A Scalding Encounter

God, I want to sleep until I come undone.

She wanted to wedge herself into some corner of a room where no one on earth could find her, eat nothing, drink nothing, and do nothing but sleep for days on end. Why didn't human beings hibernate? If people were warm-blooded the way raccoons and squirrels were, she could have slept like an absolute miracle.

Ong So-yul thought it as she dove onto the bed, just finished with her internship at Seoul Taemun Hospital.

On call. Then on call. Then on call again, with no break in the chain. And really—who had decided that intern meant trainee? A truer translation was a job built to make you want to turn your whole life around and walk out.

"Can't turn back now, though. Walk away, and all that suffering would be too much of a waste to live with."

So-yul pulled the fluffy blanket up over her face and let her heavy eyelids fall shut.

She was one breath from sleep when a line from one of the classmates heading into orthopedic surgery with her cut across the dark.

They say an OS residency is brutal. Everybody get some real rest before next week.

And how much more brutal is it planning to get?

"Ha. I don't even care right now. I'll just turn the phone off until next week."

Emergency calls, seniors summoning her, SOS after SOS from her classmates—the phone had never once stopped screaming at the hospital. Every time she tried to shut her eyes for even a moment, it had gone off like an alarm.

"Haaah. So this moment really does come."

"A legal vacation! Nobody look for me!"

Eyes glittering under dark circles that had sunk all the way to her jaw, So-yul moved to press the power button.

And in that exact moment, the phone rang at full volume.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-ba— ba ba-ba. Ba-ba ba-ba-bam.

Her ringtone was the theme from the old American show MacGyver.

Orthopedics is the MacGyver of medicine.

A fellow she had met on her surgery rotation had said it, and she had been moved enough to change the ringtone to match. Right now it sounded nothing but cruel.

She checked the caller at once.

Not the hospital, thankfully—but the name glowing on the screen was hardly a welcome one. So-yul let out a long sigh and hit accept.

If she didn't, the man saved in her phone as Mom's Son—Ong Jun-soo—was exactly the sort of person who would come straight to the house.

"What's going on?"

At the urgency in her brother's voice, So-yul flung the blanket aside and sat up.

Did something happen to Mom?

Her mother had grown frail lately. She complained of dizziness and, now and then, simply sank down where she stood. So-yul could still see her waving the suggestion off whenever anyone told her to get examined—she was fine, she insisted, don't make a fuss.

So-yul twisted her messy hair up in a hurry, threw on a single coat, and left the house.

A little more than ten minutes of alleyways from the villa where So-yul and her family lived brought you out into the traditional market.

The shop at the very end of it was the restaurant So-yul's mother and older brother ran together.

An Ong selling ongsimi—the rare Korean surname paired with chewy potato dumplings—was already a strange combination. The strangest part of all of it, though, had been the man called their father.

So-yul picked up her pace, as if she could outrun a thought she had never asked for.

"Haa. Ha."

She caught her breath and shoved open the old steel sliding door, and there he was. Ong Jun-soo.

"My little sister! You came!"

Her older brother—whose name meant something like handsome, and who possessed little beyond a face that lived up to it—was dressed in a crisply tailored suit that had nothing whatsoever to do with an emergency.

"What is that outfit? You going to a funeral? Did somebody die?"

Ong Jun-soo had served as a career soldier and been discharged not long ago, carrying the grand ambition of inheriting their mother's ongsimi shop and making it the best in the business. Maybe that was why. Most days he went around in a homemade Ong's Ongsimi T-shirt with his old army trousers underneath. Today, for some reason, he was in a perfectly decent suit.

"Where's Mom? Did you call an ambulance?"

"Why would Mom need an ambulance?"

"You said it was a huge emergency!"

"It is huge. Just not Mom's. Her legs have been all stiff and achy, so I told her to stop by the Korean medicine clinic. It'll take about two hours. They've got a famous doctor there, and the wait is insane."

"Then what is the emergency?"

"Your big brother is the emergency. I've got somewhere really, really important to be, so watch the shop for me. I'll be back."

She had sprinted the whole way on the wreckage of her stamina, half dead, and for this? What? All that, for this?

