The Man Who Rolled In (2)

As if mocking her life motto of living long and lean, since you only get one—the world's affairs always flowed contrary to Yun-seo's wishes.

"We'll be headin' off now, so you have yourself a rough night. We'll drop by again tomorrow."

Leaving behind the villagers who thumped their aching backs as they filed out of the public health clinic one by one, Yun-seo turned to look at the man sprawled out like a corpse. She had merely moved one human being onto a bed, and yet it felt as though every ounce of her energy had drained away. The rainwater that had already turned the clinic floor into something resembling the Han River was enough to make even her mind feel waterlogged and grimy.

"Ha…."

Yun-seo let out a heavy, conflicted sigh as she stared blankly down at the surreal scene she had gotten herself into.

What the man had been clutching in his hand hadn't been a knife at all—it was a phone, smashed beyond recognition. The moment she confirmed that fact, Yun-seo heard the phantom sound of her own life shattering right alongside it.

She had to keep him alive, no matter what. How he had taken a blade and drifted all the way to Yanggido no longer mattered. If anything went wrong with him, she might be deemed a decisive contributor to his cause of death. One misstep, and she could plummet into being a murderer in a single instant.

"I can save him."

Running her eyes over the man's massive, blood-soaked frame, she hurried her hands into motion. She grabbed a tourniquet and disinfectant, focused her trembling fingertips, and peeled back the wound. The sound of the storm savagely hammering against the window rang loudly in her ears like the second hand of a ticking time bomb. A very, very ominous premonition closed in around her—that this man, dumped into her life without warning, might be an enormous bomb poised to swallow her everyday existence whole.

Thud, thunk.

She stayed up all night. Outside the window, damp, relentless sheets of rain kept pouring down without mercy.

Wrinkling her nose at the smell of disinfectant mingling with the humidity and stinging the tip of her nose, she opened the window, and the cool pre-dawn air came flooding into the stuffy room.

"Haa… now I finally feel alive."

Yun-seo turned around with bleary eyes.

She had scraped together every last piece of the clinic's shabby equipment to finish the emergency treatment, and still the man on the bed hadn't stirred an inch.

A vital point that had—thank heaven—been narrowly missed. A physically implausible constitution that had held out against the freezing sea. And even the moment he'd slipped off the stretcher and nearly cracked his head open. Honestly, the fact that he was breathing at all was nothing short of a miracle. This man had clearly dumped every last drop of the luck he'd saved for the rest of his life onto this barren island floor, all at once.

"Please wake up in one piece. Please."

As Yun-seo offered up a prayer, summoning every god she knew would refuse to listen, her gaze landed on the man's torn clothes, tossed in a corner. The smashed phone was completely dead, so on the off chance she'd find something, she had rifled through his ruined belongings—but there was no wallet, not even so much as the single most common item anyone carries: an ID.

Which meant that until the weather cleared and she could get word to Bondo, she would be shouldering this unidentified man entirely on her own.

He wouldn't pounce the moment he woke up, right? Obviously he'd apologize and explain everything first—but what if instead he grabbed her by the collar without giving her so much as a chance to defend herself? What if he was a criminal who'd been trying to hide out on this island? How likely was it that an ordinary person would take a knife to the gut?

Worst-case scenarios fed on their own tails, tearing wildly through her mind. Yun-seo shoved the scalpels and scissors—anything that could serve as a weapon—deep into the back of a drawer, shooting the man a wary glance.

The elders had gagged and complained that he looked like a gangster, and his appearance was overwhelming enough to make that entirely understandable. His build towered far above average, and the scars carved all over his body seemed to testify to a rough, storm-beaten past.

He was definitely not a man who did ordinary work.

Just as she stepped back toward the bed to double-check for any danger she might have missed, her eyes locked directly with the man's, which had snapped wide open.

He stared at her—frozen, unfocused Yun-seo—and then suddenly smiled a lazy smile.

"Is this heaven?"

The voice, cracked and split, rang out clearly over the loud drumming of the rain.

"There's an angel here."

A thick hand clamped around her wrist. His squinting eyes came into her field of view one by one.

"Did I die? Everything hurts like hell."

At the heavy voice asking with a scrunched-up scowl, Yun-seo blinked slowly.

The man shook her wrist back and forth as if to confirm he was alive. Once she came to her senses, Yun-seo hastily pulled her hand free and shook her head.

"N-no, sir. I'm a doctor, and you—you're, thankfully, alive."

"How is a person this pretty, though."

