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As it turns out, his hotel is the really, really fancy kind. Which is to say, it’s so fancy they don’t stoop to the level of overpriced minibar cup ramyeon. Instead, the woven basket atop the fridge holds a bar of dark chocolate, a packet of air and a handful of almonds, a granola bar, and a mini bottle of Bordeaux wine that Vincenzo sneers at in distaste.
“It can’t be that bad.”
“It’s French.” He spits out the last word, his lips curling away from his teeth.
“You speak French,” Cha Young says, and when he raises an eyebrow at her, she shrugs. “It's on your resume when I had Jun Woo look into you.”
He opens his mouth as if to protest or ask a question, but then closes it again, shaking his head. “Forget about that,” he says, which she will remember to not forget about because there’s a story there and she will needle it out of him even if it takes her forever. “There’s no ramyeon.”
“So?”
“You wanted ramyeon.”
“Yes, with you.”
He frowns, putting his thinking face on. Not the thinking face he wears when about to rain hell down on their enemies, but the thinking face he wears when he can’t figure out what she’s getting at. Eventually, he says, “Should I call room service?” And before she can answer: “I’ll call room service.”
He moves to the general direction of the phone, which is on the nightstand, which is just by the bed, which presents a prime opportunity she cannot miss; she follows him until he's reaching for the phone, grabs him by the collar, then shoves him down to the bed.
He falls soundlessly. To be precise, there’s a soft thwump sound when his body hits the bed, but he himself is silent, eyes wide, mouth agape, the very face of a mafia boss who just got shot in the back by his own minion—or the face of a man who just got blindsided by his… long-distance whatever it is she is to him. It’s a good face, and it gets even better when his eyebrows hike even higher up his forehead as she crawls atop him, straddling his hips. His hands are fisted around the bedsheets on either side of him, and his chest rises and falls as if he’s out of breath, and his jaw is still slack with surprise, but his eyes soften as she meets his gaze and smiles at him.
“Good evening, Byeonhosa-nim,” she says, her tone cordial and professional as she lowers herself to sit on his middle. Her hair falls like a curtain around them both, and like this, it almost feels like she could keep him. “Are you maybe hungry?”
His throat bobs. “Aren’t you? You said you wanted ramyeon.”
“Drop the innocent act, it’s not as cute on you as you think it is. You know what ramyeon means.” She traces her fingertips over the line of his jaw, then the thrumming pulse of his carotid artery—here’s where you cut when you slice someone’s throat, he’d told her once upon a drunken night, and now she marvels at the utter mortality of the man she believes is unkillable—down to the starched collar of his shirt, the knot of his tie. She hooks two fingers between silk and cotton and tugs; he follows, his upper body leaping up eagerly, his breath a hot gasp against her face. “You’re stalling. Why?”
He doesn’t immediately answer, and her mind rifles through the possibilities. Does he not know about the euphemism? No, he has to, because his reaction to her proposition earlier had been… not exactly shy, but something in that neighborhood. Certainly not how one would react to an innocent invitation for a late-night meal. That, and he’d invited her to his hotel room instead of a snack bar or a convenience store. Which means, he does know. Which means, he is stalling.
Is it regret? Does he not want this anymore? Does he not want her anymore?
And it’s not even about the sex, not really. Sure, she wants it, has ached for his touch all over her for a very long time, but more than something as base as lust, she wants… him. All of him, honest and bare. She wants him to tell her if he doesn’t want sex—tonight or ever—instead of stalling awkwardly. She wants him to trust her with the truth. He talked about love, and isn’t that what love is supposed to be? Trust, given unconditionally?
He’s still half-sitting up. She’s still got him by the leash of his tie. Maybe there’s no room for truth with her plastered all over him, so she lets him go—he doesn’t budge, having propped himself up on his elbows—and rolls gracelessly to the side, lying down with her legs dangling off the edge of the bed. Closing her eyes, she gropes blindlessly to the space between them until she finds his hand; he turns his palm around and laces his fingers with hers, the touch light as an anchor.
