Where Did All the Ants Go
"Yeah, don't go."
"Fuck, everyone here and there is just waiting to throw me away—why the hell would I want to go?"
Turning Jang Hee-jo's words over in his mind, Woo Tae-kyung found himself thinking something he hadn't expected. In the end, he'd simply shuttle back and forth between Jang Hee-jo and Lee Do-hee, wherever the profit lay. If he was thrown away, someone else would pick him up and put him to use; if not, he'd be sold off to the highest bidder. Lately, the whole thing was starting to leave a sour taste in his mouth.
"Then if I'm the one who throws you away, will you have nowhere to go?"
Lee Do-hee asked, faltering mid-step. Woo Tae-kyung clicked his tongue as he stared down at her small head, wondering what on earth she thought she was doing.
"I'd say you would."
"Where would you go? Don't go to Jang Hee-jo."
"Hong Kong."
"Why?"
"Lee Do-hee."
Woo Tae-kyung stopped just before the back gate and stood, by some accident of light, at the exact seam between the shade of the overhanging trees and the sun. The sunlight spilled across Lee Do-hee's face. She gazed up at him, her eyes shining with nothing more than idle curiosity about where he might go, and then scrunched her nose hard against the glare.
He licked the inside of his lips.
There was only one reason Hong Kong kept calling out to him so desperately.
The Ant Cave—that lawless pit, that cradle of crime, where even murder could be fed into its own crematorium and vanish without a trace, without so much as bone ash left behind—had come down. And the ones who truly had no business existing anywhere in this country had been shipped off to Hong Kong. The kind of men who left loose ends.
Men who had lived in that world their whole lives, grown numb to everything, the sort of seeds you could never let bloom in daylight.
"Where do you suppose all those ants went?"
Woo Tae-kyung asked, his voice flat and dry.
There was no controlling them. Word no longer carried any weight coming out of Hong Kong, and the calls had been raining down, all begging the one man who could still rein in those beasts—Woo Tae-kyung. Jang Hee-jo had never cared about the Ant Cave in the first place. But Woo Tae-kyung, who had been buried in it far deeper than he ever was, knew how to handle the animals.
"There's one standing right in front of me."
Woo Tae-kyung smiled as he lightly smoothed the wrinkle between Lee Do-hee's brows with his fingertips.
"What's that supposed to mean? You're going to the Ant Cave? That place is gone."
Not that all those ants could have simply vanished.
Even after brandishing a sashimi knife the night before, Woo Tae-kyung still knew where the line of things unsaid lay. There was no need to frighten a pampered young lady any more than his own scarred face already did.
"So—anywhere you line up to eat?"
Woo Tae-kyung deftly changed the subject. That careless phrasing, so pointedly excluding himself, lifted the corners of Lee Do-hee's eyes. But she knew that no amount of pressing would pry an answer out of him, so she barely managed to swallow the question.
Her heart grew restless with the feeling that Woo Tae-kyung might turn around and walk out of her life at any moment.
She'd even forgotten that her hand, locked around his exposed forearm, was raking at him with her nails.
Unbothered, he quietly absorbed her tantrum as she passed, leaving red welts behind on his skin.
"Auntie's Restaurant? The Gyeongsang-style lettuce wraps? Parma? The Chinese place at the end of the back-gate strip?"
Woo Tae-kyung neither stopped her nor said a word about what she was doing. He simply recited, one after another, the student haunts he knew of—the places people lined up for. Only then did Lee Do-hee come back to herself, and the hand that had been clawing at him went still. She hadn't even noticed she'd been scratching him; she just stared up at Woo Tae-kyung, strangely wide-eyed.
"...Auntie's Restaurant."
"Figured as much. You're surprisingly a Korean-food person."
The place was famous for its spicy stir-fried pork over rice, served in portions so generous that the side dishes changed every single day—no wonder students lined up for it.
"I eat everything, though."
"Right. And you like your mom's cooking best. It was good, I'll give you that."
Since he'd already put away a proper breakfast, Woo Tae-kyung answered offhandedly—and Lee Do-hee beamed.
"Right? That's why I sometimes don't go—otherwise I'd be there every day. At first Mom complained that the smell got into the house, but I kept begging her for the food, and now she cooks it for me whenever I show up."
He'd said one thing about the food being good, and she piled on the praise as if bragging about her own achievement. She chattered on like someone begging to be asked more. It was so odd to see Lee Do-hee get so animated over something so mundane that Woo Tae-kyung had to keep reining in his gaze every time it started drifting sideways.
Even her voice took flight—high, thin, weightless.
"Must be nice."
He'd assumed they were close. Apparently not.
He let her slip past—the way she'd said it, that her mother would only cook if she came looking. Lee Do-hee's voice, stripped of all her stubbornness and arrogance, sounded exactly like a small child talking beside her mother, and for the first time in a long while, something in him eased. He didn't ask why. He didn't dig any deeper. Keeping a comfortable distance and meeting her halfway—that might suit them both just fine.
