A Responsible Student, Needed Immediately

"Jang Hee-jo's dad?"

"Yeah."

Lee Do-hee scrunched her face up in an instant. Tae-kyung had no desire to set her straight on the fact that the scar wasn't his own handiwork, not when pointing it out turned her into exactly this — a creature of pure, simmering displeasure. How could her hobbies stay so unfailingly twisted? The idea that someone else would carry a wound on his face for the rest of his life never even crossed her mind, and the words that's not the one I gave you had set her lips trembling.

"Don't lie to me. I definitely... I watched myself scratch your face open and watched the blood pour out."

"Right. It's a lie."

Her lips had been quivering so hard Tae-kyung worried her blood pressure would spike and drop her where she stood, so he surrendered the truth without a fight. She'd already gotten her shock for the day; wind her up any further and she seemed ready to keel over from sheer hysteria.

"So it was mine, right?"

He'd expected her to ask with glee. Instead her voice dropped even lower, pressing him for the answer.

"Yeah. Chairman Jang cut it first, but it was a clean slash — it was healing over just fine. Then you opened it up again. Precisely from here... to here."

Tiny shards of the shattered beer bottle had been embedded in the wound, tearing it wider, and every last one had to be dug out. A clean knife stroke would have left nothing but a faint line. Do-hee had ripped his flesh apart all over again. Because it was Chairman Jang who had carved the scar in the first place, every time Tae-kyung caught it in a mirror he thought of Chairman Jang. The girl who'd torn it back open surfaced in his mind only for a fleeting second.

It amounted to little more than quiet admiration — how on earth did she slash it exactly the same way?

"Next time you feel like cutting it, I'll hand you a knife. Use that instead. Make it pretty."

"You sound like the bigger lunatic here."

Tae-kyung laughed out loud. It was more than half sincere — the only weapon she'd ever had in her grip was a beer bottle, and watching her get hurt with it had made his head ache — but Do-hee took it as a joke. He'd offered, in earnest, to arm her with a blade, and her response was to call him the lunatic.

"That's what I'm saying — it'd be cleaner. Compared to a knife, whatever you swing at me is the more vicious weapon."

"I've never held a knife."

"Most people haven't held a shattered beer bottle, either."

Kitchen duty aside, the odds that all ten of ten random strangers on the street had never threatened anyone with a broken bottle were near certain. Do-hee pretended not to follow his perfectly obvious point.

"Then teach me, then. How to hold one."

Her gaze drifted toward the dashboard.

"Spend your whole life never holding one. I told you already. Don't pull this crap with me — just order me to shank whoever's rubbing you the wrong way. That's easier for me."

And truly, that was far easier than dealing with Lee Do-hee.

She vaulted higher than even Woo Tae-kyung — who had watched every brand of madness the world could offer since childhood — could begin to predict. Yesterday, today, always. The moment her swollen cheek caught his eye, every trace of expression drained from his face. And in that instant, Do-hee pressed her lips against his.

Smooch, smooch. Smooooooch.

He looked down at her as she suckled at his own lips without ever closing her eyes.

His nose was flattened against her face, and only after a long moment did he manage a ragged breath through it. Attacked from this close, his front teeth hurt less this time. Her split lip had to be stinging, yet she'd closed her eyes, snapped them open again, and kept her gaze locked on his the whole while. Her tongue worked against his mouth, and her eyes — absurdly, infuriatingly — glittered like jewels.

"I've been waiting for you to tell me to go to hell."

"You b—"

Do-hee pulled back just far enough and grinned wide, like a person who had waited her entire life for this exact moment. Tae-kyung barely swallowed the curse that rose on its own. She smiled brilliantly, her face saying she knew exactly what he'd been thinking just now. Fresh blood welled from her split lip and she paid it no more mind than she paid the bruise blooming across her cheek — she simply smiled there, inches from his face, radiant as someone wearing her wounds like stage makeup, as someone who had never once known anything but love.

The blood was trickling again, and still she didn't care — and that left Woo Tae-kyung speechless.

It was the arrogant face of a woman who knew she would be adored no matter what she looked like.

"Class is over for today. I'm sleepy. Gonna sleep."

Having planted her lips on him, suckled, and slathered her spit around entirely on her own authority, Do-hee stretched with a languid yawn. She blinked her drowsy eyes a few times — and then, leaving Tae-kyung exactly where he sat, her head dropped sideways onto the passenger seat. Had he not shot a hand out to catch her falling head, it would have kept dropping without end.

