Her Bare Neck
I came home and caught my breath.
Then I threw myself straight onto the bed and sprawled out.
It wasn’t simply the fatigue settling into my body.
Thinking back on what had just happened, my heart started pounding all over again, hard and sudden.
Just now… I had gone into Seoa’s place and come back out.
Into the apartment where she lived alone…
I trembled and trembled again, like someone who had stepped into forbidden territory.
As I quietly turned over the feeling of having been inside her home, a thought suddenly struck me.
What the hell was she planning to do looking like that if I hadn’t been there?
Drinking until she couldn’t even walk properly—what was she thinking?
Well… later on, that kind of cleanup would become that guy’s job, I supposed.
They weren’t a couple yet, but I figured it was a future that would arrive soon enough. My chest ached the way it always did, out of habit.
The heart that had been racing with excitement earlier now began to squeeze me without warning.
I clutched at my chest with one hand.
Because this strange feeling living right here had already worn me down so much.
With my other hand I covered my forehead and let out a long sigh.
Ah… I was supposed to work today. Everything’s shot.
I had planned to get some work done, but the day had ended like this instead. I wasn’t in any mood to pick it up again now. I decided I would just get ready for bed as I was.
Seoa really was a selfish person.
Today alone was enough to prove it.
The moment I tried to put distance between us, she seemed to sense it and tightened the reins on our relationship all over again.
Luring me back in like this so I couldn’t pull away.
What exactly did she want from me?
Was I not even allowed to leave her side by my own will? Did I need her permission just to step away?
The wounds she left felt deep, yet they never turned into scars. Before any mark could form, Seoa would hurry to close them up again.
So… unless something of me was cut clean off or left to rot, I would keep healing under her touch, over and over.
Without some kind of decisive break, it seemed I would simply stay by her side and watch, exactly the way she wanted.
That was all my resolutions amounted to.
Anyone looking in from outside would find it frustrating.
I said I’d sorted out my feelings… said I wouldn’t be swayed anymore…
I wanted that too. I thought I already was. Did anyone think I didn’t want it?
Human emotions just don’t change that easily. I only understood it now. Living through it myself finally made it clear.
Dramas, novels, movies… they all keep dragging out that lingering attachment to an ex in the most unpleasant ways, don’t they? I used to think it was just a plot device, or pure forced drama to keep the story going.
But… after going through it myself, I get it. That’s reality.
A person’s feelings don’t shift so easily.
It wasn’t like a game where one button press rewrites everything.
Even so, I had been trying. Trying to change. And if I just kept going like this, I thought I could manage it.
Hanging up on her calls, cutting down how often we walked home together—I could already do all of that without flinching, couldn’t I?
I really believed that if I stayed on this path, my heart would finally settle.
But right at the end, Seoa yanked me back again.
She shoved me to the edge of the cliff and then held out her hand once more.
That was why I hated Seoa. That was why she scared me. That was why I resented her.
What did she even want by keeping me close?
What was the reason she insisted on having me at her side?
Before I knew it, it seemed I had fallen asleep and woken up again.
Normally I slept with the blackout curtains drawn… but last night I had drifted off without realizing it, so the curtains stayed open.
Because of that, an unpleasant wash of sunlight was baking me. As if it were forcing the current time into my face.
I turned on my phone and checked the clock.
It was already past two in the afternoon.
For someone who had woken up so unpleasantly, I had slept surprisingly long and deep.
And today was the weekend.
“Haa… today I’m really going to focus only on work.”
I steeled myself with that thought.
Just a quick look at my phone first.
And just like that, out of habit, I opened Seoa’s SNS.
Had she woken up properly by now? She might be suffering from a hangover or something.
When I went into her account with that thought, a story was already up.
Contrary to my worries, she seemed to have slept well, gotten up, and was already out and about.
My finger moved to tap the story, then froze right before it.
Something… the earrings I had left at her place yesterday suddenly came to mind. I wondered if she had found them and posted about it.
Maybe I had even been hoping that was the case.
But instead of granting my wish, the story shattered it completely.
From the moment I saw what she had posted, my day was probably ruined all over again.
I had only just woken up, and already the day had started at its absolute worst.
In the photo she was with that guy at what looked like a Western-style restaurant.
They weren’t standing especially close, but they had taken a picture of themselves reflected in a mirror together.
Ha…
My hands started to shake.
I thought about sending some kind of message to the story the way she might have, but… that didn’t feel like something I should do, so I dropped it. Even if I did send one, I had no idea what I would say.
In other words, I was afraid of just how pathetic the words coming out of me might be, so I left it alone.
But… it wasn’t just something this small that made me say my day was ruined, that it was the worst.
What truly shocked me was how clean Seoa’s neck looked.
The necklace I always saw. The one I had given her. It wasn’t there.
Hoping she might have found the earrings I left last night and put them on was probably a ridiculous idea to begin with.
Instead she had taken off even the necklace I used to think of as my little claim on her, and gone to meet that guy like that.
It had been an overreaching wish on my part.
Maybe… it just didn’t match the outfit she was wearing today.