"Hey, Ong Jun-soo!"

So-yul kicked off the slipper she was wearing and hurled it at her brother's back.

With that round, innocent face, she looked like the sort of soft girl the world could fleece forever. She did not live that way.

Fearless, and utterly unfiltered—word had already spread through the hospital. She might look like a baby chick, but she hit harder than a tiger crouched to spring.

"Aack!"

The slipper So-yul threw stamped a shoe print across her brother's back. The second shoe, flung right after it, struck the back of Ong Jun-soo's head dead center.

"There aren't even any customers! Just leave the place empty! I am genuinely exhausted."

"You absolutely cannot close during lunch. It's in The Secrets of Startup Success. So just for today, I'm begging you, Ong-sso! I'll buy you those grilled rice-cake skewers you love on the way back!"

Maybe it came from all the years he had dug in and stayed in the army. Once Ong Jun-soo bolted, there was no catching him.

"Haa."

After the all-out war with her brother, So-yul trudged into the shop.

It was a familiar space. She had been born and raised in the little back room attached to the restaurant, and she had studied at these stained tables through every year of school. It had taken them a very long time to scrape together the key money for a decent villa apartment. All those years, Mom had carried it alone.

Looking around, So-yul rolled up her sleeves without quite deciding to. If it were up to her heart, she would have killed the time half-heartedly and left. But if she didn't do the work, her aching mother would be the one groaning through it, and she couldn't stand that.

"Up we go."

She went into the kitchen and hauled the basket—potatoes piled high as a mountain—over to a restaurant table. She had peeled them to the point of nausea since she was small. She could have done it with her eyes closed.

"Hahm."

Was it the vicious fatigue closing in? She had begun to nod, peeling potatoes in little jerks of sleep, when—

"...?"

The head that had been drooping dropped, all at once, into somebody's hand.

She looked up to see whose. Her eyes blew wide. Something in her neck cricked.

She had never seen a man so tall in her life. He had to be past six foot three, a height like a standing tree, a frame as solid as if someone had carved it out of rock. Not a figure you met easily on the street. His skin was browned by sun, but the face set into it—and the air around him—was far too cold. Eyes drawn long across the horizontal. A masculine bridge of nose, a jaw so sharp it looked as if a fingertip would come away bleeding.

"Wh-wh-who are you?"

The sheer presence of him was enough to overwhelm a person. So-yul stammered without meaning to and, on instinct, lifted the vegetable knife like a weapon.

"The customer who just saved that skull of yours?"

A voice as big as the rest of him rolled out, lazy and low. He laughed—a short breath through his nose—and his eyes and the corner of his mouth stretched long and sideways, so much like the gray wolf she had once seen on television that the image arrived on its own.

He looked faintly tired, but nothing about him was in a hurry. He tipped his head and glanced at the vegetable knife.

The moment she understood, the hand holding the knife lowered on its own.

"Ah—ah, yes! Please, sit! What can I get you?"

So-yul snatched up the potato basket and got to her feet. The man, having stepped aside, gave the menu a cursory glance.

Then he turned his head toward the door all at once, as if waiting for someone, and she caught the splendid line of his back. The square cut at the nape looked as if it had been measured with a protractor and trimmed into something almost artistic. When the long, clean line of his neck came into view as well, So-yul found herself staring at the ceiling for no reason at all.

Did somebody change the shop lights while I was asleep? Why does everything look brighter?

Awkward, she gripped the basket tighter and looked up at him.

"One bowl of ongsimi noodle soup, please."

Order placed, he pulled out a chair and sat.

"Yes. I'll have it right out."

So-yul tied on an apron and headed for the kitchen. Into the broth her mother had already simmered, she dropped the ongsimi—soft, fluffy potato dumplings, the dough already worked. She couldn't match her mother's hands, but she could imitate them closely enough, and the bowl came together in no time. She set the finished ongsimi noodles on a tray.

She was just about to carry it over to the man when one of the potatoes left on the table rolled off, tumbling, and caught her foot.

"Ah!"

In the next instant the bowl of boiling ongsimi was in the air, and then—

It fell. A soft, heavy thup, straight into the crotch of the man's pants.