I Got a Fiancée
I was helping run our class event that day.
While my classmates decorated the gym, I was tidying up the boxes and leftover decorations scattered across the floor. Since I wasn't doing anything remotely conspicuous, I figured nothing would happen.
"Um, Dohyun...?"
At the voice behind me, I turned around.
A girl from my class was standing there with her hands clasped together. We'd exchanged words a few times before, but we were never particularly close. Yet unlike usual, her face was flushed a deep red.
Wait. Isn't this how that always starts...?
"It might come out of nowhere, but..."
Hold on—!
"I... I like you...!"
In an instant, my mind went blank white. There had been no sign she was about to confess, and I'd been as careful as I could about keeping my distance from people.
So when had it started?
No—not the time to be wondering that.
The moment someone confessed to me, the curse would activate.
Screeeech—!
Somewhere overhead, metal began to twist and groan. I looked around and saw the lighting rig on the gym ceiling tilting to one side. A bolt had sheared free of its mount and dropped to the floor, and the steel wire holding the light stretched taut like a bowstring.
And directly beneath it stood the girl who had just confessed to me, utterly oblivious to what was happening.
"Move!"
She looked up, but frozen with fear, she couldn't make her body move.
As if mocking me, the last remaining wire snapped, and the light fixture came down.
Damn it—!
I threw myself at her, shoving her shoulders with everything I had, but there was no dodging the fixture myself. A crushing impact slammed into my shoulder and the world flipped upside down. I tried to breathe, but my chest felt pinned shut, refusing to work.
Screams and shouts erupted around me.
"Dohyun!"
The girl was crying, but I couldn't see any serious injuries on her. Thank god. As long as I was the only one hurt this time, it would be over.
"Dohyun, are you okay? Dohyun!"
Her voice was growing fainter. "S-someone get a teacher! Hurry!" My vision slowly went dark. The last thing left in my mind, all the way to the end, wasn't the pain or the fear—it was the curse.
The curse that caused an accident every single time someone harbored feelings for me and tried to convey them. Anyone would call it nonsense.
But this was far from the first such accident.
In sixth grade, a boy who was about to confess to me tumbled down a flight of stairs. After that, a girl's bike broke down on our walk home from school, and a flowerpot nearly fell on a senior's head just as she was handing me a letter.
There were plenty of other accidents too bizarre to put into words.
At first my parents wrote it all off as coincidence, but once it kept happening, they had me take part in religious ceremonies and even try talismans. Nothing changed. The light fixture incident made it more than ten accidents already. The police and the school concluded it was due to the gym's aging facilities, but I didn't believe it for a second.
Because the cause of every accident came from me.
So I changed how I dealt with people. When a girl tried to talk to me, I gave only the answers necessary and slipped away. If someone gave me a gift, I handed it back on the spot. The moment it seemed like anyone might get close, I drew the line first.
Naturally, I didn't earn myself a good reputation. People called me blunt, said I was stuck-up, said I looked down on everyone. I knew some of them badmouthed me behind my back, too.
It didn't matter. It was better to have people hate me than to have them get hurt.
There was one time I told the truth. That I wasn't avoiding her because I disliked her, but because I didn't want her to get hurt. No one believed me. After that, I never told anyone my secret again.
And despite all that effort, an incident happened once more.
Even while I was in the hospital, the girl came to visit me again and again, and I turned her away politely each time. It wasn't her fault, and the curse might trigger all over again. In the end, after my discharge, I blocked her number and decided I couldn't attend the same school anymore. It wasn't just her, either—more and more kids kept approaching me out of concern.
So I chose to spend my high school years in the countryside, where my maternal grandparents lived. My parents opposed it at first, but I dug in my heels. I didn't want to get caught up in another accident.
Haewol Village, was it? I'd heard it was a quiet place with few students and hardly any incidents. Almost no one there would know me, so all I had to do was keep everyone at arm's length from the start.
Apparently I'd visited a few times during childhood vacations, but I had almost no memory of it. I must have been too young and simply forgotten. The past didn't matter anyway. All I had to do was attend school quietly and graduate.
