It was one of those days when one feels nothing. The weather wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. Looking at the grey sky directly from the window of her office, Jennie scrutinized the building in front of hers, from the discolored bricks to the out of place balconies. It was not that she didn't know what she was looking for. No, that was something that she, whether she was willing to admit to herself or not, knew perfectly. The real problem was that, she never found it.
"I saw Lisa yesterday" a chirpy voice called for her attention.
She didn't bother turning around. Instead, she watched as a slightly overweight cat moved elegantly on the cornice of what looked about the sixth or seventh floor. She wondered what her reaction would be if she saw it fall. She doubted that rushing to help would actually be useful for something. Yet, she imagined that was what any normal person would do.
"And?"
What do you call the feeling of knowing something bad is about to happen yet you can't do anything to help it, let alone prevent it?
"She was with the model from the shoot"
Life. That's what it was.
She cleared her throat and slowly turned away from the window before she made her way to her desk. She knew that Chaeyoung was waiting to meet her eyes, yet she didn't give her the satisfaction right away. It was not the one who looks for eye contact that holds the power of a conversation, but the one who meets the other's eyes, words from her father resurfaced from the back of her mind, leaving a sour taste on her mouth.
"Well, how does the say go? The leopard can't change its spots?" She hoped the sarcasm on her voice was evident enough that Chaeyoung would not feel the need to discuss it further.
As it often happened, she was wrong.
"I think we should talk to her" the blonde said and Jennie noticed, not without feeling a bit annoyed, the way Chaeyoung's voice was higher, more insecure. She sounded just like she used back home, she couldn't help but think.
"She sounded desperate"
Jennie's hand went to fidget with a pen on her desk. It was a gift from her dad, congratulating her for the engagement to Jiyong. She didn't know why she had even kept it. It was a Mont Blanc, black, and, from the looks of the box it had come with, a limited edition.
"I don't have anything to tell her" she answered, while her eyes stayed fixated on the shiny object in her hand.
"I think we owe her at least some kind of explanation"
Her hands stilled, putting the pen back on the desk. Her eyes finally met Chaeyoung's who genuinely looked troubled. For a moment, she felt the familiar feeling of guilt clutching at her stomach, making her nauseous. She swallowed it down, like she had learned to do. Otherwise, there was no surviving this.
"You know what the deal was. If you're finding it too hard, then you should have thought about it when you offered to come with me"
She stared astonished at the sight that's in front of her: a petite bird with an orange beak had flown right beside her. Yet, the first thought that had come to her mind, hadn't been how it was possible for such creature to be in the center of Seoul, but how it didn't look the slightest bit scared. She even moved her hand closer, sliding it across the concrete bench she was seated on. It still didn't look afraid. If anything, Jennie had convinced herself while staring at its apparently soulless eyes, it was at peace.
"Miss Kim"
A voice coming from behind her managed to startle both her and her new friend who flew away just as fast as it had come to her. She didn't part her eyes until it became just a tiny colorful point amongst a grey background and she couldn't distinguish it from the lifeless buildings that surrounded her.
"Your father asked to see you"
She registered the words and with a slight nod of her head, she stood and let her feet follow the man who had made the bird fly away.
Her father's office was on the last floor. She couldn't say whether that was the reason why she had a strong dislike for elevators or it was because of the suffocating atmosphere they had. Causes aside, she had preferred taking the stairs more than once even when the elevator was right there at her disposal.
So, it came to no surprise to her when yet another elevator ride was filled with tension and stomach ache. She anticipated the moment one of her father's concierges would knock on his door, and his delayed answer. That short, yet powerful pause, he let in between his words for no use. Just because he could.
Nevertheless, she entered the room with a slight hesitation in her steps that she always hoped wasn't as visible as it was evident to her.
"They're for you"
His father's voice echoed through the room and the sound felt distant to Jennie's ears, as if it came from the other side of a gigantic room. When in fact, she was standing, uncertain, merely two feet from him.
His hands, small but manly, had pushed a crystal bowl towards her. The afternoon light hit its surface and Jennie watched curiously as it met the surface of his desk, creating a palette of different colors. It had candies in it, and she couldn't help but let a chuckle out her mouth.
"I'm good, thank you"
At his daughter's refusal, the man pushed the shiny bowl a little bit further. And Jennie watched amused, at her father's incapacity of taking no for an answer.
"Are you sure? You used to have a sweet tooth when you were younger"
"Yeah, when I was five" she corrected him, failing at biting her tongue.
They both looked at each other, revealing a dangerous moment for silence to settle in. Jennie stared at her dad, seating in front of her on a black leather chair that was too big for his height. Yet, it still managed to make him look intimidating in it.
People always told her she looked like her mother. Her eyes, her lips and her cheekbones, she had all taken from her. That, during the years, had only amplified the estranged feeling she got when she looked at her father. On moments like those, when he looked at her like she was a business transaction and not his own flesh and blood, she felt like she had nothing in common with him if not for a last name. His last name. Something that, on more occasions than one, had felt more like a burden to her rather than a gift.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" She finally breached through the silence, swallowing the tension that was keeping her from talking.
His eyebrows shot up, looking rather surprised and, on a certain extent, content at his daughter's directness. He slowly nodded, as if accepting that he wasn't the one leading the conversation.
"In a few years, I will retire."
