Tell Your Story

As if she could forget. This wasn't past tense. It was still happening.

Whoever wrote that had clearly never come to Mapo Bridge alone and taken a winter wind full in the face. That wind was paring Woo-yeon's skin like the peel off an apple.

Fine. She could do this. It wasn't a nuclear button—just an escape button. The planet wasn't going to end. She just had to press it. With a bungee jump, you were less afraid if you leaped the instant you reached the edge.

But Woo-yeon kept stalling. Some idiot crouched in her gut kept whispering, Please, let there be even one sentence that talks me out of this... and so she kept reading the next line. The sentences were beautiful and romantic to a fault. The Han River was wide. The bridge was long. And the railing, of all things, sat right at Woo-yeon's eye level.

...Yes.

It wasn't because it hurt. It was because I was scared...

I'm... so scared.

She finally stopped walking and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She didn't want to die sniveling and pathetic. In her head she had spread her arms wide and bungee-jumped in style. In reality she was standing here bawling, snagged by some words on a railing.

If it was going to end like this anyway, she should have spilled it all at least once. A friend, a teacher, the police, a crisis hotline—why had she never just said it? She should have at least said goodbye to someone.

Right. There were words she had to leave behind. If she died like this, Mom and Dad would go to the police station and weep and weep and pin it all on their daughter—that the little bitch had been too immature, that she'd driven a spike through her parents' hearts. Jin Woo-yeon would go down as a brat who'd thrown her life away in a tantrum.

That couldn't happen. Mom and Dad had a right to know exactly why their daughter had come home a corpse. They had a duty to cry until they had nothing left, to repent, to regret it for the rest of their lives.

She dug through her bag and pulled out a sketchbook—the practice pad she always carried. Opening it, Woo-yeon began to write, puffing warm breath over hands gone black with cold. Her fingers were so frozen the letters wouldn't form.

Shit. Shit! She scrubbed the hand holding the pen hard against her skirt hem. If she didn't write this, Mom and Dad would deny everything to the bitter end. That was more infuriating than dying. And the fury made the tears come again. Something inside her eyeballs must have broken. The letters that had been tagging along after her hand looked warped and crushed.

Droplets smacked down onto the letters. There was no phone. She'd left it at home. Because she might get weak, like this. Because if someone said even one kind word she might go home in tears.

If she'd known it would be like this, she would have brought her cell. Before hitting that last reset button, she could have called a teacher and said everything. Or mashed random numbers and dumped it all on whoever picked up. If it was going to end like this anyway, there was nothing left to be ashamed of, nothing left to fear.

Wiping her tears with her hand, Woo-yeon lifted her head—and her mouth fell open.

"...Huh?"

It felt like a hammer to the back of the skull. There really was a payphone standing right in front of her.

...And as if the words had lied him into existence, a man was standing right beside it.

He looked like an ordinary man. Dressed in a dull, gloomy suit that would have blended perfectly with the high-rises packed along the far bank, he stood looking at the water.

If someone was going to pop in to save a person in crisis, a Superman costume would have been better. A little primary-color cheer might have made this at least slightly less grim. Woo-yeon hurriedly erased the bizarre thought. This was exactly why people called her crazy—having thoughts like that at a time like this. She hated how these absurd ideas leaped out of her at the worst possible moments.

The man was motionless, as if frozen. The only movement she could see from him was the hem of his coat, caught in the cold wind, whipping his legs with a dull, heavy slap. He'd wrapped himself thoroughly—gray fur coat, scarf, gloves, shoes—but watching him take the river wind full-on, leaning against the railing, Woo-yeon couldn't imagine he was warm. He didn't seem to be feeling the cold at all. Looking at him, the sentence she'd just read rose up again.

Was he waiting for someone to say that to him, too?

Woo-yeon drew portraits often; she'd developed the habit of watching people closely, and she was used to reading the meaning behind a face, a gesture. The human body had a language every bit as rich as the tongue—and unlike the tongue, it was inept at lying. For someone as terrified of other people as Woo-yeon, reading that clumsy language of the body had become a window onto the world.

