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Kim Dokja awoke to a loud clatter.
The first thing he noted was the lack of sunlight coming through his windows. It was probably some ungodly hour in the morning, and the fuzziness in his brain was begging for him to go back to sleep. Never one to disobey the needs of his body, Dokja resolutely turned over and shut his eyes.
What felt like seconds later, there was a resounding crash. Then another. And another.
Dokja groaned, shoving his face into a nearby pillow. Was this supposed to be a burglary? Why were they being so loud? Was there any competence left in the world if even thieves couldn’t do their job right?
There were a few blessed moments of silence, and Dokja started to feel himself drifting off again. He had been dreaming of something wonderful, probably of himself viciously telling off his boss who cowered in the corner like the rat he was.
Then the footsteps started, slow and heavy and above all else loud. Dokja endured the noise for a solid five seconds before he shot up from his bed with an aggravated shout. What did this trespasser think they were doing? The absolute idiot was being such a pain in the ass that Dokja was going to personally give them a piece of his mind.
He stormed to his bedroom door, wrenched it open, and stomped into his lit kitchen with as much noise as he could muster. An unfamiliar man wearing black from head to toe to fingertips was crouched in front of his dishwasher, rummaging through its contents.
“You!” Dokja snarled, forcing his way over to the man. He took care to avoid the scattered porcelain fragments littering the ground in favor of stabbing the man in the back with his middle finger. Damn, the guy was built. But unfortunately, Dokja’s priceless dishes had suffered miserable ends and now their remains were threatening to slice up his feet. Needless to say, Dokja had his priorities.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “You come into my house unsolicited at this unholy hour and you break my dishes? Do you want to die?”
The guy turned to face his accuser and pulled down his black face mask. His eyes were narrowed, framed with luscious dark eyelashes and topped with thick, beautiful eyebrows. His cheekbones were swoonworthy, and so was the grim set of his mouth. Dokja was busy admiring the clean cut of his jawline when the trespasser opened his mouth to defend himself.
Dokja yanked himself out of his stupor and redirected his finger into the man’s chest. “Nope, shut up. You don’t get to speak until I say so. Wanna know something? I woke up four times before I came out here, and I decided to give you another chance. Four times.” This was a lie. Dokja was making up numbers, but who was there to go against him? “And every time, you did something stupid or broke something and woke me up again. Why are you even in my kitchen? Are you trying to take my dishes? Do you think I’d hide my stash of treasure in my dishwasher?”
“Actually,” the man said, “I was doing your dishes.”
Dokja laughed deliriously. “You’ve got to be kidding me. And I never said you could talk. Actually, go sit down.” Dokja herded him towards the dining table and forced him into a spare chair. He sat directly across from his baffled guest and smiled brightly at the glare being directed at him. “Let me give you a life lesson. When you’re stealing from someone, don’t break their dishes. Also, why did you pull down your mask as soon as you saw me? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point? I know you’re hot, but hot people still have common sense, the last time I checked. And don’t wear your Batman boots. Sure they look cool, but they sound like trash bags hitting the sides of a dumpster. For the record, I don’t believe you’re actually doing my dishes, that’s disgusting. Really, the only thing you’re doing right is the all black thing.”
The guy only glared harder. It was a shame, really. His face alone could probably get him anywhere he wanted to be in life. Too bad for him, though, because he was stuck here with Kim Dokja, who currently wanted nothing more than to see how much he could mess with him.
“Curious question,” Dokja asked, “But do you even have a weapon? I’m giving you permission to speak, by the way. None of my kitchen knives even qualify as knives anymore, I just use them to spread butter or if I run out of chopsticks.”
The guy gave Dokja a look that made it seem like he was the incompetent one. The audacity! “You can’t use knives as chopsticks,” the guy said.
Dokja took this personally. “Then watch me. You’re hungry, right? I’ll make you something incredible.”
There was only one small issue here: Dokja couldn’t cook. His culinary abilities were limited to making toast and thawing things in the microwave. Maybe he’d fry an egg or two if he was feeling fancy, or he might cut a piece of sausage and sear it in a pan. This man would just have to endure.
“Oh right, what’s your name?” Dokja asked, looking through the sad contents of his refrigerator. He had been surviving off of cucumbers and cup ramen lately, so he only had a half-empty milk carton, several packets of ham, two wrinkled tomatoes (he bought them on impulse and immediately regretted it), and a single slice of cheese to work with. And a shelf of cucumbers, but he was going to need those. He reached for the tomatoes and the milk.
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” came a curt response.
In his brainstorming, Dokja had completely forgotten he had asked his uninvited guest a question. “Sorry?”
“My name,” the guy said. “Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“Great name,” Dokja said, removing his last clean bowl from his cabinet and pouring in a generous amount of milk. “I’m Kim Dokja. Dokja as in ‘only child’”. Yoo Joonghyuk, why are you here? Trespassing on my property, I mean.”
Joonghyuk didn’t say anything for a while, but Dokja was more than content enough to work in an awkward atmosphere. Humming quietly, he rinsed the tomatoes and pulled a dull knife from its place in the useless knife block. Hopefully he could get rid of the tomatoes while there was someone here to eat them, he thought, rubbing away at the fruits’ wrinkled red skin. But how would he deliver them? Would it be strange to just feed Yoo Joonghyuk raw tomato? Maybe he’d have to disguise them.
