Lee Jei.
She was a beauty of the delicate kind, the soft line of her jaw running down into a slender neck.
What struck you most were her eyes, the faint inner fold creasing each lid, and the irises beneath, a clear, vivid brown.
They were unusually wet-looking, those eyes, wet enough that sometimes they tricked you into thinking tears had just gathered in them.
When she smiled, the long outer corners folded into half-moons and melted the heart of whoever was watching. When she didn’t smile, there was something strangely forlorn about her.
It had been that way half a year ago. It was that way now.
If anything had changed, it was that her face had grown thinner than before. A faint shadow sat under each eye.
Iheon pulled his gaze off her face and looked down at the hands holding his own. Those small white hands had gotten thinner too.
That he could care about something like that, at a moment like this, was laughable. You left me for this? The muscle in his jaw jumped.
The most pathetic part was that he felt like shit whether he was looking at her or not looking at her.
And the fact that he still wanted to hold this woman anyway was just as fucked.
“This.”
Iheon coldly shook her hands off his.
“You think this is something that can be made right or not made right?”
Right. At first it had been worry. Then suspicion. Then rage.
And at some point all of those feelings had tangled together into a mass he couldn’t put any name to.
Every time a call wouldn’t connect.
Every time a message went unanswered.
Every time he pulled out that single-page divorce agreement and read it over again.
Did she really believe one sentence could make up for all that time, time that had worn away even his pride?
He hadn’t been waiting. He simply hadn’t wanted to admit he’d been abandoned, so he’d stood his ground where she left him.
She had no idea what that had felt like, and now, at this late hour, she was asking him what she had to do to make it right.
I missed you. I’m sorry. The words that came out of her mouth didn’t sound like an apology. They sounded like mockery.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
His gaze, carrying a thin metallic sneer, lingered a moment on her split lip, then drove straight into those chestnut eyes.
“Don’t play the pitiful one, and don’t play like nothing happened either. Either one is going to drive me out of my mind.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“...”
“You just told me not to play pitiful and not to play fine.”
It wasn’t the tone of someone getting angry, and it wasn’t the tone of someone feeling wronged. She was turning his words over, chewing on them.
“Be as angry as you want to be. I never thought one sentence would fix it. I just want to take responsibility for what I did.”
“Responsibility? You should have said that before you left me. Or before you came waltzing back in like this out of nowhere. Or failing that, at the very least, before you mailed me divorce papers.”
“I know that.”
“You know, and you still-”
“But it’s already in the past. What matters more to me is now. When I said I missed you, I meant it.”
She walked out without a word on the excuse that she needed time, and now she was back saying this moment was what mattered?
Her sincerity came filthy cheap.
How the hell was he supposed to take nonsense that didn’t even qualify as words?
“I understand why you’re angry, Iheon. All of it. I’d have been angry too. So let me carry it now, even if it’s late. Your resentment, your hatred, all of it.”
“‘Carry it’ has such a noble ring to it. But if what you’re planning to carry is how I feel, you’ve got the direction wrong.”
The words were barely out before his arm shot forward.
His hand hooked Jei around the waist, and the space between their bodies vanished in an instant.
Before she could even swallow a breath, Iheon lifted her and dumped her down onto the island counter.
The food she’d laid out shoved off the edge, plates and all, and went to the floor.
Crash. A plate hit the tile with a terrible noise and shattered into pieces.
Not one of them looked down at the sound of it breaking.
Wearing a sneer cold enough to chill the bone, Iheon ground the shards under his shoes as he came forward and pushed his hips in between her knees.
Through strands of loose hair, Jei looked up at the man looming over her, savage enough to swallow her whole on the spot.
It wasn’t a frightened face. It was that damnable clear face, the one that knew nothing of its own guilt. There was even a flicker of nerve in it, a go on, then, try it.
And Jei didn’t look the least bit unaware that it provoked him all the more.
“Right. You were always like this.”
Iheon caught her narrow chin in one hand and wrenched it up, rough about it. As his fingertips tightened, her head tipped all the way back.
“Turning up with that calm face, shameless, with everything coming out of your mouth so beautifully polished.”
