Don't Misunderstand

Yu-gam's words were less a suggestion than an order, and Jae-kyung's hesitation gave way; she took the jacket he held out and draped it across her shoulders.

"...It's warm."

The scent she knew far too well, laced with his cool warmth, felt unexpectedly cozy—nothing like the assumptions she had carried.

"The fabric is made to hold a steady body temperature. That's all."

It was such a perfectly Yu-gam answer that a laugh slipped out of her despite herself.

"Still... with you here, Chairman, it's not so scary."

"Lucky, then. In the dark, the two of us are old acquaintances."

The remark—hauled up out of the past just to define what they were to each other—made her heart drop with a dull thud.

"I—I'll move out of your house now. The audit office hasn't contacted me again, so..."

She had somehow survived a week under his roof, but in the end, sharing a house with her ex-husband was asking too much of her.

"Just stay the three months. There's no telling when the vice principal or the parents' council will lob another complaint at the audit office."

"But it can't be comfortable for you either, Chairman, and I—"

"Nothing about it bothers me. Mind your work instead."

Jae-kyung opened her mouth to argue, but the lights around the grounds flickered on, one by one. From a distance came the clack of a door being opened.

"Anyone in there?"

It was a security guard's voice.

Acutely aware of how close she still stood to Yu-gam, Jae-kyung scrambled upright on her throbbing ankle. As if she had only been waiting for the lock to release, she hurried to the supply room door, pulled it open, and answered.

"Yes, over here!"

"The power company came by and fixed the transformer. Apparently a crow got into it."

"Thank you."

As noise gradually seeped back into the gymnasium, Jae-kyung slid the jacket off her shoulders and held it back out to Yu-gam.

"Here."

Yu-gam, still pressed close, looked down at her red lips, from which rose a faint, gossamer wisp of breath.

"Don't come in here alone again."

Being told not to even visit the gym by herself was absurd, but he was close enough to be overwhelming, and she swallowed against her trembling breath. He had noticed already, it seemed—the little jolt of her heart.

"...I won't."

Yu-gam drove his frosty gaze deep into her before speaking.

"By any chance..."

His voice had already sunk low.

"...Do you like that man from earlier?"

"Who... do you mean?"

Don't tell me he saw me talking with Min-ho this morning.

"The math teacher."

"Oh! No? What are you talking about?"

"Liar."

"Mr. Choi wouldn't like hearing that. No—not at all. We're nothing to each other."

Yu-gam looked down at her, disbelief thick in his eyes.

"Then why are you so tense in front of me? You must be hiding something, if you're shaking like that."

Jae-kyung was struck dumb. This had always been a man words simply could not reach.

"Th-that's—"

Yu-gam slowly brushed his fingertip up beneath her chin, and a cold sensation grazed her skin.

"The math teacher tells a different story. He says you're his type, Seo Jae-kyung. It made me wonder—was that why you turned down his proposal?"

"It's a misunderstanding. I only started seeing my boyfriend recently. Besides—"

"..."

With that disbelieving face in front of her, explaining that she had ended things with Min-ho only that very day seemed unnecessary.

"Do I really have to explain everything to you, Chairman?"

"I'm your husband. I'd say that gives me the right to hear it."

"You have no right—nothing of the sort. We're a relationship that's about to end."

Jae-kyung spread three fingers and thrust them toward the face pressed so close to hers.

"Exactly three months from now, we will be nothing to each other."

"Legally we are unmistakably something, and you call us nothing? What will you do if I change my mind and refuse to divorce you?"

Was that a threat?

Under that piercing gaze, her heart hammered. Somehow, whatever it took, she had to see the divorce through without setting off his temper.

"I'll do my best to make sure we divorce. You're too close. Back off—"

"Does being close make you uncomfortable?"

"Of course it does."

"So that was the problem."

Yu-gam's gaze wavered, deep and slow, as it came down to meet hers. One centimeter—that was all the distance left between their lips, close enough that his breath touched her skin.

Heat came flooding in, but determined not to be the one to lose, Jae-kyung refused to look away from his eyes. And the instant he confirmed it, the steadiness in Yu-gam's gaze shattered.

A breath before their lips could meet, he let the hand cradling her slender chin fall away.

"Let's go."

"...Go where?"

Her voice, too, had drowned in the air closing in around them.

"Because if I stay here, I can't stop. So we're leaving."

His face was as cold as ever, but his voice had sunk down into something abyssal.

Straightening her tracksuit as though nothing inside her had stirred, Jae-kyung gathered the shopping bag of lunchboxes Yu-gam had brought and walked out of the gymnasium.

