Seventy-Five Percent
“Ugh… eugh…”
A dry cough scraped up from the back of my throat, raw as a metal file, the kind of sound a man makes after being dragged half-drowned from a river. I managed to blink my eyelids open—they felt like foreign objects stuck to my face—and a dull, liquid pain sloshed around inside my skull.
“Ugh…”
I'm dying. I'm actually dying.
My first coherent thought was that the doctor had been right: I'd been careless. I wasn't a specialist, but a serious head injury producing amnesia as a side effect was hardly surprising. I'd stormed out of the hospital because I didn't like it, then somehow convinced myself nothing would go wrong. Now the bill for those ignorant days had come due—ah. Right. I'd been drinking.
That was when I finally recognized the hangover for what it was.
The strength drained out of my body. The moment I flopped back down, my heart began to race against the dark ceiling above me. But I didn't make a scene the way I had the first time. I wasn't alone anymore.
I switched on the soft glow of the night-light, and there was Cha Seeun, sleeping in a perfectly composed posture. My heart kicked for an entirely different reason.
How could even a person's shadow be that beautiful?
The silhouette cast by the gentle light was smooth all the way down the bridge of her nose.
I confessed to a woman like this.
…And I'd done it after a shopping-cart-induced impulse, no less. Surrounded by the soft chorus of oh my, oh my from people pretending not to stare. Cha Seeun, not a flicker of change in her expression, simply saying she understood.
Just remembering it set my ears burning red.
After all that… what if she really isn't my girlfriend?
There might come a day when Cha Seeun told me she had never been my girlfriend at all. A past relationship wouldn't be reason enough to sever what we had now—but what if it was true? If she really had been my girlfriend, I'd just have to make her fall for me again. And if she hadn't been? Same plan.
I pulled the rumpled blanket over her and settled in a little closer, lying on my side. Transparent, pale coloring. A presence so cool it seemed it might cut you if you drew near—and yet one you couldn't bear to step away from.
To me, Cha Seeun was a perfect person, setting aside the minor detail that her personality was slightly difficult for society to tolerate. Beautiful. Wealthy. She'd arranged a place for me to stay, and even surrendered half the bed for the nights I couldn't sleep alone.
So why would someone like her take in a man who revs into overdrive at the slightest brush of contact—a man whose actions run ahead of his thoughts? I whined as a matter of course. I was more of a nuisance than a bad-tempered cat. I'd even kissed her without permission and confessed in front of a crowd.
I murmured under my breath.
“Seeun… do you like me?”
No answer came. Well—silence could be a kind of yes, or so I'd heard.
I shrugged for no particular reason and quietly slipped out of bed. The heavy drinking had left my mouth parched. I crossed the hallway, found the kitchen, and drained a cold glass of water in one go.
And then, suddenly, I felt the pitch-black surroundings pressing in.
“Haa…”
My breathing roughened. I hurried back the way I'd come. My toes felt heavy; my knees kept wanting to buckle. I walked in an awkward shuffle, scanning every corner for someone who couldn't possibly be there.
I knew. I knew perfectly well—and still I couldn't erase the conviction that something in the dark was hunting me.
When I finally made it back to the bedroom, Cha Seeun was there. I lay down beside her—still sleeping in that elegant posture—and pulled the blanket over myself like a hiding place. Nights spent with her would always be unusually short.
I closed my eyes in that fragile sense of safety—and someone shook my shoulder with zero manners.
“Get up.”
Cha Seeun looked down at me, and the light behind her was dazzling. As if the good deed of taking in an amnesiac patient with nowhere to go and no one to turn to had cast a halo behind a woman whose personality ran a little sharper than most.
“Seeun… are you going to heaven?”
“What nonsense is that. Are you still drunk?”
I stared blankly at her face until my foggy mind found its way back into place. I hadn't even known I'd fallen asleep, and somehow morning had already arrived.
“Good morning. Hello.”
“It almost was. Why are you stuck to me like this?”
That was when I registered the soft something my arms were wrapped around. Cha Seeun's thigh. Instinctively I tried to rest my head against that softness—
“Ghk—!”
—and she seized me by the hair.
“Seeun! This is dating violence!”
“No. It's just violence.”
Cha Seeun swung the pillow she was holding and smashed it into my face. Expressionless: right, left. When I still held on, she wrapped the pillow around her fist and started pounding in earnest. I had no choice but to release her leg. She smoothed her rumpled clothes and narrowed her eyes at me.
“You've got terrible sleeping habits.”
“On the other hand—if all I have to give up is one leg, doesn't that make me pretty well-behaved?”
I lightly dodged the pillow flying straight at me. But a kick came next, aimed precisely where I'd dodged, as if she'd expected it—and I rolled clean off the bed.
“That's cruel.”
Cha Seeun answered without the slightest concern for me, her voice cold.
“Just remember this. I'm sensitive when I sleep. If you wake me up, I'll throw you out.”
