The forgotten hours before dawn passed in deep sleep. It was only when bright morning came that Hyungnam opened her eyes. The instant she realized she was still wearing her jacket, she let out a strangled, soundless scream.
She roughly combed her disheveled hair back with her fingers, tied it again, and changed out of her miserably worn top. Then she rushed to the bathroom and hurriedly washed her face without even having the presence of mind to look in the mirror.
Hyungnam glared at the round, wet face reflected there and let out a sickly-sweet sigh.
“I must’ve lost my mind.”
So this is what getting completely wasted is like.
She couldn’t even tell exactly where her memory had cut off.
With a grave expression, Hyungnam carefully retraced what she could remember. She had gone to a bar with Choi Eunhyung. They had ordered skewers. She had drunk that disgusting stuff called sake or saki or whatever it was.
“And then…… distilled liquor.”
A pale blue, transparent bottle shimmered vaguely in her memory. A fragment flashed through her mind of Choi Eunhyung holding it and primly pouring some into her glass.
But that was where it ended.
She had no idea what they had been talking about before she ended up like this, or how she had dragged herself home. Still, she had woken up in her own room, and there had been a cigarette butt lying on the floor. That made one thing certain: Choi Eunhyung had brought her all the way back here.
She had to see him.
She needed to ask whether she had made any mistakes, and thank him for not abandoning her by the roadside.
He’s probably in the study.
Hyungnam threw open the bathroom door and hurried out.
“…….”
But the moment she stepped into the living room, her urgent stride stopped dead.
She staggered slightly from halting so abruptly.
Choi Eunhyung was there.
He was sunk deep into the most prestigious seat on the living-room sofa, watching television.
The seat only Park Shineok ever sat in.
He had surely noticed her presence, but Eunhyung did not acknowledge her. He simply stared straight through the television screen.
Hyungnam hesitated, then edged closer. She fidgeted with her fingertips before finally managing to speak.
“Um…… Manager Choi.”
“…….”
“I’m sorry about yesterday.”
To a gangster who had installed himself in a gangster’s house, Hyungnam bowed deeply like a gangster herself.
But his unreadable expression did not so much as twitch.
Instead, he abruptly folded the newspaper spread across his knees and tossed it onto the table.
“Kimchi soup.”
“Sorry?”
“Make some.”
“Oh. Yes, yes!”
“If you put bean sprouts in it, I’ll kill you.”
He was absolutely not joking.
Hyungnam bobbed her head rapidly and fled into the kitchen.
As always, she prepared the stock step by step and put the rice on. Thinking they might need a simple side dish, she cracked three eggs and made a rolled omelet with chopped onion.
Fortunately, the smell of food neither nauseated her nor made her head hurt.
But some strange smell seemed to keep following her.
Hyungnam wrinkled her nose.
She leaned over the pot of spicy-smelling soup, then over the cutting board where she had just chopped the onion, but she could not identify the source at all.
“Ah.”
A small sound escaped her.
Suddenly she remembered a musky, fishy smell wrapped in something stale and sickly sweet.
Firelight wavering across a still surface.
Apparently that sake from yesterday really had done something terrible to her stomach.
For all I know, there was something weird mixed into that sake too, just like he tricked me into eating sparrows.
I’m never touching anything that strange again.
Hyungnam moved her upper lip resentfully and turned off the gas.
Even by the time the meal was ready, Choi Eunhyung was still sprawled in the living room. He watched television, smoked cigarettes, and peered into Park Shineok’s liquor cabinet.
When Hyungnam called him, however, he came to the dining table without delay.
“I didn’t put any bean sprouts in.”
Praise was far beyond what she could hope for. She had only added the remark in hopes of escaping another scolding.
Choi Eunhyung shot her a glare.
What? Again? What now?
Hyungnam, carefully setting down stir-fried anchovies and stuffed cucumber kimchi, shrank back preemptively.
“Yours.”
“I’ll eat in the kitchen……”
Choi Eunhyung sucked in a breath through his teeth in a way that sounded threatening.
Again today? Does he mean for us to keep eating together from now on?
But she owed him after last night, and even if she had owed him nothing, she could not defy Choi Eunhyung.
Hyungnam hurried back to the counter, grabbed her own bowl of rice, soup, spoon, and chopsticks, and returned.
She sat down with some hesitation.
Choi Eunhyung had his elbows propped on the table and his face resting on his interlaced fingers. He was staring directly at her.
“Why……?”
“Name.”
“……Shim Hyungnam.”
Hyungnam had always hated her name. Not a single one of its three syllables sounded feminine.
Meaning, my ass. Why did Father have to give his daughter such a rough name?
She lowered her head slightly in embarrassment, but Choi Eunhyung continued as if it made no difference to him.
“Right. Hyungnam.”
“…….”
“How long are you going to keep calling me Manager Choi?”
“…….”
“I’ve never had a lackey like you.”
His voice was impossible to read, somewhere between teasing and cold.
