CHAPTER 16

Taejun’s gaze fell to her thin tank top, to the curve of her br*asts. Minhee had the urge to cover her br*asts with her hands.

‘No, that’s even weirder, what should I do?’

Fortunately, it was dark enough that her entire body turning red wouldn’t be noticeable. She hunched her shoulders and crossed her arms in front of her chest as if not covering it, blocking his view.

As she bent over awkwardly to get off the bed, she bit her lip and pushed her hips back a little. Suddenly, her body tilted backward. Minhee closed her eyes tightly, and braced herself for the fall, unable to scream for fear of waking Rose, who had just drifted off to sleep.

“Hmph!”

However, something more embarrassing happened than falling off the bed onto the floor. As Minhee’s eyes widened and her breath caught in her throat.

Taejun’s lips parted slightly, letting out a silent sigh. His pupils fluttered like leaves in the wind. Seeing Minhee falling from the bed, his reflexes moved faster than his thoughts. With his long arms outstretched, Taejun grabbed Minhee’s as$.

Between his thick and long fingers, which supported Minhee’s weight, half-sprawled across the bed, a lump of flesh that was springy like jelly and soft like a marshmallow was sticking out.

Taejun was frozen in place, like a marble sculpture in a dynamic pose, his analytical mind working overtime to come up with a quick and effective excuse, a way out of this damned situation.

‘This could be considered s*xual harassment! But if never reached out Miss Minnie will fall, and Rose might wake up at the sound. However, I can’t keep holding onto Miss Minnie’s, um, forever.’

But the only thing that stuck in the mind of a supposed genius was the repetitive expletive.

‘F*ck’! F*ck’

He made a decision.

As soon as the muscles in his forearms bulged and the blood pounded in his veins, Minhee’s barely-supported body flipped onto the bed as if overturning a pancake. He quickly removed his grip on her *ss as if it were on fire. Pushing himself to his feet, he slid off the bed and quietly opened the door to escape.

In an instant, Minhee, who had fallen face-first onto the bed with her nose buried, couldn’t lift her head.

‘I wish the giant abyss would open its big mouth and swallow me whole.’

Taejun’s grip was so strong that her *ss tingled.

‘Why is it that I only make a mess, stumble, and make clumsy mistakes in front of Mr. Baek!’

Minhee couldn’t understand it all. Well, it felt somewhat uncomfortable, as if…

It was like when she was in high school and made embarrassing mistakes in front of her crush, Noah Brown and Noah would help her out, making her the b*tt of everyone’s jokes.

‘By now, Mr. Baek must have returned to his room, right?’

After a while of burying her nose in the bed in frustration, Minhee lifted her head. Carefully sliding off the bed, she gently closed the door of Rose’s room and turned around. Taejun’s n*ked upper body suddenly appeared in front of her.

‘Why…? Why is he still standing here?’

Minhee gasped as if she’d seen a ghost and covered her mouth with her hand.

“Miss Minnie, we need to talk.”

“What? What……?”

A desperate plea erupted in Minhee’s mind.

‘Please, please, please, please, don’t bring up about what happened earlier.’

With a stern expression, Taejun brushed aside his hair that had fallen

“I’m sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose……it was a mistake. Miss Minnie, I’ve been waiting to tell you this.”

“What, what is it…….?”

Minhee muttered with a voice barely louder than a mosquito.

‘Why can’t this man just let this embarrassing situation slide.’

Feeling her ears burning and her face getting hot, she lowered her head deeply.

“…I saw you were about to fall off the bed, and my hand reached out instinctively. I just want to make it clear that I absolutely did not grab it with any ulterior intention.”

“……I know very well, that you didn’t mean to do that at all. So you don’t have to apologize!”

The blood drained from Minhee’s face as she spat out her words, and her reddened face grew paler and paler.

‘I get it. There was no s*xual intention in that contact. But it hurts when your crush takes it seriously, denies it, and apologizes.”

Minhee lowered her head, looking sadly at her own attire.

‘Even wearing clothes like this, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t see me as a woman, lacking s*xual appeal. I know that well enough without emphasizing it! So, please stop scrutinizing me!’

Come to think of it, Luca had already warned her. Taejun was thoroughly annoyed by women who tried to appeal to him s*xually. Even if a beauty pageant winner undresses and dances in front of him, he won’t bat an eye.

