How to Tie a Tie

"I'll shower real quick. The room back there is the walk-in closet."

"Okay."

"Open the second door on the left and you'll find my tie console. Pick out a tie for me."

"……Me?"

"Figured I'd wear whatever my fiancée picks out."

The man broke into a wide grin and shrugged off his T-shirt in one fluid motion.

"Wh-why are you taking your clothes off with-without any warning!"

"I said I was going to shower."

Just before the bathroom door closed, the man threw back an affirmative answer—yes, his name really was Yoon Jae-gyeom.

As he disappeared into the bathroom with a chuckle, Ji-su let out an involuntary deep breath. The body she'd just laid eyes on still felt imprinted on her retinas. Muscle in all the right places…… All the right places. Get a grip, Im Ji-su. Forget it. You saw nothing.

So his name was Yoon Jae-gyeom, then. Yoon Jae-gyeom……

No matter how many times she turned the name over in her head, nothing came back to her.

That height, that body, that face—and on top of all that, an unusual name? There was no way she wouldn't remember him.

Besides, as the man himself had pointed out, Gyechon High School was tiny—a rural school barely hanging on. She'd known nothing but studying back then and kept her circle of friends narrow, so she'd hardly known any of the boys in her year. And still, the name Yoon Jae-gyeom felt completely foreign to her.

"I'll have to ask Eun-mi about him."

Eun-mi, her classmate, had been the head of the broadcasting club back at Gyechon High. She'd technically led the actual broadcast team, but with her outgoing personality and far-reaching connections, she was basically the school's unofficial social network, plugged into every piece of gossip across all three grades and the entire faculty. If anyone could tell her exactly who this man was, it would be Eun-mi.

"Second door on the left—this must be it."

She had no obligation to indulge Jae-gyeom's tie-picking request, really. But since he'd so willingly agreed to play fake boyfriend for a woman whose only claim on him was being an old high school classmate, she figured the least she could do was stroll into the closet and plant herself in front of the tie console. Staring at the neatly arranged ties, Ji-su organized her thoughts.

Sorry, but for tonight only, twenty-eight-year-old Yoon Jae-gyeom is going to be introduced to my mother as thirty-five-year-old Kim Young-baek. Get Mom's seal of approval, feed him a quick meal, then invent an urgent errand and slip out as fast as humanly possible.

One foot out of her mother's house, and she and Mr. Yoon Jae-gyeom would be strangers again. And the moment she got back to Seoul, she resolved, she would clean up her own mess once and for all—Mr. Kim Young-baek, the human junk car Jae-gyeom had so artfully described.

Her eyes drifted over the beautifully colored ties, but her mind was drowning in regret.

"I knew it. Was deciding to get married too rash? I shouldn't have come charging down here like this."

Marrying a man she didn't love enough to marry, her resolve weakening only because her mother had suddenly collapsed—of course something like this was bound to happen. It was almost a blessing, she thought, that things had fallen apart before the wedding. She was still turning that thought over, sorting through the ties, when—

"Found one? Which one should I wear?"

"Ahh! You scared me!"

A man wearing nothing but a towel around his hips had come up right behind her and closed the distance. Both his arms were braced on either side of the tie console, and she was well and truly boxed in. Their bodies were nearly touching, and Ji-su froze, barely able to breathe.

He tilted his head toward her right ear. It looked the way someone might murmur from behind, or lean their chin on a shoulder to rest—except even now, the two of them never quite made contact.

"It takes you this long to pick one? There aren't that many."

Not that many? It felt like she'd wandered into a tie boutique.

Certain her face was turning redder by the second, Ji-su squeezed her eyes shut and jabbed a finger at a random spot on the clear glass cover.

"Th-that one. Do that one."

"To meet your mother? Isn't that the one you wear to funerals?"

Of all the ties, her fingertip had to land on the blackest one. Her hand scrambled to a new spot in a hurry.

"Ah! N-no. I mean—then this one."

"Sure. Does your mother like red, by any chance?"

He leaned in even closer as he asked, and a single drop of water fell from his hair and landed on the curve of her ear. At that dizzying, inexplicably intimate sensation, Ji-su's whole body flinched.

