Choi Eunhyung pulled a cigarette from his pocket and put it between his lips. He lit it irritably and drew on the filter with hurried breaths. Pale smoke settled over the table like storm clouds.
“If you managed to squeeze fuck-money out of an old bastard who likes getting it for free, that tells me everything.”
With the cigarette clenched between his lips, he stretched out a long arm and caught Hyungnam by the chin. Then he turned her face this way and that as though appraising merchandise.
“You’re exactly the old man’s type.”
“…….”
“A native girl who looks mixed.”
For whatever reason, there was unmistakable irritation in both his expression and the way his hand moved.
The unpleasant sensation of being meat laid out on a butcher’s counter brought back an equally unwelcome familiarity, and Hyungnam frowned.
She had always been left on the outside for that reason ever since she was little.
You’re mixed, aren’t you?
The problem was that she had never been able to answer no with any certainty. She had never even seen a photograph of the mother who had given birth to her and run away.
“Try acting cute with the old man. He’d give you money, an apartment, whatever you wanted.”
“……How could I do that with the chairman?”
“Why? Disgusting?”
She nearly answered.
Hyungnam swallowed the hard-earned yes and lowered her head instead.
Choi Eunhyung gave a contemptuous snort and exhaled cigarette smoke.
“You hate money?”
“…….”
“Fuck, I’m pointing out a gold mine to you.”
“I don’t want to earn it like that.”
The longer she listened, the more he treated her like a prostitute.
She was afraid of Choi Eunhyung, but wrong was still wrong, and she had to say so.
Hyungnam closed her mouth, hesitated a moment, then borrowed his own words.
“I don’t…… want the old man to like me that way either.”
Eunhyung stared at her and took a deep drag from his cigarette. Apparently bothered by the bangs fallen across his forehead, he roughly swept them back with his fingers before asking,
“You don’t look like it. Why don’t your words and actions match?”
“What?”
“You’re diligent enough to take contraceptive pills, but you can’t stomach calling the old man brother?”
The instant he finished, Hyungnam shoved back her chair and shot to her feet.
Scrrrape.
The chair dragged across the floor, its harsh sound slicing dangerously through the air.
She had risen boldly enough, but she did not dare leave the table or talk back to him.
If she demanded to know how he knew, then the information had almost certainly come from her own mouth. If she got angry and told him not to treat her like a prostitute, then his accusation was not entirely wrong either.
If you hated it that much, you should have left this house.
You even bought contraceptive pills and kept taking them. Why endure something that horrible?
In the end, you stayed because you needed the ten thousand won you got for enduring three minutes.
Shame surged over her as though he had exposed what lay inside her.
Hyungnam clenched her molars until her face flushed scarlet.
Heat flared in her stomach, and flames seemed to leap upward.
That fireball of anger fed on every ragged scrap of crude emotion it could find and swelled in an instant.
But where was she supposed to throw that anger?
At Park Shineok, who had caused it all?
At Shim Hyungnam, who lazily wanted to remain stuck in this house?
At Choi Eunhyung, who had insisted on reminding her of reality when she had been managing to survive by pretending not to see it?
Eunhyung gave Hyungnam’s badly twisted face a sidelong glance and let cigarette smoke spill from his mouth like laughter.
“Why are you getting embarrassed? What secrets are there between us?”
“…….”
“What are you doing? Sit.”
He gave the order indifferently, then hooked a finger around the little dish of soy sauce and dragged it toward himself before tapping cigarette ash into it.
Hyungnam kept biting down on her lower lip, then slowly sat again.
Seeing the fists clenched on her knees trembling finely with humiliation, Choi Eunhyung gave a faint snicker.
“You listen well too.”
“A gangster tells me to sit, so I sit.”
The hand knocking ash from the cigarette stopped dead.
The girl had her head lowered slightly and looked obedient at a glance.
Her eyes were not.
A bright, wavering heat burned in them, sparks snapping from her pale irises.
“So what do I have to do?”
“What?”
“You said I should get Park Shineok. What do I do besides fucking him?”
A spiteful gleam entered the dark eyes listening to her suppressed voice.
That ridiculous little streak of defiance kept springing out, and it irritated him.
Those twin cherries, worn smooth as could be and still brazenly pretending purity.
Smart-ass bitch only does smart-ass things.
The ember at the end of his cigarette flared bright and lengthened with an easy draw.
It was almost exactly the length of his wounded pride.
***
The thin clatter of plastic against plastic tickled the ear.
Against the khaki military blanket, the deep red backs of the flower cards scattered carelessly across it were painfully vivid.
Eunhyung rubbed the cards around beneath his broad palm, mixing them. Then he gathered them into one hand, aligned them inside his grip, and shuffled deftly.
His hand was so large the cards nearly disappeared inside it.
“Memorize them.”
He rapidly flipped the cards one by one from his hand, arranging them in twelve rows of four.