It was embarrassing to realize that Taejun had saved her from nearly falling off the bed after she had exaggeratedly covered her chest in response to his accidental gaze.

‘What worth does my chest have in his eyes? I wish there was a wormhole under my feet that connected to my room and teleported me there without a trace.

Minhee’s heart sank at the thought.

“Okay, then. Good night.”

As Taejun left a night greeting with a grim expression, Minhee turned around, and her hair spread out like a fan before sinking down with a rustling sound. Watching Minhee’s retreating figure, Taejun nervously shook his head and let out a short sigh.

* * *

After turning off the light, Taejun laid down on his bed and tossed and turned his large body several times. Ever since he’d brought Rose home after hearing about his brother and sister-in-law’s accident, Rose had been waking up at dawn, crying for hours until she exhausted herself and fell asleep.

Whenever Taejun asked Rose, pale from her screams and sobs, she looked up at him with a tear-streaked face and cried even harder.

If he knew the reason why she was crying, he could try to find a solution, but not knowing how to console her, he just sat next to the crying child, drowned in a sense of powerless defeat.

 ‘She was having a nightmare, she was scared of the dark room, it was so obvious when you think about it, why didn’t I realize it?’

He recalled the sight of Miss Minnie comforting Rose, holding the child in her arms, placing her on her lap, and gently patting her back. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ Her whispered voice to Rose echoed in his mind.

They say most people forget what they dream about when they wake up, but Taejun’s brain vividly remembered the nightmares he’d had.

His father’s lifeless body with a deformed belly, swollen grotesquely due to revenge; the once yellowish skin turning a deep red.

Taejun was only thirteen when he found his father in bed, soiled with l*quid from a bottle and unidentifiable filth.  When he called his brother, who was at a New York university, and told him that their father wasn’t moving, his brother took a bus and arrived home the next afternoon.

Until his brother arrived, Taejun was left to fend for himself.

After the funeral and his brother’s return to school, Taejun moved to a foster home, then ran away from there and lived in a small room he managed to secure on his own. Every night, he was tormented by terrible nightmares.

His father’s corpse, the stench of ammonia that lingered heavily in the house, his consciousness floating in a vacuum, and the stark air —all vividly haunted his memories. When those images flooded his mind, he would shiver in his dark room until the sun came up.

‘If someone had been there to reassure me as I filled my mind with complex mathematical formulas to push away the fear until daylight…would I have become a different person?’

A dull ache around his chest area caught his attention.

‘This is a warning signal.’

Quickly pushing that image into some corner of his mind, he sat up abruptly and shook his head once to clear it. Slowly lying back down, he blinked at the ceiling, using it as a blackboard to solve Euler’s formulas and identities, which he liked.

Usually, reciting complex mathematical formulas at times like this helped clear his mind and bring calmness. But for some reason, it didn’t work today.

While recalling the sequence of fixing bugs in his quant program, Taejun’s stream of consciousness had shifted towards Shannon entropy and, before he knew it, towards the Black-Scholes equation while contemplating derivative product investments that currently occupied his mind.

Suddenly, a new image invaded his consciousness.

His lucid mind replayed the moment vividly and perfectly, without missing a single detail.

From the shoulder, curving slenderly into the waist, then rounded like a hill, the silhouette descending gently down the thigh. The soft curves of Miss Mini lying on the bed under dim light penetrated Taejun’s mind more quickly than a well-crafted beautiful mathematical formula.

A silhouette that curved from the shoulders to the waist and back again, rounded like a hill, and slid gently down the thighs. Under the dim light, Miss Minhee’s soft curves, lying on the bed, invaded his mind faster than a well-crafted beautiful mathematical formula.

Feeling Minhee’s curious gaze wander over his scarred upper body, Taejun’s attention was automatically drawn to her br*asts, which seemed to spill out of her thin tank top.

‘Would a woman who looks as flawless and soft as a white cream, without a single small scar, have been frightened by the grotesque scars on my body?’

The tantalizingly concealed neckline and the peak that was barely covered on top of the clothes stimulated Taejun’s imagination. As he slowly lowered his gaze, he caught a glimpse of a trim waist and navel through the short tank top and shorts, and beneath the shorts, which looked almost like an underwear already, he saw a pair of smooth thighs that looked like they would turn red at the lightest touch.

Then, without warning, his c*ck reacted, honestly and instinctively.

F*ck.