“Daniel!!!”

She came running.

Clara, shining all on her own in the crowd pouring through the first-floor arrivals hall at Incheon International Airport.

Tall as a European model, in cool ivory culottes and a sky-blue sleeveless top with her pale shoulders bare, she made the space around her go quiet for a second.

Even wearing sunglasses that suited that snow-white skin, she spotted me.

Clara came running without a moment’s hesitation…

And landed in my arms.

Ah! What on earth do I call this feeling to get it across exactly?

For a start, it was simply good.

Clara, come flying in from Hong Kong like a swallow to spend her precious vacation with me.

“What’s this? Are they both models?”

“If his name’s Daniel, the man’s a foreigner too?”

“They really go together…”

People murmured on every side.

Standing beside Clara, who outdoes any celebrity going, I didn’t come up short either.

The moment we got to Seoul we unpacked in the hotel suite I’d stayed in last winter.

Three meals a day are easy, and the pool and the fitness club are free for suite guests.

And I bought some clothes.

From the top of my head to the tips of my toes I was set up in handmade luxury goods whose brand names I didn’t even know.

Expensive does earn its money, as expected.

They were comfortable enough that the thought of wearing clothes disappeared.

My height had grown to a hundred and eighty-seven centimeters too.

I trained the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art without a break.

With the body filled out, the clothes hung right too.

Even with Clara pressed against me, I could hold her with one arm.

“Wasn’t it hard on the way over?”

“Not at all~ I haven’t slept a wink since last night. My heart was hot over the fact that I was going to Korea, where Daniel is.”

Clara’s voice was moist.

Those blue eyes sparkled at me alone.

She paid no attention at all to what was around her and looked only at me.

My heart got dangerously hot.

“Give me the bag.”

“Mm~.”

I took the big wheeled travel bag and pulled it along.

Clara linked her arm through my left one.

Anyone looking would see a young couple in love.

At every turn the two of us passed, people watched with envy in their eyes.

My shoulders squared up naturally.

At times like this the padding in a man’s shoulders becomes a symbol of confidence.

I’m a snob too, and there’s no helping it.

My view of life has definitely been colored by my second-year homeroom teacher.

The saying that studying changes the face of your future wife is the truth.

My friends agreed with that saying more than with any other maxim.

There’s no more honest advice, the kind that lands right on your skin.

Beep-beep.

We came down to the parking garage and stood in front of my car.

“Daniel! The car is so nice!”

Clara is a foreign woman who uses direct speech a lot too.

In front of the Porsche’s sharp lines she let out her admiration without hiding it.

I like a Clara who doesn’t put on airs.

“Please get in. Lady.”

“Thank you. Daniel~”

I opened the door and Clara got into the passenger seat naturally.

I put the bag in the trunk and sat down in the driver’s seat.

Vrrrrroom vrroom.

I turned the key and the six-cylinder engine cried out sharply at once.

“Welcome to Korea. Clara.”

“Thank you for inviting me. Daniel.”

I gave her the welcome inside the car.

Clara, smiling at me.

Her lips came in lightly, brushed my cheek and went past.

Haah, Clara, you can’t do that!

Just smelling your perfume is hard on me all day!

“Where has the CEO gone off to this time? What’s so busy about it? Here for one day and then gone…”

Yu Se-ra, the only employee of L.O.R. Investment Corporation, was upset about her vanished CEO.

Over several months, meeting him twice on weekends was the whole of it.

Seeing the face of the company’s owner was as hard as seeing an idol.

Yesterday he turned up out of nowhere.

Smiling wide, he threw out a line about having missed her, and it set her fluttering.

Privately she had wanted to report what had happened at the office in the meantime, and to have dinner too.

He drank tea and talked with the auditor, and then he vanished just like that.

He is a man whose nature can’t be guessed at.

Something must have happened, because a while ago there was an uproar at every brokerage and bank.

All of them asked how the CEO was and pleaded with her to get in touch if anything had displeased him.

