An Awkward Outing
In the darkened theater, a magnificent performance poured from the screen. The speakers amplified it until the sound filled every corner of the room, loud enough that his ears rang faintly — but that was part of a movie theater's charm. He could live with it. Louder was better for sinking in, anyway.
The problem was that it was boring.
With every turn of the plot, every gentle unspooling of the story, his eyelids grew a little heavier. The yawn climbing up his throat was not the kind a person could swallow. Why did these dreamy, glittering backdrops keep showing up? Whenever that soft melody drifted through the speakers, his mind went just as still, threatening to slide down beneath consciousness.
He muttered inwardly, I'm sleepy...
Not just sleepy. Fucking sleepy. Every time he let his eyes close, his head went a little hazier.
Romance movies had never been his genre to begin with. A film built around love affairs, designed to pluck at lyrical, wistful feelings? What even was this? There wasn't a single stimulating scene in the thing. For someone as unsentimental as him, a romance movie was a wall he couldn't climb. That was a purely personal take, of course — the genre just didn't match his taste. It was popular enough that other people could sit through it just fine.
He glanced sideways to see whether Seong A-rin was enjoying herself. She was watching the screen, at least — but her face was thoroughly blank. No, not blank. Empty. None of the movie's romance reached her, nor any of the faint wistfulness flickering across it. Her eyes held nothing but a hollow quiet.
He knew that look. He'd been wearing it himself until a second ago. It was boredom.
A hot little spike of injustice surged up from somewhere deep in his chest. Hey — you're the one who wanted to watch this!
He shot her a resentful look. If you picked it, the least you could do was have a good time. What was he supposed to do if she was bored too? Paying actual money to sit here and be bored. What kind of scam was this? It wasn't even school. The whole day was starting to feel like a remarkably efficient way to set cash on fire.
He let out a small sigh inside his head. Hahh...
Fine. Romance movies were fine. People whose tastes lined up would enjoy them. Plenty of people called it a good date genre, and in the sense that it prodded at the affection between a man and a woman, a romance film was a fairly effective tool. Watch one and you tended to come out wanting some wistful, aching kind of love — he'd even heard that butterfly effect carried a lot of people over the finish line into an actual relationship.
But that only worked after you'd been out a few times and had some idea of each other's tastes. Romance movies had more dead air than other genres. Because they lived in the feelings between two people, they were packed with quiet scenes, which meant the filmmaking itself lost some punch — and if the thing didn't match your taste, boredom came easy. She'd clearly just grabbed whatever the internet recommended, and that had been a lazy, narrow-minded call. Look at the result: both of them were bored out of their minds.
A comedy or a sci-fi would've been better. Those at least stayed interesting even if the genre wasn't your thing. For a first-date movie, that would've been more than enough. Better to steer clear of anything this hit-or-miss. Well — what would a fellow hopeless single know about it. Still, that was how he saw it. People always said the ones who never dated knew the theory best.
That said, the movie itself was watchable. He'd been going on about how boring it was, but that didn't mean it was unwatchable. It was a remake of an old masterpiece, apparently, so the story at least had a pedigree. And maybe because this was a gender-reversed world, watching the male and female leads' roles swapped around was pretty interesting.
Especially since the heroine was pretty.
When the movie finally ended, they stepped back out of the building. Quite a bit of time had passed; night had already settled over the street.
"Nnngh."
Lee Se-won stretched the moment they were outside. After sitting that long, his locked-up body screamed in protest. The drowsiness that had been dragging his mind under lifted as the night air hit him, and he offered a brief review.
"Well. It was decent enough."
That was it. No mention of how the final highlight had landed, or how the back half had actually gotten interesting. Just decent enough. Hearing that, Seong A-rin laughed awkwardly.
"Haha..."
It wasn't because her impression matched his. It was because that review was even more pathetic than she'd braced for. The same way Lee Se-won had read the boredom on her face, she could read it on his. He didn't seem to be making a show of it, for her sake — but she had eyes. She could pick up plenty from a person's face and the way they moved. That little bit of consideration stung more than she wanted it to.
What? I thought this was a popular movie...
She'd hunted it down like a ghost drifting through the internet for hours. A so-called opposite-sex crowd-pleaser, recommended by plenty of people. She'd even sat on her own boredom, waiting for his reaction — and when that was what came back, a heavy little gloom settled over her. Like she'd gone and disappointed him. She'd wanted to make him happy...
