I Spent a Night with a Top Star Actress Chapter 44 - Ambition and Jealousy.

Inside the elevator on the way up to the CEO’s office.

I crossed my arms and muttered.

“This is the third time I’ve been called up, isn’t it?”

Strangely enough, my state of mind was different every time I came up to the CEO’s office.

During the Director Kim Jang-hoon sponsorship scandal, I’d been scared. During Lee Ha-eun’s next project, I’d been confident.

And now… my heart was pounding with anticipation that welled up almost too much to hold.

“I’m losing my mind.”

Is this really how an employee’s supposed to feel, getting called in by the CEO?

It was absurd enough that a hollow laugh slipped out of me.

But thinking about it, I guess it made sense too.

Because the unveiling of a gift I’d waited three months for was right around the corner!

“… Still, let’s get this expression under control.”

I forced my face, blooming with a smile, back into something normal.

Checking my face in the mirror, it finally looked presentable.

I took a few deep breaths and stepped off the elevator.

Having seen my face a few times now, CEO Baek Ji-won’s secretary, Secretary Kim, greeted me like she knew me.

“Ah, Chief Kwon.”

“Hello, Secretary.”

“The CEO’s inside, so you can go right in.”

I gave a light bow and knocked on the CEO’s office door three times.

“Come in.”

At CEO Baek Ji-won’s signature low, husky voice, my heart started pumping again.

Barely holding down the rising excitement, I opened the door to the CEO’s office.

A spacious room.

Standing at its center, CEO Baek Ji-won was looking out through the clear glass wall at the streets of Gangnam.

CEO Baek Ji-won’s sharp fashion sense stood out.

A purple suit.

A sharp bob with waves in it, and bright red shoes to match.

Her style, sharp enough to make you forget she was forty-five, overflowed with confidence.

She wasn’t putting on airs, wasn’t exaggerating anything, so how could a person carry themselves like that?

Was this just what it meant to be born with it?

Pulling myself out of my thoughts, I gave a light bow at the waist.

“I heard you called for me, CEO.”

“Yeah, sit.”

A faint smile hung at the corner of CEO Baek Ji-won’s mouth.

“Coffee? Green tea? What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have coffee.”

CEO Baek Ji-won walked over, and instead of calling for her secretary, started making the coffee herself.

Startled, I got up from my seat.

“… CEO?”

“Stay seated.”

“That… but.”

“You’ve done something valuable. I can at least treat you to a cup of coffee.”

“…!”

My eyes shot up.

Meanwhile, CEO Baek Ji-won, having brewed the coffee herself, held out the cup and asked.

“I heard the news this morning. Twenty hit No. 1 on the charts, huh?”

“!”

“Congratulations, Chief Kwon. You won our bet, didn’t you?”

My heart, pounding loud enough to hear, finally exploded.

Feeling a chill run down my spine from a thrill I couldn’t put into words, I barely managed to speak.

“Thank you, CEO.”

“How do you feel?”

“Sorry?”

“Your feelings right now, Chief Kwon. How are they?”

How do I feel right now?

Good enough to die!

If this weren’t the CEO’s office, I’d want to let out a loud shout!

Luckily, thanks to the reason that had kept its composure, a calm answer came out.

“I’m still a bit unsettled.”

CEO Baek Ji-won smiled gently.

“That’s an oddly flat answer, not like you, Chief Kwon.”

“… Sorry about that.”

CEO Baek Ji-won propped her chin on her hand.

Her eyes, half black and half brown, bored straight into me.

That strange gaze felt like it was piercing straight through my soul.

CEO Baek Ji-won’s mouth opened.

“The one and only thing Baekhak’s been missing is a girl group.”

“…!”

“Everything else, I could go anywhere and hold my head up. But girl groups, weirdly, we couldn’t even reach the level where you’d want to bother showing your face. Was there some bad luck sitting on us, or was it my own fortune, I worried about every crazy possibility under the sun. I even went and got my fortune read by some famous shaman, you know that? But no matter what, it just wasn’t working out.”

CEO Baek Ji-won’s eyes, watching me, curved into a smile.

“But you’re the one who made that girl group a success, Chief Kwon?”

“!”

“Something even a shaman who’d taken the spirits couldn’t manage, you pulled off, Chief Kwon, and you saved my face doing it.”

CEO Baek Ji-won crossed her legs and spoke.

“So I’m a little curious. Did you see this coming, Chief Kwon?”

“Sorry?”

“Did you really think Twenty would take No. 1 on the charts?”

I thought over CEO Baek Ji-won’s question.

Did I think Twenty would take No. 1?

Of course.

Because I’d already gotten a glimpse of the future through the texts from the future.

But… I had no confidence I could explain that.

How was I supposed to explain the texts from the future to CEO Baek Ji-won?

