In the end, does it mean to leave everything to fate?
It’s laughable. Living in an age of cutting-edge science and being told to leave it to fate. If there’s a god, should I grab onto the hem of god’s pants and beg? Please, please don’t take the child from me?
No.
Maybe it’s actually good. Anyway, our couple got married deciding to live as “DINKs,” so we didn’t need a child in the first place. Just because it appeared and disappears without me knowing, there’s no damage our couple will receive.
Since it’s a natural phenomenon, if I just know about it alone and it disappears, wouldn’t it be enough to just keep it in my heart alone? If by any chance the child in my belly is alive until it exceeds 20 weeks, then what should I do then?
…Even though the probability of dying is half, shouldn’t Yoo Seonjae know?
Even if he dislikes children, wouldn’t his thoughts change if it’s his own child?
My head was complicated. If I could, I wished I could know my future in advance.
“Yeoul, here!”
In the parking lot, Yoo Seonjae leaned against the car, looked toward me, and waved his hand. He could just stay in the car, why is he out here… I thought, then my eyes grew hot without me realizing it.
Yoo Seonjae smiles looking at me. I want to keep seeing that smiling face… I want to smile looking at that face for my whole life…
“Please get in.”
I smiled back at Yoo Seonjae, who playfully opened the car door and smiled. As if nothing had happened.
Professor Yeonwoo has a great sense of duty as a doctor, so he won’t carelessly leak patient personal information. Even if it’s a spouse. Then it’s okay. Before I speak first, there’s no way Yoo Seonjae will notice.
So, let me organize my thoughts first.
Before that…
“Seonjae.”
“Yeah?”
Yoo Seonjae answered while fastening my seatbelt. Until he started the car and left the parking lot, when I said nothing, Yoo Seonjae, who had been glancing at my profile, opened his mouth.
“What’s wrong, Yeoul? Did something happen?”
“…”
“Yeoul?”
“Seonjae.”
I unconsciously swallowed dry saliva. Now it’s time to ask this clearly. I can’t pretend not to know anymore. It was because Professor Yeonwoo’s words kept stabbing me like a fish bone stuck in my throat.
[Because I’ve given birth.]
“Should we go somewhere and talk for a bit?”
“Where?”
Because my voice was hoarse, he seemed to notice that my atmosphere was unusual too. Yoo Seonjae, who had been silent for a long time, turned on the navigation while briefly stopped and asked:
“Should we go eat dinner? Should we go to that eel restaurant you said you wanted to eat at before?”
“No. I don’t want to eat.”
Whatever I eat will just sit there. Because my chest is already full of words.
“Should we go home?”
“Just… go to a quiet cafe.”
I didn’t want to carry this feeling all the way home.
Yoo Seonjae drove for a long time as if he had a premonition of something. Not to a cafe in a moderately close downtown area, but deliberately headed to a cafe in a quiet place in the suburbs that you need to take a car to reach.
I think we went for about an hour. During that time, neither of us spoke.
And at the cafe we arrived at, I couldn’t open my mouth for a while. It was because it was the cafe that had been introduced in a small corner of a magazine I’d shown Yoo Seonjae once… the cafe I’d said I wanted to visit.
I know that he remembers things like this one by one and doesn’t miss a single thing I want because he’s always making an effort. I also know that I don’t make as much effort as he does. Somehow, receiving what Yoo Seonjae does for me has become a matter of course.
Even things I can do alone, it became nothing for Yoo Seonjae to do them. When doing something, when eating, when dressing, even the moment I fall asleep, I always called “Seonjae, honey, darling…” calling Yoo Seonjae like that.
“Honey, how about chamomile tea? You look a bit… anxious.”
Look at me now. I’m just nodding at what Yoo Seonjae says.
Coffee was placed in front of Yoo Seonjae, chamomile tea in front of me. To me, who stared at the teacup like that for a long time without saying anything, Yoo Seonjae didn’t rush me. He just quietly waited for me to open my mouth.
