The Actress
Han Ki-ju came to The Queen for the first time in a while.
She hadn't come as a customer. She'd come as the owner.
"Boss? What brings you here?"
Lee Sang-soo asked carefully.
Han Ki-ju spoke without ceremony.
"Does The Queen do house calls?"
"House calls? We don't do those..."
Going out to meet a client was considered something only Nam-bodo did — the kind of hosts who roamed the streets in vans. A first-class host received clients properly inside the establishment. It might have looked like a small thing, but it was what protected a host's pride.
"I'm the owner, so I can send one out on a house call, right? One of my friends wants to see a particular host."
"Technically yes, but they won't like it. There's the pride issue, too."
"Is that so? I think Namhu would be different."
"You're designating Kim Namhu?"
"Yes."
"I'll call him in."
Kim Namhu was summoned to the owner's office. He received a brief explanation of the situation. And contrary to Lee Sang-soo's expectations, Kim Namhu showed no sign of being offended.
Getting your pride hurt over something like this just means you don't have confidence in your skills.
For a host, the only thing that mattered was satisfying the female client. The moment you started fretting over other things and standing on pride, that host's skills began to decline — that was Kim Namhu's thinking.
Han Ki-ju said to him,
"I'll pay plenty for the TC and the drinks. She's not short on money. I told her to pay double your daily sales. Tips will be separate."
In that case, Kim Namhu had even less reason to refuse. Getting paid twice as much for the same hours of work was always welcome.
Han Ki-ju and Kim Namhu left The Queen. She put him in her Lamborghini, and the two of them headed for an upscale residential neighborhood at the foot of Bukhansan.
On the drive, Han Ki-ju gave him a brief rundown of the client they were about to meet.
"She's not ordinary."
None of the women Kim Namhu had made into regulars so far had been ordinary. Each one was the kind of woman most men would never meet in a lifetime.
"How is she special? You're pretty special yourself, Ki-ju."
"She's even more unusual than me."
Han Ki-ju smiled as if she were looking forward to what was coming, and offered no further explanation.
They arrived near their destination. Not a single house sat under three hundred square meters. Not a single one was less than two stories. Not a single one lacked a garden. They pulled up to one of those houses. Han Ki-ju called her friend and parked in the underground garage.
Three cars already sat in that garage, each worth more than two hundred million won, with empty spots still available. Han Ki-ju stepped into the elevator installed in the garage as if she knew the place well.
When they reached the first floor and the elevator doors opened, a bright, cheerful woman's voice rang out from inside.
"Ki-ju! You're here!"
Kim Namhu looked at the woman's appearance first. Not to decide whether she was pretty — there was a lot you could tell about a woman from her looks alone.
Definitely... special.
She was someone even Kim Namhu recognized on sight. An entertainer.
I'd figured I'd get celebrity clients someday, but I didn't think it'd be this soon.
Female celebrities were VVIPs that ordinary hosts rarely ever saw. They had desires too, and times when they wanted to cut loose. When that happened, they played in secret at high-end host bars where discretion was guaranteed. A scandal about a female celebrity frequenting host bars would be fatal to her image, so it was only natural. There were plenty of clients at host bars richer than female celebrities — but female celebrities were even rarer to see than those wealthy clients.
Kim Hye-ji.
She'd been successful since her child-actor days and was now a twenty-one-year-old actress. She was famous enough that even Kim Namhu knew her name.
And she's a client I never met in my previous life.
Before he'd built up his skills in his past life, he'd never had the chance to meet VVIPs like female celebrities. After his skills had matured, he'd already had a full roster of excellent regulars, so there'd been no occasion to meet Kim Hye-ji.
Kim Namhu also recalled her recent situation. Hosts were in the hospitality business at their core, and they had to keep conversation flowing with clients. To hold continuous conversations with clients from every field, checking the news every day was the bare minimum. That news included entertainment news.
She was recently involved in a scandal with a male idol and is under suspension, right?
Otherwise, there was no way a celebrity at the prime age for going out and having fun would be holed up at home at this hour.
And Kim Namhu didn't care whether Kim Hye-ji had been dating the male idol or sleeping with him. By that standard, he was a host who slept with multiple women for money.
Besides, according to my knowledge of the future, this scandal was a complete nothing-burger.
She and the male idol had just been real friends. The two of them had gone out drinking, gotten photographed, and the photos had blown up in the press — and the male idol's obsessive fangirls had gone completely ballistic. That was all.
