“No. It’s not heavy. It’s just that I’ve already carried about thirty today, that’s all—normally... I’m not like this. Let’s go again.”
Still trying to steady his ragged breathing, Juhan lifted the canvas with those long, thin arms whose jutting joints made them look sharp.
And the second we set the piece down carefully on the second floor, he flopped onto the floor.
“Argh, I can’t do any more! I moved thirty by myself today! My legs are jelly!”
He yelled and slapped the floor, but the bob-haired woman didn’t even glance over. She started briskly stripping the wrapping off the painting we’d just brought up.
It depicted stacks of old books in hyperrealist technique. Judging by the cross-section texture, it didn’t look like it was done with paint alone.
“Over there. See the paper marked Number 1? That goes on that wall. Let’s lift it together.”
She wasn’t big, but she seemed to know this place’s operations inside out. Which meant she wasn’t about to make a beginner’s mistake like misjudging whether she could lift something from size alone.
Sure enough, there was no issue with the two of us lifting a work as tall as I was. Like our Team Leader always said, up to a point this kind of thing is about technique, not strength.
“Baek Yuni... figures you’re superhuman.... When did you hang all of Zone B by yourself again? I told you to leave it.”
Still lying on his back staring at the ceiling, Juhan turned his head to watch us hang the piece. Now that I thought of it, the messy area beside where she’d been working when we arrived was entirely cleaned up.
“I only did what I could. You two handle the rest later. I need to match captions for Zone B now.”
“Okay.”
Apparently recharged after declaring he was done, Juhan sprang up, grabbed an ion drink from the makeshift table, and twisted the cap. I wasn’t that thirsty, but he offered me a bottle too, and I took a couple sips.
“By the way, did you even say hello to Ihyeon? You didn’t, right? You probably just started ordering him around the second you saw him—do this, do that.”
“Is it a problem to suggest work to someone I met to work with?”
Even as she said it, Yuni paused in laying out the captions—title, medium, year—in her own order across the table, and looked back at me. Maybe I imagined it, but her expression seemed faintly apologetic.
“I’m Baek Yuni.”
“I’m Seo Ihyeon.”
This is a pencil. That is a desk.
Watching our flat, textbook-sample exchange, Juhan snickered so hard his shoulders bounced.
“It’s something to see—two shy people doing that. Call each other Yuni and Ihyeon. We agreed to do that too.”
It wasn’t surprising he pegged me as shy. No one would look at me and think I was outgoing. I had that much self-awareness. But his read on her was unexpected.
With that impression like a bold, carefully printed Gothic font, would someone like her ever feel she was the only one out of step in a crowd the way I did? I couldn’t picture it.
“Shut it. I can transform into the god of socializing whenever I want.”
“True. But that’s because you’re not a god, you’re a Machine. When you sell, you’re completely soulless.”
Yuni’s eyes were down on the captions, and the two of them didn’t notice, but I was facing the stairs and couldn’t miss the new presence.
Fine hair fluttered into view first, then a face with striking, deep-set features, and a man in a polished suit came up to the second-floor lobby. He was... extremely tall and dazzling.
“What would you even do putting soul into sales? The soul goes into the artist’s work.”
Yuni set the last caption in place with a cutting remark. In the meantime the big man had come right up to our worktable.
“Exactly.”
He cut in with a smiling face.
“Director!”
Yuni’s face and voice brimmed with relief as she called him that.
Ah, so this was the gallery director Juhan had mentioned—the one who spooked him saying there was a ghost in the basement storage.
He was very tall. His build was excellent, but he was sleek, so despite the height and broad shoulders he didn’t look clumsy at all. From a distance I’d wondered if he was foreign; up close there was a faintly East-Asian cast mixed into those exotic features.
“Come on, why are you only getting here now?”
“You know those two. They wouldn’t let me go, hiding behind ‘I’ve got a reservation.’”
He was very big and very handsome. If he wasn’t mixed, that exotic look made no sense; it gave him a flashy, special aura. It seemed to set him apart from everyone around him. Someone who exists not as a person who looks at others but as an object others look at...
For the first time in my life, I thought that.
Maybe this is what a Golden Alpha looks like.
“So, did you land the reservations?”
If his answer was no, Yuni looked ready to grab him by the collar right then.
“I got three. Here’s the reservation list—please put Sold Out cards on them.”
Taking the list from him, Yuni looked as delighted as if the proceeds from those works went straight into her pocket, and she tucked the memo he handed her into a notebook that had already doubled in thickness with receipts and papers.
“We almost died, the two of us. We still haven’t finished moving Zone C. And Artist Yun is kicking off because he doesn’t like the pamphlet order.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard. You’ve worked hard. Manager Han will handle Artist Yun, so let’s finish here. Hm... let’s wrap in three hours.”
He checked the time on his wrist, then his gaze flicked to me. The important business was done; now his eyes said it was time to find out who the outsider hanging around here was.
I’d been sneaking looks at him, curious about this strange new specimen, and my eyes slid down instead to somewhere around his nape.
“Manager just brought him. Asked for help today only. Ihyeon—this is our director.”
Even without facing him dead-on, the gaze was hard to withstand. A look that didn’t consider how I might feel under it. A look that roamed as long as it liked, from whatever angle it liked, tightening around my whole body.
“Hello. I’m Seo Ihyeon.”
I forced my voice out past the shrink that wanted to clamp it down.
I wasn’t sociable, but what I usually felt before new connections was awkwardness, not shrinkage. But I was hunched now.
