The Impudent Act

After leaving the club building, I quickened my steps, following him as he led the way like he knew exactly where my car was parked.

At last, my white sedan came into view. My eyes were immediately drawn to the orange convertible parked right beside it.

I had assumed he’d forced me to ride with him simply because my car wasn’t available and he happened to be heading the same direction. Apparently that wasn’t the case.

Only then did I remember the smell of liquor on him back in the room—far stronger and harsher than what Tae-yul had been drinking.

Come to think of it, his steps had only looked perfect. His body was swaying slightly.

It seemed the sheer force of his willpower had kept the heavy intoxication from showing too obviously.

Suddenly, a violent downpour crashed down as if on cue. After a few more steps, he turned and snatched my wrist, pulling me into a run.

Before I knew it, even though the parking lot was right in front of us, we stopped beneath a parasol outside a café on the first floor of a nearby building.

The raindrops were so thick and fierce.

I’d clutched my jacket over us with one hand the entire frantic sprint, so my clothes hadn’t gotten any wetter, but water had pooled inside my shoes.

As I shook the rainwater from my face and hair, my gaze was unwittingly drawn elsewhere—and what I saw was entirely unexpected.

His face, sharp and flawless, illuminated perfectly by the single streetlamp nearby.

His wet hair glistened with moisture, and I found myself mesmerized, unable to look away.

When my eyes finally drifted lower, they caught on his soaked dress shirt. It clung transparently to the defined curves of his solid muscles, rainwater streaming down in rivulets.

This won’t do, I thought, quickly slipping off my jacket to offer it to him. He was staring off into the distance as if lost in thought.

“Mmph…”

The kiss came so suddenly, like the pouring rain itself, that I couldn’t even think to avoid it.

It was as if the alcohol had soaked not my blouse but my reason. I was drowning in it.

In the soft, overlapping heat.

In the moist yet persistent, rough expertise.

I accepted it completely, as though I had been waiting for this very moment.

The intense kiss poured over me with clear intent.

I couldn’t even tell anymore whether it was my lips swelling as they were helplessly sucked on, or my entire irregularly pounding heart.

Was it because of the increasingly potent smell of liquor rising from him?

The kiss had begun without warning, so deep and overwhelming that I grew endlessly dizzy.

All the while his hot tongue pushed between my lips, thoroughly exploring every inch of my mouth, I could only focus on steadying my weakening legs.

I was simply trying to regain balance in my rigid body, yet the tension gathering in my inner thighs seemed to concentrate in that secret place.

The moment I felt myself growing damp, then unmistakably wet, was when it happened.

“Ha. Fucking…”

His low, blurred voice fell against my ear as he pulled his lips from mine, and the heavy rain that had been hammering down faded as if it had never been there at all.

How long had the kiss lasted?

I barely managed to collect myself, still clutching the jacket I’d removed with both hands, and slowly lifted my eyelids—which had at some point squeezed shut.

“Take back the lips you arbitrarily left behind nine years ago.”

Ah, that kiss from back then.

If I claimed to have forgotten it, it would be a lie. The dizzying fullness of that moment surged over me once again.

The way my legs had clenched as I secretly pressed my trembling lips to the sleeping “young master’s” on the sofa. The electric thrill that had run between my pressed thighs, making that unknown deep place inside me twitch.

It had only been a few minutes, yet the long aftertaste of that solitary secret was no longer a secret.

The rain that had stopped so abruptly—just when resentment was welling up inside me—could not have felt more infuriating.

No. In truth, it wasn’t the innocent rain I resented. It was the man who had climbed into the car without so much as a backward glance, completely indifferent to the turmoil in my heart.

With a mind endlessly tangled, I focused on driving. I wanted to carve out the man named Kang Tae-yul, who had passed out cold from drink in the passenger seat.

If only I could—completely, without leaving a trace of dust behind. From my head, my chest, and even my body.

It had been a long time since he’d drunk enough to leave a hangover this stubborn, one that made his head throb.

Tae-yul furrowed his brows and kicked off the blanket, rising to shake away the hazy scenes floating through his mind.

The moment he stepped away from the bed, his stride felt uncomfortably restricted. No doubt because of the dissatisfied protest coming from his lower body.

He rubbed his slightly parted lower lip with the tips of his index and middle fingers. His eyes darkened.

Her lips had been surprisingly soft as they parted with those short, heated moans. Hot, too.

They had trembled like aspen leaves, and that quivering had traveled straight to his cock, making his whole body tense with raw power. The sensation came rushing back vividly.

At one point, all the blood in his body had surged downward, making his lower abdomen tight and painfully swollen.

Perhaps that was why Kang-seok’s words—spoken right when the alcohol had reached its peak—kept circling in his head.

“Hey, did I just see her? The girl you always call ‘Kkomaeng-i, Kkomaeng-i.’”

The words his friend Kang-seok had rattled off nonstop as they descended the stairs toward the kitchen echoed in his ears again.

“For real? She’s your grandfather’s second’s daughter?”

Tae-yul shook his head and quickly grabbed a bottle of cold water from the refrigerator, gulping it down.

“Anyway, is it true she looks that fucking hot? Well, even back then she made my mouth water.”

It seemed he still hadn’t shaken the habit of chasing anything in a skirt that he’d had since high school.

If only he had shut him up with a good smack to the head, he wouldn’t feel this sick to his stomach now.

“But from what I saw, it looked like she came because Kang Tae-yul called her.”

Along with the chaotic memories fueled by the information he’d gotten from Kang-seok—and the curiosity about what kind of scene he might encounter next.

In short, his mind hadn’t been sound. That short but fierce kiss had meant nothing in particular.

Dismissing the clearly pointless thoughts, he moved into the living room. There, the elegant and benevolent traces of his late mother caught his eye.

In the past, life in this house had been perfectly peaceful. At least until the gas leak accident that left only questions behind.

His mother had always sat in the space prepared on one side of the living room to paint. She said it brought her a different kind of inspiration than working at the gallery.

Everyone who saw her said she embodied what innate grace truly meant. That was exactly the kind of person his mother had been.

A virtuous wife, an outstanding mother, a flawless gallery director and artist without a single flaw.

He could still clearly picture her. No matter how absorbed she was in her painting when he came home, she would open her arms and run to embrace him.

It was twelve years ago. The day the painting she had labored over for thirty days was ruined. A landscape that looked like paradise itself.

Back then, the annoying little kid who followed him everywhere calling him “young master” had only just begun to look like a woman to him. He hadn’t realized it yet.

Not until she fearlessly heated his body on her own.

Not until she pulled that impudent stunt of claiming his heart with nothing but her lips.

That she would become an unbearably irritating presence.

And that it would last for a very, very long time.

He was realizing it all over again.

The three years of so-called discipline had been rendered utterly meaningless.

An Seol-hye. You shouldn’t have been in this house.

This is clearly a foul, isn’t it?

Since you threw the first foul, I have no choice.