There are Many Flowers in Seoul

Chapter Fifty

Tae-won was too sick to shout anything from his room, and Rose saw to the task of cleaning the apartment first. She hoped that he might fall asleep while she worked and then she could call Deok-su to take over. The thought of administering medication to someone like Tae-won filled her with dread; he didn't seem the kind of guy to be an easy patient. The starry-eyed nurses at the hospital might have come to hate him if he'd stayed any longer than five minutes. Rose knew they'd be disappointed not to be looking after a celebrity, but she thought they'd gotten off lightly. If Tae-won had imposed on them for any longer they'd have found out what a nightmare of a person he really was.

With a trash can under her arm, Rose walks down the corridor and collected each disgusting balled up tissue she found, picking them up at the corners with her nails and making a mental note to scrub her hands clean when she was done. The trail of discarded Kleenex continued into the living area and Rose found them in the strangest places – under the sofa, beside the television, and one which had been flung angrily onto the top of the bookshelf which she had to jump to reach. As she looked around the room at the discarded clothes, Rose found she had a decision to make; either sniff them all to determine their cleanliness, or assume they were all dirty and wash them.

There was no way she was going to sniff Tae-won's clothes.

Sniffing clothes was something mothers and stalkers did, and Rose was neither of those things. Gathering them up one at a time – blushing when she found his underwear – she shuffled through to the kitchen and stuffed them into the washing machine her feet slipping on the tiles as she huffed and heaved. There was probably something in the user manual about not overloading the washing machine, but Rose didn't want to have to hang around waiting for several cycles to finish. Besides, the door managed to close with some firm encouragement and a lot of hushed swearing, so it wasn't like they didn't fit.

Rose did everything in her power to avoid the bedroom while the laundry span noisily; she wiped down the floors, counters, table, fluffed the cushions on the sofa, and dusted every surface she could find. She'd have cleaned the bathroom, too, if she didn't have to pass through Tae-won's bedroom to get there.

While she waited for the laundry to finish, Rose sat on the edge of the sofa, tapping her feet and chewing on her thumb nail. The whole reason she'd gone to the apartment was to take responsibility for her part in Tae-won's illness – she'd even told him that she'd force him to get better – and now she was too cowardly to walk into his room and, what, shout the illness away?

'God, I'm an idiot,' Rose whispered. Her mind was a tangled mess of emotions she didn't want to feel. It was worse than when she dated Keiji – at that time she'd thought things were perfect and never worried about anything – and she was stuck somewhere between love and hate. More hate, obviously, because Tae-won was a jerk and he wasn't even ashamed enough of that to stop being one, but whenever she was inclined to loathe him entirely she remembered those few moments of affection and humanity he'd shown her and her heart wavered back toward love.

This was why she only wanted to think about Si-woo. At least he was steadfast and certain. He was the sort of man with nothing to hide, who showed his true colours all the time. Without a doubt, Si-woo was reliable, kind, and trustworthy. Yet, none of this made Rose's heart flutter the way Tae-won did. There was no spark between them – no electricity when their hands touched – no matter how desperately she wished there would be.

It was like making a choice between an ultra-fast sports car and a hatchback with miles already on the clock. You knew the latter would get you to your destination without fail and had proven its worth before it was in your hands, and you knew the former was a death trap that'd take you on the ride of your life before it exploded in a fireball of carnage and destruction, but you couldn't help but be seduced by the promise of the thrill before you became a bloodied smear across the freeway.