Chapter 656 (1/2)

She said those words without thinking. Even Maru, who was listening, almost replied ‘okay’ without thinking. Those words contained her purest emotions, so Maru reached out to his cup of water in order to buy some time to organize his thoughts. When the cold sensation of his cup climbed up his fingers, Yuna, who was sitting in front of him, abruptly stood up. She sprang up and leaned sideways so that she could escape at any time, but she did not move her legs. Whether it was her reason that held her back or it was her body that just froze up, he did not know, but he did know that he had to talk to her right now.

“You’ll fall over. Sit down for now.”

Yuna’s gaze was on the exit. A suitable excuse, no, just a touch of his finger might make her sprint towards the exit. Maru did not want to embrace the silence, the confusion, and the lump of emotions that would replace Yuna by himself. That would be mentally exhausting. It was obvious that doing that would be even more tiring than listening to her worries.

“Sit down. You know that you’ll put me in a tight spot if you just go like that, right? And you’ll probably regret it a lot afterwards. Sit down so that both of us won’t get embarrassed. Please.”

The distance between Yuna’s nose and upper lip shrunk in an instant. Her expression was hard to describe, and it seemed that she was trying to show a hard-to-describe emotion as well. Her body slowly moved down to the seat. It seemed that she realized that things would go awry if she left just like that.

“I spoke wrong,” Yuna said as soon as she sat down.

Her urgent-looking face made it seem like she had hundreds of excuses ready. Her lips twitched in nervousness.

“Alright, I get it. Calm down for now. No one’s going to fault you for it. Do you want some water?”

“Yes.”

Yuna quickly brought her cup to Maru’s side with both of her hands. Maru filled the cup to the brim. It was a lot to drink in one go, but Yuna gulped down everything as though she had just trekked through the desert.

“Do you feel a little calmer now?”

“Can I have another cup?”

“Sure.”

He poured some more for her. After emptying her cup, she took a deep breath before breathing out. It was a warm breath that Maru could feel from that distance. He felt like he understood just how much she was boiling on the inside. She must be flustered. After all, he was quite flustered as well, and he was the listener.

From the way she denied those words immediately, it seemed that she didn’t think deeply when she said those words. They were impulsive. Maru could understand her. After all, not everyone spoke the words they had logically thought of inside their head. To change the atmosphere, he opened the menu for now.

“We should eat now, don’t you think?”

Yuna nodded after a bit of hesitation. Maru chose a suitably-priced dinner set.

“I’ll go with that as well,” Yuna said.

After ordering, Maru sighed in relief.

“Uhm, seonbae. I startled you, didn’t I?”

“You sure did. But you did say that you said wrong, so it’s fine. I also make mistakes like that from time to time.”

He tried to change the topic naturally after burying her mistake like that. He didn’t want to pry deeply into that and find out what she really meant by those words.

“Did you also make mistakes like this?”

“When I was young. I am young right now, but it was when I was even younger.”

“What kind of mistakes do you mean?”

“Trivial things. Like saying a different word or forgetting an honorific towards a senior. Sometimes, I would be on a completely different line of speech because I can’t follow what others are saying. Everyone has those moments, you know? So don’t worry about it. I won’t tell anyone about this even as a joke. Just forget about it, it’s not even funny, right?”

“Yes, it’s not a joke.”

A corner of her lips twitched as she said those words. Maru wanted to smoothly pass this situation. He did not want to waste any energy trying to understand what was really on her mind, what made her commit that mistake, nor what her wavering eyes meant. He had a vague awareness that her actions, packaged as a mistake, contained feelings that might put them both in an awkward situation, but he intentionally ignored it. Unless she wanted to talk about it, Maru was not planning to mention it either.

They got some bread as an appetizer and then the main meal. Maru kept bringing up topics so that they didn’t spend any time in awkward silence. The shoot he had during the day became a splendid topic of conversation. Just talking about Bitna allowed them to chit-chat until they finished about half of the steak.

“Bitna is really obedient when she’s outside. People are surprised by her. Sometimes, even I think that the way she’s acting is like a pro. Though, sometimes, the disparity between her actions at home and her actions outside does make me feel rather weird.”

“I think Bitna knows exactly what she’s doing.”

“Yes, that’s exactly it. I probably won’t be able to do that.”

“Yuna, I’m sure you can do it as well. You’ve splendidly overcome your trauma and you’re still doing your favorite thing - acting. That’s something really hard to do. There are many people who turn away after not being able to overcome that. Since we’re at it, what kind of audition was it for? A film? A drama?”

“A drama. It was a rather weird audition. When I first met the director, I was quite confused, but after I had a realization, everything had an intention behind it. I was rather uneasy because I couldn’t follow the audition for the first half, and I didn’t know what the director wanted from me, but the director told me midway: show me drama. When I heard those words, I suddenly had something I wanted to do. When I finished my acting, the director told me that we should work together. Those words really made me happy.”

“That’s good. Maybe you’ll get famous immediately and become busy?”

“No way.”

“You never know what will happen.”

“Geez, everyone’s teasing me about it, whether it’s you or the seonbaes from the acting club.”

“I’m not teasing you. I’m just saying that it’s a possibility. The people from your acting club cheered for you when you said you were doing an audition, right?”

“Yes. Gaeul-seonbae also encouraged me a lot. The other seonbaes did too. I feel like I passed the audition thanks to them. If I kept going to acting schools to do my acting, I would never have known what the director meant by ‘drama’. I really think I did well by choosing to do acting. I like acting.”

“I like acting too.”

Maru drank the rest of the drink. Their stiff atmosphere became a lot softer once they started eating, and now they were at a point where they could talk with smiles. Things were probably going well. He put down his fork. The only thing in front of him now was an empty plate. He had a decent talk with a junior he wanted to look after over a meal. This was a clean ending.