CFMFL 01

Chapter 1

“Oppa, wait for me!”

“Jisoo, you’re great in every way, but you walk so slowly.”

It wasn’t that Jisoo was slow. She was falling behind because she had been carrying all the apples and meat they had just paid for at the mart by herself.

As though he couldn’t stand the heat, the man shielded his forehead with one hand while continuously fanning his face with the other. He walked toward the parking lot at a brisk pace, without giving his girlfriend Jisoo the slightest consideration. No matter how fierce the August afternoon heat was, it wasn’t hot enough to justify abandoning a girlfriend carrying heavy bags just to escape to the car.

“Jisoo. Hurry up and unlock the car. It’s hot. Hurry and turn on the air conditioner, too.”

“No. Help me carry this first.”

“Seriously? Even my mom doesn’t make me do stuff like that. You started carrying it, so just carry it to the end. Do you really have to make me do it? Besides, you’re giving it to your mom anyway.”

“Oppa! How can you say that right now…?”

After struggling by herself to load the bags into the trunk, Jisoo got into the driver’s seat. Youngbaek, sitting in the passenger seat, reclined his seat as far back as it would go and urged her on again.

“Hurry with the air conditioner. Jisoo. I’m hot.”

“Yeah. I just started the engine. Give it a little time. It’ll cool down.”

“Ha… I think it’s even hotter because we’re in the countryside. The countryside doesn’t suit me. I told you before we came, didn’t I? I really hate it. Are you sure your house even has air conditioning?”

Gyechon-ri, Gyechon-eup, Cheongsan County, Gyeongsangbuk-do was Jisoo’s hometown.

They had just stopped at ‘Gyechon Mart,’ the only medium-sized supermarket in town, to buy fruit and meat as gifts for Jisoo’s mother, and had gotten back into the car.

“Oppa. Even if you don’t like the countryside, this is my hometown. If we’re getting married, you have to come greet my mom. So stop saying you hate it.”

“No… What I’m saying is, did I really have to come all the way here? Think about it. We have to come together, right? But if your mom comes to us, only one person has to move. Isn’t that way more reasonable?”

Jisoo swallowed her anger with a sigh.

They weren’t married yet, so she didn’t want to call her ‘mother-in-law’ either. But still, wasn’t calling her ‘your mom’ a bit much?

But she knew getting angry wouldn’t change anything, so she gradually calmed down, left with nothing but thoughts swirling through her mind.

Was the reason this man looked for ‘reasonableness’ even when it came to basic courtesy because Jisoo was the weaker party in this marriage?

Because she was the ‘lower’ one in this relationship?

Because she was poor?

Or because she was a daughter raised by a single mother?

“Jisoo, don’t tell me you’re mad. You know I didn’t mean anything bad, right? I’m just naturally not the type to hold grudges. And anyway, the important thing is that I came here, isn’t it?”

Yes.

Youngbaek Oppa… wasn’t a bad person.

He was just oblivious and didn’t know how to watch what he said, but he was kind by nature.

Jisoo tried to calm herself by reminding herself of that good side of him.

“But Jisoo, why isn’t the car getting any cooler? Hey. It’s blowing hot air! Ah, this is pissing me off.”

“Oppa, we’ll be there soon, so just bear with it for a little while. It’ll cool down once we start moving. I’ll get going.”

When she opened the windows, hot air rushed in, and something seemed to be wrong with the air conditioner.

Jisoo hurriedly started driving.

But it wasn’t simply an air conditioner problem.

The car seemed to be seriously ill.

It began making an ominous rattling noise and came to a stop just a few hundred meters from the mart. Then, thin wisps of smoke began rising from beneath the hood.

“Ugh! Hey! Isn’t it going to catch fire? I’m scared! I want to go home.”

“Oppa, what are you talking about? Go home?”

Youngbaek opened the car door at lightning speed, jumped out, and ran far away before stamping his feet nervously.

“Hey, haven’t you seen movies? It’s going to go ‘BOOM’ and explode! I’m leaving. I can’t die in some backwater like this when I’m about to marry you.”

“Oppa, wait. Calm down. An explosion… Sure. It could be scary. But the way you’re putting it…”

“I don’t know. I’m leaving. I had a feeling I really didn’t want to come here.”

Youngbaek was making a fuss while pulling out his phone to call a taxi when—

“Do you need some help?”

A man dressed so unmistakably like a mechanic that there could be no other interpretation approached them.

He had a large six-pack of bottled water slung over his shoulder.

He seemed to have walked over from the mart.

Jisoo felt as though she’d just encountered a savior.

She looked back and forth between her severely faded car—whose color was now impossible to distinguish as mint, sky blue, or beige—and the man.

“Ah, hello. Please help us! Thank you in advance! The car suddenly… The air conditioner wasn’t working properly when I started it, and then we turned right after leaving the mart and barely made it this far before it stopped.”

“Give me the car keys. I’ll take a look.”

Jisoo politely handed the mechanic the keys before approaching Youngbaek.

Youngbaek was sweating profusely and grumbling.