“You know,” she begins, filling the air between them while not really knowing what he knows, or what she herself knows, or what she’s supposed to say next. She gnaws on her bottom lip. Tries again. “You know, this is nice. Holding hands.”
“What?” he asks. She feels him shift next to her, but she doesn’t open her eyes. Doesn’t turn her face toward him.
“I think we’ve only done it once before, when we pretended to be a couple at the gallery, but that’s mostly for show, right?”
“I guess so,” he answers. His voice is careful, even. She’s so tempted to look, but she’s committed herself to giving him time and space, safe for the selfish concession of her hand in his. “Not all of it is for show, though.”
She snorts. “I knew it. You’ve always wanted to pinch my cheeks.”
“Among other things.” His voice is low, dulcet; she wonders if the pleasant shiver running down her spine is a consequence of his timbre or the wealth of implications behind that simple confession.
Both, perhaps. He’s always had a lovely voice, low and melodious. A voice made for languages, for proverbs and poetry. For a quiet admission made in a hotel room on a stolen night.
She can guess the meaning behind his words.
She asks anyway, trying to keep her own tone light and undemanding as she says, “Other things?”
The bed dips again as he moves, and so suddenly his warmth is so close, next to her and over her, and there’s a smaller dip on her other side followed by the callused pad of his thumb stroking the pinnacle of her cheekbone.
She scrunches her eyes shut even harder. He chuckles, and it’s a sound that travels straight to the hollowness in her chest, the one she’s been pretending doesn’t exist. How can she miss him so acutely when he’s returned to her? She’s not sure, but she does anyway.
“Byeonhosa-nim,” he says, in his voice that title sounds like a christening, a baptism, an invoking of a higher power. ‘Lawyer’, as if he has ever respected the law, as if maybe if it’s her law, he would abide by its rule. “Please, look at me.”
She opens her eyes slowly, carefully, as if emerging from a cave and squinting at daylight, and the moment she can make out his face it softens from consternation into something else, something with a gentle half-smile, laugh lines framing the edges of his eyes like the rays of a sunburst.
“Good evening,” he says, as professionally as she did mere minutes ago.
Through the dizzying haze of his cologne, she manages, “Is it? I haven’t noticed.” He rewards this effort with another chuckle, which honestly is just unfair because his breath smells like the champagne they’d shared at the party earlier and her mouth is so dry she might just try to sip whatever is left of it off his tongue. She drags her eyes off his mouth and up to his own. It doesn’t hurt less, looking at his eyes, but it at least leaves her in less danger of jumping him again. She tries, weakly, “What are you so happy about this evening?”
“I went to a party today.”
“So did I.” Her arm is beginning to cramp; she tries to disentangle her hand from his, but he simply moves it next to her head—which, granted, does ease some of the tension in the limb—and pins it there as he moves to fully straddle her. She’s finding it harder and harder to think. “The food’s not great, but at least they’re not cheap with the drinks.”
“The party I went to had an art exhibition.” His thumb goes back and forth, back and forth on her cheekbone, as if trying to remove her blusher. Not that it matters; she’s pretty sure her face is all flushed from arousal.
“Good art?”
His hand stills for a moment, before retreating from her face to cup the base of her skull, his fingers playing with the elastic binding her hair. “I got to borrow the best one for the night.”
It should sound bad, like a stupid pick-up line—because that’s exactly what it is even though she has been very much picked up and is now literally in his bed—except all she can think about is his even stupider line about seeing art and war from a distance, how in all the museums one must never touch the art, how he is right now touching her despite the warnings, how even as he touches her he keeps her at a distance yet again with his opaque metaphors and sayings.
How she’ll have him anyway, just like this, because his dishonesty hurts less than his absence.
His fingers finally find purchase on the elastic and he eases it off slowly but surely until her hair is loose around her and she feels strangely exposed. She wants to look away. She can’t. Her voice sounds distant as she asks, “Are you done stalling?”
