“Nice shot!”

Gyeong-eun Lee clapped her hands and shouted at the top of her voice.

Seong-ho Kim watched the ball soaring off into the distance for a moment, then held out his 7-iron to the caddie.

And with an it’s-nothing expression, he walked over to Gyeong-eun Lee, who was still clapping.

Gyeong-eun Lee asked him with an astonished face,

“Seong-ho. When on earth did you learn golf?”

“You know it too, don’t you, Gyeong-eun? When have I ever learned golf?”

Looking at Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends, who were staring at him with stunned faces, Seong-ho Kim smiled and said,

“I’ve just swung a club a few times, that’s all. People make it out to be hard, but trying it, it’s really nothing.”

Down ten holes in a row to a Seong-ho Kim who’d never played golf, Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends could only listen to him with flushed faces.

Gyeong-eun Lee slipped her arm through his and asked,

“But why aren’t you using the driver? For tee shots, it’s better to use the driver.”

“Since I’ve been winning ten holes straight, I figured if I keep it up like this it won’t be fun for your friends, so I thought there ought to be a bit of a handicap.”

“Ah! I suppose so. Thank you, Seong-ho.”

Hearing him, Gyeong-eun Lee turned to her friends and said,

“Don’t worry, everyone. Seong-ho says he’ll go easy, so play comfortably.”

At her words, her friends smiled awkwardly and turned around to talk among themselves.

“Hey. What’s going on? You said he couldn’t play golf? Is that what not being able to play looks like? He’s a total pro.”

“It’s not just that he’s good at golf. This place opened barely half a year ago, and look at how he’s attacking the course.”

“Even after it opened, they’ve only invited a handful of VIPs to round inside the club, so there’s no way he could already have the course figured out…”

“Impossible, my foot? He’s got the course down just fine.”

At some point, Seong-ho Kim was already at Gyeong-eun Lee’s side, explaining the pros and cons of Hole 11.

“Hole 11 tends to get a lot of wind, so sending it slightly to the right will actually help you hit the ball straight.”

Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends, who’d been looking at Seong-ho Kim with disbelieving faces, shook their heads and pulled themselves together.

“Whatever the case… we failed to embarrass him, so let’s at least win the remaining holes and salvage some face. We’ve lost ten in a row — we can’t lose all of them, can we?”

“The way I see it, we won’t even get to salvage face…”

One of Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends held up the paper with the stroke count per round and said,

“Gyeong-eun’s husband is even par through Hole 10. But us? We don’t have a single hole where we made par. It’s all double bogeys and triple bogeys — how are we supposed to salvage face on the holes that are left? Even now he hit with a 7-iron and it flew over 150 meters. That’s the distance we only get if we crush a driver — and we can’t even hope for the fairway, on top of it.”

As if he felt embarrassed even saying it, the friend shook his head and finally, barely, found his tee shot that had dropped into the rough.

Then, with a fat chunk of turf, he barely rolled the ball onto the fairway and said,

“We should count ourselves lucky he didn’t take us up on the bet. If he had… we might’ve had to walk home.”

Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends all went red in the face.

They had put on airs about spotting him a handicap and egged Seong-ho Kim on to make a modest bet of 1 million won per stroke.

At that point, Gyeong-eun Lee had refused the bet, saying it was Seong-ho Kim’s first time out on the field.

Even so, the friends had grumbled, offering an even bigger handicap and complaining that there was no fun in playing without money on the line.

But now, in hindsight, thinking that if they’d taken that bet there’d have been real trouble now, they wiped away cold sweat.

Plink.

When the ball dropped into the hole, Gyeong-eun Lee clapped as if thrilled.

“Wow~ You closed it out with par again? Honestly, someone who didn’t know would think you were a pro. Are you sure this is your first time on a course?”

“If I’d known golf was this easy, I should’ve aimed to go pro from the start.”

Seong-ho Kim gave a sweeping glance at Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends — who were helping read a line that looked hard even for a double bogey — and said, in a way meant to be overheard,

“Gyeong-eun. Do you know what thought came to me, playing golf out on the field for the first time?”

