The Monster's First Gift
The employee kept her head bowed in apology, deferential to the point of discomfort, in answer to my unspoken question.
"To be honest, when I saw you earlier, I had an impolite thought… that the gentleman didn't quite suit the woman who came in with him. I sincerely apologize."
"Ah… umm…"
I'd vaguely expected it, but I never imagined she would actually say it out loud and apologize for it, so I found myself at a loss for how to respond. I shot a furtive glance at Seongha, wary of something off about the whole exchange, but she was simply watching the employee with an unreadable expression. Right… even so, there's no way she could have done anything in that brief a moment.
"It's fine… I can see how you might think that."
"I'm deeply sorry. As an act of contrition, we'll provide both phones free of charge."
Uuuuuhh??
Do people usually go this far…?
"No, you really don't have to—"
"If that feels too burdensome, then please allow us to offer the employee discount instead. I'm begging you. I want to earn your forgiveness in whatever way I can."
"Well… yes… I mean… that's more than enough…"
I couldn't tell whether I should be pleased or pretend to be angry, but when someone pressed this hard, refusing started to feel like the greater rudeness.
"Have you chosen your phones?"
"Yes."
Now the employee asked with the world's friendliest smile, her voice so gently modulated it was almost overwhelming. Since I'd already had a model in mind, I named it, then turned to Seongha.
"Seongha, have you decided?"
"Mm-hm. I'll get the same one as you, oppa."
"You're sure that's okay?"
"What, don't you want me to?"
She asked in a tone that was just slightly put out. What man alive could say no to a woman who came at him like that? Not that it was ever a matter of wanting or not wanting in the first place.
"I want us to match. As a couple."
She smiled softly and, with calculated casualness, threaded her fingers through mine — and my heart kicked into gear without my permission.
"What's wrong, oppa?"
Peeking her head sideways, she studied my expression with eyes tilted up at me, and those bright, quick eyes seemed to know exactly what was stirring inside me. Before I could get a word out, she squeezed my hand tighter and pressed herself so close against me I could feel her warmth against my chest, and my heartbeat only grew more insistent.
Ghk… the longer time goes on, the better she seems to know exactly how to read me.
Her calculated moves were as sly as a fox's, but cuteness and beauty alone were enough to make me cave, helplessly, every single time. Ah… men really are pitiful creatures.
"N-nothing… ahem! Then we'll take these, please."
"Oppa."
I was fishing my card out of my jacket to hand it over when Seongha suddenly called to me.
"Hm?"
"Why are you using that card?"
"…Ah."
Understanding what she meant, I froze for a moment, flustered. The truth was, a few days earlier Seongha had handed me a card and told me to spend as much as I wanted. The limit was unknowable — according to her, there was enough on it that I could burn tens of millions of won a day and still be spending it years from now.
I did want to ask where such an astronomical sum came from, but if she was keeping the promise she'd made with me, I decided there was no particular reason to pry. Still, girlfriend or not, spending someone else's money left me with a faint resistance to it. How should I put it… like I was racking up a debt.
So I hadn't used the card she gave me, and barring some special occasion, I didn't intend to. Seongha found this unsatisfactory, but she took it as my conviction and respected it.
"It's just… I want to be the one buying this for you. You're always the one giving to me. Don't overthink it — just think of it as a gift."
When I put it that carefully, in roundabout words, Seongha blinked at me several times and then murmured with a bittersweet smile, "No, it's the opposite — I'm the one who's only ever received from you… but… if that's what you want, oppa… okay. I understand."
"Thank you for understanding."
After that, as the payment went through on my card, the employee tucked in free gifts under every pretext she could invent. No exaggeration — the freebies alone were easily worth more than the two phones combined.
"Is this what it's like being a big-corporation employee, apologizing and spoiling people all at once? Honestly, the world never stops being a mystery."
I muttered to myself as I pawed through the mountain of freebies stuffed into my jacket. Seongha was staring at her new phone the way someone stares at a thing they've never laid eyes on before.
Anyone would get swept up buying the latest model, brand new out of the box, and I figured Seongha was no exception. Which meant that buying it with my own money had actually meant something — and my mood lifted along with hers.
"You look happy."
"…Do I? I suppose… yes, I suppose I do. I'm happy. Happy enough that I'm trying to remember whether I have ever, since coming into this world, felt this good."
Speaking in that flat, monster's cadence, Seongha cradled the phone carefully in both hands, a soft, contented smile settling on her face as she said, matter-of-factly, "This is the first time anyone has ever given me a gift. That must be why I feel so strange…"
"Oh… really?"
The woman who had lived what sounded like a very long time was saying she had never once received a gift in her life — and my voice rose in spite of itself.
"Thank you, Hyun-ok. This will be my treasure from now on. I will keep it until the day I die."
