Boss, It's My First Time Being Your Resident - Chapter 53

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 53. Learning Each Other’s Temperature

“Go ahead and eat. Want me to cut it for you?”
“No! I can eat a pork cutlet on my own, thank you!”

A-gang grinned and set to work with his knife with practiced energy.

It was a crispy fried pork cutlet crowned with a generous helping of Western-style demi-glace sauce.

Beside it sat a mound of yellow pickled radish, macaroni salad, and a steaming bowl of rice, arranged with simple care.

“I wanted to take you somewhere nicer to eat.”
“But this tastes amazing!”

A-gang took a generous bite of the cutlet and chewed contentedly.

Unaware of the sauce at the corner of his mouth, he nodded repeatedly, the picture of someone savoring the finest feast in the world.

“I think I’ll remember the taste of this pork cutlet for the rest of my life. This is the happiest lunch of my whole life.”

Ha Tae-heon stared at him for a moment, then cleared his throat before speaking.

“Are you an F?”
“Hm?”
“Oh, I guess nowadays people classify by T or F, right?”

Ha Tae-heon laughed awkwardly.

“I’m not really sure. Haven’t tried it myself. You’re a T though, right? The decisive T.”

A-gang narrowed his eyes playfully and asked.

“Actually, I’m an F.”
“Really? You are?”
“Well, I haven’t actually done the test myself. Someone told me once that everyone thinks I’m a T, but I’m probably a decisive F instead.”

Ha Tae-heon had never felt curious about his own personality type. He didn’t want to define himself by those four small letters.

“Tae-heon, everyone else thinks you’re a T, but I know. You’re definitely an F.”

Those words had come from Joon-won, his closest friend in high school.

The image of him slinging an arm around his shoulders with a bright smile was so vivid before his eyes—the memory of a friend he’d never see again—when Ha Tae-heon fell into thought.

“Who was it? Was it Cha Yu-joo?”

It was A-gang’s voice, subtly changed, that broke the brief silence.

“Hm?”
“Was it Cha Yu-joo who said you were an F?”

A-gang reached for another piece of cutlet, then set his fork down instead.
The brightness that had filled his eyes just moments before dimmed in an instant.

The air above the table shifted in a single heartbeat.

“No. It was my friend from high scho—”
“I’m all done eating.”

Before Ha Tae-heon could finish, A-gang wiped the sauce from his mouth with his napkin, scrubbing as if trying to erase all trace of the meal itself.

His lips reddened quickly from the friction.

“What is it? Lost your appetite all of a sudden? Want to order something else?”

What could taste good anyway? Ha Tae-heon flipped through the menu.

“I’m full. I’ll just wait while you finish.”
“No, I’m done too.”

Ha Tae-heon pulled back from the chair and glanced down at his wristwatch.

“We still have an hour left. Want to take a drive?”

For A-gang, who’d finally gotten a rare day off, he couldn’t let the end of March be remembered only by the memory of a motel district.

***

Spring wind brushed against A-gang’s face.

Cherry blossoms draped along the river bank cast their pink watercolor across the water, staining it subtly.

Each petal clinging to the branches looked like dabs of spring light, tapped delicately with a brush.

It was like stepping into a masterpiece painted by some renowned artist.

March, tinted pink with spring beauty—why did his heart feel so cold?

A-gang felt his chest constrict.

In that instant when Ha Tae-heon mentioned someone calling him an F, A-gang had instantly, instinctively known that “someone” had been a woman. A girlfriend.

Cha Yu-joo.
Why did those three syllables keep pulling something petty and juvenile from his heart? He wasn’t a child.

The image of two figures walking away, arm in arm, flashed before his eyes again like an afterimage.

Jealousy?
But wasn’t that overstepping when he and Ha Tae-heon weren’t anything to each other?

Envy?
It was a foreign feeling, this envy—something he’d never known before. He’d never envied anyone.

Like light splintering across spring wind, his heart fractured and reformed, over and over.

“Next time I’ll take you somewhere even nicer.”

Ha Tae-heon whispered the promise.

“Next time? There will be a next time?”

A-gang asked.

“Once you collect five stickers?”
“Is that a gift for a junior?”

Instead of answering, Ha Tae-heon watched the tips of A-gang’s fingers as he brushed the windswept hair behind his ear.

