Immediately after that cracking slap, no one quite knew how to react. Silence filled the room, and a couple of jaws hung open in shock. Even Hyejin herself was slightly taken aback by what she had done, her hand still stinging slightly from the impact. Within seconds a huge, angry red patch had begun spreading across Hyunwon's cheek.
He opened his mouth to say something, but Hyejin beat him to it.
"We are human beings, not cockroaches that you can step all over! So what if you're the best stylist in the whole country? So what if all those celebrities are queuing round the block just to get an appointment with you? Does that give you a right to treat others as if they are the dirt beneath your shoe, calling us deadweights just because you don't like the looks of our faces? If you want to scold me for not knowing what a C-curl or a D-curl or a whatever-curl is then fine, but Yeseul did nothing wrong! Who wouldn't be intimidated by you when you're there shouting and giving death stares all the time? And for the record, I didn't ask to come to this goddamn salon, you assholes were the ones who tricked me into coming here, so if you've changed your mind then I'm happy to leave anytime but don't expect me to pay you a single cent for that slave contract."
With the sudden verbal diarrhoea, everyone who was stunned before was even more shell-shocked now. As if slapping Hyunwon weren't enough, she had just gone and added insult to the injury. The best part of the matter was, even Hyunwon himself didn't know how to react. He just stood there gaping in shock as she turned on her heels and dragged Yeseul out of the room.
"Hyejin, what are you doing? You need to go back in and apologise," Yeseul said, her face ashen with fear.
"Why should I apologise when he's the one in the wrong? He should be the one apologising," Hyejin insisted. Flopping down onto the sofa in the staff lounge, she could still feel the anger bubbling up inside her as she recalled Hyunwon's harsh words. "What does he take me for? A pushover?"
"He's the creative director of the salon! Even though my uncle owns this place, he still needs to give in to Hyunwon from time to time because without him, this place would never be what it is today."
"That still doesn't give him the right to behave the way he did." Hyejin folded her arms and pulled a face. Now she was feeling a tinge of regret for having slapped the fellow, but her pride wasn't about to let her admit she was in the wrong.
The door to the staff lounge swung open and Ryu walked in, letting out a deep sigh as he looked at the two girls.
"Well that was quite the display over in the training room," he said. "But I must say, that was the best thing anyone has ever done in this place. I can't tell you just how much I've wanted to do that myself." He gave Hyejin a wink that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand. "Even so, Hyunwon is still the creative director of this salon and he has the full control over how he trains the stylists over here. That is part of the reason why the quality of our services are top notch. Even if you may not agree with his ways, you still need to respect his position in this salon. I want you to apologise to Hyunwon for what you did over there, is that clear?"
"I'll only apologise to him if he apologises to me first," Hyejin said. "All those rude things that he said back there were uncalled for. If he doesn't say sorry for that then I'm not saying sorry for what I did either."
Ryu frowned, sitting down beside her (a little too close for her liking). Slinging one chubby arm across her shoulders, he said, "Don't be stubborn. We all know that I'm not going to fire you over a thing like this and your contract is still sitting safe in my drawer, so you're not going anywhere in the near future. Why make life so difficult for yourself?"
Hyejin shuffled her bum towards the left, shrugging Ryu's arm off her shoulders. He was far too close for comfort—she could smell the scent of Cuban cigars on his silk shirt and she didn't quite fancy seeing the few pathetic strands of hair peeking out from his beneath the collar.
"Uncle Ryu, can't you do something to help Hyejin?" Yeseul asked. "Hyunwon's not going to let her off so easily after what happened... Hyejin did it because of me, is there anything we could do?"
Standing up, Ryu stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. "Apologise to the man and pray that he doesn't bear a grudge," he said. "And don't create any more trouble here, understood? I'm trying to run a business, not a nursery."
Hyejin sank back into the seat and scowled. This entire place was a joke. They were the ones who played dirty and forced her to come here to work, yet their creative director obviously didn't want her on his turf whatsoever. Why couldn't these people just play their silly little games on their own and leave her out of it?
