SURE 10

The bell rang. At this hour. I unconsciously fumbled for and grabbed my phone. My eyes stung from the screen that suddenly lit up in the darkness.

It was Jinwoo. Why is he calling at this hour…

“Why…”

—Woon-ah. It’s an emergency.

“What’s…”

—Yoon Sungjoon got completely wasted at Seokhyun’s place, ranting about breaking off his engagement while looking for Lee Jungwoon, and then suddenly disappeared in a taxi. This bastard is totally heading to your place, right?

“What…?”

I forced my body, heavy as a thousand pounds, to sit up. What the hell is this bullshit?

—He said it’s been about 20 minutes. He bounced without even paying, so Seokhyun called me, pissed off. Hey, Woon-ah. Lock your door properly. If that bastard Yoon Sungjoon causes a scene, don’t engage him and call the police. No, should I go over?

What do you mean, come over, when you’re in the middle of a night shift at the convenience store. And I’m not such a pushover that I can’t control him. My head is ringing from being woken up just as I was about to fall asleep. I lowered my head and pressed my forehead. If it were up to me, I’d want to ignore him whether he comes or not, but knowing Yoon Sungjoon’s personality, he won’t behave himself.

Fuck, this day is so fucking long.

—Hello. Woon-ah? Are you sleeping, by any chance?

Beep, beep, bee-beep—.

Just then, the sound of the door lock keypad went off. Just as Jinwoo had said. You couldn’t time it this perfectly even if you tried. I feel my eyes being forced open by fatigue. I probably have double eyelids now.

“I get it, so hang up.”

—Hey, it’s because I’m worried!

“Why are you worried about me…. It’s fine, so don’t worry about it and just do your work.”

—Ugh, damn it. Anyway, call me if you think it’s serious. I’ll lock up the store and come right over.

I hung up and got up. The door lock beeped, indicating a wrong password. I prayed it was a thief or someone who had come to the wrong house while drunk. I turned on the wall pad.

“What the hell. Did you change the password?!”

…Of course not. As soon as I saw Yoon Sungjoon filling the screen, three years’ worth of exhaustion washed over me. He was clearly drunk.

“Hands off. If you press it one more time, I’m calling the police.”

Yoon Sungjoon wasn’t fazed by my sudden voice and instead raised his.

“Report me! Good! I’ll just use this chance to come out as a faggot to the police, whatever!”

“Go.”

“I’m not leaving until you open the door for me.”

A day that starts with Shin Taeyoon and ends with Yoon Sungjoon. There’s no bigger clusterfuck than this. My mind, forcibly awakened right before falling asleep, quickly reached its limit. The reason I had maintained all day was crumbling.

“Just go.”

I don’t want to fight and exchange harsh words with an ex. I don’t want to waste useless emotions when others are sleeping. I wish he would just get the hint and go, but if he were capable of that, Yoon Sungjoon would have changed his last name.

“…Lee Jungwoon. I’m going to break off the engagement.”

It’s exactly what Jinwoo tattled about. It seems he’s made a big decision. I couldn’t even laugh, so I turned off the wall pad. As the small screen went black, Yoon Sungjoon’s voice echoed from outside the front door. I didn’t want to hear it, so I let him talk to himself and sat on the sofa.

“Jungwoon, I’m sorry. Huh? I must have been a crazy bastard. How could I leave you and marry a woman…? It doesn’t make sense, this. I… I, I was wrong. Jungwoon……. Open the door. Huh?”

I don’t want to hear whatever he’s whispering. It feels like a bug is gnawing at my brain. It’s a pain to deal with him, so should I just call the police? My head hurt so much even just sitting there, so I had no choice but to get some headache medicine and a bottle of water.

Yoon Sungjoon, perhaps enraged by my lack of response, changed his tune from groveling and kicked the front door as if it were a soccer ball. I swallowed two pills with water and closed the refrigerator door.

“It’s your fault! If you had just given in once when you, damn it, said let’s break up! If you had even pretended to understand me, this wouldn’t have happened! You bastard! You fucking asshole! Open the door!”

It was hard to tell if I was angry at Yoon Sungjoon for kicking the front door and shouting at the top of his lungs after midnight, or if my accumulated fatigue had finally exploded. I went to the front door and, as he wished, threw it open. Just when was he making a scene, screaming so loud the whole neighborhood could hear? Now that the door was actually open, Yoon Sungjoon flinched and looked up at me. The smell of alcohol hit my nose. Just how much did he drink?

“Why are you causing a nuisance at someone else’s store? If you don’t have money, don’t drink. Did you have money for a taxi?”

