"Proposal"

“Good morning Ms. Lee.” Hanbi had stood from her desk to greet.

My feet were automatically marching me toward the office room labeled Associate Editor Lee Sora—4304 while I kept my nose stuck in papers. So bright and early in the morning, this was merely routine. Glancing up from the folder in front of me, I offered a smile. “’Morning.”

“Ms. Lee. Blue or pink borders for the fourth page of the magazine?” Someone had ed two different images in front of my face.

I barely glanced for a second before waving him away. “Blue, but a darker shade.”

“Oh, of course. Thank you.”

Stuffing away the pages of typed words into another folder, I held it to my chest and glanced at the time. 6:40am. I was slightly early, though by then I still needed my coffee, coffee, coffee. I’ve never gone a morning without coffee.

“Sora-yah!”

I looked up to the face in the whole office building that would dare address me so casually in the given work environment. Speaking of coffee, Luhan held the special cup of coffee specifically from 9 Extracts to my vision before I snagged it and sat my bottom down on the chair. “Thank you.” Pressing a button, my computer awoke. “What does it look like today?” I let the cup’s warmth soothe their way to my palms.

“Meeting at 2:00pm is moved to 8:00am this morning, but other than that, the usual.” Luhan fidgeted with his tie, leaning against the corner of my desk. His face contorted from reading off some digital calendar embedded in his phone.

“Hey, hey!” I pointed to where his was making contact with my desk. “Respect the work area that is my desk please.”

He tossed me a look, but nonetheless got back to his feet.

Something seemed off about Luhan that morning. His hair was neatly styled away from his forehead as always—it wasn’t that. He wasn’t wearing the wrong dress shirt size this time—it wasn’t that either. My eyes landed on the tie he was wearing. I studied it. It was pink and grey polka-dotted and I just had to snicker. The thing was practically begging to be ridiculed. “Nice tie.”

Luhan readjusted it out of self-consciousness again. “I ran out of ties.” He glanced out the opaque glass wall to where workers were stationed inside their cubicles. I wondered why he would even consider buying something like that in the first place. It looked more like something his father must have handed down to him. “Do you think Hyunjoong will let me switch him?”

I keyed in my password to the computer. “No, he hates pink.”

“Ah, crap.” His shoulders sunk dejectedly. “You know I have to show up to the meeting looking like this.”

I squinted at Luhan, pretending to inspect him from top to bottom with a finger tapping at my chin. If anything, the tie made him look even younger as if the face he was born with wasn’t doing its job already. “I’ll make you hold something to cover the tie, don’t worry.”

“Okay, good. Can you do something about this massive ache in my calf too?” Luhan circled my desk to sit on the arm of my chair before proceeding to roll up the bottom of his pant leg to his knee. “See? It’s—”

I elbowed his side, groaning. “Seriously? Are you serious? You’re doing that here? Quit showing me your weirdly muscular leg.”

“Weirdly muscu— I played a lot of soccer in high school!” he exclaimed, defending himself. Just to annoy me, Luhan placed his foot on top of my desk to display his leg some more. “It hurts right here.” He poked his skin.

“I will throw my coffee at you. Quit it.”

“The proper term is ‘pour’,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I wasn’t even born here. You should know more Korean than me.”

Before I was about to backfire at him with an insult and then maybe toss him out the window, his phone vibrated rather loudly in his pocket. Luhan fished his phone out and read the Caller ID with his eyes widening in surprise. He stood to wander away in the corner of the room to take his call after shaking his leg to unfold his pants.

“Hey, why are you calling? I told you not to call until you got to Seoul,” Luhan muttered into the phone with his back to me. I was certain it wasn’t business related. “What do you mean you’re in Seoul? All of you? No way... no way.”

I swore I just witnessed him skip out of my door in whatever happiness he was absorbing form his phone call. I watched his elaborate arm gesture from out the glass wall and shook my head. “Tsk, tsk.”

By the time Luhan returned to my office and shut the door behind him, I was finished emailing a report to the chief-editor. He trudged toward my desk with a frown that was the opposite of the smile I saw him wearing last. Luhan stuffed his phone away languidly.

“So... what happened?”

He scratched the nape of his neck in frustration. “That was my friend. He said him and the rest of them are in Seoul.”

I waited for a more detailed explanation, but he didn’t continue. I blinked. “I thought that that would be a good thing?”

“I thought—” Luhan slapped his own cheek. “Nevermind, nevermind. Anyway, your meeting is in five minutes. Room 3738. Let’s go.”

By the time it was 12:00pm and I was sent on my lunch break, Luhan had still been lingering beside me with the same frown on his face. It was the same face he had when he stood in the meeting with a briefcase covering his embarrassing tie successfully without being pointed at by the others, and the same face when he answered all my calls and listed new appointments in my agenda. It irked me because if it was any other day, he would have gotten excited over something as little as finding a new pencil someone had dropped on the floor.

We both stood in line inside Subway. I straightened my pencil skirt before clearing my throat. “Why do you look so upset?”

Luhan kept his gaze in front of the line. “I’m not upset.”

It was the kind of response I was expecting from him. “You were like this since the phone call. What did your friend say?”

“He and the others are all coming to Seoul to visit.”

I picked lint off my sleeve. “Please explain to me why that’s so bad.”

Please Subscribe to read the full chapter