Acting Spoiled
His voice carried a faint trace of hurt. Or maybe that was just my own bias. It felt like an odd answer to the question, but the same went for both of us—Cha Jun-jae remembered the delinquent Yang Ju-seok too. My interest shifted away from the movie and settled on Cha Jun-jae himself. I tossed the now-useless laptop onto the side table and poked the shoulder of the man sprawled on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“Hey.”
His eyes, fixed on the ceiling, rolled slightly before dropping to me. Then, as if to tease, they drifted back up again. His face was the very picture of sulkiness, but I decided not to waste energy reading every shift in his expression. Cha Jun-jae’s emotions existed on a plane ordinary people struggled to reach. I simply wanted to hear what he had to say, clearly and without distortion.
“Why did you fight him back then?”
When I first heard that Cha Jun-jae had gotten into a fight and saw the scene where he took a hit, all I’d said was that Yang Ju-seok really was a rotten guy. Part of me had even felt a grim sense of satisfaction. How had a dense thug like Yang Ju-seok even noticed Cha Jun-jae’s contempt? Cha Jun-jae wasn’t the type to be read so easily.
“Eun-dam.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you know Yang Ju-seok liked you?”
“Haha!”
I couldn’t hold back the laughter; my shoulders shook as I lay there. Yang Ju-seok had caused so much trouble that he’d been forcibly transferred into our school. He couldn’t last three months anywhere, which was why his nickname had been “Three Months.” He hadn’t lasted that long at our school either. Above all, I had zero memory of ever exchanging a single word with him. Cha Jun-jae’s absurd misunderstanding was what made me laugh.
“Come on. Why would he like me when we’ve never even spoken?”
“He said you were pretty… and that you smiled at him.”
The laughter blooming inside me snapped off at the stem. I’d assumed Cha Jun-jae was using me as an excuse because he didn’t want to reveal the real reason for the fight. But he truly was pointing to me. What had I even been like back in school? The combination of an ordinary girl like me and a delinquent like Yang Ju-seok, complete with ear piercings, felt ridiculous. As the grades climbed, my presence had grown fainter until I’d simply accepted that I was nothing more than ordinary student A.
“Was I really that pretty?”
“Yes. Insanely.”
To my half-hearted joke, Cha Jun-jae answered in a voice stripped of emotion. My heart dropped with a heavy thud. I reflexively pressed a hand to my stomach, half-convinced it really had fallen all the way to my belly button.
“Jun-jae. No matter how I look at it, you like me.”
“I don’t think so.”
Look at that bullheaded stubbornness. No matter how he tried to deny it, the truth rang clear. The fight with Yang Ju-seok had been because of me.
I inched forward on my stomach until our shoulders touched. Cha Jun-jae’s body gave a small flinch. It wasn’t as if his inability to be honest was new. At this point I had decided to simply follow my heart.
“Tell me.”
“……”
I kissed him like offering a bribe. Cha Jun-jae, who had been hugging his own stomach, instantly lost his composure. There was no need to rush. I had already discovered that—whether as a man or as a childhood friend—he couldn’t refuse me. As proof, the body that had been staring at the ceiling slowly tilted toward me. I smiled at him with puffed cheeks.
“Yang Ju-seok said you were ignoring him, right? What did that mean?”
“……”
“Answer and I’ll kiss you again. If not…”
“I did ignore him.”
He offered only a scrap of truth as payment for the kiss, then immediately claimed my lips. My kiss had been light, barely a touch. His, however, was greedy—his tongue sliding deep. The aggressive sensation felt unfamiliar, so I pulled my head back. His lips chased after me, bumping against my chin, demanding the next reward.
“Not that. More detail.”
“More detail?”
Cha Jun-jae echoed my words in a low, dropped voice and let out a cold laugh.
“There was an intersection between the kids who hated Yang Ju-seok and the ones who liked me.”
Smack. He scattered countless kisses across my lips and chin. I missed quite a few of his words, too distracted to focus. Should I push him away or accept the kisses? Beneath the words that followed lay a chill he had clearly been holding back.
“You were interested in Yang Ju-seok too… That’s why you kept bothering me? Ah, I wish he’d just die… That’s what I thought.”
Between every pause, his lips met mine. After he left me breathless three times, I gripped his shoulder hard. There were two things I absolutely could not let slide. Cha Jun-jae looked at me with a gloomy face. Realizing no more kisses would be allowed, he turned away with an expression like the world had ended. His chest, facing the ceiling, rose and fell—quickly, then slowly—as he breathed.
“I wasn’t interested in Yang Ju-seok.”
“Yeah… Liar.”
“Wow.”
Where on earth had this ridiculous misunderstanding come from? For the record, if Yang Ju-seok had never fought Cha Jun-jae, if that singular incident had never happened, I never would have remembered the guy’s name. Yet Cha Jun-jae seemed utterly convinced that the mere fact I remembered it proved I had been interested.
“I don’t like that type. Bleached hair and a nickname like Three Months? That’s middle-school-level taste.”
“People with piercings, people who run with gangs, people who hate sweets.”
The list felt strangely familiar. Cha Jun-jae was reciting the checklist from an internet novel the kids had passed around as a joke. Even while explaining it, he didn’t realize it was meant for a fictional character. There was nothing to explain. It was simply a list of preferred male-lead tropes from web novels.
“Jun-jae. That’s nothing. It’s from a novel.”
Still wearing a distrustful expression, Cha Jun-jae offered his second piece of evidence.
“I heard what you said about Yang Ju-seok.”
“What did I say?”
“He’s not that bad.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
I felt so wronged I wanted to roll across the bed in frustration. Poor Yang Ju-seok, branded trash. Whether he had liked me or not was beyond my knowledge, but he had certainly been crushed under the weight of Cha Jun-jae’s single-minded obsession.
“It’s the same with Kim Sung-jae and Yang Ju-seok.”
The blade hidden in Cha Jun-jae’s heart had turned toward someone other than Yang Ju-seok. His eyes, lost in memory, had crossed into dangerous territory.
“You really do only like strange people.”
He didn’t hesitate to aim the criticism at me. I saw exactly how far Cha Jun-jae’s jealousy could stretch. Classmates whose faces I could barely recall were dragged onto his chopping block. After finely mincing his own heart with that jealousy, he suddenly rolled over.
“Let’s sleep. Sleep.”
I left the heartbroken man alone and watched the movie by myself. Even then, I pulled the blanket over him in case his cold worsened. I had done my best, I thought. The price was that my focus on the film was shattered. The actor Kim Sung-jae’s on-screen tears looked artificial. Unable to concentrate, I kept nodding off. I ended up taking a long nap leaning against the headboard. I slept until the battery-dead laptop powered itself off.
I woke to the wind slipping beneath the blanket. Cha Jun-jae’s spot was empty too.
“Cha Jun-jae.”
The space beside me was vacant, but the luggage remained. He hadn’t run away. He must have left the door open. The door rattled in the wind and rain, creaking ominously.