"Hey, I'm just asking! I'm your friend."

"...yeah."

"Silo arrangement working alright with Kim Hye-jin? No more near-misses with the backlash?"

"It's fine."

"And no on purpose misses?"

...? On-purpose...?

oh.

"No!"

He laughs.

Min Ha-young is right, maybe he should get a parakeet.

Hye-jin has put together bookshelves in her house! She has decided that as a designated rich person, she will have a proper library. This means, of course, that she must fill it with books. Fortunately, bookstores exist. She’s in one right now, idly wandering the shelves, picking out books that look like they’d be nice to read. Or, more often, picking out books she’s already read, but wants physical copies of. Either way, her shelves will no longer be sad and empty!

And someone else is carrying their own slightly-too-tall-for-comfort pile of books and as Murphy's Law would have it enters a collision course with her that sends both of them to their asses.

"Ack! I'm so sorry, I wasn't paying enough attention, are you alright?" he asks, immediately getting out from under his dropped books to check on her.

??!??? Down goes the fire esper, completely blindsided by this event. Ack, who walks that quickly in a bookstore? Why! There are so many good books! She was standing still! And her hair is bright red, how hard is it to spot her and not run into her?? Also, more importantly, are the books okay - oh, good, they're fine. Not a crumpled page or crushed corner in sight. Good, good. She can get them in order along with her head. Right, uh. Social script, social script, she has these, she knows what they're for and can even sometimes use them competently.

"It's fine," she says, even though, no really, how do you run into someone like they're in a shitty anime in a damn bookstore. Who goes through them that quickly! "I'm fine, thank you, uh. In a hurry?"

There, that's the appropriate social script for "Why the fuck were you walking so fast you collided into me hard enough to knock us both on our asses, that is not normal behavior and I am calling attention to it, but politely and with the implication that I am sympathetic while still verbally calling out your error in basic manners!" She's a real human being that knows how to emote, yes.

"Ah, no, um, just, ah, was too ambitious with my stack of books and didn't see where I was going, um—" He looks around at the dropped books with a sheepish smile then straightens up and gets to his feet to offer her a hand.

—then he stops. "Ah—Kim Hye-jin-nim?" he asks, giving her a proper look for the first time.

Social script says she is to accept this hand, but she - noticeably hesitates. Japanese. Esper. Touching bad, especially when surprised and off balance, but but overcome the cultural gap Hye-jin, statistically it's probably fine.

Fine. He did literally knock her over. She will accept this indignity so he can feel slightly less horrible about being a terrible, book hating person. She accepts the hand.

"Yes," she begins, and then her hand touches his and ack incompatible esper ack ack and she flinches back. "... Ah, uh. Sorry. Japanese. Not really used to handshakes yet."

He pulls his hand away. "No, ah, when I realised you were an esper too I, ah, it felt awkward to withdraw my hand—"

He covers his face with a hand. "I'm making a hash of this. Can I help you with your books and then we start over and pretend I have any social skill?"

"It's - fine." No, no help with books, she will get them together and get up on her own, thank you.

"Starting over, sure. Hi, I'm Kim Hye-jin. I see for completely mysterious reasons that you're also an esper! Neat, uh. Do you live around here...?"

"My noona does and I'm spending the weekend with her. I'm Kang Jaeha, and I'm—honestly feeling a little bit star struck." He starts collecting his own books, and despite the earlier bungle he seems to treat them with a lot of care. Actually he might be muttering small "sorry" to a few of the books he's picking up, inanimate objects though they might be. "How about you, do you live nearby?"

.... Okay, saying sorry to the books is admittedly a little charming. But still. Don't walk that fast in a bookstore, dumbass.

"Uh. I think officially no comment because I do not want anyone to know my address before I've got security cameras up, sorry." This is a lie; the security cameras are already hooked up and working great, actually. But it sure is a nice excuse, isn't it!

Kang Jaeha, that name sounds familiar... where has she heard it before...?

"Yeah, that's fair," he agrees. This time he is going to be kinder to his books and not overambitiously attempt to carry all of them in a single pile. He glances at the books she's carrying, then, and pauses again. "Is that the Starsea series?"

? "Yes?"

Well. Most of it. It's missing the last book in the series; apparently this is a downside of cute out of the way bookstores, they sometimes run out of the latest releases. Which is really annoying, actually, because she already has it on kindle and what she wanted was the full set as physical books to be a set together. (Of the same print series, all in hardcover, because she wants the books in her library to match prettily, damn it, and she will throw money at it to get this objectively absurd thing that she wants.)