THE BOSS (Lee Taeyong)

Chapter 1

"Park Chaeyoung!" I was putting my books into my locker when I heard a voice that I recognized very well, calling out my name. 

I closed the locker and turned my head to the owner of the  voice that was running towards me. As the girl reached, I got the clearer view of her face that was covered in sweat, probably the result of her own marathon a minute ago.

"Hey, what's wrong with you?" I asked the girl in front of me who was having both of her hands on her knees, catching her breath.

"There's a fight in front of our school!" Hearing the answer, I let out a light chuckle.

"That's it? You freaking ran for your life, getting all sweaty like this just to tell me that? Jisoo, you know that I never care about things like this right?" 

 This is not the first time that I have heard about boys getting into a fight in our school. It happened almost every day and I never paid any attention to those useless things since day one. I hate seeing people fighting. I hate violence and my friends knew about it very well.

I have a dark past about it. My parents used to argue a lot when I was younger. To those who didn't know about the whole story of my life, they would think that I and my mother were abused by my father. Actually, it was the opposite. My father had never laid a hand on me and my mother. He was the most gentle person on earth, for me. The reason for them to always get into fights was about my father being lazy to work. Honestly, I wouldn't admit my father being lazy because when I was 7, I remembered him working day and night to feed us, while my mother was a housewife at the moment.

But, it all started a year after when my father quit working and he was just lingering around the town. We were a poor family back then so my mother got no choice but to work very hard to feed us. She was too keen to find money for our family that she forgot that she had a daughter at home that was hungry for her love and care. The result of it was I got abused by mother but I wouldn't blame her for it. Things were so hard for her back then. She worked all day long to support not only me and her but also my father who was getting worse day by day. 

Everything was happening so fast. I mean, about my father condition. He turned from a loving and hardworking father to an alcoholic and cigarette addict in the blink of an eye. He started asking money from my mother, for cigarette and alcohol which added to my mother's stress. Since then, they got into fights almost every day because my mother asked for a divorce. My mother was a hot-tempered person. Every time they got into fights, my father would get hurt by my mother. She punches, slap or throws things to my father. Me, being a very young kid to witness the scene, was traumatized by violence.

After a few months, my father got hospitalized because he had strokes and he was diagnosed to have a mental disorder. I knew it. There must be something wrong with him that caused him to change so abruptly. Because of the stroke, he paralyzed half of his body and eventually passed away a few months after. Everything was even harder for me since then because I was left with my mother. I was not in a very good term with my mother since I used to get scolded and hit a lot from her. I was so much closer to my father, who was a loving and gentle person. But, I could see that she was trying to get closer to me and care for me as much as my father used to. However, a year after my father's death, she married a man around her age and it was making things worse between me and my mother.

When I was about to get closer to her, she suddenly brought another man between us. I couldn't accept that she replaced my father so soon. The memories of my father were still fresh in my mind when she brought a new man into our house. I distanced myself from everyone for 3 months until I finally realized the effort he was making to make me like him. He is actually a good man. Ever since he came, our financial had gotten a lot better since my mother didn't have to work anymore and got to pay more attention to me. But life had never failed to bring me back down to the ground again.

My mother did not change much. She stopped abusing my physical, but she eventually makes mentally suffer. She cared about my stepfather too much. She cared for him more than she ever cares for me. However, my stepfather is making a good job at taking my father's role to love and take good care for me. He was like an angle. Sometimes, I wondered if I was actually my mom's daughter or his. He had been so nice to me that I couldn't put the fault on him that my mother loves him more than me. I don't care anymore if my mother ever cares for me or not. I'm so done in making effort to fix our relationship because I knew that it would never work. I do love her a lot but as time pass by, the fear that I felt for my mother are slowly overcoming the love itself. I stopped asking money from my mother because every time I do, it would cause a scene and I'm sick of fighting with my mother for money. So I do part-time work to support myself.

That's just how I grew up. I grew up as a dependent person. But I was lucky enough to have a bestfriend that I could rely on, Kim Jisoo.

"Yeah, I know. But it's Mino." What? 

Without any second thought, I dashed towards the main entrance of the school with Jisoo trailing behind me.

As I stepped out of the gate of the school, I could see a group of students wearing the same uniform as me circling two groups of teenagers that seemed too absorbed in their fight to even care about the surrounding. Some of them were whispering among them while some of them were recording videos with their phone.

Thanks to my slim figure that I could creep easily between the students to get to the center of the circle, getting a clearer view of what was actually happening.

The sight in front of me was so unpleasant that I wished for my eyes to just go blind at the moment. It's such chaos. Two groups of guys throwing punches and kicks to each other.

I hate this scene. No, I despised it.

It didn't take me long to recognize some of them. My eyes scanned through the scene, trying to find someone in particular and I actually found him in a few seconds, Song Mino.

He was laying on the ground with another red-haired guy straddling him, one of his hands grabbing Mino's collar while the other was throwing punches onto Mino's face. 

I approached the guys with a few large steps, grabbing the red-haired guy's collar with both of my hands and pulled the guy off  Mino with full force, throwing the guy aside before kneeling beside Mino. The corner of his lips was bleeding and his under eyes were swollen, the result of punches from the guy earlier.

"Yah! What did I tell you about fighting huh? " As I was about to pull Mino up onto his feet, my arms was harshly grabbed by someone, causing Mino to stumble back onto the ground. 

The red-haired guy pulled me up onto my feet, his eyes burning into my soul.

He was much taller than I am. Standing at close proximity with him, I studied his feature. As much as I didn't want to admit it, he looked too unreal. I was taken aback. How is it even possible to look like this? I thought to myself.

It was like his face was perfectly carved in heaven. I was too stunned that I shamelessly studied his face. My eyes trailed from his sharp prominent jawline, his thin lips to his high-bridged nose until our eyes met as I looked at his strong, burning eyes.