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There are many things that could be said about people who believe so wholeheartedly in fate. Most of what Wonu would say about such people would probably be very unflattering, so it was a good thing that he had the sense to keep such opinions to himself. Well, mostly. Almost half of the time, at least.
“How was the wedding?”
“I give it a year,” Wonu said dryly, pulling at his tie and kicking off his shoes at the door. His roommate, Junhui, was only momentarily distracted from some Chinese drama he was (illegally) streaming on the TV. His eyes were already pulling back to the screen, his hand reaching to rest in its comfy home inside his sweatpants. If Junhui were half as charming as he was handsome, no person in Seoul would be safe.
“That’s harsh,” Junhui chided. “Haven’t they been dating for like, ever?”
“Three years,” Wonu amended, flopping onto the ratty couch next to Junhui. Maybe by his next paycheck he could afford to replace it with something better. He was exhausted, although this wedding was about as short as any other. From the time Wonu had entered the wedding hall, witnessed the ceremony, and offered his congratulations to the new couple, not two hours had passed. Something about seeing Minki, just a few years older than Wonu himself, stand and confidently pledge the rest of his life to someone drained all of Wonu’s energy. His brain processed the entire thing slowly, his thoughts moving like molasses through the vows, the readings, the prayers. How, was one of the only thoughts that had enough momentum to circle back to him more than once. How is he so sure?
“Give Minki some credit, then.” Junhui spoke importantly, but a lilt to his words betrayed how little he actually cared about one of Wonu’s college buddies and his happy marriage. “Once you get to be our age,” he paused here, to pick his nose, and then resumed, “stuff like this will make sense.”
“I’m the same age as you,” Wonu said, fighting to keep an eyelid from twitching.
“Not mentally.”
Wonu would like to convey that he knows that attempted murder is never the answer for shutting up an annoying Chinese man. But if Junhui had continued to speak, there would have been a greater danger of Wonu having to jump off the balcony, and he was not above acknowledging that he probably had more to offer in his life than Junhui—who rarely did much other than model, eat, and annoy him.
(Wonu would also like to convey to you, dear reader, that, while it stings his pride, he has never been attributed to being very well-muscled. Or coordinated. He risked spraining a wrist if he turned a page in a book too quickly. So any murder attempt was never long-lived.)
“You’re awful,” Junhui coughed dramatically, rubbing his throat long after Wonu had recovered from his bloodlust. “You’ll never find love with this kind of behavior.”
Wonu hid his sneer by picking up a book from the coffee table, and spent the rest of the night annoying Junhui by loudly (and with terrific mispronunciation) repeating every other line of dialogue from Rest Your Head on My Shoulder.
{}
Within the next few weeks, spring had come, and Wonu had mostly forgotten Minki’s wedding except for the new photos on Instagram from his (Wonu repressed a shudder at even the thought) married-life Instagram that Seungcheol had guilted him into following.
But yes, anyway: his last bout of midterms as a college student had ended, and spring—as mentioned before—made the air warm and the cherry blossoms close to falling, and it prompted Wonu to want to get off a few stops early and walk the rest of the way home.
The fact that there was a Kyobo bookstore a few hundred meters away from this station wasn’t a factor.
The fact that Wonu found himself there only five minutes later was purely coincidence.
There were a lot of pushes recently among Wonu’s family (mostly by aunts that spent too much time on facebook) to abandon chains like this and favor more local, Korean-owned book stands. But Wonu was proud of how much his English reading had improved since high school, and not many Dongdaemun book stalls had much to offer beyond a few battered copies of Harry Potter.
Junhui had come with him into bookstores a few times after he had first moved in. The man had been eager to explore some of the neighborhood and pick up Korean textbooks (this was when Junhui looked at Wonu with awe and didn’t know much Korean. A much happier time in Wonu’s life), but Junhui soon found that the internet and his drinking buddies were much better tutors, and Wonu made his trips alone again.
The classics were always the first that Wonu checked in the Foreign Books section. Nothing ever really changed there, but there was some sort of comfort in knowing that whatever he bought had been acclaimed and loved for ages. No one ever occupied this section either, besides college students like him, or middle-aged, professor-looking types that looked like they could go on for hours about which color pantaloons the early English nobility wore, and what it meant in terms of the author’s purpose or sexuality or whatever. But it was deserted today, and Wonu didn’t suppress his smile as his shoulders relaxed, and he let his fingers brush the spines of a whole shelf of Pride and Prejudice as he walked down the aisle.
