“I hate working here!” Arin cried through the phone to ~. “Please, please let me find another job. I can’t work under that for another day!”

“Breathe, Ar. I know he’s bad, but you have to get used to him. And you will.”

“I hate him.”

“Which is exactly why he’s the perfect employer for you.”

Arin fell silent, wanting to complain but knowing she had no right to. This was Arin’s reality now.

“You’ll be okay, Ar. You’re strong. You can deal with him. I know you can.”

-

“She’s starting to catch on.”

Arin read the name and the message again and again, hoping that maybe her eyes were deceiving her. But the more she read it, the more frustrated she became as all the unanswered questions taunted her.

Why was “Hyojung” even talking to Jeonghan?

Arin put the phone back in the bag, taking a deep breath and trying to forget what she read, because even thinking about it was making her feel disoriented. That was the last thing she needed now, especially when everything seemed to be collapsing all around her at once.

“Miss, you can come in now!” the nurse called out to her from Jeonghan’s room.

Arin bolted off her seat, thankful for the brief distraction from all the provocative suspicions that were swimming through her head.

Jeonghan lay there peacefully, eyes closed and breathing normally. There was a bandage around his head, a needle in his arm, and a brace around his neck. He looked so gentle and calm, much different than her last experience with him: violent.

She didn’t know what to think anymore.

Lower lip trembling, she took a seat on the chair near his bedside.

What was going on?

She wanted to know now, but the thought of calling ~, or “Hyojung” or whatever her name was, sent shivers down her spine. She felt like she didn’t know her. This Hyojung person was a total stranger.

Instead, Arin decided to wait to ask Jeonghan for answers, because he wasn’t as mysterious to her now as ~ was. While deception was something that Arin could have imagined to come from Jeonghan, she could not have ever imagined it to come from ~.

He seemed totally out of it, completely subdued in tranquilizer-induced sleep. She knew that waiting for him meant waiting a long time, and her yearning to understand what was going on made the wait almost unbearable.

She tried to nudge him awake. Poke him. Pick up his foot and drop it. Talk in his ear. She couldn’t care less how well he “rested.” She just wanted him to explain.

She ended up falling asleep on the chair, his bedside as her headrest.

She woke up when she felt him shift in the bed. She jolted upward, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and eagerly waited for him to do the same.

“Where the  am I?” he grunted, eyes still closed. It made her happy to hear him say that. He sounded… normal. Not demonic.

“Hospital,” she answered him.

“The ?” he said when he heard his voice, and finally opened his eyes towards her.

“You fell,” Arin tried to explain. “You were on the roo…”

“Get back to work, Missy!” he cut her off, yelling as loudly as his weak body could manage, as if he didn’t care to know what happened to him, as if ordering her around was more important to him than understanding why he was in an actual hospital.

Normally, Arin would have listened to him, stopped talking, and did exactly as she was told. But she was feeling particularly bold at the moment. Perhaps it was because he was immobilized and she was not. Perhaps it was because she felt entitled to an explanation from him. Whatever it was, she knew that something had shifted since the last time they spoke, and the power that Jeonghan had once exuded was no longer there.

“How could you think about work in a time like this?” Arin asked him. “I need you to explain.”

“Excuse you?” Jeonghan scoffed.

“What happened yesterday?” she asked him. “You were a monster. You threatened to kill me. And then tried to kill yourself?”

She noted the change in Jeonghan’s expression as she spewed her questions at him. From smug and patronizing, he now looked troubled and disturbed, regretful even. For a moment, he looked at her like he wanted to apologize, but held himself back, and said: “go away.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Missy. No go wipe the chandeliers, or I’ll take it out of your next salary!”

Those were typical Jeonghan threats, and Arin used to find them effective, but now, they seemed empty, scripted even. It was like Jeonghan could think of nothing else to say, and dug into his mental archive of insults he often threw at her: calling her “Missy,” ordering her to work, and threatening not to pay her.

Arin then reached into Jeonghan’s bag of belongings, taking out his phone. “Explain this,” she told him, showing him the notification from Hyojung. “Why are you talking to her?”