The remark, tossed out as he pushed himself upright, left her speechless once again. The absurd comment aside, a brief question flickered through her mind. Was it too dark earlier for him to have seen her face properly? His reaction was somehow strange, coming from a man whose head she had saved.

"P-patient. Do you know where you are? What's your name?"

"My name? You mean what I'm called?"

"Yes."

"No idea."

At the perfectly calm answer, Yun-seo's brows shot straight up. An ominous premonition swept coldly across the back of her neck.

"…And your age? Is there anything you remember—your birthday, your address?"

"Well. How old do I look to you?"

When she widened her eyes in flustered bewilderment at the counter-question, the man tilted his chin and slowly looked her up and down.

"How old do I look."

"Um…."

He looked at least seven years older than her.

As she was scanning a face that seemed somewhere in his early-to-mid thirties, she met the man's narrowed eyes dead-on. In that instant, the tips of her toes prickled on pure instinct.

What she had dreaded was coming true. Her fists clenched tight with anxiety—but the man, still gazing intently at her, gave a faint laugh.

"Relax. You're such a baby. Nobody's going to eat you."

The man turned his head to sneak a look at the mirror hanging on the wall. He examined his wrecked condition from every angle, stroked his jaw a few times, then abruptly furrowed the space between his brows.

A frame so large the clinic bed looked small beneath it, sharp eyes, boldly cut features—and the scars scattered across his body besides.

Even he could tell how menacing he looked, and he let out a scoffing laugh at himself.

"…No wonder you're scared, baby. Do I look like a gangster to you, Miss?"

Wearing a hollow smile as though his own reflection were unfamiliar, the man nevertheless fixed his gaze stubbornly on her face. Whether it was sweat from treating him or a cold sweat, some kind of moisture clung sticky to her palms. Yun-seo denied the ominous feeling welling up inside her and steered the conversation awkwardly elsewhere.

"You remember where you lived, don't you?"

No sooner had the question left her mouth than the man's face twisted savagely again.

"Let's see, where did I live. Seoul, Busan, Jeju, Gangwon, Jeonju, Chungju… who knows. My memory keeps bouncing around."

As she watched him rub his temples, Yun-seo's expression stiffened into blank despair. She'd wondered which region's dialect that even was, and now the puzzle was finally clicking into place. Unless he was a criminal who'd been drifting in hiding across all eight provinces, there was no way anyone would have absorbed that many scattered dialects. The thought that she'd genuinely laid hands on a dangerous man made the room tilt before her eyes.

Face drained white, Yun-seo hastily raised her fingers.

"H-how many is this? Can you follow the movement of my fingertips with your eyes?"

"You think I'm an idiot? Four."

"And this?"

"One, obviously."

At the accurate answers, Yun-seo exhaled in relief. Thankfully, his cognition itself hadn't been destroyed.

But it was far too early to relax. In the worst case, this could be retrograde amnesia from the accident, or his memory circuits could be shattered into fragments by the physical trauma.

As the dire thoughts chained themselves together, her head began to throb. Yun-seo quickly shook her head clear. For now, all she could do was hope this was nothing more than temporary confusion from a mild concussion.

"Is there anything at all you remember about yourself? The name of your school, even something like your birthday?"

"Of course—!"

The man had opened his mouth with total confidence, only to press a hand to his forehead moments later with a troubled face. It seemed he was only now realizing that his memory wasn't intact.

"We have a problem."

Watching a faint trace of blood seep through the bandage wrapped around his head, Yun-seo swallowed dryly.

"…What's your last memory, then?"

The man frowned deeply, as if trying hard to dredge something up. But in the end, all he offered was a shrug of his shoulders, no answer at all.

Well, of course. When a man couldn't even recall his own name, there was no way his last memory would still be sitting there.

"Ha…."

Yun-seo braced a hand against her waist and heaved a sigh that felt like the ground giving way beneath her. For a while now, her fingertips had been trembling faintly, entirely against her will.

"I'm sorry."

As she bowed her head low, offering the apology in a voice that had crawled down to a whisper, the man—who had been glancing down at her shaking hand—lifted his gaze and stared at her steadily.

"You've got plenty to be sorry about, sure. But what're you so deflated for? It's my memory that's gone, Miss, not yours."

His gaze, sweeping over her as though her predicament mattered to him more than his own, doubled the guilt pressing down on her.

You only feel that way because it seems like this is our fault, doesn't it. She swallowed the confession she couldn't bring herself to voice—and out of nowhere, a lame joke cracked through the air.

"Can't remember a thing, but at least your face is pretty, Miss, so there's the silver lining. Knowing that much doesn't interfere with living, now does it?"