Heading Home
"So you already made up with her?"
"Obviously. Who do you think I am?"
"She pulls a stunt like that and you just let one apology wipe the slate clean?"
"I told you I was fine with it, Sehee..."
After we had stepped outside into that nightmarish atmosphere and come back laughing like nothing had happened, Sehee looked even more sour than before.
"Oppa. If you keep letting stuff like that slide, people are going to call you a doormat! I can't stand hearing anyone talk about you that way!"
"I'm only letting it go because it's Ari... Do I look like the kind of guy people would actually say that about?"
"Yes."
Honestly... the kid worried too much. Or maybe my credibility had simply hit rock bottom.
Was she picturing me as some poor sap a Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer had strong-armed into submission?
Either way, I had been getting an earful from Sehee for a good thirty minutes now.
Even before I had come to this gender-reversed world, Sehee used to rain lectures down on me whenever I came home hurt from work. Apparently that part of her was not the kind of thing a change of universe could fix. Really, of all the things that could have stayed the same, it had to be this.
Ari, the principal cause of this whole mess, was currently bustling around filling out footage for the video. Watching her throw herself into the heavy work still sat strangely with me—this being a gender-reversed world—but she and the managers seemed to be knocking out the orphanage's odd jobs all the same.
They horsed around with each other here and there for the stream, but at the core of it they were putting in honest labor. There was something genuinely pleasant about watching someone who had gotten into a good university and was already making serious money on stream take on the tiring, thankless work without a fuss. It was an unfair prejudice, but I had it stuck in my head that people like that would never dirty their hands with physical labor, which only made the sight land harder.
Beside me... Sehee was still watching that direction with a look of pure displeasure.
"Oppa... are you really close with her?"
"Not particularly. I only met her today, anyway. You know I don't have any friends. You're probably the person I'm closest to."
"...Yeah, I figured."
Sehee's face finally started to ease—until she glanced at Ari again and scrunched it right back up.
"If you keep furrowing your brow like that already, you're going to get wrinkles."
I pressed my thumb between her eyebrows as I said it. That only made a stranger mix of feelings flicker across her face.
"...What is it?"
"Oppa. Do you do this kind of thing with other people too?"
"Pfft. I don't even have a girlfriend. Who else would I do this with? I only do it because it's you."
Ah. Her expression melted completely. Yes—that was how she looked pretty.
Even if she had been acting out a little lately, Sehee was still something like the ringleader of the orphanage kids, and more than a few of them followed her lead without question. If the children had seen her looking at Ari's group like that, the shoot would have gotten a lot harder. Knowing she would not be showing anyone that face anymore, I could finally relax a little.
It would be nice if Sehee and Ari hit it off while they were at it. Connections with someone attending Korea University—Business Administration, no less—did not exactly grow on trees. At that level she was practically a walking expert on the college entrance exam; it could only help Sehee with school. As far as I was concerned, it was a shame that the first impression had been burned in so catastrophically.
Well. Maybe there would still be a chance.
"I'm going to go check on Minwoo. You should get some rest too—tomorrow's Monday."
"Okay. Don't work yourself too hard either, oppa."
Was it because of the bad first impression?
No. This was just a simple sense of disconnect, and I knew it.
Looking at Yuhan over there, there was really something... how to put it.
I knew well enough by now that he was a good person. He was suspiciously close with the orphanage kids, which meant he had to have been coming here for a long time already.
I had learned today, down to the bone, what came of judging someone by their looks. And still, I could not help this. One glance at the managers beside me, eating the ice cream the orphanage had handed out, suggested they were thinking along the same lines.
Anyone would understand.
"Yebin noona's the mommy, and Minwoo hyung's the daddy!"
"Then what about me?"
"Uh... Yuhan hyung can be a daddy too!"
"What kind of family is that supposed to be?"
It was a children's game of house. How elaborate a premise did anyone expect? Pretend play was where you got every kind of bizarre, brainless concept imaginable. A household with two dads was well within bounds.
The problem was that one of those dads was Geum Taeyang, and that made it... well.
Even if that Geum Taeyang was a man...
"Unnie... I don't know if that's allowed."
"Why does this game of house feel so wrong?"
Right? I held my tongue because saying it out loud felt like crossing a line, but it really was a spectacle.
The more I watched Yuhan, the stranger he seemed.
Earlier I had asked him out of genuine curiosity. Not to brag, but I was treated as a Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer; if he ran his mouth at me the wrong way, it could actually put his stream in danger. So why had he done it?
"Fits the persona, doesn't it? It's not like you've got that many viewers anyway. You messed up the vibe on our stream, so I figured that much revenge was fair. Heh heh."
A method of revenge that made no sense by any logic I had. So I asked again. Wouldn't joining this content himself be good promotion—and better for his image?
"Geum Taeyang can't go around doing good deeds. Don't even joke about that. And I'm not exactly thrilled about using the orphanage to farm aggro, either."
He had said he was not a college student, so it was not as if he needed the volunteer hours.
Did that mean he came here every week simply because he liked volunteering?
Maybe I was twisting it into something more complicated than it was... but this was not the kind of case you ran into every day.
He had led with the persona, but the part that came after was the truth. He did not want to use the orphanage like a prop. And he seemed to think that if he appeared in the content himself, the whole point of it would start to fade.