For someone that sensitive, she hadn't worn an eye mask or earplugs. And she'd slept just fine while I clung to her.
“Bring it.”
She pointed at the pillow that had landed in the far corner, the way you'd toss a toy for a dog. I obediently fetched it, and she swung it again, landing another hit on my head.
“That's for rustling around at dawn.”
“Wait—you were awake? Back then?”
Cha Seeun didn't answer. She simply got up and headed for the bathroom. Once I confirmed she was gone, I climbed back onto the bed—determined to claim the spot she'd been lying in for all it was worth.
“Ah. I should've woken up a little earlier.”
I thought it with genuine regret, then luxuriated in the softness of a bed that wasn't mine. The faint scent still lingering there, the warmth that hadn't quite left—I was just about to drift off again when Cha Seeun emerged from the bathroom and looked at me as if she were observing something deeply pathetic.
“Because of you, I'm going to have to send the sheets out for cleaning.”
She was already fastening the buttons of a crisply ironed white shirt. I rubbed my sleepy eyes and asked,
“Seeun, where are we going? Should I get ready quickly too?”
“Where do you think you're going.”
“Huh? Then why are you dressed like that?”
Cha Seeun slipped into a black suit jacket with elegant ease.
“Work. I've taken too much time off looking after you.”
“What?”
The news jolted me fully awake.
“Don't tell me you thought I was born into a rich family and just lived off it?”
“I'm sorry—was that not the case?”
One of the reasons I'd decided to freeload had been a misunderstanding?
Cha Seeun fastened a watch onto her bare wrist and nodded.
“Actually, it is.”
I scrambled out of bed.
“I want to go too!”
“I'm not going out to play. I'm going to work.”
She paused mid-adjustment of her collar and fixed me with a cool stare.
“What would you even do if you came along.”
“Anything. Just give me something to do…”
Do I have any certifications?
You never know. Cooking had turned out surprisingly decent once I tried it—maybe I had other hidden talents. But a man who didn't even know his own resident registration number was, by society's standards, a perfect incompetent.
“I could watch the car?”
I watched her carefully, braced for a scolding—but Cha Seeun reached out and stroked my hair.
“Too tall. Lower your head.”
“Should I sit?”
“That would be better.”
I sat still on the bed and accepted the touch. Her own hair was immaculate, not a single strand out of place, yet the hand mussing mine moved without the slightest hesitation. And I just sat there taking it. Had I already been domesticated?
After a long while of this, Cha Seeun glanced at her wrist.
“I should go.”
“Uh…”
She shouldn't. But the logic I could actually put into words was too thin to hold her. I couldn't cling to her like a child and say I didn't want to be home alone.
I trailed after her all the way to the entrance. At the front door, she slipped on her shoes and said,
“Stay put. Don't go wandering off and then cry because you can't find your way back.”
“Ha. What exactly do you take me for?”
Patient or not, I wasn't a child. But Cha Seeun only looked at me steadily, as if the whole idea were absurd.
“I trust my eyes are accurate.”
In that case, I had no choice but to live up to the expectation…!
“Don't get any strange ideas. I'll leave you a card—buy whatever you want to eat.”
“I'll take anything, as long as Seeun feeds it to me herself.”
“Starve, then.”
Despite the cold words, she held out the card, and I snatched it up at once.
“I'll be home early today anyway. I'll eat dinner here.”
Having said what she needed to say, Cha Seeun left the house without a backward glance.
—Thud.
I stared at the closed front door for a while, then felt a petty surge of spite. Once the homeowner had abandoned me, a rebellious impulse was only natural. So I proceeded to do something I would never have dared while Cha Seeun was around—and I did it openly.
I trudged over and threw myself onto the sofa. In a thoroughly lazy, thoroughly disastrous sprawl. I lay there looking up at the ceiling, then flailed at the sunlight gradually filtering in, trying to catch it.
“Haa…”
A meaningless sigh escaped.
Today was the fourth day since I'd woken up in the hospital. Cha Seeun had been with me for three of them—seventy-five percent of my life. They say the human body is about seventy percent water. Roughly the same number. Meaning: without it, you dry up and die.
And that percentage would only keep climbing. I thought of Cha Seeun, who had left me so coldly again today. If I wanted to hold onto her more securely, I needed to pursue her more actively. And for that, I needed to know her type.
In other words—
“What kind of guy was I?”
I wondered, and at the same time, I didn't want to know. Shin Ian was still a stranger to me—painfully so. Besides… he was already gone, wasn't he?
Yes. That man who had been treated like a pushover, who hadn't even been arrogant, who had received Cha Seeun's affection without any of this effort—he had vanished from the world. Even if I recovered my memories, I couldn't go back to being him.
Which meant the person who stayed at Cha Seeun's side—the person she would come to like—had to be the me of right now. That was all I wanted.
“….”
Even if what she was waiting for was the me from before.