Chapter Text
Jihoon is staring blankly at the printer that continues spitting out completely blacked-out pages after he had clearly set them to be printed in color, when a hand lands on his shoulder.
“Are you trying to get money deducted from your salary for ink cartridges, or what?” Jihoon doesn’t need to turn around to know who the mocking voice belongs to.
“Not my fault the printer is fucked up,” he retorts, picking up the rest of the papers the machine spits out.
“It saw your grumpy face and wanted to print accordingly,” his colleague laughs. “Cheer up, it’s a wonderful Monday!”
Jihoon finally turns around to meet his gaze. “Just tell me what you want, Siwoo-hyung.”
“Since you decided to smash your head in the door and then miss half of the meeting, I have an important update to share,” Siwoo says, as they head down the hallway together. Jihoon decides to ignore the first part of the sentence for the sake of his own sanity.
“So?” He knows he won’t get an answer unless he asks directly. Part of Siwoo’s ‘buy one annoying quality, get one for free’ special package.
“The company has selected a couple of members from the Marketing team to go to a countrywide workshop in Gangneung next week. They want us to,” his colleague lifts his hands up in air quotes, “represent Gen.1 values, explore new opportunities and develop new skills that will help the company grow.”
To say Jihoon is unimpressed is an understatement.
“Do I have to go too?”
“Well, of course,” Siwoo grins. “I’m not sharing all this crap with you just so I can make you jealous that we’ll be taking a public express bus to Gangneung.”
“No company bus?” Jihoon’s eyebrows scrunch in confusion. Siwoo only nods in confirmation. “Better than working, I guess.”
They reach Siwoo’s desk and his colleague leaves a piece of candy on the paper stack Jihoon is carrying before sitting down.
Jihoon turns around to go to his own workspace when he hears Siwoo whisper behind him.
“Sanghyeok-hyung is coming too.”
A couple of seconds go by before Jihoon manages to squeeze out a strained “I didn’t ask.”
“Just saying,” he can practically hear the mocking smile on Siwoo’s face, as he heads to his desk in silence.
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One of Jihoon’s first memories of Sanghyeok is of him sitting alone and reading a book while eating his lunch. He remembers it vividly because his colleague’s lonely figure was the total contrast of the shit that went down at the table Jihoon usually sat at. He had known Siwoo for less than a week, yet one thing was clear – he was the type of demon that was feared by silence itself.
After a couple of days of quiet observation, Jihoon couldn’t fight his curiosity anymore.
“Why does he always sit alone?” He interrupted Siwoo’s story about meeting Marketing Specialist Kim Giin in the restroom with a piece of toilet paper stuck on his shoe, which he, personally, had found extremely hilarious.
Siwoo followed Jihoon’s line of sight. “Sanghyeok-hyung?”
Jihoon only nodded in confirmation.
“He’s just like that,” Siwoo answered simply. “He probably needs his alone time after the boring meetings, don’t take it personally.”
“Does he even have friends in the company?” A rude question, but you can’t blame a man for being curious.
Siwoo laughed, as if this was not the first time he had heard the same words come out of someone’s mouth.
“He does, actually. Sanghyeok-hyung is close friends with four juniors in Product Management and HR,” he replied. “You might see them leave work together someday.”
It should’ve been nice to hear that his senior was not a social reject but actually had quite a lot of friends in the company. But for some reason, this answer was a new source of frustration for Jihoon. They had been colleagues for two weeks now, yet Sanghyeok hadn’t spoken to him a single time except for the usual ‘good morning’s and ‘you’ve worked hard today’s.
Jihoon couldn’t help but wonder what exactly made him so different from those four juniors.
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Reading is still Sanghyeok’s hobby and that’s exactly what he does throughout their whole trip to Gangneung. Jihoon knows that because life is his biggest hater and he gets handed a ticket at the bus terminal with a big bold number that is exactly Sanghyeok’s plus one.