The bus wound along the twisting mountain road for a long while. Through the window, the tall buildings thinned out one by one, giving way to rice paddies and farm fields.
"Next stop: Haewol Village Community Hall."
At the announcement, I rose from my seat. The moment I slung my bag over one shoulder, the spot that hadn't fully healed gave a faint throb, but I ignored it.
Stepping off the bus, I felt the cold wind brush against my cheek. My grandmother was waiting at the stop.
"Dohyun, it's been so long."
"Have you been well, Grandma?"
"Of course. Our grandson's grown even taller since last I saw him."
Grandma stroked my arm a few times, clearly delighted, then spotted the bag on my shoulder and immediately reached out for it. "Give it here. Let Grandma carry it."
I angled my body away from her hands. "It's fine, I've got it."
"Your shoulder hasn't healed yet."
"It's almost completely better now."
Grandma looked up at me with a disapproving frown. "This old lady drinks nothing but good fresh air, so I'm still perfectly healthy, you know."
"Even so, no."
Grandma laughed, saying I was as stubborn as ever. And it was true that both my grandparents were healthy—they'd hardly ever set foot in a hospital, and I often heard that they traveled together all the time.
I hope I can stay far away from accidents while I'm living here too, I thought.
"Where's Grandpa?"
"He's home. A friend came over and they're playing janggi. It might be a bit noisy, so bear with it."
"That's fine."
As I walked deeper into the village, a tile-roofed house wrapped in low stone walls came into view. Even though it was scenery I was seeing for the first time, strangely, it didn't feel entirely unfamiliar. Beside the front gate stood an old persimmon tree. A single red thread was tied to the tip of one bare branch, all the leaves long fallen, swaying in the wind. It was nothing—a trivial little thing—and yet my eyes kept drifting back to it.
"You visited here when you were little. Remember?"
"Not really."
"Well, you were just a baby back then. Over ten years ago now."
Following Grandma into the yard, I heard the sharp clack of janggi pieces coming from the wooden veranda. "That's check, my friend." "What check? There's still a way out." "Take that path and it's checkmate." "Honestly, you've gotten even more ornery since you came back from the hospital."
Huh...? That voice—?
There was no mistaking a voice I'd heard every single day until just a month ago.
On the veranda, my grandfather sat across a janggi board from a white-haired old man.
"Mister?"
At my voice, the old man looked up. His eyes went round when he recognized me. "Oh? Dohyun?"
He was the gentleman who had shared a hospital room with me during my stay a month ago.
My grandfather looked back and forth between us. "What's this? You two know each other?"
The old man sprang up from his seat. "So this was the grandson you kept talking about?"
"That's him."
"Well, I never! What are the odds!"
Delighted, he came over and clapped me hard on the back. "Ah—ow, that hurts."
"Oh, come on. You survived getting flattened by a light fixture. Don't play weak with me."
He was as willful as ever. Back at the hospital, he'd been a patient who made a point of never listening to a word the doctors and nurses said. The moment he felt the least bit cooped up, he'd try to wander out of the room, and while everyone told him to rest, he'd climb the stairs alone anyway.
One day he slipped out of his room, complaining his chest felt tight. Worried, I followed him and found him collapsed partway down the stairwell, gasping, unable to draw a proper breath. I called a nurse right away, and thankfully we averted disaster. He brushed it off—just got a little winded, nothing to it—but the doctor said a few minutes' delay could have been dangerous.
That was how we grew close. To be precise, it was closer to him talking at me one-sidedly while I grudgingly humored him. Above all, he insisted I call him "Mister" instead of Grandpa—young at heart, you see, and young was best.
"You leave the hospital without so much as a phone call, and then I run into you here of all places."
"You're the one who never reached out, Mister."
"A young whippersnapper should be the one checking in on his elders."
"You're the one who said we should part coolly."
"Still never let me win an argument, do you?"
He laughed cheerfully, and seeing that, I found myself smiling too.
"You two met at the hospital?" my grandfather asked, and the old man slung an arm around my shoulder. "This one took pretty good care of me while I was in there."
