"Look at that—eyes too perfect, like he’s hiding something."
Ha-kyung couldn’t put down Su-jin’s phone. Min-woo’s jawline on the screen cut like a razor. Thousands of comments, hearts plastered everywhere. Su-jin shrugged as if it were nothing.
"All the pretty ones are like that. Don’t trust them."
The moment the words brushed her ear, Ha-kyung’s body flared hot.
‘I’ll be different.’
A month later, a wine bar in Gangnam. Min-woo sat across from her. Height 185, foreign firm, a collector of two-hundred-plus red wines—confirmed beyond the rim of her glass. When he rose for the restroom, Ha-kyung snapped open her phone.
Ha-kyung: too handsome, probably bad news
Ha-kyung: but his eyes look kind and it’s messing with me
The door opened. Min-woo returned, brushing a speck from her shoulder. His fingertips tingled where they grazed.
"Dust," he said.
That night they were in bed. Afterward he kept stroking her hair, sticky fingers gliding from forehead to eyelids. A scent rose: shampoo, sweat, and the lingering ghost of red wine.
"I don’t really date much. People get hurt too easily."
Ha-kyung was hooked.
‘I’m special.’
The next day, silence. Yet his jawline circled her mind like yesterday’s breath.
Ten days later, a graduate seminar room. Ha-kyung stared at senior Su-bin’s forearm: blue veins sliding beneath rolled-up sleeves. He always taught with cuffs turned back.
"Have to be careful in front of the professor…"
Her body flared again.
‘I’m crossing a forbidden line.’
Papers scattered across the lab desk, breath at her back—her private film began rolling. Reality differed. Su-bin found her note “cute” and passed it around. Pride bruised, Ha-kyung watched his back for weeks.
That was when she understood: the formula handsome = bad was shoving her deeper into the swamp. Judge by looks first and you can’t accept sincerity when it appears. Yet the urge to pierce that shield twists into something else. The moment she thinks I’m different, she races across a psychological contamination map of her own making.
2:29 a.m. Ha-kyung lay alone in bed, zooming again on Min-woo’s photo. His jawline sank like a shadow splitting darkness. She inhaled deeply. The sheets still held the scent—shampoo, sweat, red-wine memory.
‘This time will be different.’
She raised her right thumb in a silent vow, but it trembled. Deny lookism yet still bewitched by someone’s gaze—like preaching sobriety while craving a nightly sip.
If that handsome man is truly a devil, why does she still hope he’ll keep playing the angel in her bed?
No—what she really wants to ask is this:
Do you still want to believe that smile to the very end?