“Hey, Lim Jisoo. Did you know you can’t even get a taxi through the app here? Is there really a countryside like this in this day and age? Ah, this is pissing me off.”

“Oppa, keep your voice down! That man said he’ll fix the car. Let’s wait and see, okay?”

Sure, there were probably more inconveniences here than in Seoul.

But this was still a place where people lived, and they were currently receiving help from someone who lived here.

Yet Youngbaek continued to disparage the town without a second thought, leaving Jisoo to do nothing but try to keep him in check.

She desperately hoped the man examining the car couldn’t hear Youngbaek’s words.

“Why should I keep quiet? And I can’t wait. Can’t you see I’m already sweating and my skin is getting cooked? My mom says sunscreen is useless if you put it on and then sweat. Ah, this is so annoying. There’s not even a speck of shade! What is this? And you know what kind of technician you get stuck with in a countryside like this. There’s no way he can fix it.”

“…Oppa. Please stop.”

“Stop what? If I’d known this would happen, I wouldn’t have come!”

“Does that make any sense? How are we supposed to get married if you don’t come?”

The irritation Jisoo had been holding back finally burst out.

Jisoo was human too.

How much longer was she supposed to listen to this whining that was more unbearable than the heat itself?

She had reached her limit.

“Oppa, am I the one begging to get married? Am I doing this alone? If we’re getting married, aren’t we supposed to greet each other’s parents, then have the formal meeting between the families, and prepare things step by step and make adjustments together?”

“Why are you getting angry? You don’t know because you’ve never done this before…”

“Do you think I’ve done this several times? It’s my first time too! It’s just common sense!”

Jisoo couldn’t take it anymore and shouted.

That pushed one of Youngbaek’s own buttons.

“Common sense? Did you just say common sense? Fine. Good for you, you graduated from Hankuk University. I only graduated high school, so I don’t have any common sense. Someone without common sense like me will leave.”

“Oppa! That’s not what I meant!”

“Listen carefully, because I’m being honest. Other than having a good educational background and being pretty, what do you actually have going for you? Huh?”

Youngbaek was huffing and trying to put Jisoo down when—

“Excuse me, ma’am. Could you come over here for a moment?”

The mechanic called out to Jisoo, temporarily interrupting their argument.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s hard to tell just by looking at it like this. I think we’re going to have to open it up and look inside.”

“…What?”

“No, to be precise… I should probably tell you there’s no hope for it. Anyway, what I’m saying is that this isn’t something that can be fixed by replacing one or two minor parts.”

Oh.

Then what was she supposed to do?

She had heavy bags in the trunk, and she had to carry them all the way to her mother’s house…

She didn’t even have time to stand there blankly thinking about what to do next before Youngbaek’s loud voice dragged her back to reality.

“Oh! There’s a taxi! A taxi! Taxi!”

He shouted at the approaching taxi, waving his short arms frantically to signal it.

“Hey. Lim Jisoo. I’m leaving. I still came all the way out here, so tell your mom properly. Tell her something urgent came up and I had to go back. I came all the way here, after all, so I did show some courtesy. And make sure you explain things properly to my mom too, okay?”

“Oppa! Are you kidding me?”

The taxi soon stopped right in front of them, and Youngbaek actually climbed inside.

Perhaps because the inside was cool, his expression quickly relaxed.

Then, from inside the taxi, he waved his hand at Jisoo.

A moment later, the taxi disappeared into the distance, kicking up clouds of dust.

Jisoo felt as though someone had poured a bucket of cold water over her head.

She was so stunned that she couldn’t even feel the heat anymore.

The man who had come to greet her mother before their marriage had just disappeared.

While waving at her with a smile.

“Ha. This is unbelievable.”

The dust kicked up by the taxi must have gotten into her eyes.

That was why she was crying.

She definitely wasn’t crying because she was sad.

No.

She was crying because she was so miserable, so humiliated, and so hurt.

What was she supposed to tell her mother?

What if her mother was so shocked that she collapsed again?

Jisoo hurriedly wiped away her tears because she didn’t want to cry, but she couldn’t wipe away the evidence that she had been crying.

“Miss. Don’t you know the saying, ‘When the crappy car leaves, a Benz comes’?”

“Sob. I don’t. Please fix the car quickly.”

“I don’t think this is something that can be fixed…”

“…”

“Throw it away. Don’t get attached to it.”

Jisoo wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the car or the boyfriend who had just left her there and taken a taxi by himself.

“What do you mean, a crappy car?”

“It is a crappy car. A damn crappy car at that.”

The man, his face and forearms smeared with grease, casually said this as he closed the hood of Jisoo’s car.

The car had been a ‘job gift’ Youngbaek had given Jisoo when she got hired.

Even then, it had already had 280,000 kilometers on it, and a faded ‘Beginner Driver’ sticker was still attached to the rear window.

Everything surrounding the two of them was intense.

The scorching air.

The still-blazing sunlight.

And the man’s burning gaze.

“So throw it away, Jisoo.”

If she could have thrown something away just because she wanted to, she would have done it long ago.

The ragged six-year relationship.

This car.

But then—

“Lim Jisoo. Don’t you know me?”