Chapter 3
On Tuesday, Kangmin called out sick. Upon hearing the news, everyone on the floor scattered, rushing to hide.
It was Kangmin’s day to man the support desk, and none of them wanted to be picked as the stand-in.
Junyoung, who was distracted by Mirae washing a stain from her blouse in the third-floor bathroom, had the misfortune of running into Mr. Choi on the way to the stairwell.
“Junyoung!” Mr. Choi barked, gesturing toward him with a meaty finger. Mr. Choi was the department head, a short man with a growing bald spot and an enormous, fiery temper. “You’re on desk duty today. Kangmin’s out. Food poisoning.”
Junyoung bowed, fighting to keep his expression in check. Food poisoning, my ass, he thought. “Yes, sir.”
As soon as Mr. Choi was gone, he shot off a message to Kangmin on KakaoTalk. Fuck you, man. You owe me one.
Kangmin: Sorry, dude. But when I show you her picture later, you’ll understand …
Junyoung scowled. He was going to be stuck talking to morons all day while Kangmin played hooky, no doubt curled up in bed with some bimbo.
He peeked over at Kangmin’s empty cubicle and, feeling resentful, scanned the camera feeds again.
His bad mood began to lessen as Michelle appeared on the screen.
He leaned forward as Michelle entered a stall and pulled down her pants.
Briefs. She was wearing ugly fucking briefs that not even his mother would wear. Junyoung gripped his mouse.
It was going to be a terrible day.
+
The first call of the day came from Subin. She worked on the second floor and often wore a specific pair of sexy blue panties that Junyoung loved. Kangmin had slept with her after a drunken office party a while back, leading to a two-month-long, turbulent, drama-filled entanglement.
“She’s crazy,” Kangmin had said after the fact. He twirled his finger around his temple. “But most of the females in accounting are. You know what they say about women who look at numbers all day. They’re repressed.” He lowered his voice. “Amazing body, though. Curves in all the right places.”
Kangmin’s words echoed through Junyoung’s head as he took the elevator up to Subin’s floor and walked to her desk. She smiled when she saw him, said hello. He thought about how she looked in her underwear, and how sometimes she locked herself in the stall and cried in the middle of the workday.
Subin got up and moved aside, and Junyoung sat in her chair.
It was warm. The residual heat from her body made him shiver.
She hovered over his shoulder as he booted up the computer, the ends of her hair brushing against his ear.
Junyoung’s heart raced. When she pointed at the monitor with her index finger to show him the problem, Junyoung nodded, even though the sound of his pulse throbbing was drowning out her words.
It was a process issue. A faulty program, running in the background, consuming resources. The computer was hot, the fan whirring loudly. As soon as he ended the task, everything returned to normal.
“There you go,” Junyoung said, straightening up. “Everything should be working now.”
“Thanks,” Subin said. “I’m surprised you were able to fix it. I honestly thought it was broken. The whole thing froze up when I tried to send an email and, well …” She mimed picking up the computer and throwing it onto the floor.
Junyoung laughed. “That’s what I’m here for. Feel free to call my line if you run into any other issues.”
“I appreciate it. You’ll hear from me before the day is over, I’m sure, given how terrible I am with technology.”
Subin was quite pretty, Junyoung realized.
Her eyes were warm and crinkled at the corners when she smiled.
She had nice teeth, and her neck was long and graceful like a swan’s.
He found his gaze moving lower and lower until he stopped at her breasts.
They were beautiful, barely contained by her fuzzy gray sweater.
Her waist was slim. What had Kangmin said? Curves in all the right places?
Subin stepped back, and Junyoung snapped to attention.
She wore a frightened expression on her face.
How long had he been ogling her for? Junyoung flushed.
“Sorry,” he stammered. He made his voice obnoxiously high and cheery, but even to his ears, it sounded false.
“I was spacing out. Daydreaming about lunch. Heard naengmyeon is on the menu at the cafeteria today, and you know …” He made a feeble gesture with his hands.
