A Temporary Measure
Kim Hanbin: Just got downstairs. I'm at the convenience store right now.
“He got here fast.”
The message was surprisingly welcome, considering it had interrupted her study flow. It seemed like a good time for a break anyway, so Seo Jian grabbed her phone and stood up. She hurried out of the reading room, descended the stairs, and immediately spotted Kim Hanbin waving from in front of the convenience store across the street.
On the plastic table where Hanbin had settled in were two cans of cola and a bag of potato chips. It looked like he had taken her half-joking, half-serious comment about buying snacks to heart.
Jian sat down in the chair and said, “I only drink zero sugar cola, you know?”
“...Want me to swap it out?”
“Hey, I was kidding. Kidding.”
She popped the can open, muttering about how he took everything like it was a documentary. “And asking you to buy snacks was just something I threw out there. Why take it so seriously? Anyone would think I mooch off people all the time.”
“......”
Instead of answering, Hanbin just scratched his cheek awkwardly. Jian sensed something in that moment. It wasn’t like becoming a girl had given her some new woman’s intuition or anything, but Kim Hanbin was practically screaming it with his expression. It was like he was saying, I have something going on.
Her throat suddenly felt dry, so Jian took a sip of cola first.
“Ahh… Anyway, weren’t you supposed to stop coming to the reading room starting today? Did you have something to tell me? Doesn’t look like you came here to study.”
“I was at the academy getting counseling until just now. With my parents.”
“Then why come here? Don’t tell me your grades were so bad they wouldn’t let you register?”
Jian let out a playful giggle. It was a joke thrown out to ease the strangely tense atmosphere. But Hanbin didn’t play along this time either. He just kept his mouth shut tight and stayed silent.
“......”
“...Hey, why are you making it so heavy? Is it something serious?”
“Haa… I put the academy on hold for now. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about this. I think we need to deal with this problem first.”
“?”
“We got a penalty after failing the mission yesterday, right?”
“Yeah.”
Jian nodded. She hadn’t expected the conversation to suddenly turn to penalties.
“Did nothing happen to you?”
“Not really…?”
At Hanbin’s question, Jian thought back over everything that had happened from yesterday to today. She went straight home, showered, ate some fruit in the living room, went to her room for a light review, changed into pajamas, and slept. Then, like always, she woke up at six in the morning, diligently got ready for the reading room, and… had been studying right up until just now.
The period… probably doesn’t count, right?
Other than her cramps being a bit worse than usual this morning, it had been an extremely ordinary day.
“......”
“What? Did something happen to you?”
Hanbin’s pupils shook like there was an earthquake inside them. He knew he had to say it, but now that he was actually sitting in front of Jian, he felt embarrassed. No, it wasn’t so much embarrassment as it was fear of how she would react. His lips moved uselessly as he let out a sigh.
“Haa… No, it’s just…”
He trailed off, scratched the back of his neck, then started again. The way the conversation kept dancing around the point was enough to drive Jian, who was watching, absolutely insane.
“Hey, why are you dragging this out so much? Was it such a big deal that you couldn’t even study at the academy?”
“......”
“Haa… Now I feel bad.”
Hanbin, all shrunk in on himself, and Jian, whose energy was completely drained along with him. “It was my idea to go in together in the first place. I was the one being stubborn. Yeah. We did get that penalty or whatever, right?”
“...Yeah.”
He nodded slowly. Jian let out a sigh. It was frustrating that Hanbin wouldn’t just tell her properly, but what weighed on her more was the guilt of having dragged him into this because of her own stubbornness.
“I didn’t get a penalty, but you did. Tell me properly. We can solve it together. Isn’t that why you came to talk to me?”
“......”
As he listened to Seo Jian’s words, Kim Hanbin thought to himself that the penalty had probably already been imposed on both of them. Some people might have enjoyed secretly watching Seo Jian’s naked body, but unfortunately—or fortunately—Kim Hanbin was the type to feel guilty about it.
Still, I really don’t want to know about her period pads…
That part was definitely a penalty for him. And from Jian’s perspective, she had ended up showing her naked body to someone without any consent. Just ending up in this situation was a penalty in itself. There was always the option of just letting it slide if she didn’t know, but Hanbin steeled himself. And then he began to speak.
While listening to Hanbin’s story, Jian was eating potato chips, then choked and drank cola. She nearly got it down the wrong pipe and coughed several times. At one point she even tilted the cola can the wrong way and spilled it all over her pants. The gist of it was this:
He had suddenly seen her showering at home. He saw everything. Even though he tried not to look, he couldn’t help it. He had also seen her changing clothes, and when she showered again in the morning, he saw that too… He bowed his head as he confessed.
Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to mention the sanitary pads. He decided he would take that secret to his grave.
“...Y-you saw?”
“It felt like our vision was being shared… I think closing your eyes might be a way to deal with it… but that doesn’t make sense. It’s too dangerous.”
“No, wait. You’re saying you saw everything while I was showering? Me taking my clothes off… Wait, I mean. Um.”
Someone came out of the convenience store, so Jian shut her mouth. Only after confirming the person had gone far away did she continue.
“You saw everything at exactly those moments…”
“Yeah. I couldn’t just keep quiet about it. I have no idea when it’ll end.”
