Marriage Situation

Chapter 2

Jihoon’s unspoken answer was to step out of the elevator without a word. He walked over and grabbed the woman’s hand, then let himself be lead to her hotel room.

As soon as the door closed, he pulled her into his arms like she was crumbling.

This time, there was no one to interrupt.

“Damn.” Jihoon shoved his hand up into the dress just like he’d been itching to do. “I’m losing my mind.”

The woman’s shoulders hitched at his tantalizing touch and rumbling voice. “Y-your hand.”

“What about it?”

“No, it’s fine. It’s fine, but...”

It’s fine but not fine? Is that it? A chuckle slipped past Jihoon’s lips.

He was about to ask when he realized he knew absolutely nothing about her. He wanted to call her name to tease her, but there was no name to call.

“Come to think of it, we don’t even know each other’s names. What’s yours?” he asked, hand stroking her skin. Irritated red bloomed where his nails dragged down smooth skin.

At his question, the woman let out a shaky breath, then slowly closed and opened her eyes. “Is that... important?”

Caught off-guard again...

The woman seemed more the type to cling to the fantasy of a nameless one night stand than to actually have one. Yet she was so cool about it.

“No, it’s not.” Jihoon took a handful of her body and squeezed as he whispered, “I don’t need your name.”

It was what she was hiding under all this that mattered.

He took her chin and tasted her lips again, even as he roughly delved past them. Their tongues collided, and her saliva trickled into his mouth.

The sweet and bitter taste suited his palate.

* * *

Yooyoung was dizzy. So this was what it was like to kiss.

The man who seemed uninterested in others captured her lips as soon as the door closed. He tenderly caught Yooyoung’s face in both his hands and turned her mind upside down with his hot lips.

Her first kiss was surprisingly electrifying.

“I expected as much, but you’re even...”

“Nnh...”

“...Softer and more exciting than I thought.”

He grabbed hold of Yooyoung’s body with his large hands in a crushing grip. It was intense, but rather than hurting, it was electrifying. Yooyoung’s lips parted halfway and let out a moan she’d never heard herself make before.

“Hnng.”

But he didn’t stop, even at her feeble moan.

However, seeing the way she stiffened once she came into contact with a man’s firmness, he asked, “Are you not used to this sort of thing?”

Yooyoung’s eyes narrowed. “If I say yes, are you going to stop?”

She would be meeting her seon [“blind dates with the express intention of marriage”] partner soon.

Tonight was her only opportunity to have a one night stand. It scared her that he might stop when he learned this was her first time.

Though, no, that was a lie: his lips felt so good and everywhere he touched felt so electrifying that she didn’t want him to stop.

The man laughed at her question. “No. I can’t stop here.”

She let out a heady sigh.

“We’ve already started,” he went on. “We can’t stop here.”

So why had he asked if she wasn’t used to this? Yooyoung slowly opened her eyes to look at him, but the man only laughed. “I only wanted to make you feel even better before we start, if you aren’t used to this.”

And then he knelt on the soft carpet.

What’s he doing? Before Yooyoung realized it, the man grabbed her.

The lips that looked so stubborn headed toward her lower half. His soft, hot lips skimmed her body.

“Um!” Yooyoung flailed at the unexpected act, but the man was persistent. Everywhere his lips, his fingers, touched... felt good.

“Ah, ahhh.” Yooyoung cried out enough to make herself hoarse. Even though she tried to escape, she couldn’t so much as move her toes from the pleasure.

“So...”

It was so good. The pleasure was so intense that it hurt. Her nerves were so overstimulated that she thought they would snap.

When Yooyoung began to pant, the man got to his feet and took off his clothes. With every button his long, strong fingers undid, her eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the firm, chiseled muscles being revealed.

Yooyoung’s lips went dry at the sculpted body before her.

He chuckled at seeing her hazy from pleasure. “What am I supposed to do if you’re already worn out?”

She couldn’t answer.

“The night’s just starting.” The man approached Yooyoung once more and pulled her into a bruising embrace.

It was the first time she’d done anything like this, and the pleasure Yooyoung was met with engulfed her with terrifying speed.

* * *

It was a rainy morning. Yooyoung stirred within strong arms to the sound of heavy rain drumming against the window.

“Oh no.”

It was her first time waking up in the same bed as another person. The night had been so intense that she couldn’t open her eyes properly.

The man’s neat face appeared through her blurry vision—and he was perfect.

Everyone in the lounge had been staring at him, and she had pulled a man like that into her room.

She must have been insane. Definitely, absolutely insane.

The pleasure he had given her the night before still controlled Yooyoung’s body. Her lower half was so tingling-hot that just looking at the man now was electrifying.

Yooyoung chewed her lip. He was still deeply asleep. She could see that his eyes were firmly closed beneath his disheveled hair.

Yesterday was the end of her escape. Today, she had to return to the boring, tedious life that was Yooyoung Kim’s.

