An Unsettling Current
The timing of the broadcast going live was so awkward that it had given the viewers the wrong idea.
“It’s not like that.”
“Hazy just got teased a little, that’s all.”
At this point the viewers had gotten so used to casually tossing out fake-marriage bait that both Sia and I had stopped taking it seriously and just let it pass.
“So what are we even supposed to do now that the stream’s on?”
“...Yeah, good question?”
I let out a sigh at the sight of Sia opening the stream with absolutely no plan at all.
“You got a problem?”
“There’s water over here.”
“Boring.”
“You don’t have a plan either.”
“Hey!”
After that last comment, Sia puffed out her cheeks like she was sulking.
Seeing them swell up so roundly, like a pufferfish I’d seen somewhere before, made me want to poke them and pop the air right out.
“Sia.”
“...”
She turned her head away in a huff, and I decided this was my chance.
I carefully raised my right hand, extended my index finger, and held it a little away from her cheek before calling her again.
“Sia. Look at me.”
“...”
Just as Sia turned away, my finger touched her cheek. The air trapped inside it escaped with a tiny hiss, like a balloon losing its breath.
“Hey.”
“...Huh?”
“Are you messing with me?”
The left eyebrow on Sia’s face twitched.
Worried I might have actually made her angry, I hurried to apologize.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For teasing you.”
“Why don’t you just jab me in the side like you did before?”
“Would that be okay?”
“No! I hate that!”
Sia, who had been scolding me and then suddenly veered off onto a completely different topic, came huffing over and pressed herself right against my side, still clearly annoyed.
For a second I panicked and tried to lean back, but Sia caught my shoulder to stop me.
In an instant, her angry face was right in front of mine. Damn, even when she was mad she was still ridiculously pretty—no, wait, that wasn’t the point.
Meeting that fierce glare made my eyes drop on their own.
“Sorry...”
“If you keep doing that, I’m really going to bite you, you know?”
“Bite? With your mouth?”
“Yeah, I’ll just go ‘nom’ and bite your neck like that.”
But something was strange. At first her eyes had looked genuinely furious, but the more she talked, the more playful they seemed to become.
Suspicious, I slowly lifted my gaze again, and there she was, curling the corners of her mouth as she looked at me.
“Nom!”
Then she raised both hands like a cat showing its claws, but there was no real threat in it at all. If anything, she just looked adorable.
Sia shot me a look that said she’d let me off this once, then returned to her seat.
I’m alive.
Relieved that she hadn’t actually gotten angry, I secretly tried to calm my racing heart.
It was pounding so hard I could even feel it thudding in my throat.
This was the first time I’d ever felt this way, so I was a little flustered, but after taking a few slow breaths, I finally settled down.
“Oh? You were here?”
At the familiar voice, I turned my head. Right in front of the table stood Saengsam and Yura, each holding a glass.
“Hazy’s here too. Hi!”
“H-hello...”
“We said we’d drop the polite stuff!”
We were supposed to ease into it slowly, though...
But Yura clearly wasn’t going to be satisfied until I stopped using honorifics, because she was staring at me with sparkling, expectant eyes.
“Hey, Yura...”
“That’s better!”
Apparently pleased with my casual greeting, Yura nodded. Saengsam, standing right beside her, took one look at that and said to me,
“Do you want to drop them too?”
He held out a hand first, making the offer. Seeing that, Sia apparently thought I might feel pressured and hurried to step in.
“Hey! Hazy gets shy abou—”
“Sure. Nice to meet you.”
“You’re not shy?”
“?”
I replied casually and took Saengsam’s hand, which left Sia staring at me in surprise.
“Wait, weren’t you shy around strangers?”
“Not with guys.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m a born single, so women are kind of hard for me...”
At that, Saengsam and Yura burst out laughing. I’d meant it completely sincerely, too.
Sia, hearing that, looked at me like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing and then shifted her gaze to the chat.
The chat, of course, was also reacting to my confession with a mix of sympathy and laughter.
What could I do? That was just my life.
I decided to accept it.
*
“So it really was completely spontaneous?”
“I told you, I had no idea he’d take it.”
“If that mission money had piled up that much, anyone would’ve taken it.”