Assuming he was an Alpha, I didn’t know whether this unfamiliar contraction came from an Alpha’s pheromones I’d never felt, or from the presence of a person built on layers of experience and confidence.
But as far as I knew, a Beta couldn’t sense Alpha or Omega pheromones.
If I were still in that fishing village, even with someone this striking and imposing, I wouldn’t have jumped straight to “Alpha.” But here, it was entirely plausible.
I longed for the ion drink Juhan had given me. Even with it in my hand, I couldn’t bring myself to open it.
“How do you know Manager Han?”
The question came at the end of that gaze that felt like squeezing a fist slowly closed around me.
Completely different from the tone he’d used with Juhan or Yuni—detached and stiff. There was even a hint of hostility he didn’t bother to hide.
“I work as the housekeeper at the manager’s place.”
The man’s lips twitched at the end of that gaze. He seemed displeased with the affiliation I’d given. But thankfully, the questions stopped there.
He turned his eyes from me, took off his jacket, and hung it over a chair by the worktable. While he rolled up his sleeves, Yuni gave him a quick status report. He and Juhan would handle transport, and I would switch to helping Yuni on the second floor.
Once he disappeared with Juhan down the stairs, the contracted air eased and it felt like oxygen reached me again. I felt my shoulders drop and realized even my muscles had tensed.
After I downed half the ion drink, Yuni held out a roll of thick double-sided tape to me.
“Shall we make it work—shy person to shy person?”
The work went smoothly. I put all the captions beside the works in Zone B, and as pieces came up from the basement we hung them in Zone C. In that way we finished the display through Zone D, and scraps of all kinds littered the gallery floor. While the others prepped for VIPs tomorrow, I took charge of cleanup.
By the time both floors looked presentable, the teacher came back with late-night food. Close to sunrise, it was more like an early breakfast than a midnight snack.
We all gathered around a big table in the office at the back of the first floor, with sandwiches and coffee. Everyone was loud about who would get which sandwich.
Even with the teacher—the only person here I knew—at the table, I didn’t feel more at ease than before. Probably because of the man who spoke and moved with a presence several times anyone else’s and shut me out of the room.
Such a person existed. Without even looking at me or speaking to me, he could make me feel... as if I were shut alone inside a glass wall, isolated.
It wasn’t the same as not caring at all. He kept sending me that scratchy, uncomfortable sense of distance.
“Manager, Ihyeon works really well. Compared to when Gwon Juhan first came, I’d believe he was experienced.”
Praise from Yuni—who struck me as someone who never spoke empty words—was some comfort.
“Yuni, what, you never had a tadpole phase?”
“Yeah, I was a frog from the start. Right, Director?”
“Mhm, Yuni never had a tadpole phase. That’s why I stole her.”
Chewing an avocado sandwich, the man nodded. He was a gentle boss to his staff.
After nearly five hours of labor, he was much more rumpled than when he’d first appeared in the second-floor hall. His unusually soft-looking hair kept falling instead of staying put like at first. His shirt and trousers were full of creases, and fatigue was stamped around his lids and cheeks.
But he didn’t look shabby. Just a little tired. So he looked a little on edge, a little fierce.
“Thanks, Ihyeon. If not for you we might’ve spent all night here, showered at a hotel nearby, and gone straight to the opening. If I hadn’t run into you, I don’t know what I would’ve done on a bunch of fronts.”
Sitting beside me, the teacher leaned a temple on my shoulder and play-acted a sob. Maybe it was my imagination, but I felt the man’s stare prickling from across the table.
“Tired? Want to take your sandwich and eat it at home?”
Maybe because of the mental tension, I wasn’t sleepy even though it was ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) far past my bedtime. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel physical fatigue. I was too wiped to turn down the offer.
I tucked the sandwich into my bag and was about to say goodbye when Yuni—sitting at the head of the table across the corner from me—sprang to her feet.
“Ihyeon! Could you come once more tomorrow for the event?”
It seemed like a thought that had just popped into her head and tumbled out; even she looked surprised at her own words. She took off her glasses and set them on the table, and her black eyes were still clear despite the all-nighter.
“Why? We’ve done fine with this team so far.”
She whipped her head toward the man, bobbed hair flying. From my angle I could only see her cheek, but she was probably glaring at him hard.
“We’ve only ‘done fine’ by killing ourselves. And Director, I find the current schedule pretty inhuman, actually.”
“......”
He pressed his lips together and shrugged, as if he couldn’t help it. Everyone’s expectant eyes turned to me—everyone except him. With the bag strap half over my shoulder, I stopped and looked at the three faces in turn, unable to answer.
Next to the man, Juhan had one index finger raised and his face scrunched into his most pleading look. The teacher watched me with a faint smile.
“If you’re tired or have plans, say no comfortably. But if, by any chance, it’s okay...”
“As long as it’s not guest-facing... I’ll help. I’m not good at that.”
I’m not exactly sure why I said okay.
Maybe I felt nostalgia in the teacher’s face; maybe the thrill of being around paintings again and helping with painting-related work worked on me unconsciously; maybe it was the very twenty-two-year-old pride of being useful—however simply—and needed by someone.
But there was one reason so clear I couldn’t lie to myself about it.
The moment I saw the man eating his sandwich with an expression that said it didn’t matter either way what I decided, something like contrariness rose up. It wasn’t a blazing force, but it wasn’t faint enough to deny, either.