After about thirty minutes of double checking a Naver blog post about the great classics, Wonu was debating between Jane Eyre and Lolita when someone cleared their throat. Wonu jumped, startled, and clutched his books to his chest like an embarrassed teenager when he saw the young woman trying to get by him.
She pressed her lips together in an embarrassed smile at his reaction, and bowed her head slightly, moving to get by him before she stopped, seeing the books he had been trying to decide between. Wonu wasn’t exactly opposed to her lingering gaze.
“You like your books scandalous?” She asked, and Wonu blinked dumbly at her for a moment before stuttering back to life.
“Um, yes.” He fought off the urge to smack himself. “I mean, yeah, I like it. Have you read them before?”
“Only this one,” she admitted, pointing to Lolita’s cover. “I have a friend with the same name. She hates it, so I have to quote it whenever possible. Obviously.”
Wonu was too startled to hold back his laughter. And he was glad he hadn’t kept it to himself when her face broke into an expression of a relieved sense of accomplishment. She was foreign, and although confident, was probably met with varying reactions when she interacted with anyone in Korean. A twinge of understanding resonated through his chest; she kind of reminded him of Junhui. Although much, much prettier.
“Sorry for interrupting you,” she said after a pause, heat staining her cheeks. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Wonu sat there, blinking, with some unmeasurable weight in his chest that prevented him from speaking, from breathing properly. She didn’t wait for him to speak--which was a good call, he probably looked like a gaping lunatic--and was lost into the crowd of shoppers almost immediately. Wonu shook his head, as if that could throw off the lingering embarrassment and heat he felt in his face, and put one of the books back without checking. He’d been having a nice day up until five minutes ago. Well. It was still nice, but he felt like his insides were spaghetti and someone and just stuck a fork in them and given it a good twirl.
“What’s wrong with you?” Junhui said loudly as Wonu walked into the living room. He flung his bag down and threw himself over the couch.
“Um. I bought a book?” Wonu looked at the brown paper bag that had landed next to his book bag. He didn’t really remember buying it.
“You bookworms are gross,” Junhui said bluntly, heading to his room. “Buy one book and you come home looking like you just got your first blowjob.” He paused before shutting his door, and poked his head out to the living area again. “Oh, you see, a blowjob is what happens when someone actually wants to put their--” He slammed the door shut suddenly, and a thick magazine thudded off the wood half a second later.
“Asshole,” Wonu muttered under his breath, slumping back down into the cushions.
{}
While Junhui was possibly a demon from hell, Wonu did have him to thank for introducing him to a lot of cool people that he wouldn’t have met otherwise. The friends that he had made in the last two years he’d roomed with Junhui were so much better than the pricks that were in Wonu’s school’s journalism department.
One of his favorites of these new friends was a senior at Jihoon’s performing arts school, Soonyoung, who had also just finished his midterms and was itching to celebrate. And this is how Wonu found himself out on this particular Saturday night in the busier section of his neighborhood.
Wonu, contrary to every malicious rumor Junhui had tried to spread, did not only like to jerk it to old books that smell like death. He had many hobbies. Including drinking. Including this specific place’s honey makkoli that made his head swim but his lips taste sweet when he ran his tongue over them. A waitress came by with another bottle of liquor and a pot of honey and Wonu’s other hobby could be taking her as his wife because yes.
“You’re funny when you drink,” Soonyoung sniggered as he mixed another--their fourth? Fifth?--round of drinks.
“I’m funny all of the time,” Wonu said immediately. He stretched his hand out in front of him, flexing his fingers.
Soonyoung just laughed, which Wonu thought proved his point (it doesn’t, poor boy), and Wonu moved on to trying to think back on the specific train of conversation they were having before Soonyoung felt it necessary to point out how hilarious Wonu was. “What were we talking about?”
“Well,” Soonyoung shrugged, ladling out another cup for Wonu. “Nothing really. You just asked that poor girl to marry you though.”
“Oh.” Wonu winced, feeling a little of his happy, swimmy vibe dribble out of his ears.
“Aw, I’m sure she would’ve said no,” Soonyoung chided, grinning at Wonu’s red face. “And then you’d still have a perfectly clean no-commitment record.”
“You make me sound like such a douchebag,” Wonu complained. “Just because I’m not--I’ve never…” Wonu trailed off, blinking as his words stopped trotting around in his head long enough for him to realize what kind of tangent he was going on. “Wow, I’m drunk.” He dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.
