By Zephyria 
Waiting for praise was a nerve-wracking yet fluttering experience.
The man finally discovered the shoes the following morning. As he tried to slide his feet into them, his brows furrowed sharply.
What do I do, what do I do.
Standing behind him, Eun-myeong quickly averted his gaze, his heart pounding. Thump, thump. His heart beat heavily.
Would the man be pleased? Would he finally praise him? His chest felt as if it might burst from the swelling anticipation.
However.
The voice that followed completely shattered Eun-myeong’s expectations.
“Did the hotel staff fuck this up?”
Eun-myeong nearly gasped aloud. He couldn’t bring himself to say it wasn’t them, swallowing the words back into his throat. He felt he should step forward right now and admit he had done it.
“They polished them so vulgarly.”
With the man scowling so intensely, doing so was not easy.
“Are they suggesting I go out and provide sales service or something?”
Finally, he violently kicked the shoes away.
“Director Park, get rid of these.”
Eun-myeong stood behind him in silence, unable to speak, with his hands clasped and eyes cast down. He had stared at the rug for so long that he felt he could memorize the pattern and draw it from memory.
Thump. The man left the hotel first, and then Bear picked up the man’s shoes and shoved them into the trash can. Then, he glanced back at Eun-myeong, as if he knew exactly who had done it.
“There’s a separate place for polishing shoes, so it’s better not to touch them in the future.”
Mister Bear was truly quick-witted.
Left alone in the hotel room, Eun-myeong cautiously approached the trash can. Inside lay the man’s leather shoes. He stealthily pulled them out. How could he throw away something so precious?
He fidgeted with his toes for no reason. A wave of awkwardness and embarrassment washed over him.
This was the first time Eun-myeong had done something for someone else without receiving money. He had put his whole heart into it, but it was so pathetic that it failed to bloom and was simply ignored.
Eun-myeong carefully tucked his heart away in the drawer beneath the wardrobe.
Eun-myeong strove tirelessly to earn even a single shred of praise. Since the man kept cutting his fingernails and toenails, Eun-myeong wondered if he looked too dirty, so he had neatly trimmed his own nails with a nail clipper.
As usual, the man grabbed Eun-myeong’s hand with a jackknife, looking thoroughly displeased.
‘Who touched these?’
Who else would touch Eun-myeong’s nails besides Eun-myeong himself? Could this be wrong too? When Eun-myeong timidly admitted that he had trimmed them, the man scolded him for doing something useless.
‘You’re walking around exposing your raw flesh. You don’t even know how to be ashamed.’
Because he had climbed ladders and dipped his hands into tubs, the skin in various places had peeled away, revealing raw, red flesh; yet, the man seemed annoyed by the sight and lost his temper.
Sigh. Eun-myeong let out a deep sigh. He had no idea what he had to do to satisfy the man even slightly.
In the meantime, his body gradually recovered. After nearly a week, Eun-myeong trotted back to the sashimi restaurant.
“Hello…”
“Oh my, our Eun-myeong is here!”
Aunt Jeong-hye welcomed him warmly, saying she had been worried. It was enough to make him wonder why she was so concerned. As it turned out, the man had actually contacted the restaurant and lied, saying that Eun-myeong was so ill he had stopped eating and drinking. Eun-myeong shook his head, saying he was fine.
“It… it wasn’t that bad, fortunately.”
“I’ve been hiding this to feed my baby.”
Auntie said she had taken it from her own son and made Eun-myeong gulp down some herbal medicine. He waved his hands, saying it was fine, but she just winked at him.
“Auntie, and please give me your number.”
The herbal medicine was unimaginably bitter. After drinking it all with a shudder, he rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and Auntie quickly gave him a scorched-rice candy to cleanse his palate.
“Number?”
While Eun-myeong rolled the candy in his mouth, she clapped her hands as if she had realized something.
“My goodness, did you finally buy a cell phone? I’ve lived long enough to see this day.”
Eun-myeong gave a silly giggle. Auntie quickly pulled a cell phone from her apron and flipped open the cover. The two put their heads together and exchanged phone numbers.
“Jeong-hye, Auntie.”
Eun-myeong spoke each syllable aloud, slowly but firmly pressing the keypad to save her name.
Then, Auntie taught him how to operate the phone.
“You have to make the font as large as possible to see it clearly.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” Eun-myeong replied, listening intently. Soon, the letters in Eun-myeong’s phone were enlarged to the maximum, filling the screen completely.