With that in mind, Dokja put a pot on the stove and turned the heat up to medium. He’d seen a few cooking videos, so he might as well try. He’d need the tomatoes cut, though, so gave up on the knife (which had only managed to slightly dent the tomato), grabbed a fork, and started stabbing.
At last, Yoo Joonghyuk decided to speak.
“I don’t like my job.”
“Oh really.” Dokja remarked sarcastically.
Yoo Joonghyuk ignored him. “I get paid well, but it’s too public. People recognize me when I’m out sometimes. It’s bothersome.” This guy, was he a prostitute or something? “I wanted to quit, but my manager wouldn’t let me leave. So I tried to get fired.”
Privileged brat. Dokja took out his anger on Tomato Number 2.
“So I messed up. I lost…contracts and I pissed off upper management. But I’ve always been pissing off upper management and they couldn’t tell the difference.”
“How tragic.” The tomatoes went into the pot with water, and Dokja added several more spoonfuls of sugar than necessary. May Yoo Joonghyuk’s teeth rot in hell.
“I asked my colleague, and she told me to steal a few things and get caught. It’d be all over the news, and I’d be fired for sure. So I went to a few other places earlier today, but they all recognized me and asked for my autograph.”
“What the fuck.”
Was Dokja dreaming? This was the only explanation. He stopped stirring his strange mixture to take a closer look at Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. The man was glaring at the table, folding a napkin he had taken from the roll. His handsomeness hit Dokja full in the chest again, and he had to brace himself on the counter and remind himself that this man was an idiot of another breed, and definitely not someone he knew.
“If it makes you feel better,” Dokja said, “I don’t think I know you. I don’t really go to those kinds of places. But I do think you and your colleague are a bit scuffed in the head. What would you have done if you were arrested? Aren’t there better ways of leaving your job than getting yourself a criminal history?”
“Probably,” said Yoo Joonghyuk, “but only the extremes would have gotten my boss to fire me. I make the most money out of everyone in the company.”
Dokja sneered. The smell of burnt sugar was starting to waft up from his concoction, so Dokja hurriedly turned off the heat and spooned it onto a piece of bread. Belatedly, he realized he had forgotten to toast it. Too bad. He placed the bowl of milk and the plate of not-toast with not-jam on the table before Yoo Joonghyuk. “Just a moment,” he told him, and went to take a box of plain cereal from his cabinet and a pair of dull knives from his knife block. On his way back to the table, he felt the sudden, sharp pain of something cutting open the sole of his bare foot. He looked down and cursed.
Dokja had managed to crunch his foot right into the pile of broken dishes. Amazing.
Ignoring the pain and Yoo Joonghyuk’s mildly concerned gaze, he forced his way back to the dining table and handed his guest the pair of knives.
“Chopsticks,” he told him.
Then, snickering at Joonghyuk’s bewildered expression, Dokja dumped cereal into the bowl, making sure to splash as much milk as he could in every direction.
“Bon appetit,” Dokja smiled smugly. “I sacrificed my foot for this.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stared at the pair of dull knives in his hands, then at the lukewarm cereal and the steaming pile of misshapen sweet tomatoes on a soggy piece of bread, then at Dokja with nothing but pure wonder in his eyes. “Thanks.”
He ate all of it with the knives. When the tomato mush disappeared down Yoo Joonghyuk’s glorious throat, Dokja thought he saw a faint shimmer of tears in Joonghyuk’s eyes. In fact, Dokja himself felt like he was going to cry.
Finally, the empty bowl clattered on the wooden table. “Thank you for the food,” said Yoo Joonghyuk with absolute sincerity in his eyes. He tore off another napkin and brought the dishes to the sink while Dokja watched in awe.
This man, a complete stranger, had eaten Dokja’s food. No one had dared to even approach Dokja’s food. Not Han Sooyoung, not Lee Gilyoung, not even Lee Hyunsung and his iron force of will.
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” Dokja said, standing from his seat. “You–”
But Yoo Joonghyuk put a hand on his shoulder, urging him to sit. “Give me your injured foot,” he ordered, and Dokja obliged. Joonghyuk examined it and pressed a warm paper towel to the open cut. “You fool, why weren’t you more careful? I’m an armed stranger who broke into your home. Why did you just feed me? And you left your door unlocked, are you asking to get robbed?”
Oh, how the turntables, thought Dokja.
Yoo Joonghyuk rummaged through his coat pockets and took out a bottle of disinfectant along with a roll of bandages. “Don’t complain about the pain. This was your own fault.”
Dokja didn’t complain. He watched as the glaring Joonghyuk disinfected his cut and tenderly wrapped bandages around his foot. Suddenly, it wasn’t so hard to believe that this man had actually been washing Dokja’s dishes.
Then something Joonghyuk said finally registered. “Wait, you’re armed?”
Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t even look up. “I have a sword. I left it at the entrance.”
Dokja stared in disbelief for a moment, then he burst out laughing. “Joonghyuk-ah, you’re unbelievable,” he breathed as his laughter subsided. “Are you even real?” His eyes met with Joonghyuk’s, and what little remained of his breath was immediately stolen from him.
Yoo Joonghyuk was smiling at him, his gentle expression containing the full force of the radiant sun. At that moment, the stars and the universes lined up, and something in Kim Dokja’s entire being sang that he should never let go of this man.
“You’re beautiful,” Yoo Joonghyuk said.
“Let’s date,” Kim Dokja said.
Maybe their meeting was a one-time fluke, but now their fates were in their own hands.