Han Nayeon works as a ghostwriter in Hermes Tower, a prestigious company that offers solutions to problems. Choi Junhyub is the man she meets the day she arrives late for work for the first time, the man she's attracted to but has never met before...
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Han Nayeon knew the elevator was faulty when the man leaning against the railing found Tiktok more appealing than her. Adjusting his blue tie, he turned up the volume and a boy with bed hair whispered "Tattoo" before the chorus of Golden Child's "A Woo!!" started playing. From this, she surmised two things: one, he's watching the "stop pronouncing the 't' in English" meme; two, he's a GolCha fan, especially because he's watching it on repeat. His beige suit, she now realised, reminded her of their "DDARA" era.
She swept a lock of black hair behind her ear and tightened her grip on her handbag, her gaze pensive on the panel above. Hermes Tower, the company she worked at, was a hundred-storey office building and the elevator was only on the fiftieth floor. That meant the video had looped for at least seven times. All these shouldn't have mattered, but she was late (worse still, on Valentine's Day) and needed a distraction from the thought that her hangover resulted from mistaking soju for soda. The Hermes statue in the lobby would have sufficed had she not been working here for four years. The various paintings, sculptures, flower art and chandeliers also failed to charm her, not when they chided her for her mismatched heels, a glossy scarlet for her left foot and a matte black for her right, her creased black dress and all the imperfections in her attire her flawless makeup could not salvage. It didn't help that this month's theme was "nature", that the elevator wore a wooden furnish with a musky scent, gnarled branches arching overhead, the leaves of a dead tree scratching her scalp to provide mediocre massage. Last month's "universe" theme whisked her over the moon due to the mystical acoustic guitar music in the elevator, complemented with kaleidoscopic floorboards.
A flick of her wrist told her it was 11:10 a.m., the sapphire face of her leather watch glimmering in the mirror. If the lighting were any darker, she would've mistaken it for a wolf, no thanks to Tiktok. Then again, better a wolf than the man. He had not glanced at her or hurled a condescending remark. Nayeon wondered if modern technology had dulled the male gaze.
Under the spell of the thirteenth "A Woo!!", the elevator jerked to a halt on the seventieth floor. For the first time, the man noticed his surroundings, though his eyes didn't find hers, instead judged the decorations to be unnatural. Just what Nayeon needed, an unprecedented case of tardiness and a man engrossed in ignoring her. Her lips twitched.
She could hardly speak when night embraced the miniature forest, starless and moonless and not because of the dense canopy. It seemed like the world was keen on punishing her for her mistake and she accepted it with grace, fixated on the red 70 as she jabbed the alarm button for static to come through. The man switched his phone off, cursing the forest into perpetual darkness. The leaves rustled. A roar resounded. Nayeon dug into her handbag for her pepper spray in case the man tried anything fishy. Her hand swiped at the cold cylindrical object, yet she could not bear to take it. He did seem harmless. Her fingers wrapped her phone and tapped. Some light would be good.