Together with Auntie at the sashimi restaurant, he practiced typing messages.
[B, o, s, s, d, i, d, y, o, u, h, a, v, e, l, u, n, c, h, ?]
Fearing he might interfere with work, he didn’t dare press the send button, but he felt a sense of pride nonetheless.
The shop was as busy as ever today. To make up for his time off, Eun-myeong moved busily between the kitchen and the hall, sweeping the front of the shop whenever he had a moment. Perhaps because the wind had been particularly fierce last night, fallen leaves had scattered like hair, making the front of the shop dirty.
Eventually, the twilight of the seaside descended. As the drinking customers left one by one, Eun-myeong swept the front of the shop again. He worked his hands with great diligence.
At some point, hearing the roar of an engine, he quickly looked up. It was a white sedan. It was a common model that could be seen several times a day in this neighborhood.
Eun-myeong looked back down and continued sweeping. Since the leaves were already gone, only brown sand swirled around.
“Baby.”
Turning his head, he saw Aunt Jeong-hye standing at the door. She gestured with her tanned hand.
“Come inside and rest now. What if you collapse again?”
Her face was full of anxiety and worry for Eun-myeong. Eun-myeong gave a faint smile—a smile where the corners of his mouth barely lifted. His heart ached with guilt toward Auntie, who firmly believed he had been sick enough to die.
“I’m okay, I’m not tired at all. I’m all better.”
His legs trembled slightly, but since he had eaten well before coming to work, his stomach felt very full.
“I ate a lot of food too.”
Just then, the sound of another car zooming by was heard from behind. Naturally, Eun-myeong’s head turned. This time, it was a yellow compact car. The image was the complete opposite of the car he had been imagining. His eyes, which had been full of anticipation, quickly drooped.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“…Pardon?”
He whipped his head back to Auntie. Eun-myeong blinked. How could that be? Who was there for him to wait for?
“That Boss?”
At Auntie’s sudden words, Eun-myeong flinched, and the hand gripping the broom trembled.
“No, there’s no way, Auntie…”
He slowly shook his head. The end of the broom he was holding shook violently. However, Auntie was no longer listening.
“The moment I saw him, I thought to myself, there couldn’t be a bigger bastard in the whole world than this one.”
“Yes…”
No matter how kindly one tried to put it, the man’s first impression could not be called good. Rather, it was very crude and delinquent.
Though he was heavily armed from head to toe with expensive scents, a luxurious suit, and sophisticated shoes, a certain decadence and raw atmosphere secretly seeped through. It was like a sashimi knife wrapped in a smooth silk cloth.
In other words, he suited the role of a gang leader far better than a director of some respectable company.
“But he takes you to feed you, lets you stay at his house because you have nowhere to go, calls a doctor when you’re sick…”
As the man’s unkindly kind actions were listed one by one, Eun-myeong’s shoulders slumped further. These were scenes that had driven themselves like wedges into his mind, popping up even when he tried not to think of them all night. No matter how hard he tried to pull them out, they were embedded too firmly…
“I have a strong hunch about this.”
Auntie looked around and lowered her voice significantly. Eun-myeong, also tense, pressed his ear close to her.
“Could he actually become Eun-joo’s husband soon?”
Words he had never heard before flowed into his ears. It was a statement that completely drained his energy.
“N-no, that’s not it.”
Eun-myeong soon shook his head vigorously. Eun-joo noona was very smart and clever, a person who took very good care of herself. In his past life and this one, Eun-joo noona would never be involved with such a person. The one who would be involved was rather…
Startled by his own thought, Eun-myeong quickly looked around. It wasn’t as if anyone was eavesdropping on his thoughts, but he felt inexplicably frightened.
“Eh, you never know. Between a man and a woman…”
Aunt Jeong-hye nudged Eun-myeong’s shoulder with her elbow. Ha ha, Eun-myeong gave an awkward smile. A shallow crease formed at the corner of his mouth.
Even then, hearing the sound of another car zooming by from behind, he turned his head out of habit.
‘Uh-oh.’
This time, it was some kind of yellow van. Eun-myeong’s eyes fell back down.
Thus, several times, Eun-myeong’s gaze lingered outside the shop. Until the time to leave work, he kept his neck stretched out, watching the passing cars.
As if he were desperately waiting for something.