First Aid

Jae-kyung coughed and cleared her throat, still mortified by sentences that felt as though they'd been read aloud through a speaker. She wanted to hide her flushed face behind a towel, but she managed an answer as nonchalantly as she could.

"It's my dad's. I grabbed it in a hurry."

Supposedly it was one of the commemorative T-shirts her father had handed out to his regulars for his birthday back when he worked at a host bar; since retiring, he'd had nowhere left to give them away. Who knew how many had been printed in the first place — around thirty still sat in a pile at the house. He could never afford loungewear, but five years ago he'd joked that with all those new clothes stacked up, he wouldn't have to worry about T-shirts again for the rest of his life.

"It's perfectly good. I can't just throw it away."

"There's a huge hole in it?"

"Wh-where?"

She looked down in a hurry. Perhaps the fabric had snagged on a screw jutting from the hinge of the old front door — a large hole gaped at the hem.

Jae-kyung knotted the dangling hem and lifted her head as though nothing were wrong. The cinched T-shirt now traced the full silhouette of her ample chest. The moment she caught Yu-gam unable to tear his eyes away, embarrassment scorched through her, and she gulped down the welcome drink on the table in one go.

Tick. Tock.

And with that, the ticking of the clock faded into stillness.

"...Secretary Seo. Secretary Seo? Are you asleep?"

The voice calling her seemed to echo from somewhere far away. After an all-day driving marathon, a drenching in the rain, and a shower, every inch of her body was limp with exhaustion, and the sleep crashing over her was nearly impossible to fight off.

Jae-kyung, who had nodded off, blinked awake to find Yu-gam staring at her from across the table.

"Ah... yes. Director."

She shook her head hard, wrenching her drooping eyelids open.

"The preliminary survey of the students and parents — hand me the compiled data."

Unlike her, Yu-gam was wholly absorbed in drafting the event schedule, his eyes shuttling between laptop and documents. He hadn't even been in the post that long, and this was work he could easily have dumped on his staff. Who threw themselves into foundation business like this? Every time his strong wrist moved beneath his rolled-up sleeve, thick veins stood out along his forearm. Flustered by a strange, tingling awareness she had never once felt around Minho, Jae-kyung cleared her throat.

"Ahem. Um... here."

Pamphlets and papers lay scattered across the living room table.

"Secretary Seo, what do you think of this one? Let's fill the first two days with hands-on experiences. Then on the last day, I'd like to move them to two places or so where they can take photos and just relax and enjoy themselves."

"...Right."

Rubbing at her eyes as they tried to drift shut again, she stole a glance at the clock on the wall. It was already four in the morning. She had left home at 3:30 the previous day to catch a six a.m. flight — she'd now been awake for more than twenty-four hours. Yu-gam, seated across from her, showed no trace of fatigue.

"Shall we get some coffee?"

"Oh... yes. I'll get it ready."

Before she could even rise from her seat, Yu-gam had already walked off toward the cafeteria, glancing back at her as he unbuttoned his cuffs. "Never mind. Just pick the places the kids will love. You're the teacher — you'd know better than I would." Yu-gam ground the beans with practiced hands and tipped his chin at her, beckoning. Warmed and flustered by that steady gaze, Jae-kyung bent over the materials and pored through them carefully.

Places the students would enjoy...

Parents took a keen interest in the school trip program, and whatever they chose on this scouting visit would later be used in the school's promotional video.

"Drink."

A cup was set down in front of her. The freshly ground coffee perfumed the whole living room.

"Thank you, I will. Oh... this place..."

This was where Jae-kyung had gone on her very first school visit, back when she was a first-year in high school. It was an era people still called the golden age of the Eui-tae Foundation — a place where students had been sent on a lavish trip bankrolled by Chairman Do Eui-tae's unprecedented generosity. Out of nowhere, she thought of a boy from her class back then, the one who had vanished without a word. He never got to go on that trip with them, but by now that boy would have been twenty-five.

"How is it?"

Superimposed over Yu-gam's face, she saw the image of that boy, collapsed beneath the camellia tree.

It was a face the pain had worn away into something like a mirage, and the fleeting illusion that it resembled Yu-gam's dissolved like smoke.

"Ah—"

Coffee ran down the back of her hand and soaked into the papers; the cup was toppling toward the laptop when Jae-kyung snatched it out of the air. The sloshing coffee splashed across her chest.

"Hot—!"

"Wipe it with this."

Yu-gam dabbed at the front of her T-shirt with the cardigan. Then he was on his feet in an instant, pulling an ice pack from the refrigerator and wrapping it in a towel. "Here." He held it out to her.

"I'm fine."

"Honestly! You are high-maintenance. Want me to do it for you?"

Right over her chest, of all places. She faltered under Yu-gam's unblinking stare.

"N-no."

Him doing it himself? Absolutely not.

"If you won't go to the hospital, at least use a compress. I'll have someone bring burn ointment."

