The Paralel World Doctor

No Weakness Allowed

She entered the VIP room wearing a smile she had used for too long.

The room was filled with blue light, cigarette smoke, and the scent of expensive drinks mixed with fruit. Leather sofas curved around a glass table. A large screen showed the lyrics of a love song, and three men sat with their collars open. In the middle, a familiar VIP customer waved as if he owned the stage.

“You finally came. Sit here. Tonight, your voice has to make us forget to go home.”

She laughed softly, sweet enough to sound familiar and distant enough not to seem cheap. “You always exaggerate.”

“Exaggerating is a VIP customer’s job.” He poured a drink into a small glass and pushed it toward her. “Just a little. It will warm your throat.”

Her throat had been stinging since afternoon. The left side of her chest felt tight, and each time she took a deep breath, heat spread from below the collarbone. But refusing too firmly in a room like this could sound like an insult. She accepted the glass, touched it to her lips, and took a small sip.

The liquid burned on the way down.

A cough rose at once, but she held it behind a smile. Her fingernails pressed the glass until her knuckles paled. If customers knew she was sick, her schedule could be cut. If her schedule was cut, her tips would drop. If her tips dropped, rent and medicine would not wait just because she had once been the most requested hostess in Melody Paradise.

Near the door, two other hostesses whispered while pretending to choose a song.

“She is getting paler. Maybe the lung disease rumor is true.”

“If she falls, her VIP customers come to us.”

“Lower your voice. She might hear.”

“Let her hear. Sick people should rest, not monopolize VIP tables.”

She heard everything, but only lifted her chin. In a place like this, weakness was not a condition of the body. Weakness was an opportunity for others to take your table, your customers, and the name you had built with effort. She could cough blood in the bathroom later, but in front of them, she would still stand.

The first song began. She stood, held the microphone, and sang with a voice still smooth at the start. The VIP customer tapped the table to the rhythm. The other men whistled. But near the second verse, her breath shortened. She covered it with a small turn of the body, as if giving the song more style, then drew air through her nose.

Through the vague reflection in the glass door, she saw the man selling pills still standing behind his plastic table.

His face was calm. His clothes were ordinary. His table and price board looked pitiful. Irritation rose in her, though not entirely because of him. Perhaps because someone like him still dared to set a price of sixty dollars, while she had to smile in VIP rooms every night and count cheap cough medicine before sleeping. Perhaps because when her body began to fail, she still needed someone she could look down on.

When she stepped outside for air, Peter looked at her from beside the table.

“Your cough is not ordinary fatigue,” he said.

The sentence was not loud, but it was enough to make several people near the door turn. Her face grew hot. The thing she had hidden from customers, from other hostesses, even from herself, had been exposed by a roadside medicine seller in front of the parking attendant.

She smiled coldly. “Your pills do not sell, so now you pretend to be a doctor?”

The parking attendant laughed at once. “Wrong target, bro. You cannot scare her with a street diagnosis.”

The red haired hostess added, “If he is a doctor, is that plastic table his clinic?”

Several people near the door laughed. The security guard looked at Peter with suspicious eyes, as if waiting for an excuse to throw him out. Peter did not argue. He only watched her breathing grow shorter and the color of her lips darken beneath the lipstick.

“Tonight, you will need breath longer than your pride,” he said.

She stiffened. The sentence touched the place she refused to face. She lifted her chin higher, as if a straight neck could open narrow lungs.

“Save your nonsense for stupid buyers.”

She turned and entered Melody Paradise. Her steps stayed arrogant until she passed the side door. But after several steps, the cough she had held back burst behind her palm. It was small, restrained, and painful. When she lowered her hand, a thin red stain clung between the smears of lipstick.

She stared at the stain for a long time.

Outside, the music was still loud, laughter still flowed, and her pride was still standing. But her body had just leaked a secret she could not cover with a smile.