Thanks to the CEO, Yu Se-ra had become an important figure to the big financial institutions.

“Is it KR Futures this time? They say futures are a gambling table, but it’ll be all right, won’t it?”

A few days ago staff from KR Futures had come by with their business cards and an expensive potted orchid.

They left word asking for his favor from now on.

She’s the only employee, and she didn’t know how much money the company had.

Strictly, only the CEO and the auditor could see it.

“As long as it isn’t a pyramid scheme. Because there’s no other company like this on earth.”

When the time came, the salary and the bonus landed in her account by themselves.

It’s a big office with nobody in it, but Yu Se-ra had adapted.

She threw herself into the language study she’d fallen short on in her university years.

Over a few months she pulled her English, Japanese and Chinese up to a good standard.

She didn’t invite her friends into the office.

Yu Se-ra knew it by feel.

The fact that this company was going to boom enormously before long.

“As long as he doesn’t meet women. There’s a streak of the playboy in him, but what can you do. It’s because he’s so good at everything.”

Yu Se-ra thought about the CEO, who had grown solid over a few months, and her face went red.

The body looks slight, but the muscle showing quietly under it made Yu Se-ra’s heart jump.

And that always easy, confident bearing was reassuring just to look at.

“For this year’s vacation I’ll say we should make do with a workshop. Just the two of us, cozily. Heh.”

Yu Se-ra, happy on imagination alone.

She did not know.

That a swallow skimming the water, come flying in from Hong Kong, had already hooked the CEO and was flying off with him.

Vrooooooom! Vroom!

“Daniel! Korean expressways are so nice!”

From Incheon Airport I set a course for the West Coast Expressway.

It was a weekday, in the daytime, before the vacation season had really started.

As we left the capital region a wide, cool landscape came into view.

Clara, who has spent these few years in cramped Hong Kong, took the wind through the open window and loved it.

It looked as though I ought to get myself a convertible too.

“Shall we stop and rest?”

“Mm~”

I drove to the Haengdam Island rest stop, the famous one on the West Coast Expressway.

Past the West Sea Bridge, the sea was in view.

Clara must have seen enough of the Hong Kong sea to be sick of it, and still she looked at this one fondly.

Looking at the sea made me feel cool inside too.

Getting out of a classroom where a troop of male monkeys romps around, I felt like I might live.

The day Clara and I had that phone call, those boys wrecked a full two hundred servings of pork belly.

That’s over five servings a head.

They sold the restaurant clean out of pork belly, and when that wasn’t enough they chewed and swallowed neck meat and every other cut of pig there was.

Luckily they couldn’t drink, so they went through a hundred bottles of cola and a hundred more of lemon-lime soda and Fanta.

They were super pigs and no mistake.

It was good anyway.

After the Great Sell-Out-the-Belly War, the boys didn’t touch me again until the break.

And I can gladly play banker in the spirit of a well-off older brother from the neighborhood.

Next to the karma points coming in nicely, money like that is small change.

“Goooood! This rest stop is fantastic!”

Clara, getting out of the car, let out a cry of delight.

Oops!

Looking at her from behind, I wasn’t short on admiration either.

It really was a million-dollar figure.

Her height was Western, but her skin was almost blemish-free like an Asian’s.

My eyes kept going to those long legs of hers.

Beauty is precious just by being itself.

“Daniel~ I’ve suddenly got hungry.”

Food that stirs the appetite had invaded as far as the parking lot.

Eyes sparkling, Clara took my hand and pulled me along.

Of course, on the way, men and women stopped at the sight of Clara and me.

“Whoaaa! Amazing. There’s so much to eat!”

She had been living in that Hong Kong warren, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the snack stalls at a highway rest stop.

It would be a hard sight to find even in America, where she studied.

I’ve heard that American rest stops have facilities like this only around the cities.

But they weren’t as varied as Korea’s.

