As I slipped on my pajamas and slid between the covers, I shivered, the palpable anxiety lingering. No matter what I did, the feeling wouldn’t go away. And of course, when I got like this, I knew sleep would elude me.
I ended up in the workout room an hour later, trying desperately to forget the way that phone call made me feel. Trying to bury the resurrected fear I’d lived with when I first came home to this city and lived my life perpetually looking over my shoulder. Always alert, always on edge, always an anxious mess.
Sweat dripped from my brow, dotting the floor as I ran on the treadmill, increasing the speed every few minutes until it was all I could do to keep up with the belt whizzing by beneath my feet. When running became impossible, unbearable, I shut it off, gasping for air, and moved to the next machine.
Sunrise found me guzzling a bottle of water like I’d been dehydrated for years. My hair had barely dried from the shower before I spent a whole night running myself ragged, and now it was drenched again, straight through to my scalp. I was a mess, and exhaustion was just starting to set in.
And now I had to clock in as a fucking assistant to the last person I wanted to follow around all day.
Fuck me, life really comes full circle to bite you in the ass when you least expect it.
I threw a towel around my neck and sighed, leaning my forehead against the steel door of the fridge as my eyes drifted shut.
I just needed a minute. One fucking minute.
Of course, who should walk right in but fucking Kim Seo-Jun himself, dressed to the nines in his own workout gear. I glanced at him out of the corner of one peeked-open eye, and heaved a sigh at his refreshed, immaculate appearance. He stood there, eyeing me like it was physically painful to look at me.
His hand wrapped around the handle of the fridge, but I didn’t have the strength to move just yet.
Nonetheless, he tugged on it anyhow, sending me stumbling toward the nearest wall in surprise.
Until two strong arms caught me round the waist and steadied me, of course.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Trying to get hurt?” He glared down at me as I slumped in his arms, too weak and exhausted to even pick myself up and stand on my own two feet yet. All I could do was stare into his eyes, imagining what it would feel like to smooth the crease in his brow like I used to when he was worried about something. Would they feel the same under my fingers, or had every part of him changed over the years?
“You’re the one knocking me over,” I said dryly, my eyes fluttering shut for a second. “I was just minding my own business?—”
“You were sleeping against the fridge,” he pointed out, and damned if he wasn’t one hundred percent right. “Why?”
“Don’t act like you care, Jun.” I struggled, but between my wounded pride and my stubborn refusal to keep him from seeing weakness in me, I managed to stand up on my own, shoving him back a step, albeit a bit weakly. “If you don’t mind, I have things to do. Like manage you until you’ve hired a replacement.”
“How are those coming?” he asked suddenly, turning back to the fridge. “You find anyone suitable yet?”
“You’ve got an interview block set up at noon today for three candidates.” None of which he’d like, once he got to know them, but they were strong interviewers. If they didn’t come out and reveal themselves from the start, I could foist him off on one of them and be out of town before he could even realize what I’d done.
Hell, maybe the new kNight Records office in Khula City had a position I could fill temporarily. Maybe a transfer was just what I needed.
Yeah. A transfer would solve all my problems. Distance between me and my past, that was the answer.
Chapter
Ten
JUN
Arista was hot and cold.One minute she was limp in my arms, sweating like she’d run a thousand miles and damn near unconscious from the effort, and the next she was barking out orders, that little tablet from hell in her grasp as she made notes and phone calls and organized every aspect of my life effortlessly.
She was an efficient machine the likes of which I’d never had around me in my adult life, and it was comforting on a certain level to know that everything would be taken care of and that it would all fall into place without my hands on the wheel, but . . .
I could see the toll it took on her, being near us. She couldn’t pretend our past never happened when we were in close quarters every day. Hell, she was practically itching to get the fuck out of here. I could see the pain-filled glances at Yejin every time she made a noise, and the frustration in her eyes whenever she had to interact with me. Not that how I treated her helped the situation, but . . . only Pujin got her calm, friendly demeanor. Only my head of security got the girl she used to be.
Fucking pissed me off.
How could she sit there and hate me and her own fucking flesh and blood so damn much that it physically dug into her and drained her life force to just be around us? What right did she have to hate either of us like that?
She was the one who’d done us dirty, not the other way around.
And if anyone deserved to have their life disrupted, it was her, not us.
