The Day I Regularly Get Pissed Off
"Haa..."
The Monday morning regular meeting was finally over.
I returned to my seat and let out a long, deep sigh. Anyone looking at me could tell I was pissed as hell. The people in Management Support kept stealing glances at me while hammering away at their keyboards.
Those bastards.
If they wanted to whisper, they should just whisper. I had zero interest in hanging out with the same people who went off for lunch gatherings without me anyway.
If they could just do their jobs right, maybe I'd care.
This meeting had been exactly like every other one. Management would float some personnel issue that was blatantly illegal under the Labor Standards Act, I'd lay out the risks and tell them not to do it, and then our Management Support team leader would chime in with his half-baked "research," asking whether we couldn't just do this or that instead. Except every "this or that" of his boiled down to: do something illegal and hope we don't get caught.
I'd grit my teeth and say it wasn't possible, and then they'd get all huffy among themselves, voices turning sharp: Then what are we supposed to do? Just tell me how to make it work, because I want to do it.
Crazy sons of bitches.
Just don't do it! It's illegal, so you don't do it!
Why the hell were our managers out at the logistics center directly commanding and supervising the daily outsourced workers? That was Illegal Dispatch! Even major startups got plastered all over the news and their CEOs hauled off to detention when they got caught for that!
But in the end, it would just look like I was the only one throwing a tantrum. It was simple: if the parent company—the ones holding all the power—came into a subcontractor's workplace and started ordering people around, that was illegal. The Ministry of Employment and Labor and the press both treated it as a very big deal. I'd explain it until I was blue in the face, and still someone would go, "So what?" And of course that someone would be our own executives.
Rank-and-file workers or freelancers could afford not to get it. But the executives who actually bore legal responsibility? They needed to have this burned into their skulls. What was I even supposed to say in front of idiots like these?
"I'll look into whether there's any possible approach for now."
For the record, there wasn't. I was just buying time so I could later go to the CEO in private and carefully talk him out of it. That was the job of a lowly team member like me. Why? Because the team leader didn't know a damn thing. The guy was from marketing, and somehow he was running Management Support. Being handsome was apparently one of the reasons he got the seat, too.
"Injae."
I was slowly breathing through the anger, trying to calm down, when one of the main sources of that anger—the team leader—walked over. He approached with a smile on his face, and I wanted to close my eyes. All morning in the meeting, he'd kept pinning the items he'd dropped the ball on onto me as if I'd never done them. I couldn't trash his dignity in front of everyone, so I'd stayed quiet. He knew that, which was why he was coming over now to act buddy-buddy. It wasn't genuine apology. It was a cheap little gambit to soothe me, because if I got pissed enough to stop working, he'd get chewed out right alongside me. It was pathetic.
"Want to grab lunch?"
Should I just kill him?
Buy me one meal and a coffee and call it even? I'd already eaten every kind of shit from the CEO, the COO, and the CTO. This wasn't the first or second time he'd thrown me under the bus just because I was the junior, so there was no way I was falling for this garbage.
"I'm on a diet. I'll just grab a salad on my own."
Get lost—that was the message. But I said it with a smile, and for good measure I patted the little belly I had going, selling the lie as pure truth.
"Ah... let's definitely eat together sometime."
No thanks, man. Don't act like every single meal resets your debt.
Had this guy even done his job properly back when he was in marketing?
"Riyeon, want to go for lunch?"
"I ate a big breakfast, so I'm not eating."
"Haha. How much did you put away?"
"Just a lot."
Apparently it felt awkward to retreat after getting rejected by me, so he tried inviting Riyeon too—and got shot down. The handsome team leader's pride took the hit; he didn't say another word and just herded the other female team members out for food. The other teams started getting up one by one as well, until the only people left in the office were, as always, me and Riyeon.
"Oppa, you're not eating?"
"No appetite."
"You said you were dieting. You have to eat all three meals properly or you'll binge at night."
"If I get hungry later, I'll just run out and grab a sandwich."
"From the convenience store?"
"That's the only place I can get there and back fast."
I wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone, so I stood up from my seat.
"I'm going to get some air."
"Roof?"
"...Yeah."
The roof was the smoking area—the same one Riyeon had dragged me up to last time. Wandering around the building meant a high chance of running into people from the company, so the roof it was. Right after lunch, there probably wouldn't be many smokers either.
"Riyeon."
"Yeah?"
"You don't have to go out of your way to follow me."
"I don't want to be alone in the office either."
I couldn't tell whether it was her obsession with me or genuine worry. Right now I really wanted to be alone. But if I pushed too hard just to peel her off, I'd only make things worse, so I chose to let her come along.
"Haa...!"
I looked up at the sky and blew out a sigh. Not a single cloud in sight, which only pissed me off more. That was the rule of going to work: if the weather was clear, it was clear and therefore garbage; if it was overcast, it was overcast and therefore garbage.
"Oppa, what the hell happened to put you in this state? Did the CEO and that team-leader bastard lose their minds again?"