“Yes. Sorry for the wait,” he says, and he lowers himself, not into a bow but onto her, finding her lips, and he does taste like the champagne at the party yet nothing like it. The kiss is a gentle one, an apology of a kiss, and she takes it, accepts it, accepts him. When they part, he lets her go and kneels over her, shrugging off his jacket and moving to his shirt before she halts him with a touch.
“Let me.”
His hands fall to his side. She scrambles to face him, her limbs all heavy and awkward and her stance imbalanced, wrong-footed, all knees and too-soft bed. His hands find her waist, steadying her, and they stay there as she unravels the knot of his tie and unbuttons his shirt, her knuckles brushing his skin—is she trembling, or are her hands just cold?—until there’s no more buttons to undone and she splays her hands on his chest to feel his heart, his lungs, the way his skin erupts in goosebumps at the chill of the room or maybe even at her touch, the utter aliveness of him, the realness of this moment. Sliding her hands to his shoulders, she pushes the shirt off of him; he lets her, pulls his arms out the sleeves until he is freed.
And oh, oh, she has thought about this moment before, many times, but in her fantasies Vincenzo is perfect, radiant. Here, now, he isn’t. There’s a fading bruise on the edge of his collarbone, a puckered scar on his side, a line of raised skin on his upper arm. He is scarred. He is beautiful. He has come so close to death too many times, more times than she can fathom, and he will continue living that life—and she will let him.
Cha Young loves him too much to change what he is. She’s selfish like that.
She ghosts her fingertips over the bruise; he looks down and smiles. “That’s from hand-to-hand training.”
“This is not hand-to-hand,” she says, moving her hand to the gunshot scar. “Is it?”
“Paolo wasn’t very happy I sent him away, so he sent me a friendly assassin.”
Her voice is high, a choked and distorted sound when she demands, “Friendly?”
“Just the one man who managed to infiltrate my ranks.” Vincenzo shrugs, disaffected. “He got a shot in, but it’s not even a good one. Coming from Paolo, it’s about as boring as a Christmas card.”
Well, that explains why each of his postcards had felt like a bullet to her chest.
He catches the look on her face; whatever she looks like, it’s not good, because his shoulders droop a little bit.
“Byeonhosa-nim, I’m okay, now,” he says, leaning toward her, trying to catch her eye. She keeps her eyes fixed on the scar. If she looks at him now, she will cry. She refuses to cry before—or during, or after for that matter—sex. He tilts his head lower, trying to peek through the curtain of her hair, and when she still refuses to look at him he reaches forward and gathers her into his arms and she allows herself to be pulled into the embrace, allows herself to press her face into his shoulder and listen to the sound of his heart.
She closes her eyes. Allows herself two seconds of this indulgence, then shoves him away before she feels teary-eyed. Ignoring the wide-eyed surprise on his face, she grabs the scarred arm and squeezes. “What about this one?” she demands, her voice weirdly sticky and gross despite her best attempts to sound firm.
“That’s—an old one, I got it from a brawl around three years ago. Byeonhosa-nim—”
She still refuses to meet his eye. Instead, she tries to imagine the line as an open wound, weeping red and smelling like rust. She tries to imagine the ripped, soaked sleeve of his expensive suit. She tries to imagine him, bruised and bleeding, victorious because she can’t imagine him any other way. “Are there any others?”
“Others?”
“Scars. Do you have any other scars?” Without waiting for his answer, she pulls him to the side, twisting his torso and leaning around to see his back and finding another, a short line—about the width of a knife—on one shoulder blade. Someone had stabbed him in the back.
“A lesson in character judgement,” he says.
She snorts. It sounds more like a wet scoff and a little bit too close to a sob.
