He paused and, with a gentle smile, rubbed his cheek against the cheek of the cat he was holding.
I didn’t need to hear what reaction the director—a thoroughly ordinary middle-aged man with zero immunity to even men holding hands—had to that filthy piece of mail to guess it.
“He shot himself in the foot. If that thing comes to our house, I get outed. If it goes to his house, he gets outed. We chose the company over home. The knife you use to hack someone else up can turn into a self-inflicted weapon that stabs you right back. Thanks to Baek Yuni, I learned that for sure.”
“It must’ve been a Monday morning he had a lot of feelings about, too.”
Yuni said it while drinking beer, one elbow on the table.
“If a bastard makes someone else cry, you make him bleed tears. However long it takes, however much grunt work it needs, even if my whole life has to be ground up for it... the bastard who screwed me over never, ever gets to walk away. That’s my creed.”
While saying something that could sound a little scary, Juhan lightly bumped the tip of his nose to the cat’s, in a babying voice: “Right, Cushion...?”
I did wonder what became of the stalker after that, but I could already picture it to a degree. If a salaried man in his forties gets outed like that inside his company, what comes after is obvious. Family will be shocked and maybe cut him off but keep it quiet to outsiders; society won’t.
“Do you... feel sorry for that bastard?”
His guess was wrong.
I’d only been thinking about how cleanly an incident with such a clear target for revenge and resentment could be wrapped up. I shook my head.
“I think it was a clean ending.”
“Cold, considering how you look.”
He grinned as he said it. For a moment the mischievous, impish-villain smile overlapped with Phantom’s CEO in my mind.
We each ordered another beer. They were on their third; I was on my second.
“That’s how Baek Yuni and I started. If it weren’t for him, I might’ve gone to that bastard and blown up like I always do and actually gotten a record. Back then my parents would never have paid any settlement money. Not that things are all that different now.”
With foam on his lip from the fresh beer, Juhan pulled a sour face.
“About Baek Yuni, though—turns out all that ‘slaving at a gallery’ talk was ancient history. By then he was already raking it in at Phantom on a fat salary. He was working brutal hours because we were short-staffed, sure, but he’d escaped that one-and-a-half-pyeong cubby ages ago.”
“If Phantom hadn’t been growing so fast we needed hands, I wouldn’t have pushed you to interview there either. Timing, huh...”
Yuni followed Juhan’s aggrieved “report” with a playful grumble.
In the meantime other tables cleared out, and only the owner’s friends near the entrance and our group were left inside the bar. They must have had some wager going; suddenly a cheer and then disappointed groans burst out together. Startled by the noise, the cat perked its ears forward and back and burrowed deeper into Juhan’s arms.
I took a couple of swallows of beer while looking down at Juhan’s dry hand stroking the cat. Since moving up to Seoul I’d learned the comfort and reward of a post-work can of beer, but today’s beer had a different taste from that.
Circling back to the start of the story, I asked the one thing I’d wondered about all through his revenge tale.
“What happened to the boots?”
“The boots? Ah... those boots.”
He flashed a grin and kicked his right leg up higher than the tabletop. Startled by the sudden move, the cat sprang off the chair and vanished behind the bar.
“I’m not the type to go back on my word.”
“On that note—cheers,” Yuni said.
Our three glasses clinked over the cold fries. I wasn’t exactly sure what for, but it felt like a toast to something.
“So, Ihyeon, want to come work at Phantom properly?”
“Sorry?”
As if trying to shake off the sticky residue of the past, Juhan slammed his glass down with an onomatopoeic clatter that was refreshing just to hear and suddenly brought it up. From beside him I heard Yuni sigh.
“Does slapping ‘so anyway’ on it make everything okay? You told me to leave it to you, that °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° you’d bring it up, and of course you do it like this.”
“Why? It sounded natural, didn’t it? I explained how I met you and how you ended up working at Phantom. Isn’t it natural to ask if you want to work there after that?”
“Forget it.”
He lifted his brows and dragged down the opposite corner of his mouth in a wronged expression, and Yuni, in her signature quick but calm tone, took over.
“Phantom’s treatment is near the top of the industry even if the work is tough. Honestly, most galleries have worse working conditions than we do. Plenty of galleries our size have literally one employee. We’ve added staff whenever the gallery grew, and this looks like another moment we need someone new. We’d like it to be you.”
“First of all... thank you for the offer. It feels like you see me kindly. I’m just not experienced, so I’m not sure how much help I’d be...”
Like when I heard through my teacher that they wanted to meet me privately, it was unexpected and also welcome. But I doubted how much I could actually do as staff in a specialized space like a gallery.
“The thing is, the manager... suggested I try working as a live-in helper.”
“As a full live-in?”
“Yes. I haven’t given him my decision yet, but I think that’s how it’ll go.”
It was Wednesday when my teacher offered the live-in arrangement, too.
After telling me Yuni and Juhan wanted to see me, he’d driven me home and floated the live-in idea. It was probably out of consideration for my situation. He didn’t bother to deny that. In the end it was a choice between imposing on Morae and Juhan or imposing on my teacher.
“Even better! If you move into the manager’s place, you could work at Phantom and do the helper job, too.”
“Hey, if he works at Phantom he’ll be commuting every day and doing late nights. How’s he supposed to juggle a live-in helper job on top of that? You think housework is that easy?”
“I’m a solo-dweller who runs a washer and takes the food trash out on schedule, okay? Baek Yuni... your motives are showing.”
Despite the scolding, Juhan was grinning ear to ear—for once. It was a sly smile with ulterior motives, though.
“What motives.”
“You’re jealous he’d be living at the manager’s place. That’s what this is.”
Yuni stared silently at him for a moment, then shook her head.
“Should’ve let you rot in a cell back then.”