“What thought was that?”

“That no matter how many people fret and try to solve something, what matters is the one actually doing it. Golf seems to teach that well. In the end, the one swinging has to do well for a good shot to come out, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. They do say golf is a battle with yourself.”

Gyeong-eun Lee turned to look at her friends, who were seriously deliberating over a putting line, and said,

“A double bogey or a triple bogey, it’s all the same anyway. The people rounding behind us are waiting for us to come down, so let’s hurry up. This is being a nuisance — a real nuisance.”

Then, with a delighted face, she linked arms with Seong-ho Kim and said,

“Seong-ho, let’s go ahead to the next hole. What do you make of the next one?”

“Hole 12 has a mountain on the left, so…”

The two of them moved on ahead to the next hole, leaving the friends behind.

Standing on the green, reading lines for one another, Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends could only gaze glumly at balls sitting far from the cup.

The people gathered at the halfway house took their rest, each talking about what had happened during their round.

But at the table where Gyeong-eun Lee sat, only Gyeong-eun Lee was talking golf.

“If you’d played just a little better, you’d have closed it out under par — it’s such a shame.”

Looking at the paper with Seong-ho Kim’s final stroke count, Gyeong-eun Lee, sorely regretting that he hadn’t gone under par, said to her friends,

“Have you ever seen an amateur… no, a person out on the field for the first time, shoot under par? Ah, such a shame. I nearly got to see something that hard to witness.”

Chattering on with a face delighted all on her own, Gyeong-eun Lee looked at Seong-ho Kim and said,

“Let’s properly learn golf even now and enter tournaments too. Ah — I suppose that won’t do…”

Gyeong-eun Lee glanced sidelong at her friends and, with a smile at the corner of her mouth, said,

“Father’s expectations for you are so high that there’s no time. My, my — I wonder if our country’s golf world hasn’t just lost a great talent.”

Seeing that she said such things even as her friends’ faces crumpled by the moment, Seong-ho Kim got the sense that Gyeong-eun Lee was enjoying this even more than he was.

‘She didn’t say anything, but it really must have weighed on her.’

At the sight of Gyeong-eun Lee going on and on to her friends with a delighted face, Seong-ho Kim came to realize that she’d been carrying the incident from that pre-marriage gathering on her heart all this time.

So Seong-ho Kim didn’t tell Gyeong-eun Lee to stop.

He merely watched her exhilarated figure with a smile.

Just then, a young man came over to where they sat.

“I heard the princesses were making an appearance, and here you all are gathered together?”

Byeong-mu Choi — a director at Homyeong Construction and son of its owner family — approached the table where Gyeong-eun Lee and the others sat.

Gyeong-eun Lee, who’d been talking away in high spirits, stiffened at Byeong-mu Choi’s appearance.

Unlike Gyeong-eun Lee, the friends whose faces had stiffened now relaxed and greeted Byeong-mu Choi warmly.

“We were actually going to call you if you were around — good timing. Aren’t you busy?”

“Busy or not, when the princesses make an appearance, I have to come.”

Byeong-mu Choi said it as if it were only natural, and looked at Gyeong-eun Lee with oily eyes.

And in a voice even oilier than his gaze, he greeted her.

“You’ve been well?”

“Yeah.”

Gyeong-eun Lee answered his greeting curtly and turned her head away.

She made it flagrantly plain that she had no wish to tangle gazes with Byeong-mu Choi.

But Byeong-mu Choi, unbothered by her attitude, kept talking at her.

Seeing that Gyeong-eun Lee was uncomfortable, Seong-ho Kim greeted Byeong-mu Choi.

“Hello. We met at the wedding, didn’t we? I’m Seong-ho Kim.”

Seong-ho Kim rose from his seat and extended a hand toward Byeong-mu Choi.

But Byeong-mu Choi treated him like an invisible man and said to Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends,

“When you come to my club, you should call me first.”

“We figured you were busy. You said you’ve been swamped since joining your father’s company?”