Vincenzo doesn’t try to comfort her again. She’s thankful for that. Instead, he gently shrugs her off and begins unbuckling his belt, unzipping his trousers. “I have one on my leg, too. A gunshot. I got it not long after I entered the mafia.” He moves to sit on the edge of the bed and peels it off, and shows her the round scar on his thigh.
Cha Young sits next to him, her thigh against his thigh. Presses a fingertip into the round crater of scar tissue as if she could guess the gun’s caliber from that alone. “Is that all?”
“All of my scars, yes. Most of the scrapes I got healed clean.”
She ignores the second part of that statement for her own peace of mind. “Do they hurt?”
He makes a considering hum before he answers. “The one on the back can be uncomfortable, sometimes. It was pretty deep and sliced through the tendon, and that shoulder’s never been the same. The others don’t hurt.”
“Ah.” She nods. “I think I understand. Mine kind of throbs on bad days and it’s around the same area.” She turns to finally look him in the eye, throwing a grin at him and caution to the wind. “We match.”
He doesn’t grin back. “What do you mean?” he asks, though from the brokenness of his voice, she can tell he knows exactly what she meant. “It scarred?”
“Do you want to see?”
The answer comes not in words, but in a jerky nod. Good enough. Cha Young gathers her hair and puts it over her shoulder. Turns her back to him. And waits.
When it comes, his touch is light and careful. His hand doesn’t tremble, not really, but the tip of his thumb is cold as it glides down her spine, as he pulls the zipper down. He slips his hand under the fabric covering her left shoulder; his fingertips brush over the scar and she feels him freeze behind him.
Cha Young stays quiet. She had, long ago, assured him that her getting shot had been a simple consequence to the war they were fighting. She stands by that, but she also knows—after demanding an explanation for every single scar he has—that there’s little she can say to make it easier for him.
The fact is: she had taken that bullet for him. That’s also selfishness, in a way. She had made a choice in that fraction of a second between Jang Han Seok’s aim and the squeeze of the trigger, and she’d decided the bullet would have hurt less in her rather than in Vincenzo. She’d unfolded and re-folded the events of that night in her mind, over and over again; had there been any other way for it to end? Any other way for them to stop Jang Han Seok without the death of Jang Han Seo, without the near-death of Lee Cheol Wook? Any other way where Cha Young could have stood by Vincenzo’s side for the final punishment of their enemies?
In the end, Cha Young discarded that line of thinking. There’s nothing she can change. There’s nothing she would have done differently. Even in the dark hours of the night, when the chill sets in and the scar aches, she thinks: better her shoulder than his heart. Better his guilt than her grief.
And oh, how she knows it well, his guilt. How it is present in every way he avoids her questions, in every way he lies to her, in every way he holds himself back. She knows his guilt like she knows the palm of his hand, cool and gentle over her shoulder blade as it eases the sleeve down her arm. His lips press on the scar, warm unlike his hand, and he murmurs something she can’t quite catch against it. An apology, maybe. He doesn’t linger long enough for her to reassure him that she’s okay now—or ask him if he is okay, himself.
He eases her out of her dress—she lets him, helps him peel it off of her until it is but a puddle of black fabric on the floor.
His hands fall to his side, fists opening and closing, as if unsure what to do next. If she’s being honest with herself, so is she.
But Hong Cha Young is a creature of facts and logic, and logic dictates it’s stupid to figure out the tangled mess of them without more information. “Do you still want this?”
He frowns. She could almost hear him say something self-pitying, something like the speech he’d done a long time ago when he’d pretty much admitted to not having the right to love.
So before he can give her another headache, she says, “When I said I want this, I mean I want to be in a relationship with you and I want us to make it work even with you all the way in Malta and with me here. How about you?”
There’s half an attempt of a smile on his lips, but his voice is ragged with relief when he says, “We’re both too tenacious to do otherwise, don’t you think?”
“Hey, I’m not the one who tried to walk away after two lousy kisses.”
“Lousy?” he demands, clearly offended, and she feels a bit of the nervous knot in her unraveling. “If they were lousy, would you have propositioned me?”