Right now, she just really wanted to go home.
#
Hyunwon was fuming.
He stormed back to his office and slammed the door, forgetting that Remington was following behind him. The latter jumped when the door slammed in his face, sighing as he opened it again and walked into the room.
"Are you alright?" he asked, even though he knew the answer. He, too, was still in shock after what had taken place over in the training room. Never before had anyone treated Hyunwon the way that Hyejin had just done. Hyunwon looked as if someone had just emptied cow dung over his head.
"Did that just happen?" Hyunwon looked up and asked incredulously. He still hadn't come to terms with what he had just gone through, even though the sting on his left cheek told him that everything had been real. This wasn't just a hallucination that he was having because he had drunk one too many cans of beer.
Remington nodded his head slowly.
Hyunwon didn't even know what else to say. He had just been slapped in the face and told off by some young punk who had only just stepped foot into this place, and he couldn't even come up with something to say in retaliation because everything she had said was absolutely spot on.
Unlike the others, Song Hyejin wasn't here because she wanted to be here. He had already heard that story from Remy. Ryu and Gina had basically blackmailed her into coming so that they could avoid a PR nightmare, which meant that unlike all the other staff that worked under this roof, she was the only one that he couldn't shout "You're fired!" at without needing to deal with all the troublesome repercussions.
He couldn't fire her even though she had slapped him in the face.
The thought of that made his blood boil even more, his face turning redder and redder with every passing second, like a volcano that was about to explode.
Remington quickly poured him a glass of water and placed it on the table in front of him. "Have some water and calm down," he said. "If you keep going on like this you're going to burst a blood vessel and get a stroke. I need a creative director who's not lying in hospital."
"Tell me Remy," Hyunwon said, gulping down a huge mouthful of water, "was it really my fault? Was I wrong to have expected her to know what a C-curl was? It's one of the most basic techniques in hair styling for goodness sakes! How can someone like that work here when she doesn't even know all these basics? Is Ryu trying to give me a heart attack so that he can be rid of me? That's it, isn't it? He's trying to do me in."
"No... You're right, it is one of the basic techniques—"
"Of course I'm right! When am I ever wrong?" Hyunwon exclaimed. "If she doesn't even have the basics, then she doesn't have any right to be working here. I'm going to tell Ryu that the girl needs to go right this instant. And the magazines even dared say that she'll take over my mantle? Who are they trying to kid?"
"—but you were a little harsh back there," Remy finished his sentence. "Both of them are new to the salon. Even if they made mistakes, you could have been a teensy bit nicer about it?"
Hyunwon rolled his eyes. "Oh right, so I was a little mean. Is that it?" He pointed at his left cheek. "You see this right here? The bitch slapped me!" This was the first time in his life he had ever been slapped in the face by a woman and he was certain that he would never forget that moment for as long as he lived. Gritting his teeth, he recalled Hyejin's expression of disgust when she delivered her rousing speech and it made him even more mad. What right did she have to be disgustedwith him? He was the one who should be disgusted with her lack of everything.
Remy sighed and said, "Ryu's never going to agree to let you fire the girl, especially not after all the pains he went through to settle the Ares issue. She's already done a number of interviews with the press and half the world knows that she's a stylist at the Cutting Edge now. If we suddenly fire her and the media get wind of it, then there'll be another problem in our hands. Just suck it up for now and tolerate it for a while, alright? If you think she isn't up to expectations then you can just assign her some menial tasks like sweeping the floor or shampooing. Before you know it, her contract will be up and she'll be gone."
"Do I really have to?"
The look on Remy's face told him the answer he wished he didn't need to know. Throwing his hands in the air in exasperation, he downed the remainder of the glass of water and poured himself another glass. Even if he ate an entire bucket of ice right now, it would likely do nothing to lower his temperature.