“No matter how busy, still. That hurts. If the club manager hadn’t told me, I’d nearly have missed you. So? Did you play well today? Our club’s course is a bit hard, so if you just break 100, you’re already counted among the pretty good.”

Byeong-mu Choi picked up the scorecard lying in front of him.

And after examining it, he said with startled eyes,

“There’s someone who shot 74 on our course? At this level, it looks like a club record. Even the pros are set to rack up over-par galore at this year’s tournament here, to the point they’ve been asking to make the course easier… Who’s got skill on par with a pro?”

Byeong-mu Choi checked the name written on the scorecard.

“Seong-ho Kim? Seong-ho Kim is…”

To Byeong-mu Choi, who lifted his head with a startled face, Seong-ho Kim extended his hand once more and said,

“Let me introduce myself again. I’m Seong-ho Kim, whom you met at the wedding.”

Byeong-mu Choi hastily wiped the startled look off his face and took the hand Seong-ho Kim offered.

“If you were a pro, there’s no way I wouldn’t know… Are you perhaps aspiring to go pro? From what I heard, you clearly didn’t seem like that sort of person…”

“A pro? Not at all. Today’s my very first time out on a course.”

“Your first time out on a course? What kind of nonsense…”

As if he thought Seong-ho Kim was making fun of him, Byeong-mu Choi turned his gaze to Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends seated there.

But Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends only nodded, confirming that Seong-ho Kim’s words were true.

Byeong-mu Choi looked at Seong-ho Kim once more with a disbelieving gaze and said,

“Really… it’s your first time? You’re telling me a person out on the field for the first time shot 74 on our course?”

“Hahaha, I got lucky.”

When Seong-ho Kim gave a light laugh and sat back down, Gyeong-eun Lee patted his shoulder and said,

“There’s a saying that luck is a skill too. It’s not as though you can shoot 74 on luck alone. He must just have been born with a real gift for it.”

As if Gyeong-eun Lee’s praise of Seong-ho Kim rankled him, Byeong-mu Choi threw out a barbed remark.

“This Bukseoul CC here is our company’s golf course, but golf should be kept to a hobby — getting too absorbed in it isn’t a good thing. A man ought to be recognized for his ability by being good at his work. Getting recognized for petty pastimes like this — that won’t do, will it?”

At his words, Seong-ho Kim curled up the corners of his mouth and played along.

“I agree with that, too. Petty pastimes like this aren’t a great help.”

When Seong-ho Kim went along with his words, Byeong-mu Choi furrowed his brow and turned his head toward him.

Looking at him, Seong-ho Kim added, with a smile,

“Which is why I think it’s right to place a golf course low on the ranking of a company’s assets. Should difficulties ever befall Homyeong Construction, do come find me with Bukseoul CC on the market. I’ll give you a good price for it.”

“What kind of thing is that to say?”

At his words, Byeong-mu Choi bristled and shouted.

Then Seong-ho Kim raised both hands and said,

“Ah, ah, don’t misunderstand. I said it with good intentions. I only meant that I agree with your view, Director Byeong-mu Choi, that golf is a petty pastime.”

When Seong-ho Kim even bowed his head in apology, Byeong-mu Choi couldn’t keep up his anger.

Byeong-mu Choi grimaced, waved a hand to say never mind, and turned to Gyeong-eun Lee’s friends.

“I’ve got important business at the company, so I’ll head off first. If you need anything, use my name and help yourselves however you like — I’ll tell the club. And…”

Byeong-mu Choi glared at Seong-ho Kim.

“Let’s never see each other again, shall we?”

“Ha, Korea’s such a small country, I don’t know if that’ll be possible. Still, next time we meet, I hope we can talk with a smile. Not the way we did today.”

Seong-ho Kim parried Byeong-mu Choi’s words with a smiling face.

And imagining Byeong-mu Choi, whom he’d meet at the pre-briefing session for Daeguk Fertilizer’s bidders, a smile came to his face.

(End of Chapter 16)