The car incident erected a fence of distance between them, quiet and piercing. Mina remained friendly, but the warm friendliness seemed to be cloaked with a veneer of caution. They no longer had spontaneous calls for impromptu food or lingered long on the stairs for friendly chats. This, he knew, left a deep sense of loss within him because this created some hollow space in his chest, a space that he was thrillingly unable to fill even after outmaneuvering Jang Dohoon.
He realized, rather wistfully, that he missed her. Missed the simplicity of her company, the way she turned his cramped, poor existence into a soul adventure rather than punishment. The experiment has spectacularly gone awry: while he was supposed to be testing her, she has actually tested the very foundations of his own character.
Unexpectedly, the instigator of change was Minho, Mina's younger brother. Seongjun had merely seen him by and large-a lanky, serious boy who buried himself in books. One afternoon while returning home from work a little earlier than usual, Seongjun found Minho sitting on the steps outside their apartment, with his head buried in his hands. Although he wasn't crying, his shoulders drooped with total demeanour.
Seongjun's first instinct was to walk by. Emotional displays should be avoided. However, it came to mind that Mina had splurged the beef for this boy, that he was the investment dream for her. He stopped, and after a moment's pause, asked, "Everything alright?"
Startled, Minho looked up. He quickly wiped his eyes, embarrassed. "Ah, Seongjun-ssi. Just... stupid school stuff."
Seongjun settled on the step next to him, a move which somehow felt awkward and somehow right. "School stuff is seldom silly; it's what's determining your future." It sounded like something his grandfather would have said, though he did mean it in another way.
Minho sighed loudly, as a heavy, world-weary sound for a teenager : "It's calculus. I just... don't get it. Mid-term's next week and getting below 80% will ruin chances for pre-med..." He trailed off, the weight of his family's expectations visible on his youthful face.
Calculus. Seongjun breezily passed that at some prestigious international school with private tutors retainer. That was as familiar as corporate finance.
"Maybe," found himself saying without looking back, "I can help. I use math at work I do, data analysis."
Minho looked at him skeptically. Really? "It's worth a try then. Unless you have something else in mind."
Twenty minutes after that, Seongjun was at the little table inside Mina's apartment. First time entering. The space was tiny but impeccably clean-another touch through little homely ones: a thriving succulent on the windowsill, framed pencil sketches on the walls (Mina's work, he presumed). Warmth and comfort arose from the smell of clean laundry and yesterday's dinner.
Minho is opening up the pages of his textbook and his own notes. Minho was presently struggling with basic differentiation, and his teacher was not very successful in explaining it. Seongjun picked up a pencil. "Forget the arrangement your teacher used," he said, "look at it like this."
Taking the concept apart to its simplest elements and then illustrating it by way of analogy, applying it to economics and physics-real-world applications to make the abstract tangible. He was patient and always clear and logical in his explanations. He wasn't answering your homework or getting you to memorize the steps; he was teaching a way of thinking.
It was so engrossed in those concepts that it never heard the door jangle open. Mina stepped in, looking all exhausted after a long day of part-time work. And she declined everything she otherwise would have done at the sight: her famous gap neighbor, bent over her brother's textbook, speaking in a low calm tone as Minho soaked everything in but had dawning understanding on his face.
"...so the derivative isn't simply a number-it's the rate of change at that exact point in time. It's the story of how the function is behaving," Seongjun concluded.
"Oh!" exclaimed Minho as his face lit up. "Just like, it's tracking the speed of a car at a specific second, not the average speed for the whole trip!"
"Exactly," was the answer of Seongjun, and this was the first genuine, unforced smile that touched his lips in weeks. It had an airy taste of untainted intellectual satisfaction.
It was in that moment that Mina set eyes upon him. Not the stiff, awkward man who could never operate a washing machine, not the suspicious character who took visits from chauffeurs, but a man of quiet intelligence and unexpected patience. The mask of Kim Seongjun slipped, and for a fleeting second, she caught that underneath the mask lay the true mind-the mind of Cha Seongjun.
Her suspicion evaporated, replaced with a thick wave of heartfelt gratitude. "What is the honey doing here?" she asked softly, letting flow a smile across her own face.
Minho looked up, all lit up. "Noona! Seongjun-ssi is a genius! He understood it within five minutes, and now I really understand it!"
Seongjun stands, suddenly awkward again. That moment of real connection is over; the mask settles back, but it doesn't feel the same, now with a crack in it. "I think it's right for me to go; I've intruded on your evening."
"No," said Mina, her voice firm. "You are going to stay for dinner. It's the least I can do. Please."
She looked at him not with pity or suspicion, but respect, and something else too-an even warmer something. Something that seemed to be the starts of trust.
As she bustled about the kitchen, pulling out ingredients, Seongjun felt a dangerous hopeful warmth settle deep in his chest. He had been of help. Real help. And in doing so, he'd rather unwittingly slipped a significant value closer in his grandfather's game. The lie seemed to deepen, become more convincing because it was beginning to be tied up with threads of truth-his intellect, his capacity for patience. He had shown her a piece of his real character, though not in context.
But as he watched her cook, sometimes humming to herself, he knew the victory was bittersweet. Each step she took toward her heart was another layer with which he would make his betrayal. A crack in his mask wasn't really a flaw; it was a window, and he feared the day she peered through it and saw the vast, gilded cage that lay behind it.