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3. Contract Marriage
Chairman Choi quietly breathed his last as dawn began to break.
Although he had maintained a relatively healthy appearance in recent years, he had been suffering from terminal cancer. His attending physician had said three years ago that he would not last another year, so Cheongyang-daek swallowed her tears in a gloomy voice, saying that if he had lived this long, he must have departed without regrets.
The funeral proceeded in a solemn yet composed atmosphere. From early morning, the couple did not even have a moment to close their eyes because of the procession of mourners, crowded with prominent figures.
But even if she had found the time, Seonha did not think she could have slept. A dark shadow fell over her face as she went over her final farewell with Chairman Choi.
Before his death, Chairman Choi had sent everyone out and left only her behind before laboriously opening his mouth. As she listened to the desperate final request of the old man with death hanging before his eyes, she could only nod with her throat tightly constricted.
In the end, Seonha could not tell him the truth. The guilt weighed uncomfortably upon her heart, knowing that Chairman Choi had left reassured, believing they were an ordinary married couple.
Yet she could not bring herself to burden a man who was departing this world simply to ease her own conscience. Through a voice thick with tears, she repeatedly apologized. She knew that deceiving and misleading an elder over nothing less than the grave matter of marriage was not something that could be ended with an apology.
Chairman Choi struggled to raise his hand, its strength gradually ebbing away, and patted the back of hers as lightly as a feather. He no longer even seemed to have the strength to speak.
That gesture seemed to tell her that everything was all right. It was probably only because some instinct within her wanted to believe that, if only to shake off a little of her guilt.
“Are you hurt?”
Dook, who had been looking down at Seonha, abruptly pulled at her arm.
“It’s just that…”
The bandages stuck haphazardly all over her fingers and palm looked unsightly. When Seonha tried to hide her hand behind her back, he tightened his grip on her arm, turned her hand over, and peeled away the bandages carelessly stuck to her palm. The cut had been fairly deep, yet she had not even disinfected it properly and had merely covered it with a bandage, leaving the wound still gaping open.
“Ah.”
Seonha unconsciously wrinkled the bridge of her nose. As the adhesive bandage, still clinging to the dried blood, came away, a stinging sensation spread through the open wound.
“Go get it treated.”
“It’s fine. It’s nothing…”
Confronted at such close range by her husband’s cold gaze, Seonha could not finish her sentence and closed her mouth. There was no one in the world capable of overcoming his stubbornness when he wore such a fearsome expression.
“All right. I’ll go right away.”
Seonha, neatly dressed in black mourning clothes, left his side with a demure gait. After taking only a few steps, she turned back and studied Dook’s profile with worried eyes before finally moving on with heavy footsteps.
When she stepped into the corridor, a fierce wind shook the bare branches of the leafless trees and pounded against the windows as though threatening them. The heavy sound of winter. Had her third meeting with Dook also been around this time of year?
Yes. They always seemed to meet just when she was about to forget him.
Summer, autumn, and winter. Every time the changing seasons brought them face-to-face, it had seemed nothing short of miraculous. It was foolish, but it had made her heart flutter, as though it were fate.
Remembering her past with Dook, Seonha wore a lonely smile as she felt the warmth of him still lingering in her hand.
#NoSharing@Biga #NoSharing@Biga
As the winter sun sank, the area around the tall rows of buildings was gradually dyed gold.
Seonha wrapped a worn but clean muffler tightly around her neck against the cold that made the tip of her nose tingle, then hurried out of the campus with quick, mincing steps. She tried to straighten her back and put on a bright, lively expression, but it was impossible to drive away all the gloom that had settled deep in her chest.
The call that had suddenly come from an unfamiliar number utterly ruined the calm mood Seonha had maintained throughout the day. Gyeongmin, who had contacted her for the first time in two years, was thoroughly drunk. Perhaps because of that, he could not distinguish at all between what he should and should not say.
With slurred speech that was difficult to understand, he rummaged through memories that had already been twisted beyond recognition. When she finally gave him a frigidly indifferent response, he even confessed the sordid truth that he seemed to have more regrets about her than the women he had dated before because he had never gone all the way with her.
She was too dumbfounded even to laugh hollowly. Had she been blind back then? How could she ever have liked a man like that, even for a moment?
Rather than being angry at Gyeongmin for making even the last speck of affection she had held for him vanish, she could only feel pathetic for having once liked him.
Despite her cold response, he begged her to meet him just once before he got married, for the first and last time. He even added first that he would never contact her like this again.
His clinging request carried more than a simple desire to see her face. It was tainted by the filthy desire to hold her once before he became a married man.
She could not understand how he could act so shamelessly when the person he was marrying was even her classmate. It would have been absurd enough if he had genuinely meant only to see her face, but after receiving an insult like this, he was no longer worth listening to.
Even cutting off the call was not enough. After blocking Gyeongmin’s new number, she resumed her halted steps, yet one side of her chest continued to feel stifled.
