Compass

Chapter 5

The alarm on his phone blared a couple of minutes after he had gotten dressed for the day. He forgot he left it on the table in front of the couch where Mo Hyun was lying, and he run down the stairs to turn it off before she would wake, but she was already up.

He found her sitting in the center of the sofa checking her phone. She glanced at him once he put silent on his phone. "Did I wake you?" he wondered with concern.

"No, because I was already wide awake" she ran a hand through her hair.

"Ah, okay" he shrugged. "How are you feeling?"

"I think the fever went down, but I still have a headache" she touched her forehead. "Thank you for... helping me last night."

He sat down on the wooden table in front of her. "It was the least I could do" he checked her forehead again. "You aren't hot" he commented, his expression hardened. "You shouldn't had waited under the rain last night" he added. What angered him was that she had come with her own car, she could have waited inside of her vehicle instead of staying outside in the cold.

She exhaled and nodded. "It's true, you're right. But I had a reason." He cocked his head and frowned, and she continued explaining. "When I arrived here last night, I locked the car, but my keys fell somewhere. I could have used my phone to find them, but my battery was dead and I tried searching without a light..." she bit her lip and shrugged.

"That's why you ended up drenching your clothes" he replied, rubbing his temples. "I could go look for them while you take a shower" he offered. "Then we could..." he left the phrase hanging.

"Then we could, what?"

He glanced at his feet before answering her. "Then we could go somewhere to have breakfast" he suggested. "If you like."

She grinned. "Sounds cool to me. But you'll need to accompany me home before we do. I need to change my outfit since what I wore last night probably smells of dirty rain."

He nodded and stood up. "Alright, then... I'll go find your keys. You can use my charger if you need it" he pointed at the table in the kitchen. "You can find clean towels in the bathroom."

She removed the sheets from the couch and rose from her seat, smiling wide. "Okay, thank you very much" she said, moving towards the kitchen for the charger she needed while he went for the door. Once he was about to go out, she called after him and he turned. "Ah, Eun Cheon."

"Yes?"

"I still need to tell you something" she reminded him.

He stiffened. "Sure. We'll talk later."

...


"I can't believe my keys fell in a manhole. That's never happened to me before" Mo Hyun commented a while later. He had found the keys while looking over the sewer cover. "I'm glad they said they would send somebody later to fetch them."

"It happens" he laughed. Thanks to this inconvenient, Mo Hyun went in his car. "But it can be resolved, unlike other things."

"Right."

"Think that we have ruined the environment less for this morning, because we brought one car" he said, gazing at her quickly before returning his eyes on the street ahead of him. "Do your parents still live in that neighborhood?"

"Yes. They still live there."

"You've been living with them the past three years?" he asked, hoping that question didn't bother her.

She looked at him and nodded. "I needed time to have the strength to move on and find a house where I could live alone" she admitted. "The one where you currently live is the one I liked the most."