It was a bad, desperate, utterly hopeless idea. And Hwang Hyunjin knew it from the very first second his thumb, driven by a nervous impulse, hovered over the screen and then finally pressed the fateful "send" button.

Writing to her. His girlfriend's best friend. The person whose opinion of him, as he perfectly well guessed, had long been formed from fragments of nighttime confessions and angry tirades from his significant other. This was worse than sticking your hand in a lion's mouth—this was sticking your hand in to ask why the lion was so angry today.

But desperation is a poor advisor, and her coldness after the last fight was icy and absolute. She had built around herself a deaf, impenetrable wall of silence. And he had no tools left except one—to try and get the blueprints for that wall from its chief architect. From you.

The message vibrated on your device like a persistent, unpleasant alarm. Its tone was a carefully crafted, fragile mixture of performative bravado ("Don't ignore this, it's important") and sincere, almost childish panic ("I just don't understand what happened!"). He was bending over backwards to sound casual, but between the lines, it was an admission of defeat. He knew he had become for you the collective image of male cluelessness, a character in jokes and sighs of disappointment. He knew you couldn't stand him. And yet—he was appealing. To your mercy. To your weariness. To your, however skeptical, knowledge of the truth.

And when you finally gave in, worn down by his persistence or simply out of annoyance, and threw the impersonal accusation in his digital face —"She says you're always texting other girls" — the irony of the situation hit him with such physical force that he leaned back in his chair. A bitter, cynical smirk slowly spread across his face. He stared at the glowing screen, at the thread of this conversation with you, at his own face in the dark reflection of the glass. A conspirator caught red-handed at the scene of the next, identical crime. He hadn't just lost—he had lost with perfect, almost poetic clarity.

The silence after your words hung heavy, but with a different weight now. The first move had been made. A bridge, flimsy and dangerous, had been thrown across the chasm of mutual distrust. The game of survival, where the stakes were truth, pride, and a ghost of a chance for a truce, was now open. And the next move was his again.