Strategic Mating Partner Chapter 33

Taehyun casually said goodbye.

“I’ve seen you handle things well on your own, so I’ll be going now. See you tomorrow.”

He didn’t particularly expect Sejin to look forward to seeing him again, but at least Sejin would understand that Taehyun wasn’t going to give him unsolicited advice or interfere with his training. He had shown that he was just a strange observer, not someone who would actively intervene, so he considered today’s objective achieved.

As Taehyun left so readily, Sejin continued to frown, staring at the door Taehyun had walked through. Strange person. Strange and annoying person. That was the extent of his impression.

And the next day, Taehyun appeared without fail. This time, he deliberately timed his arrival with lunchtime and brought takeout from the same restaurant, ordering different dishes. Thinking that an occasional special meal wouldn’t be bad, he had ordered enough for himself as well, resulting in a substantial amount of food. Taehyun entered Sejin’s training room, firmly holding the rather heavy containers.

Strictly speaking, eating was prohibited in the shared training facilities. However, that was only if someone reported it to the management office. If no one reported it, it wasn’t a problem. This was Taehyun’s philosophy, a philosophy so flexible that he sometimes got scolded for taking rules too lightly.

“Ta-da! I heard the other dishes at the place I bought your food from last time are good, so I stopped by and got some.”

As before, Taehyun sat with his back to the door to prevent Sejin from storming out and calmly spread out the newspaper he had brought along. The audacity of spreading newspaper on the mat to eat was baffling, but even more absurd was Taehyun’s hand, offering disposable spoons and forks as if it were a given that Sejin would eat with him.

“…….”

Sejin didn’t take the offered utensils and stared intently at Taehyun’s face. He couldn’t understand what Taehyun was thinking. This strange man, who had been following him for days, was drastically different from anyone Sejin had met since arriving in Korea. It wasn’t just a figure of speech; he was uniquely strange.

When Sejin first arrived in Korea, he was greeted by a young female manager. Although Sejin was participating in the Olympics, not the youth division, he was among the youngest, so they seemed to have assigned him a female manager instead of an older male manager. However, Sejin found this consideration uncomfortable. He disliked her constant prying and meddling, as if she were his older sister.

On top of that, there was the hazing from the existing national team members. When the meaningless punishments and dog-like training disguised as senior advice continued, Sejin couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t understand why these idiots, just because they were seniors, could pat his head, shove his chest, and do whatever they pleased, while he wasn’t allowed to retaliate.

“Get down and give me push-ups, huh? You understand Korean perfectly, don’t you? Why the hell are you acting like a foreigner? Do you think a senior’s words are a joke?”

Finally, when they gathered athletes around Sejin’s age for so-called group training and forced him to do this ridiculous bullshit, Sejin decided to stop playing along with this idiotic game. From the beginning, this whole charade was designed to break Sejin, who had no intention of getting along with them or impressing these so-called seniors. This kind of bullying, which everyone turned a blind eye to for the sake of keeping the peace, was something Sejin, who had always trained alone, was experiencing for the first time.

‘…….’

When Sejin, with his lips tightly pressed together, glared as if challenging them to say more, one of the athletes leading this ridiculous charade flicked Sejin’s cheek with the back of his hand.

‘What are you looking at? You speak Korean, right? Why do you pretend to be a foreigner only at times like this? You’re on the national team too.’

At that moment, Sejin remembered what his former agent, who had helped him compete under the Korean flag, had said before he came to Korea.

‘Sejin, many things in Korea might be different from what you’re used to. I don’t know much, but a friend of mine who was an athlete in Korea told me that hierarchy based on age and seniority is still very strong there. You’re an outsider who has just disrupted their established dynamic, and they have their own existing teammates. They might resent you for taking that spot.’

Then, as if offering crucial advice, he whispered to Sejin.

‘But you don’t have to worry too much about it. Once you step onto the piste, all that matters is your ranking and skill. No one will be able to look down on you.’

Remembering those words, Sejin put his thoughts into action. Why can he do it, but not me? The moment he swatted away the hand touching his face, the guy grabbed him by the collar. Then his body spun. Their entangled bodies crashed against the wall, and suddenly, his mouth was filled with the taste of blood.

When the startled staff rushed over and separated Sejin and the other guy, Sejin was both the victim and the perpetrator. The other guy received a two-month suspension from training. Sejin received a one-month suspension. Since the Olympics were just around the corner, they didn’t impose a harsher penalty. For the first time, Sejin thought that fencing was an annoying sport with a needlessly large team.

Korea had successfully secured spots in the team events for épée, sabre, and foil at the Istanbul Olympics. That meant there were eight national team members for each discipline, including both men and women. Among them, he only needed to focus on three, who were both teammates and rivals in the individual event, but the idiot who led the harassment wasn’t even an épée fencer, the same weapon Sejin used. Sejin couldn’t understand the point of this meaningless brawl.

The coach, intervening belatedly in an attempt to appease Sejin, explained that the athlete who particularly disliked Sejin was close friends with the athlete who had been bumped from the reserve list because of Sejin’s arrival. He said that the athlete was probably resentful of Sejin, only eighteen years old and with experience primarily overseas, suddenly joining the team.

However, Sejin became even more disillusioned with the whole situation. For such a petty reason, they were humiliating not only him but also younger athletes by lining them up like this? And they even packaged it under the guise of camaraderie? If that was camaraderie, Sejin wanted nothing to do with these lunatics.

He was annoyed by all of this. He had accepted the sponsorship terms because all he cared about was continuing to fence, but he hadn’t anticipated that it would come with such irritating restrictions when he boarded the plane to Korea. Are all Korean athletes like these idiots? Despite being Korean himself, he couldn’t control the rising disgust he felt towards Koreans.

And amidst all this, the intentions of this new idiot who had suddenly appeared were equally incomprehensible.

“Wow, this is really delicious.”

When Sejin continued to refuse the offered utensils, Taehyun placed them in front of him and proceeded to open the containers. He neatly arranged the bread for dipping in the thick sauce and wiped his hands with the antiseptic wipes he had brought. He then took out a small plastic bag and placed it between himself and Sejin.

“You can throw your trash in here.”

Then he began to eat as if it were the most natural thing in the world, his demeanor so brazen. Sejin had never seen or heard of anyone like this in his entire life. Taehyun ate heartily as if no one was watching. Seeing Taehyun chewing with a blissful expression every time he took a bite, Sejin recalled what his sponsor, who had supported him for so long, used to say – the Korean expression for eating with gusto.

It was an elderly Korean man living next door who had provided the financial support for young Sejin to continue fencing. The man had made a fortune through real estate investments in his younger days. Unfortunately, he had lost his children and wife in an accident and, left alone, he had settled in France, the country his wife had loved so much.

He supported Sejin on the condition that if Sejin ever competed in the Olympics, he would represent Korea. He would occasionally invite Sejin over for meals, and every time, he would try to feed Sejin various things, saying he needed to know how to eat ‘with gusto.’

What does eating with gusto even mean? Does it just mean eating a lot? Sejin, naturally a light eater, hadn’t understood. But watching Taehyun eat now, Sejin immediately understood. This was the ‘gusto’ the old man had always sought.