Two Fools Would Suit Each Other Just Fine
Around noon, the moment Harin shed her café apron and swapped shifts with the owner, she headed straight for the barbecue joint nearby.
She walked fast, but a strange feeling dogged her steps, as if someone were trailing close behind.
Harin glanced around uneasily and quickened her pace.
The restaurant was already packed with the lunch crowd.
"Miss! I've been asking for a bottle of soju for ages!"
"Oh—yes! Coming right up!"
Even at midday, customers hungry for grilled meat kept pouring in. Harin whirled between tables in a daze while local old-timers, faces flushed with daytime drinking, bellowed for her attention.
With a soju bottle in one hand and a platter of meat in the other, she practically sprinted between the scorching grill tables.
Sweat seeped through to her underclothes. The grease-stained apron reeked, and hurrying back and forth across the floor made slick by years of accumulated oil, she could feel blisters forming on her toes.
Once the crowd thinned and the dining hall finally loosened up, Harin choked down a belated lunch of the potato salad that came out of the kitchen as a side dish and called Ha-yul.
"Ha-yul, have you eaten yet?"
"Y-yeah. The, the caregiver came, so... I ate with G-Grandma."
She meant the care worker.
"Good. Nothing's wrong, right?"
Harin asked, washing the dry, crumbly potato salad down her throat with water.
"N-nothing! U-unnie, when will you be h-home today?"
"Hmm... I'll probably be late again tonight. Go to sleep with Grandma first, okay, Ha-yul?"
"O-okay! Got it!"
"Alright, I have to get back to work. Call me if anything happens."
She hung up and headed straight for her next job—the gym.
And sure enough, that time too, the feeling of someone following her crept back.
Harin assumed it was just her own time pressure playing tricks and tried to shrug it off. But the moment she lifted her head from watching her feet, her eyes met her own reflection in the glass of a vacant storefront.
She stopped in her tracks for a moment.
Her tightly-bound long hair had come loose in every direction, the rubber band dangling somewhere near the middle of the ponytail. Dark circles shadowed the exhaustion written plainly across her face, leaving her looking utterly worn.
And suddenly, she wanted—just for one day, only one day—to set everything down and sleep like the dead.
The days in Seoul when she'd done delivery work to pay for her rehabilitation came flooding back. She'd grumbled inwardly then, too, but looking back now, that time had almost felt happy. Because she'd still had a dream.
The Harin of today was simply a body adrift on the front lines of survival. On her shoulders rested the full weight of a sick grandmother and a young Ha-yul.
I'm so tired.
She murmured the words to herself with a blank face, then closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath.
No. Pull it together. You have to pull it together.
Harin gave her drooping shoulders one good shake, shed the weariness like dust, forced a smile onto her lips, and stepped inside the gym.
Around that time, standing in the alley across the street, Lee-gang quietly watched Harin's back as she disappeared into the gym.
Just as Noh Tae-shik had said, her life really did consist of nothing but part-time jobs. There didn't seem to be a single day off. At first he'd thought of her as diligent and hardworking, but seeing it with his own eyes, dim-witted was a closer word than diligent.
Head of the household or not, he couldn't understand it—working herself to the bone like that, every last scrap of herself, as if she were three people instead of one.
"Hm."
He stared blankly at the ice americano Tae-shik had brought him that morning, long since melted to nothing.
"This coffee tastes like absolute garbage."
Just then, the phone in his hand buzzed.
It was Ryu Seo-in.
He'd been calling once or twice a day these past few days—annoying enough, but ignoring him outright felt even more unsettling.
Lee-gang answered, his face screwing up at once.
Late that night, having finished his office work, Lee-gang headed for the construction site where a new apartment complex was slated to rise.
The Gohyeon Casino Resort—permitted a decade ago under the Special Act on Assistance to the Development of Abandoned Mine Areas to open a casino for domestic customers—had just had its license extended for a full twenty years. And as the privileges grew, so did the vicious scramble for the profits surrounding them.
The same held true for the shadowed territory hidden beneath the gleaming surface of the business—a realm of darkness the public never saw.
Factions hungry for a piece of the pie raised their heads anew or boiled over the regional borders, spilling into Gohyeon from every direction.
In response, Handong Enterprises—the mob-affiliated corporation with roots sunk deep into the city—moved at once to sweep out the upstart crews.
At Ryu Seo-in's request earlier that day, Lee-gang had lent him some of his own men to help, though the whole arrangement left a bad taste in his mouth.
Handong's previous president had, in his lifetime, traded favors behind closed doors with Chairman Yoon.
Chairman Yoon needed someone to handle the illegal work his family and company required—and so he'd made a sacrificial lamb of Lee-gang, fresh out of high school. Sent his own illegitimate son to Handong, all to raise him into a gangster.
That was how Lee-gang's life in the underworld began.
Back then, Lee-gang and Ryu Seo-in, the same age, had grown close fast. They covered for each other whenever trouble came, and to all appearances were the best of friends.
But when Chairman Yoon ordered Lee-gang to strike out on his own and found a new business—Baegun Logistics—their paths split, and contact between the two men dried up entirely.
