Off Leash

He was inspecting his reflection in the mirror, checking for spots the towel had missed, when the doorbell rang somewhere in the apartment. Yeol wiped the last trace of foam from his jaw and stepped out of the bathroom. Not that he'd expected anything, but of course it wasn't Cha Hae-soo.

"What."

Heard you had dinner with a girl last night. In Samseong-dong.

Hyun-seok's lecherous voice crackled through the phone. Unbelievable. There was no such thing as privacy in this godforsaken city. Brow furrowing, Yeol hunted down a cigarette, lit it, and stepped out onto the balcony.

"So what."

What do you mean, so what? That was Cha Hae-soo, right?

"Stay out of other people's love lives."

Whoa, 'love lives'? So you two are finally dating?

"If you don't have a point, I'm hanging up."

No, wait—I do! I do have one!

"Spit it out."

Did you do it?

"Hanging up now."

One look at you and I can tell you didn't. See, the thing about her is, she's really not your average piece of—

Yeol cut him off without a shred of mercy. Cracking the window open, he drew deep on his cigarette. Orientation was tomorrow, apparently. His thoughts drifted, unbidden, toward the summer internship schedule at Seohmun Department Store. Not ten seconds later, the phone rang again.

Ah, this persistent little bastard.

Decline. Ring. Decline again. By the third call, irritation won out and he simply picked up.

"I told you to drop it."

No, no, it's not that. Word is a Diego piece is coming up in Hong Kong—thought you'd want to know. You know, the one called Sinking or whatever.

The moment the name of the painter every serious super-collector in the world had been watching landed, a flicker of genuine interest crossed Yeol's eyes.

"Hong Kong? When?"

Saturday, week after next. Wanna fly over? Make a little trip of it, have some fun for once.

"Hmm."

The piece tempted him; Hong Kong with Hyun-seok did not.

The man's real objective went without saying: the clubs. Yeol had zero appetite for those cramped, reeking, deafening dens where crowds of strangers ground against each other in the dark. He liked his liquor and his parties well enough—clubs were another matter entirely. And the women, clinging to every passing oppa, oppa regardless of age, held no charm for him either. Ah, well—in Hong Kong, I suppose no one will call me oppa.

Come on, don't be like this. You haven't gone once since you got out of the army.

"Not in the mood. Go rope in someone else."

Tch. Fine, then what about the piece?

"I'll handle that myself."

He did enjoy the theater of a live auction, but a bid could be placed by phone just as easily—no reason to board a plane and cross the sea for it. Yeol wrapped up the call half-heartedly and smoked the rest of his cigarette down to the filter. Every time he pursed his lips to inhale, a strange rawness stirred in the swollen spot.

Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one, twenty-two...

The instant the tip of his tongue touched his dry lips, the image of Cha Hae-soo counting in that low, hushed voice surfaced in his mind. The face that had leaned weakly against his chest, murmuring thirty more seconds, had been oddly endearing. Genuinely pretty.

God... she really is breathtakingly pretty.

That had been the very first phrase to burn her into his awareness.

Pretty.

His gaze had gone to her naturally at the word. If it was a woman to Hyun-seok's taste, he'd vaguely assumed—short skirt, heavy makeup, the works. What actually came into view, though, was a bare-faced girl in faded jeans and a baggy military-issue bomber jacket.

English Language & Literature.

His eyes had idly traced the letters on her backpack. Beneath the school crest, rows of embroidery spelled out her department in meticulous detail.

Then why is she taking the business school requirements? He'd wondered idly—and that was when Hyun-seok, catching the direction of his stare, jabbed at him.

'Fucking hot, right?'

That was March of this year, the first week of the semester.

University, after the army, was simply meh. He could summon no other description. Nothing about it interested him, nothing felt new, and nothing particularly grated on him either—just a state of terminal, ambient indifference.

That day, too, Yeol sat at the back of the lecture hall, chewing over his boredom before class. He opened a stock app on his phone, skimmed an article or two, checked the weather to see whether horseback riding might be worth it this weekend. Beside him, Hyun-seok craned his neck and suddenly muttered:

"God... she really is breathtakingly pretty."

What man alive was immune to the word pretty? Without giving it a second's thought, Yeol trailed Hyun-seok's gaze diagonally across the hall. Mostly out of a kind of idle curiosity—what on earth could the idiot be gawking at with that dopey expression? Or perhaps not even that much.

And in the very next instant, Yeol found the object of Hyun-seok's attention at a single glance. A lecture hall of a hundred and thirty students, and still—one glance. Truly.

"I swear, I just want to sleep with her once. Once, and I'd die happy."

The woman rolling around on Hyun-seok's vulgar tongue was just then walking in through the front doors of the hall, damp brown hair falling loose, head turning as she searched for a seat.

