Tsunami Advisory
Chapter 4
Ever since that day, a bizarre tension had begun encroaching on Danbi’s daily life. Hae-il summoned her at all hours under the pretext of the integration project. The short walk to his desk became a trek through a bed of thorns every single time, and whenever she felt his gaze piercing through the office partition, a chill ran down her spine.
Team Leader and team member. Bound within that clear hierarchy like a marionette on invisible strings, Danbi had no choice but to be dragged around at his beck and call.
Enduring the discomfort day after day, Friday at 4:00 PM finally arrived. Having clocked in at seven that morning specifically to avoid crossing paths with him, Danbi didn’t miss the moment he stepped away from his desk to swiftly pack her bag.
“I’ll be heading out for the day~”
“Yeah, take care~”
With the company’s flexible working hours, as long as one met deadlines and completed their assigned tasks, things were relatively free. That said, the boundary between work and life remained blurry—servers crashing after hours meant working from home, and late-night deployments were routine—but right now, what mattered most to Danbi was getting out of the same room as Hae-il.
She dashed out of the office at the speed of light. While waiting for the elevator, she pondered her dinner menu. Given the pace Hae-il drove projects forward, that hellish Project B would undoubtedly begin in earnest by next week at the latest. If she wanted to enjoy herself, she had to savor this window between tonight and the weekend to the fullest. Enjoy it while you can. In an unpredictable life where an issue could explode at any moment, her long-standing motto was to smile whenever the chance presented itself.
I’ll grab some fried chicken, crack open a beer, and binge my American show~
Humming softly to herself, just as she was about to relish the pure joy of leaving work on time—
“Danbi-ssi, are you heading out now?”
At the voice that suddenly chimed in, Danbi’s heart plummeted straight to the floor. Though she screamed bloody murder on the inside, she turned around looking as casual as humanly possible.
Hae-il was sauntering toward her. Unlike Danbi, who offered a stiff bow with an awkward smile, a languid, unreadable smirk played on his lips.
He treated her respectfully as a Team Leader, almost as if honoring her wishes, but she still wanted to avoid being trapped alone in the same space with him at all costs. A subtle awkwardness, or perhaps a suffocating tension. If she had to summarize all those emotions in a single word, it was excruciating discomfort.
“Do you have a second…”
He parted his lips as if he had business with her. No. My leaving on time. My weekend. Terrified that her perfectly laid post-work plans would be ruined, Danbi instinctively clutched her stomach and hunched over. Screwing her face into a tight grimace, she let out an agonizing groan.
“Huh? What’s wrong?”
“All of a sudden, my stomach… Ugh… Haa… I’m so sorry, Team Leader. It’s… really urgent…”
To shake him off, Danbi threw out her ultimate trump card: sudden stomach trouble. Her calculation was that no matter what work-related business he had, he wouldn’t be heartless enough to detain someone who looked ready to soil their pants on the spot. He seemed slightly flustered, but soon nodded. As if she had been waiting for that very moment, Danbi brushed past him and bolted for the restroom. The spine that had been bent like a cooked shrimp straightened up the second she stepped inside. Her deeply crumpled brow, however, showed no signs of smoothing out.
Daring to stop someone on their way out the door—talk about terrible manners.
Absolutely not. She had dragged herself out of bed at five-thirty and clocked in at seven sharp just to avoid him as much as possible. She couldn’t afford to get caught here.
Perching on the toilet lid, Danbi routinely opened a mobile game. Playing games in a bathroom stall felt a bit ridiculous, but she refused to let this precious off-the-clock time go to waste. After mindlessly clearing a few stages, twenty minutes had already flown by. Just to be safe, she held out for another ten to make it a solid thirty before finally washing her hands with a refreshed feeling and stepping out of the restroom.
Humming once again, just as she was about to savor the sweet freedom of going home, Hae-il leaning against the wall next to the elevator caught her eye.
Why is that guy still standing there? He waited for thirty minutes?!
Danbi tried to take a step back into the restroom, but he spotted her and pushed himself off the wall.
“Ah, did you take care of everything?”
“Ah… yes…”
He pushed up his sleeve slightly to check his watch. Just how many watches did he own? A completely different model from yesterday’s sparkled on his wrist. He seemed to treat the office like a fashion runway.
“Mmm… sitting on the toilet for too long isn’t good for you.”
With a remarkably serious, concerned expression, he fretted over her colorectal health. Swallowing the urge to retort that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t stopped her in the first place, she forced a smile.
“Haha… yeah, you’re right.”
Letting out an internal sigh, she faced him. Given that he clearly had business with her, simply walking past him wasn’t an option.
Go on, spit it out. What magnificent business made you wait for thirty minutes?
“I’m heading out too. Care to grab a cup of coffee?”
The unexpected invitation made Danbi’s heart drop with a thud.
“…Pardon?”
“Coffee… Ah, if the timing feels awkward, how about dinner?”
“…Excuse me?”
“Coffee, dinner, or drinks. Which one? You decide.”
She should have said she had plans, that she was busy, that something came up—yet in her utter fluster over his proposal, she ended up making a choice.
“Coffee, please…”
Naturally picking the one that seemed least burdensome.
✶ ✶ ✶
Before she knew it, she found herself sitting across from Hae-il at the most secluded window seat in the in-house café. Usually, it was a familiar space where she gathered with her teammates in small groups to sip coffee, chat, laugh, and occasionally lament the hardships of corporate life. Right now, however, it felt like an unfamiliar battlefield surrounded by enemies on all sides.