She crushed the cola can completely. It overflowed, of course, making her hand sticky and wet. But she didn’t care. She had no mental space to worry about that. Just thinking about what she had done yesterday and what it must have looked like was overwhelming enough.
“Wait a second.”
Scrape— Jian shot up from her seat.
“Stay here by yourself for a bit.”
“......”
“I-I… I need to think alone for a moment. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll wait. I won’t run away.”
Seo Jian immediately ran toward the stairs leading back up to the reading room. Right now, she needed a place to be alone.
“Haa, haa… Ha, hah… Haa……”
The place she had run into in a panic was the women’s restroom located inside the reading room. Since the reading room was practically empty anyway, she was the only woman there at this hour. Dragging legs that felt like they might give out at any moment, she approached the sink. She tried to rub her burning face with her palms, only to realize they were sticky, so she scrubbed them roughly.
“Ha, seriously… this is fucking awful…”
Once the stickiness was mostly gone, she splashed her face with cold water for a long time. Her face was so hot she couldn’t stand it.
“Pwah… Haa… Ha……”
Jian swept her wet hair behind her ears, breathing roughly as she thought. What did he say? He saw everything? It was an unbelievable story, but Hanbin’s words didn’t sound like a lie at all. There was no reason for him to lie about something like this in the first place. The way Kim Hanbin had come all the way to the reading room so early in the morning, head bowed like he was making a confession… Jian could feel his sincerity.
So this was what a penalty looked like…
“Fuck.”
What the hell had she done? The whiteboard sitting all alone in the rest area wasn’t some convenient cash machine that just spat out money. The missions came with rewards, but they also came with penalties for failure. The whiteboard had just cleverly hidden the penalty during the first mission.
“Ughhh…! Haa… Seriously……”
Jian grabbed the sink and squatted down right there. Her heart was pounding wildly. Her face was bright red, and she couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror. What had she done yesterday? She had just showered… Wait, hadn’t she groped her breasts a little at the end…?
“Aaaaaagh!!!”
She clutched at her hair. She felt relieved that she hadn’t done anything even more perverted than that, but the fact that she had shown such a feminine side to Kim Hanbin, who knew her past so well, was unbearably embarrassing… Jian shot back up to her feet. She strode out of the bathroom and headed straight for the rest area. In her anger, she almost slammed the door shut with a bang—! but she managed to regain some sanity and held it open against the wall instead. Then she clenched her fist tight and slammed it into the whiteboard instead—bang!
“Ow!”
Of course, the only one who got hurt was herself. Tears sprang to her eyes, her fist throbbed where she had hit it wrong, and she felt a surge of unjustified rage. In the end, Jian had no choice but to clutch her aching hand and trudgingly head back to the convenience store.
Kim Hanbin was still sitting exactly where she had left him, just like he said he would.
“...Did you hurt your hand?”
“It’s nothing. Mind your own business.”
Feeling embarrassed, Jian answered curtly.
“......”
“......”
And so the conversation returned to the main topic. The reason Kim Hanbin had come looking for Seo Jian was not only to confess this, but more importantly, to figure out how to solve it.
“So, the way I see it, the only way to lift this penalty is to go back into that rest area.”
“No way!”
Jian shouted.
“No? But there was no mention of when the penalty would end, and the only clue we have is that whiteboard.”
“If I say no, then no.”
“......”
This time, Jian was the stubborn one. “I was stupid. There was no way it would be that easy to make money. That whiteboard is dangerous. There’s no guarantee we’ll succeed the mission, right? If we fail again, we might get hit with another weird penalty.”
“But… the penalty is…”
Of course, Kim Hanbin understood where Jian was coming from. Jumping in without knowing what kind of mission would appear was risky. But right now, the penalty right in front of them was the problem. Did it interfere with daily life? It did, in a way, but it wasn’t exactly life-threatening… As Hanbin hesitated, Jian offered a solution.
“...There’s a way.”
“What way?”
“You said it yourself earlier. That maybe I won’t see anything if I close my eyes. We can just try it. I can just wash with my eyes closed, right?!”
“Hey, does that even make sense?”
“Think about it the other way. It’s true there was no mention of when it would end, but it also didn’t say it would last forever, right? Let’s just try it first and talk about it later. I’ll bear the inconvenience. This is my fault anyway.”
“Haa…”
Hanbin licked his lips. He hesitated several times over whether he should confess that there was still more he hadn’t told her. But in the end, he couldn’t say it. If he told her now, she would probably say something like “then I’ll just close my eyes for that too,” and besides, it felt like keeping this one thing from her was the kinder thing for Jian’s mental state.
And so, they decided to wait and see for at least another day.
That evening, Kim Hanbin called Seo Jian again to double-check her plan.
Jian answered the phone.
“This is kind of a weird thing to ask, but I called to find out when you’re going to wash. I need to mentally prepare myself too.”
[ …Ah, about that. ]
What came next completely blew past anything I had expected.
[ I thought about it when I got home. The weather’s still pretty cold, right? I’m going to try holding off on washing for now. If I just wash my hair, I should be able to last a few days, don’t you think? We can check during that time whether the penalty disappears. How’s that? ]
“......Are you serious?”
[ Sorry… I thought about washing, but… if you can hear everything, I just… I don’t have the confidence… Still, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s just a little inconvenient for me… ]
The headache that hit me was so bad I had to clutch my head.