The Warmth of Pale Hands

The car stopped in front of the school gates. A group of students spilled out of a van, chatting noisily. Ye-Kang wanted nothing more than to escape from this moment.

“…What exactly am I supposed to do?”

Jeha stared at her, his gaze sharp, before answering in a voice clear and cutting.

“Don’t fall over in front of me and scrape your knees. Don’t show up panting right before class starts. Don’t laugh and joke around with Chang-Min while calling his name like it’s some kind of performance. It’s noisy and annoying. Oh, and change your uniform—I don’t like it.”

It was a precise list. Jeha’s fractured voice delivered each item with a sharpness that made Ye-Kang’s chest tighten with anxiety. Her palms felt clammy.

“I don’t care what happened to you before you transferred here,” he continued. “What’s certain is that if I decide to mess with you, it’ll be worse than anything those other guys did to you.”

Thud, thud. Her heart pounded loudly in her ears.

“I gave you a chance, and you threw it away.”

Ye-Kang couldn’t even muster the courage to look at his face, now fully stripped of any pretense.

“…If you’re done, I’ll be going now. Class is about to start.”

Clack.

She bolted from the car, slamming the door behind her. Cold sweat trickled down her neck, and her heart hammered uncomfortably in her chest.

She hadn’t imagined it. Her first impression of him had been correct. The kind, smiling boy who had tenderly wrapped her wound was nothing but a lie. The Jeha who openly displayed hostility the moment his “kindness” was rejected was no different from the ones who had tormented her before.

The class president, always top of his class. A pastor’s son who supposedly couldn’t do anything wrong.

If she could, she would have laughed bitterly at Chang-Min’s naive assumptions.

Jeha, with his perfect life and sunny smiles, was the same person who likely sat in the dark, cutting his wrists.

She knew she couldn’t tell anyone about the class president’s secret. His expression earlier wasn’t a mere threat—it was a warning of how hellish her school life could become. As if to confirm that, the wound he had wrapped began to ache sharply. Feeling stifled, she reached down to undo the handkerchief he had tied around her knee. But it was so tightly knotted, she struggled to untie it, tears threatening to spill.

Jeha had made himself clear: don’t make him notice her again. His “list” of demands was essentially an order to stay out of his sight entirely. In the same class, how was that even possible?

Wiping her burning eyes with the back of her hand, Ye-Kang walked forward. The realization that her hopes for a peaceful school life were shattered made her want to run in the opposite direction.

The moment Jeha and Ye-Kang were separated, Jeha’s vocabulary book slipped off his lap and rolled onto the car seat. Resting his forehead against the window, Jeha felt the cool glass soothe his heated skin.

He clenched and unclenched his hand, still feeling the softness of the handkerchief tied around her knee. A faint red stain lingered on his pale fingertips. He brought his fingers to his lips, lightly licking the blood. It tasted sweet, not metallic. The sudden thirst it ignited was alarming.

His heart pounded as heat surged through his body. The old scars hidden beneath his watch itched, radiating an uncomfortable warmth, much like the dream he’d had about Ye-Kang the night before.

“Damn it…”

Jeha bit his lip and muttered under his breath. This summer wasn’t unusually hot—it was him. He was losing control of himself, both physically and mentally.

“Mister.”

“If it can’t be fixed, maybe breaking it entirely isn’t so bad,” he thought grimly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Look into something for me. As detailed as possible.”

No one had ever noticed the scars on his wrist before. It was the first time he’d wanted to disappear into someone’s eyes, to let himself be consumed by them. And it was all Kang Ye-Kang’s fault.

Her soft, warm gaze made him want to bury himself in her until he was lost entirely.

Jeha stepped out of the car and picked up the handkerchief Ye-Kang had discarded on the ground. Stuffing it into his uniform pocket, he walked slowly across the school gates. For the first time that year, he was late for the first period.

When Ye-Kang was in her third year of middle school, her mother finally accepted her calling and became a shaman. It was during that time that a young male ethics teacher had taken over as the advisor for Ye-Kang’s reading club.

He was soft-spoken and frail, with a lanky frame and an ill-fitting suit. His demeanor made him an easy target for the mocking laughter of students already old enough to be jaded.

Despite this, he was kind and attentive. He was the first to notice how withdrawn Ye-Kang had become due to her mother’s situation, cautiously calling her to the counseling office.

