“Yunjoo, you’re about to see the best Hong Kong has to offer at night. The Symphony of Lights—a light show listed in the Guinness World Records where thirty-two buildings simultaneously light up with lasers, lights, and neon signs in a choreographed display. It makes you feel like the skyscrapers are dancing.”

As Kangwook explained, a gasp escaped Yunjoo’s lips. Lights of indescribable beauty embroidered the night, draping it in fantastical color. With every burst of light before her eyes, even more lights were kindling inside her heart.

Kangwook watched Yunjoo sitting there with her mouth open, completely spellbound. The natural colors of light reflected in her eyes were more beautiful to him. To Kangwook, the only thing visible was every light reflected in the eyes of the woman before him, not the show unfolding outside. The night was full of light.

“Cha Yunjoo.”

At the low sound of Kangwook’s voice, her eyes, still full of light, turned toward him.

“Yes.”

“I have something to say to you.”

“What is it?”

She had been so absorbed in the show outside that she hadn’t noticed, but now she could see that Kangwook’s eyes and voice had shifted into something she couldn’t put into words. Unease crept into Yunjoo’s gaze, though she didn’t know why.

“Listen carefully to what I’m about to say. I have taken you into my heart, Cha Yunjoo.”

“……What do you……?”

She didn’t understand. With a blank expression, Yunjoo tried to make sense of his words. He said he had taken something—what was he saying?

“Yunjoo.”

“Mr. Kangwook, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understood what you just said.”

“No, looking at your face, you understood perfectly. Don’t cut me off, hear me out to the end. I have fallen in love with a woman who is not the obedient wife I lived with for three years. A woman who isn’t prim and proper, who sprawls wherever she pleases, drinks makgeolli without a second thought, swings a hammer as well as any man, and carries so much pain and so many tears. At first I was thrown off and tried to push the feeling away, but now it only lets me see you, and I can’t do anything about my own heart. I know this is shocking and hard to believe, but I want you to stay by my side and watch me. I’ll let you do anything. Whatever Cha Yunjoo wants to do, I’ll support it. Just do it somewhere I can see you. I’m asking you to give me a chance.”

None of it made any sense to her. What Kangwook was saying was clearly Korean, so why couldn’t she make sense of it? Yunjoo’s eyes stayed fixed on Kangwook, unable to look away. It was something that couldn’t be, a confession she couldn’t believe.

“I can’t believe this is real. Why would you do this for someone like me of all people…… I will never go back to being the obedient person I used to be, and I will never give up my dream.”

“Do it. You can do all of it. I’m not asking you to feel the same way I do from the start. Let’s go back to the day we first met and start from the beginning, from dating. And I think I mentioned this once before, stop saying ‘someone like me.’ Cha Yunjoo is the one and only woman in the entire world who made Choi Kangwook confess his feelings for the first time.”

“Mr. Kangwook.”

What is this, what is it, why is my heart pounding? She couldn’t believe it, and yet her heart was racing.

“If you refuse this too, I’m going to say I will never give you the divorce. And you know that if I say I won’t, you absolutely cannot get divorced.”

Kangwook could see Yunjoo’s eyes wavering with alarm, and he played the card he was best at—threats—and laid it on the table as a condition for negotiation.

“How can you be so unreasonable?”

“I’ll make more lights sparkle in Cha Yunjoo’s heart than all the lights that lit up this place.”

The night view had already disappeared from Yunjoo’s eyes. The man before her made her forget even Hong Kong. When she first laid eyes on Kangwook, she had allowed herself a faint, hopeful dream. It hadn’t taken long to understand that he didn’t see her as a woman at all. The devastation of that still left a cold ache in her chest even now. And yet she didn’t know how to receive what this man was now saying to her.

‘What is this person saying to me? Why? Did Choi Kangwook really just confess to me, to me?’

She stared at him in disbelief, and the eyes that met hers were shouting that this was no lie. His gaze, meeting hers, held only her inside it.

