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The first time they fuck, it takes nearly two minutes for Ju-won's vision to come back, and as he shivers and gasps up at the ceiling, he thinks, well, that can't be right.
The second time happens a week later, when Ju-won experiences the indignity of wiping his own drool off his chin while his body clenches and unclenches with the aftershocks. Dong-sik gets off his knees with a grunt and a wicked smile, licks away the evidence of what he just did from his bottom lip, and says, "Don't worry, I won't kiss you again until I've brushed my teeth. I'll get you some water while I'm up, okay?"
Ju-won watches him saunter into the bathroom, utterly baffled.
Halfway through the third time, someone begins making sounds that haven't been heard since dinosaurs walked the earth. Ju-won doesn't have time to be mortified by the fact that it's him, because deft fingers do something to his unfairly sensitive nipples that hurtles him into another dimension.
"That's it, Ju-won-ah," Dong-sik murmurs, gentling him through it. "There you go."
When he comes back to his own teeth-chattering reality, he's cradled in Dong-sik's lap. Mostly out of necessity since they've managed to squeeze into the driver's seat of Dong-sik's Trailblazer. For some reason, despite having contorted himself into a square knot in order to fit, Ju-won is so comfortable that he can't even fathom moving. Not that he could if he wanted to. He can't feel his legs.
Dong-sik nuzzles his throat with a pleased sigh. Ju-won stares blankly into the backseat.
This… is all wrong.
The fourth time, he cries.
Dong-sik licks up the trail of his tears like they're made of soju, and suddenly stops thrusting. The peak Ju-won had been just about to reach disappears, but before he can scratch Dong-sik's eyes out for it, Dong-sik tightens his grip on Ju-won's hips and presses in. And in. And in. He shoves forward until Ju-won feels like he's spitted on his cock from asshole to throat, positively stuffed full and ready to burst at the seams. Just completely and utterly fucked.
With a sound like a teakettle going off, Ju-won tips right over the edge. Right over several edges.
His brain comes back online just in time to feel a series of hot, sucking kisses press to the underside of his jaw. He should probably do something. Kiss back. Reach out to touch the lines at the corner of Dong-sik's mouth that he adores. And if any of his limbs could remember what they're supposed to do, he absolutely would.
"You still with me, Inspector Han?" Dong-sik leans back to smile down at him, thumbing away the stragglers at the edges of Ju-won's eyes that managed to escape his tongue. Dong-sik's bangs are tangled and sweaty. Ju-won wants to chew on them.
"Ask me again in a moment," he gasps.
Chuckling, Dong-sik rolls away to remove the condom, then rolls back to take advantage of Ju-won's paralysis, tucking him against his side and running fingers sweetly up and down his back. He hums a song Ju-won doesn't recognize, something quiet and almost reverent, then pauses to murmur, "Take all the time you need."
Staring at the far wall, Ju-won is overcome by horror.
It can't be.
Once is a fluke. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern. Four times is an irrefutable fact.
Lee Dong-sik is absolutely astonishing in bed.
In order for there to be harmony in one's existence, there must be balance. There is a point where positives are met with negatives in order to average things out. Ju-won has long been aware of Dong-sik's many positive inherent qualities. The man is terrifyingly cunning, kind to an annoying degree, in possession of an ability to connect with people on a fundamental level that Ju-won will never understand, and is quite possibly the best detective he has ever met.
He's also purposefully obnoxious, chews with his mouth open, and he gets mean, smiley, and passive aggressive when he's angry—which isn't often, but it never fails to make Ju-won want to arrest him on false charges again.
It would be a perfect balance of traits if Dong-sik also weren't in surplus of handsomeness, good humor, a willingness to help everyone no matter how tough the job, and a capacity for forgiveness that constantly leaves Ju-won stunned. Especially when taken into consideration that he lost none of it despite all of his losses and hardships, despite the series of events that Ju-won's own father set in motion and Ju-won stupidly made so much worse.
To also be an incredible, considerate lover on top of everything else is statistically improbable.
"Okay, so I'm going to just…" Hyeok reaches over and takes the wine out of Ju-won's hand. For a middling bordeaux, it's surprisingly delicious. He's enjoyed six very full glasses of it. "Wait, 'statistically'—you've done the numbers on this?"
