Grasping at Clouds
It felt as if every eye in the bar had swung our way again. I didn't want to answer her, so I reached for something else.
"A hundred-dollar tip for the staff… You've got money to burn?"
"I make enough to leave a tip like that. Quit the nonsense and answer what I asked."
Yeri looked hungry. She grabbed a fistful of the popcorn they kept refilling, stuffed it into her mouth, and chewed. I changed the subject again.
"You've got endorsement deals lined up back to back, don't you? Sure you don't need to watch your looks? Isn't that something you manage, the way celebrities do?"
"You know perfectly well how many calories a single fight burns, and that's what you come out with? No—forget it. Lee Taehyun. Stop trying to drag my attention off with nonsense, and answer what I just asked. Properly."
"You don't respect a word I say. Why should I give your questions a faithful answer?"
"When have I ever failed to respect you?"
"I told you a minute ago, right here, that we shouldn't talk about anything that could end up on the news. And now you're going to set off a scandal in public?"
"A scandal only breaks if somebody reports it. Is there a reporter in here? All I see are college students."
"These days, you see, there's this thing they call one-person media. Any individual can be a kind of… producer of the news. You can sense them, can't you? How many smartphone lenses are pointed this way?"
"Don't talk like some old geezer. Hanging around kids a little younger than you doesn't mean you've actually gotten old. We're the same age, so when you play the old man, I feel old too. So. The lenses. Yeah. Seventeen."
Yeri answered at once, without so much as a glance around the room. The many-talented Iron Empress was a hero who could hear nothing but the mechanical ticking of a time bomb behind a concrete wall and still fix the number and position of every one of them—and disarm them all.
As an aside, her usual method of disarming terrorists' bombs was to pop the thing into her mouth and bite down. Anything under a kiloton was a frail toy to her. It couldn't so much as rattle her jaw, let alone tear the flesh inside her mouth.
A woman of that caliber was, for all practical purposes, immune to covert wiretaps and secret filming. Images and audio of her existed only when she allowed them to. Short of satellite range, getting a shot of the Empress past her senses was as good as impossible. Honestly, I doubted even a satellite would be safe.
Seventeen, though. It was a fairly large place, and people had better manners than I'd expected. Video made no shutter sound, so they could have filmed a great deal more boldly. How often did anyone in a college neighborhood get to share a room with the Iron Empress? Of course they'd want at least one clip to put online—and yet most of the students seemed to be swallowing that urge.
"How many of those recordings are close enough to actually pick up what we're saying?"
"Not that many. Three?"
"Three or thirty, the problem is that there are any at all. You going to go warn them? Tell them not to post it on social media."
"Taehyun, I'm a superhero. If I go up to civilians and start threatening them, that's serious trouble. They'll haul me in front of the UN Secretary-General. It could even hurt me at sentencing in the trial that's already underway."
"Oh, so you want it spread all over?"
"If it isn't, you'll run."
"Run, run—can we drop it? The kids are getting uncomfortable."
"Are they? From where I'm sitting, they all look like they're having a wonderful time."
The classmates at our table weren't passing the drinks around. Now and then someone picked at the snacks or quietly refilled his own glass, and otherwise they only stole glances our way.
Yeri was right. They looked less uncomfortable with the two of us than hungry to know what we were saying.
They had enough basic sense not to film us from a foot away, but under the table two of them had their thumbs going furiously—probably sending a friend a live account of us, or drafting a post. If it wasn't either of those, then a forum. None of it was welcome. I glared at one of the younger ones.
"You finding this fun?"
"No, I mean—fun isn't really…"
"Damn it, is it fun or not? Say it straight."
"Sorry, hyung. Honestly, it's fucking hilarious. If you were in our place, you'd think so too."
"There you go. It's the love story of the century. Of course everyone likes it. Why would they hate it?"
"Love story, my ass…"
Pleased with my classmates' answers, Yeri smiled and gave a little shrug. I picked up my soju glass. It was empty.
