adora • lookism

18. Crystal Choi

"Dad said to just keep a watch on him and make sure he doesn't get bought by anyone," said Crystal, striding briskly to the stage. She ignored the gazes rushing towards her face and body with well-acquainted indifference. "We'll leave right after this."

"Sure," Gun said impassively. He trailed after her with one hand in his pocket, both sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

If Crystal were to be honest, she was not in the best of moods right now. You could, perhaps, go so far as to call her grumpy. She had been up till late attending her father's meetings with him, and now she had to be awake at a time that was very firmly within her current body's sleeping hours in order to observe a boy who seemed — she glared at the stage — perfectly ordinary in every possible aspect. He had a good-looking face, she supposed, but that only made him even more annoying in her eyes. Guys like him were all more or less the same, anyway.

What made the situation even worse was that Gun, her mandatory chaperone, did not seem to be in the most social of moods either. While he could never be called her preferred company, he was usually not too bad. You wouldn't expect it looking at him, but Gun was actually fairly conversational.

Not today though.

It was usually pretty apparent whenever Gun didn't want to be wherever they were, but today it seemed particularly obvious.

Of course, Crystal didn't want to be here either.

That was probably why neither of them traded a single word as they waited for the auction to start in earnest. It was to the point that Crystal could feel the silence starting to press physically on her shoulders, adding to the exhaustion that she was already fending off with great sullenness.

There was the slightest shift of movement next to her. Crystal glanced at Gun to see that he was now surveying the crowd, doing his customary scan of the area to make sure there were no obvious threats to her well-being.

For the last couple of weeks, Gun-oppa had been... something.

It was hard to describe. It was even harder to put a name on. He hadn't been different in any appreciable way, and he hadn't done or said a single thing that was particularly out of the norm. But there was just a sense of something that Crystal, who had to spend a fair bit of time with him, couldn't help noticing.

The first thing had to do with his phone. Gun was professional in his own way, but that didn't mean he didn't look at his phone while on the clock. When he got bored waiting for her, he would often bring it out of his pocket to do whatever a guy like him did to kill time on his phone — she had never bothered to ask, because it was her strict policy to never ask anything regarding either Gun or Goo's personal lives.

Well, she knew what he was doing these days, and she didn't have to ask a thing.

He was texting someone.

Someone who wasn't Goo-oppa or any of his many underlings.

It wasn't that Gun checked his phone more often than before — it was just that once in a while, very rarely, he would smile very faintly when he looked at his screen. Not the usual vague expression of deadpan amusement or 'look at this idiot' smirk, but a relaxed quirk of his lips, one corner kicked up higher than the other.

While a very normal expression on anyone else, seeing it on Gun for the first time had given Crystal a bad case of goosebumps. She was aware that both Gun and Goo-oppa sometimes met up with girls, maybe even dated, but she didn't want to see proof of it. Ugh.

At least she didn't have to see Goo like this. She couldn't possibly imagine which poor girl had such bad taste.

The other thing she had had no choice but to notice: recently, Gun had bought a couple of stress balls. And they were... odd. Not only because they remained totally fine no matter how much he squeezed them, but also because of their completely uncharacteristic shape: gelatinous and chubby, with a collection of short and pitiful legs attached along their flat bottoms.