"I have a spreadsheet," Ju-won says, frowning down at his mussels fra diavolo. There's too much basil in the sauce and it's overpowering everything else. This is exactly why balance is so important. He should tell the chef this. Chefs love constructive criticism. "His sexual prowess isn't just statistically improbable, it's rude."
"Well, the Law of Averages says that he was due a win after everything else."
"That's not how the Law of Averages works," Ju-won snaps, slamming a hand down onto the table. His father used to do it all the time, and Ju-won gets why. It's very satisfying to see Hyeok jump like he's been electrocuted. "This isn't how any of this is supposed to work. How dare he have the audacity to be a sex god on top of everything else!"
Hyeok makes a face like he's being forced to swallow centipedes at gunpoint. "Are you sure he's a—no, I'm not saying it, I refuse. But what do you really have to compare it to?"
Ju-won blinks. Everything's warm and hazy, and the notes of blackcurrant pastilles and rose hips clinging to his tongue from the bordeaux are starting to taste a little like an old shoe. "What makes you think I lack the experience necessary to make a judgment?"
"Well." Hyeok gestures at all of him.
"That's extremely insulting," Ju-won bites out.
"But not inaccurate." Hyeok gives the shrug of someone who was present for Ju-won's first kiss, which had been from a little girl named Min-young who called Ju-won a freak for wearing disposable gloves to go on the swings and then kissed him on the nose. Ju-won proceeded to vomit all over her shoes and then begged Hyeok to let him go to boarding school two years early. "Ju-won, while I'm glad to hear that Mr. Lee is considerate toward you during, uh, your time together, I think you're conflating that and the newness of it all with what's probably a pretty average, uh, performance."
Maybe this is what Dong-sik means when he affectionately calls Ju-won a brat, because he's in a public place and wants to cause problems on purpose, so he looks Hyeok dead in the eye and asks loudly, "Is it part of a pretty average performance to fuck me so well that I can smell colors?"
The patrons at the tables around them all pause and stare. After a long, twisting moment of silence, Hyeok leans away from his veal all'arrabbiata and takes out his phone.
Ju-won blinks. "What are you doing?"
"Calling in a bomb threat so I don't have to hear anything else," Hyeok says serenely.
It isn't until after he sobers up and the SWAT team clears out of the restaurant that Ju-won realizes two things: he's going about this all wrong, and he forgot to ask for a pojang box for his fra diavolo.
Hyeok has met Dong-sik a few times since Ju-won's return to Manyang—much to Ju-won's horror, Dong-sik invites Hyeok to every gathering, and Hyeok is too much of a bastard to decline because he thinks the Manyang gang is his own personal nature documentary—but not enough to give Ju-won the answers he's looking for. Because Ju-won is asking the wrong questions.
He shouldn't be asking why. He should be asking who else.
Dong-sik may have been Manyang's favorite pariah for twenty years, but despite the murder accusations and dubious musical ability, he has always been infuriatingly handsome and charismatic. There must have been others. Short-term lovers. One-night stands. Creeps who would have rolled the dice just to be able to say they slept with a possible serial killer. Surely Ju-won isn't the only person in possession of the knowledge that the man is a virtuoso in the bedroom.
Ju-won spends his entire day off alternating between preening and seething at the prospect. He adds a few new columns to the spreadsheet, and a pie chart. At some point in the afternoon, Dong-sik texts him a reminder to eat, and also sends him a meme about a hideous drawing of a maid that is old enough to attend elementary school.
He barely manages to stop himself from texting back and demanding to know who else's life and guts Dong-sik has rearranged like sitting room furniture. Instead, he sends Dong-sik a photo of the Niçoise salad he made for lunch as proof that he is capable of fulfilling his body's basic needs.
Because he's a gremlin, Dong-sik sends him back a photo of a whole red onion on a plate. Would you still want to kiss me if I eat this like an apple?
Absolutely not, Ju-won flat out lies.
We'll find out this weekend, if you're free. There's a jazz band in Munju proper we should go see. I'll even spring for dinner.
It should be pathetic that Ju-won's heart starts pounding as hard as it does, but the one and only other date he's been on was a dinner set up by his father with a councilman's daughter that ended when Ju-won—unable to stand another second of stilted conversation that was mostly about how much money he made as an officer (enough), how many vacation houses his family had (six), and if he'd seen MBLAQ's latest video (who?)—faked a work emergency by telling her that Canada had bombed Chuncheon. Somehow, she bought it.