She filled it in an instant. I sat there holding it, not bringing it to my mouth, and she asked,
"What? You won't take a drink if I'm the one pouring?"
"It's not… that."
I didn't let the soju rest on my tongue for even a second. I sent it straight down my throat. It tasted like ordinary soju, and yet, strangely, my tongue was sweet.
"How's the taste of a drink poured by a woman you already turned down once?"
"Soju's just soju. Doesn't taste like a damn thing…"
"Need something to go with it? The tables next to us are all ordering fruit sherbet. Should we get one? I'll scoop it up and feed it to you myself."
"Ease up, Yeri. What do you actually want?"
"An answer. If I confessed to you the same way, right here tonight, would you turn me down the same way?"
"Nothing's changed. The answer would be the same."
"Everything has changed, Taehyun. I'm the strongest superhero in the world. A bit of a heretic, maybe, but in the end the lives I've saved over these past three years number well into the thousands."
"And you, Taehyun—you spent nearly three years getting worked to the bone in what they call honorable service, and all it got you was a seat as a college freshman three years older than everyone else. If you'd applied straight out of high school, you would have gotten into a place like this anyway."
"Things are different, Taehyun. You've arrived where you were supposed to be, except now you're a discharged veteran. I'm somewhere so high you can hardly stand to look."
"Are you saying that because you don't realize it only makes things worse?"
"Ah. So you admit it."
Yeri's voice sank, cold.
"That all of this comes from your inferiority complex toward me."
"As if there was ever a time you didn't know."
"You were a considerate boy, Taehyun. The truth is, you'd carried those feelings for me since the first year of middle school, and for six years you cheered me on without ever letting it show."
"That I could become the best. That I could become a hero who saved people. That the fear in the eyes around me would soon turn to admiration and cheers. You said that."
"You didn't think you'd kept it hidden, did you? How long that inferiority complex of yours has really been with you."
"If you knew all that so well… maybe you shouldn't have come here like this."
"If you didn't want me to come, maybe you shouldn't have talked about me at a drinking table where I wasn't sitting. You know how good my hearing is."
"You only heard it because you followed me."
"Yeah. That's right. Unlike your gentleness—you hated me for six years and still made room for me—I'm not a gentle woman. I don't make allowances for what you're dealing with."
"I'm sorry, Taehyun. Sorry I can't be considerate of you, when you're so lost you don't know what to do with yourself, lying because you want me. I can sit at the same table, meet your eyes, and fill your glass. But I'm someone above you, and I can never erase your inferiority. For that, I truly am sorry."
"What is it you're trying to say?"
"But I've worked out, in my own way, an internal logic for why you have to be mine. Want to hear it?"
"Forget it. I—"
Yeri showed no sign of stopping.
"The world needs me, the hero. I need you. Therefore, in the end, the world needs you to be mine. That's how a syllogism works, isn't it?"
"Yes. It does. Taehyun. For three years you've dug your heels in, insisting we can't be together because I'm too extraordinary. But the truth is, a reason we have to be together exists precisely because I'm too extraordinary. There is no logical contradiction here."
"There is. One."
"What?"
"The part where you need me is wrong. That's a lie, so the syllogism doesn't hold."
In that instant, a bright spark leapt again in Yeri's eyes.
I turned my head for a moment, and when I looked back, the fierce anger that had flashed across her face had already sunk. A deep, subdued fury had settled into its place.
"The reason you say you hate me and mean to push me away—I have nothing I can say about that, so I'll let it pass, Lee Taehyun."
"But don't you dare. Don't you dare presume to speak for the heart I dragged into the open that day and barely managed to swallow back. I knew exactly where you were, and I held it down. When I finally met you, just once, you took your discharge and ran because the person you'd run into was me. Don't you judge what I felt, watching that."
"That isn't yours to say. Not even if you're the one it's about—no, especially because you're the one it's about. You don't get to speak of it so lightly, Taehyun."