Chapter Text
“One bean sprout soup please!”
“Coming!”
A familiar voice disrupted Jongwoo from his math homework. Bending over the counter next to his mom, he hugged her waist like a sick, whiny puppy and yawned.
“Stay with me mom. The soup can wait. I’m cold.”
He nudged his face on her apron, not willing to let go.
“C’mon bunny, he’s our regular. Are you done with your homework? How about you help me serve it to him, hm?”
“Don’t wanna. He’s scary.” Jongwoo pouted, which cracked his mom up a little.
“Hey, we’ve had this conversation before. I’m sure he’s nice.”
“He looks like a debt collector.”
“Come on, you should start helping around a little. This shop will be yours when we grow old, after all.”
Still with a pout on his face, Jongwoo took the bowl from his dad, who was now sweating from all the heat, and grumpily approached the strange man sitting alone in a corner table, the furthest one from the kitchen. Behind the counter, his mom made a gesture signalling for him to smile.
Almost every afternoon around five, this same man would enter the Woo’s family restaurant. Then, he would sit in the same seat, where he would order the same meal: bean sprout soup, with an egg cracked on top. Just like clockwork. This particular man stood out so much because he always came when it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so usually it would just be him ravenously eating, and Jongwoo diligently doing homework alone together in the shop. So much so that on the rare days that he didn’t visit, Jongwoo felt like the shop was just a little empty. And on most days that he did visit, Jongwoo found dinner somehow… less appetizing. But he always brushed it off.
That odd man was now shivering in his seat from the cold, holding intense eye contact with what seemed to be his utensils. He looked as if he could devour an entire rack of spoon if his soup wasn’t coming for another minute.
“Bon appetít!”
Jongwoo said suddenly and with barely concealed fake sincerity. The man looked slightly startled. His eyes darted straight to the bowl and not Jongwoo’s. In fact, Jongwoo believed this man had never acknowledged his existence, like, ever. It was as if the only thing he ever cared about in this world was this damn bowl of bean sprout soup.
Today was no exception. He immediately started dunking the steaming bowl of rice into the equally steaming bowl of soup, and slurped it furiously as if he had been starving for decades. Well, of course, then he had to spit it out because he burned his tongue. Jongwoo looked at him, amazed. He knew exactly what this man would do next. Like a precoded machine, he shoved the next spoon down his throat with the same urgency as though his mouth wasn’t on fire like, a second earlier.
Jongwoo had spent so much time observing this man. He didn’t know why, but for some very weird reasons he seemed to be obsessed with him. He would deliberately take breaks from his chemistry exercises to steal glances at him. And when he realized the man before him cared about nothing other than his soup, he would let himself stare for the entirety of these odd meals.
“What?”
A cranky voice woke Jongwoo from his train of thought. Blood started to rush to his cheeks when he realized the man had looked up at him. And he was even more ashamed to find out for the last five minutes he had stood there staring.
“Ah! I’m sorry! Please continue to… um… enjoy your meal!”
The soup was almost gone.
Jongwoo quickly rushed back to the counter, his face the color of the egg yolk his dad cracked on the bowl earlier. When he calmed down a little, he realized his heart was racing.
Back when the man looked up at him, Jongwoo realized he was oddly good-looking. Weirdly, for all that time spent observing, Jongwoo never really noticed his face, probably because it was always shrouded in steam. Now that he had a clear, close-up look of it, Jongwoo realized he was pretty decent, if not for what looked like a month worth of stubble and a big scar that ran across his right eye. He looked like he was in his late thirties.
For the second time in ten minutes, Jongwoo felt his heart jump when he realized he was passionately analyzing this one customer, who was a random man, who also looked kind of like a gangster.
“Jesus. What’s wrong with me these days?” He grumbled and went back to his homework. And got half the answers wrong, of course.
That dinner, Jongwoo threw up half a pot of teokbokki, which was supposed to be his favorite dish.