The ceiling fan in the living room had a distinct, rhythmic click-whir that Kim Jisoo could map out down to the exact millisecond.
Click. Whir. Squeak.
It was currently 11:42 PM on a Tuesday, and Jisoo was lying flat on her back on the hardwood floor with a heavy, leather-bound volume of structural engineering codes resting squarely on her face. It wasn't that she was trying to absorb the compressive strength of reinforced concrete via osmosis. It was just that the overhead light was entirely too bright, and Jennie had a stubborn habit of leaving the hallway sconces burning like a beacon for lost aircraft whenever she was deep into an editorial layout binge.
"Jisoo? Are you dead, or are you just ignoring me again?"
The voice came muffled through the thin drywall separating the kitchen from the living area, followed immediately by the violent, high-velocity clatter of a ceramic mug hitting the counter. A second later, a mop of messy, ink-stained hair topped with a neon pink clip peered around the corner. Kim Jennie—senior editor at Vogue & Verve, tyrant of the semicolon, and the absolute bane of Jisoo's emotional stability—stood there in an oversized vintage band tee that hung off one shoulder, glaring down at her best friend.
Jisoo lifted the concrete manual off her face, blinking rapidly against the glare. A red imprint of the book's embossed lettering was undoubtedly stamped across the bridge of her nose. "I'm not dead. I'm meditating on the structural integrity of my life choices, which currently rank somewhere beneath a poorly anchored scaffolding in a gale-force wind."
"Get up. You're ruining the minimalist aesthetic of the rug." Jennie marched over, nudging Jisoo's hip with the toe of a fluffy, oversized rabbit slipper. "And stop using big engineering words when you're just procrastinating on your project specs. I have a crisis."
"When do you not have a crisis, Jen? Last week it was a rogue comma in a Chanel feature that nearly caused a diplomatic incident with Paris. Two days ago it was the existential dread of finding a gray hair that turned out to be a cat hair from a stray we don't even own." Jisoo groaned, slowly levering herself upright and rubbing the back of her neck. "What is it this time? Did the printer run out of magenta?"
"Worse." Jennie dropped onto the sofa opposite her, pulling her knees up to her chest and gnawing nervously on the corner of her thumb. Her eyes were a little too bright, the dark circles underneath them hastily masked by a layer of concealer that was fighting a losing battle against exhaustion. "Kai is taking me to the charity gala this Friday."
The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees, the lighthearted banter freezing solid in the space between them. Jisoo's jaw tightened, though she masked it instantly with a dry, practiced cough. Kim Jongin—Kai to the glossy magazine pages and the high-society cocktail circuits—was a man who possessed the physical architecture of a Greek god paired with the emotional intelligence of a damp cardboard box. He was brilliant, impossibly wealthy, and entirely exhausting.
"Ah," Jisoo said flatly, reaching down to pick up a stray pencil and rolling it between her palms. "The gala. Where he will spend twenty minutes telling you how your dress clashes with the floral arrangements, vanish to talk crypto with venture capitalists for two hours, and then text you at midnight asking why you look so miserable."
"He didn't mean to comment on the dress," Jennie muttered defensively, her shoulders instantly hunching into a protective shell. She looked down at her hands, where a faint, purplish bruise lingered just above her wrist—the souvenir from an argument two nights ago when Kai had lost his temper over her working late at the office instead of waiting for him at his penthouse. "He was just stressed about the market drop, Jisoo. You know how much pressure he's under with the new firm acquisition. And besides... he sent me those limited-edition pastries from Hannam-dong this morning to apologize. The ones with the strawberry glaze you like."
