The Confession She Never Made
Jo Sua, eighth grade. A pack of girls had swarmed the front of her classroom. The color of their name tags marked them as ninth graders, and the moment the older students appeared, the eighth graders shrank back before a word was spoken.
"Ah. There she is."
One of them picked Jo Sua out at a glance. With a face that stood out that sharply, she was impossible to miss.
"That one?"
"Hey, you. Go call her over."
A ninth grader sent an eighth grader to fetch her. The distance was nothing; she could have walked over herself. Ninth-grade pride wouldn't allow it. She wanted to see that cocky little fox come in with her head already bowed.
"You were looking for me?"
"Hey. You see a senior and you don't even say hello?"
"Hello."
Irritation settled over Jo Sua's face. This wasn't the first time. Seniors she'd never even met only ever came looking for one reason. A boy.
"Come with us."
"Okay..."
They laid down the order to follow, and the friends around her started whispering. Another ugly rumor was about to spread. She was sick of it, tired of it—but she already knew that refusing would only make things worse.
"A little fox like you dares to wag her tail at Jonghyeon oppa?"
"I'm sorry. But you don't have to worry about me. I like girls."
Jo Sua didn't even know who Jonghyeon oppa was. Probably some boy she'd passed once and forgotten.
She announced that she was a lesbian. She wasn't. She didn't like girls. But when things like this happened, it was an excellent card to play. It always threw them off, and they decided she wasn't competition.
"W-what...? You're a lesbian?"
"Yes. And I already have someone I like, so please tell Jonghyeon... that I'm sorry."
"H-hm. Well, then there's nothing we can do. Go on."
"Yes. Take care."
She bowed her head. Annoying. Infuriating. One more rumor would be added to the pile, but she didn't care. There were already dozens of stories about her, from who she was dating to who she'd slept with. Tacking on lesbian wouldn't do any real damage.
It made her angry. It wore her out. Why did anyone even have to go to school? In comics, a pretty girl got a following. In real life, all it got her was trouble.
"S-Sua! Want to walk home together today?"
She hated the boy who looked at her with eyes hot as a fever. She kept pushing him away, and he kept closing in anyway. That he was the popular guy in class only made it worse. The rumor going around was that she'd wagged her tail until he ended up like this.
"Hey. I told you. Don't come near me. Every time you get close, I'm the one who gets trashed. You get that?"
"I'll take care of that."
"How, exactly? You going to pick Sumin or Eunhye and date one of them? If you did, that'd be great for me."
Sumin and Eunhye were the girls manufacturing the gossip behind her back. The cause of it was the boy standing right in front of her.
"I'm leaving. Don't follow me. If you actually care about me."
She was stepping out through the school gate when another nuisance found her.
"Student Sua. Heading home? Or somewhere else? I'll give you a ride wherever. Get in."
Some entertainment company or other. Not an idol agency—a modeling agency, she thought. She didn't care. It was infuriating. Approaches like this came about once a month. Idols, actors, models, YouTubers. All kinds of companies saw only her face and came sniffing.
But she didn't want to be a celebrity or a public figure. If she got lucky she might make money and get famous. Jo Sua, though, was already exhausted by other people's gossip, and she was only in middle school. She didn't want fans watching her every move, and she didn't want one wrong sentence earning her a flood of vicious comments. She just wanted an ordinary life. She walked past the car without answering. Behind her, someone clicked their tongue.
"Tsk. No manners."
And which of them actually had no manners? The one who kept showing up after she'd already refused twice, or the one too worn out to answer? She hated it. It made her furious.
So Jo Sua went to a girls' high school. No boys, she figured, and the rumors about her would stop. Fortunately, she was right. She still had looks that bordered on unreal, but in a place full of nothing but girls there was less reason for anyone to envy her or tear her down.
Thanks to good friends, her cynical personality slowly turned ordinary. And little by little a fantasy grew up around the romance she used to despise, because her girls'-school friends sang about dating every single day.
"God, I want to kiss a ridiculously hot guy."
"Ahaha, you're insane. Why would a ridiculously hot guy kiss you?"
"I want to date too. Six-one, face like Ji Eunho."
"I don't care if he's a little short, as long as his face is genius-level. Oh, and the body has to be good."
"What about you, Sua?"
"Me? Hmm. Someone mature."
Boys her own age were a no. All they did was pull dangerous stunts, and she had no interest in a guy whose mental age was low. If she was going to date, she wanted someone older—old enough that her friends wouldn't seethe with envy. Seven years, at least.
Then the second semester of her junior year arrived, and the feeling that senior year was right on top of her hit all at once. From then on she buried herself in studying hard enough to forget romance and every other feeling. It was the season when she had to. A year and a half blurred past without her quite knowing how she'd lived it, and then she sat the college entrance exam.
Her score came out exactly as hard as she'd worked. A four-year university in Seoul. Not a bad result. Unlike her friends, who were already out playing, she started a part-time job the moment the exam ended. Having finished the test, she could leave school before noon, and that made it possible.
"It's finally over!"
"Let's travel over winter break! Travel! How about Japan?"