She slipped out of the man’s arms and dressed herself with the clothes scattered on the floor. And then she found her bag and rushed to pick it up.

“What do I do with him...?”

He was still deep asleep.

She could never meet him again. The moment she had refused to tell him her name the night before, there was an unspoken agreement to leave what happened between them as an anonymous one night stand.

He was such a perfect man that she stopped walking away without realizing it.

But her future was already decided.

“Thank you,” she whispered and quickly headed to the door.

For keeping me company through a lonely night.

But even as Yooyoung opened the door, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. She had to force herself to run out of the room.

Today, there was something she had to do.

* * *

“Yooyoung is so nice.”

The first word that came to mind when people described someone was said to truly represent that person, and the first thing people said when they thought of Yooyoung was that she was “nice.”

She often thought about escaping that word, but she lacked the courage and the strength to do so. She merely devoted herself to her studies and followed the track already decided for her life. She was good at her studies and had passed the bar exam, but even that meant nothing to her parents.

Yooyoung sat in the hotel café as she looked back on her life. “Nice” Yooyoung was currently waiting for her seon partner.

She thought back to what her mother had said the day before:

“It’s a very important meeting. He must approve of you, no matter what. What you think doesn’t matter, anyway.”

An arranged marriage.

It was a meeting without love or anything else. Just business.

“Don’t misunderstand. This isn’t just a marriage. The fact that someone with such qualifications wants to meet you at all? You just have to be there.”

It was her marriage, but she “just had to be there.”

Her mother repeated the command multiple times, as though she had been worried that Yooyoung would misunderstand.

“If a useless girl like you wants to be useful to our family, you have to at least meet someone of that status level.”

Was it just her imagination that “our family” didn’t sound like it included her?

Her mother’s tone was that of someone who never even imagined her daughter would refuse.

Then again, Yooyoung had no reason to. Her life had been made up only of sports and studying. She had never even got to have one of those relationships that were so commonplace in her school days. Nothing changed after she’d gotten a job, either. Who would someone like her, bad at conversation and dull, even date?

But she had to get married. If she didn’t, her parents would hate her even more.

So...

What did it matter who she married? It wasn’t like she had anyone she wanted to marry in the first place. It didn’t matter if he locked her into a tiny room and only used her as he needed.

She had basically given up.

Heavy rain pounded on the windows of the hotel café.

“The rain really isn’t stopping.”

The meeting time she had set with the man she was meeting for the seon was 1 P.M.

Five minutes until the meeting time. There was no one that looked like he was there for a seon in their meeting spot.

Maybe he won’t come at all with all this rain. Or maybe he changed his mind because he didn’t want to get married to a woman like me...

Thinking that way made the tension ease.

“Haah...”

Being stood up might actually be better. Yooyoung leaned her still-sore back against the chair.

She had done something so colossal last night that she really didn’t have the mind to meet anyone new. Her thoughts were still on the man from last night.

“I was too innocent.”

A one night stand when I’ve never even gone on a date before...

No matter how she thought about it, she must have been out of her mind.

Her memories of last night were still too vivid.

“Did you know your eyes could drive a person crazy?”

She recalled the man who had pushed her to her limits.

The pleasure vividly coming back to her made Yooyoung’s body heat up again as she sat in the café. She clutched at her arm and shook her head. “What are you thinking, Yooyoung, in broad daylight?”

Just then, she heard a ring through the rain. Rrrrr.

It was exactly 1 P.M.

It was a call from an unknown number.

“Yes, hello?”

“May I ask where you are?”

A low voice echoed in her ear.

It was her seon partner. She thought he would cancel because of the pouring rain, but it seemed the seon was on, after all.

Yooyoung replied, “Ah, I’m already here.”

She was seated deeper in the café, so she must not have been visible to him from the entrance. Just as she stood and turned to meet him, she saw a man with his phone in hand. At first, she couldn’t see him clearly because of the light from the glass behind him, but once her eyes adjusted, his appearance was clear.

Sharp nose, flashing eyes. Neat lips. They were all familiar.

“Ah.”

It was that man.

The one whose name she didn’t even know. The man who had devoured her top to bottom yesterday.

Just as Yooyoung recognized him at a glance, he also seemed to recognize her. His brow rose slightly before he ended the call and walked over.

Was he smiling? The man parted slightly quirked lips to say, “Hello. Did you wait long?”

“N-no. I’m... staying at this hotel, so I arrived early.”

“Ah, that’s right.”

The man grinned at the way Yooyoung’s expression fluctuated. After putting his phone into his jacket pocket, he extended his hand. “Jihoon Cha.”

“Hello, I’m... Yoo...” She stuttered over the name she hadn’t been able to tell him the day before. “Yooyoung Kim.”

The corners of the lips that had explored her body so thoroughly turned upward. “So, it’s ‘Miss Yooyoung Kim.’”

She sucked in a dizzying breath. “I suppose names are important now.”

Of course the one bad thing she had done in her life would come back to haunt her like this.