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She tilted her head back, and her hair spilled over the chair’s headrest — black, almost merging with the upholstery, yet somehow more vivid, catching stray glints from the lamp above. From this close, he could see the shorter strands that had broken free from the line, lying unevenly as if they had not yet accepted their new length.
She had cut it.
He’d noticed the moment she pushed her mask down, but let the thought slip past. It wasn’t the right time to linger on it; they’d had a conversation to finish. Only now, in the quiet, watching her profile, did he see how the haircut worked like a frame — dividing light from shadow about halfway between her jawline and the beginning of her collarbone. The exposed neck looked slimmer, the space around it opening with the slightly loosened zipper of her jumpsuit. As if she suddenly had more air, though air here was nothing worth boasting about.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said suddenly, not turning her head.
“Like what?” His tone was even, almost curious.
There was a pause before her reply, voice low when it came.
“Like this—” A quick glance met his for a heartbeat, then slipped away.
A memory from months ago rose unbidden: the old hair resting against the collar of a sweatshirt. Its length had made her seem more closed off, as if able to hide beneath the edges of fabric and strands, shielded from the world. That barrier was gone now.
She let out a long sigh, her gaze drifting across the ceiling as though she were silently counting the seconds. Perhaps she really was. Or perhaps she only wanted to avoid looking at him.
“Can I have a drink with you?”
He froze for a moment, caught off guard by the request.
He had seen her with alcohol only once. Back then, apart from a faint flush and a slight easing of her rigid neck, nothing much had changed. She had been just as restrained, just as closed to words as always. Alcohol didn’t open her the way it did other people — it merely left a door slightly ajar, one that could be shut again with a single glance.
“The first time you’ve asked for a drink,” he said quietly, reaching for an empty glass. “Something happen?”
Of course something had happened. He’d known it the moment he saw her sink into his chair right after stepping into this office. It was only the second day of the games. He’d wanted to call her in yesterday, but In-ho’s indulgence in playing as a contestant had left him drowning in work, and only today had he found the time.
She opened her mouth as if to answer, but instead gave a small, unreadable twist of her lips before focusing on the bottle. She watched as the glass filled with whisky; the amber liquid swayed with the movement of his hand, catching pale reflections from the lamp overhead.
He passed it to her without a word and sat across from her.
“Today,” she said after a pause, her eyes on the trembling surface, “for the first time, I hesitated before pulling the trigger.”
He didn’t move. He only took a slow sip, letting the burn in his throat fill the silence.
“Why?”
She looked unhappy. Bent over the glass, as though still weighing whether she should drink at all. Then she lifted the rim to her lips and took a solid swallow. Her throat moved and he found himself watching more closely than he meant to.
She shrugged. It was the only answer.
Perhaps speaking wasn’t what she wanted. Perhaps the reason hadn’t even taken shape yet.
“I’ll send you on an outside patrol tomorrow, if you want,” he offered flatly.
She closed her eyes, shook her head. In the dim light of that small, dark room, a pink jumpsuit looked like some exotic species of insect. Poisonous or alluring. Perhaps both.
“Back where I grew up,” she said suddenly, swirling the glass in her hand, “there was a tree with white blossoms — in spring, the branches bent under their weight. The pride of the village.”
She spoke slowly.
“I saw one like it here, recently. Wedged between two glass-and-metal buildings. Its branches cut back so they wouldn’t get in the way — not for pedestrians, not for drivers, not for that ugly façade.”
He watched in silence as the alcohol loosened her tongue.
It was a rare sight; in hours of meetings she could speak less than she had now in a single minute. How long had it been since the last time? Two, maybe three months? He would have remembered exactly, if he’d wanted to. But now his attention stayed with what was happening right in front of him, in air thick with whisky and something that might have been the beginning of a confession.
“It was ugly,” she added, wrinkling her nose “Everything here is ugly. Everything bent into submission. Supposedly not a regime… but what’s the difference, if you can’t breathe?”