Even while he went to pick up the two Americanos, Danbi fidgeted restlessly, nervously tracking his every movement like a puppy watching its owner’s mood.
Before long, he returned holding a cup in each hand and let out a low chuckle at the sight of Danbi poised awkwardly between sitting and standing.
“I told you to make yourself comfortable.”
“Ah, but still…”
Was it right to sit idly while a superior carried over the coffee himself? Danbi hastily reached out to at least take her own cup, but he deliberately dodged her hand and set the coffee down in front of her. Her hands hovered aimlessly, trailing the movement of his hands and the cup in an awkward dance. It felt like regressing to her rookie days—moving around busily, yet being completely unhelpful.
“Drink up. I’m not sure how the coffee will taste, though. I’ve never tried the in-house café before.”
He had always insisted on drinking coffee from a specific high-end brand. Danbi, on the other hand, considered spending more than three thousand won on coffee a luxury; she bought cheap takeout coffee on her way to work and drank the budget-friendly in-house café coffee at lunch. Water steeped in burnt bean powder—how different could it really be?
“Ah, thank you for the coffee.”
She cupped the warm mug in her hands, yet her fingers remained ice-cold. Having stopped someone on their way home and sat her down, he said nothing. He merely propped his chin on his hand and stared intently at Danbi. She felt utterly at a loss in the face of his completely indecipherable intentions.
She nervously toyed with her cup, waiting for him to bring up whatever was on his mind. The faint murmurs of conversation and the soft background music in the café only made their silence stand out even more. Time crawled at an agonizing pace, every second feeling like torture.
After several minutes passed, unable to bear the suffocating silence any longer, Danbi finally spoke up cautiously.
“Um… Team Leader. Did you have something you wanted to discuss?”
Her small, polite voice broke the silence. Only then did a faint flicker of movement seem to brush across his eyes, his lips curving into a gentle arc.
“What about you, Danbi-ssi?”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t you have something you want to discuss with me?”
He countered with a question of his own. The unexpected response caused Danbi’s brain to short-circuit. What is this? What does he want? Did I mess something up? After reviewing tens of thousands of possibilities without finding an answer, Danbi ended up offering the most honest response she had.
“Uh… I don’t think I do.”
“I feel like you would.”
He crossed his arms with a subtle smirk. His posture invited her to go ahead and speak, but Danbi’s mind was a complete blank.
“…I really don’t.”
“Hmm…”
“If you don’t have anything either, Team Leader… maybe I should get going…”
Sitting face-to-face with one’s boss for five minutes on the way home was more than enough time—it was overflowing. In the meantime, Danbi gulped down the lukewarm coffee. Letting out a sharp breath as if downing a shot of soju, she emptied the cup and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, at which point his expression shifted and he finally spoke.
“That Project B.”
“Ah…”
So this was it. As expected of a workaholic, his business was indeed work.
“The codebase is a complete mess. It’s so low-grade, outdated, and bizarre that it makes you wonder if senior developers at a major corporation actually wrote it…”
That codebase undoubtedly contained a bit of the garbage code written by Danbi back when she was a rookie. Without realizing it, Danbi clasped her hands politely and bowed her head. In an instant, she had become the guilty party.
“I’m sorry…”
“No, well. What do you have to be sorry for, Danbi-ssi? The senior developers who handled the project back then are the problem. If they didn’t have the talent, they should’ve quit early or studied harder.”
“…I apologize.”
“Hey, why do you keep apologizing? I’m just venting here. Isn’t talking behind other people’s backs how folks usually get close?”
He asked with genuine curiosity. Having been surrounded by crowds of people since his school days simply by standing still, he probably had zero experience ever putting in effort to ‘get close’ to someone. So right now, he was setting the stage for Danbi to freely badmouth her clumsy self from three years ago, along with the seniors and colleagues she had struggled alongside. Leaving her feeling immensely uncomfortable.
At the same time, an inexplicable question surfaced. Why was he going to such lengths just to get close to her? To anyone watching, he summoned Danbi the most out of all the team members and attempted the most conversations with her. It felt like there was more to it than just Project B.
‘Really? Should we invite him then? Looked like he was lingering because he didn’t want to eat alone.’
A passing remark someone had once made popped into her head. Between the rumors of him being the CEO’s son and his prickly personality being put on full display, the team members had been overtly wary of him and keeping their distance. Regardless of how he lived back in the United States, naturally, any human being would feel lonely when ostracized within an organization. Especially when Development Team 1 had the unusually tight-knit atmosphere of a college club.
When her thoughts reached the realization that even a socially awkward person could feel isolated, she suddenly felt a pang of pity for him.
“Are you lonely, by any chance?”
At Danbi’s surprise question, his eyes wavered ever so faintly, uncharacteristic of him. He stared at her in silence for a moment, then covered his mouth with a lightly curled fist and asked back.
“Uh… well… Which kind of loneliness are we talking about?”
Question marks popped up in Danbi’s head once again. Were there different types of loneliness?
Before she could even begin to untangle such a philosophical question, a loud notification chimed as an urgent issue alert flashed on her phone screen. Danbi immediately pulled out her laptop to handle the crisis. Swept away by the sudden deluge of work, their conversation that day dissolved, left unfinished.
