I Just Wanted Someone Who Loves Me
“Mm~. Does he really have to be some kind of prince?”
“My friend… my friend’s been real free with guys all this time. She wants to meet a man who’ll treat her like she’s precious and actually love her.”
Hui-gyeong began sinking into her own worries and unease.
Gyeong-ae had meant to tease her a little, but she decided to listen seriously, as a mother, to her daughter’s confession.
“I kept going for guys who were different from Dad—bold, strong-looking types. I’d throw myself at anyone who seemed that way, start dating them, and then just get dumped over and over.”
“…!”
“Mom, you know? If a girl’s even halfway pretty or has a little charm, dating is stupid easy. If nothing else works, you just use your body.”
As if under hypnosis, Hui-gyeong stared blankly ahead and calmly unraveled her past.
Hearing her daughter’s raw honesty for the first time left Gyeong-ae tense as well.
Still, she never let a single word slip past her.
“I really poured everything into treating them right, but the guys all left saying I was too easy, that they were sick of me. That’s how tired of me they got—not one of them ever called again after that.”
“Guess they only saw my body first and got bored of everything after.”
“He was the same. At first he reacted to my body. Of course I put up walls. There were a bunch of reasons, but more than anything I thought he wasn’t a strong guy. Well, even if he had been, there wasn’t much I could’ve done about it.”
“The start was the worst. He called me a slut and I hit him.”
“It was obvious he was after my body just like the others, but whenever I said no you could see the gears turning in his head, trying to figure out how to talk me around. And when I shut him down hard he’d just wilt, and that was kind of cute. That’s… how it started, I think.”
Slowly sorting through the days gone by, Hui-gyeong realized something anew and repeated the same words.
“Yeah. These feelings… that’s how they started.”
“Just having someone listen to me and think about my problems was so moving… That fact alone made me feel so good. It made me feel like he was doing it for me. But looking back, that’s just normal for any ordinary crush or couple, right?”
Tears fell.
They didn’t even well up; they simply slid down, empty and endless.
Just like the string of useless relationships Hui-gyeong had thrown away.
“Up till now I wasn’t really dating anyone. I gave real affection, but the guys just enjoyed my body and left. I thought I’d been careful about who I dated, but all I did was skip one-night stands. Turns out I really was a slut.”
Tears dropped onto the sofa.
Gyeong-ae waited for Hui-gyeong to spit everything out.
Or maybe Gyeong-ae herself had frozen solid, facing her daughter’s true heart for the first time, and simply couldn’t move.
“So I wanted to try a relationship that was actually for me. That’s why I kept him hanging, teasing him, telling him that if he liked me he had to hold back and show me every bit of his affection. But maybe I went too far? At the end he couldn’t take it and jumped me, and that was so disappointing.”
Yet that excessively honest confession only planted a new wariness in Gyeong-ae.
Trapped inside her tears, Hui-gyeong never noticed the way her mother’s eyes hardened for a moment.
Nor what kind of ripple that would set off.
“But he was the first person who ever treated me like that, so my feelings for him had already grown as big as they could, and I left the door open. Ever since then it’s been awkward as hell. I don’t know what to do. Yeah. That’s my problem.”
“You want it to work out?”
“I want it to work out.”
“And what do you think you have to do for that~?”
An obvious question.
“I think he has to treat me better. I can’t make the same mistakes as all the other guys.”
An obvious wrong answer.
Gyeong-ae gave a bitter smile.
The bitter taste filling her mouth at the realization that her daughter was just a girl whose body had grown up was almost unbearable.
But she was an adult, so she decided to offer sincere advice.
“You want to feel thoroughly loved, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the other way around—what does he want?”
“…My body, probably.”
“Really? You sure about that?”
Just as Hui-gyeong was about to answer without hesitation, that day’s conversation rose in her mind.
A date.
Huh…?
I’m gonna take you on a date and snap a ton of couple photos with you.
The wish he would grant if she managed two weeks of abstinence.
She’d said it half-prepared for anything, yet Gyeong-hun had wished for something she never saw coming.
A date like a real couple.
To Hui-gyeong a date had always meant a motel or someone’s house.
That was why Gyeong-hun’s wish had hit her like such a shock.
“Maybe not a hundred percent.”
So her words trailed off.
“Hui-gyeong, did you properly tell him what you want~?”
“Yeah, I said it clearly last time.”
“Then did you properly listen to what he wants?”
“Uh… he said he wanted to go on a date?”
Our daughter really isn’t as sharp as her oppa.
Gyeong-ae sighed inwardly.
“You told him, ‘I want you to be this kind of man,’ right?”
“Something like that?”
“Then shouldn’t you also hear from him what kind of woman he wants you to be toward him?”
But the mother’s intention twisted and stabbed into her daughter like a blade.
“Me? What about me? I’m just the neighborhood slut. Easy girl. What kind of woman? You know perfectly well, Mom. You’re ashamed of me too!”
