I Was Reborn at My Engagement Party, So I Proposed to Someone Else novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Last Holdout

By the time they got back to Buam-dong Ji-an couldn't stop her hands.

She sat at the long table and they shook on the wood.

Tae-gyeom looked at them. Then he took his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves and opened a cupboard.

"I can make exactly one thing," he said.

It was ramyeon.

He made it in a dented pot with an egg cracked into it and green onions he cut with scissors straight over the pot.

He put the pot on the table between them on a folded magazine, with two pairs of chopsticks and no bowls.

"My mother says bowls are for people who aren't hungry," he said.

Ji-an laughed. It came out wet.

They ate out of the same pot. The steam fogged the window full of city lights.

When the pot was half empty, she put her chopsticks down.

"There's a woman on that hill," she said.

He waited.

"In Ahyeon-dong. In one of the houses. If the demolition goes ahead, she's going to die."

"How do you know?"

"I can't tell you." Her voice cracked. "I'm not crazy. I know how this sounds after that post. I just know."

He didn't say anything for a while.

He picked up a piece of green onion from the table and ate it.

"Which house?" he asked.

"I don't know. I never looked." She pressed her hands flat on the wood. "That's the worst part. Somebody told me once, and I didn't want to hear it, so I didn't look."

"Then we'll find her."

"Tae-gyeom."

"If you say a woman on that hill is going to die," he said, "then she won't. That's all. I don't need to know how you know."

"Why not?"

He looked at her across the pot.

"Because you walked across that ballroom as if you'd already seen how it ended," he said. "And you chose me anyway. I'm not going to start doubting you now."

Ji-an got up.

She walked around the table and stood beside his chair.

He looked up at her. His face was very calm, and his hands on his knees were not.

"You've been sleeping on a sofa for four nights," she said.

"Three and a half. I gave up at five this morning and slept on the floor."

"Come upstairs."

He didn't move.

"Seo Ji-an," he said quietly. "Be sure. I'm not good at being sent back to the sofa."

"I've never been more sure of anything in either of my lives."

He didn't ask what she meant by either.

He stood up, and he was so close and so tall that she had to tip her head all the way back.

He put one hand on her jaw, very carefully, his thumb under her ear.

Then he kissed her, slow, tasting of salt and egg and something that was just him, and she stopped shaking.

Ji-an pulled him up the stairs by his hand and didn't let go until they were in his room.

The bed was huge and low and white.

The whole wall was glass, and the city glittered below them like a tray of spilled coins.

She turned and unbuttoned his black shirt herself.

Her hands were steady now.

Button by button, slow, her knuckles against the heat of his chest.

He stood still and let her, his eyes on her face the whole time.

"You're shaking," he said.

"I'm not."

"Your hands are."

She pushed the shirt off his shoulders and it fell.

"I've wanted this since the ballroom," she said. "Since you looked at me as if I were already yours."

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