When I looked at him with wide eyes, he stammered a bit more.
“No. I mean, my place is closer from here. You look so tired. You could sleep at least an hour more.”
In my hands were two warm hotteok.
“Let’s eat while we go. It’s the last hotteok of the year.”
When I offered the hotteok instead of words of refusal, he grumbled dissatisfiedly.
“You really like hotteok. Looking like a hotteok yourself.”
He stretched both my cheeks holding the bag.
“What are you doing!”
As I pushed his chest, a sneering voice interrupted.
“Making quite a scene, quite a scene.”
A large shadow appeared from behind the telephone pole. Half of Jong-hwa’s face was hidden under a cap covering his chestnut-like head. He doesn’t usually wear hats.
“Jong-hwa, is that you?”
“Yeah. It’s me. I wondered who was making a fuss on the street.”
Jong-hwa took a deep drag on his cigarette with a hardened face. As if that was all he had to rely on, he took several more drags before throwing the used butt on the ground and crushing it. Then he tossed a paper bag at my chest.
“Clothes to change into. Sleep somewhere else tonight.”
Jong-hwa gestured toward Jung Hyun-wook with his chin as he spoke. I looked at him with a face asking what the hell he was talking about.
“Why are you so surprised? It’s not like it’s the first time. You didn’t come home today anyway.”
He pushed my forehead with his index finger. I had a suspicious feeling.
“Are you really bringing a woman home?!”
When I shouted, his brow furrowed tightly. Then I lowered my voice.
“Don’t tell me you made a mistake?”
Jong-hwa, understanding my words a beat late, looked at me with a face asking what kind of bullshit I was spouting.
“Fuck! What did you think I said? That won’t happen!!”
He was the guy who said he couldn’t even get it up without a condom. But if that wasn’t it, there was no reason for this strange behavior. My heart suddenly started racing.
Ahn Jong-hwa always gave off strange vibes before causing trouble. It was like that when he got involved in a gang fight with a neighboring school a month before high school graduation, and when he secretly got hospitalized after getting into a serious motorcycle delivery accident.
“Let’s talk for a moment over there.”
Suddenly Jong-hwa took Jung Hyun-wook and disappeared around the corner of the alley. My head was too complicated to care about what they were talking about. Ahn Jong-hwa spoke one-sidedly, and Jung Hyun-wook occasionally laughed as if dumbfounded. Then eventually Jung Hyun-wook nodded as if in agreement. Only then did he let Jung Hyun-wook go, but Jong-hwa still had an uneasy face.
“Hey, I’m leaving now. Don’t skip school. If anything happens, call me right away. Got it?”
Who does he think he is, my guardian?
“Why can’t I go home?!”
This time Jong-hwa bit his jaw hard as if troubled.
“Just listen to me!! Do you need to know everything? This is why, fuck. Smart bastards are exhausting.”
Jong-hwa cursed while kicking the innocent ground. I tried to grab Jong-hwa as he headed to his motorcycle without a word.
“Hey!! Where are you going?!”
Jung Hyun-wook held me back. Jung Hyun-wook, who grabbed my arm, shook his head as if telling me to just let him go.
“What did Jong-hwa say?”
He just smiled. The motorcycle roared loudly and left the alley. Jung Hyun-wook took the paper bag from my arms and pulled my wrist.
Emotions surged up and I felt like I needed to pull out all of Ahn Jong-hwa’s hair to ease my anxiety. So this is what Jong-hwa calls my crazy fits. That nasty temperament of pretending to be docile but actually exploding when things don’t go my way. A side of me Jung Hyun-wook doesn’t know.
Jung Hyun-wook quietly stroked my shoulder.
“Let’s go sleep and eat. I even went grocery shopping to cook for you.”
“When you can’t even cook…”
At the words I couldn’t hold back, Jung Hyun-wook burst into loud laughter.
***
It started from when we entered the college building before class. From the hallway, everyone glanced at Jung Hyun-wook with an atmosphere different from usual.
When we entered the lecture hall, Sung Woo-jae and other law school classmates showed us an article on their phones. A current affairs weekly magazine had extensively covered the backstory of the Songrim Building cleaning workers’ mass dismissal incident. Despite the fact that Songrim had everyone sign confidentiality agreements, the insider tip was quite detailed.
