I love you.
Kim Mi-rae had actually said that. To him.
He would never forget her lovely face as she proclaimed it. Ji-pyeong could not stop smiling despite struggling through a run on four hours of sleep. His lungs were burning and his legs felt like dead weight. And yet he was smiling.
Every morning for a week, Ji-pyeong had awakened thinking that the previous day had been the best of his life. This morning was no different. And yet it was like no other.
Because Kim Mi-rae loved him.
Ji-pyeong spent four years pining for a woman who he saw every day. The only reply he ever received after offering his heart was a vague apology for never considering it. Love was often a void from which he rarely received anything in return — parents he knew nothing about, a woman who loved another. Even grandmother's love had its limits. She had told him to swallow down what he wanted despite his desperation.
But last night the brilliant, fierce, exquisite Mi-rae who had blazed into his life with no warning told him that she loved him unequivocally after just two weeks. Despite the difficulties of their circumstances. Without knowing how they could live their lives together. And even though everything that Mi-rae had been through should have sent her running in the opposite direction.
Ji-pyeong already had the answer to the question anyone should ask when weighing a future with a partner: Mi-rae loved him in spite of everything being impossibly hard. And so the idea that he could have a woman like her by his side made him want to run towards the ocean like a madman and offer his thanks to the fates. Perhaps they had saved all of their luck for him until now. Because despite being in the midst of the most challenging deal of his career and beginning a relationship under the most complex of circumstances, Ji-pyeong knew that this was it.
That was why he was running along Dune Road just after sunrise. Ji-pyeong had to clear his head. Every choice he made from now on was about the rest of his life.
He was exhausted. They had arrived last night floating on air and then were immediately plunged back into a whirring hive of activity. Ji-pyeong spent hours forcing himself to pour over the due diligence overview until long after midnight. Its contents troubled him for a reason that he could not quite pinpoint. And then sleep eluded him even after his work was finished. Ji-pyeong had laid in bed just down the hall from Mi-rae staring at the ceiling. Sleeping under the same roof last night had been a new kind of torture indeed.
Ji-pyeong was no stranger to women. He had of course desired women before. And he had been in love. But Ji-pyeong had never experienced what it was to desperately want someone who he was now certain was the love of his life. He feverishly replayed every moment from the stairwell, the car, and the beach in his head. Mi-rae was a force of nature. And every new discovery only made Ji-pyeong more obsessed.
She seemed to crave him like he did her without reservation. With Mi-rae, Ji-pyeong felt like he was trying to hold on to a live wire in his arms one moment and like his chest was going to break open the next. The sounds she had made in his ear while he touched her made him want to spend the rest of his life pleasing her. But then he could just kiss her on the beach and not realize hours had gone by. Ji-pyeong could not fathom all that remained unclaimed between them. He spent the night trying to imagine it anyway until he was driven into the shower to regain a measure of sanity.
But Ji-pyeong was also walking a tightrope above the all consuming pull between them. In his arms, Mi-rae wanted to always push them headfirst into oblivion. But when they spoke of the future, she was gunshy. And that filled him with trepidation. Ji-pyeong was wary of crossing too many lines before they were on the other side of this deal. They needed time to make some important choices. Ji-pyeong did not want them to make life altering decisions in the throes of falling into bed. Because once they started they would never stop. The look on her face every time she talked about the wreckage her ex-husband had left in his wake haunted him. Ji-pyeong could not live with himself if Mi-rae ever rued a choice she made because of him.
