Jieqiong has never been much of a romantic. She’s never bought into White Day or Valentine’s Day or the Disney stories, but she wants this - what this version of her from centuries ago had. She wants to lay out in the sun with her lover on a grassy hill. She wants to go hiking, to go traveling, even to just sit at home with her lover. She wants to look at someone the way she looks at the artist in those paintings.

An alarm goes off suddenly, starting Jieqiong so violently she slams her elbow onto the table, sending a shooting pain up to her fingertips. She winces, shaking out the tingles. It takes a minute for her to realize that the alarm in coming from her phone, and another few seconds for her to realize that it means her shift is over. 

She pulls her phone out and snoozes the alarm. She slips it back into her left back pocket before turning back to the painting spread across the table. She hadn’t realized how long she had spent examining the pictures. She gives the table another once over before swiveling and looking at the crate a few feet away. Somehow, it feels wrong to leave the paintings here. Jieqiong doesn’t know why she feels a surge of anger when she imagines another person looking at the paintings. They aren’t hers; she knows that, yet her skin prickles at the thought of her artist’s artwork on display. She reasons that it’s probably because the subject looks so muck like her. Some of the pictures are quite explicit.

Jieqiong knows she could lose her job. She knows she could be arrested. Deported. She might never be able to come back to Korea. It’s the stupidest thing she will ever do. She doesn’t care. All she knows is that no one else can look at those pictures.

Having the idea to sneak paintings out of a museum and actually sneaking them out are very different things. Jieqiong knows she has about fifteen minutes until the guard, Kang, comes in to lock up. She wishes she had paid more attention to those heist movies now.

Jieqiong has never been the reckless type. She doesn’t have the heart for it, and that’s never been more evident to her than now, as she puts the crate in a larger box and piles binders and loose paperwork on top of the paintings. Her heart is being so heavily that Jieqiong is afraid she might pass out. Every warning bell in her brain is going off. Every word of warning from parents and teachers is playing in her head on loop. Yet the crate is driving her on. She needs these paintings.

Jieqiong takes a deep breath and lifts the box with a little difficulty and makes her way across the basement to the stairway. There’s a special staff exit, and she’s never been gladder. The security at Leeum is tight at the main entrance, but Kang is the only guard on duty at the back entrance and she’s more concerned with people going in that people leaving. 

Jieqiong makes her way past the guard station, which is empty. She’s too relieved to wonder where Kang is until she hears footsteps. She turns around and squeezes her eyes shut, ready to be cuffed and dragged to jail right then and there, but the footsteps fade and Jieqiong lets out a breath. She makes her way to the car that she had borrowed from her landlord because of the weather that morning and heaves the box into the passenger seat. She’s safe.

Over the next month, sh