“It’s okay,” Soonyoung laughed good naturedly, slapping a hand on Wonu’s scrawny shoulder and giving it a good shake. “So you’re not ready. Big deal. Maybe you will be one day and maybe you won’t.”
One of the greatest things about Soonyoung was that he sometimes spouted stuff like that, like he’d been some sort of living vessel for ancient Buddhist texts that knew exactly what Wonu needed to hear in order to not feel like his life was just one shitty decision after another. Wonu rewarded him by paying the bill, and letting Soonyoung crash on his couch instead of forcing him to find a taxi all the way back to his one-room on the other side of the river.
“Nunu,” Soonyoung groaned as Wonu gave up on wrestling him out of his coat. “You’ll find someone who’ll make you crazy.”
“What makes you say that?” Drunk asshole almost rolled off his tongue, but Soonyoung had been very nice that night and he was, Wonu reminded himself, his favorite.
“You drive a lot of people crazy.” Soonyoung giggled. His curse was that the alcohol hit him doubly hard once he was horizontal. Wonu brought a little wastebasket over, just in case, in the time Soonyoung had untied his tongue enough to continue. “Junhui and Jihoon would love it to see you all heart-eyed over someone, after all the shit you put them through.”
“They deserved it.” Jihoon had serenaded that one girl from the rooftop of one of his university buildings. Like a love-sick male lead in a cliche drama. There was a video of it on Youtube. What did he expect? For Wonu to not hum that song whenever Jihoon mentioned any new girl?
“It’s okay,” Soonyoung said, and his hand came up to clumsily pat Wonu on the cheek. More of a dull slap, really. “I’ll be rooting for you.”
Wonu blushed and slurred out a thank you before heading to his own bed.
{}
Wonu almost wished he took another seminar class for his last semester rather than leaving a block of time for an internship. Working was hard. He could barely cope with trudging his way to work at the crack of dawn on top of his other classes and homework. How was he going to cope with a full time journalism job: forty hours a week, including research, editing, arranging interviews and scheduling shoots? He wanted to take a nap.
He couldn’t nap though. Or well. A nap wouldn’t be very proper in line at a Starbucks. The soulless drones that wandered Seoul would just step over him like he was garbage that hadn’t been collected from the night before, and he would get fired for being late.
Someone from behind jostled him, and Wonu huffed a little and scooted forward the two inches that he could. Seriously: Soulless. Drones. And when he got another tap on the shoulder, he had to fight from snapping when he turned around angrily to--
A pair of eyes blinked at him and then crinkled into a smile of recognition, and Wonu couldn’t stop the puzzled way his eyebrows drew together. It was the girl from the bookstore. The funny, pretty one. Her hair was pulled back from her face, and she was dressed like she was headed to work like him, like everyone else in line. It was weird. He had just assumed she was a tourist, or maybe an exchange student. Seeing her against the backdrop of a Monday morning in a random Starbucks felt out of place, like she didn’t belong in boring planes of reality like this.
“Hello,” she said. Not over friendly, but polite. Sort of like how he would greet his co-workers when he finally made it in this morning. Not like he was some stranger she had exchanged a handful of words with a few weeks ago.
“Hello,” he nodded to her, and the absurdity of exchanging greetings with a complete stranger made him choke on a laugh. He held a hand over his mouth, but couldn’t stop the effects of his smile changing the shape of his cheeks, his eyes. “Have you been well?”
“Yes,” she said, and the way she had to bite the inside of her cheek let Wonu know that she had enough sense to know how out of place this was. “Which book did you choose?”
“You remember?” Wonu said, but he wasn’t very surprised. “Um. Jane Eyre.”
“That’s a good one,” she nodded, and moved her chin so that Wonu knew to take a step towards the counter. “I thought you were a student.”
“I were. I am.” Wonu started fishing his wallet from the depths of his pockets. His hands got nervous. “I have an internship in the mornings though.”
“Oh. I intern too.” The way she said it made it seem special, like she and Wonu were the only two interns in all of Seongdong.“I’m an English editor at one of those startup volunteer organizations. Refugees and that sort of stuff.”
Wonu ducked his head down a little. That sounded a lot better than the morning of errands that he was about to run for a hoard of Dispatch wannabees. “That’s sounds interesting.”
“Yeah. It’s your turn.”