“They had potential,” she lies, pretending she’s not a little bit weak-kneed just remembering the way he’d pulled her into the kiss, the way it had felt like a devouring. “Also, I missed you. It’s been a year and clearly my standards have fallen a little bit. Anyway—”
The rest of the sentence is muffled by his lips as he kisses her, and it’s like an argument, a point made and restated and underlined, and it’s working because as he captures her lower lip with his teeth, as he sucks it, as his hand pulls her in by her bare waist and she feels him half-hard against her—when did they become horizontal again, and does it matter?—she thinks, yep, definitely not lousy.
But despite his growing erection and their half-nudity and the fact that they’re very much on a hotel bed, he keeps one hand cupping her cheek and the other on her waist, and it’s… not polite, really, nor chaste, but not exactly carnal either. He pulls back and asks, with the smuggest face she’d seen on him, “Sorry, you were saying?”
She was going to suggest that if the scar show-and-tell was too much of a mood-killer, they could just not have sex. She’d be happy to just cuddle him as they watch whatever is on cable tonight. Clearly, however, that reassurance is no longer necessary. He’s licking his lips as if he’d just eaten ice cream and not part of her sanity and the hand that was on her jaw is now cupping the curve of her shoulder, his thumb resting on the edge of her collarbone, waiting for an invitation, a permission.
A petty part of her is half-tempted to rile him up a little more, but mostly she’s just tired of this dance. She’s ready. He probably is, too, looking at him—feeling him against her middle—so she says, exasperatedly, “Shut up.”
She pulls him by the nape of his neck, kissing him, nipping his lower lip in rebuke when he has the audacity to laugh at her. The laugh turns into a groan and she grins into the meeting of their lips and grinds herself against him and he is hard, and she wants to feel him, and so she reaches down between them and cups him through his underwear—he bucks against her touch and she is seized by the need to see him, so she pulls away from the kiss as her hand slips past his waistband and wraps around him, and yes. Yes, watching him is the right choice, because she’s never seen this face on him, not even in half-remembered dreams, and she would want to have this on file. There will be days she will doubt this ever happened, days she will wonder if he still thinks of her, and she’ll have evidence that yes, of course this happened and yes, of course he still thinks of her, because how could he ever forget the person who’d almost undone him with nothing but a hand around his cock?
She strokes him, then—frustrated at how little room there is inside his boxer briefs—she peels the underwear down to his hips, freeing him. He mutters something under his breath and lets her go so he can push it the rest of the way down his legs, and then off. He then falls back down to the bed, reaching out to her. “Come here,” he asks.
“In a moment.” She reaches behind her and unclasps her bra, tossing it behind her, then shimmies out of her panties. It seems the fair thing to do, with him already naked. She takes a few seconds just sitting there, admiring the view—he really is handsome, isn’t he, with features that could very well be sculpted if not for the little imperfections, the bruise mottling his skin and the scars of battles past.
She should remember this, too. Him, his arms open for her at long last, and she returns to them as inevitably as he had returned to her tonight. He embraces her, his nose nuzzling the crook of her shoulder, but then he flips them—so quickly, so easily—and she is beneath him and he is watching her and she knows it’s his turn to collect evidence. He gently pushes hair away from her face, like so long ago in that hospital room, but this time his hand doesn’t stay to stroke her temple or wipe a tear away from her eye. This time, he traces the topography of her face, the curve of her cheekbone and the plumpness of her lower lip, and then down, to her chest, her breast—he rolls a nipple between his fingers and she gasps, spine arching to meet his touch—and lower still, until he finds where she’s been aching for him. He dips a finger between her folds, collecting moisture, and then he finds her clit, and his touch is so very light but it sends sparks through her anyway as he moves in circles, slow at first, then faster, all the while watching her face to learn her, learn how she likes it.