He hadn't meant to see this childish side of her, and yet here it was.
Even before lunch proper, Auntie's Restaurant was already nearly full. They just barely squeezed into the last two-seat table. The stares that swung toward him the moment he stepped inside were familiar enough that Woo Tae-kyung ignored them and tucked Lee Do-hee into the very back corner, against the wall.
There was no need to order.
Two servings of the stir-fried pork arrived, more than strictly necessary, and the side dishes came crowding onto the table before they'd even settled.
The owner's intent was written all over it: eat fast, and clear out.
Woo Tae-kyung had eaten here before, so he set about mixing his rice and pork together—but Lee Do-hee just sat there, staring at hers.
"You said you wanted to eat."
"I can't handle spicy food. You eat it."
The smell alone stung his nose. She was the one who'd insisted they come to a place where people queued, and now she was claiming she couldn't eat spicy food. Woo Tae-kyung stared at her long and hard. She stared right back, refusing to avert her eyes.
"You've never been here before?"
"Nope."
"Then get up."
"Why?"
"You said you can't eat spicy food."
"But you can. So you eat it."
Lee Do-hee looked at him with genuine incomprehension. Woo Tae-kyung returned the favor, staring back at her with a face that understood nothing. By now he was half out of his seat, demanding she get up, and every pair of eyes in the restaurant had swung their way.
Dragging Lee Do-hee out against her will, when she showed no intention whatsoever of moving, would mean making a scene—no way around it.
The seating was cramped, and while he was still weighing what to do about that, Lee Do-hee spoke again.
"Just eat and don't worry about me. I want to watch you eat. You said this place was famous."
"Who said that?"
"...My friends."
Not a single soul at that university had so much as said hello to Lee Do-hee. He'd already caught a brief, fleeting glimpse of how narrow her world was, and the claim that she had friends nearly wrung a bitter laugh out of Woo Tae-kyung. In the end, he sat back down and tried to simply eat his share without fussing over her.
"Is it good?"
Watching him eat with obvious appetite, Lee Do-hee asked, smiling brightly—wearing the face of someone already full just from looking, and asking, in her friends' unknowing words, whether it was really that delicious.
Woo Tae-kyung raised a hand and finally waved down the part-time server.
"Two eggs over easy, and one of those plum drinks, please."
He even ordered the house's plum drink, sold for the benefit of people who couldn't handle the heat. Lee Do-hee, apparently assuming he'd ordered it just because he wanted it, stayed quiet. Then, watching him, she looked around the shop, and at the scribbled graffiti covering the walls.
The over-easy eggs and the drink came out fast. Woo Tae-kyung poured the drink into a cup and handed it to her, then pulled out a fresh spoon and all but cleared the pork out of Lee Do-hee's bowl—half pork, half white rice—leaving only a bit of the red sauce behind.
Then he set both soft-boiled eggs on top of it and mixed it all together for her.
"Try it. If it's too spicy, eat this alongside."
Lee Do-hee blinked at him. Then she looked down at the rice in front of her—yolks and a faint wash of red seasoning, nothing more. She sat quietly for a moment, gazing at the bowl Woo Tae-kyung had mixed for her with his own hands, then scooped up a spoonful and brought it to her mouth.
It had a mild kick, but the eggs took the edge off so well it hardly registered as spicy.
Even so, she was curious about the drink he'd told her to try, so she drank it anyway. Too sweet, perfectly cold, and the artificial plum flavor was so unabashedly itself that Lee Do-hee's whole face lit up.
"This is so good!"
"Yeah. Never met a person who hated it. Eat. And if it's too hot, don't force the whole thing down—just taste it."
"It's not even spicy."
Woo Tae-kyung finally gave in and tore the meat into tiny, delicate shreds, stacking them on top of Lee Do-hee's bowl.
The breakfast side dishes he'd set out for her that morning came back to her, and she accepted the small pieces of meat without complaint, eating them one by one.
"Then why on earth did you drag me somewhere you can't even eat?"
"It's famous."
Woo Tae-kyung thought back to that morning. Lee Do-hee, picking only the tofu out of the kimchi stew, barely eating it, shredding it into little pieces and playing with it like a toy. Every dish she pointed to had been something mild—eggs, braised beef, anything with no heat in it—and those were the only ones she touched.
"Famous or not, you should've filtered for what you can actually eat. Are you a child?"
"I wanted to feed you."
Woo Tae-kyung's spoon stopped midair. He stared at her, dumbfounded. She'd been acting like a kid all morning, and the moment his guard dropped, she darted in and landed a hit. Just as Jang Hee-jo had said—they weren't even dating, and yet she doted on him, fussed over him, spoiled him shamefully, like someone hopelessly devoted. He couldn't get a read on her at all.