PUPPY 25

After Juwon took the puppy and went home, Seowoo had a short conversation with his grandfather. When he said that the youngest son of the tile-roofed house, meaning Juwon, would help find the puppy’s owner, his grandfather said, ‘Oh? That’s great,’ but his expression was one of disappointment.

Seowoo, who had been contemplating going to the study room, gave up because he felt strangely lethargic and tired. After taking a shower and entering his room, Seowoo dried his hair with a towel and opened his English mock exam workbook.

‘Online dating is a modern way to find a romantic partner.’

Seowoo, who had a habit of underlining as he read passages, pressed the back of his mechanical pencil firmly.

‘Mr. Johnson, who was in despair after separating from his wife, met a new girlfriend through an app called Love Hunter.’

Girlfriend.

‘Many people form new and diverse relationships through online dating services. Not only the existing relationships of unmarried men and women, but also relationships that transcend taboos and boundaries….’

Relationship….

Seowoo, who had been reading and interpreting the passage, put down his mechanical pencil and rubbed his eyes. A small sigh escaped his lips on its own. Seowoo was good at concentrating, so when he focused on one thing, he tended not to think about anything else. But sometimes, thoughts like these would come to him.

Girlfriend.

Half of the conversations among the boys in his class, including his friends the Dong-dong-jus, were about girls. Either about the girlfriends they were currently dating, or ridiculous talk about how they were going to get a girlfriend like crazy when they went to college. The other half was about games or soccer. After becoming a senior in high school, topics like grades or university would occasionally come up as well.

It wasn’t intentional, but Seowoo had never had a girlfriend. He had received confessions with gifts on Valentine’s Day and his birthday a few times, but he had immediately apologized and rejected them.

Becoming a senior made the excuse that he wasn’t dating because of college entrance exams possible, but until he became a senior, guys without girlfriends became objects of analysis.

Someone was too short, someone had acne, or if not that, they weren’t good at talking…

Among those ordinary and numerous reasons, the words that followed Seowoo were, ‘He’s sick, you know.’ Seowoo felt like he was always the odd one out in his relationships. His friends would be giggling and playing pranks on each other, but then they would draw a line, saying, ‘Hey, don’t do it to Ryu Seowoo.’ It was a consideration others showed him, but Seowoo sometimes felt that such words and actions were not consideration but exclusion. Though it might just be his own paranoia.

He also found it strange that the excuse of being sick worked, even though not liking someone or not dating probably had nothing to do with being seriously ill.

Girlfriend, boyfriend, partner….

Only fragments of the sentence remained in Seowoo’s mind as he looked at the English passage. As he picked up his mechanical pencil to check the answer, a question arose.

Have I ever been interested in a girl?

He had been relieved when he felt no particular emotion even after seeing Seo Jaeha, who was incredibly handsome and a mature adult, but on second thought, that wasn’t all there was to it.

Just including a man in the category of a potential romantic partner was… different from before.

‘This is crazy.’

Seowoo, flustered just by his own thoughts, suddenly found his gaze directed at the Polaroid picture stuck on his desk. It was a solo picture taken while standing on the wooden floor of Juwon’s house last time.

That day, Seowoo had taken a solo picture, and after that, Seowoo and Juwon had taken a picture together with their faces side by side. Of those, Juwon took the picture they took together, and Seowoo took the solo picture. Even though he was looking at the picture of himself standing there all alone, the situation where he had taken a picture with Juwon naturally came to mind.

The memories continued in a chain, leading to the walking path he had walked with Juwon, the pull-up bar where Juwon exercised, and the moment their lips touched. Shaking his head, Seowoo picked up the cell phone he had deliberately left lying with its screen facing down. And he wrote a message to send to Juwon.

「Tomorrow」

Staring at the screen, Seowoo hesitated and didn’t send the message. Seowoo’s eyes, which were sweeping over the innocent screen, noticed Seo Jaeha’s profile. In the picture taken standing with a dog, only a black silhouette was visible. When he swiped the picture to the side, he saw a picture of him with his hand resting on the steering wheel of an expensive imported car. The watch on his wrist looked expensive even to Seowoo, who had no expertise in brands.

After flipping through a few similar pictures taken in front of a luxury car or displaying a watch, Seowoo closed the messenger and opened the app Juwon had told him about. When he closed the pop-up ad window, what he saw were countless pictures of dogs and cats.