One of his brows twitched, almost imperceptibly.
He could have argued — about definitions, about shades of grey in politics and architecture — but he didn’t want to. Besides, he knew that words like everything and always rarely paired with truth, yet sometimes a person needed to say them just to stay upright.
“Top me up?” Small fingers nudged the empty glass towards him.
Her hand was dry, nails cut short. In that simple gesture there was something strangely intimate: the slide of glass across the desk, eyes lowered more than usual, as if the request itself took effort.
He refilled her glass with care, not spilling a drop.
The smell of the liquor mingled with hers — something soft, hard to name. Maybe the faint trace of soap, maybe the dust of corridors, or something else entirely that clung to skin after a whole day behind a mask.
He too had moments when something twisted inside him — a longing lined with a thin layer of regret, an ache that could not be satisfied. It wasn’t a need like hunger or thirst. More like a quiet tremor that one had to wait out until it burned itself away. He thought she might be feeling the same thing now. That today, for some reason, being a refugee hurt her more than it had yesterday.
He reached for a pack of cigarettes. The faint crinkle of cellophane sounded louder than it should have.
Her gaze fixed on his hand at once — too intent for it to be accidental. He paused, testing whether it was just reflex. But she kept looking.
“Can I?” she asked, her eyes still on his fingers.
His brows knit.
Something in her was off today, out of its usual rhythm. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe the fatigue, or maybe both in equal measure.
“You don’t smoke.”
She smiled sadly, barely lifting the corners of her mouth. A curve of her lips that looked more like resignation than an invitation to jest.
“Today, apparently, is a day for firsts,” she rasped.
He tapped the lid of the pack in a slow, steady rhythm until a single cigarette slid out of the narrow opening.
He held it between his fingers for a moment too long, as if weighing the gesture.
Then, slowly, he reached across the table.
“Is it pleasant?” she asked, turning it over between her fingers with the caution given to unfamiliar objects.
She seemed as though she had never held a cigarette before.
He gave a faint smile, without amusement.
”If it is, it means you’re in danger.”
For a moment she looked at him as if trying to decide whether he was serious. And for one second, he couldn’t tell whether the thought that unsettled her was the risk of addiction to nicotine, or something entirely different.
“Will you show me how?” she whispered.
He had seen the way she watched him before. Not once, not twice — enough to know she could probably replay every one of his gestures in her mind. But if she wanted a lesson — why not? This evening was already drifting, unhurried and without purpose, and he could allow himself a touch of theatre.
“Come closer,” he said quietly. His voice trembled on the edge between a command and an invitation.
He shifted in his chair, opening a narrow space beside him.
She crouched sideways on the armrest. Close enough for him to count the fine hairs at her temple. Near enough that she could watch every detail — the movement of his fingers, the curve of the flame, the shadows beneath his eyes.
He took the cigarette from her and set it between his lips.
With his other hand, he reached for the lighter.
All the while, his eyes stayed on her. No blink. No hurry.
The metallic click sliced the quiet — short and clean. The flame unfurled from the nozzle, flickering gently in the draft.
For a moment, it lit his face — the edges of his cheekbones, the shadow of his lashes, the narrow line of his mouth, bringing him out of the dark, only to return him to it again.
He drew in deeply.
His cheeks hollowed slightly, his eyelids lowered in reflex.
He held the breath, then let it out slowly, a narrow thread of smoke unspooling between them, mingling with the scent of whisky.
It looked like the most pleasurable thing in the world.
“Try,” he said softly, handing her the cigarette.
She set the filter to her lips hesitantly, as if expecting it to bite. For a moment she only held it there, not inhaling. Waiting for his signal.
“Draw deep, but slow,” he instructed.
She did as he told her.
The heat of the smoke struck her throat immediately, forcing a short cough. She pulled the cigarette away, covering her mouth with her hand.
He smiled faintly, without mockery.
“Too fast.” He reached out, his fingers resting on her wrist. “Give it back.”
