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The problem with doing your brother a favor at six in the morning is that you don't fully understand what you've agreed to until you're already standing in it.
Jeno understood it now. He understood it completely.
He was sitting in the driver's seat of a black sedan that smelled faintly of someone else's cologne and a great deal of pine air freshener, holding a phone that wasn't his, reading a text from a man he had never met, and the text said: You're late. I can see the car. Why are you not moving toward the entrance with an umbrella. It is raining. I have a spine condition.
It was not raining.
Jeno looked up through the windshield at the slate-colored Seoul sky, which was, admittedly, considering raining, the way a man at a buffet considers a third plate. But it was not raining. He looked back down at the phone. Three dots appeared, vanished, appeared again, and then: It's about to rain. Anticipation is a virtue. Donghyuck would have known that.
His brother, Donghyuck, was at that very moment somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on a flight to visit their grandmother, having called Jeno at 5:40 a.m. with the particular cheerfulness of a man handing off a grenade. Hyung, you just drive him from his place to the hospital and back. One client. He tips okay. He talks a lot. Don't argue with him, he likes to win. And then, fatally: You owe me for the thing with the dog.
Jeno did, in fact, owe him for the thing with the dog.
So here he was. He got out of the car. He did not have an umbrella, because it was not raining, and he was a person who believed that the universe should be addressed honestly. He walked toward the lobby of the apartment building, hands in his pockets, broad shoulders hunched a little against a cold that had teeth, and he watched a man come through the glass doors like the building was releasing him under protest.
The first thing Jeno noticed was that the text had not prepared him for the face.
The man was small and beautifully put together, the way certain expensive watches are small, with dark hair pushed back off a forehead that someone had clearly designed on purpose, and a mouth currently set in an expression of deep and personal betrayal. He was wearing a long camel coat and carrying a leather bag and a thermos, and he stopped dead three feet from Jeno and looked him up and down with the cool, clinical attention of a man reading a chart he did not like.
"You're not Donghyuck," the man said.
"No."
"Where is Donghyuck."
"On a plane."
"He didn't tell me he was going on a plane."
"He told me about it at 5:40 this morning," Jeno offered. "So you're actually ahead of where I was."
The man's eyes narrowed. They were very dark and very awake for this hour, which Jeno respected, because his own brain was still booting in the background like an old laptop. "And who are you."
"His brother. Jeno." He gave a small, polite bow, the kind their mother had drilled into them, and felt instantly that it had been the wrong choice, like bowing to a cat.
"His brother." The man said it as though Jeno had confessed to being a forgery. "Donghyuck doesn't have a brother."
"He does. We just look nothing alike and he finds me embarrassing."
A beat. Something flickered at the corner of that disapproving mouth, there and then ruthlessly suppressed. "That tracks," the man admitted. "He talks about a brother sometimes. I assumed it was a metaphor." He shifted the thermos to his other hand. "You don't have an umbrella."
"It's not raining."
"It's going to rain."
"And when it does," Jeno said gently, "I'll stand a little closer to you and feel terrible about it. Right now I would feel ridiculous holding an umbrella over two dry people. People would look at us. They'd think I'd lost it."
The man stared at him. For one full second Jeno was certain he was about to get a one-star review and an early end to a long day. Then the man exhaled through his nose, which Jeno would come to understand was as close to a laugh as you got before you'd earned it, and walked past him toward the car.
"Renjun," he said over his shoulder, the name dropped like a coin he wasn't sure Jeno deserved to catch. "Dr. Huang, if anyone official asks. Anesthesiology. And you're going to make me late, so."
"So," Jeno agreed, and went to open the door for him.
The drive to the hospital was forty minutes in the kind of Seoul traffic that made philosophers out of ordinary men, and Jeno learned more about Renjun in those forty minutes than he had learned about some people he'd known for years.
