The first time they meet, she holds a gun to his head.

Jiyong doesn't take it personally.

Instead, he keeps his eyes down and his shoulders slumped. He bites at his lower lip, watching her draw all the attention leveled at this scene, letting her look over the spectators lazily. He pulls the drawer open with an obnoxious jangle that makes her eyeline snap back at him.

When he presses the bundle of money towards her, he meets her eyes for the first time and memorizes the delicate wings of her eyeliner, the firetruck red of her lipstick that will be rendered in stark black and white by the sketch artist.

He rustles the bills unnecessarily loudly as he stuffs them into the purse she holds wide open. His lips open before he can stop them, the myriad ways ‘he would have done it’ that’s been stacked on the back of his tongue since she walked in.

“Sloppy,” he says, quiet and without venom, puffing his assessment into the sliver of air between their bodies.

A fuse lights behind her eyes that illuminates all the minuscule cracks in his mask for her to see: he holds his hands too steady, he holds his gaze without bravado or bluster. He is perfectly deferent to her demands and it keeps her audience under control.

When he dumps the last of money in, the bag is snapped shut; when he pulls his hand back, the curve of her lips is a car crash waiting to happen.

“Watch this,” she murmurs, and then she screams – Poulet!

He hears one of the cashiers cry out as she raises the gun high and brings the down hard on his head, knocking him out.

When he wakes up, there's an officer ready with questions, asking why the thief thought he was police. He sits at the back of the ambulance for 80 minutes. At the end of it the cop's notepad holds the biography of his cover identity, and his entire reconnaissance is flushed down the drain.

That, he takes personally.

The first time he hears her name, he's opening a safety deposit box for her. There's no muzzle pressed against his scalp; she's tucked it against the small of her back, the barrel outlined in the tight grip of her designer jeans. When he hands over the box, her rings clink against the steel.

She picked him out of the line-up of tellers without hesitation, grabbing him by the back of his neatly pressed jacket and marching him into the back of the bank as he gritted his teeth.

As soon as they turned into the quiet, secluded room, she released him, tucked the gun away, and looked him up and down, her face a gallery of disappointment at what she saw: his hair, flattened and neatened, with a thick-toothed comb and cheap gel; his glasses, frameless, thin, and useless; his tie, pulled just tight enough to be respectable, but not notable. She reached out and worked deftly to pull the knot loose. She ran long, crystal-blue fingernails through his hair until it mussed to her satisfaction; she trailed down and plucked the glasses off the bridge of his nose.

When he hands over the box, she bends over it; the frames nestle on top of her messy, bleached-blonde hair. He picks out the black threads of her roots.

"Lee Chaerin," she says, off-hand, her speech a heavy cadence of French, as she picks out a gaudy necklace and tucks it into the deep pocket of her coat. There are a few dusty papers beneath it that Jiyong knows are worth millions - they were his intended target.

She rips them in two.

"Near-sighted?" she casually asks, reminding him at the same time, as she spins on her heel to walk back up to the bank floor. He fights down an impetuous temptation to sprint up after her, rip the gun from her hands, and get something instead of walking away empty-handed again. Instead, he trails behind her, lets his head hang low and docile. He trips twice and keeps his eyes in a squint the rest of the robbery, even as she blows a kiss goodbye.

He goes back to his hotel with a headache three hours later.

He decides their next meeting will be on his terms. He jumps to a small town and rides out an unused alias in an attempt to flush her out. He could use the name she gave him and make a phone call or two, but it feels too intimate a matter to bid it out to a third party, this small back-and-forth. He hunkers down in a bank not even worth robbing, but gives it as much as he ever would. He doesn’t believe in giving anything less than perfection, even for a ruse.

He goes three months without seeing her, living off of standard pay and sketching out plans he’ll never use, and gives it up as a lost cause. He turns in his notice to his manager, who expresses disappointment, and waves off her questions with pleasantly vague noises about it not working out. She wishes him the best of luck.

He wraps up that identity in an unmarked suitcase and stows it in the overhead luggage the next morning.