Jennie kept quiet, not knowing what to say. She was so used to her dad being not only a business man but the owner of a company, that she struggled to imagine who and what he would be like if not in that vest.
What shocked her the most, though, was that the thought of him retiring had never, not once, crossed her mind. It just did not seem like an option for him. She had always thought that her father's first and last thought of the day had been the company. That he lived for what he had built.
What he was telling her, was making the foundation of what she thought of him crumble to the ground. And sometimes, no matter how harsh the reality of it, it's easier to hang on to what you know rather than repudiating what you've been taught your whole life.
"I'm going to be old, soon. And I don't intend of exhaling my last breath right on this desk."
Even so, she kept listening while her hands went to clutch nervously at the hem of her skirt, the one Lisa had told her was her favorite. Wearing it, touching its fabric and, in attempt to calm her, holding on to it made her feel grounded and lightheaded at the same time, while never failing to bring a smile to her face.
"But, I have to know that my company's in good hands before I leave it" he said, standing up and going to the other side of the room.
Jennie's eyes didn't dare to follow him, yet her ears caught perfectly the heels of his shoes against the marble floors, the sound ticketing in her ears like a pendulum.
Returning to his desk, he left something fall right before Jennie. A stack of papers, which she had seen enough of to realize what exactly was laying in front of her eyes, stared back at her. All that black ink on white paper was indeed a contract. Or, in other words, a point of no return.
"Page sixty four" her father's voice stated calmly, but with firmness.
Without even questioning herself about the nature of the contract, she obeyed, turning the thin sheets of paper until she was where he wanted her.
"Read the last paragraph" he then instructed, reading the confusion written across her face.
Once again, she did as she was told. Her eyes started scanning the words, building sentences in her mind that didn't really make any sense to her. Her left hand went to form a fist under her desk, her nails pressing hard into her palm.
"I don't understand" she finally replied, after reading the same sentence in her mind until the words lost their meaning, abandoned in a panicked mind.
"You have a business degree, I'm sure it's not that hard"
But Jennie didn't or, rather, couldn't take notice of the sarcasm in her father's voice; nothing about what she was reading seemed funny to her. Instead, her mind flooded with all she could think could go wrong. Her throat closed up and she could feel the arrhythmic sound of her heart, beating in her ears loudly like a drum. She wanted to gasp, but she knew she couldn't.
So, she let a few moments run by she managed to camouflage as a mere rereading of a certain passage when in fact, the only thing her eyes were busy doing was fighting the urge to cry and to grieve; not for the things she had lost, but for those she never had. Because she had never been a romantic, yet, she had never wished she had been more than in that moment, while her mind screamed that it was easier to oblige while her heart whispered to fight it.
"You want me to get married" She finally muttered. A statement. And maybe, an answer, too.
He nodded, a pleased expression on his face. And Jennie only then noticed the few wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead, blaming herself as a daughter for never looking at her father, and as a woman for being afraid to.
"Don't look at me like that, Jennie" he then said and she hated how easy he made everything to be. She hated herself for believing that it actually was.
He stood again as her hands went back at clutching the fabric of her skirt, and reached her side before laying a gentle, yet heavy hand on her shoulder.
"I'm actually doing you a favor. Taking care of a company is no easy job, especially for a pretty girl like you. Consider it... a wedding gift"
She felt his smile on his words, but she could not bring her eyes to meet his to confirm it. Instead, she looked at her hands and the half moon shaped marks she left on her skin and all the ones to come, to make up for the power she officially lost, that was never going to come back to her.
She felt her heart fall to her stomach, a sharp blow that resonated within her, while she thought about the only consequence that mattered to her. How holding that pen his father always carried in his breast pocket and signing that contract, unaware of its deadliness, would make more victims than just herself. How she wished that was the case.
Because she could take destroying her own life, but not the one of who she loved, of who she knew would never recover from something like this. She knew she could not spend her life wishing she could mend a heart she had broken.
It came as both a shock and a relief when her heart, for once, spoke up for her.
"I can't"
"What?" The man said, his smile suddenly falling, wiping away his wrinkles, along with his human facade, with it. "Don't say non sense. You would have gotten married eventually anyway, this is just speeding things up a little. Plus, you'd still be the main shareholder."
It was clear from the way his lips maintained a straight line even as he talked and his furrowed eyebrows, that he disapproved of his daughter's refusal.
But, Jennie's mind was already made up for. And so, as she stood, gloriously, her hands no longer closed in fists, she glared at him straight in the eyes.
"I can't." She said, pushing away the contract with her finger towards his end of the desk, "And I won't"
He just stared back at her, returning the intensity of the glare. He inhaled deeply, in what Jennie couldn't say was surprise or annoyance, before speaking.
"Why is that?"
"'Cause I'm gay" she said and this time, the sharp intake of breath was her own, brought by the shock that the feeling of those words leaving her mouth brought to her.
She felt as if her whole body was shaking and she was afraid she was going to be sick but mostly, under all the anxiety and fear that had always accompanied her, there was a newfound giddiness, a somewhat euphoric feeling that was making her lightheaded.
That's when she knew that she had no will to remain where she was and deal with a conversation that could only end one way. She let every cell of her body take her where she longed to be, where her heart had meant to take her all along and where she knew, despite everything, it would always like to stay.
And for once, even between the yelling and the chaos, she smiled.