“Iheon...”
“Did you think I’d let it go at that?”
Jei closed her eyelids once, slowly, and opened them again. Even with his unbearable stare locked onto hers from inches away, she didn’t look away.
Wearing a face so forlorn it seemed one squeeze would break it, she looked up at Iheon with eyes that refused, in the end, to bend.
She didn’t dodge, and she didn’t beg. She didn’t waver.
Which made it that much more absurd. Because it was the face of someone who genuinely believed she could still set something right, however late.
That lofty, insufferable faith of hers scraped at the base impulse lying at the bottom of him.
He wanted to make her cry. He wanted to break her.
Until those innocent-looking eyes were a ruin of tears. Until nothing calm could come out of that pretty little mouth anymore.
He wanted her to learn, down to the bone, how ridiculous the thing she’d said was, how weightless that offer to carry it all had been.
Iheon pressed his thumb into her split lower lip until it stung.
“If you’re so confident about it.”
He wanted to punish her.
Even knowing it wouldn’t restore an ounce of his trampled pride.
He wanted her to know.
What a joke you made of me by leaving.
And how humiliating it is that I want you even so.
The things he could never get out in words, he wanted to carve into her, even if it took the most brutal method there was.
“Let’s see you handle it, then.”
The words lashed out like a warning, and before they could even cool, Iheon’s mouth crashed down over Jei’s.
Brutally, the way a long-starved animal tears into its catch, he drove into her split, swollen lips.
Not a trace of affection in it. Stealing her breath, ransacking her mouth — the whole sequence was closer to retching up every feeling that had been rotting inside him.
Under his shoe, the shards of broken plate ground to pieces. The dry crunch disappeared into their roughened breathing, and the cold dinner scattered across the marble tile was crushed along with it.
Jei’s head tipped back. The large hand gripping her jaw slid deep into her hair and pinned her harder. A merciless hold that wouldn’t allow her so much as a gap to escape through.
The hand Jei had braced on the edge of the table grabbed the slope of Iheon’s shoulder. The dress shirt, pressed to a smooth finish, crumpled into a wreck inside her fist.
“Hnn...”
Wet breaths tangled, thick and messy. The faint taste of iron spread past their mashed lips. Tongues rubbed together with no rhythm at all.
As if to prove she hadn’t been lying when she said she’d handle it, Jei took every bit of the violence pouring into her exactly as it came.
That calm acceptance — no, a stubbornness far too unyielding to be called acceptance — drove Iheon even further out of his mind.
Without lifting his mouth, Iheon caught her hip with his free hand and hauled her tight against him. Her backside, perched on the edge of the table, slid forward until it pressed flush to his hips.
His fingers hooked the apron’s knot and tore it open in one pull. The scrap of flowered cloth that had passed itself off as some sweet little domestic life peeled away without resistance and was flung to the floor.
His hands moved without hesitation, stripping her trousers off just as easily. Her underwear went the same way. What had been hidden was laid bare under the bright lights.
For the first time, Jei’s eyes wavered. Iheon didn’t miss it.
“Scared now? Finally?”
“No. If this is what it takes for your anger to go away, I can handle as much as you wa-”
“Your anger this, handling that. I can’t wait to see how long you can keep spouting that fucking nonsense.”
Swallowing a sneer, Iheon peeled her clinging hand off him without the slightest interest and shoved her backward.
Her balance gone, Jei’s upper body swayed back and her spine met the table.
Tipped flat on her back with her legs hanging loose and open, she made quite a sight.
Iheon made no effort to hide the crude hunger glistening in his eyes. There was no need to hide it, and no wish to.
Keeping his gaze fixed between her legs, he wrenched his tie loose. He worked the shirt buttons open one by one, then at the last of them simply tore the thing off.
Broad shoulders, a hard chest, a stomach that split into clean ridges and flexed with every breath he drew. The body the immaculate suit had kept hidden was far rougher and more carnal than anyone would have guessed.
Then the belt. A sharp metallic clack rang out, cold in the air. The waist of his trousers gaped open, precarious, and beneath it, over black briefs, a threatening shape stood heavy and risen.
