His words provided absolutely zero comfort. In fact, they only served to grant a terrifying amount of structural support to my absolute worst-case hypothesis. What on earth did I ask for? There was no way a hangover of this caliber meant I had begged him to play a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors with forehead flicks.

My lips felt bone-dry. Even though I had just drained a full glass of water, an insatiable thirst clawed at my throat.

Watching me anxiously chew on my bottom lip, Na Eun-hyeok let out a smooth chuckle.

“You’re truly an entertaining person, Un-ha.”

“Huh?”

“I think this entire semester has been incredibly fun purely because of you.”

There it was again. Those deeply loaded, ambiguous statements.

Failing to construct a proper response, my eyes darted frantically around the room. Analyzing the thick atmosphere, it felt as though we had crossed a massive, dangerous line into something incredibly illicit last night, yet Na Eun-hyeok’s overall demeanor completely contradicted the weight of that reality.

His attitude was perfectly kind, yet it carried an invisible, unyielding boundary—as if indicating that everything that occurred had been nothing more than a fleeting moment of amusement.

“Yesterday was especially great.”

The way his eyes crinkled as he smiled held absolutely none of the deeper emotional warmth I was desperately searching for.

Vague, fragmented shards of last night threatened to pierce through my consciousness. It took only a fraction of a second to arrive at the absolute certainty that the absolute worst-case scenario—something I had desperately prayed hadn’t occurred—had indeed taken place. To claim I didn’t possess a shred of suppressed desire for physical intimacy would be a total lie, but observing Na Eun-hyeok’s completely detached composure, whatever fragile expectations I had harbored were instantly crushed.

The breakfast he had mentioned arrived right on cue. Sitting directly across from each other at a massive dining table, we began unwrapping the plastic packaging. The rough, crinkling sound aggressively scraped against my eardrums. My hyper-sensitive brain instantly mapped the sound to the friction of rustling bedsheets from last night, which was undoubtedly an overreaction on my part.

The entire time I forced the food down my throat, my brain was entirely hijacked by a frantic attempt to reconstruct the events of last night. Na Eun-hyeok was talking across the table, but his words barely registered. My entire focus was completely consumed by the retrospective investigation. To think that I was failing to pay attention to Na Eun-hyeok while sitting directly in front of him—the old version of myself would have fainted in sheer shock at the mere concept.

“Un-ha-ya.”

“Ah, yeah?”

I was forcefully snapped back to reality only when he clearly called my name. Na Eun-hyeok’s voice, which had dropped into a register that was slightly lower and heavier than usual, carried an innate authority that dragged me out of my deep trance. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to look him directly in the eye. His voice traveled softly across the table.

“About what happened last night……”

“Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m going to act like it never happened anyway.”

The exact moment the dreaded topic was introduced, I ruthlessly launched a preemptive strike to cut him off. Saying those words out loud sent a sharp, agonizing ache straight through my chest, but I figured uttering the rejection myself was a thousand times better than hearing him politely let me down with his own mouth. I knew my place in the grand scheme of things. The answer Na Eun-hyeok’s detached attitude had delivered to me this morning was blazingly obvious.

Na Eun-hyeok instantly shut his mouth. For a microscopic fraction of a second, his eyes seemed to freeze into a terrifyingly cold, dark glare, but the expression vanished so rapidly it made me question if I had simply imagined it. Then, his face beautifully illuminated once more with a brilliant smile, looking exactly like a man who had received the precise answer he was looking for.

“……Right.”

Did that brief pocket of heavy silence carry some kind of hidden significance? For some inexplicable reason, his radiant smile felt intensely laced with pure, suppressed anger, but the underlying cause for it was entirely beyond my understanding.

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