A little later, we were talking about the fake marriage broadcast between Saengsam and Yura.
“But even for something that random, the content was pretty solid.”
“We just did everything.”
“Let’s see. On the first day you picked nicknames, on the second day you played the wish-bread game, on the third day...”
“Let’s stop there.”
As we counted the content one by one, Saengsam cut in, clearly begging us to stop. I was a little disappointed, but we decided to leave it there.
“Now that we’ve talked about us, let’s hear about you two.”
“Yeah, are you two actually in a real relationship?”
“Nope.”
“Doesn’t sound like ‘nope.’”
Yura asked again and again, smiling brightly, even after I answered her flat-out that we weren’t.
“Think back to your broadcasts. How was that supposed to be a fake marriage?”
“The broadcast? We just picked nicknames like normal, played games, stuff like that, right?”
“Then I guess I’ll have to spell it out one by one.”
And with that, Yura started dredging up all our old black-history moments.
“The time you drank and did Discord together.”
“Ah.”
“Then the next day, when you did a collab stream.”
“Whoa, come to think of it, that’s when Hazy explained that post about Sia, wasn’t it?”
“Now that I think about it, that happened too.”
Come to think of it, that really did sound a lot less like a normal fake marriage and a lot more like something else. Still, things were fine after that, weren’t they?
“But after that, it was pretty normal, wasn’t it?”
“Normal? That?”
Was it not normal?
“In a normal fake marriage, you don’t scream that you love someone in your tournament interview.”
“Okay, yeah, that part’s true.”
The interview that had snowballed into a mess because of a single typo. Even now, I still didn’t really understand why the word sabakgwi had popped into my head back then.
But thanks to that, a scene was born that would go down in broadcast history.
“That’s not all, either. Didn’t you two also get tarot readings from Chur-nim?”
“Right.”
“But tarot should be tarot.”
“That might’ve been true if it were a normal tarot reading, but it was Chur-nim, of all people.”
“We lost... please stop.”
With the two of them ganging up on us, we finally gave up on even trying to think and raised the white flag.
Watching them high-five like they’d just defeated an enemy, I couldn’t help thinking that they really did have perfect chemistry at times like this.
And then, on stream, they’d probably go back to trying to kill each other. It was such a strange relationship.
“I just thought of something.”
“Yeah?”
“Have the two of you ever gotten together with us after you started your fake marriage?”
At Saengsam’s words, I thought about it carefully. We’d met at the PUBG event, and then after that... huh? We really hadn’t done it even once since then.
“Should we set up a collab stream?”
“Yeah. If you two did a fake marriage, then we should all meet up at least once.”
At that, Sia turned to look at me. Her expression was clearly asking what I thought, so I nodded to show her I was fine with it.
“I’m good with it. It’d be the first time we met from a completely different angle than before.”
“Then let’s do it sometime later?”
“Okay!”
After Yura and Saengsam left, only Sia and I remained at the table.
“Why am I so tired today?”
“I think I’m even more tired than usual.”
Watching Sia tap her shoulder with a fist because it ached made me feel a little sorry for her.
She’d taken every one of Yura’s questions, and since I was a little awkward in situations like this, Sia had done a good job smoothing the atmosphere over in the middle.
Of course, she’d probably consider that only natural. But I’d been told over and over that the moment consideration started feeling “natural,” that was when you needed to be careful.
“You okay?”
“No...”
She looked exhausted, and her eyelids were starting to droop. We’d only met four people, but a lot of time had passed, so it made sense.
“Sleepy?”
“A little? I’m tired...”
It was about time to wrap things up.
After Sia contacted the boss, my phone soon got a message saying the car had arrived downstairs.
“Let’s go. Boss is here.”
“Yeah. Everyone, we’re ending the stream here for today.”
After we cleaned up and headed downstairs, there was a familiar car waiting for us.
“Good work.”
“Let’s take Hazy home first.”
As I got in the back seat and reached for the door to close it, Sia grabbed it.
“You’re sitting in the back?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll sit up front.”
She tried to get out, but Sia shoved me back inside, insisting I get in first, and in the end it ended up being the two of us in the back after all.
“That’s fine. Then let’s go.”
And just like that, the day of the party came to an end.