When they meet the third time, he decides that Lee Chaerin’s mission in life is that he never makes a decent payday again. She pulls him aside before he even makes it to the employee entrance to the bank, and puts a finger to his lips. He's tempted to bite it off.

She arches her eyebrow at the expression on his face, his palpable frustration, and leans in close, close enough that he can see one of her contact is out of place, a crescent moon of blue failing to hide dark brown. 

Even her perfume is loud and overwhelming, designed to hold people down in its scent and punch them into submission. He hates it, how it clings to him and ruins all of his work to be unobtrusive as possible.

"I think you can do better," she says, perfect, unaccented. She flicks open the collar of his suit jacket and finds the shirt crease he carefully made that morning using a thrift store iron.

He scoffs.

She punches his shoulder, hard, before turning on four-inch heels and walking into the bank. She leaves the indent of a ring for him to rub a thumb over later.

He watches news of the robbery from the next town over, his coffee growing cold in front of him as he fixates, unhealthily.

The best defense, he decides once he drains the coffee, is not playing the game at all.

He pulls out the oldest of aliases and settles in, plugging away at a company where no one knows what they do, and no one cares. His paychecks are small and regular, and he hates it, but not as much as he hates being one-upped. Long plays are his specialty, and it only takes five months for her to appear again, sliding into the chair across from him as he eats a late dinner from an empty restaurant.

"I didn't think you'd just give up," she says without preamble. He raises an eyebrow at her and takes a sip of his water. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she wears plain make-up.  He looks at her and thinks, disguise.

"Who says I'm giving up?" he asks back.

"I am.”

She’s right and she makes him want to pull a gun on the 19-year-old cashier, just to prove that he can, and there's the sign he needs to get out now, before he either falls in love or gets thrown into prison.

She glances over at the front counter and closes her hand over his.

"Did you figure it out?"

"What?" he asks, stupidly, watching how her eyes crinkle under the single lightbulb.

"What you did wrong."

 He bristles and snaps out of it, snatches his hand back from where it's burning at the fire of her touch. She sits back and crosses her arms, looks at him evenly beneath the obtuse angle of her eyebrows. 

"So that's a no."

She stands up and throws down a piece of paper, digits scrawled across it.

"Call me when you figure it out."

The last time someone told her no, she's 18 and sitting in the back of a getaway van. Her hand was held out for a weapon, her heart was racing with anticipation. Her partner told her he was the only one going in. He told her to stay in the car, that there was no need to risk damaging the bait. He had a curve to his lips and chuckled at the thought of her taking action as his equal. She laughed with him.

Bait, she considered as she slid into the driver's seat and pulled into traffic, was just another word for worm.

Chaerin was not something squeezing its way through dirt, waiting to be plucked out - to be eaten, to be pierced through and through for someone else's lazy weekend leisure. She drove west for hours, and chased the sun as it tried to hide behind the horizon.

An old, barren coffee shop huddled at the foot of dry hill had no newspapers; she pulled out her phone and saw the header:

BANK ROBBER IN CUSTODY AFTER 5-HOUR STANDOFF; HOSTAGES RELEASED SAFELY.

She read it to the conclusion, raised her eyebrows in scorn at the few quotations that sounded like bad dramatics. She laughed out loud, clapped her hand over as the noise floated behind the dusty counter. The photo captured the expression of Yang Hyunsuk's face carved with lines of shock, uncertainty, fear. She thought he looked just like a worm gazing up at a beak.

But - even a worm would fight to survive, however uselessly, and she drove two hours north to the next rest stop. The slow sunrise dripped against the clouded window, and her breath puffed out visible in front of her. She spread the dye through her hair, practiced, smooth. She scrubbed her face until it was bare and plain. She burned her clothes and dumped the ashes into the working toilets, flushed them over and over again until there's nothing left.

She drove to the ocean in sweatpants, her hair pulled back tight and painful. She sang along with the radio and pictured her future victorious.

