It was supposed to be a quiet morning.
The kind of morning where the coffee's lukewarm, the wi-fi is temperamental, and nobody talks to me—just the way I like it. I was holed up in a chipped vinyl booth at Dal.Kom Coffee, typing one-handed while chewing on the corner of a peanut butter sandwich like a rat under siege.
The script deadline loomed. Not mine, of course. Ghostwriters don't get names in the credits or final say. We get a flat fee and the satisfaction of watching actors butcher our words. I was halfway through writing a scene where the lead confessed his love via drone-delivered roses when my phone buzzed.
I ignored it.
It buzzed again, then a third time—three rapid taps, like a code. Only one person abuses punctuation like that.
I sighed and swiped to answer.
"Yoon Jae, where the hell are you?" Minji, my agent-slash-friend-slash-parasite, never greeted like a normal person. "You didn't read the email? You have a meeting. In Gangnam. Today. As in now."
"I'm busy." I balanced my sandwich on the rim of my coffee cup. "And I didn't agree to anything."
"You did last night. When you were drunk."
"…No, I—"
"I have the voice recording."
I closed my laptop with the kind of quiet despair only freelancers know. "Fine. Where?"
The office looked like someone tried to cosplay a spaceship using credit cards and insecurity. Polished black floors. White neon strips along the ceiling. Glass walls everywhere, because privacy is a myth in entertainment.
I waited in a soulless meeting room that smelled like citrus air freshener and desperation. A junior assistant came in, offered me cucumber water, and left without making eye contact. Five minutes passed. Then ten.
And then she walked in.
Kang Ji-eun. Stage name: JI.EUN. Leader of Velvet Rouge. Billboard sweetheart. Menace to sound engineers everywhere.
I recognized her instantly, though her face was smaller than on the posters, her eyeliner sharper, and her eyes—god, her eyes—looked like they'd seen the devil and out-negotiated him. She wore a huge hoodie, sunglasses, and spite.
She didn't look at me.
She walked to the head of the table, took off her sunglasses, and said, "You're late."
"You're thirty minutes late," I replied. "I'm just irrelevant."
She blinked, like processing the fact that I had lips and audacity.
"Minji said you're good," she said, sliding a thick script across the table. "Fix this."
I opened it. Page one: "Episode 1: Moonlight Kisses and Hot Noodles." I didn't get past line three before a vein in my forehead pulsed.
"This is—this is actually a war crime."
"I didn't write it."
"No, but you chose it."
She leaned back in the chair, her mouth twitching. "I didn't have a choice. They want me to do a romance drama for my image."
"Your image is allergic to sincerity."
"Exactly." She tilted her head, studying me like a cat might study a wounded mouse. "So write something fake enough that the audience buys it, but not so fake I throw myself out a window."
I opened my mouth to respond, but she cut me off.
"There's a clause in my contract," she said. "If I refuse this role, I pay a penalty."
"Why not just... act badly and get yourself fired?"
"Tempting. But I need the paycheck. Debt."
She said it without blinking, without shame. That surprised me more than anything.
"And this is where I come in?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Minji said you're cheap."
"I prefer the term underappreciated."
She snorted, which—objectively—shouldn't have been cute, but it was. Unfortunately.
Then she said, "Also, if you do a good job, I might fund your weird little indie script."
I froze. "What?"
She stretched her arms like this was all perfectly casual. "I read the first ten pages. It's messy. It's also real. I like real. So help me fake this drama, and I'll help you make something real."
My mouth was dry. My palms were sweaty. My life, which had been previously meandering in the world's slowest career spiral, suddenly dangled over a trapdoor labeled compromise.
"…Why me?"
Her eyes flicked up. "You're not dazzled by me."
"You're not that dazzling."
She smiled. "Exactly."
Then she stood. Meeting over.
I sat there for a long moment, the script in my lap, my brain buzzing like a dying vending machine.
What the hell just happened?
I stared at the door long after it hissed shut behind her, waiting to see if the building itself would laugh. Or collapse. Or maybe eject me through the glass panels like I didn't belong—which, to be fair, I didn't.
My hands were still resting on the script like it might self-destruct if I moved too fast. I flipped it open again. Page one, again.
"Her eyes glistened like midnight rain on cherry blossoms."
I closed it.
A bitter laugh escaped before I could stop it, scraping the back of my throat. There was a line somewhere between bad writing and criminal negligence, and this crossed it with a confetti cannon and backup dancers.
But what haunted me wasn't the prose. It was her.
Kang Ji-eun.
The way she walked in like she owned the oxygen in the room. The way she stared at me like I was a cockroach who'd somehow been given final script approval. The casual mention of debt. The casual offer to fund my script—as if she hadn't just propositioned a stranger with his own dreams.
