She said she knew the way and bounded off toward the escalator. The round decorative pom-pom on the back of her cardigan swayed wildly with every hop — it looked just like a bunny tail, and a laugh slipped out before I could stop it.
“Baek Sihyeon.”
“Hm? What — mmph.”
Without any warning, Baek Hyunwoo scooped me up and tucked me into his arms, then bumped his forehead lightly against my head and whispered in my ear.
“You like that woman that much?”
“……I only just met her today, so there’s nothing to like or not like.”
“Looks like you’re completely taken.”
His gaze was burning, almost smoldering. I reflexively moved to cover Baek Hyunwoo’s eyes, then remembered he was carrying me while walking and settled for pinching his nose instead.
“Of course you’d feel happy running into another person after going so long without seeing anyone.”
“It’s more than that.”
“It’s not.”
“It is, so rein it in. Don’t make hyung jealous.”
It’s not that he minds me getting close to Moon Seyoung — it’s that he minds Moon Seyoung being kind to me too. I swallowed the words that had climbed all the way to the tip of my tongue and laughed silently to myself. Even with the genre flipped upside down, the female lead and the male lead still found each other and fell in love somehow.
“Why are you laughing like that?”
“I wasn’t laughing.”
I shrugged with a perfectly straight face, and Baek Hyunwoo opened his mouth and bit down hard on my ear.
“Ow!”
The sudden pain tore a shriek out of me before I could stop it. Terrified the sound might draw zombies in, I slapped a hand over my mouth and glared at him — and Baek Hyunwoo, as if exacting some kind of revenge, played equally innocent and looked away.
“Did something happen?”
“Ah, no.”
Moon Seyoung, who had been ahead of us, asked in a puzzled voice. I waved a hand vaguely in the air and touched the ear that had just been bitten. It felt bumpy — he’d left a pretty serious tooth mark.
“Hyung, are you out of your mind? Why are you taking it out on me?”
“Hmph.”
“Hmph?”
It was only natural for the male lead to start behaving out of character or becoming a different person the moment he met the female lead — but this early? It was beyond inconvenient. It was starting to be a little frightening.
“Are you trying to make me feel bad?”
“That’s my line.”
Even so, biting your little brother’s ear — no matter how little you could do about the situation, where did that come from? I kept grumbling as I watched Moon Seyoung’s back as she walked ahead.
She looked far more delicate than me — someone whose body was too weak to even run — and yet she’d taken out zombies without a single drop of blood on her. I still couldn’t quite believe it.
“……Do zombie skulls get softer or something?”
“Even if they did, they wouldn’t burst like water balloons.”
I asked tentatively, thinking maybe — and Baek Hyunwoo answered with cool, matter-of-fact bluntness, as if to say talk sense. Well…… I supposed that was right. Even splitting open a watermelon took considerable force.
“Why? Want me to show you?”
“Hm?”
“I said I could do it too. If our youngest wants to see, I can burst as many zombie heads as you’d like.”
He said it with his head held high and his shoulders squared — and even though he hadn’t actually done anything yet, he looked so insufferably smug, like a cat who’d already won, that a helpless laugh escaped me. Anyone else and I’d have written it off as bluster — but Baek Hyunwoo wasn’t someone who said things he didn’t mean, so all it did was make me break into a cold sweat.
Just what is going on in this world.
I told myself I’d stop trying to think about it, but is this really how things are?
“What scent do you prefer? Citrus? Musk?”
I was staring blankly into the air, unsettled, when Moon Seyoung appeared at my side and held out a bath bomb. I pointed in a dazed stupor at a cute little lemon-shaped one, and she exclaimed “Great!” and started gathering that one and various other things into a paper bag.
“Our baby has sensitive skin, so I’d skip the scrubs.”
“Oh really? Then I’ll just go with shower gel.”
Baek Hyunwoo took it one step further. He spoke as if this was all perfectly natural, so I just watched Moon Seyoung seriously deliberating over shower gels and said:
“I’ll take the orange one next to it.”
“Okay, go get cleaned up and come up to the top floor!”
Moon Seyoung waved brightly and bounded up the stairs. I couldn’t even get a word out in response — I just stood there with my mouth opening and closing before turning to Baek Hyunwoo with a dazed expression. Even he, who always acted unbothered no matter what came his way, looked slightly caught off guard.
“……Shall we go in for now?”
But separate from that, the hand guiding me forward was easy and natural. We pushed aside a long hanging curtain, took off our shoes, turned the corner, and stepped into a scene I had only ever seen on TV.
Rows of lockers packed tight together, a wide wooden platform, and a small shop stall in the corner stocked with toiletries and snacks.
Right — the place Moon Seyoung had been staying was a bathhouse. More precisely, a jjimjilbang building.