“Hui-gyeong, that’s not what I—”
“The whole neighborhood already knows I’m that kind of girl, that kind of bitch, so what kind of woman is he supposed to hope for? This is just… just…! He has to accept me the way I am! If he doesn’t like it he can go meet some other bitch!”
“Hui-gyeong!”
“Even though I’m this kind of girl…! I still want to meet someone who loves me!”
The tears that had stopped burst out again.
This time, though, they clung to Hui-gyeong’s long lashes together with regret.
“I shouldn’t have lived like that…!”
Sadly, that regret wasn’t something she could simply shake off and drop; it was karma she had to swallow whole.
“But I can’t take any of it back now.”
“I’m not telling you to take it back. I’m not telling you to decide what kind of girl you are. I was saying you should listen, as a man and woman who like each other, to how he wants to be treated.”
“That only comes after he accepts me first.”
The way Hui-gyeong spoke so firmly filled Gyeong-ae with deep worry.
The classic stubbornness of a twenty-something whose body had outgrown her mind—stubbornness disguised as conviction—wrapped around her daughter.
A young daughter wouldn’t know that predicting right and wrong is just stubbornness, and only looking back afterward is true judgment.
Just as Gyeong-ae herself had once been.
“If you don’t talk it out together, one side always ends up hurt. Body or heart.”
“I’ve been hurt too! He called me a slut! Did you even hear what I said?”
“That’s exactly why I’m saying you should talk about those things with each other…”
“Stop twisting my words however’s convenient for you!”
She shot to her feet so hard the cup toppled and green tea spilled across the floor.
The cooled tea was quietly announcing that this conversation needed to end.
“And what about you, Mom? Did all that great talking get you anywhere with Dad?”
And no matter where you go, conversations in families like this, sadly, almost always end badly.
“What…?”
“Before you lecture me, go talk to Dad first. You can’t even do it yourself!”
In truth, few beings listen to each other less than family.
Maybe that’s why even calm beginnings turn fierce by the end.
In the end, Gyeong-ae exploded too.
Furious, she fixed Hui-gyeong with eyes gone cold and still and snapped,
“You take after your father—shoving ahead without a thought for the other person.”
“What?!”
“And in the end the only one left hurt and struggling is the other person alone.”
“I have plenty of wounds too… I was just telling you that a second ago…!”
To the devastated Hui-gyeong, Gyeong-ae drove the final nail.
“Right—up until a second ago you only talked about yourself. Make sure you pass that on to your friend: you can’t do that.”
“…….”
“…….”
“…How can you say that to your own daughter?”
“You too…”
“I hate you, Mom…”
Hui-gyeong cut her off, went into her room, and locked the door.
She slumped against the wall and collapsed; beside her, on the neatly folded blanket, lay the pillow Gyeong-hun used.
“Oppa… hic…”
Instinctively she pulled the pillow into her arms, and the sorrow she had been holding back finally burst free. Hui-gyeong sobbed out loud.
“Hwaaaah! Oppa…. Oppaaa…!”
The more the pillow soaked under her face, the tighter she clutched it while she cried.
“I miss you so much right now… hic! If it were you, Oppa, you wouldn’t leave me like this. When are you coming home…. Hwaaang—!”
Hearing her daughter’s sobs from the living room, Gyeong-ae, still unable to close her own wounds, let a single tear fall.
“Without you this house is a complete mess…. Gyeong-hun, I really can’t do this without you…. Please come home soon…. I’m so tired…”
How ironic—the one person who could wipe the tears of the two crying women was the very one who had left to protect the family and was nowhere near them.
“I told you we should just pull out right away.”
Blaming my friend was useless; there was no stuffing the spilled mess back into the bottle.
“Didn’t think there’d be this much product. I only wanted a rough idea of the scale, but damn…”
My friend regretted it too, late as it was, but the past couldn’t be rewritten.
“Y-you… wh-what the hell are you?”
A big guy whose forearms alone had dozens of needle holes stuttered while pointing at us.
Choi Jun-hyeok, this bastard’s got nothing but thugs.
He put a heavy junkie in charge of the product?
The thought hit me that this was a guy with neither system nor plan.
“Hey, which one of you is Choi Jun-hyeok?”
“…?!”
Gyeong-jun must have lost his mind, throwing Choi Jun-hyeok’s name out in the open like that.
The atmosphere turned vicious in an instant.
One by one, guys gripping tools started crowding in.
“J-Jun-hyeok never once came here. A-and if some bastard shows up calling him by name, he’s always after the g-goods, so we g-get rid of him.”
…Was this for real? He managed his own stash this sloppily?
“Hey, you’re great at gathering intel, but why’s the cleanup always this rough?”
“Hell if I know. I’ll reflect after we survive.”
Me blaming him again, Gyeong-jun tensing up.
“D-die!”
And the junkies charging.
We’d deliberately put on the look of troublemakers, but the clubs and blades flashing back and forth meant one wrong hit and a fall would get us stomped to death right there.
I had no choice but to take the lead.
“We’re breaking through! Follow me!”
“Watch it, you idiot!”
At Gyeong-jun’s warning I turned my head—only for a steel pipe already swinging straight at my face.