Flowers Are Bait Novel - Chapter 145

As she strode down the hallway, her tied-up hair brushed against her nape. With each step, countless crossroads of choices pooled beneath her feet, but Yiyeon trampled over them as she passed.

Yiyeon was engrossed in her emotions until she burst into Kwon Chaewoo’s room without knocking.

The room was dark, as the blackout curtains hadn’t been drawn.

In the dry silence, the air purifier hummed mechanically. That inorganic noise subtly sucked all the vitality out of the place.

Yiyeon aimlessly looked around the room, which felt completely devoid of life, and stepped further inside.

Just then, Kwon Chaewoo, who had been leaning against the headboard, suddenly lifted his head. The man, who had been subtly frowning while looking at his laptop screen, seemed quite surprised by Yiyeon’s sudden appearance.

A small screen, glimpsed briefly, showed CCTV footage, and Kwon Chaewoo closed his laptop with a loud thud.

“Yiyeon.”

“Why…—”

She took a deep breath and gripped the bed rail at the end of the bed. The Sicyos angulatus wrapped around her wrist seemed to dig deeper into her skin.

“Why now, after all this time…? Why are you causing such a commotion and unsettling me…?”

His understanding, which had once seemed to gauge Yiyeon’s emotions, now felt unpleasant, as if it had crossed a line without permission.

The fact that she had cried and been agitated for no reason made her feel like a defeated soldier, sparking even harsher anger.

“I feel like I’m in a tug-of-war every moment.”

Her agitated face flushed crimson.

“Whether I want it or not, it doesn’t matter, I keep playing tug-of-war with you, Mr. Kwon Chaewoo. I never wanted this. I’m overwhelmed by you getting hurt and me feeling guilty, and these mixed feelings of gratitude and apology. I truly, truly didn’t want to feel anything…!”

That day, in the hotel room. His desperately reaching arms repeatedly caught her. The crushing grip, as if intending to leave bruises, seemed to exert its full power even more vividly in the middle of the night when Yiyeon was finally alone.

“Did you want to unfold and rewrite the past?”

“…”

“I’m sorry, but I want to close it now.”

“Yiyeon.”

Kwon Chaewoo frowned at her panting and agitated appearance, immediately pushed aside the blanket, and got up. His eyebrows twitched with the pain that pierced his body with each step, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from approaching her.

“But you keep getting in the way until the very end…!”

Kwon Chaewoo stopped, as if frozen.

From the first day she came to the Kwon family, she had been entangled with him and caught up in all sorts of incidents. In the process, his presence, like this Sicyos angulatus, kept wrapping around Yiyeon’s ankles. Yiyeon shuddered at the grip she could feel even if she couldn’t see it.

“Still, I’m going.”

Yiyeon said, quite coldly, even with her reddened eyes.

“I’m leaving here.”

“Yes, I know.”

He nodded readily, as if he knew. However, his prominent Adam’s apple moved significantly once. Yiyeon, as if further ignited by his seemingly submissive attitude, burst out with uncomfortable emotions.

“No matter what you do, Mr. Kwon Chaewoo, no matter what efforts you make, I want to stay as far away as possible. But I, I really don’t know why I have to keep being on edge…!”

Yiyeon grabbed a handful of her hair and bit her lower lip. It was a vicious form of defense, instinctively pushing and pushing the other person away.

She desperately wanted to deny the cracking shell that seemed to respond to Kwon Chaewoo’s sincerity.

“I won’t.”

Then Kwon Chaewoo interjected softly.

“I won’t ask you to go back to that time, Yiyeon.”

He murmured as if sinking into darkness, but his voice was firm.

“I know that the summer we spent together is already over.”

“…”

“I know well enough that it will never come again.”

What Kwon Chaewoo realized while suffering from Summer’s symptoms was only the bitter truth that everything was self-satisfaction and an illusion. He clenched his fist tightly.

“…So I’m not asking to go back, or to accept me again—”

Instead of taking a step closer, he took a step back.

“I want to start anew.”

“…!”

Yiyeon’s heart flinched as if pricked.

“Yiyeon, do you know my profession?”

He tilted his head slightly and asked calmly, but Yiyeon couldn’t answer.

“My real birthday?”

“…”

“Can you guess what I majored in?”

Her mind went blank for a moment, and she couldn’t say anything. Because, as he pointed out, she didn’t know. Suddenly, her fiercely burning emotions began to subside.

“I graduated from college abroad when I was young.”

He seemed like a completely new person, not the Kwon Chaewoo Yiyeon vaguely knew. These were stories she was curious about but hadn’t asked, and hadn’t paid attention to. Yiyeon felt awkward with her mouth that she could only keep shut.

