A Deception Upon a Deception
"I don't think I could accept a confession from him," Lee Eun-byul said, laughing a little awkwardly.
What the fuck? Why?!
Lee Se-won nearly shouted it out loud. Wasn't this supposed to be a gender-reversed world? She had been the one sidling up to him, practically wagging her tail — so what the hell was this about not wanting to date? He couldn't make sense of it at all.
Yu Bo-ram, standing beside her, seemed just as baffled by the answer. She asked the question like it physically pained her.
"What, are you an idiot? You said he's into you. So date him and jump his bones already."
As far as Yu Bo-ram was concerned, a guy like Lee Se-won was a serious looker. No — that was just objective fact. He was handsome, and he had that kind of pull; it was why the upperclassmen had all gone after him at the start of the year. And he had turned every last one of them down. The man had never so much as set foot in a bar with anyone.
And now that same guy was going out of his way to show interest — even coming in with a confession? If it were her, she would take it in a heartbeat. This went beyond a matter of the heart. It was a matter of status. The legendary Pokémon that everyone else had failed to catch was opening its heart to her. That fact alone made it worth accepting. It was a garbage way to think about it, maybe — but it was how Yu Bo-ram saw things, at least.
"What, is his personality that bad? Like, irredeemable-garbage bad?"
"No, no, it's not that."
Eun-byul waved both hands at Bo-ram's extreme suggestion.
"His personality's fine. We talk pretty well, actually."
If anything, her impression of him so far had been nothing but good. They clicked better than she'd expected, and his temperament was gentler and more cheerful than that brooding face of his would suggest. His looks didn't have a single thing working against them, honestly.
And yet she still couldn't accept him. There were any number of reasons, but they all boiled down to a single word.
"Mm... if I had to pin it down, it's a matter of taste."
Taste. Two simple syllables — and precisely because they were so simple, they could get as complicated as you wanted them to be. It was that taste she could never bring herself to tell anyone about that had kept Lee Eun-byul from ever wanting to date someone.
Not that I could just go out with someone on purpose, either...
That was the reason for her refusal. Simply taste.
Ha.
At Eun-byul's words, Se-won let out a hollow laugh inside his head. His mood had gone thoroughly to shit.
This is some bullshit.
Getting dumped without even having confessed was absurd enough. The thought that he'd been jerked around this whole time as a piece in those bitches' bet sent rage boiling up through him. And honestly, the fact that he wasn't getting laid tonight pissed him off plenty on its own.
"Oh, it's the taste thing again? What kind of high-and-mighty fucking taste do you have that you've dumped every single person who's ever been into you? Be honest — you barren or something?"
"What? What are you even talking about..."
Bo-ram and Eun-byul kept going after that, but none of it really reached his ears. What he wanted more than anything was to walk right over there and flip the table. He had every right to lose his shit. Objectively speaking, making a bet with a human being as the stake was already a problem. If those two had even a shred of awareness about the karma they were racking up, they wouldn't have a single comeback if he stormed in and tore into them.
For a moment, he considered doing exactly that. Then he changed his mind.
...No.
That alone wouldn't be enough. The shit-stirrer living inside him had something to say about it. Barging in and making a scene right now would be amateur hour. Make a scene now and that would be the end of it. There had to be a more calculated way to screw them over. There was definitely a way to use this situation itself.
...But how?
His head was too hot to think straight. He needed to cool off first, Se-won decided. For now, he would head back inside the bar. He'd already heard everything worth hearing anyway.
A cold gust swept through, clearing his head just a little. His thoughts kicked into a higher gear. He started piecing together the information he'd gathered, hunting for the keys hidden inside it. This was exactly the kind of thing his brain was good at.
The terms of their bet. The stakes. The win conditions. One factor after another surfaced in his mind and sank again. A picture was starting to take shape. He walked as he thought, and after a few minutes he found himself standing in front of the izakaya.
Giggles and bursts of laughter spilled out into the street, the sound of men and women talking over each other dissolving into the night. Warm orange light leaked through the windows and vanished into the dark sky. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Se-won smiled.
"Nice."
Every thought that had been circling through his head had settled into place. Se-won strolled back inside the building at his leisure, hoping Eun-byul would hurry up and get there.
The smoke Yu Bo-ram exhaled scattered in a messy cloud. The acrid smell crawled up Eun-byul's nose and made itself a problem. This was a six-milligram cigarette they were talking about. Smoke from a cigarette packing 6mg of tar was never going to be gentle.
Eun-byul frowned and waved a hand in front of her face.
"Ugh, hey, can you not smoke in front of a non-smoker?"
"I do what I want."
Bo-ram, of course, didn't listen to a damn word of it. She was fun to hang out with, sure, but the smoking was the problem. Secondhand smoke was supposed to be even worse. The way Bo-ram chain-smoked and spat on the ground just made her look like a thug.
Eun-byul put a little distance between them and checked her phone. The current time lit up on the home screen.
9:27.
Her eyes went wide.
"Ah!"
"What, why the sudden freakout?"