It was not that she had been unable to forget him, but maintaining her composure was difficult. The memories of how he had hurt her came rushing back in their entirety.
When she entered her third year, she grew close to Gyeongmin, a senior in her department who was four years older. He approached her actively without ever becoming overbearing, slowly narrowing the distance between them, and they naturally developed into a romantic relationship.
It was enough to make her feel deceived by the man he was now, because back then Gyeongmin had been a kind and broad-minded lover. Though he had grown up in a prosperous environment and must have found it difficult to understand the hardships of her life, he had never looked down on her and had treated her with respect.
She thought she had found the first person outside her family whom she could trust. No—she had been mistaken.
That was, until Gyeongmin’s mother came to the school and caused a scene.
She seemed to have been momentarily stunned by the sort of line that belonged in a trashy television drama. On her way out of the lecture hall after class, Seonha had run into a middle-aged woman wearing a vicious expression, and she could not immediately grasp what was happening.
The students from the same department who came out afterward stopped at the commotion unfolding in front of the lecture hall, their faces filled with surprise.
As Gyeongmin’s mother raised her voice and poured out her words, the murmuring around them grew louder. The blood drained from Seonha’s face until it turned deathly pale.
She swore she had never once dreamed of marrying Gyeongmin or tried to coax him into it. But there was one thing she could think of.
As they approached their first anniversary, Gyeongmin had stopped being satisfied with light physical affection and persistently demanded that they sleep together.
Seonha liked him, but she had not wanted to enter a deeper relationship. She felt sorry for continually rejecting Gyeongmin, who openly demanded sex whenever they met, but she could not sleep with him merely because she felt guilty.
In the end, she told the embarrassed Gyeongmin, who had been rejected over and over, how she truly felt. It was not because he lacked appeal or because she disliked him, but because of her own stubborn belief that she wanted to have sex only with the person she would marry. She did not possess some particularly strong conviction, but she had dreamed since childhood of marrying the person she loved, and she held an idealized view of it.
Though he had already known to some extent that Seonha was sexually conservative, he could not conceal his astonishment at her words.
She had said it knowing that perhaps they might break up then and there. She had not been dating Gyeongmin casually, but neither had she seriously considered marrying him.
At the time, she was only twenty-two. She could barely manage her own life, and there were often moments when even being in a relationship with him honestly felt burdensome.
It had long been her dream to meet a good person and build a warm, happy family, but she thought she could achieve that only far in the future, after finding a job and establishing herself properly. Certainly not while she had yet to graduate from university, much less find employment.
Even apart from her own lack of means, she thought it was absurd for a couple in their early to mid-twenties, with no foundation to their lives, to try to arrange a marriage. She had revealed all of those feelings, yet, astonishingly, Gyeongmin reacted in a way completely different from what she expected.
“Should we get married? No, let’s get married.”
“W-what are you talking about?”
“Let’s get married as soon as I graduate. Next spring.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Does the way I’m speaking sound like a joke? I wasn’t dating you casually. I’d been thinking about marriage from the beginning. This is just moving it up a little. You know my family has plenty of money, right? You don’t have to worry about money or anything.”
She was somewhat taken aback, wondering if he had really been this immature, and she continued to think that surely he must be joking.
She could not have failed to know that he was head over heels for her, but she did not believe he could possibly be so empty-headed as to make such a momentous decision on the spur of the moment simply because he wanted to have sex with his girlfriend as much as he pleased. Marriage was not a child’s game.
But Gyeongmin went ahead and made a mess of everything. He announced to his family that he would marry her after graduating the following year, laying out every detail about the background and circumstances of the woman he intended to marry.
As a result, Gyeongmin’s mother, infamous throughout the neighborhood for her ferocity, flew into a rage and chased him all the way to the school. In order to shake off the wretched woman clinging to her son, she hurled every cruel word she could think of without hesitation. For Seonha, it was no different from being struck by lightning out of a clear sky.
Gyeongmin, the only son of a family that had made its fortune in real estate, had once casually told Seonha, “Even I, her son, think my mother is incredibly fierce. When she loses her temper, no one can stop her.”
As her private family history was exposed in full because of Gyeongmin’s mother, Seonha could think of only one thing: How could he have acted so inconsiderately and thoughtlessly when he was fully aware of how vicious his parents could be? If he had failed to foresee that such a situation might occur, that was a problem in itself.
Watching Gyeongmin hurry toward the lecture hall after belatedly hearing what had happened, Seonha could not even manage a hollow laugh.
She bitterly regretted telling him about her dead parents and her wounds. Because she liked him, because she trusted him, she had honestly confided the pain she had kept hidden.
She had already experienced many times how cruel and selfish people could be, yet she was furious with herself for once again trusting someone so easily and giving them her heart. If she had not opened herself up to Gyeongmin, she would never have suffered this humiliation.
After that incident, not only her classmates but even upper- and lowerclassmen whose faces she did not know began gossiping about her.
If she went around cheerfully, they cursed her for that, too. They said she was pretending to be unaffected.