A Rest Area is, exactly as it says, a place to stop and rest for a moment.

“Pick whatever you want to eat.”

I led Clara around, from the choice-buffet restaurant to the snack corner selling udon and ramyeon.

Holding my hand, Clara said wow over and over and let the exclamations come.

“That one!!! And coffee!”

Clara picked hotteok.

It must have looked the same to her as the Chinese hotteok she’d have eaten often in Hong Kong.

I bought the hotteok.

I picked up a cup of street-stall brewed coffee and handed it to her.

“It’s hot, so be careful.”

I wrapped the hotteok in paper and handed it over.

Clara carefully worked her red lips and swallowed the hotteok.

All at once I envied the hotteok.

Just watching her eat filled me up.

I was grateful to Clara, who had come from Hong Kong to a strange country to see me.

“It’s sweet! It’s perfect!!!”

Drinking her coffee with the springy hotteok and its sweet honey running out of it, Clara showed her satisfaction.

The combination was a Korean one, but she seems to have finished adapting already.

When she ate the hotteok, the men around us glanced over.

A woman at the level of a foreign supermodel eating hotteok is a strange sight and a fascinating one.

Clara, flicking her tongue out to suck up the honey…

I turned my head and took my eyes off her.

I’d told my mom that a woman I met abroad was coming to visit.

Mom, who has an open mind, won’t be surprised.

The twins could be shut up with a little more pocket money.

My father, whose taste in a face runs close to mine, would certainly be pleased.

“Daniel. That one too~.”

Clara, who had finished off the hotteok before I noticed, pointed at the walnut cakes.

Her taste really is more native than mine.

“Sure. All right. Sit here and wait.”

“Mm~.”

I left the obedient Clara there and went over to the walnut cakes.

My father liked them, so buying a big one looked like the thing to do.

“One big box for a gift, please.”

“Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

While they were putting the walnut cakes into a gift box, I turned my head to the left.

I felt eyes on me, as though somebody was looking.

“!!!”

And my eyes met a woman’s who was looking at me.

“…”

She isn’t an enemy, exactly, but I had thought of her as a tie already let go, and she came over.

Not a single-log bridge, and yet a meeting like this at a rest stop!

“Tae-san…”

“Ye-rin sunbae.”

Lee Ye-rin came up to me and carefully called my name.

I answered coolly.

In half a year she had grown more mature.

Unlike at the graduation, her face was markedly more womanly and her makeup had gone slightly heavier.

The overwhelming looks were the same as ever.

As though she was off on a vacation, snow-white legs showed cool and bare under short denim shorts.

Her clothes had gotten bolder too.

“Have you been well?”

“Yes~ what would ever happen to a high schooler. Nothing happens and I’m doing fine.”

“That’s good…, you look well.”

Ye-rin sunbae looked me over, up and down, and nodded.

What is this? Why is she acting like she knows me all of a sudden?

This is the Ye-rin sunbae who turned away from me at the graduation.

This attitude of hers was unfamiliar.

No — an unpleasant feeling came over me.

She’s a senior who hadn’t contacted me once since that day.

Smiling and talking in a chance place like this was strange too.

“Here you are, sir.”

“Thank you. I hope you sell plenty.”

I took the box of walnut cakes in my hand.

There was no stir of feeling in me at all.

“See you next time, sunbae.”

There’s no ache left in my chest now over a first love.

A few days of that experience were enough.

I’m not a sucker, and living like a fool with the feeling of being kept on the hook made no sense.

This is a second life, and after everything it took to get it I couldn’t ruin it.

“Tae…, Tae-san.”

As I turned my back and walked past, Ye-rin sunbae called me.

Her voice, shaking.

“Daniel~ is something wrong?”

Just then Clara, who must have been watching me, came over.

“Who is it? Someone you know?”

Clara looked at Ye-rin sunbae and asked.

Her question, hot and direct.

“Ah~ a senior from the neighborhood I used to know.”

(End of Chapter 54)