Chapter 19

After crying for a long time, Soyoon roughly wiped away her tears with her arm. Her phone had been ringing continuously inside her pocket.

Even without looking, she felt like she knew who it was, so she could not bring herself to answer.

Since the rain was coming down so hard, she first took shelter in a commercial building. When she checked her phone after it had gone quiet, as expected, there were several calls from him. And there were also a call and a text from Seohyeon.

〈I fought with my boyfriend, so the trip fell through. Call me.〉

She immediately called Seohyeon back.

-Hello?

“……Seohyeon.”

-Did something happen?

“Can I come to your place right now?”

She needed a place where she could cry without caring about anything. Because Seohyeon was not the kind of person who would force her to say what she did not want to say. And she wanted to hide somewhere he would never think of.

At Seohyeon’s words telling her to come right away, she got into a taxi. She could hear the taxi driver grumbling that the seat would be ruined because of her wet clothes. She pretended not to hear and stared out the window. Then she contacted the department head at the hospital. When she said she was not feeling well and thought she needed to rest, the department head told her to use next month’s day off in advance, get plenty of rest, and see him tomorrow.

No matter how sick she had been, she had never once missed work, but today she really did not want to do anything. Even if she had to lie.

After getting out in front of Seohyeon’s house, Soyoon took out all the cash she had on her and handed it to the taxi driver.

Then she went into the building in the rain. Perhaps because Seohyeon had spoken beforehand, no one stopped her at the front.

“What happened to you? You’re completely soaked from the rain!”

“Seohyeon……”

“Did you start enjoying getting rained on?”

She spoke in a gruff tone, but she could not hide her worried expression. When she saw Soyoon’s swollen eyes, instead of asking questions, Seohyeon hugged her tightly without caring whether her own clothes got wet or not, and wrapped in that embrace, Soyoon could not say a word.

Soyoon’s shoulders trembled faintly. Hot tears soaked her cheeks and dripped down.

Even in the worst situations, she did not think she had ever felt this drained. Why did this feel so hard? What she had done to her mother today, she regretted it so much.

Soyoon’s sobs gradually grew louder.

Seohyeon did not say a single thing, only patted her back until the crying stopped. That made it even more comforting. If she asked what had happened, there was nothing Soyoon could say. She did not even want to talk about how hard things were.

“Are you done crying?”

“…Yeah.”

“You’re going to catch a cold. Go wash up first.”

“Thank you.”

“Why are you thanking me?”

When she went into the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror, she let out a laugh. She had cried so much that her eyes were swollen enough to make them hard to open, and her nose was red like Rudolph’s. She had held back her tears so hard in front of her mother that her lips had gone dry and crusted over.

Whew.

She took a deep breath. After crying her heart out, she felt somewhat calmer.

After washing in warm water, she grew drowsy, and her eyelids kept drooping shut.

When she opened the bathroom door, she saw the underwear and pajamas Seohyeon had brought and set out for her. Without saying anything, she picked them up. She wondered when Seohyeon had gone and bought more underwear, because it fit her perfectly.

The pajamas were made of silk, and when she put them on, the texture was soft and pleasant.

When she came out of the bathroom, Seohyeon was in the kitchen.

“You done washing?”

“Yeah.”

“I put your clothes in the dryer.”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

“Stop saying thank you all the time, okay? Come on. Let’s eat.”

So when Seohyeon had said she was doing something in the kitchen, she must have been cooking.

“Oh! Your phone kept ringing. Isn’t it something urgent?”

“That’s right……”

“I put it on the coffee table.”

Cha Do-ha.

When she looked at the phone, there were as many as seven missed calls. For a moment she worried whether Seohyeon might have seen the screen, but Seohyeon was not the type to look at other people’s things in secret. She was a friend who valued privacy a great deal.

Soyoon pressed the power button and turned the phone off.

He would probably be worried. About what had happened, why she was at Seohyeon’s house, and why her eyes were swollen. It was a bit difficult to explain.

Maybe this was pride, but…… still, she did not want him to know. She did not want him to learn of this pitiful side of her.

“So you really learned how to cook? This is amazing.”

“Really? This older sister showed off a little skill. Come on, sit down.”

This was not food casually learned from the internet or by watching over her mother’s shoulder. Cha Seohyeon had made food that looked like the kind she had only seen on television.

“It’s too nice to eat. When did you make all this?”

“It’s the kind of thing you can do as long as you have the ingredients.”

Saying she really did not know whether she could even bring herself to eat it, because it seemed such a waste just like the saying went, and unable to touch it, Soyoon only sat there, and Seohyeon lifted her brows and told her to eat well and then have a drink together.

The bright yellow rolled omelet, on a completely different level from the one Soyoon made herself, melted the moment it entered her mouth. And the stir-fried vegetables were the same. The steak, which was far too good to be eaten somewhere between breakfast and lunch, had been cut into small pieces, making it easy to eat in one bite.

“Don’t leave anything. If you do, I’ll get mad.”

Did the members of the Cha family have some ghost from a previous life haunting them because they had failed to feed her? Watching Seohyeon say the exact same thing Cha Do-ha did, Soyoon laughed in disbelief.

“Why are you laughing?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just so delicious. I’ll finish it all and not leave anything.”

Seeing Seohyeon rest her chin on her hand and watch with satisfaction as she ate without leaving even a single grain of rice, Soyoon smiled so broadly that the corners of her eyes curved.

“That’s a smile you make because you know your smile is pretty, isn’t it?”

“You like it when I smile.”

“That’s true, so I can’t even argue. If you’re done eating, let’s have a drink.”

She nodded. She had not felt like drinking at all, but from the moment Seohyeon suggested they have a drink, a thirst had stirred in her. She wanted to drink something strong, pass out, and sleep.

She had tried to do the dishes herself, but when Seohyeon ordered her to go sit in the living room and not lift a finger, Soyoon sat on the sofa and turned her gaze to the window outside, where the rain was still pouring down. It was really raining hard.

She had forgotten about it, but her leg was throbbing. She thought about taking a painkiller, but decided to endure it since drinking would probably ease the pain too. The silk pajamas felt so soft and pleasant that she kept touching them.

She leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes.

She could not hear the sound of rain outside at all, and instead only faintly heard the sound of running water and dishes clinking together as Seohyeon washed up. Her eyelids kept growing heavy.

How much time had passed? She opened her eyes at the cautious touch of a hand gently shaking her shoulder.

“Are you tired?”

Ah, she must have dozed off for a moment.

“No. I’m okay.”

For a moment, she almost called her Cha Do-ha. She had thought the two of them did not look alike, but in that instant Seohyeon had looked so similar that her sleepiness vanished all at once.

She had decided not to think about him while she was here, so why did she keep thinking of him? Maybe it was because she was with his younger sister. Had it been a mistake to come here?

A sigh escaped her.

“We just ate, so let’s keep the snacks light.”

“Okay. I’m full.”

Rubbing her eyes, she looked at the table and saw that somehow Seohyeon had already set out beer, soju, and snacks. And despite saying they would keep it light, there was a wide variety of things, from fruit to crackers to sausages.