Injury Time

It took them years to realize what they had for each other were only a shared past, obligation and guilt, exactly like Jaehui said.

They lived and worked in that village, helping the people and trying to fill the void in their hearts as they received the gratitude of the people in that village.

They told themselves they were happy, that after all the sufferings and pain, they finally got what they wanted. Yet, something made them felt empty. They didn't know what, but it always felt like there was something missing.

Somehow, although they never voiced it, they never officiated their relationship into a marriage. They lied to themselves that they'd do it "when they were ready". Time went by but they kept not registering their marriage, making everything stood on thin ice.

And then of course, there were the questions.

In Park Hoon's heart, he wondered whether the Jaehui who said he should lose the surgery match, making his patients victims of the game was just because she was desperate, or because that was really her?

When she begged him to not save the Prime Minister, Park Hoon remembered thinking "This is not the Jaehui I knew."

Was he correct about her character? Did he really know her? Had she changed after all the long and winding road?

These were the questions that he kept pushing to the back of his mind, but like everything suppressed, it kept coming back.

********************************************************

For Jaehui, the question was only one. It's just one, but it haunted her everyday.

The question echoed in her mind whenever she saw Park Hoon lapsing into silence. Or when she saw that the smiles he gave her was not his sincere smile, but the practiced smile he gave to his patients, like he was tolerating her, instead of genuinely loving her.

Does he love Oh Soohyun better than me?

That was the question that kept on disturbing her.

*********************************************************

Jaehui loved Hoon, of that nothing could argue. But would she live forever with a man who she knew was forcing himself to be with her?

It started as something really subtle.

He flinched when she touched him, or that his mind wandered when she was talking to him.

A part of her wanted to deny the signs.

She knew quite well that the two had never met ever since she arrived from China, and it's been three years since then.

She wondered whether she was just being a paranoid, and pushed herself to keep living the saccharine life of a couple who have found each other at the end of the road.

Until one evening, when the daughter of the rich person in the village got married and Hoon got dragged into a drinking game. He never really drank much, but he was off the next day, and the atmosphere was really merry, so he let himself got carried away.

He was dead drunk by 11 pm, and two burly guys helped carried him to another somebody's car. And then all of a sudden, Hoon said, slurring, "Quack, come on, it's your turn to carry me home. Did that for you once. Pay back."

The word "Quack" froze Jaehui to the bone.

************************************************

She was the one who left.