Deal Breaker - Chapter 88
He was still in the Director’s office. Even when she went in, he didn’t spare her a glance and kept staring at the monitor screen that didn’t seem to exist in her eyes.
“Why aren’t you leaving work?”
“I have a lot to do.”
“If you’d worked instead of flirting with your secretary during the day, you would’ve left ages ago.”
There was no reply. The mouse clicked rhythmically, brushing away the awkwardness piling up like dust. His visible attitude said go, but what she heard said don’t go.
Hyeji, who had been standing blankly by the door, walked over to the desk and perched herself beside Kanghyeon. Even then, he didn’t turn around and only looked at the opposite monitor. On the screen were materials for a meeting that wasn’t until next week.
“Did you eat dinner?”
The answer came only after about three clicks.
“Yes.”
“Today?”
“Yesterday.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. Hyeji pulled out her phone and opened the A-Mart app. It looked like the day had come to keep her promise to buy and grill top grade hanwoo beef.
She finished placing the order and lifted her head. Kanghyeon was still propping his chin with one hand, eyes fixed on the monitor. Even as the sun went down, the office remained dim, the lights still off. As she watched the man sitting there, absorbed in his work, a single line of sunset light slipped in between the dense forest of buildings outside and settled over his broad shoulders.
Bathed in the scattered glow of dusk, his eyes looked paler than usual as they drifted slowly along the text. Hyeji’s gaze slid down from Kanghyeon’s forehead to the bridge of his nose, his lips, and the line of his jaw.
He has a face that would really suit glasses. She shouldn’t be thinking this, but she almost found herself looking forward to the day presbyopia would come for him.
Come to think of it, she had thought the same thing the first time they met, that he had a face that would suit glasses.
His face now was just as cold as it had been that day, but there was a hint of dejection she hadn’t seen back then. When they first met, she had never imagined there would come a day when that intellectual yet decadent face would look cute to her. Or that her child would inherit that man’s nose.
“It’s your baby, Director.”
“Oh, really? I had no idea.”
Kanghyeon didn’t even look at her, just sniped back indifferently, then only after a long while did he narrow his eyes and glance sideways at her. His look asked what she was plotting, suddenly admitting it like that.
“I’m not marrying you.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I love you.”
Only then did his head turn her way. As if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard with his own ears, Kanghyeon’s eyes stared blankly into Hyeji’s. The longer their gazes met, the rigid line of his mouth slowly curved into a softer shape.
He leaned back in his chair and held out his hand. When she was pulled onto his lap, the faint smile on his face had fully bloomed.
It was a smile worth five billion won in opportunity cost.
“While you were figuring out your feelings and even sort them out, I failed to realize my own. If that’s my fault, then it’s my fault.”
It was only after seeing the blank check that Hyeji realized something. She didn’t fully know her own heart either.
When she found out she was pregnant, the reason she discarded the option of changing jobs was because Kanghyeon paid her the most. But even when someone appeared who would pay her more, changing jobs still didn’t appeal to her. And that was after she had already been fired.
When she first signed a contract with this man, the terms had been far worse than they were now, yet she had struggled to contain her excitement. Now, even hearing that the signing bonus alone could buy two Han River view apartments only left her amazed, not excited.
She must have grown too full in the meantime. Standing in front of five billion won, she was weighing things that should never have even crossed her mind. Saying she wanted to stay by Han Kanghyeon’s side even if she had to sell the Han River view apartment she had wanted so badly. Noh Hyeji, whose veins supposedly ran with greed rather than blood, was saying things like that.
In the end, it wasn’t money that kept Hyeji from leaving Kanghyeon.
“Do you really have no feelings for me at all?”
She hadn’t known the answer to her feelings for this man until now, and only found it when money was placed in front of her. Money illuminated the eyes of Noh Hyeji, who loved money.
Only now could she finally see it. Her greed for money had started from poverty and distrust. And yet she had been projecting her distrust of the roles of father and husband onto the man who had saved her from the pit of poverty.
She couldn’t expect him to heal all her wounds. This was pain Hyeji had to overcome on her own.
So instead of clinging to her distrust, Hyeji gathered the courage to try trusting this man.
“A daughter or a son?”
“A daughter.”
Hyeji turned on her phone and showed Kanghyeon the ultrasound photos and videos she had accumulated, one by one.
“The nose bridge looks like mine.”
“Right?”
“The lips look like the mother’s.”
“Do they? I didn’t notice.”
“What’s the nickname?”
“Baekeok.”
(Hundred billion)
“What kind of name is that. At least make it Baekjo.”
(Trillion)
The hand stroking her belly felt good. So did the kiss that landed beside her eye.
“She was conceived on the day of our first kiss, right?”
The words were spoken with no intention of being funny at all, yet Hyeji laughed. Long after their first time having s*x, they had their first kiss and ended up conceiving a child by accident. The order was completely messed up.
And calling what had been purely work back then their first kiss, with such tenderness, made her feel shy. Her heart felt ticklish too.
What had begun as a relationship between an Esper and a Guide had drifted into an unplanned port of call called lovers. And looking back on the time they had spent once they arrived there, things that had been purely professional began to sprout personal meaning.
“Should we rewrite the contract? This time we’ll take out all the toxic clauses.”
What had once been essential clauses had now become toxic ones.
“I’m actually on my way back after being offered a blank check as a signing bonus.”
As expected, Kanghyeon didn’t look surprised, as if he already knew she had met another Esper.
“If you offer better terms than that person, I’ll consider it.”
“Then on the blank check…”
In truth, there was only one thing Hyeji wanted, the single thing missing from the terms that person had offered.
“How about adding me on top?”
“Deal.”
A pair of smiling lips overlapped. And just like that, Hyeji sealed the verbal contract with a kiss, a contract where she was given the man she had said she wouldn’t take even if offered a blank check on top.