"Hey, this is bad! Se-won's going to be waiting for me!"
They'd been so busy running their mouths that a full fifteen minutes had slipped by. She was already very late. Even if she'd actually been in the bathroom taking a dump, it would have been a long time to be gone — especially when you were leaving a guy sitting there by himself.
"Alright! I'm heading back!"
"Y-yeah, okay. I'll be looking forward to the news that you lost, while you're at it."
Lee Eun-byul took off at a full sprint. She tore down the drunken street and burst back into the izakaya. She spotted him at the corner table, on his phone — those sharp eyes, those lips pressed into a flat, expressionless line. She caught her breath as best she could and approached the table.
"Haa... I'm so sorry. I'm really late, aren't I?"
"Yeah. You are pretty late."
Se-won looked up from his phone. Eun-byul was standing there a little out of breath — the look of someone who'd been talking right up until the last second and then come running. He had no intention of letting on that he'd noticed. Instead, he asked the question like he hadn't picked up on the panting at all, tossing a joke into it.
"Stomach acting up pretty bad, huh?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, I get a little constipated sometimes... hehe."
Se-won snorted inwardly. The lie was obvious. Eun-byul sat down and asked, perfectly composed,
"Sorry for being late. We're out of chicken skewers — what should we get?"
That same bright, sparkling smile she always wore came with it. Now that he knew the whole thing was a calculated come-on, it just looked fake.
"Hmm..."
Se-won pretended to think it over for a moment, then said,
"Nah. Let's just call it a night."
A brief silence.
"...What?"
Her face froze. The sparkling smile was still sitting there, but her eyes had locked onto him and stopped. For a second her brain simply refused to process what he'd just said. Se-won was kind enough to repeat himself, just for her.
"Didn't you hear me? I said let's wrap it up for today."
He said it with a faintly blank expression, meeting her gaze head-on. Eun-byul felt, in that instant, that something about the situation had gone wrong. Se-won snorted to himself.
What he was doing right now was a kind of manufactured moodiness. Getting pissy over nothing in particular. He'd suddenly decided he was in a bad mood and wanted to go home. That was all there was to it. And since his mood genuinely was foul, putting on a blank face wasn't hard at all.
"W-what? Why?"
Confusion flooded Eun-byul's face. He could practically see the gears spinning as she tried to figure out why he was suddenly acting like this. Se-won watched it happen and snorted again on the inside.
No reason, really.
If he had to give one, it was just that he was in a shitty mood. He'd done a lot of thinking on the way back in. How to screw her over in the most entertaining way possible. How to use the contents of that bet. And the conclusion he'd come to after all that thinking:
I just have to sit still.
Looked at closely, the terms of the bet were already stacked pretty heavily in his favor. He didn't need to cook up some elaborate scheme to mess with them. From the context of what those two had been saying, the bet went roughly like this:
Seduce him and get him to confess before the year is out.
Pull it off and Lee Eun-byul wins. Fail and Yu Bo-ram wins. A simple enough wager. And looking at it again, they had more than half a year left on the clock.
And she'll spend that entire time coming at me nonstop.
Every trick of seduction in the book, all aimed at wringing a "confession" out of him. But there was no chance of that happening. Why? Because Se-won already knew the win condition. Eun-byul, of course, had no idea — which meant she would keep coming at him anyway.
And that was when it clicked.
Wait. Is this not just free real estate?
The part where she was deceiving him had already ended the moment he figured out the bet. Which meant there was nothing wrong with just leaving the situation alone. She was the only one whose ass was on the line, after all. All he had to do for the rest of the year was sit back and enjoy the show.
He'd call it a deception upon a deception.
Se-won looked at the flustered Eun-byul and said,
"I just suddenly felt like going home."
"I-is that really all?"
Eun-byul's head was a mess. Why had someone who'd been laughing and talking just a minute ago suddenly gone ice-cold? Was it actually because she'd been a few minutes late? Over something that small? Any number of thoughts crossed her mind, but she decided to apologize first. A fast apology was the right move in a situation like this.
"If it's because I was late, I'm sorry... I didn't think I'd be gone that long."
"Nah, it's not that, so don't worry about it. I just need to start heading home."
Se-won waved it off casually and stood up. He did actually have something to do. He had NSFW art to draw once he got back. But there was no way she was going to take that at face value. A man's language had dozens — hundreds — of meanings, after all. She was obviously going to read it as him being in a bad mood over something and bailing because of it.
The smile had left Eun-byul's face.
"I don't know what it is, but I'm sorry."
Se-won just snorted to himself.
So this is what throwing your weight around feels like?
Messing with her like this for a while didn't seem like such a bad idea. He headed to the counter to settle up.
"That'll be twenty-five thousand won," the server said, checking the order slip.
Twenty-five thousand won, split Dutch, came out to about twelve thousand five hundred each. He started to pull out his wallet — then remembered his current financial situation was not great. Can't be helped.
"Hmm. In that case, Eun-byul."
"Yes?"
Se-won looked at her, a smile in his eyes, as if he were enjoying himself.
"Mind covering the tab, then?"