I've Always Wanted You
The monsoon rain, which had turned fierce before he knew it, was relentlessly battering the windows.
The woman crossed the dimly lit reception room with light steps, the hem of her bright yellow dress fluttering like a butterfly’s wings. And without the slightest regard for Kang-hyun’s bewilderment, she naturally claimed the seat her father had vacated.
As the distance closed, a subtle yet bitter floral scent brushed his nose, mingled with the smell of rain-soaked earth. It was nothing like the heavy perfume he would have expected from her appearance.
But that unexpected quality did not last long.
“It’s been a while.”
Her red-painted lips curved with a wicked allure. Meeting her now more sharply defined eyes, Kang-hyun belatedly realized that the Baek Yeo-eun he had run into by chance last time had been bare-faced.
He had never been particularly sharp when it came to women’s makeup—something his mother and the women around him had often scolded him for. But this time, it was also because Baek Yeo-eun gave off an overall impression of extravagance.
Her features, filling every inch of skin as white and flawless as cold porcelain, were both striking and delicate. In particular, the contrast between the slightly upturned, prim corners of her eyes and her large, round pupils held a strange power that somehow seized the gaze and refused to let go.
He could suddenly understand why men lost their heads and threw themselves at her. She was a beauty of the sort that would leave most men helpless.
Most men, that is.
“You look flustered.”
While Kang-hyun still kept his mouth firmly shut, Yeo-eun once again drove away the silence. A faint smile of a victor’s superiority lingered at the corner of her lips, which had tilted ever so slightly.
“I won’t deny it.”
Kang-hyun saw no reason to protest. He had not the slightest desire to waste energy on pointless sparring.
“So then—is this absurd situation entirely your doing, Miss?”
He pressed her as if interrogating. Even with a man who made no effort to hide his hostility right in front of her, Yeo-eun’s smile did not fade.
“That’s right. I begged Father that I wanted to see you.”
Kang-hyun did not even manage a dry laugh.
A child throwing a tantrum for a toy would not have been more childish than this. Considering how young Baek Yeo-eun had once acted like a lonely outcast shunned by the entire world, it was almost laughable.
“Actually, I kept hanging around hoping we might run into each other again. But somehow after that, I couldn’t catch a glimpse of your face at all.”
To the woman who pouted and grumbled, Kang-hyun had nothing to say in return. That had been exactly what he intended.
After unexpectedly running into Baek Yeo-eun that day, he had taken repeated care to ensure such an unpleasant encounter never happened again. He had never imagined that would only end up provoking her instead.
“So I just went ahead and did it on impulse.”
The voice that chattered as if coaxing was remarkably innocent. To Kang-hyun, it was enough to make his head ache—no, enough to make him feel dizzy.
Did that woman have any idea? Why he had come back to Cheongbaekwon of his own free will. What intention had brought him to stand here now.
“For something done on impulse, Chairman Baek seems to have quite a distant future in mind.”
Kang-hyun pointed it out, pressing his fingertips firmly against his furrowed brow. The intent was for her to realize just how much trouble her childish words and actions had stirred up.
If Chairman Baek had been cunning for seizing the opportunity of a child’s careless words, the woman who had ended up with marriage talk out of nowhere—when all she had wanted was another look at a man’s face—was just as pathetic.
“Of course. I begged Father that hard.”
But the moment the woman tilted her head and said that, Kang-hyun realized he had been under some enormous misconception.
“…You begged him for marriage?”
“Yeah.”
The way she nodded so readily, as if wondering what the problem was, was already enough to leave him speechless—yet the woman began adding even more outrageous words.
“If possible, I want to do it as soon as we can. Skipping all the bothersome formalities wouldn’t be so bad either…”
Kang-hyun stared blankly at the woman who prattled on with the face of a girl lost in a dream.
He could not tell what fantasy she was trapped in. He did not want to know. He did not even feel the will to confirm whether she was speaking in earnest.
“Why?”
Instead, he asked that.
Even if she had a history of chasing after him in childhood, they had lived twelve long years without so much as exchanging greetings. And then they had seen each other’s faces just once, and only in passing at that.