The necklace I gave her was a childhood gift, after all—the design was pretty outdated and it had gotten old.
It could have been something like that.
As I sat there alone, tormenting myself with one thought after another and then trying to accept them, I suddenly felt pathetic.
“Fuck… this really sucks.”
The crude curse slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Yesterday… she had clearly held onto me so I couldn’t run, so I couldn’t pull away—and today she was already showing me this.
Was I just being oversensitive?
I didn’t know. There was no way to know. I didn’t have anyone around I could talk to about something like this.
That fact itself was painful too. It made up a big part of why I was suffering like this.
If I looked around, there was no one who would listen to my worries. Seoa had been my only friend. But unfortunately, the subject of those worries was Seoa herself.
You can’t exactly dump your Seoa problems on Seoa, can you?
Then what about Sebin?
We weren’t close enough for me to talk about something like this, and I didn’t even want to bring up Seoa in front of her.
So I had no one to take this heavy worry to.
I just kept suffering through it alone. I really felt left by myself.
She had left another wound on me. And before that wound could turn into a scar, she would come looking for me again so it could heal.
It was cruel. How could Seoa change this much in a single day?
I forced myself out of bed and downed some cold water.
Stop thinking about it. Stop moaning alone under this pain again. I should just do what I need to do.
With that, I checked the profile of Sebin, who had been added to my SNS.
Sebin had a story up too. It felt like I suddenly had one more story to browse.
She was at a PC bang, playing games.
A look that didn’t match her appearance at all. She even seemed to be playing alone.
This person was pretty serious about games.
Come to think of it, I was pretty good at that game myself… With that pure-hearted thought, I sent a message to her story.
What?! Diamond?
Is she serious…?
Back when I was deep into that game, I had spent whole days on it—even pulling all-nighters.
Even then I never made it to Diamond…
While I was still doubting whether her tier was real, a photo arrived.
A screenshot of her account proving the rank, and then she shyly tilted the camera to show a bit of her own face for verification.
Was Sebin just that innocent?
It felt like she had no idea what kind of effect the words she was tossing out so casually could have on guys.
She was inviting me to something that could easily be mistaken for a date, without a second thought.
Of course I didn’t have any ulterior motives myself. But if it had been someone approaching her with those kinds of intentions, it would have been a dangerous thing to say.
No—maybe she could talk like this so freely precisely because it was me.
Maybe Sebin, like Seoa, didn’t see me as a man… so she could treat me comfortably.
Then Sebin sent me her location.
“Minjae! Over here!”
Sebin stayed seated and just poked her head out to call me over.
When I got closer, she offered me the seat she had been saving next to her.
It felt novel. Seoa had never really been interested in games, so the two of us had almost never sat down at a PC bang together like this.
“You got here pretty fast?”
“Yeah… I got excited thinking about playing after so long…”
I turned on the computer, and for the first time in my life I was about to game with a girl who wasn’t Seoa.
It was strange.
Even an ordinarily pretty girl could get this absorbed in games. That thought crossed my mind.
“So what lane do you usually play?”
“Me… top!”
“Oh… I figured you’d be support, but no.”
“Support’s boring. What about you, Minjae?”
“I mainly play ADC, but…”
“Ah! Then should I support for you?”
“Show me what you’re confident in first.”
Back at the café I had been so nervous about how awkward it might get, but once we met around the topic of games, the conversation flowed as naturally as water.
It was fun. For now the simple, one-dimensional feeling of fun was hitting me hard.
But the moment the game actually started…
“Ah! Does our jungler just not feel like playing the game or what?”
“Se-Sebin?”
“No… why are they talking about my teleport like it’s theirs?”
“Sebin…? Just calm down a second…”
“Die! Die! Just die already!!”
“……”
Sebin was serious about the game.
Maybe even more serious than I was.
And she was actually good. She didn’t seem like the type to rotate much, but she held her own solidly alone.
Her tone got pretty heated, yet somehow she never let a single curse slip out. That was amazing. Watching her flare up like that without swearing even once felt strangely impressive.
It was a little cute, too.
The people in the game probably had no idea that the thuggish top laner was a girl.
Let alone a pretty one.
Watching Sebin, I felt like I had collected one more new piece of information today.
A violent nickname, mainly plays top, passionately argues with teammates—and it turns out the player is a beautiful woman. That kind of setup actually existed in real life.
Anyway, I kept playing with Sebin like that. It felt like the first time in a long while that I had settled in and gamed for real hours.
During that whole stretch no other stray thoughts floated up, and that felt good.
We really only played games and then left.
Afterward Sebin said she needed to go home and eat dinner… so we parted ways like that.
The outside that had been bright earlier had already darkened with the setting sun.
I walked alone looking for the bus stop so I could head home. I planned to take the bus.
Along the way I suddenly spotted someone familiar.
That person…
I quickly scanned through the memories stored in my head.
A man wearing the exact same outfit I had seen on Seoa’s SNS.
It was definitely that Woo-bin senior or whatever his name was.
But… next to him it wasn’t Seoa. He was hanging out with a different woman.
Looking at that, I wondered what kind of expression I was making right now.