“Alright. Go wait outside. I’ll make you some tea. Since it’s nighttime, I’ll prepare chamomile.”

She said she would quickly make tea and tried to usher Kangwook out of the kitchen. Having him this close was uncomfortable, and she wanted to escape this strange, unfamiliar tension she was feeling for the first time.

“You said you’d teach me too.”

“Forget it, go wait outside. I wonder if the great Choi Kangwook would ever do something himself.”

“Cha Yunjoo.”

“…….”

“You can’t even follow through.”

“What do you mean I can’t, I can’t do what!”

Yunjoo had turned her back to him as she headed toward the cabinet where she kept the tea, but when she spun around at Kangwook’s words, he had moved close enough that their faces nearly touched.

Oh my! She found herself staring straight into a pair of dark eyes cutting directly toward her from a distance close enough to feel his breath, and she froze, her eyes wide with surprise, blinking a few times without moving. Her gaze soon darted around in a fluster. Kangwook smiled faintly without closing the distance between them. She wasn’t used to a man’s silent smile, and something felt strange in her chest.

“Aren’t you going to give me the tea?”

“…….”

“Cha Yunjoo, get a hold of yourself. I know I’m pretty good-looking, but.”

“Oh, please. Move. I need space to give you the tea.”

He swallowed the laughter that threatened to burst out as he watched her hastily push him aside and turn away, then walked out to the living room.

Yunjoo had never looked at Kangwook from such close range before. Her startled heart still hadn’t settled. A small, inexplicable tremor passed through her. And the dangerous scent Kangwook carried burned itself into her memory.

He quickly wiped away the smile that had caught on his face. What was so funny about this ridiculous situation. He sat in the living room and thought about the woman he had felt at that almost-touching distance. It was dangerous. He hadn’t shown it, but he began to think that perhaps he had been trembling more than she was. Had he ever felt this way looking at a woman before. A deep shadow fell across the man’s low, sunken expression, and that shadow existed because of the woman named Cha Yunjoo.

‘What am I supposed to do about Cha Yunjoo?’

He wasn’t even certain himself what his feelings were, so he couldn’t let the woman catch on. If Yunjoo found out before he had the time to approach her with any certainty, she would probably walk out of the house. Kangwook thought that Yunjoo was a harder problem than anything else he had ever faced.

* * *

Starting the next day, Yunjoo resumed her daily life with a face that showed nothing had happened. Nothing like that day could ever happen again. She was more careful, avoided overlapping with him as much as possible, and got along fine.

There were days she saw Kangwook and days she didn’t, but she found it oddly surprising that he came home without fail. There had been quite a few times before when he would use a nearby hotel if work ran long or meetings stretched late, so the Kangwook of these days felt strange and hard to adjust to for Yunjoo.

Several days had passed since he had last seen her after coming home. Yunjoo hadn’t come down from the second floor in days. She had shut herself in the studio to work on designs, so the days without seeing Yunjoo continued for Kangwook as well. Yunjoo’s work demanded precision.

First she had to create CAD drawings, calculate things over and over, and work with thorough care. It was a job that also involved 3D work on the computer, so she had to keep her nerves pulled tight the whole time. Otherwise, when it came time to physically set up the stage, she would have to do extra sawing, which meant more work.

Yunjoo had plenty of experience with this kind of work and knew how grueling it could be, so whenever she was in the middle of it she reduced her movement and stayed focused, which meant she often forgot to eat. Working on something she hadn’t touched in a long while made Yunjoo feel alive. Looking at the complex, interlocking drawings excited her, and when her blueprints came together in three dimensions, the thrill was electric.

Either way, she was glad to have a space where she could comfortably do the work she wanted, and a place to work at all. Before the marriage, she had used the studio under the pretense of painting, and staying overnight had been out of the question, so no matter how important the work was, there had been many days she had to cut it short and go home. Back then, Yunjoo’s one wish had been to work on her art to her heart’s content.

CAD drafting alone routinely took more than two weeks. She finally pulled her hands away from the work she had barely managed to pause, stood up, stretched her body with a strange grunt, and twisted around, only to lock eyes with Kangwook. In that instant, Yunjoo was so startled she froze with her mouth open, stuck in the contorted position she had been twisting into.