She had always tried to smile without a care in the world, and before, people had praised her for looking like someone who had been loved by her family. But now, even when she smiled, they criticized her as fake. They mocked her, saying it was disgusting how she pretended to be carefree and cheerful, acting as though she had been raised well and educated in a good family just to win people’s favor.
Then what should she have done? If she was an orphan as poor as dirt, with a disabled mother and a criminal father, was she supposed to wear it plainly on her face and live like someone crushed beneath darkness, barely surviving from one day to the next?
Although Gyeongmin’s mother was clearly the one at fault, after a few people whispered that she was merely an ignorant, overly doting mother, the matter was forgotten. That was probably because a more entertaining and enticing story about Yu Seonha had been laid out before them like prey.
The word “criminal” that Gyeongmin’s mother had blurted out was soon inflated into a baseless rumor that Seonha’s father had committed murder and died while serving his sentence. As the story that she had been born after her vicious criminal father raped her disabled mother spread as though it were fact—something people had simply imagined and babbled at random—she felt sick to her stomach.
The hidden sides of the people who had been kind and friendly to her until they learned about her background were not particularly shocking. She had experienced such things countless times even as a child.
The person who had brought her completely to her knees was Gyeongmin once again. When he came to her home, he could not accept her decision to break up. He tried to persuade her not to let what his mother had done come between them, then reluctantly admitted that he had acted thoughtlessly, but when he saw that she had steeled her heart, he grew angry and finally revealed his true colors.
The implication that he had intended to marry her out of pity, as though tossing alms to a beggar, tore sharply at her heart.
It was unbearably cruel and unreasonable.
Why did she always have to live while being hurt by people like this? Her sense of injustice surged until her chest throbbed and burned.
After breaking up with Gyeongmin following a filthy fight, Seonha eventually chose to take a leave of absence from school. The life she had struggled so desperately to maintain suddenly seemed utterly pointless. Even if Gyeongmin graduated, she did not think she could endure the nasty looks directed at her.
It had been difficult enough to attend school while earning enough money to cover her living expenses and rent, but she had stubbornly persisted because she wanted to graduate even a little sooner. She consoled herself by thinking that it would be better to use this opportunity to take a break from school and save up a lump sum of money.
Two years passed, and she returned to school, but the juniors who had heard her rumors passed along by senior students close to her looked at her through colored glasses. The false rumors, swollen like a snowball, had spread too far to be corrected, and there was no one anywhere who would listen to her words honestly and believe her.
Seonha had to attend school in resignation, repeating to herself that she only had one year left until graduation, so she should hold on just a little longer.
The end of the semester was now near. Once she graduated and found a job, she would be able to start anew in a different environment. There was no flaw in her personality, nor did she possess any great defect. She had done nothing wrong. So if she started over somewhere new, surely everything would get better.
“……”
Seonha’s expression sank into darkness.
But would it, really?
She knew that changing her surroundings would solve nothing. She would continue smiling brightly and cheerfully, as though to show those who had hurt her. The smile that made it easy for her to win people over would be dearly loved by those around her.
Even if people swarmed around her, she would remain lonely, with no one to whom she could give even a piece of her heart. And the moment everything was exposed, as it had been with Gyeongmin, she would lose even those hollow relationships. Everyone would turn their backs on her, leaving her utterly alone. Then they would repeat the same words: They would say she had deceived them.
She had tried not to resent the parents who had given birth to her, but it was also true that she had deliberately avoided telling people about them. She had never lied to anyone, but whenever the subject of her family came up, she would clamp her mouth shut. She knew all too well how people’s faces changed the moment they learned about her background.
She had repeated excuses to herself in her mind—that she was not ashamed, that she had no choice because reality was so cruel—but now she was no longer certain of the true feelings hidden inside her.
Gyeongmin’s voice, mocking her dream of getting married and creating a happy family as something utterly beyond her reach, had been echoing in her ears for some time. She had been angry with him then, telling him not to say such cruel things, but now she felt she had to admit that he might have been right.
Perhaps no one would ever appear who could accept and love her exactly as she was, without prejudice. Perhaps a destined partner meant for her had never existed in the first place.
“Oh, my. A young lady came here all by herself? This is usually a place for rough-looking men.”
When Seonha opened the tent flap of the street stall located some distance from the school’s main gate and stepped inside, the proprietress, who had been setting side dishes on the tables, greeted her in a warm, familiar tone.
“That pretty young lady has a face like she’s about to drop dead. Something happened, didn’t it? Well, everyone has times when they want to drink alone. Just because you’re young, does that mean you have no worries? Go sit over there by the heater for now. If some lowlife starts bothering you, I’ll curse him out and chase him away myself.”
Seonha lowered her head slightly in greeting and sat where the proprietress had pointed.
There was a reason she had chosen this shabby outdoor stall, tucked away in a secluded spot rather far from the school.
She had been worried that she might run into someone from her department at one of the stylish bars favored by the current students. One might think that such a coincidence was unlikely among all the bars around the university, but such coincidences happened more often than one would expect.
