SOMETIMES YOU CAN BE DECEIVED
Chanmin hurried to the car. He knew Chakyung and the others were watching him from the guesthouse entrance, but he had no time to delay.
“That was fast—you said you’d be a while.” Just as the woman in the passenger seat pushed her jet-black hair over her shoulders and turned to glance behind them, Chanmin snapped, “Don’t look!”
Risa pressed her red lips shut, shrugging as she faced forward again. “There’s nothing to yell about. Quit acting like you’re being followed.”
Without a word, Chanmin pulled off. His mouth shut tight, he started turning over all sorts of explanations in his head on the ride up to Sagyebung-ro and for a while after. He could cook up a story to explain the identity of the person in the passenger seat, but as for the reason he’d gone to Nol ... Should he say he went by to scout out the place where he’d be attending a workshop in the spring? Would Chakyung believe him? She wasn’t easy to fool. But he had to come up with a lie she could at least pretend to believe. His blood pressure was starting to rise. He relaxed his grip on the steering wheel.
He cast a sidelong glance at Risa. Her expression looked cold, but she hadn’t asked him a single question the whole time they’d been in the car. That was one thing he liked about her—she wouldn’t say a word when it was clear the other person didn’t want to talk.
“Sorry. I was a little oversensitive back there.”
In response to his apology, too, Risa’s expression didn’t change. She just pretended it didn’t matter to her either way.
“It’s fine. It’s not like I don’t know how testy you can be. You must have run into someone you knew in there and gotten yourself all worked up.”
Chanmin didn’t respond to that. “I should head back east tomorrow,” he said. “There’s not much to see out this way.”
“I’m meeting up with my team in the afternoon—we have to prepare for our conference panel. Didn’t you say you had people you’d need to meet with too, Dr. Yang?”
Another good thing about her—Risa wasn’t merely some woman he’d picked up on another night out with his friends, but one of the graduate students on his previous project team. When he first recognized her at the club the night before, he’d been taken aback, but at the same time, he reasoned this was probably for the best. He wouldn’t need to tell Chakyung a complete lie on that front. All he had to say was that they were taking part in a conference together. Chakyung was on Jeju, and he’d known it would be a risky move doing business here, but the island was huge, and he’d carelessly thought nothing would come of it. His carelessness always made such a mess of things.
“I can just meet up with them briefly. Then again, I might not.”
“Then we can grab dinner.”
Chanmin didn’t think they could, since it would be weird for him not to meet up with Chakyung. But he couldn’t explain that to Risa. As he ran through all the items on his schedule, juggling plans in his mind, Risa pointed out his cell phone ringing in the phone holder in front of him.
“Someone’s calling you.”
Honeyman. Chanmin hesitated, hands gripping the wheel, while the phone insistently continued to ring.
“Should I answer it for you?” Risa asked, but when she reached for the phone, Chanmin batted her hand away.
“No. Hold on.”
While he searched for a good spot to pull over, the phone stopped ringing. He saw a sign showing the way to Hwasun Port and turned onto that road.
“Why’d you turn down here?”
“Let’s check out the ocean for a bit.”
This late at night, even the occasional lights in the raw-fish restaurants seemed tired. The few boats anchored in the port all looked asleep, and only the fishing boats farther out on the water, roaming in the dark like nocturnal animals, gave any sense of life at all to the area. Chanmin got out of the car and held his face up to the salty breeze.
“If you’re going to smoke, I’ll just stay here.”
He felt rather relieved that Risa wasn’t getting out too. Chanmin walked toward the dock, an unlit cigarette in his teeth. Once he was far enough from the car, he took out his phone and tapped on his missed-call notification. Honeyman picked up after one ring.
“It’s me.”
Honeyman seemed to be holding back a lot of anger on the other end of the line. Chanmin didn’t know how the news that he’d gone to Nol had traveled so fast, but he was soon badgered with questions about why he’d acted so rashly. As he was being pelted by Honeyman’s barrage of words, Chanmin lit his cigarette.
“Look, I just went to scope out the situation. So we can be sure about the trade.” He decided to switch from defense to offense. “You’re the one who hasn’t been great about communication lately, you know. It’s like you had a change of heart.”
He blew out a heavy cloud of smoke.
“Anyway, I hear you. I didn’t mean to leave you out of the loop—I’m sorry. I won’t act on my own again.”
The light gray trail of smoke suffused with a sea breeze that soon blew away.
“I’ll know what moves to make on D-Day. I’m ready on my end.” As he stood on the beach, the wind felt unusually strong to him that night. Like something big was coming head-on.