Starlight in Seoul Book 2

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hongdae on a Friday was organized chaos — the street performers and the

art students and the tourists all layered on top of each other, the

music from three different venues audible simultaneously, the specific

energy of a place that runs on creativity and cheap beer. It was the

kind of evening Seoul produced specifically to make people feel things —

the air with that particular quality of late spring or early autumn or

the exact moment between seasons when you could not be sure which

direction you were going, and Ha-eun Song was in the middle of it in the

yellow cardigan with a manuscript under one arm and tteokbokki in the

other hand and the specific expression of someone who was about to have

her day become significantly more complicated.

Secretary Choi had worked for Kim Joon-ho for five years and had never

seen him do what he was currently doing, which was standing at the

window of his office watching the street below with the expression of

someone waiting for a specific person. Secretary Choi knew which

specific person. Secretary Choi was keeping this information to himself

because his job security depended on it and also because watching Kim

Joon-ho be a person was the most interesting thing that had happened in

five years of this job. The beginning of whatever this was between

Ha-eun Song and Kim Joon-ho had the specific quality of things that are

growing without permission — not planned, not announced, developing in

the background while both parties maintained the fiction of operating

normally. Secretary Choi was not maintaining any fiction. Secretary Choi

was observing with the professional attention of someone who had worked

for Kim Joon-ho for five years and was watching him become, over the

course of three months, a person who irons shirts and also thinks about

someone specific.

She observed, over her third cup of iced Americano, that Ha-eun had

mentioned Kim Joon-ho eleven times in the last twenty minutes without

noticing she was doing it. She did not point this out. She wrote it in

the notes she was keeping in her phone under the label 'Ha-eun and the

CEO' which she was going to present at the wedding as evidence that she

had known from the beginning. Soo-yeon Park's theory about Ha-eun and

Joon-ho had been documented, elaborated, and shared with Min-ji, who had

not needed the elaboration because she had already arrived at the same

conclusion through different evidence. The evidence was substantial: the

coffee order that appeared without being requested, the umbrella

incident, the jacket in the car, the forty-seven counted smiles. Ha-eun

had not shared the forty-seven count with either of them. She had not

needed to. They had counted independently.

She fell asleep on the car ride back from Busan and when she woke up

there was his jacket over her shoulders and the heat was turned up two

degrees and Joon-ho was looking at the road with the very careful

expression of someone who has done something and would like it not to be

noticed. She noticed. She said nothing. She pulled the jacket up

slightly. He looked straight ahead. His ears were pink The specific

geography of Seoul at night — the Han River paths and the Mapo-gu

rooftops and the Insadong alleys and the Hongdae streets — was

accumulating for Ha-eun a catalog of places associated with moments. The

tteokbokki cart: one. The parking garage: one confusing one. The

elevator: three. The riverside bench where they had watched the lights:

one long one that contained multitudes. She was not cataloging these

deliberately. She was simply discovering, later, that she had.

The Busan business trip that became a weekend because the return train

was delayed and neither of them called to rearrange it, the seafood at

the harbor, the boardwalk, the specific atmosphere of two people in a

city that is not their city having no reason to be anywhere else Seoul

had a way of making things happen that could not have been planned — the

wrong car, the delayed train, the company gala and the cardigan, the

Jeju cliff and the hand — as if the city itself was invested in the

outcome and was deploying its full geography in service of it. Ha-eun

had grown up in Seoul and had never noticed this quality before. She

noticed it now. She was keeping a list, not formally, of the places the

city had intervened. It was getting long.

The THE CONTRACTUAL FEELINGS had been starting in the specific way

things start when neither person knows they are starting. Bap the dog

had known from the first meeting. Secretary Choi had known from the

first professional deviation. Soo-yeon had known before Ha-eun had fully

started knowing. Min-ji had set a date in her calendar under a label she

had not shared with Ha-eun.

Joon-ho sat in his car outside the Mapo-gu building for four minutes

before driving away, which Secretary Choi would later determine because

Secretary Choi had started noting timestamps. In those four minutes

Joon-ho Kim — CEO, Ice Prince of Gangnam per three tabloids, person who

ironed his own shirts, owner of Bap the dog — thought about a yellow

cardigan and a wrong car and a woman who said exactly what she thought

at exactly the wrong moment and was precisely always right. He drove

away. He would be back. He was always back. He was figuring out what to

do about that. He drove through the Seoul night, which was lit and

moving and full of the specific promise of a city that had decided

something.

------------------------------------------------------------------------