Real Yass
His relationship with Suhyun.
It had come together in a surprisingly ordinary way.
"Oppa. There."
"Huh?"
"There's trash over there."
"Ah—sorry."
"It's not like you're a machine that manufactures garbage."
"……."
She had started dropping by his studio apartment often. At first it was under the excuse of learning about stocks.
Kinda feels like having a mom around.
Before he knew it, she was cleaning his room. Apparently she couldn't stand looking at the filthy state of the place. She even started meddling in every little thing. He had thought she was the blunt, quiet type—turns out she talked a surprising amount.
"All cleaned up."
"Good job."
"Hey."
"Yeah?"
"What are you making for me today?"
It wasn't all bad. Her speech had gone soft and melty, like butter left out too long.
Sizzle…!
He seared the meat. In exchange for the cleaning, he cooked for her like this.
Not exactly expensive beef.
American chuck flap, under two thousand won per hundred grams. Bought it at the dollar mart. Value for the price was solid—among cheap cuts, it was the best suited for steak. The downside was the tendon running through the middle. If you sliced it carefully beforehand—
"Looks good."
"Like this, it won't taste like anything."
"You still have to do something else?"
It was edible enough. But quality that came from the price tag was unavoidable.
Sparse marbling, strong meaty flavor.
Handled wrong, it could turn out dry and cheap-tasting. That was probably why you could buy it so cheap.
Shhhk!
Cooking fixed the flaws. He spooned butter that had gone past soft and into pure liquid over the slab of meat.
Keep doing this…
The juices and fat that had escaped soaked back into the steak, making the texture juicy and tender. The herbs he threw in with it tamed the off-notes. The technique was called basting.
"You know the weirdest stuff."
"This much is basic."
"Even dog shit has its uses, I guess."
"……."
Hot oil. Because he kept pouring it over from above, the steak cooked evenly and the Maillard reaction kicked into gear across the surface.
Nostalgic.
Not the kind of knowledge a Wall Street trader needed to know. But for a man of finance, it was a different story.
Private equity. Literally, a type of fund that pooled private investment capital and ran it. Put simply: a place that rolled rich people's money. The point was gathering large sums.
"Looks like it's done."
"Not yet."
"Why?"
"Resting."
He had started his first fund as a private equity vehicle himself. There weren't many places willing to lend money to a finance rookie.
It was brutal.
Other people's money. And not just any money—the kind a handful of rich people lent while making a show of it. That meant a mountain of restrictions on how you could run it. Don't do anything too risky. We lent you the cash, so tick-tock, start generating returns. Constant backseat driving—do this, don't do that. The moment you tried to put money into high-risk assets, the investors freaked out. The second the numbers dipped even a little, they wanted their cash back.
Slice!
You had to guarantee stable and high returns. Meeting those impossibly picky conditions had taught him a lot.
I learned a ton.
An eye for the true value of things. And how to use that value once you saw it.
Resting. After letting the meat sit for five to ten minutes, you cut it.
"Whoa……."
"This way you lock the juices inside."
"Looks fucking delicious."
"Watch your mouth."
Run a proper cooking process and you could elevate the value of the meat. Cheap beef transformed into a steak with juices dripping off it—enough to make you want to grab it with your bare hands without thinking. Suhyun brought a piece to her mouth and gave a crisp thumbs-up.
I used to do this kind of thing a lot.
It was one of the classic jobs of real private equity: acquiring restaurant franchises. When a food business was booming, it printed money. When it wasn't, it was dead weight. Just holding it cost you cash. Underperforming operators hit the market at fire-sale prices. Private equity bought them, normalized operations, and flipped them.
1. Bur○er King
2. B○C
3. Har○ee's
4. K○C
5. Gon○ Cha
6. Big ○ Grandma's Sundae Soup
7. Ou○back Steakhouse
．
．
．
You could find the pattern all over famous franchises. Plenty of the places people ate at every day had been through it.
Some people think it's pure evil.
The more someone knew about private equity, the more they seized up. Private equity bought it? I'm never going there again. It was about cost ratios. The easiest way to squeeze profit was to cheapen the menu into pure trash. The worst places practically cast Changryeol as a co-star and ran collabs with him. The image was bad for a reason.
"Way better than eating out."
"It's cheap meat, though."
"If it tastes good, that's enough."
That kind of thinking belonged to small-time operators chasing short-term gains. The places that really made money—his own approach—cared about quality too.
If you actually want to sell high, you need a win-win with the customer.
Buyers weren't idiots. No operator wanted to own a company that wouldn't last. Sustainable profit structure. Improve the cooking methods, raise operational efficiency, maximize the margin. Just like this steak right now. Even cheap ingredients could deliver high-level flavor.
Throw on a little decoration, slap a fancy name on it, and it'd sell like crazy.
His time in private equity had leveled him up as an investor. It was also surprisingly useful for seducing women. A man who cooked scored high.
Glug-glug-glug~
And then the alcohol. Like thread following a needle, a steak without wine felt incomplete.
"Oh—wine."
"Want some?"
"I've been wanting to try it."
It was good for setting the mood, too. Nothing hit as cleanly as a high-end drink.
Also an easy way to fail.