A face a single hand could cover, rice-water pale and luminous. Within it, the most striking thing was the lashes—the way they hung over her eyes, long as the eaves of a roof.

What is that.

Before he knew it, Yeol had planted an elbow on the desk and was studying the woman intently. Every time she blinked, her lashes fluttered up and down with unnatural slowness, as if shot in slow motion. A movement that coaxed the imagination toward dangerous places.

Does she blink like that on purpose?

The moment the stray question seized him, the woman took a seat in the second row from the front. After that, all he could see was her back. When she lowered her head to dig through her bag, her hair spilled forward and a sliver of her slender nape flashed into view. The vertebra jutting out hinted at how thin the rest of her was.

Yeol's hand drifted absently to his own throat, below the Adam's apple. A faint tightness; he tugged at his neckline.

March. The last cold snap of winter was at its fiercest, and the ceiling vents were blasting out air hot enough to suffocate. Probably that, he reasoned, and dropped his gaze lower. The back of the woman's black jacket was plastered with letters, large and small. As he read down them without thinking, a crease formed between his brows.

A military bomber jacket. Seriously.

It was the one fashion crime he couldn't stand. No—forget taste; it was a get-up he flatly could not comprehend. Why wear a uniform as everydaywear? And what psychology drove a person to broadcast their school and department to total strangers on the street?

He clicked his tongue, and Hyun-seok pressed close, whispering into his ear.

"Fucking hot, right?"

Normally he'd have swatted him away. Just say it—why do you have to breathe it into my ear like a creep?

Yet when he came to his senses, he realized he had answered in the same hushed voice as Hyun-seok—with the furtive caution of men discussing something that would be catastrophic if overheard.

"...Who is she?"

"Cha Hae-soo, English lit."

"Then why is she in the business requirements course."

"Double major, apparently. Same cohort as us, same student ID year, for the record."

"Double major? As in two degrees?"

"Yeah. Guess she actually studies. You do remember our department's cutoff is brutal, right?"

Yeol shook his head as if it were none of his concern, and Hyun-seok, lips puckering, pressed for his agreement again.

"But come on, isn't she insane? There's this subtle, like... sexual current coming off her. Honestly she's not really my usual style—kind of plain—but the aura and the whole package just steamroll right over that, you know?"

"So. She's your next target, then?"

That was Hyun-seok all right—living and dying by women. It had only been the day before yesterday that he'd ended things with a sex partner of a month or so, slap traded for slap. He was probably due for ignition again, which was why Yeol had asked. Hyun-seok stroked his chin, face clouding over.

"Hard to say. She's my type on looks, but there's a rumor."

"A rumor?"

"That basketball team mess from two years ago? Her fault. Ah—right, that was when you were still in the army choking down rations, so you wouldn't know."

Yeol lifted his eyes from the woman and looked at Hyun-seok. The moment his ordinarily apathetic friend showed even a flicker of interest, Hyun-seok launched in with relish.

"Two years ago, our school got knocked out of the college league without even making the playoffs. Nobody was hanging a trophy on us, sure, but honestly the result was indefensible, and people inside and outside the program would not shut up about it. Back-to-back champions—how do you collapse that hard in league play?"

Our basketball team was that good? For Yeol, who had zero interest in chasing a ball around for fun, it was news.

"But honestly, if you just look at how they played that season, it makes sense. It wasn't some 'bad passes, missed shots' problem. They were body-checking each other, going down, rolling around on the floor—it was a total circus. The atmosphere was so wrecked a neighborhood rec league would've looked better. I swear."

Hyun-seok twisted his mouth and went on.

"And of all of them, the ones acting out the most were the two so-called aces. Jang Won-joon and Kim Myeong-jae—the guys running pro circuits now. Those two came up through elementary, middle, and high school together, doing interviews about being soulmates and whatnot... every insufferable cliché in the book. And then, weirdly, in that game, they never once made eye contact. Not once. Isn't that something?"

Hyun-seok let out a sour scoff, as if the memory disgusted him even in retrospect.

"They fought like dogs not to look at each other, blew every scoring chance, and when they collided they were cursing each other out loud enough to reach the stands. The coach finally started subbing players, but you can't field both aces at once, so the talent gap just blew the game wide open. Team morale tanked all the way to rock bottom. And then it turned out—"

Before reaching the point, Hyun-seok dropped his already lowered voice even further. A volume that left the listener with no choice but to lean in and concentrate.

"—those two had beaten the hell out of each other in the locker room right before the league. Jang Won-joon's nose got shoved off its bridge. Kim Myeong-jae lost a front tooth. Apparently it was brutal."

"...And that was because of her?"

"Exactly."

Hyun-seok nodded at his friend, who caught on the instant he was told.