look especially crazed today, glinting like marbles as she flops her head from side to side.
“You’re dripping chicken oil on the floor,” I say. Today’s hangover is not the worst of the week, but it still throbs relentlessly.
Nami sits back down when a has-been male singer, so old—in his late thirties—comes on and starts singing a love ballad.
“I should go soon,” she says, drinking a shot and looking toward the door.
“What? You just got here. What’s wrong with you today?”
She fidgets and hems and haws and then I drag it out of her. She has apparently been sleeping with Hanbin. I blink and blink as she tells me the story.
After I had left with Miho that night, Hanbin woke up and they all drank even more. Nami said she blacked out early, but what she could remember was that at some point there was just her and Hanbin in the room and she was on her knees, blowing him. He couldn’t finish, however, and insisted on going to a hotel next door, where she had blown him some more and then they’d had violent sex and fallen asleep. In the morning, they’d had sex again and then he had insisted on getting her number before she left. He’d been texting her all week to meet up again, and she’d met him yesterday afternoon and they had gone to a hotel again.
I am silent as she tells me this.
“Is he giving you money?” I ask after a long pause. She shakes her head and looks miserable. I reach over for some soju and take a swig straight from the bottle. “I guess I am drinking today.”
Nami dumps the chicken bones into the trash and then sits back down across from me and reaches for another bottle. “You know, this is the first time I’ve slept with someone who isn’t a customer,” she says hesitantly, after she takes a gulp. “But it’s kind of all a dream, like I am watching it happen on TV or something. I mean, I know it’s happening but I can’t really wake up.”
I swirl my glass and hope getting drunk will kill the headache this time. “Do you guys talk and stuff?” I ask. “Or is it just all sex?” I’m curious what he’s like in bed, chaebol boy. Miho never talks about it.
“Yeah, a little,” she says. “He’s really sweet afterward. And he takes me to eat at these really nice restaurants and laughs when I eat a lot.” She crinkles her forehead. “He has a lot of things he has to worry about.”
“Like what?” I say skeptically. “How to sleep with as many girls as possible without paying them?”
“Yesterday, he told me his father has a demon inside of him,” she says.
“A demon? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know—Hanbin oppa kept repeating that, and saying he needs to be exorcised by a mudang. And that his mother has been banished to a basement room of his house.” Nami looks down at the floor.
“He’s known you for two seconds and he is telling you this? That’s so weird.” Especially since Miho had told me that Hanbin doesn’t talk about his father, ever. But then again, all rich kids are weird in their own ways. One guy who was a regular when I was at Miari was always flaunting his money, and once he laid money out on the bed and had me bury my face in it while he fucked me from behind. He had seen it in some movie. That made me think he was probably not that rich, but then again, he did come a few times a week so he could not have been poor.
“You better not be asking me for advice,” I say finally with a sigh.
“I’m not asking you for advice. I just don’t want to go behind your back.” Nami opens another bottle and pours another shot for herself, not even offering me one.
“This is you not going behind my back?” I blink. “But now it is one more thing I have to worry about.”