Chapter Text
The thing about Yoo's Pancake House was that it had no right to be this good.
Kim Dokja had thought about this twice a month. The shop sat at prime location along the coastal road, the kind of view that felt borrowed from someone else's screensaver. Morning light on flat water. A light breeze ruffling the coconut leaves. Sandy beach. The kind of place where a couple celebrating their third anniversary would reach across the table for each other's hands, soft music playing, no one saying anything that mattered.
He observed all of this from the window. In front of him: reasonably priced sweets that tasted too good to be true, a cup of jasmine tea, and Han Sooyoung.
Kim Dokja was here with Han Sooyoung, which was its own special category of experience.
"Your pancake has a face on it," she observed, not looking up from her phone.
"I know."
"The face looks happier than you."
"Han Sooyoung. I'm going to eat it."
The fruity pancake in front of him was, objectively, a masterpiece he felt vaguely embarrassed to touch. Sliced strawberries fanned out like a compass rose. Cream piped in a spiral. A single blueberry sitting on top like a button eye, looking at him with the tranquil certainty of something that had always known how it would end. The homemade jam came in a little ceramic pot with a tiny wooden spoon. If someone had photographed this table and posted it online with the caption "morning with my love ☀️" no one would have questioned it.
Kim Dokja was wearing yesterday's shirt and had taken the bus.
He ate a piece of pancake. The jam was good. Unreasonably good, actually. The kind of good that made a man suspicious of his own enjoyment. He'd had this almost every week and it was still better than he remembered, which was already the best he'd had in his entire life.
He ate another piece and quietly decided not to think about it.
Across the café, behind the register, the hot brooding owner whose name he had come to discover through indirect means, Yoo Joonghyuk, was explaining to a new employee where the receipt paper went.
Kim Dokja noticed this in the peripheral manner he'd become expert at over the past several months. The peripheral manner of a person who is absolutely not staring, who has never stared, who wouldn't even know how.
Yoo Joonghyuk was the sort of person who looked like a geographic formation — something that had been shaped by enormous pressure over a very long time. He was tall in a way that made the low-hanging dried herb arrangements look intentional, like the shop had been built to frame him specifically. He had the kind of jaw that belonged in a period drama about stern landowners. He ran a pancake shop with strawberry faces.
The cognitive dissonance of this had never fully resolved for Kim Dokja. He had tried. He'd concluded that some phenomena exist outside the boundaries of reasonable explanation, and that pushing too hard on them was bad for his mental health.
The new employee dropped the receipt paper. Yoo Joonghyuk picked it up. He didn't sigh. His expression shifted approximately 0.2 millimeters in a direction that communicated volumes about the incident without technically communicating anything.
Kim Dokja looked back at his pancake.
"You're doing the thing," Han Sooyoung said.
"I don't know what thing you mean."
"The not staring thing." She finally looked up. She had the expression of someone who has read ahead in the novel and is finding the other characters' obliviousness aesthetically tiresome. "You've been not staring for four months."
"I come here for the pancakes."
"The pancakes," she repeated.
"They're good. Objectively." He gestured with his fork. "You're eating one right now."
"I'm eating one right now," Han Sooyoung agreed pleasantly. She picked up her phone again. "He gave you extra cream, by the way. I ordered the same size. Mine didn't come with extra cream."
Kim Dokja did not respond to this because there was nothing to respond to. It was probably a portioning inconsistency. Kitchens were busy. Things happened.
"He also put a cookie on your saucer. I didn't get a cookie."
"Maybe you ordered later."
"I ordered first."
Kim Dokja ate his cookie. It was a butter shortbread with a dusting of sea salt and he was not going to acknowledge anything about it.
Han Sooyoung watched him with the placid patience of someone conducting an experiment. This was one of the more unsettling things about her. She never had to push. She just waited, and the situation developed around her like she'd written it.
But this time, she would push. Things were moving too slowly for her liking.
"Here's a thought," she said.
"No."
"I haven't said it yet."
"The answer is no."
She pulled out her phone, navigated somewhere, and turned the screen to face him. On it was a document icon. The preview text read: [Chapter 47 — draft] the system had—
Kim Dokja's fork stopped moving.
"Chapter forty-seven," Han Sooyoung said, with the terrible serenity of someone who has found the lever. "I've been sitting on it for six weeks. I'm told it's emotionally devastating."
"Who told you that."
"I wrote it. I'm telling you." She set the phone face-up on the table between them. "All you have to do," she said, "is go up to the counter. Flirt with the man. That's it."
"I don't flirt."
"You could learn." She tilted her head. Something in her eyes was deeply, comfortably certain. "One attempt. Sincere. I'll send you the chapter tonight."
