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I peek over my shoulder to see Nathaniel sit up groggily. The muscles in his arms flex as he pushes himself up off the bed. Catching me admiring him, he smiles, which turns to a frown as he reaches beneath him to pull out a Pikachu.
“Sori, how can you sleep like this? I feel like I’m being watched.” He tosses Pikachu off the bed. I follow its trajectory until it hits the floor, joining dozens of my stuffed animals that Nathaniel had presumably chucked off the bed while I was asleep.
I meet his eyes. “How could you?” I whisper accusatorially.
He’s unrepentant. “They’ll live.”
“This istheirbed.You’rethe intruder.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed their freeloading existence and probably scarred them to boot.” He grins, dimples showing.
He looks confident,tooconfident—which makesmefeel vulnerable—so I pout, biting my lip.
He immediately turns conciliatory, shifting closer to me. “I’ll apologize to each and every one of your stuffed animals if that’ll make you happy.”
I nod.
He kisses me, dragging the pillow away.
It’s midmorning by the time we finally break apart and emerge from my room. I give him one of his shirts, which I’d discovered the day after he left.
“I cleaned and pressed it myself.” I hand it over to him and he immediately draws it over his head. “Ajumma was on a spa vacation with her girlfriends.”
Nathaniel frowns. “You were here by yourself all week?”
“Yes, don’t you feel awful for leaving me?” I don’t point out thatIwas the reason he left. He doesn’t either. Because he’s smart.
“Yes.” He nods seriously. “It won’t happen again.”
We head downstairs, raiding the kitchen. While Nathaniel makes toast and sets the dining table, I cook eggs and bacon in a pan.
It takes us longer to make breakfast because we keep on stopping to kiss, but only fifteen minutes to eat it, both of us starving.
“I’m going to run down and get iced coffee from the convenience store,” Nathaniel says. “You want anything?”
“I’m okay,” I say, taking the dishes to the kitchen. I’m loadingthem into the dishwasher when I hear Nathaniel come back into the house.
“That was fast,” I stay, stepping out of the dining room.
My father stands in the middle of the foyer.
“Abeoji,” I say, a sudden coldness in my stomach.
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, andI knowhe knows that Nathaniel spent the night. He must also suspect that I’d broken it off with Cha Donghyun.
The door opens and I have the second shock of the morning when my mother walks through the door. She doesn’t look surprised to see my father. She must have known he’d be here. Did he tell her to come?
“Wh-where’s Nathaniel?” I ask her. There isn’t any way they didn’t see him; he’d only been gone for a few minutes.
“I sent him home,” she says, her gaze averted from my face. Only last night, she’d accepted her award from my hands, pride in her eyes. Now she can’t even look at me.
“He doesn’t have his things,” I say. His wallet and phone are still in my room, along with his suit jacket.
“He’ll be fine,” my mother says curtly. “Secretary Park is taking him back to his apartment. We’ll return his things to him later.”
I stare at them both. “Why are you here?” It’s a reasonable question. My mother hasn’t been at the house in weeks, my father inyears.
“This ismyhouse,” my father says. “Why shouldn’t I be here?” I flinch at his tone of voice, which he’s never used with me. Though I’ve heard him use it with his aides, Secretary Lee, and even withmy mother, when we lived together. “I wanted to see for myself if my daughter was truly lying to me behind my back.”
