North - South

Boys don't cry

Boys don't cry, the The Cure were used to sing in 1980. Lately, Hong Chang-sik often found himself thinking about it.

Nonsense. That was 1980. Nowadays, boys were free to cry as they pleased, exactly like girls were free to become finance tycoons.

For example, he was often feeling like crying exactly because of one of those tycoon-girls.

Hong and his friend Kwon didn't know Yoon Se-ri if not for the stories their mothers had shared with them through the years. In their words, Yoon Se-ri was a good child and a good daughter. She was beautiful. She was very, very lonely.

Because of these stories, she had become a sort of legend to the two young boys' eyes. She was the princess to save from the dragons, secluded in an old mansion with a wicked stepmother and two evil stepbrothers. Sometimes, when they were children, Hong and Kwon dreamed about being them, the knights in shining armour who would have saved her.

And it was thanks to this spirit, if they survived trough the first months at the Yoon Agency. Because at least two of the things their mothers had told them were true: she was beautiful, and very, very lonely.

But about being a good child... well, it hadn't took long before they developed a personal opinion about it.

She was used to working till night, was often upset, and they wondered how she could even survive, because they had never – never – seen her eating anything which wasn't water or tea. Kwon had refused to cook for her as his mom had told him to do, it would have been highly unprofessional. But then he had wondered if he maybe should have pushed her to eat something though. However, the only time he had done it, she had complained about the cooking time of a hard egg. So picky, so so so picky!

"Maybe it's because of her past..." Kwon always tried to defend her when they ended up complaining the one with the other for the nth weekend spent at the desk. They were in Swiss, though they could have been equally in Bali or Dubai, who knew, none of them had really had time to see what was out there.

"Sure, sure" Hong agreed while scratching the stress rash which had made its appearance a couple of weeks ago colouring his arms with red, hitchy spots.

"Besides..."

"Sure, sure," he agreed again.

Their mothers would have killed them if they would have dared to say the shadow of a negative word about Yoon Se-ri.

But it wasn't just about their mothers. Even to the eyes of two freshly graduated like them, it was clear that Yoon Se-ri wasn't just a demanding boss.

Even if, on a side, it was visible how she tried to keep a path of some sort and be a normal person, whatever normal meant, there was something deeply pitiful, negative, sorrowful, and sometime self-destructive, in the way she led her life. Careless to her own health and safety.

As her personal assistant – Kwon, anointed by the Lord, had been sent to the marketing department -, Hong was in a peculiar position to study all her quirkiness. The way she massaged her temples after having received a call from London. The way her eyes sometimes looked lost. The way she only kept three photos inside her drawer: Hong's mom, a horse, and the panorama of a city he recognized as Pyongyang. The way her appetite came and went accordingly to her mood. The way she didn't really like paragliding yet kept doing it as if it gave her a solace of some sort from something he still hadn't been able to identify.

Every damn weekend she practiced that paragliding. Every Saturday, every Sunday, no matter the weather, she risked breaking her neck. He really couldn't sort out what kind of sick mindset could bring someone to act like that.