Jeonghan glanced at the message, and then locked eyes with her. Arin tried to read his expression, but he just looked blank.

“What?”

“Stop snooping, Missy,” he murmured. It still sounded so scripted, so disingenuous.

“Tell me the truth!” she exclaimed, near tears at this point at how little she was getting from him.

Jeonghan took a deep breath and said, “you want to know the truth Missy? Well, here it is: Your friend is paying me to take care of you. You think I hired you because I needed you? I could easily hire a professional cleaning agency to come and do all the work. I only hired you because I was paid to. Also, you think I took you out of the situation on the eighth floor because I cared about what happened to you? No, I took you out of that situation because your friend paid me.”

Arin didn’t know what kind of answer she expected, but it wasn’t that.

“And I had too much to drink last night. I get violent and suicidal when I drink,” he said. “That’s why I acted the way I did. If you want an apology for what I did, or a thank you for bringing me here, you’re not getting anything from me. Any more questions?”

Arin felt stupid.

All this time, she thought she was being independent and self-reliant, making her own money, but now she could see that she was being spoon-fed all these years. She felt so silly for not considering it before. Why would such a high-end place hire her in the first place? How did Hyojung just happen to come across it? Of course she bribed him to take her in, just so that Arin felt like she had a purpose in life.

It then occurred to her how absolutely useless she was and had been until now. Her only purpose was to be a walking bomb that exploded anyone she happened to love.

She wished she could just explode herself this time, and detonate the bomb once and for all.

Such thoughts surfaced in her head every once in a while, but she had always found ways to rise above them, thinking about Chilli and Meemo. She tried to think about them again to help get herself out of such a dangerous mindset, but they were hard to suppress this time.

“I quit,” Arin finally said.

“You can’t quit, Missy. You signed a contract, remember?”

Arin didn’t listen to him, she just turned around and left. He called after her, but she ignored him. She didn’t answer to him anymore.

As she walked through the streets and into the subway, she made a mental list of things she had to do. She would entrust Meemo to Woozi, pack her suitcase, and then just leave. Run away. Away from this miserable place that she thought was her livelihood, but was just deluding her into thinking it was.

As she neared the front gate of the building, she was stopped by a stranger who suddenly stood in her path. Jolted, Arin looked up to acknowledge the person.

It was a young man. He looked foreign, Chinese maybe, and had soft and attractive facial features. He was fiddling with his shirt pacing a little as he stood, as if he were prepared to bolt, as if he were afraid of her.

“Hello,” the young man said with a nervous smile on his face.

Yes, he was definitely Chinese, Arin reasoned. He said “hello” in the same accent that Minghao used to have.

“Sorry if I’m coming off as a little skittish, I’m just a little afraid of you,” he confirmed, emphasizing little with his fingers. He also looked at the ground, like he was afraid of looking directly at her.

“Me? W...why?” she stammered.

“You know, the whole deadly curse thing,” he answered nonchalantly. “It’s terrifying!”

Arin froze.

“I scared you now, didn’t I? Don’t worry, I’m a friend,” he said with a polite smile.

“Who are you?” Arin managed to ask, trembling a little. She would have been more scared of him had he not made it clear that he was the one scared of her; this was a total stranger who was waiting outside her building, who somehow happened to know about her curse, who seemed to be stalking her.

“If you don’t mind, I’m not going to tell you my name or anything, because… you know. Maybe I can tell you a nickname, though. Do nicknames work?”

Arin took a moment to study him more carefully. From his face and the whole cowardly vibe he gave off, he seemed fairly harmless. The most suspicious thing about him was that he wore all black. But then she noticed that he also carried a tote bag.

Where had she seen the tote bag before?

When she remembered, she gasped.

This was the guy she saw through the security footage, who threw the trash in the lobby, who planted the flyers with ~’s name and face.

It was the guy who worked for the woman who cursed her.

A/N: yay i kept my promise of weekly updates for a month! I will try to keep it up from now on, but no promises. though i really am enjoying writing this story at this point, which is a good sign! :)