The Face on the Screen
San turned his gaze away from Yun-seo's four-wheeled ATV as it rumbled off into the distance with the medical bag loaded aboard.
"Unbelievable. Honestly."
He yanked the curtain shut with a rough hand and pressed his palm to his forehead, brows knotting. A wry laugh escaped him, courtesy of the lower half of his body, which stood stubbornly at attention and showed no intention of settling down.
It had started as a joke — he'd meant to fluster her a little — and instead he'd been the one swept off his feet and thoroughly done in. A wave of regret washed over him for striking a match he never should have touched.
And yet, through it all, only one thought floated through San's mind.
How could a human being be that cute? For all he knew, the man he'd been before losing his memory was some hopeless otaku with a deranged obsession for anything adorable.
Or maybe he'd been a lifelong virgin who'd never once laid eyes on a woman. Because otherwise — fuck, it made no sense. Her lips had barely brushed his, she'd only pressed up against his back for a moment, so why was his whole body burning up like this?
Things had gone sideways from the very moment Yun-seo's lips collided with his under the pretense of CPR. That soft, pillowy sensation still clung vividly to the edges of his mouth, and San dragged a hand down his face and let out a long, deep sigh.
"Hah……"
Below, things were still aching and taut as a bowstring. But he wasn't some beast in heat, and he certainly couldn't indecently relieve himself in the sanctuary of someone else's clinic.
One slip and he'd be branded a pervert without so much as a chance to explain himself — thrown out on his ear for good.
Smack. San brought his palm down hard on his own cheek. It stung enough to leave his skin tingling, but unfortunately it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the region below.
"……This is maddening."
Glaring down at his unyielding lower half, he suddenly dropped flat to the floor. The plan was to sweat it out with push-ups — but a split second in, a warning bell rang and he scrambled right back up.
"Whoa. That was close."
He rubbed briskly at his stomach. If his idiotic exercising tore the wound open again, this time Yun-seo really might kick him out.
In the end, resigned to letting time do the work, he trudged toward the sofa. He'd just plopped himself down onto the cushion when—
Beep.
The remote control tucked under his body registered the pressure, and the television powered on. San twisted awkwardly, fished out the remote, and stared at the brightened screen.
Maybe it was for the best. If he zoned out to some boring news program or documentary for a while, things were bound to calm down.
He was about to search for the news when the screen displayed Yun-seo's automatically logged-in OTT profile. A line of recent viewing history stretched down the display. San raised an eyebrow at the bleak catalogue — noir, action, and crime procedurals, nothing else.
"Huh. Didn't expect that."
She looked so small and white and soft, the skittish type — and yet her taste took a ferociously unexpected turn.
No, wait. Come to think of it, this was a woman whose eyes went sharp and alert precisely at the moments she ought to be terrified. Remembering her occasional flashes of boldness, it hardly qualified as a surprise at all.
Nodding to himself, San was scrolling idly down the list when his eyes narrowed all at once. Something was off — a second look confirmed it. Every single leading man in those films was the same guy.
"What the…"
By this point, he had to wonder whether the genre was her preference at all, or whether she simply liked that actor. Was that gaunt, sharp-featured type her ideal?
It wasn't as if the man was extraordinarily handsome, so what was the appeal? San glowered resentfully at the actor on screen, his entire body painted over with baffling ink, and then his gaze slid down his own forearm.
Or was it men with tattoos that did it for her?
His own body, he supposed, looked like it had survived some kind of violence — scars scattered here and there, but the skin itself grotesquely clean.
While everyone else was out there decorating themselves with elaborate artwork, what the hell was I doing with my life? The thought spiraled off into absurd territory.
Then, abruptly, he came face to face with his own reflection in the black mirror of the television screen — and San's brows twisted savagely. The vacant expression staring back at him jolted him to his senses, far too late.
"Why am I obsessing over what my doctor finds attractive?"
He raked a rough hand through his hair and shut down the OTT screen.
It was all a side effect of the head injury. The sensible thing was simply to stay glued to the doctor's side and recover his memory, nothing more.
Being cooped up in that narrow little space with her all day, it was obviously no wonder his thoughts kept sprouting off in useless directions.
Watching the news and hunting for anything that might jog his memory — that was a hundred times more beneficial for him.
San pressed the channel button on the remote in mechanical succession, flipping through screens in the hope that something, anything, would snag in his mind. That was when it happened.
A caption flashing across the bottom of the screen brushed past — and somehow, impossibly, looked familiar.
San's finger froze. He wound the channel back, fixed the frame, and there it was: news about the Jinyang Group, pouring out beneath the anchor's measured voice.
The moment San laid eyes on that face, an indescribable surge of disgust came boiling up from somewhere deep in his gut.
"He's got a face that makes my skin crawl."
