Chapter 2

With a crisp crunch, the toast Cha-hyun had made broke apart in Seol-young’s mouth.

Plain toast with some jam would have been enough, but Cha-hyun was frying eggs and bacon—seasoning both before cooking them. She hadn’t even known there was bacon in the house. How had he managed to find it?

There were already three slices of finished toast piled on the plate, yet Cha-hyun was still gripping the spatula.

Swallowing what she had been chewing, Seol-young said,

“Stop making more. I don’t think I can finish all of this, either.”

“So my mouth doesn’t count as a mouth?”

She had just finished one slice and was reaching for another when her cheeks flushed.

Cha-hyun watched her with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

After piling up a portion of toast for himself, he sat beside Seol-young. He had no intention of eating, though. He simply stared intently at her mouth.

The mouth that had been dutifully chewing away gradually slowed.

With an increasingly uncomfortable expression, Seol-young urged him,

“Stop staring at me and eat yours already.”

“How about sitting on my lap while you eat?”

She firmly shook her head to say no, only to choke herself in the process.

As she covered her mouth with her palm and coughed, Cha-hyun quickly found the milk in the refrigerator, poured it into a glass, and brought it over.

The moment she lowered her hand, he pressed the glass to her lips.

She hurriedly drained the glass of milk and let out a relieved breath.

Then Cha-hyun’s tongue swept over the spot where a trace of milk remained on her lips.

Embarrassed, Seol-young scrubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand.

A brief silence followed.

He watched the toast slowly growing cold, then abruptly brought it toward his own lips.

His mouth opened as though he were about to eat it, only to change direction and land against Seol-young’s cheek.

Apparently, he wanted to have Seol-young for breakfast instead.

She pushed his lips away only enough to show that she wasn’t exactly displeased as they moved from her cheek down toward her chin.

The toast was flung from her hand.

By him.

Even though she had ignored all his requests for her to sit on his lap, he pulled her toward him and finally settled her there exactly as he pleased.

He gripped her chin roughly and kissed her.

There was a patience about him that made it clear he had endured as much as he possibly could.

Seol-young could no longer reject him.

Their tongues tangled.

She caught his scent—the familiar smell she had known since their reckless, immature days—and breathed it in as though from somewhere far, far away.

So lost in the kiss that they were practically drowning in it, they failed to notice the alarm going off.

It was only seven-thirty.

She had no idea how many hours Cha-hyun had actually slept after claiming he had arrived in the early morning.

It had been two years since she had finally given in to Cha-hyun’s grand declaration on their high school graduation day, when he told her he wanted marriage rather than merely a relationship.

In those two years, Cha-hyun had undergone a complete transformation, as though he had surgically cut away every trace of the man who had once been infamous as the greatest madman under heaven.

He was making astonishing strides within Yoosung.

The man who had once done nothing but throw around vulgar jokes could now read the shifts in the business landscape beneath the surface and devise bold management strategies.

Before long, he was destined to make a name for himself as a heavyweight who would swallow Yoosung whole—nothing like the man he had once been.

And as for Kang Cha-hyun’s relentless, brake-less devotion, determined to have the utterly insignificant name Yoo Seol-young written beside his own as his wife no matter what—

Being run over by that love was something Seol-young would simply have to endure from here on out.

It had taken a full eight years for Cha-hyun to become this person.

That her own heart had begun to waver while she had hated him enough to want him dead was something that even Seol-young herself found bewildering.

In the beginning, she had genuinely trembled with disgust at his insulting words and coercive behavior.

Even if those things had gradually become less severe, Kang Cha-hyun was still Kang Cha-hyun.

How badly had he tormented her?

And how much pain had she endured?

Accepting and enduring the childish, twisted way he expressed affection—picking on the girl he liked simply because he didn’t know how else to show it—even after they had both grown into adults had required an almost unbearable amount of patience.

Everything Cha-hyun had relentlessly insisted was love…

There had been a day when she had become so sick of all of it that she felt she would die. She threw everything away and ran.