For no reason he wants to dwell on, he keeps it, tucking it into a frayed pocket of distressed jeans, nestling it behind crisp pocket squares interchangeably, a consistent fold against his heart. He carefully zips it into briefcases, backpacks, satchels.

He clicks away at the antiquated computer evenly when his co-worker calls him by his name, this month, asking him if he speaks French.

He crinkles his brow in polite decline, but his co-worker is already waving someone over to his booth.

In perfect French she says as she leans against his counter, “Withdrawal?”

He breathes in deep and shifts as though he can stop her voice from being a spark against the flint of his heart. He is ever-mindful of the eyes and ears besides their own, but even that thought betrays him, thinking of theirs instead of his.

“Account number?” he says in nasal, accented French.

She rattles off a phone number he hasn’t used in years, and he shakes his head, tamping down a smirk.

“This one, then,” she says smoothly and then gives him the number he only adopted this morning, in anticipation of moving on. It is and unused, and she already has her fingerprints all over it.

Before he can respond, she slides over a deposit slip, inviting him to flip it over with a slight raise of her eyebrow.

“Ceci est un vol,” it reads, and she is stupid, stupid for doing this here, now, when there’s a fresh guard, and the safe is on a timer, and he suddenly realizes he’s grown accustomed to her ruining his plans, but all of this offended feeling is about her, how she’s doing this all wrong and she’s going to get shot, arrested, and his impending life looks like it’s been drained. He can feel the other tellers looking at him, at the corded silence between him and her, but all he can concentrate on is her smile and how if it were a fist he’d let himself get bruised.

Beneath his fingers he feels another paper grain, and he looks down at the swirling cursive reading “Je rigole.”

One of the tellers starts to walk over, and he crumples both notes in his hands as he turns sharply to greet her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her walk around the columns, the pinkie and thumb extended, spurring him on to join the game.

His phone rings before he can bring himself to dial in the late night.

“Don’t bother coming in. There’s nothing left.”

She leaves the silence between them to draw out, willing him to respond, but he only has enough courage to hang up and pretend this is still up to him, that he still has a say in what happens next. He hangs his head and forces himself to calculate the cost of her presence in his life.

“Oh,” he breathes into the room, and he fumbles at the phone again, pulls the folded note out of his pocket and prepares to freefall, but the escalated trot of his heartbeat slows and crumbles as it hears only This phone number has been disconnected.

The first and only time Chaerin was even close to caught, she wore a mask like they all told her to, pulled down low and thick over her face.

Basics, Yang Hyunsuk said. Never let them get a good look at you.

She realized how stupid this was as she limped to her car, sloppily applying pressure to the shallow canyon the bullet carved into her jeans, thigh. She took advice from a man slowly rotting in prison.

She wrapped up her wound in a parking lot beneath stained, plain fingernails, half- with a shotgun laid beside her. She needed to be better, and she would, swore it with obscenities beneath halogen and smog, blood in the lines of her palm and gunpowder in her hair.

The next day she slid in front of the public computer and spends hours studying the steady hands, the careful precision of movements, the end result. She politely acceded to the requests for her to move, spoken and unspoken, when she looked for too long; if they asked in the afternoon, she took long walks and came back in after the sun had gone down and shifts had changed. If they asked in the evening, she went back to the hotel and practiced.

She spent a week like this and then slowly, meticulously gathered supplies from unattended purses left on bathroom counters, at the side of coffee tables, slung over the back of cushioned chairs.

In the hotel, beneath flickering fluorescence, looking into a mirror with rusted hinges, she held her right hand steady with her left, as she applied the foundation, concealer, lipstick, mascara. She washed off her face, over and over again, and re-made it until no one would recognize her as the girl who failed.

When she walked into the police station, and submitted herself as an official witness to her own failure, she held her breath as the officers studied her face, as they covertly traced the length of her bared legs beneath the frayed edge of her skirt, and released it when they let her walk out with their thanks for her public service.

She laughed as she climbed into the car, threw her purse so that it covered the dark red of the blood stain on the passengers seat, and pressed her heel to the gas pedal.