So I came up with a reasonable excuse instead.

“I had a feeling.”

“A feeling?”

“Yes, a feeling.”

A strange smile rose to the corner of CEO Baek Ji-won’s mouth.

“That doesn’t make sense, and yet it does?”

“…”

“A feeling… right. Feelings matter in this business. Whether something flops or takes off, that’s what a feeling decides in the end.”

CEO Baek Ji-won nodded, then abruptly held out a pure white envelope.

My eyes widened a little.

“CEO, what’s this…?”

“Baekhak stock.”

“!”

“At current market price, it’s probably worth around a hundred million won.”

My mouth fell open, just a little.

‘A, a hundred million??’

Then don’t tell me…

Was the gift CEO Baek Ji-won had prepared for me actually Baekhak stock?

The gift was so unexpected that I was surprised, and a little flustered too.

‘Wait, but why stock?’

If she was going to give me something, wouldn’t cash be better?

Why would she specifically choose to give stock as a gift?

As if she’d noticed my confusion, CEO Baek Ji-won explained.

“Giving Baekhak stock, that carries a lot of weight for me.”

“?”

“You’re one of my people now. So let’s grow Baekhak together. This stock is… yeah.”

CEO Baek Ji-won trailed off and gestured with her chin.

“It’s proof that you’re my person.”

“!”

“And this is the first time I’ve given that proof… to an ordinary employee.”

“…!!”

“You know what I’m saying, Chief Kwon?”

Having asked the question, a suggestive smile hung at the corner of CEO Baek Ji-won’s mouth.

In that instant, an emotion I couldn’t put into words washed over my chest.

CEO Baek Ji-won leaned in slightly and spoke.

“The Priest in Black’s going into its reading soon, isn’t it?”

“… It’s scheduled for the end of this month.”

“That’s coming up fast. You can pull this one off too, right?”

CEO Baek Ji-won, as if putting it on display, gave her own nameplate a light tap.

“You should hurry up and climb your way here.”

“…”

“The way I see it, Chief Kwon, you’re not the type to stop here.”

At that provocative gesture, I took a short breath.

What was this feeling I felt right now?

Joy? A thrill?

No, it wasn’t that kind of feeling.

This was… ambition.

In that instant, I realized.

The gift CEO Baek Ji-won had prepared for me wasn’t the stock.

“You can do it, right, Chief Kwon?”

The recognition of CEO Baek, a legend of the industry.

That was the real gift CEO Baek had prepared for me.

---

I stepped out of the CEO’s office.

Secretary Kim looked at me, blank and unblinking.

Her face said she was dying to know what CEO Baek Ji-won and I had talked about.

I walked past Secretary Kim and headed back to the management office.

At my desk, Team 5’s road managers had gathered around Team Leader Ma Seok-du.

“Oh? Chief Kwon’s here.”

At one road manager’s shout, an uncomfortable number of eyes turned on me.

“Chief Kwon, what did the CEO call you in for this time?”

“Don’t tell me it’s because of Twenty hitting No. 1?”

“Hey, hey, Chief Kwon! What’d you screw up this time!”

“If not that… heh heh. Maybe she called you in just to get a look at the star manager?”

“Don’t just laugh like that, explain! We’re dying of curiosity!”

I waved my hand against the uproar and pestering coming at me from all sides.

“It’s nothing much. She just called me in because of Twenty hitting No. 1 on the charts.”

“For real?”

“Of course it’s real. She said congrats on the No. 1, and gave me a cup of coffee.”

At my words, Seok-du hyung let out a sigh of relief.

“Ugh… that’s really all it was, right? I thought you’d gone and messed something up, you punk!”

I got our innocent Seok-du hyung to believe it easily enough, but the sharper-eyed road managers kept pressing me.

“Chief, knowing the CEO’s personality, there’s no way she’d let this slide with just that. Does that even make sense?”

“Ah, come on! Don’t do this to us! What’d she give you? A house this time or something?”

“Honestly, you took Baekhak’s girl group that’d been striking out three times over and hit a grand slam. It doesn’t make sense there’s no bonus for that.”

Yeah.

I did get something, sure.

But could I put it into words?

In material terms, I’d gotten stock. Emotionally, I’d gotten… CEO Baek Ji-won’s recognition.

The stock, fine, but how was I supposed to explain the fact that I’d earned CEO Baek Ji-won’s recognition?

So I played dumb and flatly denied it.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t get anything.”

“No way. Your face says you got something.”

“Even if I did get something, do I seem like the type to brag about it? So let me get some rest here. Meeting the CEO first thing in the morning’s got me drained enough to die.”

Once I whined about it like that, the people who’d crowded around me finally clicked their tongues and backed off.

The stares that had been hidden behind Team 5’s road managers now dug into the back of my head.