She could not easily answer either jokingly or seriously.
Hyungnam stared blankly at the kimchi soup steaming in front of her and swallowed against a dry throat.
“Then what should I call you……?”
“Fuck, people in this country are cold. Cold as hell.”
“…….”
“Brother.”
Eunhyung.
Brother Eunhyung.
He repeated it without taking his eyes off her.
He looked like a well-fed snake idly playing with a rat trapped inside its coils.
Caught completely off guard by the form of address, Hyungnam asked again in broken fragments.
“How could I…… call you…… that?”
“Why?”
“Well……”
“I’m seven years older than you.”
Hyungnam parted her lips slightly and stared at Eunhyung.
Maybe it was the bangs falling over his forehead.
She had assumed he could not possibly be more than a year or two older than her. She had never imagined there was a seven-year gap.
But that was not the real problem.
While listening to Patti Kim’s song, she had wished sometimes that she too had an older brother who would cherish her dearly.
But that brother could never be Choi Eunhyung.
Even if it was only a word.
Even if he were much older than she was.
Even if he had lived for thousands upon thousands of years.
That man hurt people.
He might sit around idly chatting with her one moment, then grow bored and put a knife to her throat the next.
There were limits even to dealing with gangsters.
She could not attach such an…… intimate name to a knife-wielding gangster of all people.
Having established her own line, Hyungnam answered stiffly, like a broken machine.
“Even so.”
“What a ridiculous girl.”
“…….”
“You were clinging to me just fine yesterday, calling me brother.”
Hyungnam shot to her feet and slammed both hands down on the table.
The world blurred away, then rushed back toward her eyes over and over.
I was clinging to Choi Eunhyung and calling him brother?
Not a single part of that brief sentence fit within anything she could accept.
But her memory was a complete void. She could not insist it had never happened.
Apparently satisfied by the maid’s confusion, Choi Eunhyung lifted only one corner of his mouth.
“You said, ‘Brother, kill Chairman Park for me.’ To me.”
Hyungnam’s expression gradually settled as she rummaged through the blank fragments of her memory.
That was something he could not possibly have known unless she herself had told him.
After a brief silence, Hyungnam asked calmly,
“I said that too?”
“Yeah.”
“What else did I say……?”
“That the fucking old bastard comes raw inside your cunt.”
She could feel Choi Eunhyung holding his breath and studying her reaction.
As though waiting to see what she would do.
The scars along the inside of her arm, the ones that had bled whenever Park Shineok used her, began itching madly.
She tightened her grip around her spoon to suppress the urge to scratch them.
What do I do? Pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about?
But Hyungnam gave up on whatever hope she might once have placed in her drunken self.
Every sentence Choi Eunhyung had produced as evidence was something no one but Shim Hyungnam could possibly have invented.
Every morning she wanted to mix rat poison into the chairman’s medicinal mushroom infusion.
Every evening she swallowed her contraceptive pill as faithfully as though carrying out a sentence.
Before long, a faint sigh escaped her.
“I really told you all sorts of things.”
“…….”
“It’s embarrassing. Please forget it.”
“……You want me to forget something that shocking?”
Choi Eunhyung gave a hollow laugh and separated his interlaced hands.
Then he stirred the red kimchi soup with his spoon.
Hyungnam had completely lost her appetite and was expressionlessly counting the grains of rice in her bowl when he set down his spoon with a sharp click.
“You really are an idiot.”
“……What?”
“If I were you, I would’ve gotten Park Shineok a long time ago and made something of my life.”
He folded his arms and rocked his chair backward with a delinquent slouch.
Hyungnam kept her head lowered toward her soup bowl, but she could feel his serious gaze repeatedly striking the side of her face.
“Park’s never hit you, has he?”
For an instant, something flickered through the despair filling her gray eyes.
Hyungnam raised only her gaze and looked sideways at Eunhyung.
If he means hit me, how much of it counts?
Does it include when he gets excited during sex and smacks my breasts, or beats my ass while taking me from behind?
But although Eunhyung had already discovered the misery of her situation, she did not want him knowing every detail of exactly how miserable it was.
And except for those times, Park Shineok did not ordinarily strike her.
So Hyungnam nodded.
“You know what medicine the old man takes too.”
“I don’t manage it. The chairman takes it himself……”
“But you know what kind of medicine it is.”
After hesitating for a moment, Hyungnam nodded again.
Park Shineok seemed to have every illness a man his age could reasonably acquire, and he took plenty of medicine for them too.
There had been times when he had ordered Hyungnam to bring his blood-pressure pills and gout medication from the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom.
But what does that have to do with anything?
Does he mean a mere maid could win the chairman’s trust just because of things like that?
What is he trying to say?
Hyungnam’s lips merely twitched as she failed to find the thread.
The low voice could wait no longer.
It curled around her ear like a snake.
“Looks like the old man trusts you quite a bit.”
“…….”
“Does he pay you for fucking you too?”
“……Yes.”