Right. It didn’t matter whether she swayed or got stepped on. All he needed to do was to drag her out.
Oscar stared ahead with open irritation and moved to take another step—
Then something thin wrapped around his forearm.
“……”
He stopped before taken the first step.
His gaze angled downward. At the end of it, he saw their entwined arms. Seo-ah, whose arm he had been holding until now, had flipped her hand and grabbed his forearm instead. But unlike him—who could easily wrap his hand around her arm—her small hand couldn’t even cover half of his.
“It must be hard for you. I’ll clear the path.”
“……”
Oscar watched as she slipped past him and stepped into the crowd first.
Her small, slender back entered his wide field of view.
As if she truly meant what she said, she rose onto her tiptoes, trying to see ahead.
He stared at her, dumbfounded. Even standing on tiptoe, she barely reached his chest. How exactly did she plan to cut through a crowd dense enough to make even him sigh?
And yet—
she started moving and began to forge a path.
There seemed to be space not only above but below. She slipped through gaps between bodies, weaving forward. The problem was that she kept getting bumped around from every side. Still, she didn’t seem to care. She even turned back to check whether he was following, stumbling clumsily like an idiot.
A hollow laugh escaped him.
“Take care of yourself first.”
“Just bear with it a little longer. We’ll be out soon.”
“As if.”
The cold reply came out naturally.
Then—
Whoosh.
A sharp sound rose behind them. People’s heads tilted upward all at once. Oscar looked up too.
A firework with a long tail crawled slowly into the sky. And there he was, standing in the middle of this damned crowd, watching it.
“……”
It felt absurd. Putting aside the lack of realism, he was truly dumbfounded.
He had personally donated a large sum to this event every year. This year included. Seats for major donors were prepared high up on the cathedral spire. His seat would have been there.
And not just there.
The department store’s VIP lounge had sofas arranged by wide windows with a perfect view. His place would have been there too.
Yet he had never attended. Not once.
Even as a child living nearby, he had never cared about such things.
But now, nearly thirty—
what exactly was he doing here, crushed among strangers?
The speed of the firework crawling towards the sky noticeably slowed.
The firework paused in mid-air for a moment —
then exploded with a sharp bang.
The first burst was dazzling. An exceptionally brilliant firework.
The crowd erupted in cheers.
Oscar let out a short, empty laugh and lowered his gaze.
Naturally, he assumed the timid outsider would be staring up at the sky as well. That would have been normal than anticipation.
But—
the woman who had shown up in a winter coat in midsummer never did anything normally. She did something as strange as her initial impression Even now, she was still forcing her way forward, tugging his hand, desperate to escape the crowd.
Oscar frowned and pulled her arm back.
“How are you going to get through? Wait until it’s over!”
His voice was swallowed by the noise. Seo-ah didn’t seem to hear him. She kept pushing ahead.
But Oscar had no intention of moving.
He tugged harder. The woman who had been struggling forward stumbled back toward him with ridiculous ease.
But when her face turned sharply, Oscar’s eyes narrowed. She was pale—so pale she almost looked bluish. Instead of looking up at the sky, she was completely hunched over and frozen. It was the exact opposite of the children sitting on their parents’ shoulders, craning their necks to watch the fireworks.
“…You don’t—”
You don’t know about fireworks?
BANG!
The rest of his words were swallowed by the thunderous explosion of fireworks. The surroundings lit up. Light burst across the square. People cheered. However, she shut her eyes immediately and ducked her head. Looking closely, the fingers clutching his arm were trembling.
A sigh slipped out of him.
She doesn’t know.
She really doesn’t know anything.
Her understanding of the world was worse than a ten-year-old child’s.
At that moment, another launched up into the sky roared upward. People shifted, trying to get a better view of the flames. The sudden movement rippled through the crowd. The woman, already panicking, lost her balance and collapsed forward. In a place like this, falling meant getting trampled. It was even more dangerous. Especially if you weren’t thinking straight.
Oscar grabbed her and pulled her toward the wall. Then he turned his back to the crowd and braced both arms against the wall, forcing space open with his body. He boxed her in between himself and the stone—barely enough room for one person.
Pressure poured onto his back.
He held firm.
Meanwhile, she cried out, her face twisted with fear.
“I—I—I hear gunpowder…!”
“Gunpowder? What are you talking about!”
As he spoke angrily, another explosion answered him.
It was then that the woman, her face contorted as if about to cry, lunged forward.
“My—my head…!”
Seo-ah reached for his head while ducking low herself.
“In a dangerous situation, you cover your head first.”
The words sounded automatic. Like a master who is teaching , it seemed something drilled into her bones.
Another blast thundered. The night sky lit up as if it were daytime with a roar that shook the windowpanes. The bright light was so intense, even with her eyes closed, the afterimage lingered.
Beneath the dazzling spectacle of flames, everyone cheered and stared upward into the sky.
Only the foreign woman who had crossed the sea crouched in fear. And the man shielding her looked down at her instead of the sky.
