I Spent a Night with a Top Star Actress Chapter 1 - An accident.

Ever since I was a kid, people told me I had sharp edges.

I denied it at first, but the older I got, the more I quietly admitted it.

My personality. I’ve got a bit of a temper.

Because of that, my words came out blunt sometimes, even when I didn’t mean them to.

I knew that curves, not straight lines, are what keep a relationship between two people going. Knowing it and doing it were different things.

‘It’s just my nature. That’s all.’

But it turns out there’s nothing in this world that can’t be changed.

My blunt personality got corrected after I enlisted, so fast it felt like a lie.

‘When the seniors tell you to eat dirt, what are you going to do?’

So I finished being socialized, got discharged, and started thinking.

‘What am I going to do for a living?’

I was bad at school, so no college.

And it’s not like I had any decent certifications either.

Looking back, I spent my teens and my early twenties just letting life carry me along.

And now the bill for that had come due.

“This is bad.”

I’m not exaggerating.

It was really bad.

I’d drifted along, and my life had started going off the rails.

That was when I got a call from a neighborhood hyung I’d known since high school.

[“They’re looking for a road manager. Give it a shot, Chan.”]

Ma Seok-du, a team leader at “Baekhak,” one of the biggest entertainment companies in the country.

The most successful person I know.

And that Seok-du hyung was asking if I wanted to try being a road manager.

A celebrity manager, in other words.

[“The job itself isn’t hard. Drive a lot, humor the celebrity you’re assigned to, and protect their private life. That’s it.”]

There was no reason to turn it down.

A life that had gone past drifting and started going off the rails.

Seok-du hyung offering to get me hired at a respectable company was, literally, a rope let down from heaven.

I grabbed that rope.

“I’ll really work hard, hyung.”

I still remember it.

The way I looked on my first day at Baekhak, carrying all those expectations.

A road manager at Baekhak, the dinosaur of the entertainment industry, no less?

I was young, my blood was hot, so of course my imagination ran wild.

But reality, as always, was cold.

They say the conditions have improved, but a road manager is still just a road manager.

If the people above say get down, you get down.

If the celebrity you handle says roll, you roll.

If the drama PD or the director says do a trick, you do a trick.

The entertainment world I saw with my own eyes was colder than I’d imagined, a jungle, and brutal past all reason toward anyone weak.

To survive in that world, I had no choice but to round off my straight edges.

The guy who used to be called a fighting cock for his sharp edges had turned into a bucket of chicken, half soy-glazed and half fried.

That version of me felt strange and I didn’t like it, but what could I do?

“If you want to eat, you hold on.”

Road manager or not, the job came with all four mandatory insurances, and the paycheck landed on time every month.

For someone who drifted while everyone else was working at it, that’s a luxurious job.

I hung on somehow, hit my third year as a road manager, and became someone the company gave a bit of credit to.

That’s when I met the bitch.

“Nice to meet you, Kwon Chan-ssi.”

Lee Ha-eun.

The rising star of Chungmuro who joined the ranks of top actresses at twenty-three.

No. Just a top star actress.

But to me she’s nothing but a bitch.

A crazy bitch who has gone properly off the deep end, at that.

“You’re a road manager and you can’t even do this?”

“That’s why your life is the way it is, Kwon Chan-ssi.”

“I hear you only got hired as a road manager because of Team Leader Ma?”

“What is wrong with you? Why do you live like that?”

She got under my skin.

And not just my skin. She went past my pride and scraped at my soul.

The personality I’d rounded off from straight was no use at all in front of Lee Ha-eun.

It was like the crazy bitch was testing how much I could take. Every single day she rode me, and rode me again.

“That’s exactly why your life is the sorry mess it is, Kwon Chan-ssi.”

In my head I wrote my resignation letter hundreds of times, and deleted it hundreds of times.

If it weren’t for the practical problems holding my ankles down…. I’d have quit the company long ago.

Right.

If it weren’t for the practical problems holding me down.

‘If I quit now, could I even move to another agency?’

Rent due right now, utilities, taxes, whatever else…. Where was all that money supposed to come from?

As always, in the end, money is the problem.

Because of the measly 2.5 million won Baekhak Entertainment paid me, I couldn’t bring myself to quit.

So it was a natural progression that I started stopping by the lottery shop to buy tickets.

I never dreamed of winning.

They say the odds of winning the lottery are one in five million, and there was no way I was punching through that.

‘This is…. Right.’

I’m buying hope.

A hell of a job.

A crazy bitch I ended up working with one day.

My wretched life, my pride and my dignity both crumpled up.

To get even a little way out of that reality, I was buying hope in the shape of a lottery ticket.

And then that hope became real.

“1.4 billion?”

I won the lottery.

Which means I punched through the one-in-five-million odds.

“Is this real?”

I couldn’t believe it, but it was real.

1.4 billion won sat printed in the Nonghyup account I’d opened that day.

In that moment, I decided.

“Fuck it, I’m quitting.”

I picked up the resignation letter I’d written and deleted hundreds of times and headed for the office.

And that night.

I slept with the top star Lee Ha-eun.