3,518

 

Park Kyung hops up on the counter of the employee lounge, coffee mug in one hand, a blank stats sheet in the other. "Okay, boys. Who wants to place their bets?"

 

A swarm of employees opens up around his legs and he gestures with his pen to the first person he sees: Jihoon from accounting. 

 

"I place $40. Jiho took her back to his place, but nothing happened because the place was a mess and it turned her off," Jihoon says and Kyung nods, scribbling it down on the paper against his thigh. 

 

"Okay," Kyung replies, pointing his ballpoint pen to the next face he sees, which just so happens to be Jaehyo from reception, the victor of the last bet. 

 

"Fifty says the girl did sleep with Jiho, but she left before he woke up and left a ty, 3-5 word note at his bedside, if at all," Jaehyo says, and Kyung curls a smirk as he jots it down. That's a good one. History supports it, too.

 

Finally, Lee Taeil from HR gets his turn. "I say neither. $35. The girl didn't even leave the bar with him, so he picked up an uglier one, who actually did sleep with him. He had to kick her out this morning."

 

Kyung nods, the statement processing in his head. It's creative, and it's not completely out of the realm of possibility. He scribbles it down. The process goes on and on until Jiho finally stumbles into the room, and Kyung has to tuck his pen behind his ear and the sheet away out of sight. 

 

"The man of the hour," Kyung says, grinning grandly. "Everyone wants to hear the story, so you better have something nice for us."

 

Jiho scowls from behind his sunglasses, flipping him off as he stumbles over to the coffee pot. " you, Kyung. It's too early for that."

 

Kyung's too used to this for Zico's middle finger, his fowl language, and his rancid expression to do much harm, if at all. He sighs. "So I'm guessing you didn't get the girl, huh. Not worth the hangover at all."

 

Zico raises an eyebrow as he takes a large gulp of his coffee. "What are you talking about? I don't remember from last night. You're talking out of your ."

 

Kyung's expression deflates. "What do you mean you don't remember anything."

 

Zico shrugs as he opens the door and passes through. "I mean exactly what I said."

 

Everyone blinks and just like that, the hype is dead. 

 

 

///

 

 

"Seven Seasons Printing Company, hello, this is Jaehyo."

 

Jaehyo answers the phone in his rehearsed, plastic sounding tone, immediately wedging it between his ear and shoulder as he sets his fingers back on his keyboard. He doesn't understand how Minhyuk can be ahead of him in scrabble; honestly, have you heard the guy talk? It's amazing the guy even managed to get a high school diploma. 

 

If he loses to him, it'll just be the embarrassment of the century. He squints. What can you do with a 'Q' and a 'Z'?

 

He his head to the side and an obnoxious laugh blares into his ear. "Oh, buddy, get ready to bury your own dead body because you're dying alone."

 

Jaehyo's mouth drops open and he takes the phone back in his hand. "Is this you, Minhyuk? How - that doesn't even make any sense."

 

Another several seconds filled with Minhyuk's obnoxious laughter follows and then the line clicks. Jaehyo has never taken online games as seriously as now.

 

///

 

There are a lot of mysteries in life Taeil's perfectly okay with not knowing, the identity of the culprit that's been stealing his lunch not being one of them.

 

He's saying this in the nicest way possible: he's ing pissed.

 

He rummages through the employee mini-fridge, tossing aside all of Jihoon's discount greek yogurt, Kyung's half-eaten teri burger, and whatever that is Minhyuk's been storing on the top shelf for a month now, but nope, his nicely packaged homemade sandwich is nowhere in sight.

 

He smiles through gritted teeth as he gently shuts the fridge and turns around. "Where's my sandwich?"

 

Kyung shrugs as he glances up from his newspaper. "Beats me. I have my own."

 

Jihoon grimaces from the seat across of him. "I'm on a low-carb diet. Your sandwich doesn't appeal to me."

 

Taeil shakes his head, mind flicking through his inventory of faces. Jaehyo knows better (judging by the last time he ate Taeil's food he probably learned his lesson), Jiho looks like he values his personal space enough to know when not to dip into others', and, well, Yukwon's not a heartless , so his name is cleared, too.

 

Taeil tilts his head to the side and opens his mouth as he stares in a daze at the ground. Eureka. 

 

"LEE MINHYUK!"

 

Kyung's shoulders jump. Somehow, people always seem to forget that Taeil has an extremely loud voice when he feels like using it. These in-and-out realizations always seem to happen at the randomest of times. When Kyung's reading the paper minding his own business, when Kyung's using the bathroom and Taeil's pissed there are no hand towels left, when Kyung's typing out a report and Taeil's mad about Minhyuk printing an absurd amount of papers because he still doesn't know how to figure out the printer settings on his computer ("We work in a printing company for s sake! How do you not know?!").