Was he dreaming of a bungee jump too, the way she was?

She kept stealing glances at him. As if on cue, a wind shoved in hard off the river, and the long coat flared wide.

...Wait.

Her eyes flashed open. The instant the silhouette hidden under that heavy coat was revealed, the drab atmosphere that had governed him vanished without a trace, and a sleek, flowing line wound itself hard around her vision.

The more Woo-yeon drew, the more obsessed she became with the lines of the human body—and in this man she felt a beauty of line so distinct it was almost primal. Forgetting entirely why she had come here, she started watching him outright.

For starters, he was tall. Very tall. The Mapo Bridge railing sat at about Woo-yeon's eye level; this man had his elbows on it, and he looked a full two heads taller than she was at 149.7 centimeters.

His face was small relative to his height, and his proportions were good. No—not good. Perfect. Taking the belt line as the divide, the ratio of torso to legs was five to eight. The so-called golden ratio. Woo-yeon had never seen a body with proportions that perfect. And unlike the unnaturally skinny models in magazines, there was a proper sense of volume to him. Under those clothes, she was certain, was a body of elegant line and rich mass.

Click.

A shutter fired in her head. Forgetting the bungee jump entirely, Woo-yeon flipped hastily to a fresh page of the sketchbook in her hand. As if by reflex, sleek lines began to spill from her fingertips. Long and short, thick and thin—they slid, they ran, they flew, they swept in and locked. Scratch. Scrape. Slash. A rapid burst of marks. In a handful of strokes she had, in an instant, captured the armature of his head, back, hips, legs—and a sound of wonder escaped her without her meaning it.

...Wow. Those lines are actual art.

The line of his body running from shoulder to back, waist, leg was both solid and fluid, like water. The only disappointment was the shoulders, which looked a little too broad—probably the coat's shoulder cape.

Scratch, hiss, slash, whisper, tap-tap-tap-tap.

She was getting more and more curious. Why had he come here? You didn't walk out to the middle of Mapo Bridge in this cold and stand staring at the river for just any reason.

Had someone grabbed him by the hair too? Hit him until both nostrils bled? Called him an idiot, a moron, a lunatic, a psychopath? Had things been done to him that he never wanted anyone to know?

She blinked and lowered her head. No. That was impossible. He wasn't a small, weak high-school girl like her. Anyone who tried to hit a man like that would have to be ready to get half-killed themselves.

But that was as far as it went. She couldn't read anything beyond that, and it frustrated her. If she could just see that face closer, from the front, she could read so much more. But if she stepped any nearer he'd catch her immediately. And that would be the end.

Woo-yeon started wrapping up the sketch at speed. To her right, the Han River drifted slowly past. To her left, cars tore by at a terrifying speed. Between them, time moved either too slow or too fast.

A low, heavy voice dropped into her ear.

Hhk—d-did he see me?

Woo-yeon jerked her head up in shock and froze stiff. A pair of eyes, cold and sharp as a blade, were locked on her. His face was even and handsome, but the shadows around his eyes ran deep, and his expression was so icy her knees nearly seized. Her head spun.

...Oh no. What do I do. What do I do.

She scrambled backward, hit the railing, and dropped the sketchbook. It bounced forward and landed on the ground. Too terrified to go pick it up, Woo-yeon just stood there at an awkward angle, her face crumpling. Her jaw chattered.

"Uh—s-sir, I—that's—"

A thick crease cut between his brows. In that instant Woo-yeon noticed, too late, that the suit hidden under the long coat was solid black, no pattern at all, and that the tie cinched tight to his throat was black as well.

...Wait. Then was he—?

Unless you were a gangster, you didn't go to work in a black suit and a black tie. Clothes like that belonged at a funeral more than an office. The savage voice came again.

The world in front of her began to bleach white. When she got this scared, her mind seemed to empty out completely. Was secretly watching someone and drawing them that big a crime? Hidden cameras were illegal, so was secret sketching a crime too? Was she about to get dragged to a police station? Should she press her palms together and beg for all she was worth?

...Please. Someone just tell me what to do.