I felt his subtle pheromones.
Gentle Yoo Seonjae.
Even if what I’m about to say shakes his gentleness, our peaceful evening routine, I had to say it. I had to acknowledge now that this was our best option. I shouldn’t turn away anymore. The day when someone’s life changed because of me.
“Seonjae.”
“Yeah.”
Yoo Seonjae took a sip of coffee and answered. I didn’t drink my tea, just caressed the teacup and felt the temperature slowly cooling.
“We… seem like a perfect couple.”
At the words that came from my mouth, Yoo Seonjae seemed relieved and smiled slightly for the first time.
“Of course. I have Han Yeoul, so we’re perfect.”
“But Seonjae…”
“Yeah?”
“Are we… a perfect family?”
Yoo Seonjae looked at me without saying anything. What I was saying didn’t seem to really resonate with him. I didn’t deliberately try to make him understand the meaning of what I’d said. Only the sound of time passing was quietly brushing between us.
“Yeoul, I have no idea what you’re saying right now.”
After wetting his throat with coffee, Yoo Seonjae finally spoke, smiling awkwardly at me. That smile was rare to find in him, so I could roughly guess how my question had come across to him.
Probably… he too was feeling that something was wrong right now.
Even after hearing what he said, I just stared at the teacup for a long time without giving any answer. When I slightly gripped the teacup’s handle, shallow ripples formed in the teacup. Because it seemed just like my heart, I stared intently at the rippling tea in the cup.
“Yeoul.”
“Seonjae.”
When I raised my head, his complexion had become a bit pale. Since nothing like this had happened before, he might not understand this situation. Still, if we’re truly a ‘perfect couple’ as he said, isn’t this… something we need to go through?
“I hate not knowing things that only I don’t know.”
Yoo Seonjae’s face instantly hardened coldly. Still, I didn’t avert my gaze and looked into his eyes and spoke directly.
“When you gave me pheromone showers and marked me without my knowledge… at that time, I was actually angry at you, but as time passed, I felt reassured. Because I seemed like such an important person to you. But-“
“But?”
“This is a different matter.”
When I took a sip of the already cold tea and met Yoo Seonjae’s eyes again, I felt a chill down my spine, feeling like I was facing a stranger somehow.
The person sitting in front of me is Yoo Seonjae, but is he really the Yoo Seonjae I know… a thought that might be a bit foolish, but somehow an uneasy feeling.
“What kind of matter might that be?”
Yoo Seonjae asked. Though he asked in a tone saying he had no idea what story I would tell, his eyes already knew what I would say.
Right.
This was the identity of the incongruity I felt.
The look in Yoo Seonjae’s eyes looking at me is different. The look in those eyes looking at me not as ‘my alpha’ as usual but just as ‘Yoo Seonjae’ was that unfamiliar to me.
Only then did I realize how lovingly he had been looking at me all this time.
Ah… I was loved. That’s why I didn’t know. No, I didn’t want to know. I thought I should never know for my whole life about what happened because of me.
I’m such a selfish person.
“You roughly guess what I’m going to ask… don’t you, Seonjae?”
“No? I don’t know.”
Yoo Seonjae took another sip of coffee and chuckled. His appearance somehow resembled Yeongjae hyung.
“Yeoul.”
“…”
“When you want to get something from someone, you have to speak accurately.”
“When I want to get something?”
It was rather me who didn’t understand what Yoo Seonjae was saying. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at all. Is my trying to find out from him what happened that day an act of trying to get something?
Why…?
I’m a party to that incident. Just like him.
“That’s right. You’re asking me to tell you what I’m hiding from you in order to become a perfect couple and a perfect family.”
Hiding…
Is that so? Was Yoo Seonjae hiding it from me? Deliberately not saying something and hiding it are different. I thought it was something he just didn’t bother to say. Like not specifically marking extreme recessive on the trait of an extreme recessive omega.
