Off Leash

It felt like the third round. Sensing a familiar atmosphere, Hae-soo turned her head this way and that. On the wall plastered end to end with twenty-some years' worth of scribbles, a crude digital clock hung crooked against the graffiti.

Had she told her mom she'd eat dinner out? The thought flashed through her mind belatedly, and Hae-soo slipped her phone into her hand and quietly rose from her seat. Do-yun immediately scrambled to ask where she was going. She gave him a careless answer — the bathroom — and stepped out of the restaurant. It was too loud inside for a phone call.

"Yeah, sweetie."

The street, the sun not yet down, felt faintly muggy. Coming out of an air-conditioned interior made the heat that much harder to bear. Hae-soo ducked into the shaded alley beside the restaurant as she answered her mother, Jung-ae.

"Hey, I called because I might be a little late tonight."

"Oh, oh — you're eating dinner out before coming home?"

"Yeah. So don't worry about me."

"All right. If it looks like you'll be really late, call me. I'll come meet you at the bus stop."

"Meet me? I'm not a kid, Mom."

"That's exactly why I worry. Who knows who might try to snatch our pretty daughter off the street at night."

A laugh escaped her at the ever-gentle voice she could never tire of hearing. Hae-soo kicked idly at the bare ground with the toe of her shoe and let out a petulant little che.

"Fine, I got it. I'll call if I'm going to be too late."

"Okay. Eat plenty."

"Mm-hmm."

Clang, clang, clang — amid a flurry of noisy clattering, the call cut off. The landlady must have been doing the dishes. If Hae-soo had come home early like she usually did, she would have helped.

She was letting out a sigh at the thought of Jung-ae, managing all that housework alone — and for another family's household, no less — when it happened.

"A boyfriend?"

Movement stirred without warning. Yeol, his back against the alley wall, was drawing something out of his pocket. A squared-off pack of cigarettes emerged attached to fingers that were pale and neat for a man's.

So he smokes. Huh. Didn't expect that.

She'd never picked up so much as a whiff of tobacco from him, which was why she hadn't known. Whenever they'd crammed shoulder to shoulder in that narrow study room for meetings, Yeol had always smelled pleasant. He must manage himself meticulously, she supposed, shaking her head.

"No, my mom."

"Ah. Right, your mom."

Yeol murmured the words with a small nod. Maybe because it was the first time the two of them had been alone together, an awkward air drifted through the narrow alley. By her reckoning he wasn't much of a talker anyway — and neither was she.

Hae-soo unconsciously tightened her grip on her phone and started moving her legs toward him. To get out of the alley, she had to pass the man standing at its mouth.

"I'll head out first. Take your time."

"I'll leave once I finish these."

She tossed out the obligatory pleasantries and moved to brush past him — and his next words caught her feet. Hae-soo stopped short where she stood.

"Oh. Already?"

"Yeah."

"Did you tell the others you were leaving?"

"No. You go in and tell them for me."

"They'll be disappointed."

As if that were none of his concern, he gave a faint smile from the tip of his nose. Then the question he'd been harboring alone in his heart tumbled out before he could stop it.

"So why did you come today, anyway? You barely ate anything."

No — barely is generous. He didn't eat at all.

Hae-soo silently corrected her own words as she looked up at Yeol, puzzled. She'd been curious from the very start. And it wasn't just her — the rest of the team had probably been equally bewildered.

Seo Moon-yeol, at a team dinner. Over the past two months they'd held five meetings, and not once had Yeol accepted an invitation to eat together afterward. When a meeting ended, he left with clockwork precision — though once, when he'd mentioned it was the last one, she thought she'd caught a flicker of reluctance in him.

But from the look of things now, that wasn't quite it either. His chopsticks had lain untouched where Si-yeon had set them down at the start, and he'd only pretended to drink his beer. His contribution to the conversation went without saying. People are pretty much the same everywhere — that line was probably the longest thing out of his mouth all evening.

"You know what? I don't really know why I came here either."

Yeol mumbled something vague. If you don't know, who would? She almost shot back, then decided against it — it would sound like a rebuke.

Well. He probably came because he was bored. Or maybe, like Woo-chan joked, he was curious about how the common folk drink.

Even at school she'd heard he only ever hung around with the kids who partied constantly. The so-called gold-spoon crowd. Different scales and different industries, perhaps, but all of them scions of considerably wealthy families, like him. They were famous for driving flashy sports cars to campus and back.

Come to think of it, he didn't drive that strange car today, did he?

Just as her stray thoughts were chasing their own tails, he held up the cigarette pinched between his fingers and asked,

"Mind if I smoke?"