#
No one else in the salon ever got to know of what transpired in the training room that day, but the tension in the salon was palpable for the next couple of days. It was as though a dark cloud was looming overhead, threatening to drench everyone in a torrential downpour at any second. Whenever anyone went about their work, they would keep a watchful eye out for their creative director who was storming around like a ticking time bomb.
As for Hyejin, she was assigned to washing towels and pouring tea for customers.
It was obvious to her who was responsible for her current plight, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Although people didn't know what she had done to anger Hyunwon, everyone knew that she had stepped on his toes somehow and no one wanted to have any association with her because of that. With the exception of Yeseul, everyone else basically gave her the cold shoulder. Nothing good ever came out of being on Kang Hyunwon's blacklist.
"What are you looking at?" Yeseul's voice suddenly popped up from behind her.
After having delivered her umpteenth cup of tea, Hyejin was hiding behind one of the mirrors peering curiously at what one of the senior stylists, Minah, was doing to the hair belonging to variety show host Yoo Na. By now she had already seen so many celebrities and TV personalities waltz in and out of the salon that it was no longer something worth getting excited over; what excited her were the strange and wonderful things that the stylists seemed to be able to do with people's hair, things that she had only been able to imagine.
"What's she doing?" she asked curiously. Minah had just finished applying some sort of cream on Yoo Na's head and was now busy adjusting the settings on one of those electronic contraptions, after having enveloped her customer's hair in what looked like an astronaut's helmet.
"That's a digital rebond," Yeseul replied. "Yoo Na has naturally curly hair, so she comes to get her hair rebonded and straightened on a regular basis."
"Are you serious?" Hyejin exclaimed. "I always thought her hair was naturally straight."
Yeseul shook her head. "She's actually got frizzy hair, except not many people know about it. You'd be surprised at what all these celebrities look like in their natural state."
"How do you do a digital rebond?"
"Are you interested to learn how to do that?"
Hyejin immediately nodded her head. Seconds later, she realised that something was off. The voice that had spoken to her didn't quite sound like Yeseul. She immediately turned around and found herself looking straight into the eyes of the devil himself, staring back at her with his cold, impassive expression.
"I think we pay you to do the job that you're assigned," he said, tossing a couple of towels into her hands, "and that job isn't to stand around and watch while the other stylists do their work."
Hyejin scowled, cursing herself for her own bad luck. She had managed to successfully stay out of Hyunwon's way for the past few days, but it seemed like her good luck had come to an end. She clutched the towels and bobbed her head in acknowledgement, before turning to head for the laundry room.
Before she could escape, Hyunwon called out to her again. "When you're done dumping those towels into the washing machine, bring a cup of tea into the VIP room and make sure it's not too hot nor too cold. There's a client in there who's waiting for it."
"Wash the towels, make the tea... What does he think I am? A slave? Make sure it's not too hot nor too cold," Hyejin muttered to herself as she threw the towels into the machine and hit the start button. The washing machine rumbled to life, churning as it dispensed soap suds to cleanse the towels that were being spun about within. Hyejin stood there staring at the spinning washing machine for a good ten minutes or so, reluctant to proceed with her next chore.
Finally, she dragged her feet away from the laundry room and went to make the tea that she had been told to. The VIP room of the salon was an exclusive little space that was only accessible to customers of a certain elevated status. The average celebrity wouldn't even get to step into the room, unless you were an A-lister the likes of BoA or Jun Ji-hyun. Hyejin herself had only been into the room once and that was when Remington brought her on the tour of the salon on her first day of work.
Carrying a cup of tea on a small wooden tray, she knocked gingerly on the door and stepped in.
As she approached the black leather chair that the customer was sitting in, she caught a glimpse of the lady's reflection in the mirror and almost dropped her tray in alarm. "Y-y-yoon—" she stammered, a little starstruck by who she was looking at.
"What are you waiting for? Put the tea down," the lady glanced at her through the mirror's reflection and said. "Took you long enough."
