He turned. A woman stood close to him, observing the two men with a furrowed brow. He recognized her.Pink panties, he thought. She worked on the fifth floor. What was her name?
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said.
She smiled. “Ah, well. Some people are just inconsiderate. Those two are in my department, and they’re like that all the time.”
“Right,” he said, feeling uncertain.
“You’re Junyoung, right?”
He blinked. “Yes. It’s nice to see you again.” He paused. Grimaced. “This is so embarrassing, but I don’t remember your name.”
“That’s alright. I don’t expect you to remember. It’s Dahye.”
“Oh, yes! On the fifth floor, right?”
“That’s right. I think you were the one who helped me a few weeks ago with my computer.” She sounded sheepish, and the memory came to him. She had accidentally deleted all her files and had begged him to recover them. There had been a lot of crying.
He grabbed the top two trays from the stack leaning against the wall and passed the first one to her. Their hands touched, and an electric current ran through Junyoung’s fingers. He pretended not to notice, though he was now hyperaware of his body. He made his way down the line. Was he walking funny? He couldn’t tell. Everything felt foreign to him, as though he were a baby deer trying out its legs for the first time. He wobbled. He piled the buckwheat noodles into his bowl and spooned icy broth over them.
“I love naengmyeon,” he said suddenly, turning to Dahye. He immediately regretted it. What kind of person randomly shoutedI love naengmyeonout of the blue? He sounded like a psychopath. But she smiled warmly and didn’t seem put out at all.
“Me too.”
You wouldn’t consider her pretty in the normal sense. Her eyes were spaced too far apart on her face, her nose was round and flat, and her cheeks were dotted with pale brown freckles. And yet there was something so charming about her, like she was a cute little alien from outer space.
Take me to your leader, Junyoung thought. Dahye, as though reading his thoughts, gave him another toothy grin.
+
For the rest of the day, Junyoung was paralyzed. He couldn’t work. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything except imagine Dahye’s eyes. He had never paid any particular attention to her in the past, especially since the office had no shortage of hotwomen. But she had done something no other woman ever had: She remembered him.
He owed Mr. Choi a summary of the day’s support requests by the end of the hour, but Junyoung found himself constantly checking the fifth-floor restroom for Dahye. He would type one word, then toggle to the camera feeds. Another word. Toggle again. After thirty minutes of this, he had barely written anything, and she was still nowhere to be found. The thought came to him that he could go to the fifth floor to try and run into her. He could make it look like an accident.
Just as he made up his mind, Dahye appeared on his screen. She chose the second stall and used the toilet. Pink panties, like always. Her pussy was covered in a thin layer of hair. A coconut, ripe and ready to be cracked open. Ready to be devoured. The sight of it made him lightheaded.
In front of the mirror, Dahye applied a fresh coat of lipstick. She reached behind her head and pulled her hair loose from its ponytail. It swept down her back like a square of silk. With the hair tie clenched between her teeth, she gathered her hair and fashioned it into a bun at the nape of her neck. The bun resembled a snail’s shell: delicate, lovely, unexpectedly beautiful. Junyoung, growing hard, imagined plunging his member right into the center of that gorgeous little mound.
Had her sister lived, Hyukjoon would have been the kind of guy she would have dated. Of that, Dahye was certain.
Every so often, snatches from an alternate timeline came to her. Eunhye, at Seoul-dae, or some other elite university, meeting some handsome chaebol son by chance in the hallways. They would date through their university years, and after graduating, Eunhye would have found a job at Samsung or Hyundai and gotten promoted quickly despite her gender. She and the boy would get married before eventually moving into a luxurious penthouse apartment somewhere in Gangnam that overlooked the city. A gift from his parents, which the couple would repay by spawning a number of good-looking, smart, and loveable children.
It wouldn’t have been anything like Dahye’s first meeting with Hyukjoon, which was less than respectable. Late night, karaoke bar, too many glasses of somaek. The meeting had been Bora’s fault, really.
The cigarettes always gave Bora away. If she was wasted, she wouldn’t stop pleading for one. She was too cheap to buy anentire pack from the convenience store and, at the same time, too embarrassed to bum them from strangers herself. It was always Dahye who had to do the dirty work.
That night, the two of them had emerged into the spring air, a welcome change from the stuffy little room where they had been drinking and singing with their girlfriends for the last hour. It was two in the morning, and only one person had been nearby: a tall, stylish man, smoking pensively at the corner of the street.
Bora jabbed her in the ribs with her elbow. Dahye scowled, rubbing at the spot with her fingers. “Why are your elbows so pointy?” she complained.
“Stop stalling,” Bora said. “Ask him!”
“Why do I always have to ask? Why can’t you do it for once?”
“Because I’m shy, and you’re not.”
“You’re not shy,” Dahye snapped. “You just like ordering me around.”
“Come on,” Bora coaxed. Her protruding lower lip stuck out even farther.