After leaving the manhwa café, we had initially planned to head straight home — but one look at the roads packed with cars and we decided to wait a little longer before moving.
Fortunately, today was Sunday, not Saturday, so the calculation was that if we waited until later, the traffic would thin out.
It was a relief that the library was closed tomorrow. If it weren’t, I’d have had to fight through those gridlocked roads right now just to get home in time for work. And on top of that, sitting trapped in traffic, crawling along at a snail’s pace — the irritation and frustration that would come with it would just be a bonus.
We headed into a nearby snack restaurant and took a seat.
This place, just like the manhwa café, was somewhere Cha Jae-woo and I used to stop by often after school. I found myself instinctively scanning the familiar interior.
“It’s been so long since I’ve been here. I didn’t think it would still be around.”
The owner had changed, but whoever had taken over had kept the place as-is — the signage and interior were almost exactly the same — and it stirred a strange sense of nostalgia. Just looking at it, it almost felt like I’d been sent back to my high school days, and my nose stung faintly with emotion.
When I was young, I never understood why adults longed for the past. When popular songs changed, you could just listen to new ones — so why on earth would anyone bother going back to songs they’d heard before?
But now I understood. To miss something is to look back and remember it precisely because you know you can never return to that time.
“What do you want to eat? I’ll treat.”
“Don’t bother. It’s not that much.”
“Excuse me, two servings of tteokbokki and one serving of sundae, please!”
Cha Jae-woo reached for his card, but I was faster. I handed my card to the owner first and quickly rattled off the order.
Ignoring the look he shot me — as if asking what on earth I was doing — I let out a small laugh.
“You’re barely going to eat anything anyway. So it’s easier on my conscience if I pay.”
Cha Jae-woo wasn’t big on eating out, especially food made by strangers. He had a picky palate and was particular about hygiene.
Before we got close enough that I’d learned that about him, we used to go to snack restaurants and fast food places all the time — and when I found out later, I’d felt so terrible about it.
Even today, I had been planning to find a restaurant that would suit his taste — but surprisingly, he was the one who suggested the snack restaurant first.
I’d asked several times whether he’d be okay with it just to be safe, and he kept saying it was fine, so I took him at his word.
“Wow, this is really good — though I doubt it suits our young lord’s palate. Just have a taste.”
“……I’m not that bad.”
Cha Jae-woo bristled and glared at me, but the fact that he couldn’t quite bring himself to reach for the tteokbokki right in front of him made it perfectly clear — he was every bit the pampered young lord he appeared to be.
Teasing him, I dipped a slice of liver that had come with the sundae into the tteokbokki sauce and popped it into my mouth.
The spicy-sweet sauce unique to snack restaurants mingled with the slightly heavy but savory flavor of the liver, spreading across my palate.
As I chewed with an expression that clearly said this is delicious, Cha Jae-woo seemed to get curious and cautiously dipped a piece of liver into the sauce before putting it in his mouth.
The moment he chewed, his brow furrowed deeply. He seemed to be restraining himself from openly badmouthing the food in front of the owner — but his eyes launched a full-scale assault, practically screaming, how can anyone eat this?
I swallowed the laugh that was threatening to burst out and let out a quiet snicker.
“See, I told you — you wouldn’t be able to eat it.”
He’d been the one to suggest coming to a snack restaurant, so I’d wondered if his tastes had changed — apparently not.
Had he just wanted to come back once, for old times’ sake?
“Do you want to leave now?”
“……We already ordered. Where would we even go.”
Suppressing a sigh, Cha Jae-woo poked at the tteokbokki with a gloomy expression.
Liver and lung were offal, so it was understandable that they might turn his stomach — but tteokbokki was just rice cakes tossed in sauce. Was it really worth that level of misery?
Since the tteokbokki was at least something Cha Jae-woo could manage, I set it aside for later and decided to work through the lung, liver, and sundae first.
Dipping the chewy, savory lung and the sundae stuffed with glass noodles one after another into the tteokbokki sauce, I found even my modest appetite growing.
Cha Jae-woo watched me demolish the food with a look of bewilderment, all while poking listlessly at the tteokbokki.
When I told him if he wasn’t going to eat it I’d finish it all myself, he seemed displeased by that prospect too — he squeezed his eyes shut and shoved a piece of tteokbokki into his mouth. Judging by his expression, he looked less like someone eating rice cake and more like someone chewing poison. A hollow laugh escaped me.
Still, we managed to get through the food somehow, and I felt reasonably full afterward.
Not stuffed, though. I’d ordered conservatively from the start, knowing Cha Jae-woo probably wouldn’t eat much.
“You don’t want anything else?”
“I’m fine. It’s getting late anyway, and it’ll be the same wherever we go.”
I’d asked just in case, but Cha Jae-woo shook his head. The moment we stepped out of the snack restaurant, he carried himself like someone who had just sworn off eating outside food ever again.
