D O N G H A E

“My name is Lee Donghae,” I bowed and held out my right hand. The girl just stared at my hand and her brows furrowed.

Again.

While we were talking, all she ever did was throw fake smiles at me, wrinkle her brows, glance at her watch and shift impatiently on her feet.

I wasn’t stupid.

I understood that she didn’t want to talk to me. But there was one thing that I couldn’t understand and that was why?

Why isn’t she like all the other girls back in Korea? Why isn’t she looking like she was about to melt in the ground? Why are her cheeks still a pale pink and not blushing red hot?

Did she have a boyfriend already?

Maybe I was right before and something was wrong with her eyesight. Was she aware of it? Had she gone to an eye doctor?

This intrigued me. And the longer I talked to her, the more intrigued I became and the more I wanted to know her.

“Please help me get around Dokbayo,” I added.

The girl looked around – at the ceiling, at the floor, everywhere but at me. Then when she finally looked at me – her stare was so powerful, so threatening, so vicious.

“Alright,” she firmly said. “But I have a job. From eight in the morning to five in the afternoon.”

“Okay,” I shrugged, pretending that it isn’t a big thing. I took out my cell phone and handed it to her. “I will call you tomorrow.”

“You want…” she looked at my cell phone as if it was a severed body part. “You want my number?”

“I will call you tomorrow,” I repeated and reached the phone out a little more towards her. “After five.”

She took my cell phone carefully from my hand, handling it like you would handle a wriggling worm. She stared at it for a moment and I could tell that she was deliberating whether she should give out her number or not. Finally, she punched in some numbers and handed the phone back to me.

“I will pay you at the end of the week,” I told her as I pocketed my phone.

“No thank you,” she tilted her head to one side and raised both her brows. The way she did this reminded me of a killer for hire ready to pounce on a helpless victim. “The Dokbayonese are very hospitable people.”

I bowed at her, but when I looked up, I realized she was already walking away.

“Wait!” I called out and ran up to her again. “What’s your name?”

The girl quickened her steps. I thought she didn’t hear me but when she was at least twenty feet away from me, she called out (without turning around of course, without looking at me), “Yoona.”