Team 3’s Chief Lee Jae-min’s irritated glare.

Other teams’ road managers, watching me with wary, sharpened eyes.

The complicated stares of the various team leaders, whose seniority over me ran nearly ten years or more.

My unsettled mind sharpened awake under those stares.

Laughing quietly to myself, I slipped out of the management office and headed up to the roof.

-Hyah!

I threw open the rooftop door, and a wide-open summer sky came into view.

But maybe because fall was slowly creeping in, the breeze blowing through was pretty cool.

With a cigarette in my mouth, I walked slowly over and rested my arms on the railing.

Gangnam, the district people call the center of Korea, stretched out below.

“… When was that, again.”

Probably when I won the lottery, right?

Back then, I’d come up to the roof, looked out at those high-rises, and thought.

that right now, I felt like I could do anything.

And astonishingly, that had turned into reality.

“Everything started going right, right around that point.”

Of course, it’s not like there’d been no crises.

But looking only at the results, I’d made a success of everything, exactly like I’d resolved to back then.

“Weird. What exactly changed to make things go this smoothly?”

The texts from the future?

The lottery?… No.

The texts and the lottery were part of what made me succeed, sure, but they didn’t account for the bigger share of it.

‘Confidence.’

Right.

The me back then and the me now had different confidence.

Thanks to the confidence that having the lottery as a solid backer gave me, I’d been able to keep succeeding.

“But now, it’s not just the lottery giving me confidence, is it?”

Twenty, who’d hit No. 1 on the charts.

The Priest in Black, this quarter’s buzz title, that I was handling myself.

CEO Baek Ji-won’s recognition.

My reputation at the company.

It wasn’t just the lottery anymore. Now… too many things were giving me confidence.

So I found myself suddenly curious.

“How far could I go?”

I’d climbed this far trusting only the lottery.

But now, with more solid backing than just the lottery…

just how far could I really climb?

In an industry where success is never a sure thing, I could just as easily fall flat instead of climbing.

But… yeah.

The me right now didn’t have it in me to fall flat.

I might stumble a little, but I was confident I’d reach the finish line.

In that instant, I muttered without meaning to.

“Should I actually give it a shot?”

Up until now, I’d been doing this half-heartedly, making excuses out of whatever situation came along.

But now, with CEO Baek Ji-won’s recognition in hand, I wanted to do this properly.

I genuinely wanted to succeed in this business.

“There’s no reason left to quit now, is there?”

Lee Ha-eun, who used to torment me.

And a work life that used to just be one irritation after another. Everything had gone back to normal.

So… a little higher.

Wouldn’t it be fine to chase this success’s dopamine all the way to the end?

In that instant, I had the illusion that the wide-open streets of Gangnam were spread out right under my feet.

The corner of my mouth curled up, clean and satisfying.

“Yeah, what the hell, let’s give it a shot.”

The ambition CEO Baek Ji-won had lit was burning fierce again.

I was breathing out hot breath and about to light the cigarette still in my mouth.

My phone rang.

-[International][Sender](attached file: image)]

A new text from the future had arrived.

---

A dark, empty living room.

Across the way, a faint light leaked out from behind a bedroom door.

[“I think the maknae, Seol Chae-i, has the best visuals.”]

[“Rei-ssi is… I guess you’d call her a big eater?”]

[“Nova’s the mood maker. The kind of friend who puts you in a good mood just looking at her.”]

[“Not that I care most about her, but Ga-eul-ssi’s unusually attached to me.”]

Inside the room the light leaked from, dozens of scripts lay scattered across the floor.

Scripts covered in notes and interpretations, blacked in with ballpoint pen.

Sitting among those scripts with her legs crossed, the top-star actress stared at the TV, her face blank and lifeless.

[“Ga-eul-ssi, watch out…!”]

Lee Ha-eun picked up the remote and replayed the scene from a moment ago.

[“Ga-eul-ssi, watch out…!”]

[“Ga-eul-ssi, watch out…!”]

[“Ga-eul-ssi, watch out…!”]

Once, twice, three times.

After replaying it ten times like that, the corner of Lee Ha-eun’s mouth curled up.

“Ha.”

She clicked her tongue, short, and at the end of her gaze was the face of the woman held in Kwon Chan’s arms.

The woman’s face, flushed red, was enough to spark some suggestive imagination.

Lee Ha-eun flung the remote aside and let out a hollow laugh.

“… Look at this. I step away for one second and the bugs come swarming.”

Life rose into the face of the top-star actress, which had looked like a shriveled wax doll.

Jealousy, irritation, and obsession.

Lee Ha-eun muttered, her voice thick with venom.

“This is exactly why I can’t go to Hollywood. Not with this many people coveting what’s mine.”

Sparks flew from the top-star actress’s eyes.