He puts on his headphones the moment he sits down and tries to sleep to kill time. His eyes however disobey him and keep opening every two minutes to involuntarily steal glances at the man next to him. Sanghyeok is like a statue while he reads, unmoving and silent. He flips book pages nonstop for two hours and then spends the other two with closed eyes.
If Jihoon didn’t know him better (through methodical observation, not creepy two-year-long staring), he’d assume his coworker was asleep. But through his careful examinations of Sanghyeok’s behavior, he has learned that the man just enjoys meditating. Jihoon doesn’t really get that hobby of his, since to him sleep is like a gift from the heavens. Looking at Sanghyeok meditating for two hours straight also doesn’t help him understand it better but he decides to blame it on the lack of better things to do.
The workshop is held in multiple conference rooms of a fancy hotel, each of them full of people from all around the country. Jihoon starts questioning the point of the event only ten minutes in after he notices that most of the teams around them are struggling to figure out how to present their ideas without them getting stolen by others. Marketing is a big part of every business and naturally, no one wants to show their cards to the opponent. This makes such open workshops completely useless, however, Jihoon stands by his statement that it’s still better than working, so he doesn’t complain.
After four hours of empty talk, the event ends and he finds his new favorite spot by a table with one-bite sandwiches. His peace and quiet are quickly interrupted when Siwoo joins him and stacks three of them in a tower before stuffing it whole in his mouth.
“Did you get your room key?” He asks after an intense chewing session.
Jihoon shakes his head in response, “You can have it, I’ll pick mine up later.”
He’s met with Siwoo’s devilish grin which makes his blood run cold.
“You’re not sleeping with me,” he says. “I’m sharing a room with Giin tonight.”
“Then who am I rooming with?” Jihoon asks despite already knowing the answer. There’s no other reason Siwoo would be grinning from ear to ear like a monkey.
“Sanghyeok-hyung, of course,” his colleague replies, as if that’s the greatest news he’s ever delivered. “Since the company is paying for our stay we have to share and he’s the only one without a roommate yet.”
“Siwoo-hyung, do you hate me?” Jihoon asks simply. Trying to reason with this man is like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down.
Said man grabs two more sandwiches and lets out a comically deep sigh. “I hate you as much as you hate Sanghyeok-hyung,” he replies. “I’ll leave it up to your small brain to figure it out one day.”
Then he’s gone, just like Jihoon’s will to live.
Sanghyeok is waiting in the hallway when Jihoon finally takes his card key from the reception desk and goes up to their shared room. He looks up from his book and greets him with a nod, seemingly uneager to start a conversation.
Jihoon decides to ignore his colleague’s signals because he’s petty when it comes to Sanghyeok and he’s also curious as to why he’s standing outside when he had clearly seen him leave the conference room way too long ago.
“Sanghyeok-ssi,” Jihoon greets with a curt bow. “Why are you standing outside? Did you not get your key from the reception desk?”
His coworker presses two fingers into his suit’s front pocket and takes out a card just like Jihoon’s.
“I have the key,” he answers calmly. “But I thought going inside first would be improper of me so I waited.”
It takes a lot of self-control for Jihoon to not roll his eyes dramatically in front of his colleague’s face. Mr. Proper as always, is what he thinks.
“That’s very considerate of you,” is what he answers instead. Even if the monotonous delivery of his line causes suspicion of his sincerity, Sanghyeok doesn’t comment on it.
The room is silent while they unpack the small amount of things they’ve brought to Gangneung. Jihoon feels like he’s suffocating, too eager to fill the silence but also too unwilling to start a conversation. He’s saved from his misery when Sanghyeok asks him if he’s going to shower, to which he replies with an awkward no. Jihoon then decides to give him some personal space while he washes up and goes back to the lobby to kill time.
It takes him approximately three minutes on the lobby sofa to realize he has two problems. One, he has absolutely no clue how long it will take for Sanghyeok to shower and two, he has nothing to do downstairs.
