013. It Still Felt Unfamiliar
Daytime came again.
— Overnight, Police Officer Jung Se-hee has died. —
At last, the first victim had appeared.
Jung Se-hee stared at the knife-shaped token resting on her role card, her face frozen in stunned disbelief.
"...Who was it? Who's the mafia?"
"I-I'm a civilian...!"
"You were the cop? You're already dead?"
An Woo-jin narrowed his eyes at the two remaining players, his voice dead serious, while Lee Yu-na waved her hands in frantic protest. And Han Jihun, still utterly lost, was calmly trying to explain the situation to Se-hee's body.
So who on earth was the mafia?
In the end, the game concluded with a victory for the mafia.
"Oh, come on..."
An Woo-jin, only now piecing together the mafia's identity, let out a quiet sigh and shot Han Jihun a sidelong glare. Jihun, wearing the faintest of smiles, nodded to himself with deep satisfaction. Yu-na groaned and flopped backward, while Se-hee — the first to see through him, and also the first to die — glared at Jihun with eyes full of grudge.
"That was fun."
Amid the gloomy ranks of the defeated, the sole victor, Han Jihun, was the only one murmuring such a thing.
...The board game café.
That was surprisingly fun.
By the time we finished playing and stepped outside, losing all track of time, the sky had already gone dark.
I stretched my arms overhead with a satisfied grin, and Se-hee — who had slipped out after me — came to stand beside me, looking up at my face.
"Glad you enjoyed yourself."
"Yeah, it was more fun than I expected."
"After killing me."
"...It was just a game."
Of course, Se-hee wasn't actually sulking. She was just teasing me, plain and simple. When I answered with a laugh at the thought, she gave a small nod and went on.
"As long as you had fun, that's what matters."
"That's more than enough for me."
"Even though you killed me."
"...Sorry?"
Having extracted my apology at last, Se-hee nodded with a look of smug triumph.
"We should get going."
"Waaah, that was so fun. Right?"
At An Woo-jin's remark — he'd only just returned from the bathroom — Yu-na latched onto Se-hee's arm and practically melted against her.
It was a relief, honestly, that everyone besides me seemed to have genuinely enjoyed themselves.
"We're heading this way!"
"See you."
"Yeah, take care."
"Bye-bye~"
Watching Yu-na's back as she walked off with Se-hee, I let out a small breath — and my eyes met Se-hee's as she glanced back over her shoulder, dodging Yu-na's line of sight. When she held up her phone and tapped it lightly, I understood what she wanted to say and gave a small nod. Without a hint of reluctance, she turned away.
"I'm going that way. I've got an errand."
Her trademark coolness made me smile a little, and I pulled out my wireless earbuds and popped them in.
"Oh — see you tomorrow."
"Yep."
The music hadn't started yet, so Woo-jin's voice came through clearly; I traded a brief goodbye with him too before drifting off at my own pace.
With Woo-jin gone, I started the music and let my feet carry me wherever they pleased.
...Huh.
It felt like the whole day had blown past in a blur.
It struck me, suddenly, that it had been far too long since I'd let a day slip by without a single thought in my head.
I paused for a moment and looked up at the sky, then let out a long breath and quickened my pace. The night sky was dark, but the city's brilliant glow swallowed the stars whole.
A familiar melody drifted into my ears, and beside me I felt an inexplicable, unfamiliar chill. I closed my eyes for just a moment, then opened them again.
This was the street we used to walk together.
Even when you weren't there, it was the street I walked with you on my mind.
Walking it alone now felt strange, yet somehow not strange at all — a contradiction I couldn't quite resolve.
I still hadn't forgotten her. I couldn't claim my heart was fully settled, either. Every time I saw her, some corner of my chest kept twisting uncomfortably, so I'd been deliberately avoiding looking her way — but the moment my guard slipped, my eyes would always go searching for you.
Still, I could say this with certainty: little by little, I was shaking it off.
After all — I was slowly getting used to being alone like this.
For now, that was enough.
Bzzt.
A small vibration rose from the phone in my hand. I shook off my thoughts and checked the message with a blank expression.
It was Se-hee. Her wallpaper — a small, adorable cheese-colored cat — asked me whether I was listening to the song she'd recommended just moments ago.
