SURE 9

Ah. So dating is draining. So things like heart-fluttering love have their own time and place. Should I have revealed my first love that suddenly came to me in high school instead of hiding it, and pushed through even if I got slapped in the face?

Everything was futile. The past doesn’t come back. Whether it’s love or anything else.

And so, until my early twenties, I was like any other kid my age. From fresh-faced romance to clingy relationships, I dated while maintaining a line that wasn’t burdensome to either of us within a world made entirely of human relationships, and then I enlisted in the army. Back then, I had no worries. I dreamed of graduating right after being discharged, getting a job in my major, and living as an office worker with a steady paycheck… a life that was tiring but enjoyable in its own way. Until, after my discharge, foreclosure notices were suddenly slapped on our house and my parents passed away in an accident.

‘You die after skipping out on someone else’s money?! You fucking bastard, you think dying solves everything?!’

Strangers came to the funeral home and screamed. It was loud. There was even someone who grabbed me by the collar of my chief mourner’s armband and spat in my face. As I swayed helplessly, I looked at my parents, trapped inside a square frame. Resentment? If I were to feel such an emotion, I would have done so when my allowance was cut off for three months. I didn’t even have the mental capacity to blame my parents. I was numb.

Is there anything eternal in this world? Warmth, happiness, and peace had all vanished in an instant.

After the funeral, I submitted a leave of absence from school. It was because I had become busier with other things than school. Writing a waiver of inheritance was too difficult for a mere twenty-something college student. I looked down at the paper lined with words I had never seen before, signed it mechanically, and handed over the documents they requested. If the scope of the world I had experienced was this much, the reality was so vast that a person like me was just a single dot.

The funny thing is, even after becoming penniless, paying the deposit for a semi-basement one-room apartment with the money I had saved up, and working two part-time jobs a day, I didn’t stop dating. It was an act closer to escapism than love. I was a beggar with nothing to my name but my own body, so I had to at least date if I wanted to become rich.

‘Jungwoon, someone’s looking for you.’

The manager called me while I was making side dishes in the kitchen of an indoor street bar. Since I had waived my inheritance, it couldn’t be a creditor. I had heard that everything related to my parents and money had been legally taken care of, so the only person who could be looking for me was my boyfriend, but the time… it was the time he was supposed to be working his part-time job, too.

I went out, puzzled, to find that the person looking for me was none other than my aunt. My aunt, who looked so much like my mother that they were often mistaken for twins, was four years younger than my mother.

‘I thought you’d look like you haven’t had a decent meal, but your face is all shiny.’

‘Aunt, how did you know I was here?’

‘I hired someone to find you, why.’

‘Huh?’

‘Tell your boss you’re only working until the end of this month and quit. And get out of that room that doesn’t get a speck of sunlight.’

My aunt turned and trudged away, leaving me bewildered by the sudden meeting. I stood frozen, unable to even respond stupidly, until my boss yelled at me to get back inside, so for that day, I just finished my work. I was too exhausted to tell him I was quitting that day. The next day was the same. Business was too good.

My aunt came to see me three more times over the next six months. Each time, I was busy getting through a backlog of orders, and my boss said, ‘The tteokbokki is ridiculously popular for some reason, so I raised the price by two thousand won and marked it as a best-seller, you know? And Jungwoon, you personally serve the tables that order tteokbokki. The customers seem to like it whenever they see you in the kitchen.’ He even made me do sales.

The problem was that every single table ordered tteokbokki. Even though the prices for the side dishes were high since it was a street bar, the tteokbokki, which cost eighteen thousand won, sold like hotcakes. There wasn’t even a set recipe; I just made it as my hands led me, but every time I served it, the customers would look at me and say a word or two about how delicious it was. Around that time, I became so busy that I literally had no time to breathe, so my relationship with my boyfriend grew distant, and I had to break up with him over the phone.

As sales increased along with it, it was only natural that the boss’s grin stretched from ear to ear. Taking it a step further, the boss even created a takeout menu and held out a notebook to me, suggesting we formalize the recipe. I filled half the notebook based on the rough measurements I used when adding seasonings with a spoon, and the boss put 100,000 won in cash in my hand, calling it a recipe fee.

It was a good feeling to be recognized. Even though I was being paid less than the minimum wage, I worked hard, thinking of that 100,000 won recipe fee. If my aunt hadn’t shown up at the store with a club, calling it labor exploitation, I might have foolishly continued working with that boss until now.

‘Hey, you motherfucker, did you report me? I was being nice to you, and now you’re getting cocky. You bastard.’

The boss was reported to the Ministry of Labor. It was my aunt’s doing. The boss, who was called in and investigated by the Ministry of Labor, cursed at me, threw a wad of bills in my face, and told me to get lost. It was quite a shock to see his smiling face from when he gave me the recipe notebook contort so frighteningly, transforming him into a different person.

