11:47 p.m., a bar in Yeonnam-dong
Seung-yeon exhaled cigarette smoke and lobbed a sentence across the table.
“Hey, I saw Min-ji texting Jun-hyuk. ‘Babe, I’m having a really hard day today’—lol.”
A glass slipped from my hand. Shards skittered across my ankle, but the shards weren’t the problem. The problem was that single word. “Babe”—the pet name Min-ji used for Jun-hyuk. Until that moment I had called Min-ji nothing more than a “colleague.” She had sworn, over and over, that she saw Jun-hyuk only as her “friend’s boyfriend.” Yet now she was calling him “babe,” and Jun-hyuk was answering.
127 notifications
What I found were 127 messages, all under the nickname “Min-ji 💛.”
Babe, today was really hard.
Talking to you makes me feel better.
When can we grab lunch?
Jun-hyuk replied:
Sounds rough 😢 How’s tomorrow for lunch?
The tone was ordinary. But the word “tomorrow,” the word “lunch” stripped me bare. With me he claimed his evenings were booked; with her he offered lunch first.
The miniskirt photo she sent
After work Min-ji sent two suggestive photos. The first: a miniskirt that barely covered her thighs. The second: a mirror selfie in that same skirt, captioned “I picked this because I thought babe would like it.”
Jun-hyuk answered with two emojis. 😳🥰
Those two pixels said everything. He was enjoying it—the fantasy Min-ji dangled of being the chosen one.
I pretended I knew nothing
I pretended I knew nothing. Every morning I chirped “thanks” to Jun-hyuk’s ritual “have a good commute” text. Yet at the same moment he was texting Min-ji: “hang in there today.”
With me he used banmal, raw and intimate. With Min-ji he used polite form—except reversed, twisted into playful deference. She called him “babe,” and he answered, “me too.” Two languages, two relationships.
The end of three years, in three minutes
That night I asked him:
“What are you doing with Min-ji?”
Jun-hyuk hesitated. Three seconds of silence. Those three seconds ended three years.
“I just… gave her some comfort.”
Comfort. With that word we were finished. It wasn’t comfort; it was desire, and that desire devoured three years.
After that night I erased Jun-hyuk’s name. Yet whenever I unlock my phone, the nickname “Min-ji 💛” still glides upward. She quit the company, but the 127 notifications she left behind keep vibrating inside me.
Since that day the word “babe” steals my breath. Someone’s longing, someone’s fantasy of being chosen—compressed into a single line of text—swallowed three years of my life. And somewhere, even now, that desire keeps spreading.