She stood there with her head down, and then a sound rolled out of her stomach. A loud, unmistakable gurgle, broadcasting to the open air that something empty wanted filling. Come to think of it, they'd been out for quite a while without putting a single thing in their mouths. It was about time to eat.
"Ah..."
Did it really have to announce itself that loudly? It could have rumbled a little quieter. Faced with a physiological fact she couldn't argue with, she felt her face go hot.
A moment later, Lee Se-won — who had very much heard it — let out a small laugh.
"It is about time to eat. Seeing as your stomach's empty."
"...Yeah."
"Anywhere around here to grab food? You know a place?"
Seong A-rin nodded quickly. Of course she did. You couldn't leave a meal out of a date course, and she'd picked the restaurant for exactly that reason. Luckily, it was nearby.
I have to make up for it this time.
She made the quiet little vow to herself. So far she'd only managed to look ridiculous. At the very least, she wanted mealtime to be something he actually enjoyed.
"Yeah. This way."
She said it lightly and led him toward the restaurant. The place they arrived at was a pasta shop that looked fairly upscale — orange-glowing lamps hung from the ceiling, and uneven brickwork dressed the walls. Quiet, cozy, the kind of room that invited conversation. Lee Se-won let out a small sound of appreciation as they walked in.
"Oh."
It was a pretty decent spot. Looking at the course so far, he'd honestly been a little nervous, but it seemed she'd gone with something safely inoffensive for dinner. A pasta place. Nice. To be honest, he didn't much care what they ate. Except for that carbonara-specialty shop he'd gone to with Eun-byul last time, he wasn't picky.
Ugh.
The memory of that bland, watery taste flickered through his head and he shoved it out immediately. He did not want to revisit that. Still, this place looked like it had more than carbonara on offer — ordinary tomato, jjamppong, cream, squid ink, the works. Yeah. That was more like it. A pasta restaurant without tomato on the menu had no right to call itself the real thing. That other place, stripping tomato pasta for the sake of a carbonara-only concept, had been a fraud.
Seong A-rin and Lee Se-won sat down across from each other. Light conversation drifted back and forth as they looked over the menus.
"What are you getting?"
"Hmm... I don't really have anything in mind. Got a recommendation?"
"Well, I heard they make a really good carbonara here."
"Please... recommend anything but that."
Conversation was happening, at least. They ended up ordering one tomato pasta and one jjamppong pasta — tomato for Lee Se-won, jjamppong for Seong A-rin.
"Order confirmed. Please wait just a moment."
The server took the menus and left, and just like that it was the two of them. All that sat on the tiny table were a couple of small napkins and some forks. There was nothing to scatter their attention — a stretch of time in which they could focus entirely on each other. A gentle melody was drifting through the restaurant, the kind of healing music that seemed to melt the tension out of your shoulders. Perfect timing for a conversation.
Seong A-rin decided this was her chance. All she had to do was open her mouth. She drew a breath, organizing the words in her head, watching phrases rise up and collapse again. Alright. Now...
"......"
...What was she supposed to say?
Strangely, no sentence would form. Thinking about it, there was a massive flaw in the plan. A comfortable atmosphere for talking was nice. A quiet, moody room was nice too. Someone with even a little skill could have used this mood to build a serious amount of goodwill — just chatting and laughing a bit would have been enough to close the distance. The problem was that she had no gift for conversation whatsoever.
Making use of a good atmosphere was still a skill. A real talker could close the gap with someone in a dingy back alley. Which meant the opposite was also true. She, who had nothing resembling a motor attached to her mouth, had no idea how to use a good mood even when one landed in her lap. She could become endlessly easy when she was at ease — but anyone she still had a wall with left her stranded.
"The weather's nice today..."
What finally came out was empty muttering, the same nothing she'd been mumbling while they walked around earlier in the day, and she knew perfectly well it wasn't helping. A silence so awkward it felt physical pressed down on her. Every time she tried to open her mouth, it shut itself again around the same useless question: what topic even suited a guy?
That silence held until the food arrived. The bright scent of tomato and the salty punch of jjamppong mixed together in the air.