Before Dong-sik, he'd never been out with someone he actually wanted to be with. When he and Dong-sik went to dinner for the first time once they decided to go all in, Dong-sik spent the entire time trying to make Ju-won laugh and Ju-won spent the entire time wanting to suck the marrow out of Dong-sik's bones. He settled for sucking on Dong-sik's tongue in his driveway.
He sends, If you wear flannel to a jazz bar, I will have you charged with a felony. Do you still have your leather jacket?
It's doubtful that anyone at the bar would care if Dong-sik walked in wearing a clown costume, never mind his soft, worn flannel. Ju-won has nothing against the flannel. In fact, he goes a little crazy whenever he sees the checkered red and white peeking out from Dong-sik's old, gross coat. He just really wants to see him in leather again. It does obscene things for his shoulders.
How could I ever get rid of it, Dong-sik writes back. I was wearing that jacket when you arrested me!
Ju-won is obsessed with him.
Leaning his head back on the couch, he imagines Dong-sik at this nice jazz bar, butter-soft leather stretched over his shoulders, with Ju-won at his side. But after a few minutes, Ju-won's replaced by someone else, a handsome but faceless date. Someone more suited to Dong-sik. Someone who would allow Dong-sik to wrap his arm around their waist for all and sundry to see. Someone who would sit on the same side of the table and cuddle close while cool, improvised notes swung around them. Someone whose family wasn't responsible for twenty years of ruin and misery. Someone who would risk a misdemeanor for a blowjob in a coat closet.
Instead of pitching his phone off the balcony like he wants, he opens up a new text. He's not going to get the answers he needs by stewing on this alone.
There is something I would like to discuss with you in person, privately, he types. Could we meet up?
Two hours later, he's clutching a glass of water like a life raft and all but accusing Oh Ji-hwa of deliberate sabotage when he says, "I said I wanted to discuss something with you. The 'without an audience' was heavily implied."
Ji-hwa shrugs unrepentantly. "Next time you should be more specific."
"When Ji-hwa-yah said she was meeting with you, we had to be part of it," Oh Ji-hoon chimes in. "No one knows hyung better than us."
"I literally had no choice," Yoo Jae-yi says. "You decided to have this conversation here."
'Here' being Manyang's one butcher shop.
Ju-won schools his expression into the blank politeness that was once mandatory in the Han household. Literally mandatory. His father used to test him on it. "I never said I wanted to discuss Lee Dong-sik."
"What else would you want to talk to us about?" Ji-hoon legitimately sounds curious.
As if on cue, Ju-won's phone buzzes with a new text message. Are you in Manyang? I swear I saw your mom-of-7 minibus pass by the Community Center about 20 minutes ago.
Trading the Corvette for a Tahoe really had been a dumb decision on Ju-won's part. It's too conspicuous, goes through gas the way Ju-won used to go through hand sanitizer, and it handles corners about as well as a grizzly bear that's been hit by a tranquilizer dart.
"Even if it were about him—and I'm not saying it is—that doesn't explain why you're both here. I asked Detective Oh if we could meet here to have a private conversation."
At the grill, Jae-yi looks like she wants to fling her tongs at him. "You asked her to meet at my place of business, where Lee Dong-sik and all his friends spend most of their free time, and thought this conversation would be private? Are you sure you passed the police exam?"
If Ju-won wanted someone to tell him that he's a colossal disappointment, he'd just go visit his father.
"Is everything okay with you and hyung?" Ji-hoon asks. "Has it been difficult trying to navigate a relationship now that your various shared traumas have resolved?"
Everyone turns to stare at him. It's the most random thing that's ever come out of his mouth in Ju-won's presence, which is saying something. A week ago he offhandedly mentioned that he breeds hermit crabs and his most loyal customer is Lee Jae-myung.
"What did you say?" Jae-yi snorts out a disbelieving laugh.
"It's called trauma bonding! I've been doing some reading." Ji-hoon is positively beaming. It's like looking directly at the sun. Ju-won's eyes start watering. "While suffering and sacrifice have always been primordial reasons for intense connection, they don't equate to compatibility. Kind of like you and hyung."
Ju-won's jaw drops. "Excuse me?"
"I mean, hyung went away for a whole year and you didn't visit him once. So, either the bond forged from your shared tragedies dissolved with distance, or something else kept you away. Which one was it?"
Ju-won couldn't visit Dong-sik that year because he was too busy either crying in grocery stores every time he passed the instant ramen aisle or lying on his living room floor while listening to a Spotify playlist called Sad and Pathetic Songs for Sad and Pathetic Bitches.
