Let's See How You Fall
"Fuck!"
A tremendous crash filled the room. Everything that had been sitting on the desk in Park Woojin's studio apartment went flying to the floor — swept off in a single, furious motion he couldn't hold back.
"This is such bullshit... Ha, fuck, fuck, fuck...!"
Even that wasn't enough to bleed the rage out of him. He drove his fist into the wall, stomped the desk with his heel — the whole display looked less like a tantrum and more like a full-blown anger management episode.
"These fucking idiots dare to treat me like garbage?!"
The image of Dayeon telling him to get out was still burned into his eyes — that ice-cold face that hadn't so much as flickered, even after he'd dropped to his knees. To Woojin, that look had been the purest kind of humiliation.
"What the fuck did I even do wrong?! I worked my ass off for her all this time, and now some new guy she likes shows up and she treats me like this? That fucking bitch?!"
He snatched up whatever was in reach and hurled it at the walls, at the front door. It didn't help. The anger wouldn't go anywhere.
Bang, bang!
"Hey! Keep it down in there!"
After a long stretch of throwing things and pounding on the walls, someone finally came pounding right back, shouting at him to shut up.
"Fuck off, you piece of shit!"
Woojin kept right on raging. He did not, however, open the door. The voice outside was a man's, and there was no telling what kind of guy was standing out there — if it came to a fight, Woojin might lose. Besides, he'd never actually been in a real fistfight in his life. The thought of one scared him.
"If you keep this up, I'm calling the cops!"
The threats from the hallway kept coming — quiet down, or the police were next — but Woojin just stood there panting, ignoring every word of it.
"Fuck, I need to get out of this dump. The soundproofing is complete garbage."
He didn't have the money to move. He had no idea what was going to happen to him from here. But pride was pride, and the idea of actual cops showing up was a little much even for him, so he finally shut his mouth.
...At this point, what if I just dump her first?
In a situation like this, a normal person would have started thinking about how to look like they were trying — how to show they were putting in the work. Park Woojin's mind went somewhere else entirely.
That bitch's subscriber count's been climbing lately, hasn't it?
Dayeon was a streamer on a serious hot streak, her numbers shooting up by the day.
Let's see how well you do after kicking me to the curb, you fucking bitch.
A streamer that hot was also a streamer ripe for controversy. The kind of name that drama stuck to like glue.
Now, who was that guy again?
Woojin didn't watch streamers much himself, but drama YouTubers? Those he watched with genuine delight, cackling at every takedown.
Hmm. Tip line's this one. If I report that I got wrongfully fired, they'll jump on it so fast. Not like they need actual evidence anyway.
He'd watched enough of those channels to know exactly how they operated. If a story looked like it would pull views, they moved first and asked questions never — evidence optional.
"Heh. Still, I should give her one more chance."
He was in no position to be giving anyone a chance. That did not stop Park Woojin from operating under the utterly deranged assumption that he still stood above Lee Dayeon. Not once, in the entire history of their working relationship, had she ever been beneath him.
"I won't send the tip just yet, Lee Dayeon. But the second you slip up — you're done."
A nasty little laugh leaked out of him as he pulled out his phone and typed a message to Dayeon.
He'd already wiped the memory of kneeling on the floor clean out of his head. The message sat there, shameless, demanding an apology. Nothing came back.
"Probably streaming, can't see it. Whatever. She'll answer when she checks. If she's got a brain in her head, she'll apologize."
The one without a brain was Park Woojin. He took that fact and buried it under a mountain of sheer, staggering nerve, kicked the last of the debris off his bed onto the floor, and lay down among the wreckage of his own room.
"Let's watch how you fall. Then I'll decide what to do with you."
The text landed in the middle of dinner with Dohyun, and Dayeon's face twisted on the spot.
"Nuna, is something wrong?"
They'd been eating well, talking easily, the whole evening warm and easy — and then her expression locked up out of nowhere. Dohyun's voice went soft with worry.
"Ah, sorry. Park Woojin just sent me some complete garbage."
"What's he saying?"