And the part that really annoyed me?
She was right.
I wasn't dazzled by her. But I was intrigued.
God help me.
I stood, scooped up the script, and left the building like a man exiting a crime scene. The assistant at the front desk tried to offer me a branded keychain. I shook my head. I had enough regrets already.
By the time I got back to my apartment, the sun was low and blood-orange across the skyline. My place looked like every male freelancer's last stand—half-empty ramen cups, notebooks I never finished, an air conditioner that wheezed like it owed me money.
I dumped the script on my kitchen counter, dropped my bag, and peeled off my hoodie like it was soaked in questions I didn't want to answer.
The city buzzed below. Somewhere out there, Ji-eun was probably having her makeup retouched or being photographed in unnatural lighting while pretending to enjoy air.
I cracked open a beer and slumped into my desk chair, dragging the script toward me like it was a corpse I'd been assigned to autopsy.
I flipped to the character descriptions.
LEAD FEMALE:
Yoo Hana – twenty-five. Beautiful, innocent, warm-hearted. A baker who gives cookies to orphans. Smiles a lot. Possibly allergic to conflict.
"Jesus," I muttered.
I turned to the male lead.
LEAD MALE:
Cha Do-hyun – thirty. Cold, rich, emotionally constipated. Wears suits. Hates children and smiling. Probably a vampire, but we won't say it.
So this was the story. A rich CEO and a cookie fairy fall in love because... she trips in front of his car.
Twice.
But this wasn't just fiction. Ji-eun had to play this. She had to put on this skin and pretend to be soft and wholesome and simple. None of which she was. And I didn't even know her—but I knew that.
That bothered me.
It wasn't just the writing. It was the insult of it.
I closed the script again and leaned back, staring at the cracked ceiling like it owed me answers. And then I thought about what she'd said.
> "Write something fake enough that the audience buys it, but not so fake I throw myself out a window."
That wasn't the voice of someone who enjoyed pretending.
It was the voice of someone who'd been pretending too long.
I didn't realize I was reaching for a pen until it was in my hand. I grabbed a legal pad, the yellow kind, and scribbled one word across the top.
Rewrite.
Then I sat still for a long time.
I wasn't doing this for her. I wasn't doing it for the paycheck.
I was doing it because someone who looked like that, sounded like that, shouldn't have to be edited down to a one-dimensional mannequin just to move product.
If I was going to sell out, I might as well burn the building down while I did it.
At 2:14 a.m., my phone buzzed.
A text from an unknown number.
JI.EUN:
You still awake, script boy?
I stared at it for a full minute.
Then I typed:
ME:
Define "awake."
The typing bubbles appeared. Then disappeared. Then reappeared.
JI.EUN:
I hate the male lead's name. "Do-hyun." He sounds like a paper cut.
I grinned before I could stop myself.
ME:
Noted. You want something more… alpha?
JI.EUN:
No. I want something that doesn't make me want to eat drywall. Surprise me.
I didn't reply. I didn't need to. I was already flipping pages, already rewriting scenes in my head. Already wondering what the hell she was doing texting me at 2 a.m. when she probably had a 6 a.m. call time.
I was already in deeper than I wanted to be.
And I hadn't even started yet.
The next morning, I woke up with a pen cap in my mouth and ink on my jawline. It wasn't the first time. Probably not the last.
The script pages I'd rewritten were fanned out across my desk, weighed down by an empty ramen bowl and the crushed remains of sleep. I'd barely made it to page ten before something changed—not the plot, but the way I saw her in it.
She wasn't Yoo Hana anymore, the giggling cupcake of a female lead.
She was… something sharper. A woman with corners. A woman who smiled like she was negotiating a hostage exchange. A woman with secrets layered under studio lights.
She was Kang Ji-eun pretending to be someone else, and that was the story worth writing.
I arrived at the agency's back rehearsal room at noon, clutching my revised pages and a cup of vending machine coffee that tasted like warm regret. I wasn't even sure she'd show. She didn't strike me as the "meet-me-at-noon-sharp" type.
But she was there.
Seated on the floor, back against the mirrored wall, sunglasses on, legs crossed like a queen in exile. She was dressed down today—gray sweatpants, oversized black tee, and socks that said "NOPE" in red block letters.
She didn't look up as I entered. Just held out one hand, expectantly.
I dropped the pages into her palm. "Don't get them sticky."
"No promises," she muttered, pulling off her sunglasses and flipping to the first scene.
I watched her read. Not just her eyes, but the subtle flex in her fingers, the twitch in her jaw, the way her lips parted just slightly when she was about to laugh but didn't. She was silently mouthing some of the lines. I pretended not to notice.
Page one.
Page two.
Page three…
A long pause.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Dialogue."
"This isn't the same scene."