“I don’t have a single friend, but there are a few people who contact me unilaterally.”

“…”

“All of them are foreigners.”

“…”

“And I’m good at German.”

Yiyeon blinked rapidly in confusion.

“I could try to push the person you buried back in, Yiyeon. But you don’t know as much about me as you think. About the real Kwon Chaewoo, not the comatose husband.”

He straightened his head and stared intently at Yiyeon. A clear flame flickered in his irises, as if she would be swallowed whole if she made a wrong move.

“So I’m not going back, I’m starting anew.”

“…!”

“Let the dead stay dead. My rival has always been your ex-husband, then and now.”

Yiyeon’s mouth hung half open in disbelief.

“If I can’t even push that kind of trash out of your memory from now on, I should just cut off my dick.”

He overlapped with the Kwon Chaewoo who had once misunderstood and fumed at the dinner table in Hwaido, saying such things.

Despite his body being riddled with holes and a mess, the man, who sent such fervent gazes just like back then, had still deepened by another inch.

Finally, Yiyeon ran a hand over her face and let out a sigh that was almost a scoff. For some reason, the tension in her shoulders seemed to release. Who, then, was still trapped in the past?

Burying Kwon Chaewoo was for a new beginning, not to assert such stubbornness.

But while she welcomed her own new start, it was difficult to acknowledge the other person.

Whenever she clashed with the young master of the Kwon family, a side of him she had never experienced, she put up a wall and stubbornly ignored him.

That’s what people who haven’t emptied everything out do, isn’t it…?

A strange sense of shame made her face flush.

“…Don’t say such scary things. I know perfectly well who you are…!”

His momentum was formidable, but Yiyeon still held her neck stiffly to the end.

“Do you think I’ve been living with my eyes closed all this time? How many things have I seen, heard, and experienced here…! I’ve experienced all sorts of bizarre things that no one would believe even if I posted them anonymously, so what can I possibly do with the Kwon family’s son, logically speaking?”

“Ah—. Yiyeon, you liked good things, didn’t you?”

Just then, Kwon Chaewoo, who had been standing at a distance, strode closer. Perhaps because of his loose clothing, his straight collarbones and clavicle were clearly visible.

This man, he was much thinner than before.

Is he eating properly?

“I can be anything, anyone, you want, Yiyeon.”

“Ha…”

“Do you have any conditions you want? If you prefer a penniless person, I can accommodate that too. If I seem useful, pick me up and use me, even if it’s just for one time. I’ll somehow match your taste, Yiyeon.”

“…”

“Do you prefer it long, or short?”

“Huh? What, what—”

“Well, housework.”

Kwon Chaewoo shrugged his smooth shoulders. Yiyeon instinctively took a few steps back, feeling a very familiar sense of danger. Playing with words like this to completely disarm someone was one of Kwon Chaewoo’s old tricks.

At that, Yiyeon decided to reclaim the lost initiative.

“The sacred tree.”

As expected, as soon as she brought up those words, Kwon Chaewoo’s face hardened.

“The sacred tree was 500 years old. It was a legacy over five hundred years old.”

“…”

“What are you going to do about that?”

It was Yiyeon’s last gamble, an insurmountable problem she could present when cornered.

“Do you think Kwon Chaewoo, who hasn’t even lived thirty years, can replace that?”

Days passed since she had posed an insoluble problem as her last bastion of self-defense.

In the meantime, Yiyeon began packing her bags. Kwon Chaewoo remained frozen, as if speechless by the task Yiyeon had thrown at him.

But even today, he came with crutches, still offering her a lunchbox, and not a single word was mentioned about the sacred tree, just as she intended.

Well, of course, that would be the case. Because it was a problem she had intentionally posed, knowing it could never be solved.

Yiyeon felt a sense of relief, as if her motion sickness had finally stopped, and folded her clothes into her suitcase.

Just then, her phone rang, and she naturally slid her finger across the screen.

“Hello?”

—Director, we need to clear the Sicyos angulatus from the garden near the warehouse today.

“Near the warehouse?”

—Ah, well, it’s not really a warehouse, but… I heard it’s a building that’s not in use right now. I don’t know much about it, but it’s been a restricted area since I started working here. So, no staff members, except for direct family, have ever been inside, but the restriction was just lifted.

Yiyeon barely managed to suppress a sigh. This contract seemed determined to work her to the bone until the very end.

—So, while we’re clearing the other gardens, we’re planning to stop by there too. I’ll take care of the tools, so please come directly there today instead of the office! The location is two blocks behind the annex.

“Yes, alright.”

The moment she skillfully concealed her annoyance, Yiyeon’s hands paused at the next words.

—Ah…! I heard it was the room the youngest master briefly used when he was little.