Hyejin quickly did as she was told, although she didn't leave immediately as she should have. Yoon Ji-eun was one of her all-time favourite actresses ever since her high school days—she could almost recite almost all the lines that Ji-eun uttered in "Palace Days", the drama that had propelled the actress to stardom. Seeing the actress in the flesh made her weak in the knees, and she concluded that Ji-eun was much prettier in real life than she was on the TV screen. If that was even possible.
Yoon Ji-eun picked up the teacup and brought it elegantly to her lips, taking a sip of her tea. A frown immediately appeared across her porcelain forehead, and she set the cup back down on its saucer with a loud clang.
"Go and make me a new cup of tea, it's way too cold," she said snootily. "It should be exactly seventy degrees, no more no less. How many times do I need to tell you people?"
Startled by her sudden outburst, Hyejin picked up the tray and quickly hurried out of the room, running back to the pantry to prepare a new cup of tea. As she let the hot water steep in the cup, she wondered how on earth she was expected to make a cup of tea that was exactly seventy degrees. "How does she even know whether or not her tea is seventy degrees in temperature?" she wondered out loud. "Does she have a thermometer for a tongue?"
Nevertheless, when she felt that the tea had cooled down the approximately the right temperature, she placed it back on the tray and headed back to the VIP room. Ji-eun was casually flipping through some of the magazines that she had been given, waiting for Hyunwon to return to begin with her haircut. When she saw that Hyejin, she rolled her eyes and reached for the new cup of tea.
Raising it to her lips, she took another sip. Then, she spat everything out—all over Hyejin's blouse.
"Are you trying to murder me? Why's the tea so hot! I already told you what temperature it should be, didn't I? Can't you even make a proper cup of tea?" she shrieked. She quickly reached for a tissue and dabbed the corners of her lips, glaring at Hyejin as though she had just committed an unforgiveable crime.
"I'm so sorry," Hyejin apologised, bowing over and over again. "I'll make you a new cup. I am so, so sorry."
She didn't know what else she could do except apologise. Dashing out of the room once more, she hurriedly made yet another cup of tea, this time tasting it herself with a teaspoon to make sure that the temperature wasn't too hot nor too cold. Taking a deep breath, she returned to the VIP room once more, this time a little fearful of what to expect.
"Here's your tea," she said quietly, setting the cup down in front of Ji-eun.
The actress didn't even bother glancing her way. Picking up the cup somewhat irately, she took her third sip. This time, she didn't even bother saying anything. She simply dropped the porcelain cup onto the floor, watching it shatter into tiny shards as it came into contact with the marble flooring.
"This is ridiculous. Don't you know that I never take sugar with my tea? If you can't even do a simple thing like this properly, then maybe you should just go work at Macdonalds instead why don't you?"
Hyejin felt the tears brimming up in her eyes as she bent down to pick up the broken pieces of porcelain from the floor. She had been so excited to have seen her favourite actress here in the salon, but everything seemed to have spiralled downhill from there. She knew that Hyunwon must have been trying to make life difficult for her by sending her here, knowing that Yoon Ji-eun was extremely finnicky with the way she had her tea, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
She was disappointed at how Ji-eun had turned out to be, and she was disappointed with herself for not being able to do anything right.
"Tell Hyunwon that I'm going to the washroom. I'll be right back," Ji-eun said, standing up from her seat. As she walked away, her heels accidentally stepped on Hyejin's left hand, pressing it down against the floor. "Oh I'm so sorry, don't mind me." Without a single shred of remorse, she left the room and headed for the washroom.
When Hyejin lifted her hand and flipped it over, she winced when she saw that a tiny shard of porcelain had sliced through her skin, embedding itself right beneath her thumb. Blood was slowly beginning to ooze out from her hand and the sting made the tears begin to trickle down her cheeks.
"What happened?" Someone reached out to grab hold of her wrist. "You're bleeding! Leave that alone, we'll get someone else to clean it up."
Swallowing back her tears, Hyejin found herself looking up into the eyes of someone she hadn't been expecting to see.
Ares.
#