But boredom is often the best instigator for things we usually avoid doing due to embarrassment or some kind of inner moral compass. It’s when we have nothing to do that we find it hard to resist googling the answer to an obscure question we’ve had for a while or finally taking a peek at someone’s social media and zooming in on their posts until we accidentally press “Like” and throw our phone on the other side of the room.
Maybe that’s why fifteen minutes later Jihoon finds himself staring at Sanghyeok’s Instagram profile, hands a bit too shaky to press on his last post and open it. Finding it hadn’t been a struggle since he just used his full legal name like the average uncle but Jihoon had needed approximately ten minutes to gather the courage to actually type it in the search bar.
After the first few seconds of pure adrenaline pass, self-judgment settles in. Why is he so scared to take a peek at his colleague’s social media? They are acquaintances so it’s only natural for him to want to learn a bit more about Sanghyeok. And it’s not like it’s forbidden – after all his account is public so he must be aware that everyone can see his posts.
Finding confidence in his own reasoning, Jihoon taps on the picture that his thumb hovers over. It’s a recent post of Sanghyeok in front of N Seoul Tower during a snowy night. He’s posing exactly how Jihoon would expect him to – a standing emoji in the first pic and a standing emoji with a thumbs up in the second one. But for some reason, Jihoon feels like the more he looks at these photos, the more his brain chemicals change.
He eventually figures it out. It’s still Sanghyeok but he’s one, not wearing a suit and two, actually smiling. It’s not like he doesn’t smile at work – he’s the most polite person Jihoon knows and he bows at anyone and anything. But the expression on these pics is not his usual business “Good morning” smile. There’s something softer and more sincere about it that pisses Jihoon off. Unfortunately, he’s a bit too emotionally constipated to understand what exactly makes him mad about someone smiling.
Jihoon scrolls through his posts and gets even more pissed off after finding out that in most of them Sanghyeok is surrounded by the same group of people who he looks extremely happy with. In some of the pics he even ditches the standing emoji pose for a shot from a goofy perspective which leads Jihoon to stick his nose to the screen to confirm that’s actually his colleague and not some random person who looks like him.
The revelation that Sanghyeok has friends he drops his business smile for is Jihoon’s last straw. He slams his phone on the sofa with a deep sigh and runs his fingers through his hair. In his twenty-five years of living, he has never been so confused about his own opinion about a person. It’s not like he hates Sanghyeok – he has never been anything but kind and helpful. Jealousy is also not all of it, since Jihoon has learned to be proud of his achievements and also receives acknowledgment for them.
One thing he knows is that it’s complicated. If he doesn’t hate Sanghyeok but also doesn’t care enough about him to be jealous, then why does he need ten minutes to click on his account. And colleagues don’t get pissed off at each other for smiling either, so what exactly is wrong with him?
Jihoon decides that such difficult questions are impossible to solve after a long day of corporal workshops, so he moves on to the next challenge – sharing a room with the person who caused this situation in the first place.
Once he realizes that he has been in the lobby for over forty minutes, Jihoon goes back to their room. He expects to be engulfed in darkness since Sanghyeok seems like the type of person who goes to bed early, but is instead welcomed by the soft light of the bedside lamp. After taking a few more steps inside, he realizes that the light isn’t on because Sanghyeok is awake. In fact, his colleague is lying in his bed like a corpse with his blanket pulled up all the way to his chin.
It’s an intense staring contest except Jihoon is the only participant and the only one staring. He has never seen Sanghyeok without his glasses before and he’s starting to freak out because the first time he does is because his coworker is sleeping in a bed less than five meters away from where he will be sleeping later.
He does his skincare to calm down and then lays down, refusing to move his eyes even an inch towards the person sleeping next to him. It could always be worse, he thinks to himself. They could’ve made them share a queen bed. That would’ve been way worse, right?
Luckily, Jihoon’s gulp isn’t loud enough to wake Sanghyeok up.