The Man Who Rolled In — Episode 6: Dream or Delusion

“Th-then what exactly…….”

Could it be that he actually remembered something? Yun-seo swallowed dryly and looked up at him. But the question that came back was on a completely different wavelength from what she'd been bracing for.

“Do you have a boyfriend? Or a husband, maybe?”

“Excuse me? What does that have to do with—”

Yun-seo's lips merely flapped in a dumbstruck expression. Her brain, which had been scanning for signs of catastrophic brain injury mere moments ago, simply could not process this turn of events.

“You touched a strange man's body without so much as flinching, and you kept grabbing my hand. So I figured you must be single. And from the looks of it, you even took my underwear off.”

“N-no, that's not……! I simply took the best course of action as a doctor! If I hadn't, your life would have been in danger—”

“Spare me the complicated stuff. So which is it — do you have one or not?”

“Wh-what……?”

“A boyfriend. A husband.”

“……Why do you want to know?”

“Because I want to know.”

What a refreshingly shameless reason. While Yun-seo blinked at him with a slack-jawed look, the man rubbed his jaw as if sizing up his own age and continued muttering to himself.

“In your professional opinion, how old do I look?”

“I'm…… sorry, what?”

“No, never mind. One look and it's obvious — I've got at least ten years on you. Ha. This really is a problem now.”

He swept a hand down the back of his neck and let out a low sigh, then fixed Yun-seo with a steady gaze.

“How much older than you can a man be before it's a dealbreaker?”

Yun-seo absorbed the runaway barrage of his advance completely defenseless until she finally choked. Even as she coughed and sputtered with tears welling in her eyes, the man's headlong gaze showed no sign of letting up.

“What on earth are you…….”

Worse, he casually filled a paper cup from the water purifier beside him and handed it over. Even as she absently accepted the water and swallowed it down, Yun-seo kept darting wary glances at him over the rim of the cup.

The man looked down impassively at the paper cup's edge, which she had been gnawing into a ragged mess of anxiety, then plucked it out of her hand. The once-stiff paper cup crumpled lifelessly in his enormous palm.

“I asked what our Dr. Ko Yun-seo's type of man happens to be.”

He pitched the crumpled cup cleanly into the trash bin, then studied his face from every angle in the old mirror hanging on the wall. Quite pleased with what he saw, he rubbed his chin and glanced down at Yun-seo, a strange confidence spreading across his features.

“I mean, with a physique like this, I'm hardly a face people would turn away, am I? Am I not Dr. Ko Yun-seo's type? What style does she usually go for?”

“No — San-ssi, what on earth have you been saying for the past several minutes……?”

“Ah. I never got to the main point, did I.”

When Yun-seo asked, still wearing an expression of pure confusion, the man tilted his head at an angle. He scrutinized her tear-reddened eyes from her coughing fit with meticulous attention, then drove the wedge in as casually as if announcing today's lunch menu.

“I believe I fell for you at first sight. Dr. Ko Yun-seo.”

Ssshh—

“What am I going to do, seriously.”

Cold water dripped from the tip of Yun-seo's chin as she stared blankly at the faucet spewing its noisy stream.

When she lifted her head, the mirror showed a woman flushed scarlet as a ripened apple, standing there in a daze. The redness didn't stop at her face — it flooded her ears and the back of her neck too, and at the sight of herself she finally squeezed her eyes shut.

He'd bared everything down to the bottom, so there was nothing left to hide or be embarrassed about — that was the man who'd shamelessly thrown a fastball straight down the middle, love at first sight and all, and she had bolted from the clinic and left him standing right there.

Her sense of duty as a physician could wait; at that moment, the sheer mortification threatening to burst out of her had simply come first.

And that mortification was still going strong. No matter how she plugged her ears or shut her eyes, the man's voice and his gaze floated back, vivid as day. The look with which he'd read the name tag on her chest, and that voice balanced somewhere between a confession and not — they clung to her ears like a stuck sticker, showing no sign of peeling off.

Yun-seo slapped her own cheek without mercy and splashed cold water on her face yet again.

“Get a grip, Ko Yun-seo. That man is under a delusion right now.”

He was acting like a man smitten with her, but in truth it was nothing of the sort — nothing romantic at all. This was definitely…….

“……Obviously a glitch in the brain.”