And yet, I had no choice but to gather the bills that had fallen after hitting my face and leave. I was powerless. When my aunt, who had been waiting in an old compact car in front of the store, got out of the driver’s seat, grabbed my arm, and practically crumpled me into the passenger seat, I burst into sobs that I had held back even when my parents died.

‘Chalk it up to social experience.’

‘Sob, sob.’

‘Think of it as learning something that others pay to learn, but you learned it while getting paid your hard-earned, blood-and-guts money.’

The damp smell that clung to my work clothes even after washing them, the musty humidity that pooled in the barred window, the cigarette ash that fell like someone’s steps and eyes, the discarded cigarette butts. The first day I entered my aunt’s house, escaping the roars of the stray cats that woke me from my sleep.

In the warmth of the futon spread on the floor, I made a resolution. Whether I ended up as porridge or rice, I would survive in this world where nothing is eternal.

JW Foods is a company that I started with difficulty and have protected until now. It is no exaggeration to say that I have poured my everything into it. But Shin Taeyoon, so easily, with just one word, trampled on my everything.

‘Do you plan on running that company for a long time?’

Everyone has a dual nature. Their attitude also changes depending on who they are with. From a business perspective, I believe that acting differently based on whether someone is a truly beneficial asset to me or a disposable substitute that will just suck me dry and be thrown away is also a part of that duality.

Shin Taeyoon was a person specialized in this field. It wasn’t my first or second time meeting an ambitious person who moved people’s hearts with calculated goodwill and sweet talk to ultimately achieve their desired goal, so why was I foolishly making strange assumptions? Why didn’t I coldly grasp Shin Taeyoon’s intentions and only think of them in a personal way? Of all things, about romance.

‘Are you, by any chance, referring to a merger and acquisition right now?’

‘Haha… no. Objectively speaking, the corporate value of JW Foods isn’t outstanding or special enough to discuss a merger and acquisition, is it? I told you, I’m interested in CEO Lee Jungwoon.’

‘That means…’

‘In my opinion, three years should be enough for that company.’

In other words, he meant I should grow the company appropriately, sell it, and come to Shinyoon F&B. It wasn’t a romantic advance, but a scouting offer, and for that purpose, Shin Taeyoon had put effort into dealing with me.

The strange thing was that the direction that had gone so spectacularly wrong had actually brought back my lost composure. Rather than the embarrassment of having jumped to conclusions on my own or the anger at how little he must have thought of our company to make such an offer, my restored reason acted as a shield, and my scattered line of reasoning was properly realigned.

‘Don’t you think that’s a rather rude offer, considering a collaboration with your company hasn’t even been decided yet?’

‘Because it’s an offer made to CEO Lee Jungwoon personally, not to JW Foods as a whole. Besides, I have to stake my claim now for you to even consider it, right? Well, even if it’s absurd for now.’

Then, Shin Taeyoon smoothly snatched the bill I was holding. He said I shouldn’t pay for a meal he was buying. Shin Taeyoon’s brazen attitude as he took out an iced Americano from the back seat and smiled, telling me to consider it as him buying the coffee, should have been annoying, but at that moment, I just wanted him to take it and get lost.

As I stared at Shin Taeyoon’s retreating back for a long time, got into the driver’s seat, and entered the company’s address into the navigation, I remembered something as I looked at the blue line stretching straight ahead. That Shin Taeyoon hadn’t said goodbye with an assurance of our next meeting when we parted. He was just testing me.

I returned to the company and tried not to think about my meeting with Shin Taeyoon while handling my afternoon work. An absurd offer can always be rejected. Above all, I had a lot of work to catch up on, and I was drained from an hour-long meeting with the sales management team regarding a VOC case that had come up in the customer feedback section, so my head was throbbing the whole way to the main store. It made sense that my aunt would ask if I had been harassed.

“Who was in here that the seat is pushed back this far? It’s so spacious I could do the flutter kick.”

My aunt, who had opened the passenger door, adjusted the seat distance. It was a trace left by Shin Taeyoon. The coffee that had been in the back seat was now gone, as I had given a cup to every employee I saw, but the square empty space in the carrier, created when Shin Taeyoon took a coffee, left a impoverished afterimage.

“Mom! Hyung! Waiiiit a minute!”

Just as I was starting the engine to leave, Minjae came running like a madman and blocked the car. He is my aunt’s son and my cousin, a new employee who has just graduated from college and taken his first step into society. Minjae, who cheerfully got into the back seat, gasped for breath.

“Whoa! Almost missed it by a hair. Good thing I ran. Haa.”