The monster looked up from the phone, fixed her gaze squarely on me, and broke into a wide, honest smile — startlingly unlike the monster she was. It wasn't the Seongha smile at all, and yet it was so unexpectedly pure that I felt tears pricking at my eyes.
Maybe because I wanted to hold onto that innocent smile for as long as I could, my brain played a trick on me, as if time itself had begun to slow. In that decelerating moment, I felt as though I'd glimpsed some fragment of what lived inside her — inside Seongha, inside the monster, inside her — as she marveled at the world with the purest, most unblemished wonder she'd ever known.
"Are you… feeling unwell somewhere, Hyun-ok?"
When I just stood there staring at her, mouth hanging open, the monster asked with a worried look. Gathering myself at last, I answered with a strange smile that I couldn't tell was joy or tears.
"No, it's just… you were being so lovely I couldn't stop looking at you."
The instant the words left my mouth, the monster's expression vanished, freezing hard and stiff. Realizing too late that I'd delivered a line so saccharine it made me want to gag, I scrambled to salvage the situation.
"That came out kind of cringy, huh…"
"I love you too, oppa."
The monster — abandoning her own natural speech — borrowed Seongha's voice and returned the confession word for word. Relieved, I closed the mouth I'd opened to paper things over and managed a gentle smile instead. And it occurred to me that maybe she'd switched back to Seongha's voice not to gloss over the moment, but to hide her own embarrassment.
Technically we'd left the house under the banner of a date, but beyond buying the phones we had no particular destination in mind, so the next stop became a dilemma. Seongha would have said she didn't care either way, but I'd gone to the trouble of dressing up, and heading straight home like this sat uneasily with me.
"Want to go see a movie, oppa?"
As we walked together while I deliberated, Seongha made the first move.
"A movie? Oh, that works. Yeah, let's do that. Come to think of it… it has been a while since I saw one. Wonder what's good these days…"
"There's… a movie I want to see. Could we maybe watch that one?"
I was pulling out my brand-new phone to look it up when Seongha — uncharacteristically — spoke up, careful and hesitant. Her rare offer of an opinion had me beaming, and I clapped my hands together in agreement.
"Oh, seriously? Sure, let's watch that one."
"Thank you, oppa. Since you bought me the phone, I'll get the tickets and the popcorn. Let me do at least that much. Or else… I'll get mad?"
"Haha, okay, okay."
When she narrowed her eyes at me in playful menace, a warm laugh burst out of me. This is nice. It feels like a real relationship. Even if Seongha was only performing this for my benefit, I loved this boyfriend-and-girlfriend atmosphere more than anything.
We stopped at a nearby theater, bought our tickets and popcorn, and slipped into the auditorium right on schedule. Walking into a theater for the first time in ages, I felt something like the flutter of childhood come rushing back — and knowing nothing whatsoever about the film we were seeing only sharpened my anticipation.
We settled side by side into a couple's seat in the very back row. It was a weekday, I suppose, because only a scattering of people occupied the seats, few enough to count on my fingers. For some reason it felt like we'd rented out the whole theater — I nearly fancied myself a millionaire.
The movie soon began, and as the story unfolded, I came to understand exactly why Seongha had chosen this film. It was about a parasitic organism from outer space that took over human hosts, multiplying its own kind, conquering the Earth piece by piece.
Good lord…
What played out on the screen was nothing more than a story inside the medium of film — but to me, it was a tale so close to reality it raised the hair on my arms. You could have called it a documentary and been half right.
Watching the audience take in a fictional story as pure fiction, enjoying the movie on its own terms, I felt a bitter irony settle over me. If I stood up right now and shouted that the woman sitting beside me was something like the parasites in that film, what would these people make of Seongha and me?
…They'd take me for a lunatic, no question. Not that it would ever come to that.
I glanced sideways. In the darkness, Seongha was watching the screen with grave, unblinking focus. She was putting popcorn into her mouth, but the motion was so eerily rhythmic it brought a machine to mind. She wasn't eating the popcorn because she wanted it — she was moving her hand to imitate what a human looks like, eating popcorn in a movie theater.
I let it go and turned back to the screen. Sometime later, I felt a hand groping around near my thigh — and then gently brushing against the spot itself.
"Ah — sorry, oppa. I thought the drink was there."
Seongha apologized in a low voice with a thin smile, but she couldn't hide how deliberate it had been. There was no reason for her to be drinking anything in the first place, and a woman whose night vision was dozens of times sharper than a human's, feeling around in the dark for a drink? None of it made sense.
"Oh — no, you were… right, actually. The drink is there."
At first I didn't grasp what she meant. Then I saw where her eyes had landed — fixed squarely between my legs — and the meaning reached me a beat too late.
"Your… delicious drink is right there, isn't it."
Seongha — no, the monster — narrowed her eyes, and in the darkness they gleamed a vivid, freshly spilled red.