I'll Be There Soon

There was still more she wanted to say. The moment Lee-kyung moved to hang up, Won-young called his name in a rush.

Wow. Seonbae, you really are something.

At that signature Ryu Lee-kyung delivery of the facts, Won-young shrieked as if appalled.

Pfft. A laugh broke from Lee-kyung on a rush of breath and reached her, and she liked how familiar it was. With him, a childish streak still lived in both of them—childish enough that acting hopelessly immature, even at thirty, never caused the slightest problem. It didn't feel like being a thirty-year-old scrambling just to survive. It felt like becoming Noh Won-young again, still living inside that old season.

A name she missed. A seonbae she missed.

She had been sure he was nothing more than a first love already gone, and yet all at once she missed him so sharply it ached. She held her breath and spoke in a voice that was small, but clear.

The street was crowded now. Florence, as if someone had gathered every European in the world into a single place, had nowhere left to set a foot, and the city was bracing for a hot summer. She had looked forward to burning even hotter here herself. Too bad.

Won-young brushed off her seat and stood up from the bench.

The truth was, the days had been achingly hard. From the moment she left straight for her studies in Japan to the long work of adapting alone in Florence, not a single day had come easily. She had cried often, been lonely, and sometimes suffered so bitterly she could hardly bear it.

Last night, a call had come from a company she had sent her portfolio to several months before. It was not a door a new designer could knock on lightly, so she hadn't truly expected anything—and still, for Won-young, it was the job of her dreams. Stung into pride by rejection after rejection, she had sent her portfolio there out of sheer stubbornness, and when the personnel office never contacted her even once, she had forgotten the whole thing completely.

He said he liked her designs. Pointing in particular to a photograph of the bag she had made as her graduation piece, he hadn't stinted on the praise: if it had been for sale in a department store, he would have bought it on the spot. As the call drew to a close, he added an introduction of himself.

He was the man who had put his own name to a handbag brand for more than forty years—its founder, hailed as its finest designer. Marlon Lee.

Marlon told her he wanted to buy her future. And he didn't forget to ask that she visit the company as soon as she possibly could.

The moment she hung up, Won-young sank to the floor and sobbed. It felt as if the nine years she had spent in other countries were driving straight through her. A violent excitement that raised gooseflesh over her whole body, and all the old sorrow of what had already passed—every feeling tangled together until her head rang and rang.

So going back to Korea like this made no sense at all. If she told the people around her that she had turned down Marlon Lee's offer, every one of them would probably ask whether something was wrong with her head. Even she thought the situation was genuinely ridiculous. The timing was almost too perfect.

"Hah."

She would have to tell them that something had come up and she wouldn't be able to visit the company—by Monday morning at the latest, if she could manage it. Won-young yanked her sneaker laces tight. She had no regrets about this choice.

Looking back, she had always walked with her eyes only on what lay ahead. When she left Korea for Japan, and again later—just as she had found a job at the company she wanted after graduation and was beginning to feel the steadiness of a profession—she had suddenly flown to Florence, Italy, and decided to become a university student all over again.

Won-young didn't think about it for long. Keeping her thoughts short, short enough to seem almost dull, and putting them into action at once: that was both Noh Won-young's strength and her flaw.

No need to make it complicated. Life, by nature, was only the repetition of ruining things yourself, falling flat, and then spreading them open again however you pleased. There was no one to blame. Just as the one who had spoiled the picture she had been carefully drawing across a clean white sheet was no one else but her, this time too she only had to let herself come apart.

Life and pictures alike—she could leave them to be ruined at her own whim, let them tear and turn ugly, and then, on some other day, simply paint over them in the most beautiful color in the world. That was enough.

……I had always lived that way.

She would wipe away the swarm of worries and fears rushing in, and empty her head completely. She turned back along the road she had come and broke into a hard run.

The noise of the plane touching down struck her ears.

Ah. She really had gone and come back. Even thinking of it now, it felt a little absurd. The realization that she had settled on returning to Korea in less than half a day flickered through her, and a laugh burst out before she knew it.

Won-young looked down through the narrow window at the familiar scenery. At least she wouldn't have to suffer over the language—that small comfort was there. In Japan, and in Italy too, what had tormented her most was a tongue she could never quite make perfect.

"Here we go."

Two in the morning. When Won-young arrived at the airport, the hands of the wristwatch she glanced at pointed exactly to 2:00 a.m.

The first time she left Korea for Japan, her luggage had been more than three suitcases. Crossing from Japan to Italy, five in all. Now there was barely one. Back then she had no friends, but now there were plenty of people who would ship her things to Korea whenever she asked.

So Won-young had left the rest of her luggage with Monica, the woman who lived next door. Even now, Monica's face wavered in front of her—the face of someone who had cried for two days and two nights when Won-young told her she was suddenly going back to Korea.

She messaged Monica first of all.

She had grown close enough to Monica to trade stories of their first loves, and she had already poured out, in painful detail, how she and Lee-kyung had met and how they had parted. On her last night in Florence, sharing a drink with Monica, Won-young had said it almost in passing—that Seonbae probably wouldn't come to the airport. She had also admitted, honestly, that a little hope remained. She had texted him her arrival time, so maybe that Ryu Lee-kyung, fickle as the wind, might come to meet her after all.

Monica answered in a long message. The heart of it was not to be upset, and the rest was thick with lingering lines asking whether she wouldn't think of coming back to Florence even now.

Because of that, laughter burst out of Won-young.

"What is she even saying. Monica, I told you I got to Korea just fine."

She was still muttering to herself when she passed through the airport doors. Among the taxi drivers angling for fares, a familiar face far across the way lifted a hand in a light wave to greet her.

Ryu Lee-kyung.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and striking enough that it would have been a lie to claim anyone could fail to recognize him. Unable to hide how glad she was, Won-young gave a little shrug and put on a needlessly prim face. Lee-kyung seemed embarrassed; the hand he had been waving slipped straight into his pocket.

She watched his face the whole time as he turned his gaze the other way, and at last she crossed and came to a stop in front of him.

"What. You said you weren't coming."

Her eyes were laughing wide, while she deliberately parted her lips only a little and spoke in a stiff voice. Lee-kyung's eyes answered for him. Spare me the chatter and get in the car.

"Right. That was me saying thank you."

She added that and went around to the back of the car to load her bag into the trunk, and Lee-kyung took the suitcase from her instead. While he put the luggage in, Won-young opened the passenger door and climbed into his car.

She had already heard it from Ji-an, long before now—that the year before last her brother had finally lost his mind and bought a top-of-the-line imported car. Even so, seeing the real thing felt different. He had been born into a family of artists and had drawn unusually well since he was little, but she had never imagined he would succeed to this extent.

Ji-an had often worried that he shut himself in the studio and did nothing but paint, yet Lee-kyung had debuted as if to prove them wrong, and lately he had made a great deal of money commercially. There were plenty of times she wanted to ask where he meant to spend all that money, but Won-young never once asked.

Wouldn't that just be meddling? When she wasn't even his girlfriend.