Chapter 2

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Translator: Harry Potta
Chapter: 2
Chapter Title: Your Thoughts
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In a hotel café on a weekday afternoon, the brilliant sunlight stayed beyond the windows, unable to penetrate the interior. The lighting, softer than the summer glare outside, combined with dark mahogany furniture and monochrome fabrics to give the spacious interior a comfortable feel.

That comfort was shattered by the arrival of a single man. His Italian leather shoes clicked against the marble floor. His heavy footsteps echoed through the high-ceilinged space.

The eyes of the patrons, who had been chatting idly, followed the man as he strode between the tables.

The man walked with an expression that seemed to mock the afternoon's tranquility.

A hand shoved into one suit pocket and the slight curl of his lip betrayed his foul mood, yet no one could tear their eyes from his face, handsome as a work of art.

Accustomed to being the center of attention, the man ignored the stares and headed deeper into the café.

Deeper inside, a woman sat demurely at a table that had been reserved since the café opened.

As the man stopped before her, the woman, dressed in an elegant one-piece, rose to her feet, a blush coloring her cheeks. To any observer, it was clear she had been waiting for him with eager anticipation.

As if this were a familiar routine, the man waited for her to speak. She nervously bit her red-painted lip, then released it, repeating the motion. At last, she parted her lips.

“It’s been a while, Oppa.”

A cliché greeting, considering how long she had waited. Without a word of reply, the man sat down.

He raised a hand to a waiter watching from a distance, and a uniformed man hurried over.

As if in contempt of the woman who had waited so long for him, he didn't spare her a single glance before speaking curtly to the waiter at his side.

“Water.”

“Water?”

“Yes, water. Quickly.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

The woman watched him uncertainly, waiting until the waiter had walked away before speaking again.

“Taeseo, you seem to have changed. I heard you've been working hard lately, which is new.”

Taeseo glanced at his left wrist, visible beyond the cuff of his suit. The distinctive, angular case of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak peeked out from under his sleeve.

His quick glance at the watch seemed to make the woman anxious, and she hurried on.

“Now that you're interested in work, I thought I could be of some help to you…”

Only then did Taeseo's gaze land on her face.

“And my father said he would help Namgyeong Group if…”

The woman flinched and stopped talking.

The waiter returned, carrying a bottle of water and a glass on a tray. The woman, whose lips had been slightly parted, pressed them shut. Her family background was too prominent for her to suffer such a loss of face in public.

Taeseo opened the bottle the waiter had left and poured the water into his glass. Her gaze lingered on his long fingers as they held the glass.

A man so beautiful that even the sight of his lips on the glass and the movement of his throat as he swallowed was captivating. In that moment, a thick possessiveness crept onto the face of the woman who had, until now, seemed so vulnerable.

“Seo Jiae, you’re ridiculous.”

But Taeseo had no intention of playing her game.

“Ridiculous?”

“A long time ago. You begged me to go out with you, so I did. How did we end things again?”

Taeseo raised the glass he had been leisurely caressing to his lips.

“Four years… That was four years ago. I was young then, and…”

His gaze on her, a sip of water still in his mouth, made Jiae's own mouth go dry.

“Right. Four years ago. How did we end things?”

“…”

“You begged me to date you, so I did. You begged me to sleep with you, so I did. You promised you wouldn't be a bother.”

As Taeseo said, they had been a couple. Jiae had harbored a crush on him since they were young, pursuing him for over five years before they finally became a couple.

“But you couldn't even keep a promise you made yourself.”

That promise not to be a nuisance was the only reason he'd let her stand by his side, but unwilling to lose the prize she had so painstakingly won, Jiae had resorted to a cheap trick.

She'd visited a gynecologist to track her ovulation and took medication to increase her fertility. The relationship ended when he caught her tampering with their contraception.

Four years had passed since then, and this was the first time they had met face-to-face.

“That's why you're ridiculous. It's been four years since we broke up, and you suddenly show up asking to, what, get married?”

“Taeseo. We're older now, and this is about more than just us. It's about a mutually beneficial business—”

Taeseo cut her off as if he didn't need to hear any more.

“Clean up the rumors you've been spreading yourself.”

For a moment, a fierce fire ignited in Jiae's eyes.

She had spent years pining for Kwon Taeseo. This time, she had orchestrated a much grander scheme, not as an individual woman pursuing a man, but as a union of two powerful families, a strategic merger of interests.

But then and now, he could still read her like an open book.

“Is it because of that woman?”

The words 'that woman' had been an impulse. At that moment, for the first time since sitting down, he showed emotion.

“An Yuna.”

Jiae spat out the name of Taeseo's sex partner as if it were poison.

“Is it because of her?”

Taeseo's relaxed demeanor, which had seemed to invite her to spout whatever nonsense she wished, vanished in an instant.

“Cut the bullshit.”

Jiae's face, which had been a mask of submission, twisted into a venomous sneer.

Over a mere woman? A bitter laugh escaped her.

“This is pathetic. Over some worthless woman.”

