Deal Breaker - Chapter 85
The door opened. Hyeji went out in a daze, then turned back. Kanghyeon was standing with his back to her. The door closed just like that.
Hyeji couldn’t tear her eyes away from the afterimage left on the closed door.
She was the one who had been cut off, yet it looked as though that man was the one who had been severed.
Contract termination.
She had just heard the words she feared hearing the most, yet there was no particular shock. Maybe something else had hit her harder, so this didn’t even register as a blow. No, the fact that something else hurt more than this was itself shocking.
She went in to apologize and came out fired. Just an hour ago, he had promised there would be no dismissal and that he would still pay her full salary. This wasn’t resentment, it was just that the sheer speed of this turn of events was mind boggling.
That man, when he made up his mind in business or operations, pushed forward like a bulldozer. It seemed romance worked the same way for him. He pushed ahead without giving anyone time to breathe, charging forward relentlessly, and in that brief span Hyeji felt completely drained.
The first time, he crossed the line on his own and hurt her. This time, he crossed the line on his own and got hurt himself. Watching the man she had thought of as the adult holding the reins in this relationship get tossed around and lose his bearings felt strange.
“What did I do wrong?”
He hadn’t done anything wrong. This was entirely Hyeji’s problem. Why did he have to go and love a woman like her. A cliché line echoed in her head.
Hyeji simply wanted to go back to their old relationship, where they moved back and forth between familiarity and boundaries, maintaining an appropriate distance. She still didn’t know why she had to take such a dangerous gamble.
But Kanghyeon said he hated their old relationship. He said he wanted to take that dangerous gamble. He didn’t see it as dangerous at all. There was no point of compromise.
As she let out a deep sigh, the door to the Director’s office opened. Hyeji pressed her lips together and forced the corners upward. She exchanged a nod with the woman who came out of the office and headed outside, and the woman nodded back. Her expression wasn’t as confident as when she had gone in for the Guide interview.
Whatever. It would work out somehow. If they told her to leave, she would leave. It wasn’t like she had nowhere else to go.
The day after the contract was terminated, Kanghyeon went to the Center and received a new matching. It was his first time in seven years.
Over the next ten days, interviewees came and went from the Director’s office. Some Guides stole curious glances at Hyeji, while others acted like concubines who had shoved aside the queen.
Last week, she got a call from Kim Yewoon, a training classmate, for the first time in six years. Yewoon suggested getting a meal together, so Hyeji told her that if she had stayed out of contact and was now calling to ask a favor, it would be shameless, and since it would be a waste of time for both of them, she should just send a chicken gifticon and state her business. Sure enough, it was a favor.
She said she had received a contact-type guide matching at the Center, and her match rate with Han Kanghyeon came out to 30.17%. It barely cleared the standard, by about as much as stray breading flakes.
In any case, she met the criteria, but she heard he was looking for a new Guide and yet no call came. Of course there was no call. That man was looking for a radiative Guide, not a contact-type one.
Anyway, since the chicken was good, Hyeji brought Yewoon’s resume to the Director’s office. Kanghyeon glared at her as if asking whether she was joking, then fed the resume straight into the shredder.
It seemed that man was just running a jealousy campaign.
So was the firing a retreat for the sake of a leap forward after all?
For the first few days he kept his distance, but lately he had started hovering around and striking up conversations. Today too, as soon as an interviewee left, he came over to Hyeji’s desk, perched on it, and asked,
“A daughter or a son?”
“You won’t know until it’s born.”
“You’re cruel, Noh Hyeji. No, still, I love you. Is this what they call love and hate two sides of the same coin?”
He’d been like that ever since the day she brought him the yanggaeng her grandmother had made. Maybe she shouldn’t have given it to him.
She had wanted to see whether he would return to being the old Han Kanghyeon if she kept her distance for a few days, but she couldn’t stand the awkward atmosphere and ended up giving it to him. In the end, she was the one who lit the fire.
It also made her uncomfortable how he smiled like someone completely healed after being hurt by her, just from a single piece of yanggaeng. She hammered at the keyboard as if she might break it, refusing to look away from the monitor, when a heart shaped box blocked her view. What Kanghyeon had placed in front of her keyboard was an expensive looking box of chocolates.