"You said you were bored. I was just someone to talk to."
"Listen to him. Mr. Shy over here."
Ignoring my words entirely, the old man turned to my grandfather. By then the janggi board had been pushed off to one side.
"Had I known he was your grandson, I'd have asked sooner."
"Asked what?"
"I told you, didn't I? That I met a young man at the hospital I took quite a liking to. Responsible and kind—not like kids these days."
My grandfather looked at me and broke into a wide grin. It was the expression of a man who had just discovered something very amusing. "Ohh, so that's who you meant."
Between the two old men, a conversation passed back and forth that only I couldn't follow.
I did not have a good feeling about this.
Then my grandfather asked, "Dohyun, you're not seeing anyone right now, are you?"
"No."
Even Grandma was smiling at me meaningfully now. Apparently all three of them were having a conversation that excluded me entirely.
"Why do you ask?"
"Oh, nothing. Just curious."
People who were "just curious" didn't wear expressions like that. My unease swelled, but pressing them for answers clearly wouldn't get me a straight one. I adjusted the strap of my bag on my shoulder. I'd been in the countryside for less than an hour, and I was already exhausted.
...
The next morning, the old man showed up at our house. "Dohyun, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to."
Behind him stood a girl who looked about my age.
The first thing that caught my eye was her silver hair, falling straight down to her waist. Beneath it sat blue eyes like a winter lake. From her pale skin to her finely cut features, she looked like a doll crafted with meticulous care—though on that beautiful face, warmth was strangely hard to find.
And yet, for some reason, she didn't feel completely like a stranger. I had the odd sensation that I'd seen those blue eyes somewhere before.
Our gazes met briefly, but she said nothing. The old man glanced between the two of us and smiled in evident satisfaction.
"Well? What do you think?"
"About what?"
"Isn't she pretty?"
"Grandpa...!"
The girl cut him off in a low voice, and only then did I guess who she was. For our entire shared hospital stay, the old man had bragged about his granddaughter at every opportunity: brilliant at her studies, great at sports, pretty as a picture, perfectly polite to her elders. Once the granddaughter bragging began, it wouldn't end until a nurse came around with medication.
Our Seol-ah, you see—
The name had been drilled into my ears until it might as well have been tattooed there: Baek Seol-ah.
"Could it be..."
When I asked carefully, the old man seized the opening and introduced her at once. "That's right. My granddaughter."
He tapped the girl lightly on the shoulder, brimming with pride. Baek Seol-ah brushed his hand aside and gave me a small bow. "Nice to meet you. I'm Baek Seol-ah."
"I'm Lee Dohyun."
"I've heard a lot about you from my grandfather."
That made the old man laugh happily. "I've told Seol-ah plenty about you too! Young people who share my tastes are hard to come by, I tell you!"
Baek Seol-ah's blue eyes turned to me again. "I heard you went through a lot looking after my grandfather. He must have been a bother, so thank you for helping him."
Despite her cold appearance, her speech and manner were impeccably proper. I could see why he liked to brag about her—but that aside, I had no intention of getting close to her.
Just then, the old man looked back and forth between us with a self-satisfied nod. "I've been thinking for a while now."
"About what?"
That deepening smile struck me as ominous. "I decided you'd be just the person to entrust our Seol-ah to."
It took me a few seconds to process his words. Baek Seol-ah's blue eyes narrowed, too—apparently this was news to her as well.
"Grandpa? What are you talking about?"
"You two will be attending the same school, you're the same age, and our families have known each other for years. What better match could there be?"
Alarm bells went off in my head. I'm pretty sure I just heard the word "match."
"Hold on a second."
I hurried to interject, but the old man ignored me completely. My grandparents made no move to stop him either, just watched with interested expressions. They were all in it together, apparently.
"So the two of you—get engaged."
Engaged. Me, the guy who moved to the countryside specifically to avoid getting entangled with girls, engaged within a single day of arriving. How did that make any sense?
"No, thank you."
"Absolutely not."
My answer and hers landed in perfect unison. Far from being flustered, the old man nodded, looking pleased. "Look at that, your hearts already agree."