If she remained anxious about running into someone she knew, she would not be able to drink comfortably or put her mind at ease. She was already a returning student burdened with all sorts of rumors; she could not let anyone see her pathetically downing a bottle alone.
Today, she wanted to get drunk without thinking about anything at all. She did not want to be interrupted, nor did she want to worry about anyone else’s opinion.
She ordered a bottle of soju and a bowl of udon, then pulled her plastic chair closer to the table and sat down. Since it was winter, she could not help worrying about the biting cold, but the inside of the stall was cozier and warmer than she had expected, thanks to the large heater set near the tables.
“Haa……”
Once the shivering in her body, frozen by the cold outside, had subsided, Seonha rubbed her palms together. Before long, the soju she had ordered arrived, along with a bowl of udon sending up clouds of steaming heat.
She neither drank well nor liked alcohol. At the beginning of her first year, she had been dragged to drinking parties several times and forced to drink alcohol that did not agree with her. Perhaps because of that, she had developed an aversion to it and, unless she was in a situation where she was being forced, generally avoided drinking altogether.
This was the first time she had ever come out to drink of her own accord. She had never imagined that a day would come when she would sit alone, tilt a bottle of soju, and pour herself lonely drinks.
She had little expectation that alcohol would comfort her pain, as people so often claimed. She simply wanted to empty her mind, which had been so full of thoughts that it felt ready to burst after her phone call with Gyeongmin—even if she had to borrow the strength of alcohol to do it.
“……”
It’s only bitter after all.
They said alcohol tasted sweet when life was bitter, but it was not so. Perhaps because her life had already allowed her to taste nothing but bitterness for so long, she simply hated the bitterness of alcohol.
She had once told Professor Ahn that she could not eat sweets very well, but that had been a lie to turn him down. She had always liked sweet things. Whenever she tasted the sweetness of candy, chocolate, or cotton candy—the kind that made her tongue tingle and stimulated her salivary glands—a soft smile would spread across her face without her realizing it. Sometimes she had the foolish thought that she wished life tasted like that, too.
Her brow furrowed unconsciously, but she thought it would be all right if this clear-headedness could at least grow a little hazy. Should she be grateful that Gyeongmin had chosen to contact her on a day when she happened not to have work? On an ordinary day, she would not have had the free time to savor her wounds and drink like this.
As Seonha was sneering at herself, she dropped her chopsticks when she saw two men enter the nearly empty stall, perhaps because of the cold.
“Aren’t you Seonha?”
Professor Ahn, who recognized her immediately, brightened with delight.
“Ah…… Professor. Hello.”
Seonha stood and greeted him awkwardly. Her gaze was directed at Professor Ahn, but all her attention was focused on the tall, striking man standing beside him.
It had become clear now. God was not merely mischievous—He must hate her so much that He had decided to torment her relentlessly. Otherwise, how could she keep running into that man without fail in situations this embarrassing?
After she had inadvertently overheard what he said to Professor Ahn one day last autumn, her feelings for him had only deepened. Now, rather than his handsome face, the low voice with which he had spoken came to mind first. She knew he had not said those words for her, but perhaps they had comforted her more deeply than she had realized.
Since he was a man who kept forcing his way into her thoughts without permission, it would have been normal for her to feel happy at seeing him again after so long. Yet she was in a miserable state.
She was deeply embarrassed that he had discovered her shabby table, where she had been sitting alone and drinking by herself. He would surely think she was the sort of woman who liked alcohol enough to go drinking alone. In truth, she could count on her fingers the number of times she had ever touched alcohol. He probably would not care, but an unjust sense of grievance rose in her throat along with a flood of excuses.
“Well, it’s strangely nice running into you here. This place is one of my regular haunts. What’s a young thing like you doing drinking alone in such a gloomy place? You should have called a friend to drink with you.”
“Well, that……”
“If you don’t mind, come over here, Seonha. Join us. Doyuk, you’re fine with that, right? You said the two of you knew each other.”
Although he was asking for their opinions, Professor Ahn was rather impulsive by nature. He pulled out a chair for her and gestured for her to sit.
Seonha subtly shifted her gaze to gauge the man’s reaction. With an expression that suggested it made no difference to him either way, he sat across from Professor Ahn. He had not welcomed her, but neither had he objected, which eased her mind slightly. Hesitantly, she moved to the other seat.
She was already slightly tipsy after only a few shots, as she had little tolerance for alcohol, but with him sitting directly before her, tension made the hair rise along her spine.
Professor Ahn opened the soju bottle and filled both their glasses. Since it was difficult for Seonha to refuse a drink offered by her academic adviser, she emptied several glasses. Professor Ahn grinned and remarked that she held her alcohol better than he had expected.
Meanwhile, the man named Doyuk, Professor Ahn’s nephew, simply remained in his seat, indifferent, as though he had nothing to do with them.
As the drinking session grew livelier, Professor Ahn, apparently somewhat drunk, once again began poking his nose into other people’s affairs.