The offer to work at Phantom honestly stirred me. The moving-crew job and the helper job at my teacher’s place suited me and felt comfortable, but they didn’t thrill me. They were jobs that sent me crawling farther inward, and that was exactly why I felt comfortable there.
But Phantom... made me uneasy.
It felt like hands dragging me out of the damp beach sand where I was curled up and setting me on the heaving water—an unpredictable jolt that came out of nowhere.
One way or another I knew it was time for me to choose something. Sleeping with a sliding door between me and a couple who had loved each other enough to run, throwing myself into manual labor because it was good for emptying my head—I couldn’t just keep living like that.
“Hiring someone doesn’t make the workload drop overnight. Depending on who it is, it can even get heavier, and if personalities clash it’s just stress... That’s why we kept putting off recruiting. It’s because we think we could enjoy working with you that we’re asking. Just think it over. If it feels right, tell us—or tell the manager.”
I was purely happy about their offer. I hadn’t held a brush in a long time, but if I could work surrounded by paintings instead, that felt like a fine substitute.
But there was another reason I couldn’t just grab the hand being held out, even while being honestly glad.
“Wouldn’t the CEO... not be thrilled about me joining?”
“What is there to like or not like? You’d just be helping out for a bit.” —His offhandedness still sat heavy inside me.
“Don’t worry about that. The guy’s had enough bumps in life that he doesn’t trust people easily, that’s all; once you know him, he’s favorable to you. Maybe it’s the Golden Alpha thing, but he trusts his gut like crazy. If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t have let you into Phantom at all. And if he didn’t like you, why would he have asked the manager about you?”
“...”
Maybe he thought my tight eyes and mouth were from offense; he winced and corrected himself.
“Okay, not ‘pried.’ He just asked whether you’d majored in art or anything like that. What you said about the work to Inwoo that day was a topic between us for a while. Don’t feel bad. I was right there—there was zero malice, no digging into your past.”
I wasn’t offended. For a second something swelled in my chest like a wave lifting under my feet, but it wasn’t displeasure. I was clumsy at putting feelings into words, but I tried hard to explain I wasn’t upset. I hoped the two of them could feel I meant it.
“Even if you don’t work at Phantom, let’s keep seeing each other sometimes. It’s rare, but Baek Yuni seems to actually like you.”
“He likes you because you’re handsome.”
“You’re the one who sings the ‘let’s recruit him’ song every time you see the CEO, and you’re being all tsundere about it. You adjust, Ihyeon.”
That night I drank three beers for the first time. Hearing about a past that wasn’t light made me feel closer and more at ease with them than before, and there was also a restless, undefined lift that pushed me to tilt my glass faster than usual.
I had to rest twice climbing the stairs home. The night view of Seoul from the steps no longer reminded me of squid boats out on the harbor.
■ ■ ■
Almond cereal, a one-liter carton of milk, a pack of plain yogurt, and lastly a bottle of cranberry juice went into the basket, and as I headed for the register I noticed Korean melons were already out.
You could eat watermelon in midwinter and tangerines in midsummer, sure, but the melons on that green-felted stand were true seasonal fruit, even if they were coming out a little early.
I picked one up and held it under my nose; the scent was pretty sweet. If I peeled it and cut it into easy pieces and put it in the fridge, it would be easy for him to take out and eat.
Grocery runs weren’t part of the household duties at my teacher’s place, but if I didn’t buy even this much, I knew his diet would fall apart more, so about once a week I stocked juice and milk, fruit, cereal, and bread. If I could cook, I’d have made something simple, but about all I knew was ramen and fried eggs.
He says delivery food is so good these days I don’t need to shop, but he seems to eat what I buy out of appreciation, and I’m glad. He already pays generously for work that isn’t all that hard; I wanted to be a bit more helpful somehow.
After grabbing a few sandwiches and breads from the bakery across from the registers, I stepped outside into hard sunlight. I shaded my eyes with my hand, adjusted, and started walking.
My teacher’s place was a high-end apartment with a view of the Han River, but it was a small complex of just two buildings with no shops of its own. The massive complex next door had a strip of shops, but only a small market, so I’d do a big shop at the supermarket ten minutes away on foot and then walk to work.
“Seo Ihyeon!”
I had just turned into the street that ran straight to the apartments after the crosswalk when someone called me. Reflexively I looked toward the voice and saw my teacher smiling at me from the passenger seat of a sleek white SUV. I smiled back and walked over to the car, and over his shoulder I spotted Phantom’s CEO behind the wheel.
I hadn’t done anything wrong to him, but my chest still flinched for no reason.
“I told you not to bother with groceries, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“It’s not much.”
“Get in. Let’s go up together.”
While I hesitated, another car was turning into the street. It didn’t feel like something to refuse out of politeness, so I got into the back seat. As soon as I closed the door, the car slid down the street toward the riverfront where the apartments stood.
“I had a fender-bender on the way in this morning. I left it at the shop, and they said it’ll take about a week. So I’m hitching a ride home in Director Ryu’s car.”
“An... accident?”
At my raised voice, my teacher glanced back with a gentle smile, like he meant to reassure me.
“Yeah. Just a small one, and I’m fine.”
“What’s small or big about a crash? I know it wasn’t your fault this time, but do you know how many times this makes it? Try thinking about the person who gets a call every few months saying you’ve been in another accident.”
I’d left earlier than usual since I hadn’t booked a moving shift today and had wondered why my teacher was off so early, and—hurt or not—he’d been in a crash... I couldn’t help siding with the CEO this time.
To hide my trembling hands and steady myself, I hauled the canvas eco-bag I used for groceries onto my lap and hugged it tight.
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I’m a hundred times sorry for worrying you.”
“I tell you every time your driving style is too aggressive.”
