The fact that a voice that sounded like it had been simmered until soft in a fondue pot could still sound threatening was really…… impressive.

Even a light touch made his face ache and his head ring. In the middle of that, seeing this face suddenly so close again left nothing in his head except how fiercely handsome he was.

He didn’t look that old, but he had the face of a completely grown man. If you’re going to use the word _male_ for a person, this is the level you need.

Ruined by the super-powered face assault shoved right into his face while he was still defenseless, Taeeun, completely dazed and unable to help himself, answered without thinking.

“Nothing, I just…… thought you were way too handsome…….”

“……?”

At those words, the man’s face was momentarily tinged with surprise.

As if trying to figure it out, he looked over Jo Taeeun kneeling in front of him, and muttered, “What the hell, are you a girl?” It seemed Taeeun’s words had caused a misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, Baek Beomgu, whose mental state was cracking in real time, wondered if he had maybe beaten up a girl who just happened to be tall.

He wasn’t even sure whether he had beaten up a girl, and whether that girl had only been tall.

He examined Jo Taeeun thoroughly, almost licking over him with his eyes.

His face was a little pretty, sure, but not to the point it looked like a woman’s. His voice was low and husky. It was hard to see properly because of the winter coat, but didn’t he have an Adam’s apple too? He was also fucking tall and had broad shoulders, right?

But the unbiased Baek Beomgu started to feel a little afraid.

It wasn’t impossible for there to be a girl in the world who was over 180 centimeters, had a husky voice, and had a face that looked more like a handsome guy than a pretty girl.

Taeeun, not even realizing he was awkwardly scratching his chin, had just barely gathered his shattered mentality when he opened his mouth.

“Hey, um…….”

His tone had even softened.

“If you keep looking at me like that and making my head spin, I’ll end up punching you.” That was the kind of line he wanted to say, but if he did, this was clearly the point where he’d get laid out again. Since he’d believed that anyone who looked at him with dreamy eyes and said _you’re handsome_ must be a girl no matter whether they were over 180 centimeters tall or looked and sounded like a man, he was almost thinking he might as well just say so.

But if he got caught lying, he felt like he’d just be even more fucked, so Taeeun chose to answer honestly.

With his cheek still stinging and his pronunciation a little slurred, making him sound slightly stupid.

“Nope, I’m a guy.”

That day’s memory ended there. Like déjà vu, with one more bang- echoing once again.

⌗ • ⌗ • ⌗

In the end, he’d beaten the kid until he passed out, but he hadn’t wanted a tragic ending that would make the neighborhood noisy, with the badly behaved petty criminal freezing to death after collapsing in the winter alley.

So Baek Beomgu dragged the guy over to one of the nearby shops.

He threw him down near the back door, close to a pile of random stuff, and said, “If he doesn’t wake up before closing, wake him and throw him out.”

There were lots of similar shops around, but he picked the one he was most familiar with and visited most often. It had been a thoughtless action, but that was Baek Beomgu’s mistake. After that, Jo Taeeun came looking for that bar every other day.

Even beasts don’t step back into the same territory after getting beaten down hard by someone once. But Jo Taeeun went and did it.

He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just a one-night visual shock; one man’s face kept lingering in front of his eyes and even appeared in his dreams.

He wondered if maybe it had just been an illusion because his head rang from getting hit that day, but the man he met again while hovering around cautiously near the area…… looked even more devastatingly handsome than before.

Seeing him under bright lighting, even his smooth bronze skin was outrageously perfect. It was a color that, even if you carefully mixed the paint and applied it with a fine brush and dried it properly under sunlight, would still be hard to reproduce.

……I want to lick him so badly…….

Taeeun’s head was full of thoughts that a hot-blooded twenty-year-old facing his first-ever object of desire would naturally have. So…… the fear of getting hit again wasn’t enough to stop Jo Taeeun’s feet.

In the middle of that, Jo Taeeun found out who the man was.

Baek Beomgu. A name he had heard before.

The woman his father and Taeeun were currently living off of was someone who went to a beauty salon that was very familiar with neighborhood gossip once a month and the bathhouse even more often. She used to bring back all kinds of rumors from there and tell them to Taeeun’s father while they ate dinner at home.

