Click-clack.

High heels sound out, steady and even. A beautiful woman comes into view.

The ponytail suits her.

Clear pale skin. A fine straight nose, balanced against big eyes.

Every head in the coffee shop turns her way.

Just looking at her sets my shoulders straighter. My girlfriend, Gu Hyejin.

Shff.

She lowered herself into the seat across from me, smooth about it, elegant.

“Traffic was bad, right?”

“No.”

“Were you busy?”

“No.”

Her tone is colder than it is on other days.

“I’ve got something to say.”

“……??”

She’s been watching me with that indifferent stare since she sat down. Now she opens her mouth. It’s a look I’ve been seeing more and more of lately.

“Let’s end it.”

A bomb, out of her mouth without warning.

“You weren’t seriously planning on keeping me around, were you?”

She asks it cold, like she’s confirming something she already knows.

“…….”

She’s right a hundred times over.

She and I are no longer the same class of person. For a jobless bum, she’s far more than I’m owed.

She doesn’t belong beside me. She’s a permanent employee at a top-ten corporation.

“……Right.”

I’d been denying it without meaning to. There’s no arguing with it.

“It’s the last time, so eat something before you go. And — it’s late, but. Birthday present.”

I pulled the gift box out of my bag in a hurry.

Her birthday had been a few days back. Her schedule had been packed and I’d never got the chance.

“Don’t bother. Sell it and put it toward your debt, oppa.”

“Hyejin!”

“What? Embarrassed? Good. You ought to be plenty ashamed. Reaching your age with no car and no place of your own is shameful. Lucky you’re working it out even now.”

A shudder.

My pride’s taken a lot of scratches today. My girlfriend is sitting right there and my fist still tightens.

“I hate anything pathetic. You know that. Delete my number. And don’t get drunk and start calling like some loser. Hold on to your pride. If there’s a scrap of conscience left in you.”

She drives the blade in again and again, until my heart hangs in strips.

She isn’t just crossing the river there’s no crossing back over. She takes a running jump at it.

“It’s been fun.”

She throws that one down as comfort, and it’s the worst of them.

“Honestly, oppa, you’re not bad-looking by anyone’s measure. What I’m saying is, find a woman at your level and have a good life.”

Is that a compliment? Or a curse dressed up as consolation?

Her words turned into a spearhead and — thunk — buried themselves dead center in my chest.

I stared at Hyejin’s cold face without moving.

However busy things got, I’d done what I could for the company and for my woman.

I’d thought living that way meant nobody would betray you. That’s what the advice from older men had amounted to.

It was all a lie. On the same day, the company and my woman both threw me out.

My coworkers, who’d eaten out of the same pot for years, were no different.

They’d watched me come out of the director’s office after going at Go Dongyeol. Every one of them slid their eyes off mine.

Right up until that morning they’d been saying let’s get lunch, let’s get a drink.

They cut me loose that fast, and something in me broke.

And the girlfriend I met a few hours later was no different.

I have…… no money and no backing.

“I’m sorry to say it, but I’ll give you one more piece of advice, for your sake. The truth is, oppa, you were the third man I had on the hook.”

“……??”

“So count yourself lucky. It’s a fact you neglected me the whole time we were together, off working part-time jobs and making a show of having nothing.”

It goes past hurt and straight into anger, and the anger catches.

Then, strangely, within a breath, everything in me goes cold.

We’d spent years together as lovers.

The memories of those years flicker past the way a life does at the end, and scatter like dust.

Brrrring.

Her phone rings. Hyejin checks the screen like she’d been waiting on it.

Her eyes brighten. Pleasure comes up in her face. A soft smile spreads slowly across her mouth.

She turns away to take the call.

“Sunbae-nim~”

Until a few days ago I’d believed that sweet voice was mine alone to hear.

“Are you here already?”

The same coquettish lilt drips off every word.

“…….”

The title she used was sunbae. But what’s in her voice on that call is nothing so ordinary.

Pain rises in my chest. My whole body prickles with it.

“I’ll come down.”

Hyejin is out of her chair before the words are finished.

Click-clack.

She walks off without so much as an indifferent glance.

Gulp, gulp.

I drained the ice water in the cup without stopping to breathe. My throat burns with the cold.

Right. That’s the full account of what happened to me on this lucky day.

And then……

“Want a golden tip for getting yourself blessed?”

“……??”

“When the money comes in, don’t stuff your face alone like some pig until you burst. One out of every ten, set it aside for other people. That’s how the blessings keep coming right up till you die.”

“…….”

A golden tip? Not much of a secret.

She whispers it low anyway, as if somebody might overhear.

“Don’t let them beat you down……. This old woman’s going to give you strength.”

Could she be — a g-god? I swallowed the snort that nearly got out.

“Sleep deep and get up again. Something good will happen. A lucky…….”

