Neither of them would be able to forget that day at the woods for as long as they lived.
Hansu walked into the area with denser trees holding Eun Gyo's hand, and she had a distinct feeling of leaving everything she knew outside the woods.
She carried two large baskets to pick as many mushrooms as possible, and he indeed knew an area where it had so many of them. Eun Gyo was used to pick mushrooms each year in the summer. It would be a precious food ingredient for soups and stir-fries at the boarding house.
Where she usually turned right, he brought her to the left. It's a knowledge he discovered the previous year, when he was surveying the small town for the expansion of his fishing business.
Eun Gyo was awed. There were so many mushrooms in front of them.
"Omo! We can make so much tasty food with these!"
She quickly knelt on the grass and began picking them up.
Meanwhile, Hansu was hit by a sense of nostalgia that overwhelmed him. A long time ago, he was a child in Jeju. Hunger was his constant companion, since his mother died young, and his father was incompetent. He would go to the woods often, trying to get edible plants and mushrooms. Or fruits. Anything that could curb his starvation.
He had come a long way from then. He had fought hard, and won, then became on top of the food chain. He would never starve, had no shelter or enough clothes anymore.
But being with her in the forest that day, he was reminded of his roots. If his father didn't bring him to Japan, he, too, would have grown to be a fishermen, and marry someone like Eun Gyo.
"Can't you help me, Sir? I want more than I can carry."
She was smiling so brightly, and Hansu felt a strange sense of unreality as he knelt down and picked the mushrooms.
They quickly filled her two baskets, and Eun Gyo soon began picking up more, holding them on her apron.
"Maybe we should carry some on your suit as well, Sir," she laughed.
"Look at me, I'm so greedy!"
The glee in her laughter stirred something in him.
"Please be greedier," he said, and reached for her cheeks with his two hands, then kissed her.
She gasped, but didn't pull away. Instinctively, she knew it was going to happen between them.
He untied her apron and put the mushrooms she gathered aside.
His hands returned to her cheeks.
She didn't understand much, but she knew she didn't feel any fear. Maybe it's his desperate look that told her so. He's desperate for her, of that she understood.