It was a place I’d told myself I’d come to at least once when I got better. I hadn’t imagined it would be under these circumstances. I tried to act composed, but the corners of my mouth kept twitching upward.
While I was changing and looking around, Baek Hyunwoo had gone to the snack stall and gathered drinks and various other things. He seemed to have already adapted to the situation — or decided it wasn’t worth being rattled about.
“Let’s go in.”
He pushed open the glass door and we stepped into the bathing area, where warm, steamy air wrapped around us. The water bubbled gently and the floor was spotless — it almost felt like arriving at a bathhouse in the early hours of the morning. We’ve got the whole place to ourselves, I murmured — and before I’d even finished saying it, Baek Hyunwoo dropped a bath bomb into the hot tub.
Is that allowed? I was about to say something, but settled for a single scrunch of my nose instead. Come to think of it, Moon Seyoung had mentioned an enormous bathtub — she must have said that because this was fine…… but somehow I felt strangely like a demanding customer. There was an odd catharsis to it too, actually.
“What are you doing? Go wash up.”
“Mm-hm.”
After showering, I sank into the bath and a groan escaped all on its own. Ahh, this is amazing. The moment I murmured that, Baek Hyunwoo pushed his wet hair back and said:
“Should we set something like this up for ourselves.”
“That would be nice.”
I played along with his absurd suggestion and giggled, and Baek Hyunwoo looked over at me and laughed too.
“It’s incredibly clean in here though — do you think she actually cleaned it herself?”
“Most likely. Water would be more important than almost anything else.”
“Is that so?”
Cleanliness mattered, but enough to clean the men’s bath too? I tilted my head in thought, then shrugged it off and let my body go slack. The tub — well, the bathing pool — was large enough that the color of the water didn’t change much, but a pleasant lemon scent drifted up and that alone was lovely.
“There’s a steam sauna over there too.”
“Want to try it?”
“Yeah.”
We didn’t emerge until two hours later. After the sauna, a swim in the cold plunge pool, and some fooling around in the scrub room, we were hungry enough that we had no choice.
When we stepped back out, our fingers were pruned and our faces were gleaming. Anyone could see we’d had an absolutely thorough bath — we kept snickering as we dried each other’s hair and changed into the jjimjilbang loungewear set out in the corner.
“This really feels like we came on a little trip.”
“We’re at someone else’s place, so technically we did.”
“Does it work like that?”
There was a staircase that went directly up to the jjimjilbang floor, so I sipped on the iced tea hyung had brought and walked up.
The higher we climbed, the cooler and more comfortable the air became. As we reached the final step, Moon Seyoung — who had been lying sprawled on the floor — shot upright.
“You’re here? How was it, good right?”
“Yes! It was amazing.”
Given that the building had been made for this purpose, the jjimjilbang was also extraordinarily, almost absurdly spacious. I kept nodding as I made my way over to her — and Baek Hyunwoo worked his lips a few times before finally giving a reluctant nod.
“Not bad.”
Not bad, you say — you enjoyed it even more than I did.
Even in response to Baek Hyunwoo’s openly provocative remark, Moon Seyoung didn’t look the least bit offended — she just laughed sheepishly and said, “I can’t cook.” A genuine angel.
“Are you hungry?”
Moon Seyoung’s cheeks were flushed, as if she too had treated herself to a spectacular bath. Her loose hair had been braided into two sections, each twisted up into a little towel knot on top of her head — it was impossibly adorable.
“A little.”
“I figured as much, so I made seaweed soup. Come this way.”
“Really? When did you even have time to make seaweed soup on top of everything……”
“Hehe, honestly I just heated up a pre-made packet.”
Moon Seyoung grabbed my hand and led me forward gently. Baek Hyunwoo said something beside me, but none of it registered.
The female lead’s hands are incredibly soft…….
It didn’t feel like holding a person’s hand — it was closer to pressing your fingers into the soft, squishy belly of a newborn animal, or running your hand through velvet fur.
Not just something to say — her hands were genuinely so pillowy that I nearly started kneading them without thinking. I’d already half-tightened my grip when I had to forcibly remind myself to have some decorum, and only then managed to hold back.
“Ta-da! What do you think?”
“……Wow.”
Despite her modest claim of only heating up a pre-made packet, what greeted us the moment we stepped into the dining area was a table covered in food. Seaweed soup, short ribs, japchae, tteok galbi…… the only word for it was a full spread.
“It’s not just the soup — everything here is pre-made and reheated.”
This hyung, honestly.
Even with Baek Hyunwoo picking a fight so openly, Moon Seyoung didn’t take offense in the slightest — she just smiled awkwardly and said, “I’m not much of a cook.” A true angel.
