The Cutting Edge

014

As if Hyejin wasn't already in a foul mood, Hannah's random interruption only made her even more gloomy. She stared at the sketches she had laid out on the table and sighed. It had already been close to five days and she had completed about ten sketches that were to her satisfaction. That was ten out of close to a hundred that she had drawn over the past few days. The wastepaper basket at one corner of the training room was overflowing with crumpled paper balls.

"Stupid Kang Hyunwon. Asshole. Jerk. Annoying prick," she muttered. She drew a caricature of him on a blank sheet of paper and surrounded the image with all the words that she could think of to describe him, each one more insulting than the one before.

All of a sudden, the paper was snatched away from her.

"Not bad, looks quite a lot like me," Hyunwon quipped, the left corner of his lips tugging upwards slightly. "If you finally decide to come to terms with reality, you could consider pursuing a career as a street artist. The fellow by the subway station who draws caricatures for people charges twenty thousand won a piece."

"Give it back!" Hyejin shrieked, appalled that the subject of her drawing and cursing had gotten his hands on it. She reached out to grab it but Hyunwon was one step faster. He quickly took a couple of steps back, almost causing her to fall flat on the floor.

"What's this? You dare to draw something like that and give me all these names but you don't have the guts to show it to me?" Hyunwon said with a laugh. "You know what, I think I'll keep this. As a souvenir. It's not every day your mentee draws such a lovely picture of yourself."

Hyejin was so embarrassed and outraged that her face was turning as red as a tomato. Hyunwon didn't seem the least bit angry with what she had done, in fact, he was standing there with the slightest hint of a smile on his face—Hyejin knew that that meant, it meant that he was secretly plotting new ways to torture her to death. He was the devil reincarnate.

"You know what, suit yourself," she said, throwing her hands up in the air. "If you like it so much, then keep it. I've got a lot of work to do, so if you don't mind, I won't be wasting your time any longer, sir."

Hyunwon was slightly crestfallen when he heard her say that. He had been expecting her to put up more of a struggle so that he could gloat about it and deal a couple more jabs to her pride, but here she was behaving like a wet blanket. He folded up the drawing and stuffed it into his pocket, walking over to the table and looking at the other pieces of paper lying around.

"How's the progress coming along?" he asked. "It's already been five days, don't you have anything to show me yet? If you work at this snail pace, three months will be up in the blink of an eye."

Yes, I realised that Mister Obvious. Hyejin rolled her eyes, not even caring that he had seen her do that. In her opinion, there was really no need to put on a show in front of this man. He hated her and she hated him—the feeling was mutual. Reaching into her plastic folio, she fished out the ten designs that she had done so far and handed them to him.

"I've only done ten for now. These are based on the Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter collections from two years back. I've only just started on last year's collections," she said.

Hyunwon casually flipped through the designs that she had passed to him, a look of slight surprise flashing across his eyes as he scanned them through.

"Right," he said flippantly. "Only ten? Looks like you're not that eager to make any progress after all. I'll take these for now. Give me the rest whenever you're ready, I think I might need some more scrap paper in my office." He turned and headed for the door. "Oh and Hyejin, if you ever want to throw in the towel, you know where to find me."