“We’re going to be late at this rate. Let’s hurry.”

Jungwook checked his watch and urged them along. The staff came back in and got to work quickly. The delay had been unavoidable, but they had arrived at the salon with time to spare, so they still made it to the set without being late.

The security at the shoot was noticeably tighter, as though to demonstrate they would not make the same mistake twice.

Though perhaps because of that, the atmosphere was subdued and somber.

ChaVita was Cha Foods’ flagship vitamin drink, and the brief had called for the bright, lively energy that was uniquely Yoo Hari’s to carry the commercial.

With that in mind, Hari pushed the morning’s fear aside and focused only on the warmth of being held in Jisang’s arms, carrying that feeling into each take.

The way she lifted the entire mood of the set with her beaming smile drew admiration from the staff around her.

When she came out in the last outfit, a tracksuit, stylist Yeonji pressed a straw into the water bottle and offered it to her.

“I’m okay.”

She must have assumed Hari was thirsty. But Hari waved the bottle away, and Yeonji tied her hair back and asked.

“Unnie. Aren’t you thirsty?”

“No.”

Her mouth was completely parched, honestly, but she wanted to avoid any situation that would require a bathroom trip.

Thanks to that, the shoot wrapped without incident.

Back home, the moment she finished her shower, Hari opened the fridge and went straight for a cold can of beer.

She was in such a hurry that she hadn’t even dried her hair, just wrapped a towel around it. After holding out through the entire shoot, the thirst was that desperate.

At that moment, Jisang appeared from somewhere and took the can from her.

He looked as though he had just showered too. His hair, slightly damp and falling naturally, gave him a softer quality that was quite different from his usual sharp impression.

“Are you having some?”

He answered with a nod.

Hari immediately reached in for another, and in the meantime Jisang opened the can and held it out to her. He had been a little too hasty, though, and white foam began to well up and spill over the rim.

“Oh no.”

Flustered, Hari leaned forward in a flurry and pressed her lips to the top of the can he was holding. The movement was so sudden and ungainly that the towel wrapped around her head slowly unraveled and slipped off.

The towel dropped to the floor and a rich shampoo scent spread through the air instantly. A few strands of her hair fell across the foam.

“You really should be more careful.”

Hari scolded him without noticing that her own lips were covered in white foam.

Who was the one who shook the can in the first place? Jisang laughed despite himself.

He rubbed his thumb across her lips, wiping away the foam that had transferred there, then tucked the strands of hair flying around her face behind her ear.

His unhesitating touch made Hari go completely rigid.

She retreated to the coffee table in the living room as though fleeing, and Jisang transferred some roasted nuts onto a small plate and followed, sitting down beside her.

He could have just eaten them straight from the bag, but he went to the trouble of using a plate. Hari was the type who tried to minimize dishes as much as possible, so she couldn’t understand this kind of effort.

She looked back and forth between the plate and his face with a baffled expression, and Jisang asked, looking faintly amused.

“Something wrong?”

Hari answered quickly.

“Nothing wrong. I was just thinking you look good.”

“Unnecessary.”

He dismissed the idle comment with a light frown and swallowed his beer. His throat moved each time he swallowed, and Hari couldn’t look away from it.

The moment their eyes met, she pretended she hadn’t been looking and drank her beer in a rush.

This time he was the one who didn’t look away from her lips as she drank.

Both of them were aware of the other’s awareness, and both of them kept pretending otherwise.

“Want another?”

He gave a light nod at her offer, and before she could get up he was already on his feet, getting one himself.

He opened it and handed it to her, then asked quietly.

“Feeling better?”

“Yes. Thanks to you.”

“Watching you today, I thought you’ve grown up a lot.”

Hari blinked in surprise.

“What……?”

“Anyone would have understood if you’d used fear as an excuse to lie down and refuse to work. Pushing through that level of dread and showing up the way you did isn’t something just anyone can do.”

Jisang stroked the back of her head and smiled slowly.

“I find myself wondering when you grew up like this. You were such a bold little twenty-year-old.”

A current ran from the place his hand rested on her head all the way down her back, and Hari drew her shoulders in.

She had always assumed this man still saw her as a child, which made the praise land somewhere deep and aching.

Hari lifted her beer to hide her expression. But her lips, pressed against the rim of the can, kept twitching in a way she couldn’t quite control.

Jisang laughed openly, the way he sometimes did, without bothering to hide it.

The quiet of the night they shared together ripened warmly once again.

* * *

Hari came out to the living room pressing a hand against her burning forehead.

Maybe it was from sleeping with the window open the night before. She felt the beginnings of a body ache. She had been pushing herself hard for the past few days catching up on postponed schedules, so falling ill out of nowhere wasn’t entirely surprising.

Jisang was sitting on the living room sofa reading a paper newspaper, a rare sight these days, and looked up to greet her.

“Sleep well?”

Hari gave a small nod and pulled a bottle of water from the fridge, drinking it in long gulps. She had hoped the cold water might help, but it only added a rattling, throbbing pain to her head.

“Are you not feeling well?”

“Just a little headache. I’m fine.”

She had been about to go back to her room with a hand pressed to her forehead, but she didn’t even make it that far and collapsed onto the living room sofa.

“That doesn’t look like a little headache.”

“Do you have any painkillers?”

“Hold on.”

Jisang insisted she shouldn’t take anything on an empty stomach and went straight out to buy porridge. Hari managed a few spoonfuls of what he fed her and took the medicine, but there was little improvement.

Even so, she insisted on going ahead with her schedule.

“Hari. Are you sure you’re up to this? Should we just push it back?”

“I leave the country in three days. How am I supposed to push it back?”

Jungwook had come to pick her up and tried more than once to talk her out of it after seeing her condition, but it was no use.

“It’s just trying on clothes. What reason do I have to skip it. Let’s go.”

She needed to be fitted for the dress she would wear to an awards ceremony scheduled roughly three weeks out, and in three days she was heading to Koh Samui in Thailand for a photo shoot, so she also needed to try on the outfits for that in advance.

It was literally just a fitting, something that could have been postponed if she’d wanted to, yet Hari’s sense of responsibility was needlessly immovable.

She dragged her heavy body into the magazine’s wardrobe room, and Yeonji, who had arrived early and was waiting, immediately read the situation.

“Unnie, are you not feeling well? You look pale.”

“I’m not okay, so let’s get through this quickly. What do I start with?”

“Oh. Then……”

Yeonji exchanged a silent look with the editor beside her and decided to do the photo shoot fitting first.

The plan was to get the photo shoot team out first, since the dress fitting could be done with just the two of them.

“I’ll wait by the door.”

Jisang and Jungwook stepped out of the wardrobe room naturally.

The concept for the upcoming photo shoot was ‘a holiday with your first love,’ featuring layered looks of bikinis with dresses or robes to showcase a ‘vacation romance fashion.’ Originally the shoot had included solo bikini shots, but the agency had stipulated no excessive skin exposure to stay true to Hari’s ‘Nation’s First Love’ image, so those were cut. For the conservative Hari, that was very welcome news.