There are Many Flowers in Seoul

Chapter Seventy-Two

It was a long walk back to the hotel, and Rose began it barefoot, taking each step slowly as she dragged herself away from the beach. She'd left her shoes abandoned in the sand without a care to their worth. After what she'd said and done, she didn't feel that she deserved the comfort they'd afford her and, instead, she suffered the needling of the uneven road and the loose stones which bit into her soles.

With each passing moment the burden of guilt and shame weighed heavily in her stomach, slowing her down and making her fearful of what she might find when she returned to the others. Yuta would be angry, that went without saying these days, and Hitomi would reprimand her for not thinking of them before she vanished into the dark in an unfamiliar place. There was no knowing what Tae-won's reaction would be. They'd hardly been on good terms since arriving on Jeju Island and she hadn't attempted to make amends with him ahead of her flight from the hotel.

For all she knew, he was over the moon at the idea of working with a professional model again instead of being forced into her company.

It disturbed her that Si-woo thought he knew Tae-won – that he presumed he was a playboy and would break her heart as he had so many women before – but not because she thought that he was wrong. As much as she screamed and shouted at anyone who opposed their relationship that they could make it work and he would never treat her like he had the rest, the fact of the matter was that even she was uncertain their relationship could stand the test of time. Even if he'd been Japanese and she didn't have a visa which would soon expire, she was still only nineteen, and it was statistically unlikely that she'd find the guy she was destined to spend the rest of her life with at such a young age.

Rose sighed softly and wrapped her arms around herself as she continued her journey around the winding roads. An island it might have been, but Jeju was far larger than one might presume, and it was difficult to travel around it without the help of a car. If there was a cab company she could have called, Rose wouldn't have known the number for it, and she didn't have a phone on her person anyway. Had she been in Tokyo, a city designed with the convenience of pedestrians in mind, she would have found a hotel or café by now and waited out the night.

But she wasn't in Tokyo.

She wasn't in her loud, familiar, tightly-packed city where she knew every sweet family owned restaurant or café, where she could hide in arcades and game centres when she wanted to skip school or get away from her responsibilities, or where she and Hitomi could walk together through the park in Spring and sit beneath the cherry blossom trees and pretend they were the only people in the world.

She wasn't with her parents, the two people she wished she could run to right at that moment and spill her heart out to. Since she'd arrived, she'd avoided emailing them for fear she might let slip some detail of her exploits in Seoul and they'd demand that she come home at once.

No, it wasn't fear.

It was shame.

Rose hadn't done anything that they'd be proud of since she'd arrived.

Lily had told her that she wanted her to go abroad to find the path she wanted to walk in life, and all she'd done was wreak havoc and get herself caught up in some secret love affair. If her mother had any inkling of the sort of person Rose was when away from home, she'd never allow her to leave the country again.

The roar of an engine drew Rose sharply from her depressing reverie. She stepped back against the edge of the road, frightened that she might be struck by a speeding vehicle if she didn't remove herself from its path, and watched as the headlights approached at astonishing speed. The driver overshot her and came to a screeching halt, the tyres dragging on the asphalt road and leaving ugly black streaks in their wake. It sat for a moment, the headlights casting long yellow beams out over the edge of the road and down toward the ocean, the driver within stoic and still behind the wheel. Rose didn't dare approach – she had no idea who the driver might be – and waited for them to make a move.