Later, word spread that Handong's old president had died of a chronic illness and a succession war had erupted within the organization—and not long after, Ryu Seo-in returned as Handong's new president.
There had been no time to feel glad about reuniting with an old friend, however. Seo-in set about scheming by every means available to win Chairman Yoon's favor and open a channel of trade.
And the scheme he cultivated most devotedly of all: reporting Lee-gang's every move to the chairman—a man troubled by his lack of heirs—so that his troublesome illegitimate son could be watched, sniffed out, and policed.
Dredging up friendship only when he needed something, the way he had today—it grated on Lee-gang's nerves endlessly. But if the new factions cut into his own revenue, the headache would be his as well, and so, grudgingly, he had no choice but to lend Seo-in his men.
The site bore the clear marks of a fresh brawl. Bent steel pipes and dried bloodstains gave off a faint fishy stench.
When the heel of his dress shoe touched ground littered with glass shards and grit, it crunched.
"There you are."
From the corner, Ryu Seo-in, perched on a paint bucket, raised a hand toward the sound.
He'd been idly flicking his Zippo lighter, tink, tink, out of sheer boredom, and now he flashed a grin as he met Lee-gang's darkened eyes.
"Figured you'd just send the boys and never show. Good of you to come."
"Had to check the job was done right."
Lee-gang said it flatly, glancing around.
It looked more or less cleaned up, but the loitering crew members and the leftovers of the melee still littered the place.
"Chairman Yoon really is a hard-ass, huh? Heard he summoned you all the way to Seoul."
Ryu Seo-in rose from his seat and ambled over.
"Mayor Choi whined and whined, so all I did was pass a little message along to the chairman. That's it."
"..."
"Still—what kind of friend decks you and just walks off? Didn't even apologize."
He lit the cigarette between his lips, then blew a slow puff of smoke straight into Lee-gang's face.
Lee-gang's brow furrowed as he answered in a low voice.
"I had it coming."
Ryu Seo-in dragged on his cigarette with a mocking smirk.
Lee-gang jammed his hands into his pockets and spoke with an indifferent face.
"You've been skimming machines from our game land. You thought I wouldn't notice?"
"So that's why you came all the way out here—to settle accounts."
Seo-in cut in, but Lee-gang went on calmly enough.
"I see it. I've been choosing to look the other way."
"Who asked you to look?"
Lee-gang's jaw clenched as he tilted his head to one side.
Ryu Seo-in let his eyes narrow into a lazy squint and shook the ash off his cigarette with perfect composure.
"Ever thought about merging Baegun Logistics into Handong Enterprises?"
As if daring him to keep talking, Lee-gang simply stared at him.
"A merger could work out nicely. Why'd you even leave Handong, back when we were doing so well together?"
"..."
"I'm the president now, so you could come work under me, no problem. If merging's on the table, say the word. I'll take good care of you."
Lee-gang swallowed a bitter laugh, but it curdled into something too absurd to hold back, and a short, sharp scoff escaped him.
"If you were so set on taking care of me, you shouldn't have been tattling to the chairman."
The end of the sentence dropped low, fury bleeding through it—but Ryu Seo-in seemed entirely untouched, only wearing that faint, soft smile around his lips, his eyes flat and unreadable.
"Haah..."
Lee-gang exhaled long and hard, anger and frustration churning together.
"Forget it. I'm done helping you—handle your own messes from here on out."
As Lee-gang turned to go, Ryu Seo-in murmured at the back of his head.
"How long are you planning to live as your daddy's little bitch?"
Lee-gang's step faltered—then, as if shaking it off, he kept walking.
A flicker of regret surfaced. He shouldn't have come, after all. What had he even wanted to confirm by coming here? Was it that his friend had turned his back on him for good?
Father and friend alike, both of them scrambling over each other to get their hands on money, whatever it costs.
He dragged his feet along and chewed the words over inside, spitting them out like gristle.
He was sick of it. Sick to death.
The man called his father worked him as if to suck out his guts and his marrow both, and the thing called a friend slammed a blade into his back without a moment's hesitation.
He wanted for nothing, sure—and president was a fine word for it. But in the end, wasn't he just a pawn on Chairman Yoon's chessboard, or a punching bag for Ryu Seo-in's idle amusement?
Life's a real bitch.
In front of his car, the murky yellow work lights of the construction site stretched his shadow long across the ground.
He looked down at the shadow spilling out before him—and thought of Harin's back as she swept into the gym, her tangled long hair flying behind her.
Who was it, exactly, who'd been calling anyone dim-witted?
I'm the biggest fool of the lot.
He cricked his neck, as if loosening something stiff. Then, with a dull crack, something settled in him, and his eyes gleamed with decision.
Damn it. Two fools like us—hell, we'd suit each other just fine.
Taking things slow. Building trust, winning her heart, claiming her body. That kind of patience, maybe, was a luxury he couldn't afford.
His own father and his old friend alike would turn on him at any moment—so if he waited too long and lost her, that, perhaps, would be the true end of everything.