Her slow, even breathing confirmed it a second time: Lee Do-hee was truly asleep.

Could a human being fall asleep in ten seconds flat, as if fainting?

Tae-kyung carefully straightened her neck and reclined the passenger seat as far back as it would go.

Once she settled in, she slept like the dead. Her long lashes fell in a curtain over her gleaming eyes, and she looked, for all the world, like a docile lamb.

He rose slowly from his seat, closed the passenger door without a sound, and returned the emergency kit to the trunk.

He keyed in the Seongbuk-dong address still saved in the navigation and drove as slowly as he possibly could.

There was no carrying her inside, and she'd have to be woken to walk in — so this was less consideration than a pretense of it, letting her steal a few extra minutes of sleep.

By the time Do-hee swayed through the front door of the Seongbuk-dong house, sleep-drunk and listing like a ship in a storm, a face she half-recognized but rarely crossed paths with was sprawled on the sofa — scrolling through his phone in precisely the same position she was about to adopt. Lee Se-gyum. The second son.

"Hey, brat."

Se-gyum didn't even look up. He simply felt her presence and called out.

"Oppaaaah—"

Unlike the way she treated Yoon-gyum, Do-hee came toddling over and clung to Se-gyum, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck and burying her face in his shoulder. With practiced ease, Se-gyum lifted one hand off his phone and ruffled the back of her hair, chuckling.

"Still milking the aegyeo, I see."

And then his gaze locked on the man standing behind her. Whenever Se-gyum had gone up to the Ant Cave, he'd used almost nothing but the gambling floors, so he and Tae-kyung were barely more than faces to each other. Still stroking Do-hee's hair, he eyed Tae-kyung with open bewilderment.

"Why is that in our house. Did my meds not wear off yet..."

Se-gyum wore the expression of a man who genuinely couldn't tell whether he was sitting in the Ant Cave or his own living room.

"It's Tae-kyung."

"I know the name. Hey — what the hell happened to your face?"

Do-hee lifted her head at that, muttering that of course he knew the name, and as Se-gyum moved to resume stroking her hair, the wound came into sharp focus. He was so startled he jolted upright, seized her by the chin, and turned her face this way and that.

"You hurt anywhere else?"

"Nope. Just my face is like this. And I'm sleepy. I'm going to bed."

Do-hee let out a tiny yawn and half-closed her eyes again.

"And where were the bodyguards in all this?"

"Tae-kyung's my bodyguard now. It's not his fault — I was so tired I didn't notice there was a wall in front of me."

It was unexpected, Do-hee covering for him. Tae-kyung kept his mouth shut and didn't intrude on whatever she chose to say. She'd told him not to let her family know anything, so he had nothing to offer anyway — he simply stood there, hands clasped behind his back.

"Is that so. Well, if nothing else hurts, go on in and sleep, brat."

Which left Tae-kyung with the instruction to stay put.

Whether she could truly keep her eyes open or not, Do-hee climbed to the second floor, leaving him behind. Halfway up the stairs, she apparently realized only then that the footsteps she'd expected behind her weren't there, because she leaned far over the landing rail.

"Tae-kyung."

"Tae-kyung and I have some things to discuss."

"What is there to discuss with you, oppa? Tae-kyung only talks with me."

The same girl who'd been cooing oppa and nuzzling his neck a minute ago turned ice-cold in an instant. Se-gyum, who'd been glaring at Tae-kyung, tipped his chin upward — go on up, the gesture said. Tae-kyung returned a light bow and climbed to the second floor.

Once Do-hee was asleep, his turn would almost certainly come.

Even without Se-gyum saying a word, Tae-kyung understood that as soon as she drifted off, he'd be expected to come downstairs and give the full account. He exhaled a short sigh.

What he needed right now, urgently, was one responsible student being ferried away somewhere in a car.

He was thoroughly sick of being the one who took responsibility. Nearly every disaster Jang Hee-jo caused landed squarely on Tae-kyung's shoulders, and it had worn him down to the bone.

"Tae-kyung."

Unable to wait out even that brief pause, Do-hee chirped his name from the stairs like a small bird.

"I'm coming up right now, aren't I."

Se-gyum was Se-gyum — but seeing that face of hers, fighting off sleep just to call his name, Woo Tae-kyung smiled, faintly.