If I Had Your Face(30)

I swirl my glass and hope getting drunk will kill the headache this time. “Do you guys talk and stuff?” I ask. “Or is it just all sex?” I’m curious what he’s like in bed, chaebol boy. Miho never talks about it.

“Yeah, a little,” she says. “He’s really sweet afterward. And he takes me to eat at these really nice restaurants and laughs when I eat a lot.” She crinkles her forehead. “He has a lot of things he has to worry about.”

“Like what?” I say skeptically. “How to sleep with as many girls as possible without paying them?”

“Yesterday, he told me his father has a demon inside of him,” she says.

“A demon? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know—Hanbin oppa kept repeating that, and saying he needs to be exorcised by a mudang. And that his mother has been banished to a basement room of his house.” Nami looks down at the floor.

“He’s known you for two seconds and he is telling you this? That’s so weird.” Especially since Miho had told me that Hanbin doesn’t talk about his father, ever. But then again, all rich kids are weird in their own ways. One guy who was a regular when I was at Miari was always flaunting his money, and once he laid money out on the bed and had me bury my face in it while he fucked me from behind. He had seen it in some movie. That made me think he was probably not that rich, but then again, he did come a few times a week so he could not have been poor.

“You better not be asking me for advice,” I say finally with a sigh.

“I’m not asking you for advice. I just don’t want to go behind your back.” Nami opens another bottle and pours another shot for herself, not even offering me one.

“This is you not going behind my back?” I blink. “But now it is one more thing I have to worry about.”

Nami looks wounded and we are both silent, but then I pull her toward me and hug her. She smells like almond shampoo and cheap perfume. “Did he say anything about Miho?” I ask.

“No,” she says, taking a strand of my hair and twisting it around her finger. “He hasn’t mentioned her once.”



* * *



—

WHEN SHE LEAVES, taking all her trash with her in the little plastic bag that she brought her chicken in, I feel both agitated and weary. A sickly feeling settles across my shoulders like a heavy cape, and no matter what drama or reality show comes on TV, I find my mind wandering. It’s maddening, how I am wasting my day off on a bad mood.

I try to trace the reason for this feeling. It can’t be surprise at Hanbin—first of all, I had fully been expecting him to be an asshole like all the other rich boys with Mom’s Maseratis and Dad’s credit cards. Hadn’t I? It was also not like Miho and I were actual friends anyway. We never talked about anything personal—I don’t think I’d ever talked to her about my father or my sister. It wasn’t like Hanbin was really going to marry her.

The bad mood was probably protectiveness toward Nami, if anything. I couldn’t remember a single time she had ever talked to me about a boy—outside of work, of course. Work never counts—it doesn’t matter how nice a client is. Nami, for all her childishness, knows that by now.

When I hear Miho unlocking the door to her apartment, I stay quiet on my side, hoping she doesn’t come over, but she does. She wanders in and pokes her head into my room as I pretend to be engrossed in my phone.

“What are you doing? Did you eat yet?” she says.

Her hair is in braids wound tightly around her head and there are turquoise paint splotches all over her neck and hands. Her face is guileless and happy, which depresses me.

“Did you not eat all day again?” I say, exasperated.

“You know, I really meant to today—I bought this yogurt and a breakfast roll from that new bakery on the corner of Tehranro, and then I must have left the bag somewhere because when I remembered them this afternoon I couldn’t find them anywhere,” she says. “It’s a mystery.”

She comes in, oblivious to my mood, and sits on the bed, fingering the dress I wore last night. “I like this color,” she says dreamily, running her hands along the hem. The dress is cheap and tight, but I also like the color—a somber slate. None of the other girls like to wear it and it makes me feel as if I am a person of depth.

“Want to go to the aquarium with me?” Miho says abruptly.

“The aquarium? Why?”

“I need to look at fish.”

“For work again, you mean?” I say. Last time, she wanted to look at how duck meat was hung at a Beijing duck restaurant.

She nods. “I’m starting this glass project and it made me think of fish. Hanbin can’t go with me because he has some family thing.”

I roll my eyes, enraged, but she doesn’t see.

“The aquarium on the weekend will be overrun with shrieking children,” I say, pleased at coming up with such a perfect excuse not to go. “Hundreds of children in an enclosed dark space.” I shudder. “Sounds like a horror movie.”

Miho looks irked.

“But you should go,” I say hastily. “Feed your brain. And maybe all those children will inspire you too. I’ve heard that children do that sometimes.”

She looks at me. “Do you know that all these ob-gyns and birthing centers and postpartum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children? I heard that on the radio news today.”