She had tried to be cold. She had tried not to look back.

Perhaps she had wanted to do it even more desperately because she wanted to deny the fact that some part of her heart was already being drawn toward him.

But the one who had felt as though she would die—who had genuinely wanted to die—was herself.

And a month after she ran away, almost mockingly proving what a coward she was for lacking the courage to die, news reached her.

Cha-hyun had deliberately driven his car into something.

Just knowing that he had been prepared to accept death as the consequence of what he had done was enough to make Seol-young realize she could never win against him.

On the day she went to see him again at Chairman Kang’s request—

Though perhaps she had gone of her own accord—

Cha-hyun looked at her with reddened, exhausted-looking eyes and said…

“Do you… hate me that much?”

This was the same Kang Cha-hyun who had spent his life acting as though there were nothing in this world more exceptional than himself, cloaking thoughtless arrogance in blatant disregard for everyone around him.

But that night, seeing those eyes of his growing pitifully wet, Seol-young had shaken like a candle before a storm.

The defenses she had built against him vanished as though someone had blown out a flame.

And in their place, something else began to rise like smoke.

Love…

It felt like love.

It must have been love.

“What are you thinking about? Want me to guess?”

A low, deep voice pulled Seol-young back to the present.

When she finally escaped the rain-soaked memories of the past, Cha-hyun stood vividly before her—the man she wanted to lose herself in even more than those memories.

Lying back on the bed, she watched him through half-lidded eyes as he quickly buttoned his shirt before the full-length mirror.

“You’re thinking about how badly you want to marry me.”

Here we go again.

Seol-young treated it like one of his jokes and simply laughed.

“Go already. There are only thirty minutes left until nine.”

“Yoo Seol-young.”

He stopped halfway through tying his necktie and suddenly bent down until their eyes were level.

His dark, intense eyes locked onto hers like a blade.

“Today marks seven years. I know that if I bring up marriage again, you’ll throw it straight into the trash, but I’m still burning up inside. So don’t laugh like that. Like you’re never going to be my wife. Not ever.”

“……”

Seol-young’s eyes trembled.

He finished straightening his tie and stood.

Before she even had time to decide whether to follow him without so much as a goodbye, her feet were already moving after him.

“Cha-hyun!”

“……”

“I’m sorry…”

Her voice was as limp and loose as the hem of his shirt she was weakly clutching.

“You won’t be able to come tonight, will you?”

“If you ask me to come, I’ll become an idiot who grabs the steering wheel even in the middle of a storm.”

It was obviously meant to be a joke, but because of what he had said before, she couldn’t laugh.

She could only bite her lip.

Cha-hyun gently pressed his lips against the spot.

A wordless plea not to bite it.

The soft touch eased her heart for a moment.

And then Cha-hyun immediately dropped his next bomb without warning.

“I love you.”

“……Drive carefully.”

In the full-length mirror, Seol-young’s face looked utterly lost.

Both sides of her were reflected there in plain sight—

The part of her that felt this was love, and the part that was afraid to admit it was.

Cha-hyun looked as though he wanted to tear those contradictions apart one by one.

Instead, he forced the words out again, almost as though he were stuffing them into her.

“I love you.”

“You won’t be able to come tonight, will you?”

Ha.

Cha-hyun’s lips twisted.

The crooked smile hanging at the corner of his mouth soon broke into a bright, helpless grin.

Even after the traffic light changed, he rested his forehead against the steering wheel and laughed to his heart’s content.

The impatient honking behind him was inevitable.

So were the curses shouted by drivers swerving around his Volvo.

But no one dared confront him directly.

Only after he had laughed to his fill did Cha-hyun leisurely press down on the accelerator.

I need to buy a high-quality voice recorder.

The sudden thought that he would never be able to hear that pitiful little voice again irritated him.

But the lingering sweetness of her voice still remained in his ears, making his eyes crease with amusement.

If he could, he wanted to shove his tongue straight into his own ear.

If he licked it clean enough, there ought to be little grains of sugar