“By the way, Seonha, do you have something troubling you, too? Why were you drinking alone? On such a cold and lonely winter night. Is something difficult going on?”
“Ah, no.”
“If you ever want to talk about something difficult, or need help with anything, feel free to contact me anytime. My nephew here has some troublesome business of his own, so I dragged him out to school today on purpose to give him some advice.”
Judging by the annoyance written across the man’s face, Professor Ahn had clearly gone to considerable lengths to force him out and counsel him.
Troublesome business, though. What could it be?
Before she could continue wondering, Professor Ahn cheerfully began blabbing about Doyuk’s situation.
“This guy’s at the point where he has to grab just about anyone and get married because of his grandfather’s orders. The old man is really something, putting that on a young man with his whole life ahead of him when he’s only twenty-nine…… Well, I do understand wanting to see his most beloved grandson get married before he passes away after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.”
Thoroughly drunk, Professor Ahn was rambling on about his nephew’s intensely private affairs in front of Seonha, who was practically a complete stranger.
Dowook did furrow one eyebrow, but perhaps because Seonha, Professor Ahn’s student, was there, he did not openly rebuke Professor Ahn as he had last time.
“But this fellow is so particular. I hear he rejects every woman within thirty minutes of meeting her and gets up to leave, so the poor man must be suffering quite a bit. Do you really intend to get married? You’re not just pretending to go along with it because your grandfather is pestering you, are you? Is this your strategy—saying you’ll do it while digging in your heels like this?”
“They said they won’t hand the company over to me if I don’t do as I’m told, so I have to.”
Even as he answered, the man’s face was filled with every kind of irritation. Seonha was so shocked that she barely heard what he had just said.
Marriage…….
He was getting married?
It wasn’t that he had someone he loved and was naturally taking the next step with her. He had entered the marriage market because he could no longer withstand the pressure from his terminally ill grandfather.
If he had been a man with a lover, the strange affection she had built up until now would have crumbled into nothing. But hearing that he had to marry someone he had no feelings for stirred an even deeper regret—and an absurd longing for him.
What kind of person would become that man’s bride?
Unlike herself, who had been hated by God alone, she would probably be a woman born with everything, showered with God’s affection from the moment she entered the world, and loved to excess by everyone around her—a woman capable of claiming the seat beside him.
Seonha let out a bitter smile and emptied her glass again. His quiet gaze settled over her face.
*The burning thirst made her open her eyes on its own.
Unlike her throat, which had dried out painfully, the corners of her eyes were faintly damp. She had dreamed of her father for the first time in a long while.
In the dream, she was a little girl. Her mother had fallen ill and was unable to look after her, so she followed her father when he went out to work.
Her father, who had a criminal record, had moved from one day-laboring job to another before gradually saving enough money to start a food stall out of a truck. It was a cold winter, and while her father sold miscellaneous goods to passersby, young Seonha kept nodding off and waking up inside the vehicle.
Just when she could no longer bear the boredom, loud voices began to come from outside. Unable to overcome her curiosity, she opened the car door and climbed out. Her father and a middle-aged woman who appeared to be a customer were arguing and pointing fingers at each other. Though the people nearby continued walking, they cast sidelong glances at the fight as they watched.
The woman grabbed the hand of the boy beside her, spun around, and said loudly enough for everyone to hear,
“Yoonseok, if you don’t get an education and live without anything, you’ll have to sell things like that on the street to get by. You don’t want to work like your dad, do you? You want to work in an office, with air-conditioning blowing on you when it’s hot and a heater warming you when it’s cold, right? Then you have to study hard. Got it?”
Her father was still snorting with rage after arguing with the woman, but his clenched fist was trembling with shame. That hand was the first thing Seonha noticed with her eyes, even though she was only half her father’s height.
Her father, who had not even graduated middle school, had always told her, almost out of habit, that she needed to study hard and attend a good university. She had found it tiresome and suffocating to hear those words every day, but even at her young age, she could vaguely understand how he must have felt.
The moment her father’s eyes met his young daughter’s, he turned away with a hardened expression. The reason he had been so deeply wounded that day was probably not because a complete stranger had insulted him, but because he had shown his only daughter such a sight.
Abandoned not long after he was born, her father had been cast out of the orphanage at an early age and had never been able to complete his education properly.
She had heard that their relationship had begun when her father helped her mother, who had been wandering the streets in her youth. Even after he confessed that he had served time in prison for theft, her mother did not turn away from him, and not long afterward, the two of them married.
A photograph of the young man and woman standing side by side in hairstyles and clothes that now seemed merely old-fashioned sat on the low table beside the bed. They were trapped inside the frame, and she could no longer see them or hear their voices.
Seonha let out a thin sigh and threw off the blanket. After walking only a few steps from the old mattress, she reached the cramped kitchen, poured water from the refrigerator into a cup, drank it, and returned to bed.
“……
Huh?”
Seonha was holding the cup, already more than half empty despite having been filled to the brim, when she checked the time and froze in place.