In a nutshell: even with his memories gone, the brain instinctively recognizes the person and the situation that once threatened it.

He'd been confronted all at once with a helmet, a pack of grandmothers, and his own direct assailant — so it was a medically inevitable conclusion that his heart would surge on pure survival instinct. And then his malfunctioning frontal lobe had translated that emergency alarm into the wildly inappropriate emotion of attraction, producing one fatal misunderstanding.

“Agh, what do I do, honestly.”

She knew the logic perfectly well, and yet her head throbbed.

It had been so long since she'd been on the receiving end of a burning gaze and a bulldozer-straight advance that her own nerves seemed to have short-circuited along with everything else. Her heart actually fluttered hearing a ridiculous confession from a man of unknown identity.

And besides — wasn't he, strictly speaking, the victim? He was the one whose head she had cracked open, erasing his memory in the process.

“I really have lost my mind, Ko Yun-seo.”

Finished washing up, Yun-seo pressed her face into a towel and let out a low groan. She shuffled out of the bathroom and flopped bonelessly onto the sofa.

She shoved her head in front of the rattling, wheezing fan and took the cold breeze head-on, and only then did the fever that had been spreading to the very roots of her hair begin to ebb, little by little.

The moment her reason cooled, she found herself unbearably pathetic. To abandon a patient without so much as explaining the basics — how he was supposed to manage at the clinic, when to take his medication.

Her conscience as a doctor stabbed at her chest, belated and remorseless.

He wouldn't have a change of clothes or anything to eat, either.

“……Should I go back now, even this late?”

Even as she rose from the sofa, Yun-seo sank back down with a heavy sigh. She simply could not work up the courage to face that ticking time bomb of a man again so soon.

The clinic wasn't far from her house, and she could check the CCTV feed in real time on her phone app anyway. Worst case, she could call the extension and ask how he was doing. That would suffice.

For now I'll just monitor things from home, and move if anything actually goes wrong. Yeah.

Having completed her cowardly self-rationalization, Yun-seo picked up her phone. On the screen, the image of the man left behind at the clinic came through crisp and clear.

Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep—

“That man—!”

Yun-seo's head snapped up, her eyes flying open at the alarm shrieking into her eardrums. Her unfocused gaze groped at the empty air, but the owner of the voice that had been scolding her just a moment ago was nowhere to be found. Outside the window, a hazy predawn light was bleeding across the sky as morning broke.

“A dr-dream……?”

Relieved, Yun-seo fumbled for her phone and silenced the alarm. Her neck ached dully — apparently she'd nodded off propped against the sofa. Half in and half out of sleep, she opened the CCTV app.

She checked the yard, then the inside of the clinic, then the storage shed, one after the other — and her eyes went perfectly round.

“What? Where did he go?”

There was no sign of the man anywhere on the screens.

Had he gone to the bathroom? Was he sleeping in the on-call room? Surely he hadn't collapsed somewhere out of sight…….

Anxiety swept over her in an instant. Yun-seo grabbed the clothes of her grandfather's she'd set aside the night before and hurried out of the house. In the short ride to the clinic on her four-wheeled motorcycle, every scenario imaginable surfaced and dissolved in her head.

The moment she pulled up in front of the clinic, Yun-seo dumped the motorcycle haphazardly and flung the door wide open.

“San-ssi……?”

The interior was still to an uncanny degree.

“Sa-San-ssi……? You're here, right?”

Not only that — the space that had been in chaos only yesterday was now immaculately organized. The floor gleamed beyond polish into a mirror shine, and the sunlight pouring through the dustless windowsill was so clear it felt unreal.

That serene tableau, as if no commotion had ever taken place, sent a chill crawling up her spine instead.

Yun-seo scanned the clinic anxiously. She knocked on the bathroom door and called for him again and again, but only a cold silence answered.

Did something really happen to him?

She should have kept him under observation until today, at the very least. That was no way to leave a sick person. Racked with guilt, she looked around high and low — and it was in that instant, wrenching open the door of the on-call room, her last bastion of hope, that—

“San-ssi, there you ar—!”

Fortunately, San was indeed there. The problem, however, was that he was in the middle of dragging his pants down to his ankles.

The man's bared lower body and his awkward, half-caught stance stopped Yun-seo dead in the doorway, her gaze tangling hopelessly in midair.