 

Minhyuk casually walks into the room, one hand in his pocket, the other holding onto... Taeil's sandwich. Kyung and Jihoon shake their heads. Well he deserves what he's walking into, parading the sandwich around like that.

 

"You !" Taeil says, eyes widening from behind his wire rimmed circle glasses. "Do you have no brain or do you just have a death wish?!"

 

Minhyuk blinks, remaining completely calm. "What do you mean?"

 

Taeil presses his eyes closed. Judging by how wide they'd been, they probably need a rest. 

 

Taeil reopens his eyes and grits his teeth. "My sandwich, you bafoon. You stole my sandwich!"

 

Minhyuk sighs, as if it's only occured to him now that him having Taeil's sandwich is a problem. He tosses the sandwich to Taeil, and it looks like Taeil's seconds from lunging on the guy. Damn, Kyung really wishes he had a pen and pencil and a large enough crowd to get some numbers rolling.

 

"Don't shoot the messenger," Minhyuk sighs, rolling his eyes as he shoves his hands back in his pockets.

 

Taeil squints. "What did we tell you about using random sayings when you don't even know what they mean?"

 

Jihoon pulls out his phone and presses the record button on his camera. Who cares that he has a ten page report to edit? This is the fight of the year.

 

"The company head's been stealing your damn food," Minhyuk replies with an exasperated sigh. "I'm just the mule boy. Would you like me to get fired, Taeil? You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

 

Taeil snarls, taking a leap forward. "You're dead."

 

Little by little, more and more employees pour into the room for front row seats. And so it begins.

 

///

 

Yukwon's a good guy. In fact, he's a lot nicer than any other guy you'll encounter here. When you're nice, you make a lot of friends. But when you're nice, you also get taken advantage of. 

 

Often.

 

"Hey, Kwon, you want to do me a huge favor and make copies of these for me?" Kyung says, sliding up on Yukwon's desk beside his computer. "You know, I'd do it myself, but you're just so good at it. You always get the pages aligned perfectly."

 

Yukwon raises his eyebrows. He didn't realize there was a good or bad way to make xerox copies of something. His eyes lower from Kyung's extremely wide smile to the hefty stack of papers in his lap. "Uh, okay. Well, how many copies do you need?"

 

"Just five," Kyung replies shortly, his smile returning to his face immediately. 

 

"Five of each paper?" Yukwon replies, eyes widening. "That's like fifty papers in your lap."

 

Kyung's face plunges into a frown, a synthetic sort of frown, but a frown in any case. "I know. That's why I said it was a huge favor, rather than a regular sized one. You know, I'll be indebted to you, for the rest of my life. I'll even name my first born after you, if that's what gets you shakin'."

 

Yukwon glances back to his computer screen. He has enough to work on for his own workload; dealing with Kyung's will just slow him down. He thinks about it for a second before nodding. "Okay. But only because you're a good looking guy and I'm sure your first born will be beautiful."

 

Kyung grins. A piece of cake.

 

///

 

Minhyuk sits up on the table beside the xerox machine, punching in whichever buttons look right to him at the moment, while hoping for the best. It's been four years since he started working at this company and he still has yet to learn how to make double-sided copies. 

 

Not like it's his fault. He just has terrible memory.

 

He's good at other things, though. Like sneaking around the office, pretending like he's doing work when he's not. 

 

He glances around the office, eyes coming into contact with Yukwon and a fat stack of papers tucked under his arm. "Jesus. You think we have enough paper in this building for you?"

 

Yukwon sighs, dropping the stack onto the table beside Minhyuk. He throws out his arm and winces. "We work at a printing company, Minhyuk. Of course we do."

 

Minhyuk blinks. Yukwon's nice, but he's not the best guy to bounce your jokes off of. He punches a few more buttons then presses enter, realizing Yukwon's probably hoping he'll make it quick. The machine whirrs and then he opens the top to flip around the paper. 

 

Yukwon leans forward, looking completely mortified. "What is that?!"

 

Minhyuk smiles, pleasantly surprised to see the whole double-sided thing actually pulled through. He hands Yukwon the paper: a snapshot of Jaehyo's face on one side, a baboon's on the other. "I'm going to send this to Jaehyo, since he's still salty that I beat him at scrabble and he's fun to mess with."

 

Yukwon hands the paper back, face looking permanently fixed in its shocked expression. "You beat Jaehyo at scrabble? He spends more time playing that than he actually does answering calls."

 

Minhyuk grins as he grabs one of the blank envelopes from the table's box. "I used one of those scrabble unscrambler websites, but he doesn't need to know that."

