The Sun to my Moon

Chapter 25: Unexpected gift

The bedtime phone calls had gotten to be a bit of a habit.

Cha Dal-geon was still worried about Go Hae-ri, and had started called her every night just when he knew she normally was getting ready for bed. Though she still got exasperated with him at the office if he hovered too close, she seemed to realize he needed some kind of extra reassurance and tolerated the late night phone calls with reasonably good grace. In fact, he was starting to suspect that she enjoyed them, too. She always acted like the long-suffering care-giver indulging a mental patient when she first picked up, but he could hear the smile in her voice when she heard him on the other end of the line.

These conversations were precious to him. Not just because every minute spent talking to Hae-ri was one where he could be absolutely sure she was still breathing, but because Hae-ri was more relaxed with him over the phone late at night when she wasn't on the clock. The brusqueness of Agent Go Hae-ri fell away and the teasing humor of Hae-ri came out in full force. God, what he wouldn't give…

Dal-geon ruthlessly tamped down such thoughts before they had a chance to fully form and told himself to be content with the simple pleasure of having Hae-ri's voice be the last thing he heard before he went to sleep.

As a result, despite his continued fear for her safety, he tended to find himself in a rather more sanguine mood than usual when he got to the NIS in the mornings these days.

And when, one of those mornings, he ran into Hae-ri in the parking lot of the NIS offices, he couldn't help the smile that broke out over his face when he saw her.

"Good morning," she greeted him, smiling back.

"Joheun achimmnida, Timjangnim!" he playfully returned, his own smile widening. She really had a lovely smile. He really ought to make sure she did it more often.

"Slept well?" she asked.

"Surprisingly, yes," he told her. "Turns out the image of you pretending to be Thai exhange student for a day in front of so many people on your first day in university sent me quite happily into dreamland."

She punched him in the arm. She was still smiling, though, so he knew she wasn't mad. "I told you, I lost a bet."

"Were you any good?"

"I was terrible," she admitted. "I had the worst Thai accent ever. Everyone in the university was looking at me like I was crazy the whole day. But I had to stick it out until the end of the day to meet the terms of the bet, so I just kept saying 'Sawasdee ka' like an idiot to anyone who talked to me. It was completely mortifying."

He chuckled. "I'd have paid good money to have seen that."

They rode up the elevator together and exited it still smiling rather foolishly at one another, but when Kong Hwa-sook accosted them before they had even entered the bullpen, her face grim and her shoulders tense, their smiles faded.

"Wae? What's wrong?" Hae-ri asked immediately. Dal-geon's hand was at the small of her back and he felt the muscles of her lower back tighten under his hand as she reacted to Hwa-sook's tension.

Hwa-sook bit her lip. "It's Han-kissi. From the tactical research advance team."

"Yoon Han-ki? The one who helped us on the buy-bust operation a few months ago?" Dal-geon asked.

"Ne, him," Hwa-sook said impatiently.

"What about him?" Hae-ri prompted.

"He's in one of the interrogation rooms."

Hae-ri clearly didn't see any cause for alarm in this statement. "Okay," she said slowly. "Is he in there with a suspect?"

"Aniya. He's been in there by himself since the custodial staff got here this morning."