"It's nothing. Don't worry about it."
"Tell me. I want us to live while laying everything out honestly with each other."
"There's no such thing. Everyone's got a secret or two."
"Hmm~?"
Riyeon planted herself right in front of me, bent at the waist, and looked up into my face. She tilted her head to one side, and her hair spilled over, exposing an ear crowded with piercings. No big hoops or long dangling earrings, but every single one of them was flashy. It was always like this. The secret two-tone was the perfect visual for Riyeon's shell and her core. The black on the outside was the sensitive, cold shell; the blue underneath was the calm yet coldly burning emotion she kept hidden. Whether that emotion was affection, hatred, or pure lust, I had no idea. I couldn't even read my own feelings or state half the time—how was I supposed to guess someone else's?
Damn it. Inside the company I used to pride myself on being sharp, but somewhere along the way she'd completely outmaneuvered me, and once she crossed into my private territory, everything about her was nothing but error messages.
"Company life is just fucking miserable, that's all."
Fucking miserable. It was the single best word for chewing up and spitting out every tangled emotion I couldn't unpack anywhere else.
"Hearing you talk like this really makes it sink in that we're at the same company."
Riyeon's face drifted closer and closer. I stepped back. She closed the distance again. I kept retreating until my back hit the wall. Her face was close enough to kiss. But she only stared straight into both of my eyes.
"But you know, Oppa."
"...?"
"Even when I'm being as direct as I can, it feels like you still don't really get what I'm saying."
"What?"
"I clearly told you I want us to live while laying everything out honestly with each other."
"You did. We just talked about that a second ago."
Riyeon broke into a soft little smile. For some reason, that alone eased the knot in my chest a fraction. Of course it did—a beautiful woman's smile aimed entirely at me was, in game terms, at least a medium healing potion. But the next thing she said sent my stress and anxiety meters rocketing toward a new all-time high.
"If you won't open up and tell me yourself, then I have no choice but to find out on my own, right?"
"What?"
Come again?
"How are you going to find out? You going to torture me?"
"Of course not."
Her eyes narrowed into a smile that followed the curve of her lips.
"I'm the type who likes being scolded, so I wouldn't bully you or anything."
I had just heard one hell of a confession. Or a confession, a confession, a declaration—I couldn't even tell which. She thought for a second, then suddenly straightened her head and looked me dead-on.
"I'll just work harder at getting to know you."
"What exactly about me are you trying to learn?"
"Data collection on your words and actions, I guess?"
"So you're going to surveil me? Every move I make?"
"Don't use such a strong word as 'surveil.' It sounds ugly."
That sentence felt both familiar and completely foreign. The smile vanished from Riyeon's face entirely.
"Not surveillance—sharing. Real-time sharing, okay?"
Her lips moved right beside mine. It wasn't a kiss, yet I could feel every motion of those lips with perfect clarity.
"Whatever happens to you, whatever you do, who approaches you, who spouts nonsense, what kind of bitch or bastard it is—man, woman, old, young—I get a real-time share of your entire situation."
"Sharing only works as a concept if I'm the one giving it to you, doesn't it?"
"......"
She didn't answer. She just kept staring at me, unblinking. From this close I could see every tiny gap in her irises. They looked exactly like the eyes of a yandere heroine peering through someone else's door peephole in a manga. Not that the wording mattered. What she actually did was the real issue.
"......"
"......"
Neither of us spoke. But Riyeon's breathing was growing hotter by the second. Just as I was studying her, she was dissecting my eyes from every angle, every corner, like she was licking them clean. Look at how her breath was speeding up. It even trembled, thin and fine. This was way too much pressu—
"Relax, Oppa."
She smiled, bright and sudden.
"We're still just in the talking stage, so I won't go as far as real-time sharing yet. Doing that while we're only talking would be too... fast, right? It'd feel like we were burning through the romance we're supposed to save for when we become an official couple."
"But doesn't that just mean you're still stacking up data on my movements in the meantime?"
Ah, shit! This stupid habit of arguing back! This was a seriously insolent disease—the kind that just had to pick a fight somehow! Who the hell advertised the advantages of getting surveilled early on their own?
Riyeon's eyes went round. She grabbed both of my hands and cried out with pure delight.
"I knew it—you understand this kind of romance too! I knew Oppa would get it!"
"Ah... well..."
"But still, no."
She grinned and clasped her hands under her chin and nose.
"We're only talking right now, so I can't ask for too much, can I?"
Unable to hold back the smile that kept deepening, she whispered to me like an excited child.
"I'll give you until tomorrow after work. Tell me by then."
"Mm..."
Listening to her go on about the romance of real-time sharing made every single thing that had happened that morning feel completely meaningless. Come to think of it, it was still lunchtime, wasn't it?
"I'm hungry. Want to go eat?"
"Really? Where?"
"Salad place."
"Okay!"
Riyeon took the lead. She latched onto my arm and marched us toward the elevator. Following that back of hers, I thought to myself: instead of teaching her social skills, it felt like I was the one being trained.