"No. I rewrote it."
She looked up sharply. "The male lead proposes to the girl in a hospital elevator."
"Now he doesn't."
"…Now he's breaking up with her."
"Mid-elevator ride, yeah."
She blinked.
"I wanted it to feel like two people trapped in a metal box with feelings they don't know how to carry. You know. Like real people."
A beat.
Then: "You're weird."
I took it as a compliment.
She didn't say anything else. Just kept reading. By page eight, her lips were moving. By page nine, she was mouthing both parts. Her voice barely above a whisper.
And then… something happened.
She got to the scene where the girl lashes out—not in a melodramatic "don't leave me" way, but quiet. Real. Devastating. A single line:
> "Do you love me, or do you just love the version of me you made up?"
Her breath hitched.
I saw it. She tried to mask it by turning the page too fast, but I caught the microexpression. The blink that took too long. The way she pressed her fingers to her lips like she could physically push something back in.
I didn't say anything.
But she knew I saw.
The script trembled in her hand just once, like paper catching wind, and then she slammed it down beside her and stood.
"Let's go."
I blinked. "Go?"
"You wrote it. You're reading with me."
"I'm—what?"
"You're playing the guy. Unless you want the assistant director to do it, and he sounds like he's allergic to vowels."
Before I could protest, she shoved the script into my chest and moved to the center of the room. Her expression was already shifting, assembling the idol mask like a magician palming a coin. Voice warm. Posture straight. Face unreadable.
And just like that, she was Yoo Hana again.
But now, I could see the cracks.
We read the scene once. It was awkward. My delivery was garbage and I knew it. I wasn't an actor. I didn't know how to "emote." But she didn't mock me for it.
We read it again.
And again.
And by the fourth time, she started changing.
Her voice cracked on line three.
Her hand trembled when she delivered the line about being "seen and not known."
Then she went quiet.
Not just acting-quiet.
Real quiet.
"Ji-eun?" I said, unsure.
She didn't move. Her eyes were glassy, fixed on a point somewhere past my shoulder. Her jaw was locked, her throat working like she was swallowing glass.
"…Are you okay?"
And then, just as I took a step toward her, she spun on her heel, walked to the corner of the room, and kicked the mirror.
Not hard enough to break it.
Hard enough to scare the shit out of me.
I froze.
She stood with her back to me, hands on the wall, head bowed.
Silence.
When she finally spoke, her voice was so low I almost didn't hear it.
"I can't do this."
I didn't know if she meant the scene. The drama. The job. Her life.
Maybe all of it.
"I'm not… I'm not her," she said, voice trembling now. "I can't be soft. Or grateful. Or whatever the hell this script wants me to be. I don't feel that shit."
"You don't have to," I said, gently.
"I do," she snapped, turning back toward me. "I do, because if I don't, they replace me. And I disappear. You think people love me? They love the version of me I invented. The one I can't even stand anymore."
I didn't know what to say.
So I didn't say anything.
I just stood there, script in hand, useless.
Then, she laughed—sharp, bitter, like a knife scraping ceramic.
"God," she said. "You probably think I'm crazy."
"No," I said. "I think you're cracking in all the right places."
She stared at me.
And for the first time, really looked.
Like she was trying to figure out what kind of man says shit like that and means it.
She took one slow step toward me.
Then another.
My heart was pounding.
And then she said, too casually:
"I need you to marry me."
The words crashed into the room like a goddamn meteor.
"…What?" I said, because that's all I could manage.
She didn't flinch.
"I said: marry me."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"Is this some kind of line read? Because if so, it's very off-script—"
"I'm serious."
"Okay. Pause. What the hell are you talking about?"
"I need a fake marriage," she said, pulling her hoodie back over her head. "Something quiet. Private. No press. Legal but buried."
"Why would you possibly—"
"Because someone's trying to leak a story. About me. About someone I was with before. And I can't survive another scandal right now. If I'm married, they can't spin it into a dating exposé."
I stared at her.
"This is a joke."
"Nope."
"You—you just met me."
"I know."
"And you want to marry me."
"I've done weirder things for less money."
My mouth opened. My heart thudded. My reality twisted on its axis.
She took another step closer.
"I'll fund your script," she said. "The one you shelved. I read it. It's good. I'll buy you six months of full-time writing. Hell, I'll even throw in a coffee machine."
My throat was dry.
"And what exactly would I be agreeing to?"
"No public appearances. No hand-holding. No kissing. No actual feelings, god forbid. Just a contract, notarized, filed. You play husband. I play untouchable. It ends when I say it does."
She held out her hand.
"Deal?"
I stared at her.
At her outstretched fingers. Her calm expression. Her utter, terrifying certainty.
And I realized: this was no performance.
This was survival.
And somehow, it had my name on it.