In the end, Lee Se-won was the one who spoke first. He wasn't exactly a conversational genius either, but he figured he could steer things better than Seong A-rin, who looked that uncomfortable. Somehow nothing had changed since their first meeting. Feeling a flicker of déjà vu, he let out a small laugh.
"Come to think of it, what do you usually do with your days?"
Start light. Everyday stuff.
"Me? I just go to school and then work my part-time job..."
"Pretty similar. I go to school and then I work too."
He had no intention of launching into anything interesting or cheerful right out of the gate. Just enough to take the edge off this awkward air. Something ordinary that wouldn't let the conversation die — that was all he was aiming for. Everyday talk seemed about right for that.
"By work you mean the drawing?"
"Yeah. Making side dishes for you lot."
"...I don't watch that often."
Quiet, comfortable, the conversation snagging now and then but never quite breaking.
"What kind of part-time job do you do, anyway?"
"I serve at a beer hall. Five in the afternoon to eleven at night."
"Do people even come to a beer hall during the day?"
"Not really, but it's still pretty busy. I have to clean everything beforehand."
"Ah. Got it."
And so it went. Mealtime passed faster than either of them expected.
On the way out after dinner, the evening was already crawling toward the dead of night. He hadn't noticed time moving that fast while they were actually out — weekends really did vanish on you. A fresh little demonstration of Einstein's theory of relativity. Ah, Einstein. The man was always right.
They were walking the streets again. By this point they'd done everything there was to do, and their stomachs were full. This was probably around when most couples would start saying goodbye. Seong A-rin could feel the end of the date coming on. She'd also burned through the entire course she'd planned. Namsan Tower had been sitting there as a last stop for the view... but she knew perfectly well that wasn't happening. Ending it here was the right call.
"How was today...?"
So she asked him. She'd heard you weren't supposed to ask things like that, but she was too curious to swallow it. She wanted his honest impression. As far as she could tell, today's plan had been a failure. She'd sworn she was going to make him happy, and instead she'd spent the whole day looking pathetic. The claw machines they'd hit as a warm-up had just been a solid ten thousand won set on fire. The movie she'd agonized over had him looking obviously bored. At the restaurant she'd picked specifically so they could talk, she'd fumbled so badly that Lee Se-won had ended up carrying the whole conversation. A sorry display, start to finish.
That was why she asked. Maybe — just maybe — only his face had looked like that, and he'd actually had fun. A thin little thread of hope.
"Hmm. It was just okay."
The words that came back were cruel.
"Ah......"
She let out a small, defeated sound. Of course. She'd watched him look bored with her own eyes, so what had she expected? In the end her plan had failed — the plan to make him happy, and by making him happy, to take the late hours of the night as well. It had all come apart. A heavy gloom crept in over her heart.
But Lee Se-won wasn't finished.
"But it was fun, though."
"Huh?"
She tilted her head, unable to let that sit.
"You said it was just okay."
"Yeah. Honestly, the places we went were just boring. But you prepared all of it for me, right? That made me happy."
He said it with a small smile, and he meant it. Honestly — who went this far preparing something for him? Even if most of it had been dull, he liked that he could feel the effort in it. Watching Seong A-rin's reactions from beside her had been pretty entertaining on its own. So when you added it all up, "fun" came out ahead. That was enough.
And then—
"Besides. That wasn't the main event so far, was it?"
Lee Se-won said it as he took Seong A-rin's hand. His eyes flashed like a wolf's. Inside his head, a single thought landed hard.
Holy shit.
How long had he been holding this in? From daytime until now, his gaze had gone to her chest a few dozen times. Was that crossbody bag slung over her shoulder a deliberate turn-on? Wedged between those huge breasts, it almost looked like she was giving a titjob. Every time he saw it, his poor neglected dick had just about screamed. He'd held off because it looked like she'd prepared a lot — but that was over now. From here on, it was his time.
He pulled her hand along with a firm, unapologetic grip. There happened to be a motel nearby, so getting there wouldn't take long.
"W-wait a second."
Seong A-rin stumbled a little, flustered by the hand dragging her forward. What kind of guy had a sex drive this aggressive? It felt like the roles had flipped. She wasn't remotely ready for how fast this had turned.
Seeing that small bit of resistance, Lee Se-won asked her flatly.
"What, you don't want to have sex?"
"...N-no."
Seong A-rin stood still for a moment, then quietly went red and shook her head. As expected — when it came to wanting it, she was the honest type.