“What? Is that the first thing you have to say to me? What right do you have to say that to me?! I, I, because of whom…!”

“Then. Are you in the right, standing in front of me in this state?”

Since he had no comeback after I hit a nerve, he just glared at me to death. My brain would probably go crazy from the smell of alcohol faster than the headache medicine would take effect.

“…Move. I’m coming in.”

I grabbed his skinny shoulder as he tried to squeeze past me and pushed him away. His body, like a piece of paper, swayed. I had never laid a hand on him with this kind of force before, so Yoon Sungjoon seemed quite shocked.

“…Did you just push me?”

“Go.”

“You pushed me?! You, Lee Jungwoon?!”

His round eyes instantly narrowed, and he started pounding my left shoulder with his fist like a madman. After taking a few hits, I grabbed his wrist and twisted it hard. I couldn’t take it anymore. By then, I was fully prepared to have a huge fight with Yoon Sungjoon and then move out.

“Ack!”

“Hey. Wasn’t throwing coffee in my face enough for you?”

Come to think of it, I had never even used the informal address ‘hey’ when we were dating. It was because Yoon Sungjoon detested people with foul mouths. The relationship with someone so infinitely lenient with himself belatedly returned as disillusionment.

“……What?”

“Sungjoon. I.”

The syllables flew out as if being chewed up and spat out. Yoon Sungjoon stared at me blankly. Dragging this out with a drunk bastard would only stress me out.

“How far do I have to let you go.”

“Lee Jungwoon, you…”

“You have to do fucked-up things in moderation for me to just pass it off as fucked-up. In your eyes, do I still look like a moron who will tell you you’re pretty, you’re pretty?”

Click, the front door of the apartment across the hall opened in my peripheral vision. There were only two units per floor, and the staircase hallway itself was wide, so the distance to the apartment across was quite far. And yet, this ruckus had reached that house.

I need to resolve this quickly. I slipped on some slippers and roughly dragged Yoon Sungjoon, whose wrist I was still holding. The elevator, luckily, had stayed on our floor instead of going down to the first, so as soon as the doors opened, I pushed Yoon Sungjoon in as if I were throwing him. The torrent of abuse I had poured on him was plastered all over his face. His eyes, colored with shock, shed tears drop by drop. I pressed the button for the first floor and, as the doors were closing, drove the point home.

“Go. Don’t ever come looking for me again, and don’t contact me. This is your last warning.”

The gap between the doors gradually narrowed, and finally, it completely swallowed Yoon Sungjoon. I watched until the numbers on the elevator descended, then turned around. If we were still dating, I would have sent Jinwoo the money for the drinks that bastard had drunk and run off on, but since we had broken up, it was best to let him handle it himself.

The door across the hall was closed. If they had kept watching, I would have politely apologized and looked into moving.

…I don’t know, fuck it. Whatever happens, happens. A faint smell of alcohol wafted through the hallway where the commotion had taken place. Yoon Sungjoon’s traces remained unpleasant to the end. I went inside, brushed my teeth, and put a cigarette to my lips. Sleep was out of the question. I sat at the dining table, opened my laptop to work, then slammed the lid shut in frustration.

‘Shall we meet for dinner next time? French cuisine would be nice.’

Ironically, what was eating at my mind was not Yoon Sungjoon, who had just been raising hell a moment ago, but Shin Taeyoon. Why, of all times, was that passing, commonplace business line coming to mind now?

The long ash of the cigarette fell with a thud into the ashtray. It’s hard to tell if the cause of my headache is Shin Taeyoon or Yoon Sungjoon. What’s certain is that this was quite possibly the worst Monday of my 34 years of life.

“As you can see, the fried food is distributed frozen and fully cooked. When we went there, they had already ordered our snack bar’s tteokbokki for delivery. We could have just made it and brought it, but anyway. We fried up the fully cooked product and tasted it with the tteokbokki, and maybe it’s because they’re a big corporation? Since there’s no room for error in the recipe, there wasn’t much variation in the taste. It seems like it would be easy for the stores to handle as well.”

“Any other opinions?”

“The cooking time for the fried food is 5 minutes at 180 degrees, but since we have to consider various opinions, we fried samples while adjusting the temperature and time. Personally, I found the texture to be crispier and better at 175 degrees for 5 minutes and 30 seconds. The meat juices when you take a bite, how should I put it… felt like they spread out more? That’s what it was like.”

Team Leader Park and Team Leader Im were also next to me, listening to the briefing from the sales team leader who had just returned from the second meeting at Shinyoon F&B.

