Off Leash

"Excuse me, is that man in the sky-blue shirt the Vice President?"

"Yes, yes, that's him. And the woman in the beige dress is probably the Head of Sales, I think."

"Seriously, they're sending the Vice President to hire interns?"

"Considering the competition rate, it's not that unreasonable."

"Okay, but who's that guy over there?"

"Hmm, I really couldn't say..."

Amid the crowd of people in crisp office wear, one man stood out — glaringly so. It was partly his outfit: jeans, a short-sleeve T-shirt, and sneakers to top it all off, the very picture of casual. But honestly, the man would have drawn every eye in the room no matter what he wore.

A full head taller than anyone else, shoulders spreading in a perfect right angle from his neck, and a face far too handsome for his own good. What had begun as sidelong glances was quickly turning into open staring.

"Wait. That guy... don't I know him from somewhere?"

"What, you recognize him?"

"Hold on. He should come up if I search. He's... ugh, what was it. He was somebody's son..."

The man seated next to Hae-soo pulled out his phone, his face lighting up as something clicked into place. It took him less than ten seconds to uncover Yeol's identity through a portal site.

"Look, look. This is the guy, right?"

The logo of a notoriously sensational tabloid glowed on the phone screen he laid flat on the table. Beneath it, the headline read:

Below the headline was a photo of Yeol, apparently taken with a ski slope as the backdrop. The problem was that the image quality was so poor it was hard to tell whether it really was him.

"I can't really tell. Maybe it's him, maybe not."

"Ah, really? Then... hmm, hold on a sec. I definitely saw a different photo a while back."

The man was relentless. He fiddled with his phone again and pulled up a new article, setting it on the table. Every applicant seated around the name tags pinned to their chests leaned in with hungry eyes, peering at the palm-sized screen.

This headline made the previous one look tame. It was more recent, too, and came bundled with three photos — all of them crisp, and naturally, without a single pixel of mosaic blur.

"Ooh. Okay, seeing this, it's definitely him."

"Wow. Forget the photos — in person he's insanely gorgeous..."

"What's he doing there?"

"Isn't he smoking a cigar?"

"Ahh, a cigar. And here I thought it was weed or something."

"Please. They'd never run an article about that. Only way the company stays open."

As the chatter ping-ponged around her, Hae-soo's gaze, too, was pulled toward the phone like iron filings to a magnet. The 'this' he'd allegedly done with the former US Secretary of State's daughter appeared to be a boat party. Every photo had been taken aboard a white yacht, the blue sea stretching out behind them.

In them, Yeol was talking to someone with a cigar clamped between his teeth; in another, he gripped the yacht's wheel. There was even one where he sat laughing brightly with a blonde woman in a swimsuit, their bodies pressed close, both of them wet from the water.

Since they were all looking straight into the camera, it clearly hadn't been some sneaky paparazzi shot. The article had probably lifted the pictures straight off someone's personal social media.

"God... total rich-kid energy."

murmured the woman sitting across from Hae-soo, half in admiration.

Rich-kid energy — nothing drove the point home like those photos. Hae-soo quietly rose from her seat, leaving the wrapper of her finished Chocobar behind. She stopped by the bathroom to check her outfit and compose herself — never in her wildest dreams imagining that Yeol would be standing in the corridor when she came out.

"We keep meeting."

He said it offhandedly. Beside him stood a middle-aged woman in an ivory pantsuit. Hae-soo froze on the spot, still shaking the last drops of water from her fingertips.

"Your shoes took a while."

He asked with a tilted smile, his gaze sliding down the length of Hae-soo's legs. Her knees, her shins, her ankles prickled in turn. She was secretly curling her toes against the ant-crawling itch when—

"Who is she? Yeol, do you know her?"

"Yes."

"Oh my, really? Who is she?"

The woman turned to Hae-soo with curious eyes. Porcelain-white skin, a face with clean, defined lines — and in those elegant, urbane features it wasn't hard to find traces of Seo Moon-yeol. If her guess was right, this was Yeol's mother, Lim Hee-ryeong, CEO of Seomoon Hotel.

"Well... how should I put it."

Yeol looked down at Hae-soo with a crooked expression. The woman laughed as if to say, what kind of answer is that? His eyes were sharp enough to make direct eye contact unbearable when he was expressionless — yet they curved into gentle arcs when he smiled, a complete reversal. Even those eyes were identical to his son's.

"A classmate of our Yeol from university? A friend?"