"Seo Jae-kyung."

The voice landed between her shoulder blades, and she stopped dead. If she turned to face him now, she was certain the scorching moment they had just shared would send sweat breaking over every inch of her.

"Don't misunderstand."

The word misunderstand rooted her where she stood. She stared, hollow-eyed, at the black sky hanging in front of her.

"...What misunderstanding?"

"That I'm going to fall for you again."

At an interpretation warped past all sense, Jae-kyung whirled around and met Yu-gam's gaze dead-on.

"Don't worry. I wouldn't have a delusion like that even in my dreams. And... liking, loving—is there anything on this earth scarier than that kind of passion?"

The passion of a twenty-year-old couple who had once burned for each other without restraint—she herself was what that reckless, thoughtless love had produced. And yet not one of the three—her father, her mother, or Jae-kyung—had found happiness as the price of it.

"...The way you cut me off so cleanly—it's getting under my skin. See you at home."

At his words, Jae-kyung dipped her head in a brief bow and turned away.

He says he'll fall for me again.

He was a genuinely strange man, saying things that blurred everything into seeming as though the two of them had once been something special.

Yu-gam lingered on the sight of her retreating back, so visibly unsettled, before moving off in the opposite direction—toward his dinner with the executives—every step more reluctant than the last. If not for that ankle, he would have taken her along. No—better yet, should he offer to take her home, citing the sprain? But after what he had said only moments ago, he knew perfectly well she would refuse, saying she didn't want to.

Passion, was it.

Do Jun-woo. Chairman Do's only son—the man the world had lost when Yu-gam was eight years old.

A tender, attentive husband; a loving father. He had adored Executive Director Jin and Yu-gam with everything he had—and he had loved another woman, and a child, just as fiercely.

There had been moments when his father's love made him happy. In the end, it left everyone wretched. A love that cannot protect is not love. Because of that love, Yu-gam had gone on living with a hole blown through his chest, doing nothing but breathe.

Was that the passion Jae-kyung had called frightening?

"Frightening. That's exactly what it is."

Yu-gam let out a hollow little laugh, a dry chuckle at nothing. He fished from his pocket the phone he had flatly denied having when Jae-kyung asked, and dialed Director Kwon.

Jae-kyung rose in his memory: the instant the lights inside the supply room had died, her eyes opening wide and startled beneath the moonlight.

The moment he heard that sound, he had known the door locked itself. But being trapped had never been the problem. The problem was Jae-kyung, standing right beside him.

"Are we locked in?"

Just as it had five years ago, in bed, he loved the sound of Jae-kyung's clear voice in the darkness. That limpid timbre rang through the space and brushed against his ears.

In the breathless silence, her every slightest movement registered with staggering clarity, raking across every nerve he owned.

"Ah! It stings a little."

The moment she touched her ankle, every cell in his body responded as though it remembered her voice, her scent—entirely without his permission.

He had never planned to sit beside her on the mat. Yet somewhere along the way, his hand had settled her there at his side.

It had been a scoff, yes—but laughing at all was a bad sign. The sign of a wall coming down.

He had to sever his own body, his own nerves, from answering to Jae-kyung. He had declared he would never waver—and he kept crumbling anyway.

It was a chill night, and thanks to Seo Jae-kyung, sleep looked to be a lost cause.

Clenching shut the hand that still carried the burn of her heat, Yu-gam walked toward the main building wearing his usual face.

"Ms. Seo!"

At the sound of an unfamiliar man calling to Jae-kyung from behind, Yu-gam veered on instinct. There he was—the math teacher who had been trading pointless jokes with her out on the field earlier—emerging from the gymnasium and closing in on Jae-kyung as she made for the auditorium.

"How's your ankle from earlier? All right? I could give you a ride home."

Beneath the lights, Jae-kyung smiled as though flustered.

"Oh—no, I'm fine. Really."

It was her oldest trick, transparent as glass. The bright, clear smile that suited her unadorned face so well; the lovely line of her jaw tilted just a degree in feigned shyness; that pretty laugh that had very nearly fooled even him, once.

His face edged like a blade, Yu-gam walked straight toward the math teacher and Jae-kyung.

"Not 'Teacher Seo.' Secretary Seo—the Chairman's personal secretary."

"Oh! Chairman—good evening, sir!"

The math teacher jolted at the Chairman's abrupt appearance and faltered mid-stride.

"On school grounds, I'd ask you to refrain from making personal offers to the female staff."

Yu-gam's tone was courtesy itself. It was also, unmistakably, a warning.