Off Leash
"Come on, you were wearing a sky-blue shirt with white pants. You looked so stylish it stuck with me. Oh, and your mother was seriously sharp-looking too."
"No idea. When I think about that day, you're the only thing I remember."
"Ah, right. The shoes."
It really had been a disaster. Hae-soo nodded and wiped her hands with the wet towel on the table. It smelled lovely. He's so meticulous about every little thing, she was admiring in secret when he gave a small laugh and contradicted her.
"No. It's because you were pretty."
"...What?"
"You were gorgeous that day. I watched you sitting in that café and thought, yep, no way I'm settling for just saying hello to that one. I knew it right away."
"..."
"I told myself I'd charm you no matter what it took."
Yeol dried his hands along with her, tossing out the words with a mischievous air. But for all the flippancy of his tone, his gaze flew in unerring and pierced straight through her. Under that frighteningly direct look, Hae-soo had to clasp her hands tightly together beneath the table.
"...Well, it worked."
"Not yet."
"We're eating dinner together right now, aren't we?"
"Dinner is just dinner. It counts when there's more after that."
The nuance was ambiguous. If she read a distinctly sexual intent into that, was she jumping to conclusions?
She scowled and glared at him, and Yeol raised both hands in a show of wounded innocence.
"What, I'm just saying. Drives, movies, amusement parks. There are a million things a man and a woman do when they're dating, and you're getting high and mighty over one meal? You've still got Korean, Chinese, Japanese — you need to work through the whole lineup."
"Uh... sure. Fine."
"Of course there's also hand-holding, and kissing, and sleeping together—"
"—Hey!"
"Your welcome drink, sir."
Just as she was about to fire back, a server appeared carrying a single cup of soy-sauce-sized portion filled with yellow liquid. Yeol suppressed a snicker and smoothed a fingertip over the end of his brow. Trembling, out of options, Hae-soo sat obediently back down and listened to the server's explanation.
No — she pretended to listen. Something about what tea was blended with what fruit purée skimmed meaninglessly past her ears.
You were gorgeous. I'd charm you. And sleeping together.
All that stayed with her were those maddening, skin-prickling phrases.
The champagne she'd been told to raise a glass with if it didn't suit her taste suited her far too well. Sweet, chilled, fragrant. She'd meant to have exactly one glass, but sipping a little at a time alongside the relentless stream of dishes, the two of them emptied the whole bottle.
"Ah..."
"What, dizzy?"
"No, no. I'm fine."
As she rose from her seat, Hae-soo felt her head swim. Too late, she picked up the champagne bottle to check the label. Fizzy and bright with not a trace of bitterness — closer to a soft drink than alcohol — and yet a full twelve percent. For someone who'd been mentally bracketing it with beer, it was nothing short of staggering.
"You're really okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine. I can walk by myself."
The one mercy was that she wasn't a particularly light drinker. Hae-soo carefully pushed away Yeol's steadying hand and walked with deliberate care, one step at a time. The floor did seem to lunge up at her now and then — her knees buckled once or twice — but she could still walk unaided.
Oh, thank goodness. Hae-soo relaxed and let out a breath of relief. It was premature conceit.
"You are not fine."
Somewhere between the cavernous dining room, the long corridor, and the high-speed elevator that seemed to plunge downward, the drunkenness came rushing back all at once.
Hae-soo had just stepped through the building entrance when she staggered hard. Yeol caught her with practiced ease as she pitched forward. A firm arm coiled around her slender waist, tenacious as a vine. Her body, heavy as waterlogged cotton, went limp against him.
"Ah, sorry..."
"Don't fight it. Just lean on me. You'll hurt yourself that way."
She wanted to tell him not to worry, but her head was spinning too violently. It felt like her brain was performing somersaults inside her skull. Hae-soo let out a low groan and rested her forehead against his collarbone.
Just... not a long one. Really, one minute... no, thirty seconds. Then I'll be totally fine.
She murmured it inwardly and began to count. One, two, three...
"...Seven, eight, nine..."
She was drunk enough that she didn't even register that she was voicing the numbers aloud. And yet at thirteen, the one sensation that pierced through clearly was Yeol's hand cradling the back of her head. By seventeen, the arm braced at her waist had tightened; at eighteen, her stomach came flush against his hip.
Nineteen — the hand stroking the back of her head slid down to the nape of her neck.
Twenty — the hand at her nape began toying with her earlobe.
Twenty-one — the hand at her earlobe glided along the line of her jaw.
Twenty-two — fingers tipped her chin upward, lifting a head she could no longer hold steady.
"Twenty..."
"Shh. That's enough."
The instant he whispered it playfully and laid his lips over hers, the inner stopwatch that had been ticking away in Hae-soo's head went pop and burst. She could count no further.