The app was intuitive enough that even a first-time user could navigate it without difficulty. Seowoo first went into the ‘Please find my family’ tab.

He saw pictures of various types of animals, not just dogs and cats, but also parrots and lizards. It seemed that the posts were uploaded directly by people whose pets had gone missing.

[Please find the family I’ve been with for 10 years.]

[Reward: 1.5 million won.]

[Please contact me anytime, 24 hours a day.]

The pictures and descriptions were all different, but the desperate hearts of the people looking for their pets were all the same. Seowoo opened the filter and set it to show only dog posts. Mixed breeds, Shih Tzus, Maltese, etc. Various dogs were listed, but none resembled the brown-furred puppy that had come to Seowoo’s house. Seowoo, who had been carefully examining the pictures for a long time, let out a short sigh. And he clicked on another tab.

Please be my family.

This time, pictures of animals in the opposite situation appeared. The pictures of the animals posted here were immediately contrasted with the pictures in the ‘Please find my family’ tab.

There were many pictures of cats huddled on the street, and many uniform pictures uploaded from temporary shelters.

Unlike the ‘Please find my family’ tab, which could only be sorted by the time of posting, the ‘Please be my family’ tab could be sorted in order of the animals that had received the most interest and had the highest number of views.

It seemed to be a strategy to get the animals that caught people’s eyes adopted as quickly as possible. When he selected only dogs and pressed the ‘Sort by popularity’ button, dogs of similar breeds were listed at the top. It was the same breed as a dog that had recently appeared on an observational reality show. There was already someone who had expressed their intention to adopt, and the number of people who had shown interest was enormous.

As he scrolled down, the frequency of mixed-breed dogs increased, and the breeds became more diverse. Near the very end, he saw dogs with noticeable physical disabilities.

At first, Seowoo had been smiling at the cute puppy pictures, but his expression gradually disappeared. Each had its own charm stemming from its different appearance, but the reality of this interest and popularity being converted into numbers and sorted was somehow bitter.

🦴

Juwon placed the puppy, no, the young therianthrope he had brought from Seowoo’s house, on the living room floor. As it happened, his parents were away on a business trip to inspect their overseas dumpling factory. He had sent them a message, but seeing as they hadn’t checked it, they seemed to be asleep. If it had been his well-connected parents, they would have probably recognized whose child this tiny little puppy was right away, which was a shame. As luck would have it, his older sister wasn’t home today either. His sister, who had built a large business based on social media, was so busy these days that it was hard to see her face.

“Hey.”

“……”

The still-young therianthrope seemed to think that if he just closed his eyes tightly and hid his head, he wouldn’t be seen by others. Juwon looked pathetically at the small puppy that had only stuck its head into the gap under the sofa.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Yap!”

At Juwon’s call of ‘kiddo,’ the brown-furred puppy quickly pulled its head out from under the sofa. Then, it stood up and barked as if in protest. Watching that, Juwon let out a short, incredulous sigh.

“Ha…”

“Yap!”

“Hey, transform.”

He said, waving his hand dismissively as if it were a bother. At Juwon’s words, the puppy shook its head firmly.

“Yap yap!”

“Who do you think you’re yapping at? Get dressed and go sleep in the guest room.”

“Yap!”

Even at Juwon’s words, as he waved the clothes in his hand, the puppy showed no intention of changing into its human form.

It is important for therianthropes to maintain a balance between their human and animal forms. However, for young therianthropes, it was often the case that one instinct was stronger.

In Juwon’s family alone, his older brother Dowon preferred to be in human form, while Juwon stayed in his dog form at home. His older sister Hyewon, who had been the epitome of self-management since birth, was the only exception who maintained a perfect balance. This young therianthrope probably much preferred to be in its dog form. The problem was how long it had been in its dog form.

“This is truly absurd… Then sleep like that, I don’t care.”

“Yap…”

As Juwon spoke as if giving up, putting down the clothes, the puppy nodded its head. Juwon let out a long sigh as he looked at the puppy, which was huddled on the floor, watching him warily.

Looking at its scruffy appearance, it seemed to have been wandering for at least two days. It was a mystery how such a young child had gotten lost and ended up crawling into Seowoo’s house.

Dammit. Juwon, letting out a voice that sounded brutal, raised a hand and swept his hair up. Then he asked the puppy sprawled on the floor.

“Hey, want some dumplings?”

“Yap! Yap!”

For the first time, a sound drenched in joy burst out from the small puppy.