TW 27

Chapter 27

Hae-il sat there blankly for a long while.

The air in the empty conference room was cold enough to chill him to the bone. His gaze remained fixed on the coffee cup Danbi had left behind. A faint wisp of steam rose from it like its final trace of warmth.

Before the coffee could even grow cold, the first confession of his life had been shattered to pieces.

He had always calculated every possible outcome and prepared for it.

This confession had been no different.

She had drawn a line and said that she no longer had any personal feelings for him, but Hae-il had never taken her words at face value.

He vividly remembered the look in her eyes that had once been filled with such intense feeling for him. He had arrogantly believed that a heart like that couldn’t possibly be erased so easily.

She had once had feelings for him, so if he reached out and grabbed hold of her again, he had assumed she would return to him in no time.

In the scenario Hae-il had calculated, she was supposed to be flustered while unable to hide her excitement.

Perhaps, somewhere in his heart, he had even hoped to see her face bloom with emotion again, like it had on that day long ago when she had drenched his heart in an agonizing rain.

But what she had shown him was an error that had existed in none of his simulations—a terrified girl trembling in fear.

His brain felt numb, as though he had been struck hard in the back of the head.

Retirement savings, being a good subordinate, all those women her age everywhere…

She had poured out countless words, but when he put them all together, the conclusion was simple.

She wanted to pretend she had never heard his confession.

She had absolutely no intention of becoming his lover.

And ultimately…

His brain finally arrived at a single conclusion.

“I got rejected…”

Han Hae-il had been rejected by Lee Danbi.

A hollow laugh escaped him.

At the same time, a twisted sense of displeasure surged through his insides.

On the perfect blueprint he had drawn, an unpredictable variable called Lee Danbi had caused a catastrophe.

Hae-il irritably ran a hand through his hair and picked up Danbi’s coffee cup.

A vivid red mark remained along the edge of the white paper cup where her lips had touched it.

To be honest, he had been looking forward to it.

The moment she nodded, he had planned to pull her toward him and shower her with a victorious kiss.

At a different pace and with a different intensity than when they were young.

Of course, that entire picture had been based on the assumption that she would willingly become his.

It had been his trump card, thrown down to correct the imbalance in their relationship.

As a result, everything had not merely tilted—it had been completely overturned.

Now it was his turn to watch her reactions and have his entire body shaken by a single word from her.

The power dynamic between them had become crystal clear.

“I’ve never been the one on the losing end before…”

Hae-il pointlessly traced the lipstick mark with his fingertip.

Then, as though trying to swallow even the trace she had left behind, he drank the remaining coffee from exactly the spot where her lips had touched.

The coffee, which had gone lukewarm while he was suffering, was unbearably bitter, as though it were describing his current circumstances.

And at the very end of that bitterness lingered the faint strawberry scent of her, refusing to disappear.

Cruelly tantalizing.

✶ ✶ ✶

She had no idea how she had managed to flee the conference room.

Danbi returned to her desk and collapsed into her chair.

Her heart was pounding as though it might leap straight out of her throat, while the sound of her own breathing echoed loudly in her ears.

Dongjun, sitting beside her, asked with concern.

“What happened? Why did you run in here? Didn’t you say you were going to get coffee?”

Her fingertips were cold, as though all the blood had drained from them.

Only then did she realize that her hand was empty.

The paper cup that had been giving her its comforting warmth…

She must have left it in the conference room.

But it didn’t matter.

Even without caffeine, her heart was racing like crazy, and the sleepiness that had weighed down her entire body only moments ago had vanished without a trace.

The problem was that her ability to concentrate had disappeared along with it.

“I think I’m going home for today…”

She couldn’t stay in this place any longer.

She couldn’t bring herself to face him again right now.

Danbi hurriedly swept the things on her desk into her bag.

She slammed her laptop shut and stuffed her mouse and charging cable inside in a tangled mess.

“What, you’re leaving?”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

Without even looking at Dongjun, she answered and snatched up the cardigan hanging over her chair.

After mechanically bowing to the few colleagues still at their desks, she practically fled the office.

She didn’t even glance toward the conference room where Hae-il might still be.

She hurried down the hallway and repeatedly jabbed at the elevator button.

Finally, she reached the first floor.

When she pushed open the cold glass doors and stepped outside, the chilly, sharp night air pierced deep into her lungs.

Only then did the breath she had been holding burst out all at once.

Danbi’s shoulders heaved like someone who had just run a hundred-meter sprint, and she stared up at the night sky for a long time.

It felt as though her sense of reality were melting away.

Perhaps she had dozed off for a moment and was trapped in some long, terrible dream.

Han Hae-il—the man she had admired since childhood, looked up to, and secretly pined for—had confessed his feelings to her.

Even in Danbi’s boldest dreams, he had always been an absolute powerful one, shining far above her, so high that she had never even dared to reach out her hand.