“What’s wrong? Tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

After much hesitation, Ye-Kang had finally opened up about her mother—a story she couldn’t share with even her closest friends. She cried a lot that day.

“It must have been so hard for you. Come to me anytime when you’re struggling. I understand.”

She had taken him at his word. They spoke often under the shade of the sycamore tree during lunch breaks. Because he was a teacher, she trusted him even more.

Only later did she realize how strange their interactions must have seemed to other students, especially those on the cusp of adolescence. When a friend, upset and shocked, asked if she knew what others were saying about her, it was that same teacher who consoled her.

“Our relationship isn’t something dirty like they’re making it out to be. I see us as friends who understand each other best.”

It was an awkward sentiment for Ye-Kang, who had seen him as a trustworthy adult, but she dismissed it as his way of being kind. At that age, she couldn’t fully grasp what most adults who wanted to befriend minors truly desired.

After all, he was a teacher.

When he called her into his filthy, disheveled car under the guise of offering comfort, and when he held her hand in the name of consolation—

Feeling his clammy, cold, sweat-soaked hand like a slippery snake against her skin, a chill ran down Ye-Kang’s spine. It was then that her instincts screamed: this wasn’t right.

Using a stomachache as an excuse, she had managed to escape as naturally as possible. She bolted to a nearby public restroom, where she scrubbed her hands under freezing cold water until they turned red, sobbing uncontrollably. The tears streaming down her face were a bitter mixture of betrayal toward the adult she had trusted and self-loathing for having believed in him at all.

After that day, the ethics teacher acted as though she didn’t exist. But what followed was a reality even more horrifying than his silence: rumors.

“Isn’t it her? The one who’s, you know… involved with the ethics teacher?”

“…Seriously? Ugh, that’s disgusting. Creepy.”

On the day of her middle school graduation, she was pelted with flour and raw eggs. It was a brutal reminder that trust was dangerous. She vowed to doubt anyone’s kindness, regardless of age or gender. It was the only way to escape the curse-like future her shaman mother had once warned her about.

The cicadas were loud, announcing the peak of summer. As Ye-Kang trudged up the hill, she nervously bit her lip.

She was late. Turning back home to grab her umbrella had been a mistake. At this point, she didn’t even consider running.

“Not only are you late, but your uniform is out of order too.”

Jeha caught her at the school gate, where several boys were being punished with push-ups. She belatedly remembered hearing that the class president sometimes stood in for the student guidance teacher as part of the discipline committee. Standing beside him was Chang-min, the vice president.

Why did she always seem to run into him in the worst situations? It had only been two days since their unpleasant encounter in the car.

“Why is your uniform still the same?”

Facing Jeha’s sharp glare, Ye-Kang felt her mouth go dry. She had managed to get a free gym uniform from a kind laundress in her neighborhood, but a school uniform was out of the question. Even secondhand ones were hard to find these days.

“…The semester’s almost over, and I’m a senior now. Spending hundreds of dollars on a uniform I’ll only wear for a month felt… wasteful.”

She forced the words out, trying to steady the churning in her stomach, but Jeha wasn’t letting it slide.

“Then you should have filed an official explanation with the student office.”

“I’ll do that,” she replied quietly, hoping to defuse the situation.

But Jeha, unsatisfied, moved on to another issue.

“Fine. What about your name tag?”

Ye-Kang nervously licked her dry lips. She’d been missing her name tag since the day before and knew it.

“…I lost it. I told the student office, but they said all the orders go through at once.”

“That was unnecessary.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeha clicked his tongue softly and pulled something out of his pocket. Slowly opening his hand, he revealed a dark blue acrylic name tag with her name clearly printed on it.

“You dropped it in the car two days ago.”

The expressions of the other discipline committee members instantly shifted to curiosity. She could hear the whispers: “She lives in the shantytown, right?”

Shantytown. Her new nickname.

She recalled Chang-min’s mocking voice from the restroom, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Did you see her blouse? It’s about to burst at the seams. She’s so tacky it’s disgusting.”

Wearing hand-me-down clothes that barely fit, Ye-Kang wondered if she looked just as “tacky” to Jeha.

“Do I need to pin it on you myself?”

Jeha’s calm, taunting tone made her neck and ears burn with humiliation. Snatching the name tag from his hand, she quickly pinned it to her blouse, feeling the weight of every gaze on her.