Conflict? (3)
In the end, Seol Soyoung's casting for Demon's Temptation fell through.
The very day after our text exchange, she was the one who went to White Box and declined the offer. White Box expressed deep regret and wished her well on whatever came next; Soyoung, for her part, hoped the drama would do well at the box office. The whole casting affair wrapped up on a warm, amicable note.
And so… every misfortune that had been waiting for her was gone. The future where Lee Hwayang never got her surgery. The future where Soyoung got tangled up in a drug scandal. All of it, erased.
From here on out, nothing but a flower path stretched ahead of her.
It was a good thing—undeniably. The problem was that, thanks to it, I had earned her monumental hatred.
Even I had to admit that last text had been a little extreme. I'd thrown it out there because I was convinced that if I didn't come down hard, I wouldn't be able to stop her from appearing in Demon's Temptation. But telling her, out of nowhere, that if she didn't listen she could forget about ever appearing in one of my works again—wasn't that basically a threat?
If I'd been in her shoes, I couldn't even begin to imagine how rattled that message would have left me.
Three days had passed since then, and still not a single word from her. Honestly, I figured this level of reaction was getting off easy. What kind of deranged writer goes around restricting which projects an actress can take? Turns out that deranged bastard was sitting right here. Damn it.
I reread the message that seemed to carry every ounce of her resentment and let out a long, heavy sigh. Yeah… we both needed some time to sort our heads out. The water was already spilled. All I could do now was pray her anger would cool soon.
"Hm?"
Right then—
Bzzzzzt—
A text lit up the phone in my hand. The sender was…?
The moment I saw her name, my body shot upright like a roly-poly toy. Already? I'd figured it would take at least another week. I swallowed hard and opened the message—and what I found only stunned me further.
That was where her message ended—with a request that I look after her from here on out.
Hooo…
How does someone even talk this prettily? Honestly, I still couldn't be sure her anger had fully cooled just from this. She might still be carrying a serious grudge and putting on a brave face for my sake. And yet, for her to be the one reaching out with an apology first… Seol Soyoung really was…
"An angel?"
In more ways than one, she seemed like a woman with an extraordinarily generous heart.
"This wasn't how it was supposed to go…"
Meanwhile, Seol Soyoung sent him the message and let out a deep sigh of her own.
Her original plan had been to wait a little longer—either for her to text first after some time had passed, or for him to be the one to break the silence. But a day went by, then two, and by the third day she finally understood: that scenario required a level of patience she simply did not possess.
The fact that she could no longer trade messages with him every day—something that had become as natural as her daily routine—hit her like a crushing weight of stress. At first she'd thought she could tough it out well enough.
Wait a second… He only threatened me like that for my own sake in the first place.
The problem was that her condition was far more severe than she'd realized. A girl in love is, by nature, rather blind—and rather soft. So once Soyoung recognized that what she was doing was wrong, she sent the apology first.
Thanks to that, their conversations resumed as before. But the girl who had outsmarted herself spent the aftermath reflecting on how rash she'd been.
And then, before she knew it, time had slipped by… until the incident in question exploded.
Soyoung sat with her mouth hanging open as the news poured out of the broadcast. Of course she knew who Yu Byeongmin was. If she had accepted White Box's casting offer back then, he would have been the actor sharing the screen with her.
And the story wasn't just on the news—it had detonated across every online community as well.
Through the communities, Soyoung learned not only what the news was reporting but a whole additional layer of truth. And then she understood. Why he had gone so far as to threaten her.
…So that was it.
The reason he'd been so desperate to keep her out of Demon's Temptation was this. Because he'd been terrified she might get swept up in a drug scandal the way the other actors on that drama had.
How much must he have fretted over it, all alone… And without knowing any of that, she had…
Soyoung clenched her fists tight. Right now, how he could have known the truth in advance barely mattered. What mattered was that he had helped her again. Without asking for anything in return—and this time, even choosing the extreme option of making himself hated for it.
From the casting of Welcome to Cafe Violet all the way to now. If every step of this had been a campaign he'd designed, it had worked perfectly.
Thanks to that, she wasn't sure she could hold back much longer. This feeling, and the sound of her own heartbeat, only kept growing louder with every passing day.
Soyoung slowly closed her eyes. Until now, she had been confessing her heart to him in quiet, indirect ways. And every time, just as always, he had dodged giving her an answer. If things kept going like this, nothing would ever move forward.
…But still.
If you were going to tear a girl's pure heart to pieces like this, didn't you owe her a matching responsibility?
Soyoung had no intention of repeating that cycle any longer. She would stand in front of him herself and get a clear answer out of him.
And of course—
…It would absolutely be a yes.
"A—achoo!"
"What. You catching a cold?"
"No… my nose just got a little itchy."
"Hey—hey! Why are you suddenly yanking on my uniform?!"
"I was gonna wipe my runny nose."
I'd said it as a joke, but my friend was staring at me like I was a complete lunatic. Well… technically it hadn't been a joke. Haha.
"Anyway, this whole thing worked out lucky for Seol Soyoung."
"Ah, the Yu Byeongmin drug scandal?"
"Yeah. Her name was originally on the casting list for Demon's Temptation, but she turned it down herself saying it didn't quite suit her. At this point, isn't even the goddess of fortune on that woman's side?"
"Well… the goddess of fortune probably fell for her too and decided to take her side."
"Oh, so not a goddess—a god, then."
Trading stream-of-consciousness banter with Cha Musik, I found a grin spreading across my face on its own. Lately it felt like some breathing room had finally come back into my life. For the time being, nothing major was going to happen, so every day just felt… peaceful.
Yeah. This was what a normal middle schooler's life was supposed to feel like. Honestly, last year had been an abnormal mess of one incident after another.
"So what are you gonna do now, Writer 927?"
I was still savoring that long-overdue peace when Cha Musik opened his mouth as casually as if he were talking about someone else's problem.
"What are you talking about?"
"Basically, Writer 927 keeps not putting out a new project, so people are collectively losing their minds. Uh… probably worldwide?"
…Huh?
What kind of nonsense was this now?
As if something had just occurred to him, Cha Musik held out his phone. It was the national public petition site. And written there was this:
We Strongly Demand Writer 927's Next Work.
The sheer shamelessness of posting a demand like that on a petition site was already absurd enough—but when I sorted by most signatures, the entire top of the list was plastered with Writer 927's name. One petition I could ignore. This many of them was genuinely unnerving.
This… was starting to look like things were going seriously wrong.