Kim Dokja looked at the phone. He looked at the counter.
The rational case against this was overwhelming. He was a regular customer. Yoo Joonghyuk was the owner. There was a professional dynamic. Kim Dokja had, to his knowledge, nothing interesting to offer in any capacity that would justify —
The chapter forty-seven document sat there, glowing softly.
He thought about the last chapter he'd read, six weeks ago. The way it had ended mid-sentence, like Han Sooyoung had looked up from her keyboard and thought: that's enough suffering for today. He thought about six more weeks of not knowing. He thought about sitting in his apartment tonight and re-reading chapter forty-six of this stupid slow burn hero hunter story for the third time, because there was nothing else to do.
"One line," he said.
Han Sooyoung smiled. She had been smiling since before he said it, which he pretended not to notice. "One line."
Kim Dokja put down his fork. He took out his phone. He opened a search tab.
There were, it turned out, many pickup lines related to sweet things.
There were also many pickup lines that were extremely bad. The problem was that extremely bad overlapped significantly with related to sweet things, and the intersection of this Venn diagram was where Kim Dokja currently found himself standing, scrolling, with the distinct sensation that every second he spent on his phone was being catalogued by Han Sooyoung with great amusement.
He found one. He read it twice. It was not good, exactly, but it had the advantage of being the one he could physically get his voice to produce without the words dissolving in his throat on the way out. No advanced PhD-level vocabulary he would inevitably stumble over. He thinks.
He stood up.
The walk to the counter was approximately twelve feet. It took no notable amount of time. There was no reason for his pulse to be doing what it was doing, which was making a strong argument for its own existence.
Yoo Joonghyuk was behind the register. The new employee had retreated to the back. It was, in the arbitrary luck that governed small disasters, just the two of them.
Kim Dokja was not going to think about the jaw. He was categorically not thinking about it.
"Excuse me," he said.
Yoo Joonghyuk looked up.
Up close, his eyes were. There were people whose faces you could describe in a sentence, where one detail covered the whole. Yoo Joonghyuk's face was not like that. His face required something like methodology, a slow accounting, and Kim Dokja had conducted this accounting more times than was professionally appropriate for a man who came in every week to order pancakes.
Right now, those eyes were on him. Waiting.
Kim Dokja took a breath.
"Do you know what would go perfectly with this menu?" he said.
Yoo Joonghyuk's expression did not move.
"You," Kim Dokja said. "Because you're so sweet."
There was a silence.
It was the kind of silence that had mass and weight. Kim Dokja could hear the soft jazz from the shop speaker. He could hear the distant sound of waves through the window. He could hear, with perfect clarity, the complete and utter wrongness of what had just come out of his mouth. Heat rose to his face.
Yoo Joonghyuk looked at him.
He did not look away. He did not look amused. He did not laugh, which would have been survivable. He simply looked, with an expression so flat and so complete that it was its own form of communication. Specifically, a communication that said: What did you just say to me in my establishment.
"Yes," Kim Dokja said.
He walked back to his table.
He sat down.
Han Sooyoung was looking at her pancake with the focus of a woman who has developed, in the last fifteen seconds, a profound interest in the arrangement of sliced mango.
"The chapter," Kim Dokja said.
"Mm."
"Han Sooyoung."
"I heard you." She picked up her mango piece and ate it. "Sending tonight." She paused. "You said you're so sweet."
"I'm going to leave."
"You searched that up."
"I'm leaving right now."
He didn't leave. He had pancakes remaining and he cannot waste food. He ate the rest of his pancake. He did not look at the counter. He did not look at the counter and ate his pancake while not thinking about anything at all.
What he was not thinking about was whether he had just permanently destroyed the one café he actually liked. He was not thinking about the twelve feet between the table and the register and how he should have kept all twelve of them. He was not running a cost-benefit analysis of chapter forty-seven against the specific experience of being looked at like that by the Greek god statue of a man who had probably never needed to look up a pickup line in his life.
He was not doing any of that.
He was eating his pancake.
The jam was still very good.
Was it worth it, some portion of his brain asked, with the tone of a prosecutor who already knew the answer.
Kim Dokja took the last bite. He set down his fork.
He had absolutely no idea.
That evening, Han Sooyoung sent the chapter.
Chapter 47 was, in fact, emotionally devastating.
He read it twice, forgot about the pickup line for approximately forty minutes, and then remembered it again right before falling asleep.
He stared at his ceiling for a while.
Probably fine, he thought. I'll stop going there.
He'd gone there every week for six months.
He'd go again next week.
He knew this already. He didn't examine it.