She gave him a curt nod. “I have to get back to work,” she said. The kindness in her voice had evaporated.
“Good luck,” he blurted out. She ignored him.
Alone in the elevator, Junyoung pressed his fist into the center of his forehead. “Stupid,” he muttered under his breath. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
+
At least there was still the naengmyeon.
But it was a busy morning; Junyoung found himself glued to his desk throughout the lunch hour.
By the time he was done, it was nearly one-thirty, and his stomach was grumbling.
He took the elevator up to the cafeteria, rushing to make it before the doors were locked.
Without the chaos of the lunch rush, the line was short; there were only two men standing in front of him.
For some unknown reason, though, they were taking forever, scooping the rice slowly and picking up each piece of kimchi one by one.
Junyoung, wallowing in his frustration, was startled when a quiet voice came from behind him.
“Can they be any slower?”
He turned. A woman stood close to him, observing the two men with a furrowed brow. He recognized her. Pink panties, he thought. She worked on the fifth floor. What was her name?
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said.
She smiled. “Ah, well. Some people are just inconsiderate. Those two are in my department, and they’re like that all the time.”
“Right,” he said, feeling uncertain.
“You’re Junyoung, right?”
He blinked. “Yes. It’s nice to see you again.” He paused. Grimaced. “This is so embarrassing, but I don’t remember your name.”
“That’s alright. I don’t expect you to remember. It’s Dahye.”
“Oh, yes! On the fifth floor, right?”
“That’s right. I think you were the one who helped me a few weeks ago with my computer.” She sounded sheepish, and the memory came to him. She had accidentally deleted all her files and had begged him to recover them. There had been a lot of crying.
He grabbed the top two trays from the stack leaning against the wall and passed the first one to her.
Their hands touched, and an electric current ran through Junyoung’s fingers.
He pretended not to notice, though he was now hyperaware of his body.
He made his way down the line. Was he walking funny?
He couldn’t tell. Everything felt foreign to him, as though he were a baby deer trying out its legs for the first time.
He wobbled. He piled the buckwheat noodles into his bowl and spooned icy broth over them.
“I love naengmyeon,” he said suddenly, turning to Dahye. He immediately regretted it. What kind of person randomly shouted I love naengmyeon out of the blue? He sounded like a psychopath. But she smiled warmly and didn’t seem put out at all.
“Me too.”
You wouldn’t consider her pretty in the normal sense. Her eyes were spaced too far apart on her face, her nose was round and flat, and her cheeks were dotted with pale brown freckles. And yet there was something so charming about her, like she was a cute little alien from outer space.
Take me to your leader, Junyoung thought. Dahye, as though reading his thoughts, gave him another toothy grin.
+
For the rest of the day, Junyoung was paralyzed.
He couldn’t work. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything except imagine Dahye’s eyes.
He had never paid any particular attention to her in the past, especially since the office had no shortage of hot women.
But she had done something no other woman ever had: She remembered him.
He owed Mr. Choi a summary of the day’s support requests by the end of the hour, but Junyoung found himself constantly checking the fifth-floor restroom for Dahye.
He would type one word, then toggle to the camera feeds.
Another word. Toggle again. After thirty minutes of this, he had barely written anything, and she was still nowhere to be found.
The thought came to him that he could go to the fifth floor to try and run into her. He could make it look like an accident.
Just as he made up his mind, Dahye appeared on his screen. She chose the second stall and used the toilet. Pink panties, like always. Her pussy was covered in a thin layer of hair. A coconut, ripe and ready to be cracked open. Ready to be devoured. The sight of it made him lightheaded.
In front of the mirror, Dahye applied a fresh coat of lipstick.
She reached behind her head and pulled her hair loose from its ponytail.
It swept down her back like a square of silk.
With the hair tie clenched between her teeth, she gathered her hair and fashioned it into a bun at the nape of her neck.
The bun resembled a snail’s shell: delicate, lovely, unexpectedly beautiful.
Junyoung, growing hard, imagined plunging his member right into the center of that gorgeous little mound.