“It’s just this gossip newsletter. I just tweak the site and--”
“No, uh. It’s your turn.” Wonu followed her gaze to the empty register, where an employee was clearly hiding her irritation behind a smile. He gathered his strength and managed to walk forward and place his order without his face melting off from his blush; he gave himself a small pat on the back while he went to join the bundle of commuters waiting for their order to be called.
“You’re funny,” she said when she came over to wait as well. She said it lowly, in English, not rude or conversational, but an observation.
“No, I’m Wonu,” he said back, switching over to her language. He knew his accent was awful--his parents couldn’t afford to send him abroad like his cousins had done, but it made her smile anyway. He liked the way her eyes shined; even though the sound didn’t escape, the light of laughter was trapped in her, and it refused to be quiet completely.
She told him her name, and Wonu butchered it, but promised to try harder, or come up with a nickname for her if he got really lazy.
“Meeting twice is kind of testing fate in a city like Seoul,” she said after her order was called. She looked at him levelly over the plastic top of her coffee as she took her first sip. “You seem nice.”
Nice. She thought he was nice. Wonu kind of floated on that for the rest of the morning. Minhyun yelled at him for accidentally deleting some D-list idol’s interview edits, but Wonu couldn’t find it in him to care. She also thought he was funny, said some part of his brain that did not want him to focus on any task he was given. She laughed at him a lot, anyway. And now he had her kkt ID stored in his phone.
“You’re acting weirder than usual,” Minhyun said loudly as he passed Wonu’s desk. He tossed a thumb-drive over to Jonghyun. “What is it?”
“He’s smiling too much,” Jonghyun said, his voice distorted around his fourth mug of coffee. Jonghyun was a perpetually tired grad student who also moonlighted as a dance crew leader in Hongdae. Wonu wasn’t actually one-hundred percent sure that Jonghyun could exist, as a person, without being hooked up to a caffeine IV.
“So I’m not allowed to smile?” Wonu deadpanned, the edges of his mouth smoothing down. Minhyun just shrugged.
“Classes going well?” Jonghyun guessed.
“They’re okay.”
“It’s a girl,” Minhyun said, leaning against Jonghyun’s chair in order to get a look at his computer screen.
“Are you into girls?” Jonghyun asked. He sounded unbiasedly curious, but he didn’t look up from his assignment.
“Sometimes,” Wonu said bitterly. That floaty feeling from before was getting dampened by this conversation, which is why Wonu genuinely did not like people in his business. Having another set--or sets--of eyes on him made everything seem tiny, examined piece by piece under a microscope. If you look at something closely enough, the importance seems to drain out of it. Or worse, you realize it wasn’t even important to begin with.
[]
She texted him at 8:59pm on Saturday. Wonu only knows this because it was the exact time that they were announcing the guests for the next week of Knowing Bros. It was Taemin, and Wonu was already being bombarded by messages. He was trying to figure out how to mute Soonyoung’s alert tone (because there are only so many times he could be disturbed by a keyboard smash without wanting to smash Soonyoung’s head against a keyboard) when her icon popped up in a banner.
Free sometime tomorrow or Monday?
Wonwho: tomorrow? 4? There’s a good cafe near exit 8
Junhui called it a date. Wonu was not that optimistic--he was realistic.
“That’s not realistic, that’s just being sad,” Junhui said, rubbing an eye and smearing some of the liner a stylist had forgotten to wipe off. “You’re not a sad person. Go sow your wild oats.”
Wonu raised an eyebrow at him. “Where did you even learn that expression?”
“I’m telling you: I was a scholar in my previous life, and Buddha decided to reward me with good looks in this one. Maybe he’ll do the same for you.”
“That’s not how Buddhism works,” Wonu said boredly through a mouthful of ramen.
“I’ll start my own sect then. Wanna be my first disciple?”
Maybe in a different universe, they did start their own religion, right there in the living room. Converted millions and changed lives and went down in history as modern re-evangelists. Wrote essays and papers and revamped prayers to account for vanity and the need for more instagram followers.
In this universe though, Junhui’s joke (like many, many others, Wonu feels the need to add) fell flat, and the drone of shit variety television did little to distract that he (Jeon Wonu) indeed, perhaps, maybe had a date the following day.
And it could have been fate or something a little bit more simple. But whatever it was, Wonu felt happier and more excited than he had in a long, long time.
Maybe Minki and the rest of them were onto something.