‘How did I get home yesterday?’
Soon, both of Seonha’s eyes began to fill with despair. Fortunately—or unfortunately—she had not blacked out, and the events of the previous day came back to her one after another.
The person responsible for the gathering had left early because he was feeling unwell, but not before making the pointless request that his nephew safely take his beloved student home. And Seonha, who had already been fairly drunk by the time Professor Ahn disappeared, had…….
“Everyone gets married so easily, even though they don’t really want to. You too, and my ex-boyfriend.”
What on earth—
“He seems to have even set a date already. He says he’s getting married next spring. I can’t get married even if I want to…… He told me I’d have a hard time getting married because my circumstances were so terrible.”
What on earth had she been babbling about, Yoo Seonha?
“Well, it’s not like I can’t understand. His mother even came to my school and hurled every insult imaginable at me. She didn’t grab me by the hair, that’s all. All because someone as horrible as me was dating her son.”
She had never drunk much, so she had not even been aware of what her own drinking habit was. Apparently, her drunken behavior consisted of rambling endlessly to whoever happened to be in front of her, telling them every grievance she had always swallowed down inside. The type people found most exhausting.
Seonha forced the scream that threatened to burst out of her mouth back down. At their first meeting, she had smelled of sweat; at their second, she had eavesdropped; and at their third, she had poured out a pathetic, tedious lament. The first and second incidents had been cute by comparison.
What was a drunken outburst doing in front of the man she had fallen for at first sight?
It was the worst of the worst. If possible, she wanted to disappear from this world. In crude terms, she felt she could accept even death gladly out of sheer embarrassment.
She wanted either to erase him from her own memory or scrape away every stupid thing she had done from his. Whenever the words she had spoken the previous day played back clearly in her mind, the color drained from her face.
“Me, I was so sick of my parents always having to hear people say that they were uneducated and had nothing. When people insult me in other ways, I can dismiss it inwardly and tell myself it isn’t true, but those words really…… They make a person feel endlessly miserable in an instant. That’s why I studied desperately and got into this university, even though we didn’t have money or any breathing room. I should have gotten a job as soon as I graduated high school, but I couldn’t afford not to. It was my father’s wish, too, and I’ll probably have to keep hearing that I have nothing for quite a while, but I really hated hearing that I was uneducated. In the end, I’m going to school while barely sleeping and earning money through part-time jobs.”
She must truly have dragged out every thought she had inside her.
“I’ve lived hard…… I really am living hard…… but I guess it’s nothing more or less than struggling in place. No matter how hard I try, I don’t think anything will change. After getting that person’s call, everything feels so futile. It’s as if he was reminding me that every cruel thing he said to me was true.”
He had not drunk a single drop of alcohol, yet, as Professor Ahn had asked, he drove her home. He seemed like the type who would never do anything unnecessary, so she had expected him to simply hail a taxi and send her off. His actions had been unexpected.
Seonha set the cup down on the table and belatedly noticed the square piece of paper beneath her phone. Her pupils grew large as she held the stiff business card, uncreased in any way, in her hand.
“Why is this…….”
At that moment, her phone lit up. Her gaze dropped.
[I’ll have some time during lunch. I’ll come to the front of the university, so let’s meet then and have a proper conversation.]
The message had come from the same number written on the business card. In other words, it was from the man named Choi Dowook. She could read the message, but she could not decipher its meaning at all.
What on earth did he want to have a proper conversation about…….
“Are you really getting married?”
A memory from the previous day flashed through her mind like lightning. When a sleek, luxurious sedan utterly out of place in her shabby neighborhood had stopped in front of her home, the still-drunken Seonha had made an utterly ridiculous proposal.
“If you haven’t even decided who your partner is yet, and you really don’t care who it is…… Could I marry you instead?”
Seonha’s face turned as white as a sheet before suddenly flushing red like a perfectly ripe apple.
*She had not sent the message by mistake or anything of the sort. Choi Dowook really did come to the front of the College of Social Sciences during lunch. During the short time it took to travel in his car, Seonha felt as though she could barely breathe inside the enclosed space.
Seonha sat facing Dowook in a coffee shop near the main gate. Unable to raise her eyes, she kept her head bowed and stared only at the tips of her fingernails.
“Look over the contract first.”
He held out a document envelope to her.
“The contract……?”
Only then did Seonha meet his eyes.
As always, he was immaculate in a perfectly tailored suit, not a single strand of hair out of place. He was a man who could easily capture a woman’s heart and toy with it, yet seemed so perfect in another way that he intimidated everyone around him.
Unable to overcome her puzzlement at the word contract, Seonha hurriedly opened the document envelope. Her eyes widened when she saw what was inside.
“……
What is this?”
“You remember proposing marriage to me yesterday, don’t you?”
“I-I remember. I do, but…….”
Seonha stammered in confusion. Her concentration was too scattered to properly read the contract packed with lines of text, but one thing immediately caught her eye.