She knew how he had always looked at women. The disdainful gaze he reserved for the women who adored him.

In a way, it was a relief that his weakness was such an insignificant woman. An actress like An Yuna would be easy to manipulate.

“I can understand. Men with careers having a woman on the side… I can understand all of that.”

Jiae said, her eyes fixed on Taeseo's.

“Things will get difficult for her if she becomes any more entangled with Namgyeong Group.”

It wasn't just that Namgyeong's second son was backing An Yuna; her entire family was living off Namgyeong's money.

The easiest people in the world to control were those motivated by money, a fact the wealthy knew all too well.

“If you continue to see her after we're married, I'll cover for you. I won't be jealous. If she has your child, I can even raise it as my own.”

She thought this would be enough to win him over, but she was sorely mistaken.

Taeseo removed his hand from the water glass he'd been holding and fixed her with an even colder stare.

“You really put a lot of thought into this bullshit, didn't you?”

Unlike before, any trace of agitation had vanished from his eyes.

“You talk as if I'd actually marry you and have your children. Who said I'd ever marry someone like you?”

This time, Jiae tightly gripped the handle of the cup placed in front of her. The mug, once hot, had long since grown cold during the hour she'd spent waiting for him.

“Marriage or not.”

The reason she gripped the cup she wouldn't touch again so tightly was to hide her hands trembling with humiliation.

“I don't even see you as a woman.”

Taeseo got up from his seat.

“I won't say this again. Clean up your own mess. And don't ever create a reason for us to meet again.”

His words, a clear warning, stabbed her heart like a dagger.

Seo Jiae had waited for him for over an hour, but Taeseo departed with resolute steps, as if unwilling to spare her even ten minutes of his time.

* * *

The mansion overlooking the Han River was like a gallery, filled with objects and furniture from renowned designers like Jaime Hayon and Arne Jacobsen.

The art lining the walls, the geometric rugs, and the indoor temperature, maintained at a constant 24 degrees Celsius, were all a testament to the owner's particular tastes.

Yet, for some time now, a murmur ill-suited to the modern space had been echoing within it.

“Period, period, period, fuck, period.”

Under the Artichoke lamp, Taeseo, lying askew on a long, white sofa, tapped the remote control in his hand against his other palm.

He had met Seo Jiae earlier that day, but she wasn't the one on his mind.

Absurdly, the thing that had been plaguing him for half the day was the thought of a woman's menstrual cycle.

He'd been tracking her cycle for years, as if it were his own. And the reason he obsessively counted out the 28-day cycle, like a man suffering from PMS himself, was An Yuna.

When her period came around, Yuna refused to see him. Her reason was that they couldn't be intimate while she was menstruating.

There were plenty of things a man and woman could do without being intimate. They could talk, catch up on each other's lives, or even just cook and share a meal.

But at some point, Yuna had stopped making time for that.

Since her acting debut, An Yuna had soared to stardom under Taeseo's patronage.

Now, you could see advertisements with An Yuna's face all over the country, but paradoxically, as her fame grew, she began to slip through his fingers like sand.

These days, he saw her more often on TV than in person.

On days like today, when her name came from someone else's lips, he desperately wanted to see her and ask what was going on. But she never answered his calls during her period.

“It's not like I'm going to eat her alive…”

Taeseo was a man who always did as he pleased, but he believed Yuna's excuses without question—that she was sensitive because of her hormones, that her body ached from cramps.

The Yuna he knew wasn't capable of deception. She was the type to turn the other cheek if someone struck her.

A woman so gentle she had to be protected. And because she was that kind of woman, he hated hearing her name from the venomous lips of someone like Seo Jiae.

Taeseo reached for his phone on the coffee table, intending to call her, but stopped.

‘The cramps are so bad, I need to take medicine and sleep. Other people just get stomachaches, but my head feels like it's going to split open…’

She said she's in pain, damn it. She's in pain. No need to give her something else to worry about.

“Ha, that psycho Seo Jiae.”

To his fury, Seo Jiae had spread rumors about a marriage between him and her. She'd even painted a grand picture of Namgyeong Group and S Financial joining forces.

If anyone was an expert on these kinds of rumors, it was Taeseo. He was used to them. Like most children of privilege, Taeseo had spent his early twenties adrift.

He'd had plenty of peers from similar backgrounds to run with, but even when they got into trouble together, Taeseo was always the one who drew the most attention.

He had the kind of face that made people look twice. Even when he got into trouble with others, he was always the focus of public interest.

And so he'd had a longer and more turbulent adolescence than most, but with time, those incidents had faded from the public eye.

So he assumed the rumors started by Seo Jiae would also be dismissed as baseless gossip and eventually die down.

He was forgetting one crucial fact: the subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.

Taeseo turned on the TV with the remote control in his hand.

The theme music for a commercial flowed from the tall speakers flanking the large screen.

The moment he saw the face of an actress holding an orange cosmetics bottle and saying, “I'm never letting go,” Taeseo shot up from the sofa.

While he'd been buried in work, the model for Yuna's commercial had been replaced.