Because of that, Taeeun, who was eating with them, also ended up knowing everything about what was going on in the neighborhood by association. Gossip about affairs and inheritance, someone’s pregnancy and family estrangement, and so on.

Of course, he only listened with one ear and let it out the other, but a few things had stuck in his memory.

For example, that a famous gangster who had settled early in the city and expanded his territory was finally trying to raise his son properly.

But that father had nothing, so he had started with his fists. He was also quite smart and ambitious, and was trying to expand his business into insurance and finance, but that son showed absolutely no interest in any of it.

So he apparently used to lament that the boy should have been born in the rough old days, when the age of dumb brawling decided victory and defeat, and had decided to raise him by giving him the bar alley instead of the office he had originally planned to hand over. That kind of miscellaneous rumor.

The rumor itself wasn’t what left an impression. What remained was that the son, who had a bigger build than his father and was more straightforwardly rough, was named Baek Beomgu.

It was the kind of name that sounded exactly like a gangster’s son, and at the same time like a name with a truckload of possible nicknames. Taeeun remembered muttering that impression to himself pretty clearly.

Anyway, once he learned who he was, Taeeun could also figure out why he suddenly had to be beaten by him. Jo Taeeun’s side hustle of loitering around this area was truly, absolutely “business obstruction.”

And not just for one shop, but for the entire wide bar alley that Baek Beomgu was managing in order to prove his abilities to his father.

Since this was the most diverse area in terms of age groups drinking and talking, local companies held their company dinners at the bars under Baek Beomgu’s care.

The whole course of coming for first round, drinking noisily, splitting up for second round, and going on to a third round while completely drunk was all under his jurisdiction. On top of that, they were also the people who spent the most money there. And the ones Taeeun targeted most often were those suit-wearing office workers.

Even when they were in a group, they somehow looked a little easy and weak, and because they had business cards, it was easy to identify them later if things went wrong. More often than not, the ones most affected when Taeeun pulled out the _‘I’m still a high school student, you know?’_ line were ordinary office workers.

Mm. It made sense that Baek Beomgu would be pissed.

Instead of resenting the beating, Taeeun honestly admitted it. And because of that, he was happy to learn that the man he had met, his ideal type, was the one managing this entire alley, and started dutifully punching his attendance card at the back alley every single day.

It wasn’t exactly something someone with much conscience would do—coming every day to a place where he had no idea when he’d run into the people he had picked fights with first and extorted compensation from, and hanging around while looking for Baek Beomgu.

But Taeeun pulled it off. He just thought that way.

The man who fit words like king of males, the kind of word that would be too embarrassing to attach to most men, had no dramatic reversal at all, and Taeeun liked that he was also a thug whose fists were faster than his words and thoughts.

No wonder in movies where an elite prosecutor fights a total gangster, the gangster character was always so good. It was all because his tastes were this badly wired.

But Baek Beomgu, who had suddenly delivered a fatal blow to someone else’s “bad taste,” wasn’t actually a man who spent all day at the shops. He only managed a great many bars.

The bars his father had put him in charge of with the instruction, _“You’re too stupid to be given the office right away, so go do the money calculations too, learn some things, and use that dumb little brain of yours to soften up a bit,”_ were actually already running way too well on their own.

Baek Beomgu mostly just had to check whether business was good, flip through the ledgers a bit, get greeted by the guys in charge of the shops, and go into places like the bigger night bars where the owner had an office attached, meet people, and do some work.

So there wasn’t any need for him to stay at the bars all the time, which meant that no matter how much Jo Taeeun hung around this area, he wouldn’t have been easy to run into…….

Jo Taeeun. A twenty-year-old with a face that gave off a strange impression, somewhere between angular and round, just like the character in his name.

His chin was quite solid and manly, and his facial lines were pretty and neat for a boy, but for some reason he also looked a little blank…… stupid, even, like one screw had come loose, so his impression was impossible to pin down. At least it was certain he couldn’t fight.

No matter how much of a pathetic high school loser he was, he was still quite a person of concern around here.