This place is the company’s cooking and menu testing room. We mainly used the upper floor, which was set up as a simple kitchen, for testing new menus with the sales management team. The fully cooked fried food that Team Leader Kim had received from Shinyoon was portioned into bags of seven. We had just finished the second frying of the frozen, pre-fried product at the recommended temperature, and, as Team Leader Kim had suggested, we had also adjusted the temperature and time, and had just taken a picture of the plate set up with tteokbokki.

“Ooh, that’s hot.”

Team Leader Park, who had tasted just the fried food first, fanned his mouth with his hand. Team Leader Im and Team Leader Kim had already tasted it at Shinyoon, so they were waiting for my and Team Leader Park’s opinions. With a spoon, I dipped a bite-sized piece of fried food deep into the tteokbokki sauce.

“Wow, this fried food is actually delicious. The perilla leaf does a good job of masking the greasiness of the beef.”

“Right? I told you it was good.”

Team Leader Im nodded gravely, as if to guarantee the taste. I held the red-stained fried food on a small plate and chewed. It wasn’t mind-blowingly delicious, but it did a good job of neutralizing the spiciness of the tteokbokki. I rinsed my mouth with water and then tried the fried food from the plate next to it, which had been cooked at an adjusted temperature and time, in the same way. To my palate, neither was bad. Then there’s probably no need to change the cooking time.

“It’s good.”

“It doesn’t seem like we’ll get complaints from customers about it not tasting good.”

“Yeah. But it’s not an item we can carry for a long time.”

“I agree with that.”

“I agree as well.”

It tasted like something that would sell like crazy for about three months and then fizzle out. Team Leader Park, who seemed to like it, rolled the fried food in the tteokbokki sauce just like I did.

“But this tastes like it would make you gain a ton of weight. How many calories is it?”

“600 calories per bag.”

Team Leader Kim answered after looking at the bag.

“Oh my god, crazy.”

Team Leader Park, who had been about to eat a few more, quickly put down his spoon. Team Leader Im, a self-proclaimed tteokbokki enthusiast, crossed his arms with a thud.

“One serving of tteokbokki, seven pieces of fried food. And in here, we’re including a random insertion of 1 out of 6 types of Tae’s photo cards. The price for this is 9,900 won. One fan signing event entry ticket will be given out per set.”

“No, but they’re just kids. Is 100 won off of 10,000 won going to work? Isn’t that expensive? It’s not like they’ll only eat it once. You said that Tae kid is the most popular member.”

“That’s why we have to make the photo cards so unbelievably good that they’ll keep buying tteokbokki even if they throw up from eating it. No, I mean, I was so surprised at how clueless Shinyoon, such a big corporation, is… They were going to shoot the photo cards in a studio, holding a bowl of tteokbokki with full-on lighting. Does that make any sense?”

“Why doesn’t it make sense?”

Wouldn’t that be good for promoting the product, too? Team Leader Im reacted to my response with horror, contorting his facial muscles as if he had heard something bizarre and grotesque.

“Are you kidding me? You really don’t know the idol scene. Mr. CEO, in the idol scene, the photo cards are everything. Team Leader Park also said 9,900 won is expensive, right? Do you have any idea how much idol fans spend on albums and unofficial event photo cards? On the contrary, if it’s an amazing photo card for 9,900 won, they’d pull out the pillars of their apartment to buy tteokbokki. The value for money is so great. Besides, albums are useless and just take up space. Tteokbokki, you can eat and get rid of it.”

He was so dumbfounded that he went on a passionate rant without even pausing. The three of us, completely ignorant of idol fan culture, could only think, ‘I guess so,’ in a daze. Do celebrity photo cards really have that much meaning? They’re just printed photos. Why do they have that much value…

“Anyway, that’s why I vehemently opposed it. Forget all that, we’re going with selfies, no artificial feel at all. The brand collaboration name can just be written on the back. With a cute drawing of a tteokbokki picture. I mean, how can people with such good academic backgrounds not understand the target audience’s minds. This is why being good at studying in school is completely useless.”

“Alright. Calm down.”

Team Leader Im, who has a particularly keen eye for idol fan culture, was more intense than the color of the tteokbokki. He even rolled up his sleeves, saying he would show them a thing or two about what fans like this time. His motivation was so overflowing it could pierce the ceiling. When I asked him before if he was an idol fan, he vehemently denied it, but I see he is. Still, an employee who is willing to work hard is truly admirable, so while we were at it, I encouraged him to do everything he wanted to do while pulling in the capital from the big corporation.