“What time is it that you’re just getting off work now?”

“Ah, hyung. Don’t even ask. I have so much work I feel like I’m going to throw up. Today is actually an early day.”

“That one doesn’t crawl back home until 10 o’clock.”

“You must be having a hard time.”

He finally takes off the bag he was carrying like a turtle shell. Minjae, who had broken through the tough job market to get a job as a developer at an IT company, chattered away on his own, perhaps because he was an only child. It was mostly about his supervisor, but upon listening closely, it sounded more like a process of breaking in a new employee. My aunt said that even if she had a daughter, she would talk less than him, but from my perspective, since I’m also not very talkative, I thought it was rather fortunate.

“And I’m planning to buy a car.”

“What money do you have to buy a car?”

“Mom, are you looking down on me? I can just buy a used car. I feel like I’m going to die transferring at Sindorim every morning.”

“Shut up and take the subway until you save up money. With a used car, the repair costs could end up being as much as a new car. What ability do you have to be driving a car already?”

It’s a common conversation between a mother and son. I chuckled as I listened.

“Look up the car you want and send it to me in a text. It’s late, but I’ll buy it for you as a graduation gift.”

“Hey, are you crazy?”

My aunt slapped my arm hard, but Minjae, who wouldn’t miss an opportunity, his eyes shining, moved his butt to the middle seat and thrust his face forward.

“Really?! For real, hyung? What’s the budget?”

“You little brat, what do you mean what’s the budget! Jungwoon, don’t buy it for him. Got it?”

“Hyung is buying it with his own money, why are you stopping him, Mom!”

I owe my aunt so much that it will take a long time to repay her. Besides, my aunt has always refused allowances or gifts, so I feel better if I can at least give back to Minjae. Since I was just smiling, my aunt burst with anger and smacked Minjae on the head.

“Ow! Why’d you hit me!”

“You immature child, you know how hard your hyung works for his money, and you just accept it so readily. Huh?”

I’m not living that hard of a life…

“Hyung, then I’ll let you know within next week.”

“Okay.”

“I can’t believe this.”

I should probably change the subject at this point.

“What do you want for dinner? Let’s get what Minjae wants.”

“Then, raw fish?”

“Raw fish, my ass. Let’s just go home and grill some pork belly. We still have some left from last time.”

“Ah, I had pork belly at the company dinner yesterday…!”

“Be quiet. Let’s go home.”

Seriously, there’s no stopping them. I’ll have to order delivery raw fish if he says it’s okay. To suppress the craving for a cigarette that was washing over me like hunger, I rolled down the driver’s side window while stopped at a light. The chilly wind clung to my skin.

After showering, I lay down and opened my social media account. There’s nothing like social media for keeping up with the latest trends. First, I went to Jungwoon’s Place’s official account, scrolled all the way down, and then back up. At the very top, a farmer wearing a straw hat was holding a tray of freshly pulled rice cakes instead of rice stalks and smiling broadly.

Jungwoon’s Place’s tteokbokki is made with rice cakes made from 100% domestic new-crop rice o(^^o)

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#JungwoonsPlace #Tteokbokki #RiceTteokbokki #DomesticIngredients #CravingTteokbokkiToday #ATasteSoGoodItWouldntBeStrangeIfTwoPeopleSuddenlyDiedWhileEatingOne #TheBestCompanyWelfareIsTheCEOsFace #AndNextIsTheTteokbokki #AndYouWontBelieveHowDeliciousTheFriedFoodIs

“This is actually working?”

The bizarre hashtags were the result of entrusting it entirely to the marketing team’s social media manager. He was a talented individual, brimming with creative ideas, whom Team Leader Im had strongly recommended because the portfolio he submitted when he was hired showed that his personal account had as many followers as a celebrity.

Separate from that, I had no idea why they were mentioning me in the hashtags. Moreover, if you scrolled down just a little, there was a picture of me, posted after getting my permission for the use of my likeness, plastered right there. It was a picture Chief Han had secretly taken of me while I was resting and getting a caffeine fix after a tug-of-war with a client representative over a delivery. He said he had no choice because an order had come down from the marketing team.

I have no idea what they gain from posting a picture of me looking worn out, but since it was already taken, I told him to do whatever he wanted, and the social media manager posted the feed with all sorts of flattery. The number of followers did increase sharply, but that was probably because we were giving out coupons at the time. Can’t we take it down now? It’s embarrassing every time I see my face on the official account.

I wandered through the hashtags, saving any useful information to my phone’s notepad, and as drowsiness washed over me, I tossed my phone aside. I have to sleep right when I’m sleepy to survive tomorrow. I closed my eyes. I felt my body sink heavily into the mattress as if it were being buried, and just as I was about to let go of my consciousness.