Ennui and Thirty Are Alike

Ennui and thirty are alike.

At least, she had always been certain that neither would ever come for her.

But ten years ago, Ryu Lee-kyung changed.

The tender, fever-hot senior who used to spend whole nights pulling her into his arms—from that autumn on, so much about Ryu Lee-kyung was unmistakably different.

Won-young watched Lee-kyung push open the café door and amble toward her, a full two hours past the time they had set. Even if he had come running at a dead sprint, her stomach would have turned; the sight of that unhurried ease made her anger boil.

"Why are you this late?"

His voice, indifferent and dry, was nothing but cold.

"I told you I'd be late."

"If I'd known it would be this late, I wouldn't have waited. What were you even doing?"

"Had something to take care of."

"So what was it? Explain. Every last bit of it."

"Noh Won-young."

A shard of ice in his eyes cut straight into her. The low voice was cold enough to ache in her chest. Won-young hated this particular voice of his, the one that could freeze a person where they stood. Seonbae was usually warmer and kinder than anyone, but when he sank into that heavy, chilly register, he had a way of making people shrink.

She clenched her hands. Jazz was playing, and still the café seemed, for an instant, to fall silent.

She knew. These days, whenever he looked at her, his eyes held the weariness of someone staring at a thing that was tiresome and dull. That was what frightened her—the fear that the words would come from Ryu Lee-kyung first. That being with her had stopped being fun. That they should break up.

How could Seonbae throw me away? He promised. He said he wouldn't leave me.

Won-young forced out a bright smile. The Ryu Lee-kyung she knew was simple to a fault; smile at him like this, and his anger melted at once.

"Okay. I won't ask anymore. I'm sorry I ignored your message—the one where you said you'd be really late and we should meet another time. I just hated our plans falling apart on me like that. We didn't see each other last week either, and you've been so busy this week we barely managed once. I don't even know what you've been doing lately, but..."

"Won-young."

"Okay, okay! I get it! I won't ask! Stop scowling. What, am I going to eat you alive?"

"..."

"But you know it too, right? You've been really strange lately. You feel like a stranger. That blank face, the frown, flying off the handle if I so much as touch you. Do you have any idea what goes through my head every time you get like that?"

"Do I need to?"

It landed like a sentence being passed. As if he were telling her he no longer cared to know anything about her. Her heart felt ripped open, but Won-young smiled again, pretending she was fine.

"Huh? No, that's not—what I meant was..."

"Noh Won-young. I'm hungry."

"Okay. Let's go. Come on! Seonbae, what do you want to eat?"

After that, Lee-kyung hardly spoke. The meals they shared grew fewer and fewer, and the tenderness that used to keep him from easily walking away at the end of a date faded, little by little, with time. He behaved like an entirely different person.

In that unusually cold winter, leaving Won-young so far behind, Lee-kyung climbed the stairs alone in long strides. A gust slammed into her and her slight frame staggered, and still he did not look back.

I hate this feeling. It makes my skin crawl.

She resented him. She felt wretched. In the end, a love that had not even lasted two years had grown too heavy to carry. There had been a time, though. Back when she was hopelessly, one-sidedly in love with him, she had thought that if he would only look at her, she would want for nothing else.

Even so, this isn't right. Seonbae isn't supposed to do this to me.

While he climbed every step, Won-young did not set foot on a single one. Only when the door of the Hongdae pub they often went to together creaked open did Lee-kyung finally turn toward her.

"What are you doing down there. You coming or not?"

For the first time, Won-young wanted to cry. She barely held the tears back as they rose.

"Ryu Lee-kyung. You know something?"

"What."

"The whole way here, you never looked back. Not once."

"So what."

A biting winter wind skimmed her cheek, and memories she could never forget rose all at once and made her ache. Their first meeting. Their first kiss. The first night they had spent in the same bed. The silver couple rings they had slipped onto each other's fingers. Lee-kyung wouldn't have noticed, but today Won-young was not wearing hers.

Because those things had made her happy. So the last of it, at least, she would face bravely.

"Fine. Let's end it. Right here."

"..."

"I'm leaving for Japan next month to study. The thing I told you about. Professor Im's recommendation. I decided to take it."

"..."

"Once I'm there, I might just find a job in Japan for good. You know it yourself. Korea is far too small to hold my dream. So I'm going to try. I've decided to be brave."

"Good for you."

"Yeah. It is good... It is a good thing. Right. So you take care too, Seonbae."

It was a stock farewell. She didn't cry, didn't rage, didn't whine. She meant to call herself admirable, shake it off cleanly, and disappear. She should have stopped there and turned away. Then it might have been a halfway decent breakup scene.

Lee-kyung was wearing the green sweater she had bought him. Jeans down those long legs, navy sneakers, brows black as ink, shoulders set wide and square. That much alone, she might have let go. It was the sight of both hands shoved carelessly into his pockets that she could not stand. Something in her flared, and Won-young charged up the stairs and struck the back of his head.

Thwack.

"What? Good for me? That's what you have to say right now? Hey! Ryu Lee-kyung, you son of a bitch! I'm telling you I'm ditching you and running overseas, and all you've got is good for me? You want to die? Seonbae, don't tell me there's another woman. If there is, just say so! No matter how I turn it over, I don't get it. Last month you vanished for three days. You wouldn't pick up, and when we finally talked you didn't give me a single word of explanation."

"..."

"And ever since, every time you look at me it's with those eyes. Last week you went two whole days without a word, like you were trying to drive me insane. Do you even know how long it's been since we saw each other? Stop sitting there like some pathetic Buddha and shutting up on me!"

She kept firing without giving him a chance to answer. Looking back, maybe everything she had been holding in simply burst all at once.

"Fine, I know! You've never been good at talking about yourself. I knew you hated being grilled, hated me checking where you were every second, so all this time I haven't been able to ask you anything. But is this even a real relationship? Or is it just one where you're on top and I'm underneath? Is this how you treat me now because I spent years chasing after you?"

"..."

"Ryu Lee-kyung, you bastard! I'm warning you—watch your back at night. If I so much as see someone who looks like you from behind, I'll run up and crack him across the skull just like this! Don't call me! You call me and I will kill you! I will kill you! You rotten bastard!"

Heedless of every staring stranger, she screamed at the top of her lungs and spilled every word she had never been able to say.

She regretted that day down to the bone. No matter how she turned it over, she should have left out those last words. The one who could not hold out—who called first, all the way through a safe graduation in Japan and the job she landed after, to a Ryu Lee-kyung who never once phoned her—was Won-young herself. Some nights she was blind drunk. Other nights she woke at four in the morning and called him sobbing.

There would never be another outrage against her senior like it in her life. She had sworn she would never tangle with Seonbae again, but the vow had been premature. Maybe because it was a first love so fierce that from the day they met at twelve, through eighteen, nineteen, twenty—until she was grown—she had lived looking at no one but Ryu Lee-kyung. Won-young could not let him go.

On the day that long, one-sided love was finally returned, she had held a foolish faith that they would never, ever part. Why had she believed so absolutely, back then, that even if everyone else changed, the two of them could not exist without each other? The Won-young of those days could not admit that Lee-kyung had been the one to change first.

A single meeting of the eyes used to set them both ablaze, they liked each other that much—so how could a heart change so easily? And his, of all hearts. Toward her. The thought alone felt so unjust she could have died of it.

The venom she spat at him when she was drunk was always the same old script.