Which One of Us Is the Dog?
"I've eaten here before."
"With who?"
"Alone. I had time to kill."
It was a place he'd drifted into by chance, with time to spare before picking up Choi Baek-young — the woman Jang Hee-jo couldn't live without. It had been swarming with students, loud and overstimulating, and the food was good, but he'd figured it wasn't somewhere a man could come twice.
"Alone? How does anyone eat a meal alone?"
"...You fill your stomach and call it a meal."
At Lee Do-hee's wonder-struck question — this, from a woman who, in all her years in the world, had apparently never once eaten alone — Woo Tae-kyung very nearly told her that she was the strange one here. Then he caught himself wondering instead: she didn't seem to have a single friend at this school, so how exactly had she been feeding herself until now?
Do-hee pecked away at her food like a bird at feed — a bowl that was closer to plain egg rice than the stir-fried pork over rice she'd been so generous as to mix — and then she stubbornly drained an entire drink to the last drop.
"From now on, eat with me."
"Fine by me."
There was nothing bad about having his meals seen to for once. Woo Tae-kyung ducked his head and scooped up a spoonful of rice, hiding the laugh that had slipped out of him against his will. Yesterday, clearly, Do-hee had starved herself out of sheer stubbornness. Or perhaps her dress had simply been cinched too tight for anything to fit.
"...Who's that next to her?"
"No idea. The guy with the scar across his face. He turns up on the school forum sometimes, doesn't he?"
"Since when have those two known each other?"
"He used to be chasing after some other girl. Guess he switched over to Lee Do-hee."
"So is he the next one who dies, then?"
"Hehe. Bit too big for the psycho to take down, isn't he?"
Even through the din, someone's slander always carried. Woo Tae-kyung swept his gaze around the room, and the two male students three or four tables over who had met his eyes hastily looked away and buried themselves in their rice. Faces that had never once picked a fight with anybody in their lives — kids these days were awfully brave.
Do-hee went on eating with obvious relish, as if talk loud enough to reach even his ears meant nothing to her, and Woo Tae-kyung narrowed his eyes for a moment.
"It's not spicy, and it's good. I think I'd like to come back."
Their eyes met, and Do-hee smiled sweetly. Woo Tae-kyung, who read changes in people faster than anyone, found his mood turning strange at the sight of her smiling like it genuinely didn't touch her at all. Slowly, and slower still, she ate exactly half of her disproportionately large portion, then set her spoon down with a look of perfect contentment.
"You're finished?"
"Yep."
"Then wait for me outside."
"What about you?"
"What, you plan on following me into the bathroom?"
At that, Do-hee nodded with the face of someone who finally understood, declared that she would take care of the bill, and sashayed off toward the counter with nothing but her phone in hand. Watching her retreating figure, Woo Tae-kyung once again came away with nothing but a useless fact.
So when she's happy, she walks on the balls of her feet, heels lifted. The kind of knowledge a man never needed.
The moment Do-hee stepped out of the restaurant, he rose from his seat. Despite a build and height that barely fit the narrow gaps between the tables, he crossed the room without disturbing a single one, and planted himself in front of the male students who had just been trading that irritating chatter.
"Wh-what do you want?"
They were both wearing identical plaid shirts, and for one absurd instant Woo Tae-kyung thought: Are these two dating?
Faced with him standing squarely in front of them, neither could keep pretending to care about his food anymore, and one of the students scraped together the courage to ask his business.
"You were talking about me. Only you couldn't be bothered to look me in the face while you did it."
"We were talking about the psycho, though?"
The student raised his voice. The way he postured — as if calling someone a psycho were some shared dialect every student at these tables was in on — turned Woo Tae-kyung's stomach in a way he couldn't quite name. Do-hee was a psycho, fine, but only in front of him; he had never once seen her put on that act for anyone else.
"Don't know what you're on about, but either way, I'm apparently her second. So wouldn't that make it our story — mine, I mean?"
It was the word our — the one Do-hee would have eaten up if she'd heard it — that Woo Tae-kyung forced out with visible difficulty. Judging by what he'd half-overheard, he was Do-hee's second, and the next one due to die.
"W-well, since you clearly don't know, I was telling you out of pity! She killed a person, and—"
"Heard she was bad at handling the body. That's how she got caught, you know."
The student, who had been speaking with such confidence, gaped at him, mouth still smeared with red sauce. Did he have sauce on his own mouth too? Woo Tae-kyung looked at the kid, pulled a tissue from the box in front of them, and swiped it around his lips with a glutton's greed.
Then he ran his tongue along the edges of his mouth, double-checking that no trace of sauce remained.
"A mouth that eats should stick to eating. And if you're going to worry about someone, do it to their face. Yeah?"