“April, December, this is October……”
Still holding a cigarette between his lips, he muttered through the months until the final card left his hand.
Twelve rows of four cards now lay on the floor.
“Starting here, January. Then in order, all the way to December.”
Red and yellow colors spun dizzyingly before her eyes.
Hyungnam barely managed to count the months as far as the golden cuckoo before a sudden wave of dizziness made her squeeze her eyes shut.
No. This isn’t it.
How am I supposed to get Park Shineok with something like this?
And for Hyungnam, whose pathetic father had staked his property and his life on gambling, this lesson was particularly cruel.
Hadn’t these cards, smaller than a matchbox, been the very thing that had dragged her father down into the mud?
“You gonna keep your eyes closed?”
The rebuke came down on her in disbelief.
Eunhyung tapped ash into a crystal ashtray, then habitually swept his long bangs up.
Irritation clouded the pitch-black eyes glaring at her.
I know.
You’re going to say I’m the one who asked you to teach me.
But Hyungnam had something more important to worry about.
What if I actually start enjoying this?
What if I turn into the same kind of person as the father I hated?
That fear was more frightening than Choi Eunhyung.
Hyungnam forced her voice up.
“……Do I really have to learn flower cards?”
“What, then? You planning to play something classy like poker?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Quit your bullshit and learn while I’m teaching you. You can’t even match a pair of January cards.”
At the razor-edged command, Hyungnam quickly lowered her gaze and committed the brightly colored flowers to memory.
Peonies. Chrysanthemums. Maple leaves.
She obediently repeated them under her breath exactly as he taught her.
“Chairman Park’s gambling dens run poker too, but flower cards are the main game. The old man built the business from games out in the rice fields to begin with.”
“…….”
“If you want to keep cozying up to the old man for a long time, you’d better get used to bouquets.”
There was not a trace of amusement on his face as he made the crude joke.
She knew that too.
The gambling dens her father had visited more often than home had been scattered across every low mountain near Seoul.
Around sunset, a battered gray van would roam through the neighborhood.
Gamblers lurking suspiciously in the alleys would climb aboard as though hypnotized moths drawn to a flame, then vanish.
Only later had she learned that all of those destinations were Park Shineok’s businesses.
Troubled, Hyungnam fiddled with the double-junk paulownia card.
She had angrily demanded that he teach her how to get Park Shineok, but she had never expected him to abandon his work and stick around to do it.
When she asked whether he wasn’t busy, he ignored her cleanly.
He almost seemed like someone who had been looking for an excuse because he had nothing else to do.
Which meant she could no longer take back the favor she had never wanted.
Looking at the cards Choi Eunhyung held out like a test, Hyungnam haltingly recited the months.
He gathered the cards together and shuffled them with crisp slapping sounds.
“If you flip your hand and think you’re fucked, fold. Knowing when to fold is a skill too.”
Eunhyung ground out his cigarette butt and dealt the cards with practiced ease.
Hyungnam worried her lip with her front teeth, then carefully picked them up with trembling fingertips.
She had seen enough gambling to know she should even cup both hands protectively around them so no one could see.
Matching the cards in her hand to the pictures on the floor was simple enough.
She only got nervous whenever she had to flip a card from the deck.
When each of them failed to take anything in turn and left dead cards behind, there was even a certain fair sort of fun to it.
But at some point, Choi Eunhyung began putting down cards that had no match on the floor and somehow, miraculously, flipping exactly what he needed from the deck.
Then he even took one of Hyungnam’s pitiful junk cards she had barely managed to collect.
Her temper rose, and so did her voice.
“Can you see what card comes next or something?”
Leaning one arm crookedly across a raised knee, Eunhyung lifted only his eyes and looked at her.
Faced with his openly displeased expression, Hyungnam’s lower lip pushed out into a small, dejected knot.
His atrocities did not end there.
He saved the match Hyungnam had painstakingly built until the very end, then played the needed card from his own hand and swept the whole thing away.
She had been thinking, The cherry blossom will come out this time. It’ll come on my turn, so the betrayal stung even worse.
“Manager!”
“Brother.”
Faced with the absurdity of that stern voice demanding such an embarrassingly intimate form of address, Hyungnam, who had worked up the courage to protest, clamped her mouth shut.
The unlucky maid’s very last card was a worthless November card.
Choi Eunhyung swept that one up too.
In front of her sat one deer, one boar, and a single red January card.
Every other card had been neatly lined up in front of Eunhyung.
It was unbelievable.
How is this even possible?
He pointed at the cards with one long finger as he calculated the score.
Bird set, red ribbons, blue ribbons, bright-card penalty, junk-card penalty, two shakes……
He muttered through the details of the game under his breath, paused briefly, then finished calculating.
“Thirteen thousand two hundred eight points.”
“What?”
“If we’d been playing for ten thousand won a point, you’d have lost your organs.”