The Errand (2)

"Good evening, Doctor."

"What were you doing, that you're only getting here now?"

Kang Dae-han had been grilling the meat. The moment he saw So-yul, the scolding came flying.

"......I was checking on a patient."

"You check on patients without eating? Waste away to a stick and collapse, and tell me who the patient is going to be."

How did he know she hadn't eaten a thing all day?

Gruff as the words were, he swept the beef off the grill in one pass of the tongs and piled it on the plate in front of her until it stood like a mountain.

"What am I supposed to do if you give me all of this?"

"You were late. Call it a penalty."

"No, that's not what I mean. The other doctors should eat too. This is flower ribeye, the prized cut......"

So-yul said it with her eyes on the beef, so rich with gloss it looked ready to drip.

"Dr. Ong, eat plenty. Wrap some in lettuce while you're at it. You've got to keep your vitamins up."

The man seated across nudged the basket of lettuce closer. Only then did So-yul take in the Soldier Doctors Trio sharing the table. Had someone set a concrete barrier down the middle of it? The three of them were built so large that their bodies alone hid every other table in the room. The frames were alike. The temperaments were not.

"Ha. Dr. Ong, nibbling lettuce like that, you look exactly like a rabbit."

The one who had offered the lettuce was Dr. Lee Hyeok, and he had the clean look of a genteel scholar, a face that seemed gentle clear through. Even his hair was neatly kept, proper enough that pure was the word that came to mind.

"You two don't know the first thing. What a first-year resident needs right now isn't meat and lettuce. It's a drink. They're a little hopeless, Dr. Ong, so you'll have to forgive them. Soju and beer?"

"Ah, yes! That sounds great!"

The man who, without a word of warning, stuck chopsticks into So-yul's glass and whipped up a whirlpool was So Joo-won. Stripped of his white coat, he had the slick gleam of a Gangnam playboy. His black silk shirt carried a quiet sheen, and the buttons were undone so far she had no idea where to put her eyes. His hair was pomaded back into a slick sweep, and a thoroughly delinquent air poured off him.

Social skill dialed to the maximum, So-yul let her tense shoulders down and reached for the drink he held out. Halfway there, someone took the glass.

"On an empty stomach, that will burn."

"......"

"And if your stomach is burning, do you expect to run errands?"

The hand that snatched it—broad as a cauldron lid—and drained it in her place belonged to none other than Kang Dae-han. He finished the soju-beer in a single swallow, as if it were yogurt, set the glass down with a flat clack, and jerked his chin at her plate.

Not eating did not seem to be an option. She hurried a piece into her mouth, and his brow creased all over again, displeased by something new. From the inner pocket of his jacket he drew something out.

The presence on him was such that a gun would not have been strange. What emerged was an apple juice with a straw.

"Drink the juice."

"......?"

"Or milk?"

A strawberry milk popped from the opposite pocket. Did Dr. Kang keep a Doraemon pocket in that jacket? So-yul stared at him, eyes gone wide.

"Dae-han, milk with meat is a little......"

"Fine. Juice."

Cutting Joo-won off, Dae-han punched the straw into the apple juice with a pop and held it out.

"Drink, Dr. Ong So-yul. If you get indigestion, I expect I will be extremely put out."

At his words her heart jolted, the way a wheel goes over a speed bump.

That was when it hit. A MacGyver ringtone burst out, bright and relentless—ba-bam-bam-bam, ba ba-ba, ba-ba ba-ba-bam—and the eyes fixed on her phone screen twitched in a fine tremor.

"You're not going to answer."

"No. It's a call I don't need to take."

As if the screen had never startled her at all, Ong So-yul pressed the power button and shoved the phone all the way into her bag.

Born for a poker face, was she. The more he learned, the less he could see into her.

"Thank you, but I'll skip the juice and just drink. This is a department dinner. And I won't let a hangover get in the way of your errands, Dr. Kang. Don't worry!"

Kang Dae-han looked at Ong So-yul, crisp and unhesitating as she said it.

"All right, then."

The apple juice, straw already in, went not to her mouth but to his. A sweet, bright tartness spread over his tongue. It did nothing for his mood.

"Now that we're all here, a round for everyone!"

Professor Ham, tie hanging half undone, rose and launched into a toast. A cheer like thunder hit the barbecue house, and a drinking party, in the most literal sense, broke open.

One glass, two, three. She looked like a woman with no capacity for alcohol whatsoever, and yet Ong So-yul could hold her liquor.

"So-yul, over here!"

"Then I'll head that way. Please enjoy your dinner, seniors!"

A pink-haired resident flapped a loose hand at her, and the cheeky little chick at his side pattered off to the other table.

"Good evening!"

