Love - Chapter 2 Part1

After the abandonment, while Jung-woo’s words dwindled to almost nothing, Eun-hye’s chatter only grew louder. She buzzed around him like an insistent firefly, doing handstands she’d practiced for months, bragging about praise from her new English teacher—”She says my pronunciation sounds like I’ve lived abroad!”—all to crack his stony silence.

She became what he once was: tutoring the younger kids at Eun-hye Home, helping Sister Agnes with kimchi-making. Meanwhile, Jung-woo withdrew completely. He no longer mediated the children’s fights or listened to their troubles. When Sister Agnes pulled him aside, her worry a tangible thing, he absorbed her words like a brick wall absorbs rain—impenetrable, unchanged.

Yet Eun-hye saw what others didn’t. Where the children whispered about his terrifying gaze—”It makes my scalp crawl!”—she recognized the constellations in his dark eyes. If she waited long enough, the silence always broke into the faintest smile.

The year Eun-hye turned thirteen, two things happened:
1. She started bleeding one autumn afternoon, late compared to her peers.
2. Jung-woo, now eighteen and towering, blocked her path home with the quiet intensity of a storm cloud.

“…You’ve been crying.”

“N-no—”

She’d scrubbed her face raw at school, but he knew. His fingers—calloused from God knows what—tipped her chin up.

“Who was it?”

“Oppa, it’s not—”

“Name. Now.”

The boy who’d cornered Eun-hye in that empty alley—the one who’d grabbed her from behind and left bruises like fingerprints on her wrists—was found three hours later in a PC bang alleyway with two ribs snapped and his nose cartilage crushed into pulp.

His father, a police officer grooming his son for baseball stardom, took one look at the damage and pulled strings to have Jung-woo sent to a juvenile detention center—the kind that housed minors whose crimes were vicious enough to belong in adult prisons.

Sister Agnes wrote ten handwritten pleas. “Don’t let this stain his record,” she begged. “Let it end with protective custody.” None of the letters reached the right hands.

Eight months later, Jung-woo came back with his head shaved raw and eyes like extinguished coals. The children now skirted around him as if he emitted radiation. Only Eun-hye remained, a relentless satellite:

“Guess what? No one dares mess with me at school now. They think I’m some gangster’s little sister. Morons—the real thug’s the guy you turned into a breathing bruise.”

She thrust a block of white tofu at him—something about purification she’d overheard—and Jung-woo ate every bland mouthful without complaint. Not because he believed in superstitions, but because Eun-hye was planted in front of him, arms crossed, as if she’d bodily block all exits until he finished.

He dropped out of high school and started haunting a dingy boxing gym downtown. The owner, a former lightweight champion, took one look at Jung-woo’s footwork and declared him “born to punch.”

The first time Eun-hye saw him spar, she forgot how lungs worked.

Sweat-slick and snarling, Jung-woo moved like a live wire. Every punch landed with a thwack that made her teeth vibrate. When his opponent staggered, Jung-woo pursued like a predator—until a wild hook nearly clipped his jaw.

“OPPA!”

Her shriek broke his focus. The counterpunch that followed cracked into his solar plexus.

“You bastard! Don’t touch my brother!”

She was on the ring apron before anyone could stop her. The gym erupted in laughter—”Look, it’s Jung-woo’s spitfire kid sister!”—as he hauled her out fireman-style, her fists still flailing.

The gym owner saw dollar signs. “With training, she could go pro,” he bragged, drilling Jung-woo harder than ever.

Eun-hye secretly googled boxing fatalities. The search results left her nauseous: fractured skulls, brain bleeds, a news clip of some poor bastard dying mid-match. That night, she prayed with her forehead pressed to the floorboards: Please make him stop.

Miraculously—or perhaps coincidentally—the gym owner’s star fighter vanished two weeks later, along with the loan money he’d cosigned. The gym folded under debt.

The gym—the owner’s last remaining possession—finally shut its doors. Jung-woo sat slumped in the corner beside the man, silently helping him pack up the last of the equipment as the owner drowned his sorrows in soju.

“Oppa, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I… prayed for you to quit boxing. That’s why the gym closed. My prayers… they’ve always been too strong.”

Jung-woo lifted a box of gloves, his voice flat.

“…Why’d you pray for that?”

“Because I hate seeing you get hurt. But I guess it backfired.”

He was twenty now, and she was sixteen. She was old enough to see through the lies he’d told her as a child—about ghosts, about bruises being nothing—but still too small to reach the man he had become. The gap between them wasn’t just age. It was the growing distance in their hearts, the fear that he was slipping into a world where she couldn’t follow.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again, so quiet it was almost lost.

Jung-woo set the box down under a tree. “Don’t worry about it. I never liked boxing anyway.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because I was suffocating.”

He pulled out a glove and tapped his chest once.

“It’s like… everything’s clogged up here. I just wanted to hit something.”

His voice was hollow, his eyes emptier than she’d ever seen them. The boy whose gaze used to shine like stars now looked like a sky after the stars had burned out.

“Because there’s nothing else I can do.”
The winter air bit at their skin as he tossed the glove back into the box, his breath curling white in the cold.

“I couldn’t change anything.”

That winter, she caught him smoking behind the dorm again.

“Does it help? More than boxing?”

He exhaled a plume that obscured his face. “Nothing helps.”

The raw honesty startled her. This was the boy who’d once lied about ghosts to spare her nightmares, who’d taken the blame when she’d gummed up her hair.

When he stubbed the cigarette out on his own wrist—ssss—Eun-hye grabbed his hand. The burn mark matched the ones on his knuckles.

“Then stop hurting yourself,” she whispered. “Hurting you hurts me.”

Jung-woo went very still. Then, for the first time in eight months, he pulled her into a hug so tight she felt his heartbeat through both their ribs.

It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a promise.

But it was a start.