"That I went too far today and I need to apologize. Unbelievable. Just... unbelievable."
She had never, in her entire life, encountered a human being quite like this. The irritation had already burned itself out. What was left was pure, speechless disbelief.
"What exactly does he think he did that entitles him to an apology...?"
Dohyun's face scrunched up the same way. Even he had never seen anything this absurd.
"Is he, like... missing something? Upstairs?"
She didn't usually like passing judgment on people so freely. But there really was no other word for it. Missing something. That was the only phrase that fit.
"If he's not missing something, he's just an idiot. Ah — sorry for the language."
"No, don't be. I was thinking the exact same thing. Idiot tracks."
Dayeon had landed in the same place Dohyun had. Either the man was genuinely not all there, or he was just an idiot. There was no third option.
"Just ignore him. I don't think he'd understand a word you said anyway."
"Yeah, that was the plan. Even typing a reply feels like a waste of time."
She shut the phone off entirely, let out a long breath, and started stabbing her tteokbokki with her fork like it had personally offended her.
"How did someone like that hide who he really was for so long?"
They'd worked together for a fairly long time. The idea that this was the person underneath had never once crossed her mind, and the look on her face said as much.
"...Have I just not been paying enough attention to people?"
She'd always thought of herself as someone who took a real interest in her staff. But looking back, even sitting down for dinner like this — or lunch, for that matter — had only started after Dohyun arrived. Before that, it had never happened. Not once.
"I was so busy I wasn't even eating with Eunchae... Yeah. I really was checked out, wasn't I."
It was true that growing the channel had left her with nothing to spare. It was also true that the scale of it had kept expanding, and she'd spent every day just trying to keep up.
"...Ha. Who am I kidding. That's all just excuses."
The channel was still growing in real time, right now. After Dohyun came on, they'd started putting out short-form videos too, and the influx from those had the whole thing climbing faster than before — not slower. If anything, the pace had picked up.
"I regret it. If I'd just paid a little more attention, I could have cut him loose a long time ago."
The other editors wouldn't have had to suffer as much. Things never would have gotten this far. Once that thought took hold, the regrets just kept coming, one after another.
"Still... that's how I met you, Dohyun. So it wasn't all bad."
Everything else, she regretted. Meeting Dohyun? That wasn't a regret. That was the best thing that had happened to her. She meant it, completely.
"It's strange, you know. You've got this way of putting people at ease. I don't know how to describe it."
"Me? Do I?"
"Yeah. And you're the kind of person your eyes just... go to."
At first, that was all it had been — he was the viewer who'd kept making fan videos for her, steadily, without fail. That was enough to catch her attention. But once he officially became her editor, it went well past that.
He wasn't devastatingly handsome, exactly. But there was something appealing in his face, and he always dressed neatly. He had a voice that was easy to listen to, a gentle way of speaking, and — more than anything — he was genuinely good with people. From every angle, he was someone your eyes went to.
"It's happening right now, isn't it. I'm not the type who says this kind of thing to just anyone. But I'm saying it to you."
When Dohyun had first come to her and told her she could lean on him if things got hard, she'd thought, no, she shouldn't. And then they'd talked a little, and eaten dinner, and here she was — opening up about all of it, without even meaning to.
"I'm glad I can be that person for you, nuna. But honestly, you're the one who puts people at ease. That's why people like that end up around you."
"See? That. The way you just say nice things like it's a reflex."
Someone who said kind things without even trying to. Dayeon couldn't help but like that about him. She really, truly couldn't.
Her life had always been full of people who wanted to use her. Aside from Eunchae, who had always treated her with real sincerity, that was most of them. Which only made it that much harder not to look at Dohyun.
"Come on. You're a good person, so there's nothing to say except good things. That's all it is."
"Aigoo. Fine, you sweetheart. I'll clean up — you go on home first."
"Huh? No, I'll clean up. You go home. You paid for dinner. The least I can do is take care of this."
They went back and forth like that for a while — you clean, no I'll clean — until they finally just did it together, finished clearing the trash, and headed home.