After that, the warmth left the empty seat, and it filled with males of every kind. Some rigidly proper young man wound tight with barracks discipline—Go Je-gun or Gu Jae-gun, the name wouldn't stick—and Ma Seong-cheol, who could go more than thirty minutes on nothing but jokgu from his army days, that endless foot-volleyball, latched on beside him and emptied glass after glass.

"Hey, babe. Where you going?"

When Kang Dae-han stood, So Joo-won asked it in an easy voice.

"I'll come too. Let's go together."

Quick as ever, Lee Hyeok picked up his jacket and fell in with them.

The alley behind the barbecue house.

In the dimness, thin white smoke curled up around the men. They were only leaning on the wall with a cigarette resting lightly at their mouths, and yet passersby, pressed under that dark and threatening air, flinched and took the long way around.

"When are you two quitting."

Plastic rustled, and Lee Hyeok appeared—the one who had said he was stepping out to the convenience store. He held the bag out toward Kang Dae-han and So Joo-won, smoking together in a grim paired silhouette.

"You're the one who went to buy cigarettes."

"I was going to eat some ice cream and settle my stomach."

Joo-won ground out his butt, dropped it into a pocket ashtray, and pulled an ice cream from the bag, his face already twisting.

"You little shit. You go all that way and bring back freeze pops."

"Out in those empty wastes we couldn't get them no matter how bad we wanted them. You getting sentimental?"

"How'd you know. I missed them like hell."

A corner of Joo-won's mouth tipped up. He bit the top off the ice pop in one go and set it between his teeth with a delinquent tilt. Soda, pear, chocolate. Each man took the flavor that suited him, put his back to the alley wall, and they talked.

"Ha. I can't get used to Korea, and I can't get used to a drinking table. Keeps making me think of Jake, the one we left with the Ark Unit."

"Thinking about Arab mutts, more like. This bastard Hyeok's socialization is completely fucked. That's why they call you a lifer."

"And you, Soju, so thoroughly socialized—can't last five minutes without scrolling through women's numbers?"

Lee Hyeok and So Joo-won volleyed it back and forth, skinning each other as they went.

The Soldier Doctors Trio were medical school classmates who had enlisted together and stayed on as career military surgeons. Unlike the inward Hyeok, Joo-won had always appointed himself the life of whatever ground he stood on, and between those two mismatched natures Kang Dae-han stood planted like an old tree. The years had been long enough that there was nothing they did not know about one another. The ugly history was no exception.

"What, so I should be whining like you just because I ran into an old love?"

"Haa...... You're right. Maybe Yoon-ah can't even stand to sit across from me."

Seo Yoon-ah, the only woman among the fellows, the single bright figure in that company. She and Hyeok had been friends for a long time, but a year after they became lovers, they broke apart. She was, in the end, the reason he had followed Kang Dae-han into the army and driven his stake in deep. She was also the reason he had come back here.

"Find another woman, even now. What do you say—we clear out and go somewhere worth going?"

"You go."

Dae-han, listening to his classmates with half an ear, tossed the bare ice cream stick into a trash can nearby. Why was it that even something sweet would not loosen the knot in him?

"Hey. Isn't that Dr. Ong So-yul?"

So Joo-won, whose radar for everything around him ran sharper than most, was looking at Ong So-yul where she stood in front of the bar. Before the woman with her arms crossed stood a man thin as a dried anchovy.

"Oh, a boyfriend? Figures. Dr. Ong has the kind of face that would be popular. I thought it was strange she didn't have one."

"She looks easy to be around, like the girl next door. Seems kind, too. Doesn't look hard to talk to."

"Hyeok. A girl that pretty lives next door to you? Correct yourself. She's not just the girl next door. She's a girl-next-door the world doesn't actually have. Girls who look like that—men want them like you wouldn't believe."

Hearing Ong So-yul weighed and measured in the mouths of those grim bastards caught on a nerve. Kang Dae-han ground his teeth until his jaw ached, and then, as if by instinct, he lifted his phone and called for a driver to take his car.

The moment he hung up, So Joo-won at his side squinted, the look of a man thinking there he went again.

"You're leaving, Kang Dae-han? Walking out on that youth drama? Do you have anything human in you at all?"

"Yeah, Dae-han. You've been running Dr. Ong ragged for a week. Ought to look after her before you go, shouldn't you?"

"Works her like that and still doesn't care. Getting marked by a rotten piece of work like Kang Dae-han. Poor Dr. Ong."

His classmates had it in their heads that every errand he sent Ong So-yul on was harassment—that she displeased him, and he was tormenting her for it. That was not the truth. Keep her beside him, and the raw edge of his mind and body settled past all reason. Let her go, and his nerves stood up in a strange, unpleasant way, so he kept calling her back.

An irritating little chick, in every way there was.