I smiled faintly and started searching for the track she'd suggested. A gentle, quiet melody poured out, somehow familiar all the same.
With it playing, I began to walk.
Normally I'd have caught a bus from downtown straight to my front door, but today, for some reason, I felt like walking. The bus would bring me back around the same way, so there wouldn't be much difference in time anyway.
And besides — today, for some reason, I just wanted to walk with music in my ears.
It wasn't only because Se-hee had said her hobby was strolling with songs playing. Though, granted, her words accounted for the larger share of it.
Wrapped in a stillness that made it feel as though I alone had been set down in the middle of the world, I strode onward.
"Hmm, hmm."
Before I knew it, I was humming along to the melody in my ears.
"..."
Baek Seol-ah woke early in the morning and gazed out the window.
Pit-a-pat — spring rain, falling since before dawn, drummed against the glass.
Seol-ah loved rainy days. But if anyone asked her why, she couldn't have given a clear answer either. She just always had, ever since she was little — the peculiar scent of rain drifting in as it fell, the quiet sound of raindrops tapping the window in the silence. She loved the patter of rain bouncing off an umbrella, loved everything about rainy days, really.
I'll need to bring an umbrella.
But today, somehow, was different. On any ordinary morning, waking to find the rain already falling would have lifted her spirits — yet her sunken heart showed no sign of recovering. She didn't like that it was raining. She didn't like having to pack an umbrella. Waking earlier than usual, too — today, for some inexplicable reason, was a day when her mood and her heart had sunk deep.
But what filled an even larger corner of her heart was the scene she'd witnessed yesterday.
Jihun.
Did he get a new girlfriend?
The scene from her walk home from school yesterday — Han Jihun and An Woo-jin heading off somewhere together with two girls she didn't recognize. Ever since she'd seen it, Seol-ah's heart had been sinking, deeper and deeper.
That can't be it.
She quickly erased the thought. After all, barely two weeks had passed since she and Jihun broke up. For him to get a girlfriend in that time would mean he'd known her before then — and those two girls' faces were ones she'd never seen before.
Seol-ah knew every corner of Han Jihun's social circle. Every person he met was someone whose face she had seen at least once. And Jihun was simply not the kind of person to lose his heart to someone he'd only met a few times.
She tried to soothe herself that way, but—
"Ugh..."
The area around her heart ached, dull and persistent. Even as she felt certain it could never happen, an unexplainable anxiety came bubbling up from somewhere below.
Him — Han Jihun — smiling at someone else the way he used to smile at her. Whispering gently. Holding hands, linking arms. Sharing an umbrella on a day like this, the way he'd once shared it with her. Laughing, chattering away... The more she pictured it, the larger that anxiety swelled.
"Why am I like this?"
Seol-ah murmured it without realizing, and hugged the pillow beside her tight to her chest.
Could it be... that I actually liked Jihun?
The thought crossed her mind, but even that she couldn't be sure of. It was true that being at Jihun's side had made her heart comfortable and at ease. But Seol-ah had always learned that love, real love, meant your heart pounding just from being near someone, a fluttering so intense it felt like going mad. So she'd convinced herself that what she felt was nothing more than simple friendship with him.
What even is love...?
Seol-ah was someone who had never once experienced it. Jihun had always been there beside her — and that was precisely why she'd grown accustomed to him, why everything he did had felt familiar and easy. But she had no way of judging whether that feeling was love or not.
Blinking slowly, Seol-ah let out a small breath and shook her head.
"I don't know... I really, really don't knooow."
Her head throbbed. Whenever she closed her eyes, Jihun's face floated up before her, so she forced her eyes wide open and stared around the room. But the turmoil in her heart wouldn't fade. If anything, it only grew clearer.
"Aaah..."
Rolling around on her bed with the pillow clutched to her chest, Seol-ah eventually sighed softly and sat up. Lying here any longer would only summon the same thoughts on an endless loop. Faced with a question that had no answer, Seol-ah decided, for now, to run from it.
Let's wash up first.
Wash up, then think. And if it still didn't work out—
Maybe I'll just ask A-young.
With that thought, Seol-ah dragged her heavy feet off the bed.
The chill she'd been feeling lately — a chill like loneliness — pressed in more thickly than ever today. And somehow, it was so terribly unfamiliar.
No.
It was still unfamiliar.
Kim A-young.