Their touching lips pressed and moved slowly. His mouth, smooth and unmarked by a single line, traced the seam of hers with an almost maddening patience. Soft, feathering sounds — chak, chak — bloomed incessantly at her ears.
"...Hah."
Hae-soo exhaled a caught breath and closed her eyes. Her eyelids hung heavy, as though weighted with dew.
As if he'd been waiting for exactly that, he tilted his head deeper. The curves and hollows of their lips locked together perfectly, meshing like gear teeth without a single gap. The arm she'd pushed out to hold him at bay instead wound around his neck, clinging.
At the same moment, a soft warmth wedged through the seam of her lips. Two tongues tangled as one. Tangling, mingling, coming apart in ruin.
Twenty-three — she kissed him as though her breath might stop. Tender beyond measure, precious beyond words.
It had been a hopeless kiss.
Lips that only knew how to part and stay still, a tongue that merely let itself be batted about, breathing so unsteady he'd half-feared she might faint.
It was decidedly not the kiss he'd imagined. Passive, cautious, watery. Push and she yielded as pushed; pull and she came as pulled — her whole contribution amounting to barely receiving his lead.
"God."
He couldn't fathom why he'd worked himself up so much over a kiss like that.
"It's swollen."
With the sun already riding at its peak, Yeol was belatedly starting his day. Midway through lathering shaving foam onto his face, he clicked his tongue without thinking. When the foam touched his lip, it stung faintly. Leaning into the mirror, he found the red skin there puffed up a little more than usual.
So she'd sucked and ground at him until it reached this state. Absurd — and yet, somewhere beneath the exasperation, quietly satisfying. Because it meant that right about now, Cha Hae-soo's prim, unimpressed lips would be in exactly the same condition.
If only he could see it with his own eyes.
He regretted, once again, not asking one more time last night. She might have pretended to lose the standoff and trailed along after him after all... The more he replayed it, the less it seemed she'd been playing hard to get on purpose, which only made his clean retreat feel like a waste now.
'Want me to walk you home?'
'...No. That's enough for today. Let's split here.'
'We're close. At this hour it's under ten minutes.'
'Another time. Thank you, really. For dinner. It was lovely.'
The woman who'd gone breathless and gasping around his tongue pushed him away with her usual composure the moment their lips parted. Even swaying on her feet, she silently slipped her hand free of his, as if determined to stand on her own somehow. She'd even waved off his perfectly reasonable offer to see her home.
'It makes me uncomfortable, a man walking me to my door. I don't live alone, you know... I'll text you the second I get there. Don't worry.'
'No. What if you doze off in the taxi?'
'See? I'm not that drunk. Fine — I'll text you the whole way. One every five minutes. Happy now?'
Cha Hae-soo had waved him off with an exasperation that bordered on endless. It wasn't simply that his consideration felt burdensome — beneath it ran a hard, unmistakable will: she did not want him knowing where she lived.
So men have hunted her down to her front door before, have they. Yeol pieced the circumstances together on his own and, without pressing, let the grim-faced Hae-soo go.
'Five minutes is too long. Make it one every three. And if you're even a minute late, I'm filing a missing-persons report with the police, understood?'
'Okay, okay. You get home safe too.'
'Worry about yourself.'
He'd given the tip of her nose a light flick, and the image of her faintly smiling face surfaced in his memory. Just in case, he'd photographed the taxi's number plate, but it never came in handy. Cha Hae-soo really did send her messages with metronomic precision, one every three minutes.
Thinking back on it, it was beyond ridiculous. Messages with no content whatsoever — pure survival signals, nothing more and nothing less. He'd called a designated driver and, on the ride home, laughed helplessly at the sheer absurdity of it.
Does she really have that little to say to me? A little stung, he'd fired back a single curt "k" of his own. He'd expected at least a "lol" in return, but Hae-soo paid it no mind and kept up the same message, one every three minutes.
The message with any actual thought behind it had arrived only at the fifteenth. He'd picked up his phone listlessly, braced for another bare "k" — and those eleven unexpected characters had left him feeling, quite rightly, pleased. Was that deliberate, I wonder. Over that flickering suspicion, Hyun-seok's snickering voice had briefly overlapped in his memory.
'You cast your line in every pond in town and this is what finally reels you in. Serves you right.'
...A fishing pond.
A fishing pond, he says.
Like hell.
Yeol rinsed the razor blade under the water and smiled thinly, without warmth. Cha Hae-soo was nothing more than a coward who believed herself sharp and upright. One who hid the curiosity and the stirrings boiling beneath her surface behind a show of indifference, keeping a straight face while her ears betrayed her — like a cat that whips its head away and then, so cruelly, twitches its ears to listen anyway.