Wine got harder the more you knew about it. A beginner picking by gut usually crashed. Red wine especially split opinions hard. The taste was nothing like the vague image people carried around.
"How is it?"
"Not as sweet as I expected……."
"Bad?"
"Still kinda okay?"
Astringent, bitter, sour—hard to even name the flavor. Even good wine was like that.
There's a reason sommeliers exist as a job.
You needed years, minimum, to learn the taste. An extremely high-maintenance drink.
Gulp!
But not every wine was like that. There was a category even beginners could enjoy. Dried-grape wine. A method that used naturally dried grapes. The sugars concentrated.
There's residual sweetness.
A little sugar stayed in the finished wine. Barely perceptible, but enough.
"When I really taste it, the fruit notes explode. It's actually good?"
"Tastes like raisins, right?"
"Yeah. Raisins!"
It helped people drink without stress. Even complete beginners knocked it back easily.
Like how people who can't drink coffee do fine once you add a little syrup.
The flavor was intuitive. Anyone could tell it tasted like grapes.
Gulp!
Atmosphere and taste. He hadn't gone through all this prep just to catch two rabbits that small.
If she keeps drinking like that, she's going to get drunk.
Fermented drinks were made by fermenting the sugars in fruit or grain. Higher sugar meant higher alcohol. Regular wine sat around twelve percent. Dried-grape wine started higher—from fourteen percent up.
Gulp! Gulp!
That faint sweetness made you forget the proof. A kind of sneaky, sit-you-down liquor.
"One more!"
"You know a way to make it taste even better?"
"?"
"Chew it together with the meat in your mouth."
Chuck flap had a deep meaty flavor. With the juices locked in by basting and resting, it was even stronger. It didn't lose to the wine's intensity. Chew them together and a whole new horizon of taste opened up.
Chew, chew!
Gulp!
Suhyun brought another piece of steak to her mouth. Then she let it sit with the wine, tasting both together.
"It's real?"
"Right? That's what they call mariage."
"Oh~ I've heard of that!"
If all you wanted was something that went down easy, there were plenty of options. Cocktails, port wine, and so on. Those got cloying. Too sweet, too loud—they clashed with food.
Wine isn't the classic seduction drink for nothing.
You could feed it to someone almost naturally. A liquor nearly as strong as soju, no less.
Suhyun's cheeks were flushed pink. The eyes looking at her wine glass had gone a little unfocused.
"You a bit drunk?"
"I'm still fine though. Uung?"
They had been sitting at the low folding table on the floor. When Suhyun stood, she swayed. She looked surprised herself—she hadn't expected to be this far gone.
Thud!
He steadied her and sat her on the bed. If he was trying to get her tipsy and she just passed out cold—
That'd be missing the whole point.
Her eyes were half-lidded. But she still seemed conscious, looking straight at him.
"Sleepy?"
"Not that drunk……."
"Then want to sit and talk a bit?"
Pretending to check her color, he brushed her cheek. Slightly damp, as if a light sweat had broken.
Slick.
Unlike Hye-ri, there was no baby fat. A sharp jawline rode under his fingertips.
"Wine good?"
"Yeah. The meat too……."
"I don't think I told you the best way to drink it yet."
"?"
A woman. Not the kind that felt young—the kind you could actually enjoy.
Gulp! Gulp!
He drank the wine. Not poured into a glass—straight from the bottle. Some of it ran down his chin; he didn't care.
Thud!
He pushed Suhyun, who had barely been sitting up, over. The slightest pressure and she toppled onto the bed. Those two eyes looking straight at him already knew what was about to happen. She didn't refuse.
Gulp!
Her lips were parted, just barely. Wine passed from mouth to mouth. He could hear it go down her throat. In a studio apartment, even small sounds doubled, tripled.
"Haa……, haa……."
When he pulled back, she was breathing hard. The eyes looking up at him seemed to be waiting for his answer.
"These past few days, with Suhyun helping out, work's been a lot easier."
"And?"
"How about it? Want to try pairing up for a mariage with oppa?"
"That pickup line's a little lame."
"……."
Maybe not. A cold answer. Given she had a boyfriend, it was almost the natural response.
Slurp, suck!
This wasn't the time for reason to step in. Their lips had already locked again, roughly hunting each other's spit. The wine mixed into the saliva was a little sour. It felt like those beer-flavored candies from childhood—something you just wanted to keep sucking on.
"You sure about this?"
"After going this far, what are you……."
"Got it."
"Hurry before I change my mind."
The jeans she'd been wearing hit the floor. Her underwear was folded neatly on top. Suhyun, lower half bare. In that moment alone she looked almost like a girl, covering her face with both arms.
Squelch!
When he checked, she was wet just enough. Foreplay didn't seem necessary.
Did her boyfriend train her well?
His own lower half felt ready to burst. He lined up and pushed straight in. Maybe because she was still young—even though he thought she was wet enough, the resistance was no joke.
"Ah!"
He was hard enough that it worked somehow. With a lewd moan that didn't sound like Suhyun at all, he entered. Warm. No—a little sticky. That hot sensation was wrong.
He checked the join belatedly. The red liquid running down didn't look like the wine from earlier.
Fuck…….
Brand-new product, apparently.