And oh, oh he’s good. He’s good to her, like this. There’s a slow, satisfied smile blooming on his face as she is slowly coming apart from his touch, and when he leaves her clit she makes a little noise of complaint, but then his slick fingertips touches her opening and he asks, “May I?”
“Yes,” she breathes out, and he enters her, two fingers at once, and she is so wet that there’s barely any resistance. She’s so, so full, but then he begins thrusting, his thumb on her clit still, and still he watches her, still he reacts to her, her hand on his wrist urging him to go faster and the broken sounds escaping her, and then he crooks his fingers just so, just right, and everything goes bright as her body is rigid with pleasure, her toes curling, and she knows she’s being loud, probably, but she can’t stop and she doesn’t care and he doesn’t seem to, either, as he continues moving in her, easing her until the waves pass over her. Only then does he release her, pressing a gentle kiss to her forehead before rolling over to lie on his side, facing her.
She breathes in, blinking at the ceiling, and when she manages to gather her thoughts she says, “Shit.”
He pushes himself up, half-sitting. “What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s just…” she waves a hand uselessly. “We’ve been missing out. All those times I thought of jumping you? Could have done that.”
He doesn’t ask when she’d thought of this, or how many times. She suspects he knows, the way he’s always watching her. Instead, he asks, “Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t you?” she asks in return, because she’s seen him struggle with it before. “Just—look, we could have gotten so good at this. Not that this isn’t already good, but, you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he says quietly. “I know.”
She turns to her side and faces him. “We could have tried so many things. We could have—” She flounders, unsure of what exactly she wants to try with him. It’s hard to imagine, with the knowledge that he’ll soon leave again.
“We could have had time.” He takes her hand, interlaces his fingers with hers. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “You have your work there. I have mine here. And before, we weren’t ready.” This is the reality of them, she supposes. These are the cards they’ve been dealt, and she can do nothing but play them.
“We still have time,” he says. “I’m already a criminal. I’ll steal us more time.”
“Come on,” she says, sniggering. “Surely you have better lines than that.” She shoves him to his back; he lets himself be toppled by her. Lifting herself to her knees, she moves to straddle his hips and reaches down, finding his still-hard cock—he hisses at the touch and she can’t help but grin as she pumps it a few times, smearing his precum on him—and aligning it with her cunt.
His throat bobs as he swallows. “I love you,” he says. “Is that better?”
And it’s not like she doesn’t know that Vincenzo loves her. Cha Young is not an idiot. Of course he loves her and of course she loves him back, and she thought there wouldn’t be any need for them to say it in such plain, banal words. He had his weird quotes and she’s happy to take another bullet or ten for him and that would be enough.
She’s right, of course. It would be.
But she didn’t expect how much better it is, to hear him say it. To not have to study his codes like a cryptographer and just have him say what he means, what she means to him.
“Cha Young-ah?” he asks, and the name is so odd in his voice, but she likes it.
“Oh, yes. Sorry.” She smiles at him, tremulous. “I love you too, you know that, right?”
“I do,” he says.
“Good.” She lowers herself on him, slowly, slowly, and she is so full. His fingers are nothing, to this, to the heat and the feeling of him inside her, and as she begins rocking atop him, her hands pinning his own to the sheets so she can hold his hands and still have some balance. It’s slow, unrushed. She knows he’ll want her again tonight; she knows she’ll ask him to be fast, later, to be rough, and they’ll try to make up for lost time again and again until the sun takes him away from her.
But now, she goes slow, and he doesn’t ask for anything else. They try to make it last, this, their first time, but they’re so very human, thwarted by the biology of their rushing bloods and nerve endings, and eventually—eventually—he comes, a groan escaping him, and she puts her fingertips on her clit as she continues to ride him, until he is spent.
He tangles his hand in her hair and pulls her into yet another kiss, an exhausted, grateful one, and she thinks if he kisses her often enough tonight she might forget how to let him go. And if she kisses him often enough, she might be able to leave a mark on him as he’d left on her.
So, she kisses him back.