"Sorry. I have to go earn my tuition. I already found a job."
Her family wasn't so poor they were scraping the bottom of the pot. It wasn't comfortable, either. Her life was hers to carry. Her parents had always said it: they would prepare for their own old age, so from twenty on she was to stand on her own. They had no room to spare. Her older brother and her older sister had already found their own ways to survive. Now it was her turn.
And at the luxury counter of a department store, the part-time job she'd taken on to make money, she met her first love.
"What, first time working?"
"I-I'm sorry."
The customer had asked for item A, and she'd brought item B by mistake. It wasn't a serious error. Apologize, go back, bring the right one. The problem was that the customer was a jin-sang, the kind of abusive shopper who treated people like prey. Somewhere in her mid-thirties, she burned with jealousy toward Jo Sua, who was younger and prettier than she was.
"Sorry fixes it? Are you looking down on me right now? I told you to bring the Rocler line. So what's your intention, showing up with a line several tiers below that? Huh?"
It was the first jin-sang she had ever faced. The delinquents she'd met as a kid didn't even compare. She had never had one person drive another like they meant to kill them. The customer jabbed a finger and raised her voice, and Jo Sua froze, unable to do a thing.
That was when Kim Taeyoung stepped in.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Our employee hasn't been with us long, so it seems there was a mistake. I'll take care of you myself. Sua, go wait in the back. I'll see you in a bit."
He said it as if he meant to scold her once the customer was gone. Jo Sua went into the break room with a dark face and waited for him. He came in after handling the jin-sang cleanly. She had braced for a reprimand. What she heard was something gentle.
"Sua. You know that saying? You don't have to bother picking up trash."
"Sorry...?"
"Don't give meaning to the things a jin-sang spits out. What they say is garbage. Trash dumped anywhere along the street. You don't have to bend down and collect it. You're not a trash can. Understand?"
"Ah... yes."
It was nothing more than a small comfort. To Jo Sua it landed with far too much weight. After that, Kim Taeyoung started to catch at her attention—what he'd worn in that day, what he ate for lunch, what he did after work. Little curiosities, one after another.
And every time she made a mistake, the way he covered for her made her start to like him. A mature man, a man she could trust and lean on. Nothing at all like the boys her own age.
It was first love. First love had found her. The feeling that had been growing by degrees swelled, in a moment she failed to notice, past anything she could hold. What should she do? Confess when winter break was nearing its end. She settled on that. If she confessed and got rejected, she'd be too ashamed to look him in the face. So she nursed the feeling and waited for winter break to end.
"I hear Taeyoung hyung is quitting."
Then news dropped like a thunderbolt.
"What? Assistant Manager, is that true?"
"Yeah. I heard he's already finished talking it over with headquarters."
"Wh-why would he quit all of a sudden...?"
"How would I know. But are you going to be okay, Sua?"
"What?"
"Never mind. Hyung's mind is set. I don't think we can stop him from leaving. Still, I'll at least put a farewell party together."
She had thought there was still plenty of time. All at once there was a deadline. She went looking for Kim Taeyoung at once.
"Manager. Are you really resigning?"
"Looks that way. Didn't think I'd be out of here before you. Haha."
He laughed, easy and shameless. Should she tell him how she felt, even now? But she wasn't ready at all.
"Ah... yes."
In the end Jo Sua couldn't say a thing, and had to answer with an awkward smile. The farewell party was the same. Because she was still a minor, luck somehow left the two of them alone. Even then, her mouth wouldn't open.
She was scared. Terrified. What if she confessed and he turned her down? Wouldn't she lose even the relationship they had now? She knew that if she never handed him her heart, he would never know. She knew that what they had would thin with time. Confessing a first love was still not an easy thing.
Time passed. Even as it passed, her feelings for Kim Taeyoung didn't shrink at all. Then something happened. Section Chief Yoo Baekhyeon—head of fashion, or was it overseas? An unpleasant older man either way. Even Jo Sua, long since calloused to men swarming her, couldn't easily shake this jin-sang off. She didn't humor him with a smile. She shut him down cold, in one-word answers, and he still oozed closer. Kim Taeyoung gave that man a lesson he wouldn't forget.
She didn't know how it had happened, only that Chief Baek had gone to his knees and apologized to Kim Taeyoung. He looked incredible. In that instant Kim Taeyoung was a prince on a white horse, and the feelings piled so deep inside her that she couldn't endure them a second longer.
"Manager!"
She followed Kim Taeyoung as he left the sales floor.
"C-could we talk for a second?"
There were too many people around. She meant to take him somewhere quiet and confess. Before Kim Taeyoung could even answer, someone slipped an arm through his.
"Found you!"
The arm through his was perfectly natural, as if they were lovers. And the woman was stunning—a beautiful face, and a figure that was something else entirely. Pretty enough that if Sua had met her off the clock, she would have wanted to become friends.
He had a girlfriend? She was certain he'd said he didn't, not long ago. Maybe it had happened in that short a span. In that moment, Jo Sua's world collapsed.
"Sua. What is it?"
"No, it's nothing.... Thank you for today.... I'll get going...."