My Webtoon Hero Is the CEO Next Door novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Panel
On the balcony at night she draws his real hand for the first time; he answers only when she faces him, and tells her to draw his face for her, not the readers.
At ten o'clock Yeo-reum stood on her side of the balcony in her thickest hoodie, holding a sketchbook against her chest.
The night was cool and clear, and the lights of Hapjeong were scattered below.
The frosted panel between the two apartments came up to her waist.
Above it was a gap, one hand wide, where she had passed him a red sock by accident last spring.
Jin-woo's door slid open.
He came out in a plain dark grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, and he had taken off his suit jacket.
He had a bare plastic chair under his arm.
He put it down next to the panel and did not sit.
"You came," he said.
"You said ten."
"I did."
"I can't believe I'm doing this," she said. "I can't believe you're the one who lives there."
"It is a nice balcony."
"It is a very small balcony. I put my sock on it."
"It was a red sock," he said, and she pressed her lips together to stop another laugh.
She opened the sketchbook on the railing, found a clean page and a soft pencil, and looked at the hand he had rested on the top of the panel.
It was his left hand, large, with long fingers and a white scar across the thumb.
It was exactly the hand she had drawn four hundred times.
It was so much more specific than she had managed.
"Can you turn it over?" she said.
He turned it over.
"Open it slightly. Like you're about to take something."
He opened it.
She started to draw, quickly, because she was afraid the light on his knuckles would change.
The pencil scratched the quiet.
"The veins are different from what I drew," she said, to the paper. "Your thumb is wider. Do you carry things with this hand? Is it the one you write with?"
He said nothing.
She kept drawing, and waited.
"Hello?" she said, still looking down.
Nothing.
She looked up, and his dark eyes were already on her face.
"Is it the hand you write with?" she said again, to his face.
"Yes," he said at once.
She stopped.
"You didn't hear me the first time."
"I was thinking," he said.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"You only answer when I'm looking at you."
"Yes."
"That's the strangest thing I've ever heard."
"People talk to me better when they look at me," he said, flat and a little too loud, as if announcing a train.
She laughed outright this time.
She could not help it, and he watched her do it.
His face softened, and then he looked away at the city.
She went back to the page.
"How long have you lived there?"
"Two years and one month."
"That's so exact."
"I count things," he said.
"Why does a CEO live in a five-story villa with no elevator?"
"Because I sold my apartment in Hannam to buy Dalbit."
She looked up, startled.
"All of it?"
"The apartment, the car and one watch. Ryu Content owns itself. I own an unusual amount of paper and a bed."
"That's insane."
"It was a good platform until Gong," he said. "I will fix it."
She believed him, which was alarming.
"Your hand is shaking," he said.
She looked down.
It was, a little.
"It's cold," she lied.
"Come here."
He took his hand off the panel and held it out through the gap, palm up and open, in the exact angle she had asked for.
Yeo-reum put her pencil in her mouth, climbed on the bottom rung of the railing, and leaned over the frosted glass.
She took his wrist with her right hand and set his fingers a little straighter.
His skin was warm, and she felt his pulse moving under her thumb.
Neither of them said anything.
"There," she said, and it came out softer than she meant it to.
"Is that right?"
"It's right."
She was close enough to see the fine lines at the corner of his eyes, and the single pale hair in his left eyebrow.
She had imagined this face a thousand times, and none of them came close.
The real one was better, and it was looking at her mouth.
"You are not looking at the hand," she said.
"No."
"The hand is what I'm drawing."
"I know." His voice came out low, and for once it was not loud. "Dowon has no face."
"He doesn't."
"Four point eight million people are waiting for it."
"I promised it at chapter sixty," she said. "I didn't know who I'd draw."
He held her gaze, and his fingers closed gently around her wrist.
"Then draw mine."
Her pulse jumped under his thumb.
"For the readers?"
"No," he said. "For you."
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