"Hello. I'm Kim Namhu. Pleasure to meet you."
Kim Namhu greeted her politely.
Even though she was the one who'd called for him, Kim Hye-ji only glanced at him before pulling Han Ki-ju aside for a private conversation. Eventually the three of them moved to the dining room.
There was a wide table with several chairs. In the corner of the dining room, a small mini-bar had been set up.
"Have a seat."
The three of them sat down. Delivery food was piled messily on the table — pasta, steak, and salad. It was far too much for one person, and most of it had been left to go cold.
Han Ki-ju looked at it and said,
"Clean up a little, will you? If you're done eating, throw it out."
"Should I?"
Still making a show of hospitality for her guests, Kim Hye-ji gathered up all the delivery food at once and dumped it in the trash.
No matter how many times I see it, I can't understand that.
If it had been Kim Namhu, he would have separated the food waste and sorted the rest for recycling. And he would have ordered only as much as he could eat in the first place, or put leftovers in the fridge to reheat later. But the rich were different. If you just left it like that, a housekeeper would come and deal with it.
Kim Hye-ji tried to resume her conversation with Han Ki-ju. Since Han Ki-ju had brought Kim Namhu, she introduced him again.
"A host who works at The Queen. Kim Namhu. Same age as us. He works under me, but we hang out like friends."
"Interesting. Friends with the boss, too."
Kim Hye-ji looked at Kim Namhu and asked,
"Anything you want to eat? I'll order whatever you like."
Kim Namhu glanced at the mini-bar. There was quite a bit of expensive liquor, but in a small fridge in one corner he could see it packed full of soju.
A heavy drinker, then.
No matter how much money you made, there were people who preferred soju. Especially in the film industry — a lot of entertainers were like that. People who thought back to hard times, remembered when they'd first learned to drink, and knocked back soju by the bottle. If she'd learned to drink in that world, there was a good chance Kim Hye-ji liked soju too.
"You like soju, don't you? And with soju, you need something spicy. How about spicy jokbal?"
"You've got a sharp eye, I'll give you that. So why, out of all those side dishes, did you specifically pick spicy jokbal?"
Kim Hye-ji was starting to take interest. This was the opening.
"First, when a man gives a vague answer, women don't like it. Even if you give a wrong answer, it's better to present one clear option."
"True. Vague men aren't attractive."
"And there's this common idea that women love spicy chicken feet or spicy tteokbokki, but that's all case by case. Plenty of women can't stand chicken feet because they're gross, and plenty of women stay away from tteokbokki because it's a carb bomb and they're watching their figures."
Kim Hye-ji might have been under suspension for the scandal, but she was still a celebrity. She had to constantly manage her body.
"So I went with spicy jokbal — high in protein and great with drinks. Order it as a set with bossam and you can eat something delicious and relatively healthy."
Whether jokbal and bossam actually made you gain less weight than tteokbokki was unclear. But psychologically, it felt like it would.
Kim Hye-ji confirmed that every word from Kim Namhu carried multiple layers of consideration, and she smiled. She looked at Han Ki-ju and said,
"Hmm. Definitely interesting. I think I can drink with this one."
For a moment, Kim Namhu thought he was going to make easy money today. But that was a miscalculation. This was the first time he'd met Kim Hye-ji across both his past and present lives, and Kim Hye-ji was no ordinary woman — she'd succeeded in the entertainment industry from a young age.
Kim Hye-ji looked straight at Kim Namhu and said,
"But do you know this? There are already way too many men around me who cater to my every whim. I'm not really into guys like that."
Every female client had her own atmosphere. That atmosphere was shaped by the life she'd lived.
Jang Sun-young had worked so long as a Ten-Pro Ace that she carried an air of seducing men even when she was just standing still.
Ha Ji-yeon had used her sharp mind to choose a prosecutor husband and live an easy life, so she had a laid-back quality with a clear-headed edge underneath.
Han Ki-ju had the glamorous, leisurely air of a golden spoon who'd never once worried about money.
Jang Su-young, the daughter of a mother who worked in the nightlife industry, had a sharp, solid presence — as if she'd sworn her whole life never to live that way.
And right now, Kim Hye-ji carried the atmosphere of a woman who'd become an entertainment star on her own strength alone.
Confidence in her own ability. A conviction that wouldn't break even after seeing every filthy thing the industry had to offer. You could feel it.
She's definitely not going to be easy. This is going to be fun.
Kim Namhu was taking an interest in Kim Hye-ji as well.