So even the small talk ends here. Hae-soo nodded and angled herself away. Sorry, but cigarette smoke was the one thing she couldn't stand.

"Go ahead. I'm heading in. I'll just tell the others you were busy and left early."

"Yeah, thanks."

"Okay, take care. Thanks for all your work on—"

"Can I get your number?"

She had been about to offer what might well be a final farewell between them when the words were chopped off clean at the middle.

Frozen mid-step in the posture of someone about to leave the alley, Hae-soo could do nothing but blink her eyes, blank. He let the hand holding the cigarette drop, and the body that had been slouched against the wall straightened. One long stride — his steps were wide, closing the distance in a heartbeat.

"...What?"

She asked again as if doubting her own ears, though she couldn't honestly say she was surprised. Somehow, it didn't feel sudden at all. The gazes that kept colliding with hers, the mouth corners that would curl up ever so subtly in those moments — it felt like all of it had just been explained in a single stroke.

Suspicious. Strange. Inexplicable. Uncertain.

The emotions and questions that sometimes surged up whenever she stood before Seo Moon-yeol — that one sentence seemed to dissolve them all.

Oh. So that's what it was.

Ah. So that's why.

It was a sentence that cut straight through to understanding.

"I said — can I get your number."

Yeol, after a beat, repeated himself slowly and clearly. They were close enough that the tips of their shoes nearly touched. She was by no means short for a woman, but he was so tall she had to crane her head all the way back just to meet his eyes.

Seen this near, his gaze was deep and dark. The lips that habitually tilted into a faint slant were pressed flat and firm now. Thump. Thump. That unwelcome signal reverberated once more from inside her ribs.

Oh. So I'm this weak to a pretty face, huh.

A shallow self-loathing flickered across Hae-soo's eyes. If this pounding was attraction, then eighty percent of it was owed to that absurdly handsome face. The remaining twenty percent, maybe, to the unexpected dependability and skill he'd shown during the group project.

She didn't know him well enough to name any other reasons. His personality, least of all.

So her deliberation didn't take long. Hae-soo faced Yeol with the same expression she often gave Do-yun — firm resolve laced with a small measure of apology.

"Our group project is over."

"Which is exactly why."

Which is exactly why — meaning any contact between them would be personal.

Hae-soo skipped the preamble and kept it short.

"Sorry. That's going to be difficult."

"Why?"

"Like you know, I'm a senior. I'm busy with this and that. I don't have the luxury of texting some guy back and forth."

She doubted the rich young heir with nothing but a smooth road ahead could truly grasp what a senior's too busy meant. A life free of job-hunting anxiety, free of career worries — he'd surely never known anything else.

Hae-soo pressed down hard on the envy that rose despite herself. If the sparrow chases the stork, it only tears its own legs. Each of us does their best with the hand we're dealt, she recited to herself, unglamorously, and he tilted his head and asked,

"So it's the situation. Not me."

"Yeah, well. I guess."

"It's not that you don't like me."

Who, in any sane universe, would call you unlikable?

Hae-soo burst out laughing at the mild absurdity of it. The moment someone shouted Seo Moon-yeol's here!, girls would swarm the windows to dissect him from head to toe — the campus was drowning in them. He couldn't be unaware of it. Which made that question of his feel less like a question and more like a high-level strategy for extracting exactly the answer he wanted.

"There's no like or dislike. We barely know each other."

"Then let's get to know each other."

"Like I just said, it's a matter of time. I don't have it."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"What do you mean, what—"

"I want to. With you."

The voice of a man swallowing her sentence whole. With the object omitted, Yeol's words sounded somehow off. Want to — which made it all a little... intimate. A little suggestive.

Heat rushed to her ears, and Hae-soo's brow creased despite herself. He added, one beat late:

"Contact."

"......"

"I want to keep in touch, I mean."

Round and round — the teasing glint in his expression belonged, beyond any doubt, to a man who knew exactly what he'd just done. Hae-soo took a discreet half-step back from the sly-eyed man, drew a comfortable safety margin, and traced an invisible line on the ground between them.

"Not me. I don't want to keep in touch with you, or anything else. Let's just be the kind of people who say hi when we run into each other on campus."

Somehow I doubt even that will be easy.

A strong premonition told her things with Yeol would turn sour. The response of a man whose affections had been refused was, broadly speaking, one of two kinds. Either he'd suggest staying friends, comfortable and easy, and then cling and linger while angling for the next opening — or he'd sever the relationship entirely and make an aggressive show of his rage and frustration.