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Choi Yujun studies me for a moment and then puts a hand over his stomach. “I feel a sudden onset of a stomach pain. Oh no.”
I see what he’s doing. A reluctant smile tugs on the corners of my lips. “Stop.”
“It’s very painful.” He bends over.
Ahn Sangki appears out of nowhere. “What’s going on?”
Still bent over, Choi Yujun peeks at me, waiting for a sign. If I want to leave, he’s given me an out. I shake my head slightly. I’m good, I tell him.
He straightens and flashes a warm smile at his friend. “A cramp.”
Ahn Sangki-nim shoots the two of us a narrowed suspicious gaze before raising a green bottle and three shot glasses. “I have soju,” he says, like he’s brought out the Christmas turkey. “What would you drink in America?”
“Watered-down beer,” I tell them, watching the soju bottle like a hawk so I can snatch it up. I’m not going to mess up the beer-pouring protocol. If there’s one thing a twentysomething should know, it’s bar etiquette. Along with how to do your taxes and laundry, knowing how to act in a bar should be in the first two chapters of those little handbooks they sell at the bookstore by the checkout counter.
“This is the opposite of watered-down beer.” He turns to Choi Yujun. “What did you drink when you were in college?”
“Beer. Vodka. Wine out of a box.”
“Out of a box?” Ahn Sangki looks half-horrified, half-intrigued.
“It is not good.”
I wonder where Choi Yujun went to college.
“But cheap and American,” he tacks on as if that explains everything, although it sort of does. We are a to-go society and I have yet to see anyone on the street in Seoul drinking or eating, whereas back home, you couldn’t go one block without seeing someone with a Starbucks coffee cup in their hand.
“American is good. Cheap is good,” Ahn Sangki declares and pours the soju into the small cups before I can grab the bottle. He hands them out and clinks his glass against mine and then Choi Yujun’s. “Gun bae!”
“Gun bae!” Choi Yujun echoes.
I repeat it in my head and down the shot of rice wine, frowning slightly at not getting the chance to do the pouring and then kicking myself when I belatedly remember to turn my head to my side. Everyone else but the two men turn away. If there is a test on social skills, I’m failing.
Jules asks Ahn Sangki a question in Korean and by the way she touches her hair, I’m guessing it’s about his very good dye job. The washed-wheat-gold color looks better on him than on natural blonds. It’s kind of amazing and I begin to wonder what I would look like blond. I run a hand down my own plain black hair and think of all the times I wanted to be a blonde growing up. I could’ve been but I didn’t have the vision. Damn.
Next to me, Choi Yujun leans back against the cushions and eyes me from beneath the fringe of his eyelashes. Both names are a handful in my head. I want to shorten it, make it more familiar. He specifically told me to call him Yujun, not Choi Yujun or Yujun-nim or even—what was it that Jules said was cringey? Oppa?
“You have questions in your eyes.”
“It’s the strobe lights.”
His own eyes twinkle as the corners of his mouth quirk up. He rolls his empty shot glass between his fingers a couple of times before saying, “I’m very good at listening. My eomma says it’s my best quality.”
“What? Not your dimples?” I jest.
He grins and I pretend I’m unaffected.
“Those are a very close second,” he says, putting his thumb and forefinger millimeters apart. “But I scored high on my listening skills in aptitude tests. Try me out. See if what I’m saying is true.”
He did ask, I suppose. “Age is important here.”
He nods.
“So I’m going to ask even though it feels unnatural. How old are you?”
“Ah. We actually ask what year you were born. I was born in ninety-two and so was Sangki-ah, so he is my same-age friend. A chingu. And you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“That would make you a ninety-five-liner, which would make me your oppa since I’m older.” He says the word a little cheekily, as if he’s inviting me to call him something that’s slightly inappropriate.
I eye him suspiciously. “Do I want to know what oppa means?”
“Older brother,” he supplies readily.
I can see how calling a man who is not related an older brother is cringey. I’m glad that Jules warned me. Of course, this means that all his warmth that I took for flirtation is actually a gesture of friendship, which is disappointing, but I’ll live. I mean, maybe I’ll cry into my pillow tonight and erase all the mental scribbling where I put our names inside a heart, but I will live. “My flatmate told me I shouldn’t use it but you’re telling me I should call everyone oppa?”
