Haha, what is that? Not even funny.
Beyond the glass wall of the meeting room, the sunset flashed like a blade. My proposal glowed on the screen, and Manager Jeong folded his arms and snorted.
“Team lead, we saw this last time too, didn’t we? Same idea.”
I laughed. I had to.
When he flicked my forehead with his pale knuckles, when the four men around the table barked haha, I laughed again.
He really has no idea. This is what he calls strategy?
Soap scent drifted from his hand; blood rushed backward through my skull.
What seeps into a bent neck
That night I drank with Manager Jeong. He’d summoned the “after-work bonding”—post-mortem torture in another name.
“You’ve grown stiff lately, Ha-kyung. You used to smile cuter.”
He patted my shoulder. I smiled. I had to.
Yet the soju glass in my hand trembled.
Then the man next to him spoke.
“Hyung, that’s enough. Look, her face is all red.”
Ha-jin—Manager Jeong’s junior from university, the lowest rung in the sales unit, even below me. Still, he said it calmly, as if it were nothing.
“Sorry, I flush when I drink.”
A woman carrying her first wound
Min Ha-kyung, 29, third-year account executive.
After that night I danced between two temperatures.
In front of Manager Jeong: Ah, yes, my thinking was shallow.
In front of Ha-jin: Really? Thank you for seeing it that way.
Same company, different mercury.
I lowered my tail for the manager’s mockery, but my pupils flashed at Ha-jin’s single sentence. When he passed, I turned my head; when he lingered at the in-house café, my feet followed.
“Senior Min, shall we head home together tonight?”
He was always like that—well-groomed, yet quietly smoldering. Watching Manager Jeong’s mood, yet measuring me. It thrilled me more.
Nothing on the surface, yet nothing is everything, isn’t it?
The moment a second name becomes necessary
One Friday night, Manager Jeong stood first.
“I’m heading out. You two go home early.”
He had never left a company drinking table first.
Ha-jin and I were left behind. Amber bar lights wavered.
“Senior, is your hand okay?”
The wound on my knuckle—this morning Manager Jeong had flung my file into the trash; the sharp edge of a folder sliced me. I’d laughed it off, but Ha-jin had noticed.
“I don’t like him either,” he said.
My heart dropped.
A common enemy.
Without thinking, I held out my hand. A smear of blood.
“Sorry, your handkerchief.”
He wiped my knuckles. My skin prickled.
In that moment I realized:
The way Manager Jeong calls my name, the way Ha-jin calls it—different temperatures in the same building.
A game to guess who burns hotter
After that, we drank without the manager.
“Why do you let him treat you like that?”
I played dumb.
“Like what?”
“Saying nothing, wagging your tail.”
Heat flared across my cheeks.
He had seen it—my laughing, my tail-wagging.
I answered, “You do it too.”
Ha-jin laughed. A different laugh—something hidden.
“Then we’re the same, senior.”
How thick is desire?
We drank at a plastic-tarp tent in the alley behind the office.
Ha-jin stroked my wounded knuckle. His fingers carried a different warmth—nothing like Manager Jeong’s.
“Senior, does it still hurt?”
I shook my head, yet the cut stung.
“Actually,” he said, lowering his gaze.
In his pupils I saw my own reflection—crumpled, yet strangely beautiful.
“I wag my tail for you too. So…”
My heart thudded.
We were falling into the same hole.
Tail for the manager, woman and man for each other.
A map drawn on a starlit night
That night we climbed to the rooftop. Seoul glared like a furnace.
“Could we keep this just here?” he asked.
I laughed.
A secret.
Checking Manager Jeong’s mood while locking eyes with his friend—filthy, scorching.
“Senior, I can’t help it.”
He took my hand; the wound was closing.
The cut the manager gave, the care his friend offered.
Why do we burn in this hell?
Psychologists say: humiliation by power drills a hole in self-esteem, and the hole seeks filling elsewhere.
We tried to fill each other’s holes.
The insult from Manager Jeong, the pain Ha-jin carried from receiving that same contempt second-hand—yet the pain made us hotter.
My self-worth flattened at work; his helplessness at the bottom of the hierarchy.
We licked each other’s wounds. The taste was fire.
You too are wagging your tail for someone
Manager Jeong still doesn’t know that his friend strokes my knuckles. Behind the office, in bar restrooms, we kiss while watching his mood.
It burns more fiercely.
You too are wagging your tail for someone, then turning into a woman or a man for somebody else, aren’t you?
So—at whose feet do you wag, and for whom do you transform?