A Sweet Weekend with Lee Yu-ri (3)
I stood facing Lee Yu-ri, both of us drenched in beads of sweat.
“Haa… huff…”
“Hoo… How was it?”
“Let’s do it one more time, yeah?”
“Again? You said it was your first time, but you’re already hooked? Was it that good?”
“Yeah. Hurry, hurry…”
Lee Yu-ri begged me with her eyes, and I gave in to her request. I pulled a 500-won coin from my pocket and dropped it into the machine in front of us. As soon as the coins we’d pooled together were exchanged and fed into the slot, cheerful music poured out of the speakers. I stepped on the right platform and began scrolling through the song list.
“What do you want to play?”
“Something upbeat!”
Even though sweat was pouring down her face, Lee Yu-ri answered instantly with an excited expression. She had never really had any hobbies besides reading webtoons or watching dramas, so something like DDR—an arcade game that had been popular years ago—felt like an incredible new thrill to her.
On the game screen, arrows pointing up, down, left, and right kept falling, and the two of us began dancing on top of the DDR platform.
“Huh?! W-wait… why is this so fa—ahh! I died again!”
Unfortunately, Lee Yu-ri, who had zero sense of rhythm, couldn’t handle the relentless barrage of arrows and died almost immediately. I wasn’t exactly a regular at DDR either, so I didn’t last much longer before I failed too.
“Damn, this is hard.”
“Just one more round, please?”
She held up a single index finger and whined, but this time I firmly refused.
“Hey, this is already our fifth game. I’m tired too. Let’s not just stick to this—try something else. We’ve got plenty of time today anyway, right?”
“Hng…”
Inside the arcade, we spent our time hopping between coin karaoke and DDR, and Lee Yu-ri quickly became absorbed in it all. Maybe it was because she was experiencing fresh stimulation for the first time, but instead of her usual cold demeanor, she started acting like a child—pouting her lips and whining.
I smiled and gently pressed my finger against her protruding lower lip. Normally, she would have looked at me like I was a bug and recoiled in disgust, but right now I had a strong feeling that this was okay.
“Look at you pouting like that. Are you a kid? There are plenty of other things we can do, so let’s wrap up the arcade here.”
Her lips were moist and slightly sticky from the lip balm. Lee Yu-ri glanced at my finger touching her mouth, then raised an eyebrow slightly as she grabbed my hand and pulled it away.
“So, where are we going next?”
Her expression seemed to ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ but she didn’t actually get angry about the fact that I had touched her lips. It was clear that the walls in her heart had thinned considerably.
I chuckled inwardly and answered her question.
“Have you ever been to an escape room café?”
“I’ve only heard the name… I don’t really know what it is…”
“You’ve been missing out on half your life. It’s probably going to be the most intense thing we do today.”
“...?”
I searched my memory for an escape room café that would give Lee Yu-ri the strongest first impression possible. It didn’t take long to decide, and I soon led her to a place near Jinsu Station with a sign that read “Amazing.”
“Welcome to Amazing! Just the two of you? What theme would you like?”
“Want to pick the theme?”
I handed the choice over to her.
“Theme? What kind of themes are there?”
“It’s like… the atmosphere of the room we’ll enter? You’ll understand once you go in after choosing.”
“Hmm…”
Lee Yu-ri fell into deep thought as she looked at the catalog the clerk handed her. This café was unique in that the catalog only showed theme names and gave no hints about what kind of experience each one offered. And the one she picked was…
“Ah! Found it!”
She pointed at a section of the catalog for me.
A seemingly cute name for a room escape experience.
“Isn’t the name adorable? I want this one!”
She must have imagined something like a cat café just from the title. We pooled our money to pay, then followed the clerk’s guidance toward the room.
It was a small, enclosed space of only a few square meters. The surroundings were pitch dark, lit only by white lights that illuminated the gloomy room. We heard the sound of the clerk locking the door, and mere seconds later, a deep, ominous male voice filled the entire space.
Lee Yu-ri flinched at the voice but soon looked around the dark room with eyes full of anticipation. However, the next line from the narrator completely flipped the mood.
“What… the…?”
The horrifying content left Lee Yu-ri frozen in shock. At the same time, the white lights illuminating the room shifted to an eerie blood-red color.
