**CHAPTER 1 — Kim Narea's POV**
---
22:00.
Forty minutes until the end of my shift and not a single customer in sight.
I had my elbows on the counter, chopsticks in one hand, phone propped against the ramen cup with the other. The convenience store hummed quietly around me — the refrigerator units, the fluorescent lights, the occasional crinkle of the egg wrapper I was definitely not supposed to be eating on shift.
Hyewon's face filled the screen. Short red hair, bright brown eyes, the expression she always wore when she was about to say something I didn't want to hear.
"You're literally eating on the job," she said. "While video calling. Are you even allowed to have your phone out?"
I chewed slowly and deliberately. "I have zero customers and twenty minutes left. I'm practically already off."
"You're waiting for Kijoon."
"I'm waiting for Kijoon," I confirmed, with the exhaustion of someone who had been waiting for Kijoon for two years.
She sighed. "That man has never been on time in his life."
"That man has never been on time in his life," I agreed.
We stayed on the call, the comfortable silence of people who had known each other long enough that silence didn't need filling. I scraped the last of the broth from the cup. Outside, the street was quiet — that specific late-night quiet that belonged only to this hour, when the city had thinned down to people walking home alone and the occasional car cutting through empty intersections.
"How's Mirae?" Hyewon asked.
I set the chopsticks down.
"She wants to apply to Hansung," I said. "The private university."
Hyewon went quiet for a moment. Then — "That's why you picked up the extra shifts."
"Someone has to."
"Narea—"
"She's going to go," I said. "She's going to finish her degree and she's going to have a life that looks completely different from mine. That's the plan."
"The plan." Hyewon's voice had that careful quality that meant she was choosing words. "You were one of the best students in our department. Before your parents — before everything. You gave up your own degree to work full time at twenty-two. You know that's not nothing, right?"
"Mirae is the most important person to me."
"Oh my God." Hyewon pressed a hand to her chest dramatically. "I'm having a cardiac event. Right now. In real time. I'm dying."
She slumped sideways off screen, one arm dangling.
I laughed — genuinely, fully, the kind that loosened something in my chest. "You're so stupid."
She reappeared, grinning. "Say I matter. Say it."
"You matter, you disaster."
"Thank you. I feel better—"
The door chimed.
I straightened immediately, shoulders back, phone down — shoved discreetly beneath the counter in one practiced motion. "Client. I'll call you later."
"Go, go—"
I ended the call.
---
He wasn't what I expected at 22:00 on a Tuesday.
Tall. Dark wavy hair slightly disheveled, like he'd been running a hand through it. An expensive coat — the kind that looked effortless and wasn't. He moved through the store with the quiet ease of someone accustomed to occupying space without announcing it, scanning the shelves without urgency.
I watched him from behind the counter.
There was something familiar about his face. The specific kind of familiar that came from screens — the face you knew before you knew the person. A drama actor, maybe. Someone I'd seen in passing on a streaming thumbnail and half-remembered.
He brought his items to the counter.
Chicken ramen. Banana milk. A rice ball.
He set them down without a word, eyes on the items, and I ran them through the register with what I hoped was the professional efficiency of someone who had absolutely not been video calling and eating ramen thirty seconds ago.
"Twelve thousand won," I said.
He paid. Exact change. Tucked his card away and picked up the items — then stopped.
Turned back.
"You have sauce," he said quietly. "On your face."
My entire body temperature rose approximately four degrees.
"Where?" I reached up, touched my cheek.
"Right side."
I wiped. He watched, not unkindly, with the neutral patience of someone waiting for a task to be completed.
"Better?" I asked.
He nodded once.
Then he took his items to the small table by the window, sat down, and stared outside.
Just — stared. Like a man carrying something too heavy to put down, using the late-night street as somewhere to rest his eyes.
I turned away and pretended to reorganize a display I had already organized twice tonight.
---
Ten minutes passed.
I had changed out of my uniform jacket into my regular clothes — still behind the counter, technically still on shift until Kijoon arrived, which could be anywhere between now and the heat death of the universe.
I was straightening the snack aisle when the door chimed again.
Without looking up: "Oh Kijoon, finally. I have been standing here since—"
I turned.
Not Kijoon.
A different man. Similar height to the one at the window but sharper somehow — the kind of sharp that came from intention rather than genetics. Expensive suit. Hair that was too perfect for this hour. He scanned the store once, clocked the man at the table, and walked toward him with the directness of someone who hadn't come to browse.
"Sorry," I said. "I thought you were someone else."
He didn't acknowledge this. Just kept walking.
I returned to the snack aisle.
Their voices started low. I wasn't trying to listen — there was simply nowhere else for sound to go in a quiet convenience store at 22:10. I caught fragments. Something about a company. A name — *Iseul.* The word *marry* repeated twice.
Then the second man's voice rose.
"She's been waiting for you, Junho. You can't keep doing this to her."
I stopped pretending to organize.
The man from the window — Junho, apparently — answered with the flat calm of someone who had said this before. "I've told you. I'm not marrying Iseul."
"It's not a question. Father wants this. Half the company, Junho — or nothing. Your choice."
"Then nothing."
"You don't even have a reason." The sharp one — Yohan — stepped closer. "You don't have someone else. We both know that."
A pause.
Then Junho said, quietly: "Actually, I do."
Silence.
I became extremely interested in the chip display.
"Stop lying." Yohan's voice had dropped. "We both know there's no one."
"There is."
"Then prove it. Right now."
I heard footsteps.
I thought — *his girlfriend must have come in while I wasn't watching, she must be somewhere in the store, I should look up and give them privacy—*
I looked up.
Junho was walking directly toward me.
I stepped back. Glanced behind me instinctively — maybe she was there, maybe she'd slipped past me, maybe—
His hand closed around my arm.
Gently. But certain.
He turned me toward him in one motion, and I had approximately one second to register the proximity — the exhausted dark eyes, the slight furrow between his brows, the silent *I'm sorry* he didn't say out loud—
Before he kissed me.
It wasn't a stage kiss. It wasn't brief or performative or easy to dismiss.
It was the kind of kiss that made the fluorescent lights irrelevant. That made the refrigerator hum and the chip display and the fact that I still had sauce on my face irrelevant. His hand at my arm and his mouth on mine and the complete, disorienting certainty that this was happening in my actual life and not in one of Hyewon's dramas.
When he pulled back, he was looking past me.
At his brother.
Yohan's face had gone through several emotions in rapid succession and landed somewhere between fury and something I couldn't name. He moved toward the door in three sharp steps, coat swinging. Stopped with his hand on the glass.
Turned back.
"You'll regret this, Junho."
The door swung shut behind him.
The store returned to its normal sounds. Refrigerator hum. Fluorescent lights. The distant noise of a car on the street outside.
Junho released my arm.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
"I—" he started.
I slapped him.
Not hard enough to do damage. Hard enough to mean it.
He deserved it.
He seemed to know he deserved it. He didn't move away. Just stood there, absorbing it, jaw tight.
The door chimed.
"SORRY I'M LATE," Oh Kijoon announced, bursting through the entrance with his jacket half on and his hair still damp, "the subway was insane and my phone died and there was this whole situation with a—"
He stopped.
Looked at me.
Looked at the man standing in front of me with a handprint forming on his cheek.
Looked back at me.
"...Should I come back later?"
I picked up my bag from behind the counter.
Looked at Junho one more time — at his expensive coat and his banana milk and the exhaustion in his eyes that had nothing to do with the hour.
"My shift is over," I said to no one in particular.
And walked out.