Seo-ah gasped for breath again and again.
Her ears rang.
Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.
Her thoughts tangled.
The fear of the unknown and the instinct for survival filled her entire body like smoke.
Boom. Boom boom!
The explosions kept coming. The cheers blurred into screams. She only wanted it to end.
Then—
through her muffled hearing—
a low laugh slipped in. Amid the pounding heart and dizzy breathing, the sound seeped through.
At first, she thought she’d imagined it.
But she hadn’t.
Seo-ah blinked. Her pulse still raced, her breathing still uneven—
yet that laughter cracked through her mind which had been filled the fear.
“Heh… heh…heh”
The laughter, which cracked through her suffocating fear, was familiar.
A laugh that scraped low in the throat. A sound that belonged somewhere dark and quiet.
She slowly raised her head.
And her world stopped. In that moment. Once more.
Curly jet-black hair brushed her nose. It carried a scent that evoked the smoky night. The faint scent clung to it.
Her heart dropped. Thump. The sound drowned out everything else.
The fireworks.
The screams.
All of it.
Only then did she realize how close they were. She felt everything.
Her hands were gripping his head as if embracing him. The hair tickling her nose and lips. Their legs were touching. His unfamiliar scent filled her lungs. Even her own breath stirred his hair.
Seo-ah quickly held her breath and pulled her hands away from his hair. She pressed herself back against the wall, trying to create distance.
Oscar lifted his head.
Through the strands of hair falling over his forehead, his deep blue eyes looked down at her.
Ah.
She didn’t even realize she had let out a breath.
Everything that had driven her into panic moments ago seemed to vanish. As if being erased.
Sound.
Wind.
Light.
All of it thinned out.
“……”
“……”
For an instant, it felt as if only the two of them remained.
It was as if an unreal world had swallowed her from head to toe. The sense of where she was, why she was here, alone with him here, or what was happening—all of it broke apart.
Only the man in front of her remained clear.
Oscar.
His face was close enough to touch.
The blue eyes beneath long lashes were sharp and steady. They belonged to a man with a face so beautiful it could enchant anyone, were inches away. The delicate eyelashes and transparent irises, the texture was visible, were as beautiful as his face.
Not soft. Not falter.
There was no hesitation in them. A confidence that did not cower, a strong certainty, was clearly felt in those beautiful eyes.
Knows no retreat. A figure that did not bend.
So, there are someone with eyes like this.
The thought passed through her blankly.
The man, who had been staring at her as if glaring, seemed to draw closer. His gaze, which had seemed to swallow her eyes, drifted down to her jawline. The path his eyes traced felt strangely ticklish. Her lips tingled. She pressed them together.
His face tilted. He leaned a little closer.
As she thought that his confident and certain blue eyes seemed to have blurred for some reason, he moved a little closer.
“Hic.”
Only then did she realize she had been holding her breath.
The strange stillness that felt like only he and she existed, shattered.
The scent that evoked the smoky night seeped into her lungs, and her heart, which she hadn't realized was beating. Her heart dropped hard in her chest.
“Ah!”
Seo-ah recoiled as far back as she could. Even so, there was nowhere to go. Pressed against the wall, she held her breath, unable to even blink. She felt as if blinking would make her eyelashes touch Oscar's bangs. Breathing would mix her breath with his.
Why—
What should I do, what should I do—
At that moment, the man who had been stopped, bracing himself against the wall with both arms and leaning towards her, moved. His pupils, nestled beneath delicate eyelashes, drifted towards the crowded space, and the corner of his lips curled upwards. She thought she heard a breathy laugh.
Seo-ah, frozen and unable to speak, could only stare blankly watched him straighten up. As she felt anew the presence of the man, who stood like a mountain peak blocking her path, the moment when she had lost herself in this man and their closeness disappeared as if it had never happened.
He stood upright again, tall and solid, blocking the path like a wall.
The world rushed back in all at once like a tidal wave. The cheers, which she couldn't believe she hadn't heard until now, echoed thunderously in her ears. Yet, somehow Seo-ah felt that the man in front of her felt larger than all of thing in the world.
Boom.
Startled by the sound above her head, she looked up toward the sky, almost fleeing from him.
“Ah…”
Fireworks brilliantly burst high above the cathedral. The multi-colors spread across the sky, then faded.
What she had mistaken for gunpowder—
What she had feared—
They were only fireworks.
Screams were cheers
The dazzling fireworks, the first she had ever seen, exploded ceaselessly in the sky.
The lights reflected in her wide glass-like brown eyes.
Flames blooming in the sky—
and mirrored inside her gaze.
Oscar watched the flames that colored Seo-ah's eyes quietly, then he removed the hand braced against the wall. As he did, the faint smile left his face.
He brushed his hair back and the expression disappeared completely.
The bright light in her sparkling eyes.
The flicker of those reflections—
They reminded him of something he had momentarily forgotten. The existence of the thorns.
“…It’s bothersome.”
The low murmur dissolved into the noise behind the brilliant fireworks.
—