“That scared me! W-what is this?!”
A terribly ominous and skin-crawling cat cry echoed through the room.
“Mommy!!!”
Completely panicked, Lee Yu-ri clung tightly to me and screamed.
“Hiiiik!!!”
The theme Lee Yu-ri had chosen—Dogs, Cats, and the Mystery Pension—sounded cute, but it was actually a high-level horror thriller.
“Thank you for visiting!”
An hour later, we left the escape room café after hearing the clerk’s farewell. Somehow we had managed to solve all the puzzles right at the one-hour mark, but…
“Huuu… hic…”
“Hey, stop crying already. It’s over.”
From the moment the horror atmosphere reached its peak, Lee Yu-ri had been half out of her mind. By the end, she had become a piece of gum completely stuck to my arm. The second everything finished and the door opened, she burst out crying like a child and had stayed that way ever since.
“I thought I was going to die of fright! What the heck was that?! You said dogs and cats! I thought it was going to be a pet café or something!”
“But you were the one who picked the theme, remember?”
“Huuuuh… You should have told me, you jerk! I really thought I was having a heart attack!”
“I didn’t know either. Who memorizes every single escape room theme?”
“Hic… You bad guy… You tricked me…”
It was only after she stepped into the afternoon sunlight that Lee Yu-ri finally began to calm down. The entire time, she kept whining nonstop about how I had tricked her and what a terrible person I was. Between the time she tried to ditch me and ended up in that delinquent alley, and now picking this horror theme today, maybe she really did have terrible luck.
I took her to a nearby convenience store, bought her a chocolate bar, and tried to soothe her. Even while grumbling at me, she happily accepted the chocolate and ate it. She must have been really scared—hiccups had started too. We sat on a bench in the central plaza for a while, and she quietly chewed her chocolate without saying a word.
“Munch munch… hic.”
“Feeling better now?”
“No.”
Seeing her still pouting, I reached out and gently wiped the tear stains from the corners of her eyes with my sleeve.
“Kyaa?!”
She flinched in surprise but didn’t slap my hand away, so I was able to feel the soft texture of her cheek as I cleaned her face.
“Your makeup’s going to be ruined. You went through the trouble of doing it nicely to show me, it’d be a shame to waste it.”
“W-who said I did my makeup for you?! Hic!”
“Didn’t you? This is the first time you’ve come out dressed up like this, so I figured it was for me.”
“N-no it’s not! You’re just imagining weird things on your own… hic.”
“Really? Guess my head’s not working right and I got the wrong idea. If you’re feeling calmer now, should we go somewhere a bit more relaxing next?”
“Not another escape room, right? If you trick me again, I’m really going to get mad.”
“It’s not. Hmm… How about watching a movie?”
Lee Yu-ri tilted her head at my suggestion.
“A movie? There isn’t really anything I want to see that’s playing right now.”
“Sorry, but I don’t have much money left for a theater ticket… After paying for the escape room, I’m pretty much broke…”
“Then how are we supposed to watch a movie?”
“What about a DVD bang?”
At that, Lee Yu-ri narrowed her eyes and looked me up and down with deep suspicion.
“Even if I’ve never been, do you really think I don’t know what a DVD bang is for?”
“What are you imagining? We’ll just watch one movie. I won’t do anything weird, I promise.”
“……Really?”
Instead of answering, I held out my pinky. She looked reluctant, but eventually hooked her own pinky around mine.
“If you do anything strange, I’ll scream for real.”
“I’m realizing all over again that you really don’t trust me at all.”
“Then maybe you should have behaved better before. Sigh… It feels a bit sketchy… but it’ll still be cheaper than the theater. I’m picking the movie, though.”
“Fine. Just don’t pick some weird movie and end up crying and throwing a fit by yourself, okay?”
“I won’t!”
Lee Yu-ri crossed her arms and walked ahead with an obviously sulky attitude. I quickly caught up and walked beside her, poking her puffed-out cheek with my finger.
“But did you really hate the escape room that much? Enough that you never want to go again?”
She swatted my hand away from her cheek, then quietly bit off the last piece of chocolate. After swallowing it, she turned her head to the side to avoid my gaze and answered softly.
“……Next time we go, let’s pick a not-scary one.”