There was a lot of Celine Dion on it. One of his neighbors threatened to sue him if he played If You Asked Me To one more time and Hyeok vowed to represent them pro bono.
"I'm not answering that," Ju-won mumbles.
"Ji-hoon-ah, if you start bringing home essential oils or crystals, I will place you on a 36-hour involuntary psych hold," Ji-hwa says, then turns a sly grin on Ju-won. "That being said: Inspector Han, you came here for a reason and I have ways of making you talk."
Ju-won's shoulders pull up to his ears. "This is not an interrogation, Detective Oh."
"Not with that attitude," she says cheerfully.
"Look, you've got about ten minutes before Hwang Gwang-young gets here, so you'd better spit it out before half the country knows by the time dinner's ready," Jae-yi says without an ounce of sympathy.
Oh, good. That's exactly what this nightmare was missing. "I wanted to know who had been… That is, if there had been anyone before… me."
Ji-hwa tilts her head, like she's trying to see him from an angle that makes him look like less of an idiot. "Before you?"
"That is, if you had ever spoken with any of Lee Dong-sik's previous, um." He clears his throat. "His… his par—"
Unsurprisingly, Jae-yi is way ahead of him. "Do not say paramours."
"I wasn't going to," he lies. "Partners. Any of his previous partners."
Smiling, Ji-hoon raises his hand. "Well, there was me, of course, and before me there was—"
Ju-won tries to suppress a horrified grimace at the thought of Ji-hoon being counted. By the offended look on Ji-hwa's face, he's not succeeding. "No, not his work partners. His romantic partners."
It obviously isn't what Ji-hwa had been expecting, because she leans back slowly in her chair, blinking rapidly like there's an eyelash caught in her eye, or like she's having a small stroke. "I—huh."
He doesn't know what he's hoping her answer will be. If she says some astronomical number and starts naming names, he absolutely will abuse his power when he looks them all up and reports them to the government for being enemies of the state. If she says there was no one, he'll go door to door and ask every single resident of Manyang if they have functioning eyes.
"Huh," Ji-hwa says again, thoughtfully. She tilts her head back and looks at the ceiling. "There definitely were people before everything went down twenty years ago, and after… I mean, I'm sure there were too? Probably? I'm drawing a bit of a blank, to be honest."
There is something wrong with everyone in this town.
"What about that IT specialist from Ansan, the RIU liaison. The handsome one… Didn't they go out to dinner a few times?" The way Jae-yi says it sounds innocent, just a random memory of a random guest surfacing while they all ponder, but she catches Ju-won's gaze and makes her eyes pointedly wide.
I know what you're doing and I won't stand for it, he glowers at her.
I've got a dozen fresh eggs and a distinct lack of fucks to give, she dimples back.
"No, I think he had a wife," Ji-hwa says.
Jae-yi grins and starts removing the meat from the grill, plating it in an enormous pile. "That doesn't mean anything. People tend to abandon all reason when it comes to ahjussi, don't they?"
Ju-won doesn't throw his cup of water at her, but it's a near thing.
"Why do you want to know about that idiot's dating history, anyway?" Ji-hwa looks completely baffled. "There's never been anyone like you for him."
"You're definitely the only one who's ever arrested him," Ji-hoon agrees sunnily.
"I don't want to know about his dating history." He wants to know if any of Dong-sik's previous paramours blabbed about him being a sexual savant and has no idea how to say that out loud with his actual mouth.
After a moment, Ji-hoon sits up, flushed with triumph. Ju-won already hates what he's going to say. "Oh, I get it! You're jealous of hyung's previous significant others."
"No." Yes. "I'm simply… trying to see if my experiences with him"—his mind-shattering, world-destroying experiences—"are similar to anyone else's."
That's sufficiently vague enough. It could mean anything. Maybe he's asking if Dong-sik's dates ever complained about him eating uncooked ramen noodles in bed like a psychopath. Except Yoo Jae-yi is in the room, and she gives him a knowing look, lips twitching. "You want to know if any of them said anything about ahjussi being bad in bed."
Ju-won rears back, offended on Dong-sik's behalf, and blurts, "What? No! The complete opposite!"
The room goes very quiet. Ji-hoon stares at him, wide-eyed. Ji-hwa's brows lift until they're in her hairline. Jae-yi looks like every one of her birthdays has come at once. Ju-won quickly calculates the odds of a plane crashing into the building within the next twenty seconds. They're not good.