 

Yukwon looks away and shakes his head. "Forget I asked."

 

///

 

Jiho tugs his necktie away from his throat, grimacing uncomfortably. He hardly wears neckties, but at company meetings, they're apparently required. He'd probably invest in one of those clip-on bowties Kyung has on if they didn't look so ridiculous. He'd rather suffer than look like that.

 

"It seems our sales trends have been doing much better," Taeil comments as he glances down at his paper. "But I still think we can do a lot better." 

 

Jiho doesn't even bother looking at his own. Minhyuk was in charge of making copies of the reports, and somehow he managed to screw it up by printing everything on bright yellow fluorescent paper. How he's managed to stay in the company for so long is beyond him; he's probably related to some big wig or something.

 

"I think our problem is our customer service," Yukwon comments, looking slightly embarrassed when he says this, almost like he's insulted everyone's family with his comment. "We've had a lot of complaints in the past month."

 

Taeil doesn't say anything, so Yukwon continues. "I don't mean to put out names, but I don't want to be vague. A woman said Jiho swore at her for asking a question he didn't know the answer to."

 

Everyone glances over at Jiho, but he doesn't say anything. Yukwon failed to mention that the lady was also a complete and, to make matters worse, had a similar voice to that one teacher that flunked him in high school. Well, he's not about to be petty, so he'll stay silent on the matter.

 

"And Kyung tried to direct another customer to his instagram page," Yukwon continues, awkwardly glancing over at Kyung.

 

Kyung sits up in his seat, tucking his phone away with an oblivious expression. "I'm sorry, what?"

 

Yukwon repeats himself and Kyung nods. "Right. Well it was a business deal -- exchanging goods for services. She follows me and likes my pictures and I shout her out. I don't see how that's worthy of a complaint."

 

Yukwon looks toward Taeil, wondering if he has to say something or if Taeil will. Minhyuk's hand goes up and Taeil nods for him to continue.

 

"I was told to put together a presentation, so I'm wondering when I'm going to have time to do that," Minhyuk says, fingers tapping his laptop. "I see we only have ten minutes left in our meeting."

 

Taeil blinks for a second, before remembering that the so-called "presentation" was just a way to keep Minhyuk out of everyone's hair while the rest of the office tended to important things. Totally escaped his mind.

 

"Go on," Taeil says, nodding. 

 

Minhyuk gets up from his seat and plugs his laptop into the projector. Jiho's eyebrows fly up. Not only is Minhyuk's desktop background some barely clothed woman with an unusually big , but his desktop is covered in files like 'bootypopping.mp4' and 'bikinicarwash.mp4.' Either Minhyuk doesn't realize everyone can see this or he doesn't care. Both seem just as likely in Jiho's eyes.

 

Minhyuk pulls up his powerpoint, which is just as much of an eyesore as those damn papers he xerox copied. Honestly, you'd have to put in a lot of effort to compose such a trainwreck. Jiho blinks. At least it'll take up the rest of the time and Jiho won't have to worry about answering absurd questions.

 

"So this ties in perfectly with Yukwon's concerns," Minhyuk begins, showing the first slide (which is really just a very distorted image of a dog). "Customer service is like a dog. It could be friendly and cuddly like a golden retriever or it can be scary and life threatening like a pit bull."

 

Jihoon raises an eyebrow. "Life threatening?"

 

"Well imagine if the woman Jiho was talking to was an elderly woman," Minhyuk answers in an overly intelligent tone. "She'd probably have a heart attack and die."

 

Jihoon nods, looking impressed. 

 

Just as Minhyuk's about to flick to the next slide, Jaehyo's face pops up on the screen (Incoming video chat request from Ahn Jaehyo) and a ringtone blares through the speakers. 

 

Minhyuk answers the call without hesitation. It seems like he doesn't care that he's in a very important company meeting. 

 

Jaehyo's very angry face flicks onto the screen. "Minhyuk, I swear I will murder every last one of your relatives and then deliver them to your doorstep!"

 

Kyung leans back in his seat. "Jesus Christ."

 

Yukwon turns to Taeil. "See, Jaehyo's our receptionist and even he's a little fowl mouthed. Don't you find this alarming?"

 

Minhyuk laughs merrily. "I see you got my picture. Isn't it hilarious?!"

 

"No, it's not hilarious at all!" Jaehyo says, face moving closer towards the screen so now all you see his his piercing eyes. "You know, I'd be more careful if I were you. Does Jihoon know that the soup you let him finish the other day was loaded with calories?! Or that you were the one that's been anonymously sending Kyung those creepy chain letters?! Or that crappy excuse you gave Taeil for eating his food is a complete lie. Or that-"

 

Minhyuk slams his laptop shut, flashing a bright smile to a room full of petrified faces. 

