Closed Door

“Is it here?”

“…”

“I’m asking, is it here?!”

“…conversation… I didn’t hear…”

“What do you mean ‘didn’t hear’? You were standing right next to me when I was talking on the phone. Damn, I should have written it down, I trusted my memory too much. Maybe I should call back?”

“This is a hospital. Calls are disturbing…”

“What ‘disturbing’? So people in hospitals don’t make phone calls at all? They ask not to talk too loudly, but there was no talk about not calling at all. You’re so stupid.”

Right. You shouldn’t make noise, be it a phone or regular conversation. In this sense, these two were already causing inconvenience in all directions.

I woke up to a woman’s clear voice coming from behind the hospital room door.

Sa Gongwoo had eaten early in the morning and fallen asleep again, and I was thinking of going to the restaurant to prepare for work. But I got lazy, stretched out on the sofa, and apparently fell asleep too.

When grandmother was alive, the restaurant never closed for a single day. Before returning to the past, I even sold it. And after returning, somehow I didn’t feel much enthusiasm for work.

The world won’t fall apart if we close for one day, so what’s the point? This isn’t a world where there’s nothing but seolleongtang. If someone dies of hunger because they didn’t eat a bowl of seolleongtang once, let them die. The meaning of my life isn’t to create a world where no one dies of hunger.

Such thoughts almost extinguished my already small enthusiasm.

I got up from the sofa, stretching my aching back due to the uncomfortable sleeping position.

It seems Sa Gongwoo’s colleagues, whom he talked to on the phone before falling asleep, have arrived. I clearly told them the room number, but they still couldn’t remember it. Apparently, not only Sa Gongwoo but his colleagues are quite absent-minded too.

“Maybe I should just open the door? Or should I apologize first?”

“You’re disturbing…”

“Shut up.”

“Here’s Sa Gongwoo’s name.”

“Ah, damn. Why did you only now notice the name plate?”

“Your eyesight… terrible.”

“Quiet.”

The noisiest person made a remark and knocked on the door.

“Yes.”

“Excuse me.”

They had been disturbing for a long time, but it seems they didn’t realize it themselves.

Hiding my thoughts, I awkwardly greeted the man and woman entering the room.

I was seeing the woman for the first time, but the man who entered after her was the big guy who had recently come to the restaurant with Sa Gongwoo and eaten almost ten portions of kimchi.

“Hello. We talked on the phone this morning.”

“Yes. Sa Gongwoo ate and fell asleep.”

“Oh, this carefree guy.”

The woman glanced sideways at the sleeping Sa Gongwoo, then smiled at me and said, “Thank you for your efforts.”

“My name is Cha Yeseung. You’ve already seen him, right? I heard he was at your restaurant recently.”

“Yes, I remember.”

With his unusual build and how he destroyed all the kimchi in one visit, it was impossible to forget him.

“His name is Ma Changgun. Because of his physique, he’s often misunderstood, but he’s just a herbivorous bear. A panda in a bear’s skin? Although pandas only eat bamboo. Anyway, his name is Changgun, but he’s so shy that he can barely speak properly.”

“That’s not…”

“Shut up.”

The big guy named Ma Changgun tried to timidly object to the woman’s words but fell silent due to her rude expression.

“I’m Cho Roy, the manager of the seolleongtang restaurant.”

“Oh, I’ve heard a lot about you. Half of what this Sa Gongwoo says is only about you.”

I wonder what he could have said so much about me. I was curious about what they might have heard from Sa Gongwoo, but somehow I didn’t want to satisfy this desire.

“It seems this guy still went to the restaurant, although we told him to rest. You must have been so surprised by his visit that you couldn’t even close the shop at such a late hour. You could have just left him on the street, he wouldn’t have died, but you even brought him to the hospital.”

Even if you say so, you can’t just leave a person on the street.

Although they’re members of the same hunter team, their attitude towards him is worse than towards a street stone.

“Our leader caused you trouble. But he’s not a bad person.”

He’s even the team leader?

“Sa Gongwoo… leader?”

“Though it’s shameful to admit, yes, he’s the leader.”

Isn’t their treatment of the leader too rough?

“But he’s still better than others. There’s just no one else who could be the leader, so we have no choice. Ahahaha.”

Are the other team members treated even worse?

“…Ah, yes.”

I nodded awkwardly with a sour expression.