He learned it not because Renjun explained himself but because Renjun could not, it seemed, exist quietly. The coffee in the thermos was wrong, the barista had used the wrong syrup, he had said no hazelnut in a way that he had personally felt was very clear. The lane Jeno chose was the wrong lane. The radio station, when Jeno turned it on low, was playing a song that Renjun described as aural pollution before reaching over without permission and changing it to something quieter, and then, two minutes later, changing it back, and then muttering that actually the first one wasn't terrible, which Jeno chose to treat as a victory and did not comment on.
He complained about the hospital parking. He complained about a colleague named Jaemin whose handwriting on the schedule was, according to Renjun, an act of violence. He complained that it was cold, and then, when Jeno reached to turn up the heat, told him not to, because then it would be too hot and he would have to take off his coat and his coat was the only thing holding him together this morning.
And the strange thing — the thing Jeno kept turning over as he drove — was that none of it was unkind. It poured out of him like water out of a kettle that had been on too long, complaint after complaint, and somehow not a single one of them had a person being hurt at the bottom of it. He complained about the barista and then said the boy was new and probably nervous and Jeno should go easy on him if he ever went there, the coffee was good when they got it right. He flayed Jaemin's handwriting and then said Jaemin was the best pair of hands in the department and he'd want him in the room if it were his own mother on the table. The complaints, Jeno was starting to think, were not the point. They were the noise a generous engine made while it ran.
"You're quiet," Renjun accused, somewhere around the river.
"I'm driving."
"Donghyuck talks while he drives."
"Donghyuck talks while he sleeps. It's a documented family condition."
That earned him a real one — not a laugh exactly, but a quick bright sound, surprised out of him, and Renjun turned to look out the window so Jeno wouldn't see his face, which meant Jeno could see the side of it, and the side of it was, Jeno thought with the calm of a man identifying a fact, the most interesting thing he had seen in a long while.
"You can't just say things like that," Renjun told the window. "About sleep-talking. I'm a doctor. I'll worry about him now. He's flying. What if he stops breathing."
"He won't stop breathing."
"You don't know that. You're not an anesthesiologist."
"No," Jeno said. "I drive a car I borrowed and I have a degree in mechanical engineering that I'm not using, which my mother brings up at every holiday."
Renjun turned back around. The disapproval had been replaced, briefly, by something that looked almost like interest, the way a cat will abandon its dignity for exactly one toy. "Engineering. So you could fix this car if it broke."
"I could fix this car if it broke."
"Will it break?"
"Not today."
"How do you know," Renjun said, and Jeno understood that this was simply how the man asked you to keep talking to him, and found, to his quiet alarm, that he wanted to.
The hospital swallowed Renjun for eleven hours.
Jeno knew it was eleven hours because Renjun had told him, with the air of a man laying out the terms of a hostage negotiation, that there was a long case today, a complicated one, a child, and that he did not know exactly when he'd be done but that Jeno was not to leave, and then had immediately undercut the order by adding that of course Jeno could leave, he wasn't a monster, he just — he'd appreciate it. If Jeno stayed. He'd appreciate it. He'd said the word appreciate like it cost him something.
So Jeno stayed.
He moved the car twice. He ate a sandwich. He read most of a paperback he found in the glove box, which turned out to be Donghyuck's and turned out to be terrible. He texted his brother the client is a doctor and he hates me and got back, eleven minutes later, no he doesn't. trust me. did he tell you to bring an umbrella. Jeno stared at that for a while.
At some point in the gray middle of the afternoon it did, in fact, begin to rain.
Jeno watched it come down the windshield and thought about a small man in a camel coat somewhere inside that enormous building, standing at the head of a table keeping a child asleep and breathing while other people's hands did frightening things, and he thought: I should have brought the umbrella. Not because Renjun would be outside in it. But because of the principle of the thing. Because the man had asked, in his sideways prickly way, to be looked after, and Jeno had been right that it wasn't raining and that being right had felt, in retrospect, like a thin and stupid thing to win.
He drove to a convenience store and bought an umbrella. He felt absurd doing it. He bought it anyway.
It was nearly nine at night when Renjun came out, and he came out wrong.