When her son kept dragging his feet with that half-hearted answer, Hee-ryeong asked Hae-soo directly. Her tone was friendly, but an elder was still an elder — it was intimidating. Fragments of explanation flew through Hae-soo's frozen mind in a panicked blur.

We're in the same class year, but I'm an English Literature major, so not the same department. Yeol and I met through a group project this semester in International Business Manage— no, wait, I don't need to go into THAT much detail. Can't I just say we're from the same school?

"Oh, um, we're—"

"Friend? Hardly."

Just as she'd wrestled the words out of her mouth, Yeol cut her off and delivered his verdict.

"Her and me — we're at, like, the level where we say hi if we run into each other on campus."

"..."

"Right?"

It was a word-for-word recycling of what she'd said to him last week, the words with which she'd severed whatever warmth he'd offered.

'I don't want to text you or anything. Let's just know each other as people who say hi if we see each other at school.'

A tear slipped silently down over that thin, frost-pale smile of his. Hae-soo had to fight with everything she had to keep her own twitching mouth under control.

Petty bastard. Spiteful bastard. Grudge-holding bastard.

She was cursing him out seven ways in her head when Hee-ryeong lightly smacked Yeol's arm and shot him a fondly exasperated look.

"Yeol, that is a friend. What more does a friend have to be? Don't you think so?"

Why are you looking at ME when you say that?

Hae-soo could only respond, feeling very close to tears.

"...Yes, of course."

A low snort — pfft — rang clearly in her ear.

The interview itself went smoothly.

Hae-soo delivered her one-minute self-introduction, answered the standard questions, fielded the individual questions and their follow-ups — all without a tremor. Every time her eyes met one of the four interviewers' faces, her facial muscles flinched of their own accord, but she managed to hold that fake smile in place until the very end.

Results would be announced individually within two weeks.

If she passed, she'd complete the internship over July and August, and outstanding interns would be offered a chance at a full-time position. She would get to spend the rest of the semester without a single worry about finding a job.

If that happens, it really will be a dream come true.

As she walked out of the convention center on tired legs, Hae-soo pictured herself with a Seomoon Department Store employee badge hanging from her neck. She imagined the first payday, too — treating her mother to dinner somewhere nice, handing her a gift. Her chest swelled until it ached. If merely picturing it in her head did this to her, she couldn't even fathom how much happiness she'd feel when it became real.

It's going to work out.

Repeating the words like a charm — if you wish hard enough, it comes true — Hae-soo passed the Seomoon Hotel and headed toward the department store. While she was at it, she decided to look up the price of those shoes. With the box and shopping bag, tracking down the brand wouldn't be difficult.

"One, ten, one hundred..."

The price, however, was the hard part.

At first glance she'd thought it was 26,000 won. Why so cheap for a department store brand? Puzzled, she counted the digits carefully — it was 260,000 won.

Ah. That's my money.

The old Hae-soo would rather have shattered both her feet than spent that kind of money. Even after subtracting the 19,900 won she'd quoted to Yeol, that left 240,000 — no, precisely 240,100 won. More than enough to cover her entire month's food budget. My precious, hard-earned cash, she mourned inwardly, the wail escaping on its own.

Still, she refused to play ignorant and wash her hands of it. She refused even more strongly to owe him. It made no difference that to Seo Moon-yeol, the amount was pocket change.

The next day at school, Hae-soo withdrew money from the ATM on campus. Four fifty-thousand-won notes, four ten-thousand-won notes. She counted out 240,000 won in total and checked her balance slip. Her emergency savings had grown to quite a sum. A proud smile spread across her bare, unmade-up face.

Painful, though. I was up to 1,500 in interest.

It was the passbook she'd opened on her first day of elementary school and steadily fed ever since — a portion of the monthly allowance from Jeong-ae, the New Year's money Chairman Park gave her, and later, tutoring wages she'd secretly saved behind Jeong-ae's back. Somewhere along the way, it had swelled into an eight-digit number.

People joked these days that the old saying "stacking dust builds a mountain" had become "stacking dust builds dust" — but Hae-soo believed that even that dust was what made it possible to dream of a better life.

ideally I'd get an apartment... though Seoul's probably out of the question for that, right?

Turning over one plan after another, Hae-soo walked beneath the thick green canopy of the campus trees. Mee-eh, meh-meh. The cicadas sang with all their might, as if announcing the final exams a week away — and the summer vacation that would follow.