Honestly, if you went by looks alone, you would not find a more thorough delinquent if you tried. Talk to him, though, and he used a surprisingly considerate way of speaking. On stream he had not seemed all that considerate, but then... I had been worse.
Even so, I still could not understand why someone like that insisted on walking around looking the way he did.
A tan you almost never saw in Korea. A silver piercing in his ear whose meaning I could not begin to guess. And now the blonde, with dark roots pushing through, had gone completely unmanaged and dulled to a muddy shine.
If you looked only at his face, was he not the kind of handsome that would rank near the top anywhere he went?
It would have been rude to ask, so I had not, but I could not help wondering whether there was some profound meaning to that tan that I simply did not know.
"Unnie. Did you actually make up with that guy? Today aside, you've been through a lot of heartache because of him."
The manager asked it while watching Yuhan throw himself into the kids' game of house, matching their incomprehensible lore with a full performance. My managers had had a front-row seat to the conflict between Yuhan and me, which was probably why they could not quite believe me when I said we had made up in an instant.
Well. I would have had trouble believing it too. But when two people clicked this well, even if you told yourself you did not want to reconcile, your heart would have opened on its own.
"I've told you already—we made up. The shoot went this smoothly today because Yuhan helped."
"Looking at him like this, he does seem like a decent person..."
Yuhan, never losing his smile as he played along with a child pouring out a language only that child could understand. Anyone watching this would think the same thing as the manager. He seemed like a decent person.
"You've actually talked to him, unnie. What's his personality like?"
"Mm... there are a few slightly weird parts."
Mannerisms that were suspiciously feminine. That bizarre appearance.
But of this much, I could be sure.
"He seemed like a good person."
"So the work's all done now?"
Ari seemed to be the type who repaid her mistakes in the most extreme way possible.
She had packed every last manager into a single car and sent them home, and she was still here, insisting she would drive me to my place herself.
It was eight p.m. Had she not said she had fought with her boyfriend? In that case, going home as early as possible seemed like the correct move. Even a chronically single guy like me, Seong Yuhan, knew that much.
I was planning to stay late anyway, so I told her to go on ahead. She refused outright, saying a man had to be careful on the streets at night.
"Wouldn't the person who ran into me on a night street be the one in more danger?"
"Still, it's better to always be careful, right?"
Well. I would save on subway fare and get home faster, so I was not complaining.
And so I climbed into Ari's car, and we set off for my place.
"If you're tired, you can sleep a little. I'll wake you when we get there."
"I appreciate it, but I'm not really sleepy. Besides, you're not supposed to doze off in the passenger seat."
"Who said that?"
"The old guy I used to do parcel loading with."
"You... did parcel loading? Just the two of you? With an older man...?"
"Ah... I-I mean the lady! The lady I used to haul cargo with said that!!"
Mr. Kim, who had taught me every trick in the parcel-loading book... had he become Mrs. Kim in this world?
Ari and I had already talked plenty at the cafe, and even so the conversation never once dried up for lack of material. Having similar interests really was a huge advantage when it came to talking.
"So you just keep playing the same game on stream? No plans to try anything else?"
"My computer isn't exactly high-end. Anything that needs real mechanical skill would be rough."
Small talk like that carried us along.
"The light's green. Watch the road. The road."
"Oh... right. But if you're going to stream, shouldn't you upgrade to something a little better?"
"I should, but if I actually built a decent PC, I'd be scraping to make next month's rent. And it's not like the one I have is unusable."
Before I had come to this world, a lot of money had gone out in hospital bills, so what I had managed to save was not much. What I had earned this week was... around a hundred dollars, maybe?
I was really going to have to look into a parcel-loading gig at this rate. Keep going like this and I might turn up as a corpse before the year was out.
Worry piled up all at once, but I shoved any thoughts about the future to the back of the line. Start thinking like that while you were talking to someone and you only ended up making the air awkward.
Chatting idly as we drove, my place—which should have been a fair distance away—felt like it arrived faster than expected. Before I knew it, the car was in my neighborhood.
A generally gloomy atmosphere. Roads stained with filth. Streetlights that barely glowed. And sitting in the middle of it, one immaculate car. The combination gave off a distinctly uncanny mood.
"Ah. You can let me out over there."
Ari did not seem to have much experience driving on narrow roads; she fumbled her way along. Still, the car inched forward, and it was time to get out. There would be no car next week... I was already going to miss this kind of comfort.
I set that thought aside, eased the door open, stepped out, and tapped on the driver's-side window.
"You really worked hard today, Ari. If my footage shows up on your stream later, at least pretend you know me. And you have to do a collab. Let me soak up a little of that sweet spotlight too."
"Pfft. Okay. I really am grateful for today. I'll definitely get in touch."
A man's goodbye only needed one line.
We exchanged farewells, and I was about to turn around all cool and walk off when the brakes slammed on in my body. This was it. That Geum Taeyang-style behavior that kept getting in my way.
I still could not get used to this bizarre change. This body just would not listen to me.
Moving on its own, it turned me right back around and carried me toward Ari.
I caught the back of her head with one hand and pulled her toward me.
I whispered it against her ear. Words heavy with implication.
In Ari's wavering eyes, my face was reflected, thick with feeling.
"Heh heh... get home safe, yeah?"
The dull gold hair clinging to Ari's clothes caught the faint glow of the streetlight and glittered.