The content was that Songrim had planted someone on their side in the existing company to induce strikes and protests in order to replace the cleaning service company, and that person was the son of Songrim’s representative Jung Kyeong-hwan.
And the article expanded its tone by tracing the origin of all these incidents back to the long relationship between Songrim and Taegang Group.
Regarding the content that the representative of the new cleaning service company was the fiancée of Taegang Securities President Jo Tae-hwa and the second daughter of Congressman A, Taegang immediately refuted that it had nothing to do with this incident. But no one doubted the connection.
I recalled the weekly magazine reporter’s business card that had fallen from Jung Hyun-wook’s pants pocket last night.
Around the end of the liberal arts class, the professor took a vote from the students for and against. It was a vote on whether to give Jung Hyun-wook, who had been absent consecutively, the same presentation score as me. The students all voted in favor. I don’t know if today’s weekly magazine article influenced that.
In any case, as a price for that, Jung Hyun-wook and I had been dragged to the after-party following the department gathering.
“Mo Hyo-kyung! You have a drink too.”
A beer glass was filled to overflowing in front of me. The foam finally spilled over the glass.
“I don’t drink.”
Sung Woo-jae, sitting across from me, said loudly,
“No one drinks well from the start. Even if you can’t drink, you’ll get better if you drink regularly! Come on, cheers!”
Sung Woo-jae raised his beer glass high and urged me. Attention focused on our table. Sung Woo-jae couldn’t distinguish between “won’t drink” and “can’t drink.” I asked,
“What grade did you get in the language section?”
“Suddenly? Grade 1.”
When I looked at him with a face that said I found it hard to believe, Jung Hyun-wook, who understood the intention of the question, laughed.
“Sung Woo-jae got in through essay writing. His CSAT score just barely made it.”
It was nonsense. I shook my head. Sung Woo-jae once again held out a beer glass to me, and everyone around joined in.
“Here! The black knight appears.”
Jung Hyun-wook took the glass in front of me, then stood up and drank it all at once. Everyone’s attention turned to Jung Hyun-wook. His Adam’s apple moved greatly. When he even pretended to turn the cleanly emptied glass upside down above his head, laughter erupted from various parts of the table.
Everyone seemed to have completely forgotten that the original owner of that glass was me. Only Sung Woo-jae in the front seat looked back and forth between me and Jung Hyun-wook with a strange expression. Even after that, Jung Hyun-wook drank the alcohol offered to me several times.
Jung Hyun-wook shook his flushed face several times, then stood up saying he’d go to the bathroom. As I watched him worriedly, Sung Woo-jae asked with a strange smile,
“I thought you two weren’t close.”
That story again. Sung Woo-jae seems like he needs to go back to elementary school.
“Mo Hyo-kyung, you already knew, right? About Jung Hyun-wook’s family.”
“Well.”
Suddenly my throat was parched, so I gulped down the water in front of me.
“I didn’t see you that way, but you’re more cunning than I thought. Ah, don’t misunderstand. It’s a compliment. I see why Hyun-wook took an interest in you. You’re quite an interesting guy.”
Sung Woo-jae’s lips, which had always been smiling, momentarily hardened stiffly. He poured alcohol into the soju glass in front of him and threw it back in one go, then frowned as if the taste was bitter. Throughout the drinking session, I had noticed the subtle antipathy Sung Woo-jae showed toward Jung Hyun-wook. It seemed to be because of matters involving his father.
“But seeing Hyun-wook like that, even a great family seems useless. You know what? Songrim is a name taken from the surnames of the two founders. One of them, Song, is Congressman Song Gang-seok. Hyun-wook’s maternal grandfather. But the funny thing is that it’s the Jungs who are actually leading Songrim now. It’s a well-known story, but at the time, Attorney Jung Kyeong-hwan, who had no connections and was a high school graduate, had an affair with a woman who had a fiancé, and Hyun-wook is the result of that. Ugh- it’s kind of terrible that just searching the internet brings up the story of my birth.”
Before Sung Woo-jae finished speaking, I emptied the remaining water glasses one after another. I could feel eyes watching me with interest, but I had no time to care as I rummaged through my memories.
The day I went to Songrim Building. The anecdotes about Songrim that I had looked up after hearing about Jung Hyun-wook came flooding back indiscriminately.