“Your hand—why didn’t you apply the ointment?”
“What ointment?”
“The one I left on your nightstand when you came to my room that day.”
“Oh… I didn’t notice.”
“How do you manage to walk around with such scattered attention?”

Ha Tae-heon pulled the ointment from deep in his pocket.

“Let me see your hand.”

Ha Tae-heon gently took A-gang’s delicate fingers and began spreading ointment across them with his index finger.

“Your own hands are much worse off.”

A-gang murmured softly.

“A surgeon’s hands are his life. Remember that.”

With each touch of his warm hand, cells that had been dormant seemed to awaken one by one.

“I’ve always been curious about something. Why do you always keep your nails so short? Won’t it hurt if you cut them that close?”

A-gang stared at Ha Tae-heon’s nails, trimmed so short that redness showed at the edges, and asked.

“Oh, this?”

Ha Tae-heon gazed indifferently at his own nails.

“It’s a habit. At some point they started bothering me, so I keep them as short as possible to maintain maximum sensitivity.”
“Your nails bother you?”
“When they grow even a little, my sense of touch dulls. I need to keep my fingertips as sensitive as possible.”
“I see…”
“Sometimes a surgeon needs to feel the pulse flowing through a patient’s blood vessels with his fingertips. Even a 0.1-centimeter hard nail becomes an obstruction then. There can’t be any barrier between my fingertip and the patient’s artery.”
“That must hurt…”

A memory surfaced—his violin teacher’s nails, always short, from his childhood lessons.

His teacher had said something similar back then.

That artists endure trials, suffering, and constant discipline.
That bodily pain could never come before art.

Was surgery like that too?
Was the duty of handling human life more pressing than the pain in his own fingertips?

“Don’t go that far.”
“But I want to be a good surgeon too…”
“You’re already doing fine as you are.”

Was Ha Tae-heon always this tender with his juniors?
A-gang smiled bitterly.

That kindness kept returning like a sharp blade, carving into his chest.

Painfully tender.
That’s why it hurt more.

At some point, his chest had tightened until he couldn’t breathe properly.

When had it started?

Perhaps.
From that moment when he’d racked his brain trying to convince himself to have a clean breakup, to put distance between them.

Or perhaps from the day he’d witnessed him—that man who seemed incapable of bleeding—tenderly seeing off an elderly patient at the moment of death, showing his humanity.

No.
Maybe it had been from the very first moment they’d met.

In the guest reception room of a monk at Baegun Temple on Cheongwha Mountain.
From that instant when their eyes first locked, until now, his heart had been beating strangely, as if broken.

He looked at his raw, honest heart—the one he’d been denying, trying to hide.

At the end of that transparent truth lay that night on Cheongwha Mountain.
From the moment he’d held him warm in his embrace, the whole world had already become Ha Tae-heon.

Facing an emotion he couldn’t put into words, A-gang’s eyes suddenly grew hot.

“Why are you crying? Does something hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”

In front of the flustered Ha Tae-heon, A-gang gathered his breath and opened his lips.

“I keep having trouble breathing.”
“Trouble breathing? What kind of symptoms? Are you having them right now?”
“Yes. Right now too.”

Trouble breathing here, at an open river with wind flowing all around him?
The river breeze was so refreshing.

A-gang stopped crying and bit his lip, then let out a hollow laugh.

Ha Tae-heon looked at him with worried eyes.

“Ever since I came to the Medical Center, I’ve been having trouble breathing.”
“That happens a lot in your first year. Next year will be better, and the year after even more so. By the third year, you’ll think to yourself, ‘Ah, now I can finally breathe a little easier.'”

“When it feels suffocating, tell me. I’ll take you out for some air. We can drive around near the hospital.”
“…Do you always treat your juniors this well?”

Ha Tae-heon looked flustered, like a man trying to soothe a complaining child, as A-gang asked him this.

“Go to cardiology tomorrow when you’re at work and get an electrocardiogram. Just in case, go to pulmonary medicine and get a chest X-ray too. Respiratory distress isn’t really my specialty, so that’s all the advice I can give you.”

“Oh, okay. Electrocardiogram? Chest X-ray? Seriously?”

A-gang stared at Ha Tae-heon with exasperation, his lip trembling.

So oblivious to what was really happening, only worried about the medical side—and that look was so unbearable that A-gang finally couldn’t hold back. The truth spilled out.

“The reason I can’t breathe is because of you!”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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