She encourages me flat out and offers no explanation for any of it.

Empty words or not, I was grateful.

She’s no relative I’ve ever laid eyes on. But there was a closeness to her I couldn’t put a name to.

I’d run headlong into her in the alley on my way home, drunk out of my mind.

She’s definitely someone I don’t know. Whether this is a dream or not, I have no idea.

“Go on now……. And I’ve tucked a few good things in there, so keep your chin up. Whatever happens, don’t you forget you’re a big bear.”

“Th-thank you.”

A failed life. It didn’t matter to me if the whole thing was nonsense.

A few good things? Still no idea.

The more bewildering part was her turning up out of nowhere and treating me this way at all.

I bowed my head to her anyway. I had zero grip on reality and the whole thing felt like a dream, but I’m the sort who keeps his manners.

“This old woman is so very sorry…….”

Who is she, apologizing over and over?

If we could just establish who’s who……

“It’s a short life. Go on and enjoy yourself…….”

She left nothing behind but words I couldn’t make sense of. And now that I look, her eyes are wet.

What is that? That look. Full of pity, and something close to grief.

However I turn it over, this is the first time I’ve met her. So why……

Soft steps.

While I was trying to stitch my broken-off thoughts together, the granny in the flowered rubber shoes disappeared into the alley.

I wanted to catch hold of her and pin down one single thing, but my mouth would not open.

And then.

“……!!”

Gone completely. Not even a shadow left.

She seemed to sink into the dark, and then she was hidden entirely.

“…… Was I bewitched by a ghost?”

But she wasn’t a ghost.

Turn them over however I like, today’s events stay sharp.

“…… A lucky day…… my ass…….”

“Agh!”

I came awake with a jolt.

Thump.

Eyes still shut, I kicked away the blanket tangled around my feet.

The moment I woke, the whole rotten business of yesterday came down on me. Every last detail of it.

“Fine! Go on. Go. I might not have money but I’ve got my face.”

I spat the resentment at the ceiling.

Gu Hyejin had torn the last of my pride into strips and stood on it.

She’d been a hoobae from the business school at university.

We’d met after my discharge, back at school, thrown into the same group in a general studies course.

From the first time I laid eyes on her, Gu Hyejin was popular.

She was the center of every room she walked into.

Delicate features. Good proportions.

And looks striking enough to stop people where they stood.

She had a pull that drew a crowd even standing still.

Her face was past anything ordinary people get issued. Any man would have taken to her.

And when she turned the charm on, the men around her lost the plot entirely.

At first I paid her no attention.

Pretty. That was the whole of my interest.

The way things were at home, I’d had no leisure to daydream about dating.

I was too busy carving hours out for part-time work.

Pretty, bright, courted by every man in range. For someone like me, Gu Hyejin was unthinkable. And that was exactly where it turned over.

Because I showed no interest, she started paying attention to me instead.

She’d go sulky when I didn’t react, and the curiosity showed. Her weakness for bad men had kicked in.

She signaled several times. I read every one of them and ignored them.

In the end it didn’t take long. The vixen won. I was a man too.

There’s no holding out once a vixen decides to work on you.

It was a drinking night with the hoobaes, the first in a long while. She was there.

She sat down next to me and said it over and over. Sunbae-nim, sunbae-nim. Pressed up against my side……

I went down drunk without a fight.

She aimed that sultry, clinging look at me deliberately, and I was gone. A man who doesn’t fall for a vixen isn’t a man.

Even now, they were happy days.

And all of that happiness ended yesterday. It went out in a blaze there’ll never be another of.

“Thanks for it all. ……Have a good life.”

I muttered the words I couldn’t get out yesterday.

I’m not petty enough to wish her harm. The larger fault is mine, for trusting her and loving her.

I was happy with her.

A girlfriend overflowing with beauty and charm both. A blessing of my hot-blooded years.

“Unemployed as of today. What am I supposed to live on now…….”

There’s nothing in my chest but blankness.

I handed in the resignation clean and walked out. The road ahead is black.

I’m afraid to even open my eyes.

I never once imagined I’d run into the same IMF crisis my parents had lived through.

Flash.

“Hm??”

Blinding sunlight against my closed eyelids.

This is unfamiliar.

I rent a semi-basement room in a low-rise block.

The window sits half above ground and stays locked. On top of that I keep blackout curtains drawn across it around the clock.

I’d made that choice because I didn’t want to be a sight for people going up and down the alley.

But……

No semi-basement window has ever let in light like this.

The warmth settles across my eyelids and wraps my whole face. Sunlight with real heat in it, at that.

My eyes snapped open.

“……??”

Cheap lattice-patterned ceiling paper comes into view.

Unfamiliar somehow, and known at the same time.

The strange part is how much it resembles the rooftop room I lived in through high school——

“Haaah—!”

(End of Chapter 2)