They Threw Out the Maid's Daughter, Now She Sits at Their Table novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: First Night

Ye-rin let herself into the penthouse at ten, and Seo-jun was standing in the dark living room with a glass he had not drunk from.

"You went to your mother's," he said.

"I did."

"What did she say?"

"That I shouldn't come back here." She dropped her bag on the sofa. "Then she burned a photograph of a man with your eyes."

The glass did not move in his hand.

It was the stillness of it that gave him away.

"Many people have those eyes," he said.

"That's what she said. Word for word."

"Then it's probably true."

"You know something," said Ye-rin. "You've known since Sunday, when she looked at you over the soup. You went white. I saw it."

"I'm not discussing your mother."

"She's the only thing in my life that isn't a lie, and she's lying to me, and you're helping her," said Ye-rin.

"Ye-rin."

"Don't say my name like that, like you're calming a horse." Her voice cracked and she hated it. "You looked at the hedge. You look at the hedge every time it matters. Say something real."

He set the glass down on the table very carefully.

"I can't," said Seo-jun. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because when I do, you'll leave."

It was the first thing he had ever said that sounded afraid.

She stared at him, and her anger went somewhere she could not follow.

What was left was how close he stood, and the street light across his collarbone, and the tight pulse in his neck.

Her mother's voice said do not go back.

Ye-rin crossed the floor, took him by the open collar of his shirt and kissed him.

He made a sound against her mouth, low and shocked, and for one second his hands stayed at his sides.

"This is in the terms," he said against her lips, rough. "You made the terms."

"I'm breaking them."

"Ye-rin," he said.

"Then break them with me."

His hands came up.

They went into her hair and held her head, and he kissed her back so hard that her heels left the floor.

His mouth was hot and openly hungry, and there was no hedge in it anywhere.

She heard herself moan.

He walked her backward without letting her go, past the sofa, down the hall, through a door she had never been through.

His room smelled of cedar and clean linen.

The bed was a dark flat shape under the window, with the city laid out behind it in a long field of lights.

He stopped at the edge of it.

"Last chance," he said, breathing hard. "Tell me to stop."

"Take off your shirt."

He did.

He undid the buttons one-handed, holding her around the waist with the other, and shrugged out of it.

He had a long, lean, hard torso, and the pale burn ran down his left forearm from the wrist.

She took that arm and laid her mouth to the scar.

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