The expression on San's face, lit by the cold bluish glow spilling from the television, hardened into frost.
Whether it was simply because Jang Hee-je's features looked filthy, or because the man was genuinely someone he knew and his body was recoiling on pure instinct, San could not tell for the life of him.
Then again, it made no sense that he — presumed to have lived the life of a street thug — would be acquainted with a chaebol executive in the first place.
San rested his chin on his hand, eyes gone cold and flat. Or had he once been the kind of man who polished Jang Hee-je's shoes for him? Perhaps he was entangled with the Jinyang corporation itself.
"Jinyang Group."
San spoke the words in a low voice.
"Jang Hee-je."
He chewed the two names over slowly, one after the other, but the true nature of that queasy, foreign lump of feeling pointed in no clear direction.
Was it the company name grating on his nerves, or the three syllables of Jang Hee-je? Or both at once?
Only one thing was certain: the longer he looked, the fouler his mood grew, twisting his insides into knots.
Perhaps it had something to do with his accident, he thought.
San, it turned out, was less flexible than Yun-seo had expected. Going by his usual behavior, she'd been certain he would latch on with some excuse about his wound and insist on staying by her side.
Instead, the doctor-who-are-you-still-doing-here firmness with which he'd shown himself the door left her feeling oddly, unreasonably sore.
"Seriously…… shaking a person's heart to pieces and then walking off."
Though, fair enough — he was the one who'd lied with his own mouth about having a girlfriend. He had asked to be on friendly terms, too, and keeping that boundary was the right thing to do. But the moment a wall went up on his side, some corner of her chest went raw and bitter.
Yun-seo pulled the visor of her new helmet firmly down. Praying that her tangled, wounded feelings would scatter and blow away with the exhaust fumes, she gripped the handlebars of the ATV tight.
Vroom. The rough snarl of the engine thundered through the edge of the village.
She climbed the stone-wall path that lined the steep uphill road, visiting houses one by one — and as if by prior arrangement, every courtyard, every alley, was empty.
After confirming the fifth house was deserted, Yun-seo adjusted her destination. There was exactly one place where the elders gathered at times like this.
As the ATV drew near Grandma Pil-soon's house at the very top of the village, the rich aroma of ginseng chicken soup — the whole bird simmered low and slow in the great iron cauldron — was already stinging her nose.
The moment Yun-seo parked the ATV in front of the gate and dismounted, Grandma Kkeut-dan spotted her and startled up off the wooden platform in alarm.
"Oh my, if it ain't Yun-seo? Was today the house-call day, dearie?"
Yun-seo tugged off her helmet and set it on the ATV seat. Sweeping her sweat-damp bangs back, she busied herself unpacking the medical bag and gave a brisk nod.
"That's right, Grandma. Today's blood pressure and blood sugar check. Nobody's eaten yet, have they? Perfect timing. We'll get the checks done quick, and then everyone can eat in comfort."
"W-well, now……?"
Grandma Kkeut-dan shuffled her feet and turned to look behind her. On the wooden platform, the eyes of the elders clustered there began to waver in perfect unison.
"Aiyo, my body's all out of sorts today — I simply can't be bothered with it, y'know?"
"Me too, me too! Just skip it this once and it'd be just right. Yun-seo's a busy girl, she can go on ahead, she can."
Yun-seo let the elders' sly attempt at dodging slide right past her, took her seat on the platform, and pulled out the blood pressure cuff.
"No can do. You all know what I'm like when I put my mind to something. If you want to enjoy that piping-hot chicken soup, the wisest move is to get this over with fast."
"Yun-seo, that girl — mush the rest of the time, but Lord help me, she sure does turn sharp as a blade for these things."
In the end, the elders raised the white flag to Yun-seo's not-quite-a-threat.
"Fine, fine. If we must, then let's be quick about it."
Grumbling all the while, they meekly lined up in a row and began rolling up their sleeves one by one.
"Aigoo, how can such a teensy little fingertip sting so fierce? Go easy, will ya?"
"Grandma, your blood pressure's wonderful. Did you skip the salty food yesterday or something?"
Mock groans and exaggerated complaints flew back and forth across the platform without pause, but Yun-seo's fingertips never missed a beat. She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around one arm with practiced ease, coaxing and comforting the frightened elders like so many children.
Once the exams were finished at a breakneck pace — uncannily like racing through a semester's worth of overdue homework — the elders, finally at ease, settled in around the platform in earnest and began tearing into the perfectly cooked chicken soup.
"Tastes even better after a good day's work, it does."
"For nourishing the body, nothin' beats this cauldron of chicken soup, I swear."
As Yun-seo packed up her medical bag, the word nourishing brought San to mind, unbidden. If anyone on this earth needed to rebuild his body, it was him.
"Grandma, could you pack up a little of this for me?"