“……!”

Even as he watched her startled reaction, Kangwook had no intention of moving. If anything, he seemed to find it amusing and let out a small laugh.

“What are you, what are you doing here? Why are you here?”

“Close your mouth.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, why are you looking at someone’s insides without permission? Why are you here without making a sound?”

She had no idea what she was saying. She was just throwing words out as they came. But to Kangwook’s eyes, Yunjoo like this looked endearing. In Kangwook’s world, women fell into two categories: women he wanted to sleep with and women he didn’t. A new species had appeared.

“You hadn’t moved in days and there were no signs of food downstairs, so I came to check if you were dead.”

“I can’t die, it would be too unfair. If I die now I’d be a spinster ghost, and I really don’t like the hair or the outfit.”

“The state of you…… when did you last wash your hair?”

She wasn’t even surprised by what Kangwook said with a furrowed brow. She naturally touched her own hair and tried to think. She had survived on scraps of bread, water, and milk, but as for washing…… she couldn’t remember that herself.

‘D*mn!’

There wasn’t anything particularly to hide, but it wasn’t a state she wanted to be seen in either. The slight crease in her forehead smoothed out shortly after.

“I tend to get like this when I’m working.”

“Really…… Cha Yunjoo, you’re something else.”

“This is me too. So what? You’ve confirmed I’m not dead, so why don’t you head back down?”

He had said he came to check if she was dead and then said she was something else, so she had no choice but to fire back. She thought, who asked him to worry, that he had come all the way up here just to say things that turned her stomach.

“Come down after you wash up.”

“I want to sleep. I don’t know what it is, but do it another day, not today.”

What stopped Yunjoo, who was making no effort to hide how much of a nuisance she found all of this and acting indifferently, was Kangwook’s next words.

“Eat first, then sleep. I’m not stopping you from sleeping. Come down.”

At Kangwook’s words, she wondered for a moment if she had heard wrong. He hadn’t eaten anything strange, so why was he acting like this? His unfamiliar behavior left Yunjoo confused.

‘Why is that man acting like this.’

Yunjoo muttered to herself as she watched Kangwook descend the stairs, then went into the bathroom. Even if he had already seen her state, she couldn’t just go downstairs knowing what she must look like. But the reflection in the mirror was beyond what she had imagined.

“I’m not even human. He must have completely lost any fondness for me.”

She stopped mid-sentence, having said without realizing it that Kangwook must have lost whatever fondness he had for her. Well, were they even at a stage where there was fondness to lose or not lose? But she couldn’t figure out what Kangwook’s intentions were.

In truth, Kangwook had gone up to the second floor at least once each day while Yunjoo hadn’t come down. From the first day, when he had simply stood and watched the woman concentrating in her studio, finding her unfamiliar, and then gone back down, he had watched Yunjoo as she worked, then turned away. 

The next day, he had stared at her in the same disheveled state as the day before, finding it curious. It went on like that, and one day, in the midst of watching her, he came to realize something.

He had seen it on the day he had intended to drag her downstairs after figuring out that the small woman was neglecting both food and sleep. He watched her eyes, full of joy and happiness, shimmering as they moved, and felt a pang in his chest. Startled by his own unfamiliar reaction, he had come back down and hadn’t slept a wink that night.

He had spent the night wide awake thinking about it, and if it was a feeling he still couldn’t understand after all that, he decided to stop thinking about it and let it run its course. He concluded that he would understand it once he reached the end. It had felt like he couldn’t leave it until today, so he had left work a little early.

When it came to work, he was someone people called an addict, a workaholic. But eating while working was still working. The thought of dragging Yunjoo out and getting some food into her was what had led him to order a custom hotel bento and bring it in, and he found himself both unfamiliar and a little ridiculous for it.

‘Choi Kangwook, what are you doing? What’s that thing you’re carrying around?’

And then, on the second floor, the sight of Yunjoo that greeted him had left him briefly speechless. Her appearance after days without washing was already a disaster, but the strange noise and the contorted pose she was twisting herself into made it more surprising that he hadn’t recoiled than the fact that he had.