Jeno saw it from across the pickup lane and was out of the car before he'd decided to be. The coat that had been holding the man together that morning had failed at its job; Renjun was walking like someone whose strings had been cut and badly reattached, slow, his face drained to the color of the sky, and when he got to the car he didn't reach for the door, he just stood there in the rain that Jeno had predicted and stared at the handle as though he'd forgotten what it was for.
Jeno opened the umbrella over both of them.
Renjun looked up at it. Then at Jeno. Something moved across his face that had no complaint in it at all, that had nothing sharp in it, and that was so much worse than anything he'd said all morning that Jeno felt it land in his own chest.
"You said it wasn't going to rain," Renjun said. His voice had gone small.
"I was wrong," Jeno said. "I went and bought one. I'm sorry I made you stand there dry this morning like I knew anything."
"The kid's okay," Renjun said, which was not an answer to anything Jeno had said, which was the only thing in the man's head. "She's okay. It was — it went long. It got bad in the middle and then it was okay. She's okay."
"Okay," Jeno said softly.
"I kept her asleep the whole time. That's my whole job. Nobody claps for it. You keep them under and you keep them breathing and if you do it perfectly nobody ever knows you were there. You're the most important person in the room and you're invisible and then you go home." His jaw worked. "And there's no one to — Donghyuck usually just lets me talk. On the way home. He doesn't even listen, I can tell, but he lets me talk."
"I'll listen," Jeno said. "I'm not as good as not-listening as he is, I might mess up and actually hear you, but I'll try."
And that, finally, did it. Renjun laughed — a real one this time, wet and startled and undignified, his hand coming up to his mouth too late to catch it — and the sound of it under the umbrella in the rain was so much better than being right about the weather that Jeno understood, with the clean certainty of an engineer looking at a load-bearing wall, that he was in a great deal of trouble.
He drove slowly. He drove slowly on purpose, and Renjun noticed, because Renjun noticed everything, and for once didn't complain about it.
"You're going under the speed limit," he said, but there was no bite in it. He'd talked the whole way, exactly as promised — about the long case, about the child, about the surgeon who'd panicked for thirty seconds in the middle and how Renjun had been the calm one, me, the calm one, can you imagine, I complain about parking and then someone's heart does something it shouldn't and I'm a lake. Jeno had listened. He had actually heard every word, and had said so only once, near the end, and Renjun had gone quiet for a whole block, which was its own kind of confession.
"I'm giving you more time to talk," Jeno said.
"I'm out of things to complain about."
"Impossible. I've known you for fifteen hours. You complained about the concept of Tuesday this morning."
"Tuesdays are objectively the worst, I stand by that, but —" Renjun stopped. He was looking at the side of Jeno's face now, openly, the way he hadn't let himself that morning. "You bought an umbrella."
"I told you. I felt bad."
"You bought an umbrella in the middle of your shift for a man who was rude to you about hazelnut syrup before seven a.m."
"You weren't rude," Jeno said. "You were specific. There's a difference. And the barista really should learn the syrups."
Renjun made a sound that he tried very hard to turn into a scoff and that escaped instead as something fond, and he sank down into the camel coat that had finally been allowed to do its one job, and he was quiet for a moment, and then he said, in a different voice, smaller and more careful, the voice of a man putting one foot onto ice he wasn't sure would hold:
"Is Donghyuck coming back?"
"In a week."
"So you're —"
"I'm driving the car for a week," Jeno said. "If the client will have me."
The rain came down. The city slid by gold and wet outside the glass. Somewhere a light turned green and Jeno didn't move, because he was waiting, and he was a patient man, and the most important answer he'd hear all day was about to come from someone who had spent eleven hours keeping a child asleep and would never be clapped for and was right now, Jeno could see it, gathering himself to be brave about something that wasn't medicine.
"The client," Renjun said at last, to the windshield, to the rain, to the small warm distance between them, "is going to need picking up at six again tomorrow." A breath. "And he's going to want an umbrella. Whether it's raining or not."
"Anticipation is a virtue," Jeno said.
"It is," Renjun agreed, and turned his face toward the window so Jeno wouldn't see him smile, and Jeno, who could see the side of it, drove him home the long way, under the speed limit, in no hurry at all.