Hopping on the bus, Maru sat on one of the back seats. He opened the window slightly and took out the script from his bag. Although he only had two lines, he read them again and again. He engraved each word into his tongue, his teeth and his lips so that he would be able to mutter the words subconsciously. When he kept reading those lines, he could finally feel the pressure from saying those few words. He wished that it would be longer so that he had some time to breathe. He had to express the disdain that the delinquent had towards the old man through those short words as well as the relative catharsis of being above the old man.

“What kind of shit… shit… sshiiit….”

There was a motto on one of the walls in the practice room he practiced acting with Ganghwan in - The quality of a line uttered once is different to the quality of a line uttered a hundred times. The word might be a fixed ‘shit’, but the nuance would be different according to the intonation, the accent, and the pronunciation of the word. What ‘shit’ actually fits with the line? He had a clear answer when he practiced alone, but now that he was on his way to the read-through, he felt complicated.

“Uhm, excuse me. Can you quieten down a little?”

Maru flinched when he heard that voice. Someone had sat down next to him without him knowing. When he looked outside the window, he saw that the...