“Excuse me, but…… the Chairman Choi Gyeongman written here, is he perhaps…….”
Even though she had no connection to that world, she remembered the familiar name from television news and magazines. Once the words “Seongil Department Store” on the man’s business card overlapped with the name Chairman Choi Gyeongman, there was hardly any room left for doubt, but she still wanted to know for certain.
Perhaps seeing right through her thoughts, Dowook spoke in a clear voice.
“He is Chairman Choi Gyeongman, the owner of the Seongil Group.”
No way.
Seonha mouthed the words soundlessly, utterly dazed. Once she regained some measure of composure, she felt keenly just how outrageous a proposal she had made the previous day.
The Seongil Group was a massive distribution company that had amassed an enormous fortune. Seongil Department Store alone was a famous department-store chain with more than twenty branches across the country. If the head of the Seongil Group, Choi Gyeongman, was his grandfather, then this man was royalty as well.
His appearance and bearing had seemed far from ordinary, but she could never have imagined he was this important. If she had known his background, she would never have uttered such an insolent remark as asking whether she could marry him, no matter how completely drunk she had been.
A shabby, penniless woman drinking alone miserably in a corner of a street stall had proposed marriage out of nowhere to a man she had met only a handful of times. How ridiculous and absurd must it have seemed to him? Seonha squeezed her eyes shut, feeling her face grow even hotter than it had when she recalled the events that morning.
‘But…….’
Seonha’s eyelids lifted again. She glanced at the man, who was checking the time on his wristwatch.
He had come here because he had not simply dismissed her words as drunken nonsense, hadn’t he? There was no mockery or contempt on his stiff face. She could not find in him the expression Gyeongmin had worn when he asked whether someone like her could possibly dream of such a thing.
“Did you come here because of what I said yesterday? You’re saying you want to…… marry me?”
“That’s a strange question. If that wasn’t my purpose, why would I have come here to see you, Ms. Yoo Seonha?”
His tone lightly rebuked her as though she had asked something pointless, and, as it had been in the past, it was simply cold. But he had suddenly proposed marriage. It was true that she had been the one to propose it first, but according to ordinary common sense…… surely no one would seriously accept something said by a person so drunk that she could barely keep her senses.
It really had been nothing more than absurd drunken nonsense.
Although she was deeply upset by the fact that he was in a position where he had to grab hold of any woman and marry her, and by the news that he would soon become a married man, marriage? She could barely manage to worry about next month’s rent; she had no room in her life to get married right away. Why had he dragged an offer that was no different from drunken rambling—something she could simply let go in one ear and out the other—all the way to this meeting today?
She wondered whether she had done something at the drinking party the night before to make him take an interest in her, but there was not the slightest sign on his face that he had fallen for her or fallen in love. Then again, if he had suddenly developed feelings for a woman who had behaved so strangely while drunk, he would have quite an unusual taste.
“Look over the contract carefully. The terms shouldn’t be bad for you, Miss Yoo Seonha.”
Ah, right. He had not suggested simply getting married. He had said they should make a contract first.
In other words… a contract marriage.
Did all chaebol families make separate contracts like this before getting married? Or was it something popular among young people these days?
As she came up with such trivial hypotheses, Seonha returned to the fundamental question.
Contract marriage or an ordinary marriage aside, why on earth me?
“You said you rejected all the arranged matches, didn’t you? Then why…”
Why did you choose me?
Doyuk seemed to immediately understand the question she had left unsaid.
“I was looking for a woman like you.”
Thump.
At his words, spoken without hesitation as he looked straight at her, Seonha felt the steady rhythm of her heart shatter in an instant.
“You said you hated being told that you were uneducated and had grown up poor.”
Seonha’s face flared hot. She had so desperately hoped it wasn’t the case, but he remembered every word of her complaints from the night before with perfect clarity.
Ah… this is unbearably humiliating.
“Do you remember saying that marriage was your dream?”
Seonha lightly furrowed her smooth brow as she searched her memory.
“If you marry me, you’ll never have to hear anyone say that you’re poor again. With the amount written in the contract, you won’t need to scrape by as you do now even after the contract ends and we divorce…”
“W-Wait a moment!”
Seonha hurriedly stopped him. Her flustered eyes darted restlessly from side to side.
“When you say you were looking for a woman like me…”
“A woman who can be moved by money.”
Thud.
Her rapidly beating heart plunged straight to the ground.
“If that expression offended you, I understand. I had no bad intentions. It would be more accurate to say a woman who needs money.”
Seonha felt utterly pathetic for having allowed her heart to flutter for even a moment at his words. She let out the breath she had been holding in a great rush. At last, she understood. She understood why he had asked someone as insignificant as her to marry him.
From the beginning, he had needed an “insignificant” woman. There was no way a woman from a family comparable to his own, one who appeared at arranged matches, could be moved by money.
A woman who had lamented her circumstances, saying she hated being poor, had suddenly declared that her dream was to marry and become happy. It was only natural for him to interpret it that way—to assume she was the kind of woman who wanted what graduating female students jokingly called “marrying into comfort.”
