Marry Me, Then
Even though the engagement had stretched on for years, not a single article had ever leaked.
That was how thoroughly the woman's identity had been buried—and realizing it only deepened the distance Jaein felt between them. If he set his mind to it, he could hide anything. The world my senior lives in is a different one from mine, she thought.
The Woo Taeha who shared cafeteria lunches with her, who stayed up late ordering midnight snacks and chattering away, who traipsed back and forth to the convenience store—he existed only in her memories.
So a nobody like me dared to fall for a man from another world.
What could she possibly say to him as he proposed ending the engagement?
While she hesitated, weighing her words—
“Will you marry me?”
At Taeha's question, Jaein's eyes went hopelessly wide. She had heard it with both ears, yet the question refused to be believed, and all she could do was blink.
What did my senior just say?
She was almost sure she'd heard the word marriage.
Hoping she'd misheard, Jaein stared at the man.
“I'm sorry? Senior, what did you just say?”
But as if to prove she hadn't misheard anything, he took a step toward her. The deep scent of menthol that stirred with his movement pierced the tip of her nose.
“I asked if you'd marry me. Me.”
His voice carved itself vividly into her ears. In that moment, as if time itself had stopped, every one of Jaein's senses snapped into sharp focus.
She hadn't known then.
How much that single sentence would change the entire course of her life.
Even now, she remembered every word he'd said without missing so much as a syllable.
The noise of the bar spilling through the gap of a slightly opened door, loud as a street market.
Even the smell of his cigarettes that had wafted at the tip of her nose that day.
“You said you needed money for your father's surgery, right? I'll cover all of it.”
Her father's illness had surfaced right around her college graduation. With the household stretched too thin to afford proper insurance, the cost of his cancer surgery fell entirely on Jaein's shoulders. One tumor removed, only for another malignant growth to turn up somewhere else. Surgery, then chemotherapy. The hospital bills kept her permanently in the red.
Her poor, poor father.
A man who had neglected his own health while caring for his dementia-stricken wife—she wanted to save him somehow, even if it meant drowning in debt.
“I thought you didn't like me anymore.”
“...”
“Think of it as a marriage of necessity. You need money, and I need image management before the succession. What do you say?”
After a long silence, what Jaein finally offered was a question.
“...Why me?”
If it could have been anyone, why did he have to choose her?
“To keep you quiet. You know my secret, don't you?”
The fiancée's identity that no one outside the family elders was supposed to know. So that's it. Even while breaking up, my senior wanted to protect that woman to the very end.
The marriage proposal she could never make sense of finally began to add up.
He would do it for his ex-fiancée.
She would do it for her father.
Senior's right. It's a win-win for both of us.
Even as her brain insisted there could be no better option, a corner of Jaein's heart trembled faintly. Marrying him wouldn't make him love her. She couldn't believe she'd been foolish enough to hope.
That maybe, given time, they could become a real husband and wife.
That was the moment she should never have accepted the proposal.
Overnight, Jaein became the Cinderella who married into a chaebol family.
The kind who'd grown from senior and junior in the same department of the same university into lovers, kept the relationship going after graduation, and finally made it down the aisle.
Her story had swallowed up the tale of his engagement to that other woman. Jaein was the one who had taken her place.
“You seriously dated our senior behind our backs? You were that girlfriend?”
“How could you not say a single word to us? Since when? Huh? Wow. I feel so betrayed.”
When she explained that they'd broken up briefly, then gotten back together and were now preparing for marriage, it didn't quite add up—but since Taeha and Jaein said it was so, her classmates seemed to accept it.
Everyone assumed Jaein was loved and cherished by her husband. The truth was nothing of the kind.
Throughout their five years of marriage, Taeha simply hadn't been there.
Six months after the wedding, Taeha was posted to the American branch. When he asked if she would come with him, Jaein couldn't.
She couldn't just sail off to America, leaving behind a mother with dementia and a father battling cancer.
Her senior was busy beyond measure, too.
It was a distant land, and I didn't have the confidence to wait alone at home for him anyway.
So Jaein chose to remain in Korea and wait for him to return.
Even if he carried another woman in his heart, the wife of Woo Taeha was still her, wasn't it?
Her in-laws looked at her with resentment, but she told herself things would improve if she just tried hard enough. And so she endured the exhausting life of a daughter-in-law.
Then her father passed away, and with him, every reason to hold on vanished.
Not a single member of her husband's family attended the funeral.
Not even the aunts who had shown up without fail every holiday, grilling her the way they always did.
Not even Taeha, her own husband. She called him countless times, but couldn't even reach him.
And with that came a pain almost impossible to bear.
Loneliness, emptiness—every emotion there was came crashing over her like a rising tide.
So heavy that even antidepressants did nothing.
That was how she came to decide on divorce.
And yet he liked me all along?
A blatant, scarlet lie.
Jaein was still staring at Taeha, utterly dumbfounded.
Their eyes met just as he finished his solo shoot. Taeha immediately waved and broke into a smile.
What are you smiling at?
And why did your smile have to be that infuriatingly handsome?
Perhaps because the old memories had surfaced, Jaein went on glaring at him with a sullen face. Just then, the photography director's voice came from behind her.
“We'll shoot right away. Once we get a few stills, we need to film some video too. Let's start with the photos—Jaein, why don't you take a seat on the chair?”
At the mention of a two-shot, Taeha walked back in front of the camera. Then, his eyes on Jaein, he tipped his chin toward the chair below. It meant: come over here already.
Leaving behind Minseop and Seul-i, who were still chattering away, Jaein walked over. She sat down and, in a voice low enough that only Taeha could hear, murmured:
“Senior, why would you tell a lie like that?”
“What lie?”
When Jaein lifted her head to look at him, their gazes locked and held. In front of them, the staff's voices rang out—Perfect, right there! Keep looking at each other just like that, hold it!
“In the pre-interview, you said you liked me? What exactly did you tell them that day?”
It was me who had the crush from the start, after all.
The first time they'd crossed paths in front of the department lockers, she had fallen for him at first sight.
“I fell head over heels for you, if you'll recall. What on earth did you say that had everyone calling you a hopeless romantic?”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course it does! The beginning of the story is a big deal. Viewers are surprisingly sensitive about that sort of thing. If the details don't match—”
Jaein never got to finish.
Taeha smirked, then ducked his head down to meet her eyes.
“You don't actually know, do you. Whether you were first—or whether I was.”
She was about to snap back, how could I not know that—when—
“Aww, such a shame. Could you two get a little closer? You are a married couple, after all.”
The director, who'd been peering at the camera, popped his head up and addressed Jaein.
“Producer Seo, this is the Sesame Couple, remember? The sesame seeds have to pour. You two need to look even sweeter on each other.”
“It's a promotional photo, though.”
Jaein blinked. Hadn't Couples No. 1 and No. 2 just taken an ordinary family portrait?
“Surely the other couples—”
She never got to say they didn't.
The man's face closed in within an instant.
It lasted only a heartbeat. His breath drew near, and then warm lips touched Jaein's.
“Oh, perfect, just like that! Hold it right there.”
The shutter clattered endlessly. Jaein's eyes went round. She couldn't move.
Heat flooded her face in a flash—starting at her cheeks and spreading all the way to the tips of her ears, staining everything crimson.
“Senior. What... what did you just—”
Before she could even finish, he pulled back with a mischievous smile.
“What did I do? You heard the man—he wanted it sweet.”
At the sight of him laughing so lightly, Jaein's heart began pounding noisily, uncontrollably.