Then again, it might be faster to just go home and cook himself something rather than hunt for a restaurant that matched that particular palate. I checked the time — it had just passed 8 o’clock.
It’s Sunday, so if we leave now, the roads should be a bit clearer, right?
But I’d rather not set off at an awkward time and end up stuck on the road with nowhere to go. I wanted to move at a leisurely pace once the traffic had eased.
Still mulling it over, I stopped walking toward the parking lot and looked around. Driving meant no bars — so what was left……
I spotted something and grabbed Cha Jae-woo’s arm before he could walk any further ahead. When he turned around, I pointed at the arcade right in front of us and grinned.
“We ate, so we need dessert. Want to bet on who wins? Winner gets ice cream.”
Back in high school, whenever we headed home after cram school, we’d always stop for tteokbokki and then play the basketball shooting game at the arcade without fail. Cha Jae-woo seemed to have thought the same thing, because he nodded.
“Sure. But are you going to be okay? You’re terrible at basketball.”
“Hey, you think I still can’t beat you?”
“Have you ever beaten me?”
Cha Jae-woo stared at me with skeptical eyes, as if the answer were obviously no. I nodded back with complete confidence.
“Of course I have.”
“……When?”
“Today.”
Cha Jae-woo scrunched his face in disbelief, but I paid no mind. It wasn’t wrong, was it? All I had to do was win today.
“Sure, whatever. Delusion is free.”
“Hey, you. Don’t go disrespecting your elders.”
“Elders? We’re the same age.”
“Mentally, I’m older.”
Cha Jae-woo and I bickered back and forth with pointless jabs as we made our way into the arcade.
In that moment, we weren’t twenty-eight and twenty — it felt like we were both eighteen again, and a smile crept onto my face without me even noticing.
***
After shooting basketball hoops to our hearts’ content at the arcade, we headed to a convenience store. Unfortunately, the winner of this round was Cha Jae-woo, as usual.
His attitude — gloating and laughing at me as if to rub it in — stung my pride a little, and I nearly snapped back, but I remembered belatedly that the person in front of me was a twenty-year-old kid and let it go with a laugh.
Still, the score difference hadn’t been that large. Next time, maybe I’d actually win.
Thinking that, after we’d finished the ice cream too, it was nearly midnight. The roads should be reasonably clear by now — it was probably fine to get moving.
Somehow, I don’t want it to end.
It had been so fun feeling like we were back in high school, and now that it seemed like time to wake from the dream, I felt a strange pang.
The drive back had a softer atmosphere than the morning — different from before. Both of us were probably tired, and a long silence had settled between us just the same, but the mood was far more comfortable.
The silence wasn’t awkward — it was easy, the kind where it was perfectly fine not to keep talking.
We were riding quietly toward home like that when Cha Jae-woo suddenly asked.
“Hey — why did you become a librarian?”
He asked as if he was genuinely curious, and I kept my eyes on the road ahead as I turned the wheel and asked back.
“Did I never tell you?”
“If you had, I wouldn’t be asking.”
That was fair. Come to think of it, I had never told Cha Jae-woo — whether the twenty-year-old version or the twenty-eight-year-old version — why I had decided to become a librarian.
I supposed I’d never had the occasion to bring it up.
Right after I’d made the decision, maybe — but once I’d already become one, there wasn’t really an opportunity for that kind of conversation. And there wasn’t some grand reason behind it either, which made it hard to bring up on my own.
After a brief pause, I kept my gaze fixed ahead and opened my mouth.
“When I was going to the manhwa café with you, I suddenly realized that I liked books. So from that point on, I started looking into how to become a librarian. I even chose my major around it.”
Saying it out loud, I felt oddly embarrassed. It meant I had decided on a career path that would shape my entire future simply because reading manhwa with Cha Jae-woo had been fun. Just like that.
Is he going to laugh at me? I wanted to check his expression and almost turned my head — then remembered I was driving and fixed my eyes back on the road.
Cha Jae-woo, to my surprise, didn’t laugh or tease me. He simply said this.
“Good call.”
That was all. It wasn’t a big thing to say, and it wasn’t exactly a compliment — but something about it felt strange.
Maybe it was because it had been so long since I’d heard anything like it — but it felt as though a damp, heavy resentment that had been stuck to the corner of my chest had been cleanly washed away.
The feeling that someone had acknowledged an emotion I had kept quietly buried in a corner of my heart, never even allowing myself to face it.
I knew it was nothing more than my own projection — and yet, somehow, something in my chest loosened.
Thanks to that, I drove the rest of the way with a considerably lighter heart, and the road home was that much more peaceful. Peaceful enough that I had room to quietly revisit the events of the day as I went.
The time we had spent at the manhwa café, the snack restaurant, and the arcade had been brief — but it had turned both Cha Jae-woo and me back into high schoolers for a little while.
Those days had their own struggles, but they were still joyful — days when we were too busy laughing to cry. So it made me happy, and sad at the same time.
No matter what I did, there was no going back to that time.