Perhaps that was why.

When she heard Hae-il’s confession, the first emotion that pierced her heart wasn’t joy or excitement.

It was dizzying vertigo.

Fear, like looking down from the edge of a sheer cliff.

It was a feeling that had held her ankles captive for a very long time.

She had felt it when her parents had pressured her into entering competitions far beyond her abilities.

She had felt it again when she couldn’t adapt to a neighborhood far beyond her means and found herself lingering awkwardly on the outskirts.

It was the anxiety of standing in empty air with nowhere to put her feet.

After being pushed by her parents to reluctantly experience the world outside her little well, Danbi’s values had become clear.

Don’t even look up at heights beyond your station.

Only hold on to things you can handle with your own abilities.

And Han Hae-il was the very embodiment of the high place she had spent her entire life avoiding.

Taking the hand he extended would mean tearing down the safe little world she had painstakingly built and stepping back into that overwhelming world.

How could she have an equal relationship with someone who held her lifeline in his hands?

How could she possibly love him without constantly worrying?

The image of him recently picking apart every little mistake she made and driving her relentlessly flashed through her mind.

Danbi’s head instantly grew cold.

If she had offended him with what had just happened, he might torment her even more from now on.

In the worst case, he was someone who could find some plausible excuse and throw her out of the company altogether.

As long as he was the practical owner of the company and she was merely an employee desperately dependent on her salary, this power game could never be fair.

That was why his confession had felt not like excitement, but like an unpredictable natural disaster.

Suddenly, she remembered the box of condoms sitting on the nightstand beside the bed in his house.

That memory strengthened her conviction that she had made the right choice.

That’s right.

He must have been lonely.

After spending so long abroad, Korea probably felt unfamiliar to him.

He simply needed a woman to temporarily fill that emptiness.

And as luck would have it, his eyes had fallen on Lee Danbi—the woman who had once been passionately in love with him and therefore seemed easy to approach.

She couldn’t put her livelihood on the line for some passing interest of his.

I think I like you.

His voice echoed in her ears like a hallucination.

Danbi desperately reassured herself that everything was fine.

But she couldn’t stop the faint trembling that rose from somewhere deep inside her chest.

Adult Lee Danbi couldn’t possibly fail to understand what that trembling meant.

For the sake of survival, she crushed it down.

As she walked alone through the cold night streets, her wildly beating heart gradually returned to normal.

Under the streetlights, a lonely shadow stretched across the asphalt.

Danbi filled her lungs with the chilly air and slowly began untangling the mess of thoughts in her head.

He must have women practically lining up around him anyway.

Maybe she had overreacted to what had merely been a casual test.

She had no way of knowing how he normally behaved in romantic relationships.

But at least the Han Hae-il she remembered from childhood wasn’t the kind of man who would pathetically cling to a woman after being rejected once.

He had an incredibly strong pride.

His self-esteem reached the heavens.

Confidence in himself practically radiated from his entire body.

There was no way someone like that would continue wasting his emotions and time on a woman who had rejected him once.

Especially when that woman was Lee Danbi, who had so obviously once been madly in love with him.

To him, she probably wasn’t even worth making a special effort for.

Yes. It’ll be fine.

It would be painfully awkward when they met at the office tomorrow, but after a few days, today’s incident would disappear as though it had never happened.

He would turn his attention to another interesting woman, and she could simply return to being Ordinary Subordinate A.

Just as she had completely convinced herself and her tangled heart had finally begun to settle—

The phone in her hand vibrated briefly.

Danbi absentmindedly glanced at the screen.

Her eyes stopped.

At the top of the screen was the name “Team Leader Han Hae-il,” followed by several newly arrived messages.

Team Leader Han Hae-il

So you ran away.

I thought about it.

But I don’t think I can do what you want.

Her heart plunged toward the ground with a heavy thump once again.

Suddenly, the image of him at seventeen flashed through her mind.

A problem at the level of a university competition that their math teacher had assigned for fun.

Everyone else had given up and shaken their heads.

Only Hae-il had obsessively clung to the problem.

Because he was irritated by the mere existence of a problem he couldn’t solve.

While eating, during breaks—he had done nothing but focus on that one problem.

His eyes had held an interest and madness that were almost frightening.

And finally, a week later, he had gone to the teacher with the answer.

It was correct.

The teacher had been stunned.

Only after having his answer confirmed did he finally let the problem go.

Danbi suddenly realized that she had forgotten one critical fact—the very foundation upon which all her assumptions had been built.

The essence of the man named Han Hae-il.

When he has a goal, he never stops until he achieves it.

And right now, his goal was her.

Team Leader Han Hae-il

I want Lee Danbi.

He was a massive tidal wave that swept in without warning and carried everything away.

An unavoidable disaster.