The words she had half-heard in surprise when he said he needed to find someone to marry as soon as possible had lain crouched in the back of her mind, only now brushing across it. Perhaps he thought she had eagerly thrown herself at him and asked him to marry her the moment she heard he would inherit a company. No—right now, that man almost certainly thought she was exactly that kind of vulgar, materialistic woman.
What was unusual was that although he regarded her as a shameless materialist who was crazy for money, he showed no sign of despising or looking down on that trait. His attitude was endlessly serious, as though proving that his words—“I was looking for a woman like you”—were not a lie.
But she had never, not even once, harbored such thoughts. Last night, she had probably given a much-abbreviated explanation of her dream, but her goal was to establish herself properly, both socially and financially, then marry with dignity and build a lovely family. The reason she had made that nonsense of a proposal—or rather, something resembling a proposal—to him while drunk was not because he had a company to inherit. It was because she liked him.
The situation was unfair, but she could not reveal the truth. Even though the man before her did not seem to ridicule women who chased money, he would probably let out a derisive laugh if she told him that she liked him. She did not know much about him, but she was certain of it.
Even if she put herself in his place, she could not understand it. They had met only three times. They had not even had a truly deep conversation, and yet she claimed to have fallen for him. If she were him, she would also suspect that someone making such a confession was not sincere.
What would be even worse was being branded not only as a woman obsessed with money, without ever clearing up the misunderstanding, but also as one obsessed with his looks. And she could not even firmly protest that the latter was a misunderstanding. Yes, it would be better to keep her mouth shut.
Floundering in this utterly absurd situation, Seonha lifted her head and met his gaze. One of the fragmented pieces of memory from the previous night had come back to her.
“Um, yesterday… didn’t I tell you about my parents, too?”
“You did.”
“And even so… do you really think I’m suitable as a marriage partner?”
During high school, a girl who had particularly hated her had referred to Seonha and her family as “a bottom-of-the-barrel family.”
Even if this was a marriage made by contract, she wondered whether it truly did not bother a man born and raised in such an impressive family. People who had been kind and gentle to her had completely changed the look in their eyes as soon as they learned about her father, who had been to prison.
“I don’t understand why you’ve been asking so many unnecessary questions.”
He slightly furrowed his brow, as if she were becoming a nuisance.
“I’m trying to marry Yoo Seonha, not your parents.”
It was an exceedingly cold reply, yet Seonha felt a warm sensation spread through one corner of her chest, just as it had when she overheard him speaking to Professor Ahn during their second meeting.
She knew that he had not said it out of consideration, to comfort or encourage her. His expression suggested that he would not care even if she herself were a criminal, let alone her father, so long as she was a woman who would cleanly leave once the period he wanted had ended. And yet, her heart had been moved.
“Have you changed your mind since yesterday?”
She might regret it before long, realizing that it had been a terribly reckless decision. Even so, she wanted to seize this opportunity.
A man who saw Yoo Seonha as nothing but Yoo Seonha, and the first man she had ever fallen for. There might never be another man who met both of those conditions. Perhaps this man was the fate she had been waiting for.
Those terribly emotionless, frigid eyes felt strangely kind to Seonha. Even when she pretended not to care about the expressions of people who mocked or pitied her, her heart split open a little more every day. But he would neither mock nor pity her.
‘Even if that alone is enough, I…’
She wanted to hold on to this man. For the first time since she was born, she felt blinded by desire and longing for something. Her trembling eyes lowered to the contract in her hands. One clause pierced clearly into her heart.
「During the contract period, both parties shall remember that this marriage is contractual and shall not demand unnecessary emotions from each other.」
She understood exactly what the man wanted. A woman who would not love him. A woman who would leave without clinging to him once the contract period ended. He had chosen her as someone who fulfilled those conditions.
But his judgment was mistaken. Unbelievably, her heart was already wholly drawn to him.
She could not tell him that, however. Even if it meant deceiving him, she did not want to let this opportunity slip away. Despite having already seen those cold eyes that seemed as though they would never offer love, an overpowering desire she could not resist rose within her.
She wanted to stay by his side. She wanted to know more about him. If she did not accept his proposal now, this opportunity would never come again. The moment she refused, he would immediately find another woman who met his conditions.
She had never been able to understand Gyeongmin’s decision to marry for such an absurd reason, but no one would understand her resolve now, either. Even if everyone clicked their tongues and called it a foolish choice, she did not care.
Staring at the man within her field of vision, Seonha murmured as if entranced.
“No. I’ll do it. I’ll get married… I’ll do it.”
As she answered in a quiet voice, Seonha had a premonition. She felt that she would come to love the man before her far, far more in the days to come.
Summer, autumn, and winter.
Once each season changed, she got drunk and proposed to a man she had met only three times, and he responded by offering her a contract with an exceedingly rational and cold expression.
Then, the following spring, they held their wedding ceremony. The relationship between two people who held such completely different thoughts and intentions began that way.