The cigarette returned to his lips. The ember flaring warm red.
Then he leaned his head toward her and exhaled slowly, just beside her face. She could feel its warmth on her cheek before it drifted away.
“Again,” he said, low.
She reached for the cigarette. Set the filter against her lips, and waited.
“Steady this time,” he added.
She drew the smoke in, trying not to blink even as the heat settled in her throat.
“Hold it,” his voice slid between her breaths.
She obeyed. The weight of the smoke spread through her lungs.
He watched her mouth, not her eyes.
“Now let it out.”
She parted her lips. Released the smoke slowly, into the space between them.
He drew in part of the cloud through his slightly open mouth.
Their eyes met in the suspended haze.
He took the cigarette from her, and inhaled again, never breaking eye contact.
The filter returned to her; their fingers brushed in the handover.
“Why didn’t you write?” she asked at last, tilting the smoking cigarette.
The flame was dying, the ember dimming. She lifted it back to her lips. A thin ribbon of grey slid over her tongue and she let it out slowly, not looking at him. As though ashamed of the question, or the moment it had found her.
He took it from her without force.
“I left Seoul,” he said. The smoke left his mouth in thin strands. “Been here nearly a month. Too many changes, new games.”
She nodded. Her gaze stayed fixed on the slim cylinder balancing on his lips, watching it tremble with his breath.
“You could have written too,” he said. There was less reproach in the words than a kind of unfamiliar warmth.
Her mouth twitched.
“I didn’t want to intrude.”
He smiled in that barely perceptible way that came only when she said something too improbable to be true.
“You never do.”
She took the cigarette straight from his lips, holding it for a moment between her fingers, as though testing its warmth. She drew on it cautiously, not fully. Only tasting what had been his a moment earlier.
She gave it back only when the ash threatened to fall.
He turned it between his fingers, and stubbed it out in the ashtray.
“Don’t smoke anymore,” he said. It didn’t sound like a prohibition. More like a request rarely spoken.
She smiled faintly, so briefly that if he had blinked, he might have missed it. Her gaze drifted over his hair, catching on the pale threads at his temple, strands visible only from the distance of a breath.
She pushed away from the armrest, sliding down to the floor. His hand fell lightly against her wrist — as if to hold her there a moment longer.
“And tell me,” he said, “if you ever get another reckless idea. Whatever it is.”
She nodded. Inside, something seemed to pull tight, as if invisible hands had knotted her from within.
Then stepped back to her own chair, the one opposite his, and lifted her glass.
For a while, neither spoke.
The whisky stood between them, two glasses half-full, catching the dim light in their amber depths. Smoke lingered in the air, not yet willing to disperse, curling above the table in thin, wavering lines.
She felt the weight of the room pressing in on her, but it was not unpleasant.
His presence had a way of making silence feel like a kind of shelter. It was the same as it had always been between them — words secondary, unnecessary unless they carried weight. And when they didn’t, there was no point in speaking at all.
He busied himself with something on the desk — papers shifted, a lighter set aside, the faint scratch of a pen. His glance flickered toward her now and then, almost reflexively, as if to confirm she was still there.
She could have told him.
Told him why she had come, what she had been thinking about since morning, why the sight of a white-blossomed tree, cut back and hemmed in, had felt like a bruise she couldn’t stop touching.
She could have said that earlier today she’d looked into the eyes of a player and seen the same shadow there that lived in his. That it had been enough to make her finger ease away from the trigger, as if her body had quietly refused the order.
That for the rest of the day she kept seeing him lying still on the sand, in the hush and the widening pool of red.
That the taste of smoke had belonged only to him for years, as if everything else had been an imitation.
That in the wreckage of her life, he felt like an anchor. Even when she knew anchors could drag you under.
But she didn’t.
She didn’t tell him that today, for the first time in a long while, she had truly been afraid.
Instead, she traced the rim of her glass with her finger, eyes fixed on the golden liquid inside. Somewhere in that faint ring of motion was the answer she would never give him.