"It's not that hot... nngh. I'm fine." It stung more than she'd expected, and her brow creased.

Oh. Oh no. Yu-gam's fingers had caught the hem of her father's commemorative T-shirt and pulled.

Riiiip.

The fabric tore in one long run from the hole at the hem, splitting clean into two pieces.

"Wh-what are you doing?!"

She shoved with all her strength, but it was hopeless against an arm corded with muscle, its tendons standing out hard.

"First aid. You're burned — how long were you planning to keep it on?"

Another second and her white bra would have been on full display. Jae-kyung's arms flew up to cover herself, and beneath them the underside of her breasts — pressed high like an underboob — was plump and shameless right before Yu-gam's eyes. He turned his head away and pressed the towel-wrapped ice to her scalded skin, his brow knotted as though something of his own had just been damaged.

"I-I can do it myself." Tripping over her own tongue, she pried his hand away.

"Whew. Hold the ice pack on properly, then."

Jae-kyung couldn't look away from Yu-gam's averted face. He was so handsome it seemed as though someone had brushed a soft-focus filter over him — handsome didn't even begin to cover it. The cool, cleanly cut line of his nose carried a patrician elegance, and his deep eyes looked as though they held water, dark enough to pull her under.

"Doesn't it hurt? It looked red to me earlier."

Yu-gam asked the question over the documents, affecting indifference.

"It doesn't... hurt."

When exactly did he see the burn to be calling it red? Jae-kyung's cheeks flamed.

Beneath the soft, muted lighting—

Thump. Thump. Thump. Had he slipped something into her coffee? Like the night five years ago, the night she had first met her husband, her heart galloped wildly out of control. Ten months of fevered nights. Her husband's wicked, lingering hands.

She wanted to touch Yu-gam's full lips. Lips dampened with the lightest flick of the tongue were so sensual she ached to sink her teeth into them then and there.

Sensing her gaze, Yu-gam lifted his head and looked into her clear eyes.

"Did I ever tell you? I've always wondered about these eyes you once kept hidden behind a veil."

"Hah..."

His timing was exquisite. She had been holding it in, and now a shallow breath slipped out through her parted lips. They had drawn so close, with no sliver of space left between them, that heartbeats carried. Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

No.

A danger alarm blared through Jae-kyung's sleep-starved, hazy mind like a siren. Managing Director Jin Hee-yeon. The penalty clause. Dad's job.

Snap out of it! Jae-kyung shoved Yu-gam's iron-hard shoulder. Thud. As she shot to her feet, her knee cracked into a very sensitive part of him.

"Ugh!"

"Director! I-I'm so sorry!"

Jae-kyung bolted into her room and leaned her forehead against the door, letting her ragged breathing slowly settle. Being shut up in one space with her ex-husband this late at night was dangerous. She'd known it — they should never have come on this business trip together.

The T-shirt had torn wide enough to bare her underwear, and just picturing it made her face burn hot enough to want to run away and hide. Yes, they were living under the same roof, and Yu-gam's sprawling house had plenty of places to disappear into — but here, stuck right on top of each other, there was no escape.

Not a sound came from the living room, yet she couldn't bring herself to move. Not that Yu-gam would actually follow her in. And surely she wasn't... disappointed about that.

She laid a hand over her chest, still heaving as if in spasms, and rubbed slow circles into it. She lay down on the bed, but between her ex-husband and the sting in her chest, sleep refused to come.

Morning arrived just like that.

In the cramped elevator, Jae-kyung — hollow-eyed from a sleepless night — offered a small bow.

"How's your chest?"

A morning greeting about her chest. Who starts the day by asking after a woman's breasts? But the one who blushes, loses — she had to act as if it were nothing.

"...Perfectly fine. And I'm sorry about the shove."

She had pushed him away last night; he was bound to be in a mood. At the sound of her voice behind him, Yu-gam turned around.

"Good to hear you're fine."

His gaze snagged on the proud swell of her chest.

"About last night... let's pretend it never happened."

"Last night? My body's in far too sorry a state to pretend nothing happened."

"It wasn't on purpose."

"Then Secretary Seo had better take responsibility."

"It was an accident, and I don't find that kind of joke funny. Shall I escort you to the hospital?"

"Mine's sturdy enough; no hospital required. So — were you staring because you wanted to kiss me?"

"Wh-what?"

The sheer absurdity of it struck her dumb. A kiss? Out of nowhere?

Of course, she had tried before — eyes closed, trying to recall what kissing her husband had felt like. Not that sleep deprivation had left her with much to recall. And it was true that last night, looking at Yu-gam's lips, she had wanted to touch them.

She could not admit that.

The distance between them had narrowed to something perilous. Jae-kyung eased her head aside, dodging the gaze that was plunging brazenly down her front, mere inches from her face.

"Your eyes kept wandering to my lips, Secretary Seo."

"...That is not what that was. I was simply making it clear that there is nothing between us—"

A soft peck.

Yu-gam's cool lips landed on hers, still frozen in shock.