Heart of Ice

Hatching

For a long time after that confrontation, Yewon's head was up in the clouds. She kept replaying those words in her head over and over and over again. "I don't think I can lose someone I love for the third time."

She analyzed every aspect of that sentence. He was afraid of losing her? He didn't want her to die? And her favorite part: "someone I love." He loves her. That's what the phrase implies, right? There is no other way around it, no other way to interpret it. "For the third time." First was Solbin. Second was Jeonghan. And third was her?

She backtracked a little and realized that maybe Jeonghan was the third, Solbin was the second, and the first could be someone she did not know about. Maybe Seungcheol was seeing her as Jeonghan again?

That made a lot more sense, she thought.

She remembered that Seungcheol had told her that Jeonghan always insisted on going to the hospital no matter how much Seungcheol said that he couldn't. Maybe Seungcheol saw Jeonghan in her when she insisted to go herself, and was saying "someone I love" to refer to Jeonghan.

Yes, that must be it, she reasoned.

Or... or... or... he just said it to shut her up. She was defying him and not taking no for an answer, and he knew that she, being the romance-obsessed fool that she was, would stop complaining once she heard him say that. Yes, that made more sense. He was just manipulating her. Yes, that made a lot more sense.

The more she reasoned with herself and tried to understand what had happened, the less convinced she was of her initial conclusion that he loved her. She felt stupid for believing that he did, and scolded herself countless time for being too far up in her delusions, unable to separate fact from fiction.

-

Yulhee had just recently started her first cycle, making her moody and even more talkative than before, if that was even possible.

Within hours after the first blood, all of the guards and servants, male and female, had found out, as Yulhee could not stop talking about how gross it was and how much her belly hurt. The maids tried to tell her to be quiet, to tell her that it's not proper men to know about it, but she wasn't convinced.

The maids and nurses who were teaching her about what this blood meant could not satisfy her raging curiosity. And so Yewon decided to help them and explain to Yulhee exactly what the blood coming out of her body meant.

"It means you're not a girl anymore. You're a woman, and you're ready to have babies," Yewon told her.

"Really?" Yulhee asked with wide eyes.

"Yes! It's like laying eggs. But you need a man to help those eggs hatch."

"But why does it hurt so much," she whined. "If the eggs hatch, does that mean it won't hurt?"

"It means the egg stays inside of you and you become pregnant. But if you don't have a man to help them hatch, the eggs will go out of your body, and it will hurt a little."

"Then I need a man as soon as possible, because the stupid eggs hurt."

Yewon laughed at that, but her laugh was stifled when Yulhee asked the next question.

"But Yewon, you have a man. So why aren't your eggs hatching?" Yulhee looked genuinely curious, but the question stung Yewon a little bit.

Yewon shrugged her shoulders. She didn't know why her eggs weren't hatching either.

"Maybe it's because you need to be in love for the eggs to hatch," Yulhee suggested. "Because it hatched with Solbin and..."

"Wait, what?"