“Cha Yunjoo, be mine, the only one in the world. I’ll be the best man for you.”

A hot tongue took in her slightly parted lips, which had fallen open in surprise, and swept through her as though drinking her in completely. Kangwook’s tongue, hot and soft and pulling her close, sent small bursts of sparks going off inside Yunjoo’s mind.

While Yunjoo’s mind was exploding, Kangwook was drinking in every bit of her, maddeningly sweet. He couldn’t let go of this wife who had become a woman who drove him out of his mind, made his heart race wildly, with nothing more than a kiss. Kangwook was consuming her as though determined to have all of her, when a warning light went off in his mind at the achingly sweet fragrance spreading from her.

‘I have to stop here.’

Stopping was the last thing Kangwook wanted, and even after lifting his lips away, the lingering want made him press two quick kisses more before he waited for the dazed Yunjoo to come back to herself. Yunjoo’s flushed face met his eyes, and Kangwook pulled her fully into his arms.

“You’re mine now. Cha Yunjoo, I’ll make you soar from within my arms.”

* * *

Yunjoo and Kangwook returned from their dreamlike trip to Hong Kong and became a couple, beginning something called dating. The fact that they were a married couple who had lived together for three years didn’t make it any different from anyone else. Between the two of them, there was a flutter that felt like the very first time.

Even after receiving Kangwook’s confession, Yunjoo hadn’t been able to give him any answer. Kangwook was too vast a presence to simply step toward, and she couldn’t let go of her dream either. She had lived through her marriage with one thing in her heart—the desire to study abroad. Folding that away in an instant and falling into a man’s arms was too much to ask when the longing had been so desperate.

Seeing her like that, Kangwook persuaded her by saying it was fine if she didn’t come to him right away—she only needed to stand where she was and watch him come to her. It made her heart tremble, and the flutter this man was sending her way felt good. How could she possibly dislike it?

He went back and forth between coaxing and threatening, saying he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want, and that taking someone into his heart was a first for him too, so she had to give him a chance. That felt good too. Kangwook wasn’t forcing an answer from her, and Yunjoo told him, with an uncertain face, to please wait.

Kangwook decided to start from just that. The fact that she hadn’t refused was enough for him to wait. He had put everything on the line, so even a refusal wouldn’t have been the end. Yunjoo didn’t know it yet, but Kangwook was not a man who ever gave up on something he had set his mind to.

A man this thorough in his work, with someone in his heart for the very first time—he was not the kind of man who would ever let her go. Yunjoo still didn’t know what her own feelings were, or why she should be at Kangwook’s side. She started to tremble whenever she saw him, and when he spoke, the whole world seemed to come down in light, but she couldn’t find the courage. So instead of her own unclear feelings, she decided to move forward by watching only his.

To Kangwook, women had never been people he needed to think about or look after. They had always been people who adjusted to him on their own, where both meeting and parting ended with a single word from him. Or rather, he had never dated at all.

He had thought it a waste of emotion and a waste of time. He had told himself there wasn’t even enough time to focus on work, so living like that was beneath him. He hadn’t known that Yunjoo had been burrowing into his heart over the three years they had lived together. And then when she said she was leaving, his heart lurched.

So now he had no choice but to look to Yunjoo first, to consider her, to read her and adjust to her. Yunjoo’s feelings weren’t the same as his, and she hadn’t given him any clear answer yet, so all she could say was that she wouldn’t run away and would try walking this path with him.

Kangwook was simply happy. He would sit in a daze and smile to himself, or drift off into his own thoughts in the middle of a meeting, the corners of his lips curling up. The people around him were starting to look at him with puzzled eyes. Team Leader Moon walked in with a report but just stood there staring at Kangwook instead of delivering it.

“Sir.”

“What? Go ahead with the report.”

“Are you feeling unwell?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look quite unwell. You should see a doctor.”

“Enough. Leave that and get out.”