The Cutting Edge

020

When Hyejin stepped out of the building at the end of a long day's work (she had refused to take the day off), the first thing that caught her eye was the sleek, silver Audi sports car that was parked out front. It was no surprise to be seeing expensive cars around this area, but for someone who had never seen a sports car outside of a TV screen until she started working in Gangnam, it was still quite a sight to behold. As she walked closer towards it, the car door suddenly swung open and a figure clad in a black overcoat, with a black mask and cap obscuring much of what he looked like, stepped out.

Not again... Hyejin thought to herself in dismay, wishing that she had taken the back door out instead. She reckoned she should be getting use to these late night surprises by now but the truth was she was still surprised each time she saw him standing there. Her first instinct was to look around to make sure that there was no one else around who had noticed anything amiss. Thankfully, the district was relatively quiet at this time of night.

Seeing that there was no way of evading this, she walked up to him and said, "What are you doing here?"

"Get in," Ares replied, opening the door of the passenger seat for her. "I'll give you a ride home."

A quick glance at her watch told her that it was almost midnight and she was feeling exhausted after everything that had happened today even though she had since gotten over the disappointment of the interim assessment. Since Ares was volunteering to give her a ride which would shave almost half an hour off her commute, there was no good reason to reject him.

Nothing wrong with taking a ride from a friend, she told herself as she slid into the passenger seat. The seat were made of genuine leather and she could smell it the moment she stepped in.

Once Ares got into the car, he removed his mask and cap, ruffling his newly-dyed white crop of hair to get rid of the awful cap effect. He smiled in amusement when he saw how Hyejin was staring wide-eyed at the dashboard of his car, running her fingers across the blue LED display as if it were the first time she had ever seen such a thing before. Sticking the key into the ignition, he stepped down on the acceleration and the car began speeding down the empty roads.

"Where have you been over the past few days?" he asked.

Hyejin snapped out of her moment of awe, tearing her attention away from the car. "Where have I been?" she repeated his question. "Oh, I was just out of town with Hyunwon undergoing some training in preparation for today's assessment..." Her voice trailed off when the memory of this morning's disappointment came flooding back to mind. "Were you looking for me?"

"With Kang Hyunwon?" Ares arched an eyebrow, seemingly contemplating about what this meant. "Did he make life difficult for you?" Hyejin shook her head in response, although he didn't know whether or not be believe her entirely—it was no secret that Hyunwon was a harsh taskmaster and it was already obvious from previous instances that he hadn't taken a liking to Hyejin whatsoever. "I came by the salon a couple of times, not intentionally to look for you," he caveated, "but to have some things done with my hair. Since I was around I thought I'd buy you a cup of tea if you were free, but they told me you weren't around."

Hyejin stole a quick glance at Ares's new hairdo, wondering how long it took him to get his hair bleached to that shade of white. She had only seen one of the senior stylists bleach someone's hair once before and it looked like a horribly painful experience for the customer—there were points in time where she thought she saw the person's scalp bleed a little, and she flinched at the thought of that.

The things people put themselves through just to stand out from the crowd, she thought to herself.

"You shouldn't do that to your hair so often," Hyejin remarked. She tried counting the number of different hairstyles she had seen on Ares ever since they first met on that rainy night back at the barbershop—she reckoned he must have cycled through at least four or five different looks since then. "It's not good for your scalp. You won't realise it now but if you continue putting your hair under that sort of stress, the problems are going to start showing sooner or later. I had this friend from school who loved dying her hair all sorts of weird shades of the rainbow, and about two years into her craze her hair started falling out a lot more than it should, so much so that the doctor demanded that she stop any sort of chemical treatments to her hair until her scalp had sufficient time to recover."