"Well," Ji-hoon says faintly.
"Well," Jae-yi gasps through barely-leashed laughter.
"Well," Ji-hwa agrees, then appears to give it some serious thought. "Actually, that tracks. Once when we were at a party in high school, he sucked the filament out of a lightbulb without breaking the glass, so."
"I see. Thank you for your time," Ju-won says as he stands. "If you'll please excuse me, there is traffic somewhere that I must walk into."
"I'll send ahjussi over with leftovers and a box of extra-large condoms!" Jae-yi calls after him as he walks out the door.
He's going to leave her shop such a nasty Google review when he gets home.
"I'm glad you came to visit," Park Jeong-je says through the partition when Ju-won sits down. "It's been a while."
Ju-won staples a mild expression to his face and hopes it holds for the duration of the visit. "Orange is a surprisingly good color on you. How have you been?"
Considering he's currently serving a prison sentence for a crime he didn't remember for twenty years because his own mother gaslit him into another reality, Jeong-je shouldn't look so thrilled by the question. He holds up a notebook for Ju-won to see. KEEP OUT is written in marker on the cover.
"I've been great. I've had a lot of time to work on my art," Jeong-je says, flipping through the notebook. "They let me go on the internet an hour a day, and I stumbled across a forum that's really been helping me get through all this."
Jeong-je holds the notebook up again and drawn on the page is—
Without a word, Ju-won stands, bows, and beats a hasty retreat.
While he's peeling out of the parking lot, he's so distracted by the thought of a deer having a dick that big and veiny that he doesn't see the Kia Forte until he slams into the back of it.
Ju-won's lying on his couch in Seoul, burritoed in a throw blanket and searching for flights to Oymyakon—where a glamorous, and more importantly anonymous, life as a heating plant worker awaits—when his doorbell chimes. He ignores it. It chimes again, and he hunkers down in his blanket cocoon until only his hair sticks out.
Oymyakon is one of the most remote places in the world. The average winter temperature is a balmy -50 degrees and they get about four hours of sunlight per day. It's also about as far as he can get from the abject humiliation he's going to be subjected to the next time he sets foot in Manyang. He can learn to love ushankas.
There come four telltale beeps, followed by the door opening. A hateful voice carols out, "I just had the most interesting conversation on the way here!"
"You're trespassing," Ju-won says. It's muffed by the blanket.
"Is it trespassing if I was previously given the door code and express permission to use it? It's been ages since I've had to remember the law. Everything went to pot in prison."
Dong-sik's grin is audible. There's never been a more infuriating person on the planet. Ju-won wants to beat him with the wine bottle he killed over the last hour.
The couch dips down next to Ju-won's head. "Can you please tell me why everyone spent the last twenty minutes calling me 'Lee Don Juan'?"
There's a flight to Yakutsk in a few hours. If Ju-won leaves for the airport now, he'll just make it. He sets a reminder on his phone.
"Are you ignoring me?"
"I'm trying to," Ju-won says. "What do you know about ice fishing?"
"I know that you'd hate every second of it," Dong-sik says, a smile in his voice. He puts a hand on the part of the blanket covering Ju-won's shoulder. It's a nice weight. "If you come out from there, will you be a beautiful butterfly?"
Grumbling, Ju-won tilts his head so he can peek out from his blanket burrito. "Why are you so insufferable?"
"Insufferable, yet apparently a wizard in the sack," Dong-sik says with great relish. "I hear someone went sniffing around for information on all my—how did Jae-yi put it?—previous paramours. Something about wanting to know if they had it as good as you do?"
Ju-won's going to review-bomb Jae-yi's shop. He bucks off Dong-sik's hand and then heaves his cocooned body to face the back of the couch. "If you came all this way just to make fun of me, you can turn right around and go home."
"Ju-won-ah." The way he says it, like it's a secret to be shared, always leaves Ju-won breathless. It's not just because it's sweltering in the blanket burrito and he might be suffocating a little. "Why are you upset? It makes me happy to hear that you've been enjoying yourself when we're together. That's the whole point."
"It's not that," Ju-won mutters, annoyed even as warmth blossoms both in his chest and cheeks, which just makes things worse because he's definitely overheating.
"So, tell me what it is."