“Have you had breakfast? They probably didn’t serve food to the accompanying person.”

“I haven’t eaten, but I don’t have much of an appetite, so it’s fine.”

“Oh, but you need to eat. We should have bought something to snack on. Maybe because all we do is beat monsters, we’ve completely lost our sense of tact. By the way, why did you choose such an expensive room? They don’t really do anything in the hospital anyway.”

The woman looked around the single room and exaggeratedly exclaimed, “Wow, what a nice room.”

“I was told all the regular rooms were occupied.”

“Oh, then you should have just not hospitalized him. He’s just sleeping anyway.”

“He was unconscious, I couldn’t do anything.”

“You’re really too kind. If you had just left him on the street, he wouldn’t have died. If you were worried, you could have put him on a bench in front of the hospital. In the morning, he would have woken up as if nothing happened and crawled home.”

Indeed, the attitude towards the leader was quite rough.

Moreover, I was a bit concerned about the woman’s strangely familiar face.

We’re not acquainted, but her face seemed familiar to me. I definitely had never met her, but somehow, looking at her, I had these feelings.

Judging by how the woman spoke in the spirit of “I’ve heard a lot about you,” although we had never met, it was clear that this was our first meeting.

And yet, why does it seem so unfamiliar and familiar at the same time?

“…What?”

Feeling my intense gaze, the woman tilted her head and asked.

“No, I just feel like I’ve seen you somewhere…”

“Oh, oh. What’s this? Is a child who’s not even twenty trying to pick me up? Is that it?”

It’s not like that.

I really said this because the face seemed familiar, but it looks like I was mistaken. The woman hit the arm of the silently standing Ma Changgun hard and laughed, “Ohoho.”

“Oh, well. I’m often told I look young, but I’m already over twenty-five. The age difference with little brother is not big at all, just a tiny bit.”

I wasn’t interested in the woman’s age, and the age difference seemed not “a tiny bit,” but huge.

“Although they say couples with an age difference are trendy now, our little brother is too young. I’m so sorry.”

I had never heard that such couples were trendy.

Moreover, she didn’t need to apologize at all, but she said “sorry” with a face that showed no signs of regret.

It was an apology without soul.

“Not twenty-five, but twenty-ei… ahem.”

“Shut up.”

Ma Changgun, who had been silent all this time, didn’t finish his sentence before receiving an elbow to the stomach from the woman and collapsing.

“I really thought I had seen you somewhere, but it seems I was mistaken. Since you’ve come, I think I’ll go.”

Somehow, I had a feeling that if I stayed here, I would sink into an even bigger swamp of misunderstandings, so I decided to leave. I have no particular reason to stay, and when team members have arrived, there’s no need for an outsider restaurant owner to occupy the room.

“Why not stay and see how this guy wakes up? Our little brother will leave, and the leader will be very bored.”

I don’t know when I became this woman’s little brother, but she suddenly switched to informal speech. It seems her misunderstanding alarmingly quickly reduced the distance. As if her reduced distance was transmitted to me, my distance to her doubled.

“No, thank you. Since colleagues have come, I think I can go. I’ve fully paid the hospital bills, so when he wakes up, he can just check out.”

“Oh, what an inconvenience…”

“What inconvenience? Please tell him to pay for last night’s dinner and hospital expenses after discharge.”

I didn’t say I wouldn’t take the money.

Hearing my clear words, the woman looked surprised, as if she had heard something unexpected.

“Uh, hmm. Okay, I’ll tell him.”

I took the outerwear I had taken off earlier, bowed, and left the room. Behind the closing door, I heard the woman saying in surprise, “What was that?”

Is it so hard to understand that I want to be paid for the hospital expenses? If a complete stranger took him to the hospital, isn’t that enough? Did they expect me to pay for the hospital expenses too?

Perhaps the previous me could have done so. I would have said that the main thing is that the person is okay, and it’s good that nothing is worrying. I wouldn’t have even mentioned the hospital expenses. I would have thought that this is what human relationships are about.

“Strange. Maybe I was too cold? He left, offended in the end, right?”

No.

I wanted to open the room door and firmly refute the woman’s mumbling coming from behind the door.

“Anyway, being so popular is so problematic.”

“You… it’s a disease…”

“Shut up.”

No matter how you look at it, strange people.

I decided to just ignore them, imagining how my head would start to ache if I went back and started to correct the misunderstanding that had occurred.