 

"And that concludes my presentation."

 

///

 

Jihoon shoves a cookie in his mouth, humming along to the song playing throughout the room. Even though company parties are completely lame and it forces him to be in a room full of people he only tolerates, he has to admit the food is pretty darn good. Good enough to cheat on his diet, at least.

 

"Please make sure to leave enough for everyone else this time," Taeil says, moving beside him to grab a mini cupcake. "Do you realize how long it takes for me to make those?"

 

Jihoon gives him a look. "But you do realize I'm the only one who gives them the appreciation they deserve."

 

Taeil gives his comment a few seconds of thought before his expression turns around completely. "You know what? Take them all. Don't even use a plate, just take the whole bowl with you."

 

Jihoon grins. Office parties are the best.

 

While Kyung's busy flirting with some girl who works on the ninth floor, Minhyuk rifles through his wallet. It's a surprise Kyung didn't feel it when he yanked it out of his back pocket, but maybe he really is beginning to get good at pickpocketing. He frowns as he eyes its insides, though. There's $5 and a coupon for some waffle house. He'll take the coupon and leave the money just to avoid suspicion. 

 

-

 

Directly across of them are Jaehyo and Yukwon. Jaehyo his head to the side. "You think Kyung looks like a bobblehead because of genetics or because he cuts his hair like my mother prunes her hedges?"

 

Yukwon looks like he has an answer in mind but also looks extremely uncomfortable. "Was that a joke or are you expecting me to answer?"

 

Jaehyo takes a sip of his drink. "Both."

 

-

 

Jiho blinks, completely missing everything the girl in front of him had just said. "This place ing blows. Let's just leave and go back to my place."

 

The girl blinks. "Nah, I was actually hoping you'd introduce me to that friend of yours, Park Kyung."

 

Jiho growls. "First off, he's not my friend. Second of all, why does everyone suddenly like him? He was an ugly bastard in high school."

 

-

 

Kyung his head to the side. "Seems like your boyfriend doesn't appreciate you. Maybe you should wake up and smell the roses. You deserve a lot better."

 

The girl looks like she's just discovered a new color.  "You know what? You're completely right."

 

Kyung nods. Of course he is. 

 

The girl beams, which is weird since she's just realized her boyfriend's a complete dirtbag. "Let's get married! I know it's quick, but I just have a feeling you're the one."

 

Kyung nearly loses a hand on his drink. "Wait, what?"

 

-

 

Taeil stumbles into the bathroom, kicking open the nearest stall with his zipper already pulled halfway down. He's had quite a bit to drink and he feels like his bladder's about to burs- "What the hell?"

 

There Minhyuk is, unconscious and handcuffed to the toilet seat with "I'm a massive " scribbled across his face. Goddamn. Why does Taeil always have to stumble upon things like this? He closes the stall and goes to use the bathroom in the next one. 

 

Taeil's doesn't want to be that guy, but it's time Minhyuk learned not to touch other people's food.

 

-

 

Kyung steps into the bathroom, whistling some addictive pop tune he can't get out of his head. You know, Nine Muses really deserves more attention than they're getting. Sure they've gone through a million lineup changes, but-

 

He stumbles, nearly falling on the fellow sleeping on the toilet. He quickly stands up, untangling his limbs from the other guy's. "What the heck?"

 

It takes a few moments for him to I.D. the guy because of the scribbled on his face. "Minhyuk? Is that you?"

 

The guy doesn't answer, but it's not because he's not Minhyuk, it's because he's unconscious. Kyung shakes his head, not believing his eyes. "Jeez, who did this to you?"

 

Sure Minhyuk's the one who's been haunting him all these weeks with those chain letters, but Kyung can't just leave the guy here. He knows exactly how it feels to be left unconscious, handcuffed to a toilet and it's not a pretty feeling to wake up to.

 

He searches Minhyuk's pockets for the key, but instead pulls out... is this the same waffle house coupon Kyung has? Man, what are the chances?

 

Kyung takes out his own wallet to compare, but then he realizes, no, Minhyuk doesn't have the same coupon as him, this is his coupon. 

 

Kyung scoffs, returns the coupon back into his wallet, and then backs out of the stall. "Seems like you have some thinking to do. I'll be waiting for an apology."

 

-

 

Jaehyo's the next one to enter the bathroom, but it's only to briefly check up on Minhyuk. He smirks, laughing cynically. "That'll teach you."

 

He walks back out and then locks the bathroom door nice and tight. He always knew being friends with the janitor would come in handy one day.