"In what way, exactly?"
I'd noticed it back at the hospital: the man had a real talent for hearing only what he wanted to hear.
Deciding that persuading me was a lost cause, he turned to Baek Seol-ah instead. "Seol-ah, haven't you been complaining about how exhausting those bothersome boys have been lately?"
"Grandpa! That has nothing to do with this!"
Baek Seol-ah's expression stayed perfectly calm, but the tips of her ears had gone faintly red.
"Nothing to do with it, sure. Once word gets around that Dohyun is your fiancé, those pests will give up."
"Even so, getting engaged to someone I've just met is ridiculous."
You tell him, I thought, mentally nodding along. At least there was one sane person in this room.
"Seol-ah, Dohyun is a boy you can trust."
"Don't push this on me."
She didn't yield an inch. The old man gazed at her quietly for a moment—then suddenly clutched at his chest.
"Khh! Khh-khh!"
The man who'd been talking perfectly normally seconds ago doubled over, coughing violently.
"Aigoo... I don't suppose I have many days left in me."
I'd seen him genuinely unable to breathe at the hospital, so even a stranger could have told that cough was pure theater. "It's this old man's final request," he said, even adding trembling hands to the performance as he looked at her. "Before I die, I want to see my one and only granddaughter fall in love. Just once."
"Every time things go badly for you, it's the same speech...!"
But even as she snapped at him, she didn't refuse outright.
Don't tell me she's actually considering it.
A surge of dread made me cut in first. "I've told you this before, haven't I?" I had explained my curse to him once, back at the hospital. There was no way he couldn't understand why I'd made that choice.
As if reading my mind, the old man answered without a flicker of concern. "That's exactly why I'm introducing you to Seol-ah." He fixed me with a serious stare—the same look he'd worn that day I'd told him about the curse. "Our Seol-ah has been lucky since the day she was born. No matter how close she's come to disaster, she's always come out unscathed."
"Don't talk about a person like she's a talisman."
Baek Seol-ah's eyes sharpened. "A talisman? I mean the two of you would do each other good."
He was grinning playfully, but his eyes were inexplicably serious. He genuinely looked like a man who believed she would be safe from my curse.
A lucky girl. Even if that were true, it offered no comfort. Every person caught up in my accidents so far had been an ordinary person living an ordinary life. No matter how good her luck was, the moment she became entangled with me, that could change.
Worse, playing the part of my fiancée would mean sticking by my side at school, day after day. The longer we spent together, the greater the danger became. And even if she never fell for me, other variables could arise. There was no reason to take that risk.
Once again, as if reading my mind, the old man moved first. "How about you at least give it a try?" Then, smiling at Baek Seol-ah, he added, "Just until you graduate—no, even just until the end of this year. Live as each other's fiancé and fiancée. If it turns out you hate it, we'll wipe the slate clean."
"The timeframe isn't the problem."
"Okay."
I turned toward the voice beside me. Seol-ah—the girl I'd thought, until thirty seconds ago, was the only sane person here—was staring at me with a perfectly blank face.
"Didn't you just say no?"
"There's no fighting my grandfather's stubbornness anyway. And if it lets me deal with the people who keep hounding me at school, it's not a bad deal for me either."
Baek Seol-ah took a single step toward me. "Of course, this wouldn't be a real engagement. We'd simply use whatever we each need from the other. Not actually dating—just maintaining the appearance of the relationship."
A fake relationship or a real one—either way, for me, both were the worst possible outcome. "I never agreed to this."
"Weren't you the one who helped my grandfather?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
A faint smile crossed Baek Seol-ah's lips. "Someone that kind surely couldn't turn his back on a girl in trouble."
I was left speechless. That shameless attitude—she really was exactly like the old man.
Apparently, not a single person in this village was on my side. I'd come down to the countryside to avoid entanglement with girls and graduate in peace... and now I had a fiancée.
"Looking forward to working with you, fiancé."
Maybe I should move to a different village.
This is an illustration of Baek Seol-ah, created with AI.