When the student shot up from his seat to protest, Woo Tae-kyung pressed his head back down with his palm. And then, not content with merely pressing, he seized the kid's hair by the roots — his eyes wrenched up at the corners by force — and under that monstrous grip the boy stammered out:
"Y-yes."
Students — Do-hee very much included — were impossible to calibrate; there was no telling where the proper line lay. Woo Tae-kyung gave the head he'd seized a few idle shakes, and only after receiving his obedient answer did he withdraw with full courtesy. Where would that mouth flap next? Maybe he should have planted the kid's face in the spicy sauce and ground it around in there.
Even as he walked away, trailing useless thoughts behind him, he dug at his ear with his pinky finger.
And when he stepped outside, he found her at once: Do-hee standing quietly in the sunlight, watching nothing but the restaurant door.
Fuck. He couldn't even tell which one of them was the dog.
Sometimes, when he took Jang Hee-jo's dog out for its walk in the man's place and had to duck into a bathroom or a convenience store, he'd tie it up outside for a bit. Watching Do-hee wait for him exactly like that dog made something in his chest go tangled.
"What took you so long? I was about to come looking for you — bathroom and all — right now."
"Hey. Am I not allowed a single shred of privacy?"
He could picture it all too easily: Do-hee rapping her knuckles on the bathroom door while he took a dump. Woo Tae-kyung broke out in a faint chill, forgetting entirely that the weather was still warm.
"Fine, then. Next time I go to the bathroom, you come find me. Deal?"
"Like hell."
The person he actually ought to be furious at was this tiny scrap of a woman standing right in front of him, and instead he'd vented it on entirely the wrong targets. She had stripped him of everything down to his underwear without a single thought of buying him new ones, and now she was announcing she would manage his bowel movements as well. Woo Tae-kyung tipped his head back and stared at the sky for a moment.
Man, this is brutal.
"Why not?"
"I told you to think before you speak. This is how a person ends up a pervert sneaking into the women's bathroom… And don't you dare think about walking into the men's room either. Got it? Lee Do-hee. Answer."
Do-hee, her face still a portrait of incomprehension, shut her mouth in stubborn silence.
Swallowing the urge to ask why teaching a small child her prohibitions, one by one, had fallen to him instead of her parents, Woo Tae-kyung pressed for an answer.
"Okay. Got it. For now."
"What do you mean, for now? Don't say it like that. It sounds ominous."
Woo Tae-kyung's brow creased. He could not let himself relax over the two little words she'd tacked onto her yes.
His opponent was Lee Do-hee. Face to face with the most difficult opponent in the world, Woo Tae-kyung was beginning to understand what it meant to be unable to take your eyes off someone for even a second.
"If you tell me how many minutes you'll be in the bathroom, I'll wait."
Woo Tae-kyung dragged a rough palm down his face. The woman had just had her own privacy held up as the issue, and here she was asserting her right to trample his in exactly the same way — it was absurd — but her final offer, that she would wait if only he told her how long he'd be, forced him to back down.
Because he knew this was as far as a concession from Lee Do-hee would ever go.
"Fine. Let's do that. Fuck — next time I go at dawn, I'll wake you up and report it down to the minute. There. Happy?"
"I'd love that."
"Love, my ass… Forget it."
With Do-hee beaming her delight and slipping her arm back through his as naturally as breathing, Woo Tae-kyung simply talked less.
"You know why I let your 'fuck's slide without a word?"
"No idea. Couldn't tell you, my lady."
Woo Tae-kyung answered absently, eyes fixed straight ahead.
"Every time you say 'fuck,' it sounds to me like you're saying it because I make you so happy you could die. That's how I hear it. I get a little worked up every time you curse, that's all."
Fuck.
He decided he much preferred the Do-hee whose nipples stiffened whenever she flew into a rant.
Like this, he'd have to watch himself in front of her — couldn't even swear in peace. Maybe Do-hee really had gotten into this school through Regular Admissions. She had a way of delivering "watch your language" so elegant and so obscene that for a moment he genuinely wondered whether the top of her own head had come unscrewed.
"Fine. I won't do anything, then. Not a single thing."
Perhaps because he hadn't slept properly, exhaustion came flooding in.
Woo Tae-kyung thought it dimly, staring at nothing. The man he used to be — the one who could burn through nights on end and still stand perfectly sound — had packed up and gone somewhere without him.
Back on campus, Do-hee had at some point dropped Woo Tae-kyung entirely and fixed her attention elsewhere. The person wasn't in any of the lecture halls, and once she declared she'd try the department lounges, she truly made the rounds of every single one the school had, trying every door. Students resting inside gawked at her in disbelief, but if the face she was looking for wasn't among them, she simply shut the door again. Watching the spectacle from a few paces behind, Woo Tae-kyung honestly thought she had lost her mind.
Who on earth was she looking for, that she would open every department lounge on campus to find them?