He hates that he's going to have to give voice to this. He should never have gone digging. One: he's terrible at it, as evidenced by his inability to actually turn up anything useful (which is probably why Dong-sik won't let him into the garden), and two: he didn't think it through completely. What did he think would happen after he got his answers? Dong-sik was always going to find out and then they'd have to talk about it.
"It's just…" He closes his eyes and sighs. To hell with it. Once he's eating frozen fish in Russia, baring his soul to the only one who has power over it won't matter. "You forgave me for everything my family did—everything I put you through. You forgave me for putting you in jail. You welcomed me back to Manyang with open arms, and you… you wanted to be with me, despite our history. That you were amazing and considerate in bed on top of everything else… just seemed too good to be true. I wanted to know if it was."
The error bars on his scatter plot graphs might have cleaned up the data in his spreadsheet, but they couldn't tell him what he really wanted to know, which was whether or not Ju-won was a special case. If it had been someone else who'd ruined Dong-sik's life, would they have merited the same love and acceptance in the aftermath? Would Dong-sik have happily brought them into the fold? Would his friends have accepted them as easily as they did Ju-won? Would they have been fucked so well that it felt like their brains were turned inside out, and then put back together just to be all but worshipped with gentle touches and kisses afterward?
Are those things just part of the Lee Dong-sik Special, available to anyone who happens to glance at the menu, or are they reserved only for Ju-won?
There's a stunned sort of silence that follows. And follows. And follows.
Ju-won turns his head to glare balefully over the lip of the blanket. "Well?"
At that, Dong-sik snaps out of whatever trance he'd fallen into when Ju-won started running his mouth and—wraps his arms around Ju-won, hauling him into his lap like he isn't a grown man with a mortgage. Ju-won hisses like a wet cat and tries to struggle out of it, but he's wrapped up too tightly in the blanket to be able to make a break for it.
"Ju-won-ah, I've never adored anyone the way I adore you."
"I'm going to punch you," Ju-won growls.
"I'll believe it when you can free your arms," Dong-sik says, taking shameless advantage of Ju-won's inability to move in order to cuddle him like a stuffed animal. He presses a fond kiss to the mess of Ju-won's hair. "No one's ever made me work this hard, you know."
That gets him to stop moving. He tilts his head suspiciously. "So there were others."
"A few. No one who stuck around." Dong-sik presses another kiss to his head, then noses around in his hair like a truffle hog. "No one I wanted to stick around. One tried to interview me for this new thing they called a 'podcast'—"
Ju-won rolls his eyes. "Stop. You're not old."
"No one has ever been like you," Dong-sik murmurs against his head. The words rattle around in there, then start sinking into Ju-won's gray matter. "So, if I pull out all the stops and make it extra good for you, it's because I'm trying to get you to stick around."
Heart cramping, Ju-won twists enough to get his whole head out of the blanket, then slides their mouths together. Almost immediately, Dong-sik licks inside, hot and sweet, and despite the fact that he's about to suffer a massive heat stroke, Ju-won shivers and presses closer. He's so good at this. It can't only be for Ju-won.
"No one's really ever been like me?"
"You're certainly the only one who's ever broken into my house and promised to gore me with their horns of justice," Dong-sik agrees, ducking down to try and get to Ju-won's throat with his teeth. He pulls back with a frustrated huff and bits of fuzz stuck to his bottom lip. "Han Ju-won, is there a reason you've turned yourself into a pill bug?"
"It's been a very trying day," Ju-won says, shifting up to let Dong-sik loosen the blanket.
"Ah." Dong-sik gives a sage nod, then presses his mouth to Ju-won's throat as soon as it's uncovered. "Is that why your minibus is all banged up?"
"I don't want to talk about it." The less brain power he devotes to the reason his insurance premium is going to skyrocket, the better.
Just as Dong-sik starts unbuttoning Ju-won's shirt, his phone chimes from his lap. Both of them look down at the screen. Reminder: Flight UL704 to Yakutsk, 9:50pm departure.
Dong-sik squints at him. "I just told you I want you to stick around and already you're fleeing the country."
"It's a long story," Ju-won admits. "There's a spreadsheet."
"You wanna hear a joke about spreading and sheets?" With a grin, Dong-sik gets to his feet and helps Ju-won shed the blanket, yanking him up off the couch toward the bed.
Reluctantly, Ju-won laughs and allows himself to be moved. "Honestly? I'd rather you just show me. Word is you'll be good at it."