Yet here she was, suddenly talking of marriage.
Setting aside how close the once-distant father and daughter had grown in the meantime, he simply could not follow a mindset that treated one of life’s most important matters as lightly as picking something out at a supermarket.
Was her mind still stuck twelve years in the past, contrary to her appearance? Or did she have some other scheme entirely?
“Why, you ask.”
The woman let out a short, scoffing laugh, as if he had asked something ridiculous.
“You already know.”
Know what?
But Kang-hyun could not ask that back. Her voice, murmuring as if singing, was endlessly light. In contrast, her eyes were sunk black like a well whose bottom could not be seen.
No matter how hard he looked, the murky black waterway within seemed as though he might truly know it after all…
“That I’ve always wanted to have you.”
But the moment Baek Yeo-eun’s mouth, which had paused briefly, moved again, the thoughts that had been digging into that gap were cut short.
Her eyes, hidden behind her lids and then revealed once more, were simply smooth like black go stones. They made him realize all too clearly that the sense of dissonance that had unsettled him until just now had been nothing more than a delusion.
“So this time, I’m really going to take you.”
Baek Yeo-eun’s red lips curved elegantly. It was the innocent and cruel smile of a child who had finally seized someone else’s toy in her own hands.
Kang-hyun’s gaze, which had been sharpened as if it might pierce through her true intentions at any moment, gradually dulled.
There was nothing new about it. Baek Yeo-eun, who stubbornly did as she pleased without caring about the other person’s intentions, was nothing unfamiliar to him.
There was no need to attach meaning to the last time she had pushed him away without mercy. It would have been nothing more and nothing less than the same trivial whim she always indulged.
“Well, you’ll need time to sort out your thoughts too.”
Having toyed with him to her heart’s content, Baek Yeo-eun suddenly changed her attitude and took a step back—as if she were being considerate of him.
But Kang-hyun knew. “Sorting out” presupposed that a decision had already been made.
With that being the case, her attitude of acting as though she were doing him a favor could not help but be laughable.
“I’ll be waiting. Just not too long.”
Leaving only her own words to the end, the woman drifted lightly away just as she had appeared, leaving behind the man who had no intention of seeing her off.
“Boss, are you very busy?”
At the sudden voice, Kang-hyun stopped the hands that had been tapping at the keyboard and sent his gaze toward the doorway.
When their eyes met, Jung-woo—who had been poking only his head through the crack of the door—playfully tugged up the corner of his mouth.
“Come in.”
Kang-hyun leaned his upper body back and stretched briefly as he spoke.
Once permission was given, Jung-woo carefully checked that the door was properly shut before heading to the small table set aside in the representative’s office.
Kang-hyun, who had been watching him in silence, also went and sat opposite Jung-woo.
“I didn’t see you in the office, so I thought you were out on business.”
“What am I supposed to do if even the boss can’t keep track of my schedule? How many employees do we even have?”
At a scolding that sounded like something a rich idle man who ran a company as a hobby might hear, Kang-hyun let out a half-hearted laugh. Come to think of it, it was not entirely wrong.
NS Consulting had only six people on staff. Since it had never been established with any particular vision or ambition, there had been no need to expand its scale. Settling into a shared office in Gangnam that could be cleaned up at any time was part of the same logic.
Most of the work fell to Kang-hyun anyway, and the rest of the staff mainly handled document work or data organization to assist him. Among them, Jung-woo served as his secretary.
One might wonder what kind of secretary a company representative with only six employees needed, but surprisingly, Jung-woo was proving quite useful to Kang-hyun—especially in matters unrelated to company business.
“About that Jung Seung-ho’s family you asked me to look into…”
At the name Jung-woo mentioned while even lowering his voice, Kang-hyun’s eyes sank darkly.
Jung Seung-ho.
A name he had lived as if he had forgotten forever, yet one he could never forget—and must never forget. Even when he did not call it to mind, it had continuously festered somewhere inside him.
He was the victim who had been killed by Tak Hyung-sub.