By the time it registered that she could not, under any circumstances, stay pressed together like this in a room with only two people in it, it was far too late. She took a deep breath to keep from stammering.

"Um, could you step back? I'm done picking."

"You're the one who needs to step back. This is my closet."

"No, right now your arm is—"

"Oh."

Withdrawing one arm from the console, Jae-gyeom stared at her long and hard. His eyes were searching her, burning. Ji-su's gaze was no different. Playing with that taut, crackling tension like it was a toy, Jae-gyeom picked the conversation back up in a tone dripping with mischief.

"If you want to keep looking, you can stay."

Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, his fingers went to the knotted towel hanging at his waist and pulled it loose.

Ji-su didn't even manage a scream. She bolted for the living room with lightning speed. From the closet, the man's laughter rang out without pause.

"Wow. Yoon Jae-gyeom or whoever you are—you are genuinely weird."

Though really, she mused, he was probably not entirely sane. No sane person would have agreed to this whole scheme in the first place. Just as she had no chance to gather herself from the shock and fluster, her phone rang shrilly. Come to think of it, the estimated arrival time she'd given her mother was nearly up.

And here she'd thought she was spared from ever hurting this mother of hers—still so girlish, so adorable even now. Retracted: Yoon Jae-gyeom is weird. He was a good man. A very good man.

"Mom, I'll be there in thirty minutes. See you soon."

"Yes, all right. Drive safe, now! See you soon. I love you, my darling daughter."

"Mom…… stop it. Did you take your medicine?"

"Don't you worry. I've been taking it on schedule, every single time. Hoho. See you soon."

She had just ended the call on the sound of her mother's embarrassed giggle when—

"Whoa."

Jae-gyeom appeared before her eyes.

An involuntary gasp escaped her, and she couldn't even manage to close her mouth as she stared at him.

He'd looked good in his mechanic's coveralls earlier, but the moment she saw him fully suited, admiration burst past her lips before she could stop it.

Even standing there holding the tie in his hand, he was beautiful. Calling him model-like felt almost too clichéd a word for it.

"The pride of Gyechon High, Im Ji-su—her husband should be at least this much. What's there to be surprised about?"

Now that she thought about it, what had Kim Young-baek worn today? She couldn't remember exactly, but it hadn't been a suit. She'd never demanded that level of courtesy from him, no—but the fact that he'd never even once considered it made her angry all over again, and a little heartsick too.

"Thank you."

The heartfelt thanks tumbled out of her a second time. Being around someone she barely knew, the polite register came back on its own.

"If you're grateful, then do this for me. It's been so long since I tied one, I can't remember how."

As he handed her the tie, something about the request felt like an obvious, well-worn gambit—but she found herself wanting to indulge him anyway. The man bent down toward her, and even shut his eyes primly. But no matter how long he waited, no touch came, so he cracked one eye open slyly.

"Ha……. Im Ji-su, what are you doing right now?"

Ji-su had draped the tie around her own neck.

"I've never tied anyone's tie but my own. But I was pretty good at my uniform's ribbon-tie back in school."

Murmuring quietly that her own tie had never been the zip-up kind, so every school morning had been a scramble, Ji-su looped the burgundy tie Jae-gyeom had handed her around her own neck, whipped it into a neat knot, then widened the loop and slipped the finished tie back out.

"Here you go."

Watching her hold it out with an expression of pure self-satisfaction, Jae-gyeom looked utterly dumbfounded.

"You do know, right—that when a, you know, when a man asks a woman to tie his tie, that's not really what he means?"

"……"

"I'm asking whether you understood what I was expecting."

"Yeah, I think I got it…… but wouldn't that be a bit of an overinflated ego on your part? I concluded there's no way a man who watched everything I went through today would try to put the moves on me."

"Moves. Right. I think that's exactly what I want to put on you."

"Don't. Go say that to some other woman, not me."

At Ji-su's words—so crisp and clean in the way they pushed him away—Jae-gyeom broke into a perfect smile. And at the same time, as if to say he had no intention of conceding the point, he gave a small shake of his head.