Chapter 16
MINJI
You would think someone like me, who is a force to be reckoned with, wouldn’t still be losing sleep after a week of having sex with Aaron.
Yet here I am, still going stir-crazy. I thought I would get over him, but it’s not working.
I’ve tried everything—burying myself in work, avoiding him whenever possible, and even my foolproof Korean drama therapy with a bottle of wine. Nothing works.
Every morning, I wake up with the same hollow feeling in my chest. Every night, I lie awake remembering the way his hands felt on my skin. I keep telling myself that I made the right decision, but the conviction behind those thoughts weakens with each passing day.
Our days in the office go by in a blur. Aaron arrives early every day, always in crisp shirts and tailored pants, blending seamlessly into the rhythm of the office, but never making any effort to speak to me beyond what’s absolutely necessary.
He sits in on a couple more depositions, always quiet in the back, scribbling notes in that black notebook.
Sometimes I forget for hours that he’s even there, until I look up and find him watching me, unsmiling and remote, as if he’s looking through me to somewhere else entirely.
I try to distract myself with my casework, which has reached its usual mid-June chaos.
There’s a new batch of asset-tracing requests for the Wilcox case, a round of settlement negotiations for a hedge fund couple splintering over a Tribeca townhouse, and a pile of unsent letters in the pending mail tray that somehow keep growing no matter how quickly I work through them.
On Wednesday, I find myself working through lunch again at my desk, covered in files and discovery binders, when Aaron walks in holding a brown paper bag with the Woorijip logo.
It amazes me just how much he remembers from our conversations that happened over a decade ago.
He stands silently in the doorway, then approaches my desk and places the bag on top of my inbox.
“I picked up a lot of lunch boxes, and I wasn’t sure what you’d have a taste for.
I got gochujang chicken, kimchi stew with rice, and kimchi fried rice—there’s a lot of variety in there.
I would have gone to Jersey, but I probably wouldn’t have made it back in time.
” He avoids meeting my eyes. “You haven’t eaten anything but Kind bars for lunch these past few days. ”
I blink, thrown by the unexpected gesture. “How did you know I haven’t—” But then I remember, he’s been watching me all week. Of course, he knows.
“It’s that, or you start eating your own hand,” he says. There’s no smile, but a faint trace of humor in his voice.
I look down at the bag, then up at him. He’s already turning to leave.
“Thank you.” I’m not sure if he hears me, but I hope he does. He pauses halfway out the door.
“Eat it while it’s hot,” he calls over his shoulder, and then he’s gone.
I sit for a long time, staring at the bag. It’s a stupid, simple thing, and it shouldn’t matter. But I can’t think of the last time someone noticed I skipped lunch, let alone did anything about it. Even though there is an awkward tension between us, Aaron will forever be a gentleman.
He wasn’t joking about it being a lot—four lunch boxes and the stew.
I begin with the kimchi fried rice, and with every bite, the gnawing tension inside me starts to fade.
I need to resolve this with Aaron because he wasn’t asking to be my boyfriend, but to give us a chance.
I don’t know how to handle the thought that if Aaron left my life right now, I’d regret it.
That night, I called Demi and shared the whole story, omitting the details but not denying that it was, without doubt, the best sex I had ever experienced since college. “I told you so,” she said, sounding incredibly smug even through the speakerphone.
“Girl, if he brought you a shit ton of food after all that, that’s love. Food is love, Minji. You can’t take it back. Soon, he’ll be buying you tissues when you’re sick and holding your hair when you throw up.”
“Christ, Demi.”
“Just go talk to him. Quit acting like you’re made of stone.”
“I’m not acting. I am stone.”
“You’re not.”
“Then what am I?” I regret asking, but it’s too late; she is going to tell it like it is.
“You are afraid of losing control, and falling in love is like letting someone else take your hand and lead you out of the darkness. When you told me back in college how you met this guy and started to like him, I was happy for you. Those two months, you were so happy. Then you said you broke things off—ghosted him—and it looked like you lost a little bit of your sparkle. And then life happened, you met that dickhead William while you were interning, and your darkness seemed to brighten again.” Demi pauses as if daring me to argue.
“But then you go right back to stuffing everything down as soon as things get complicated. Sure, it will always be fuck William. But it’s your way of defending yourself when you feel out of control, and it’s boring. Grow up.”
“For fuck’s sake, Demetria.”
“Do it. Apologize not just for your recent actions but for what you did to him in the past. He deserves at least that much.”
I didn’t sleep that night, not really. Every time I close my eyes, I’m replaying scenes from the last two weeks—his dimpled smile, the smell of his cologne, the way his arm wraps subconsciously around my waist when we step into a street together.
I miss the way he says my name. God, when did I become such a cold-hearted bitch?
The next day, I see Aaron by the elevator bank.
He wears a baby blue shirt that matches the Manhattan sky behind him.
He doesn’t notice me at first. His head is bent over his phone; the screen’s soft glow highlights the strong line of his jaw.
I wait until the last possible second to step up beside him.
He glances up, startled. “Morning.”
It’s almost funny how the simplest word can sound so formal.
“Morning,” I repeat, cradling my coffee as if it’s a shield. We ride up together without another word. On the forty-seventh floor, he follows me into the reception area, trailing behind me. When he veers toward the break room, I panic.
“Aaron,” I call after him, before I lose my nerve.
He stops but doesn’t look back.
“Do you have a minute? For coffee? Or… a walk, maybe?”
He finally turns. “Seems like you already have your coffee.” He gestures to the cup in my hand. “But sure, we can go for a walk.”
I lead the way to the secret rooftop terrace—my go-to spot for celebrating court victories and hiding from existential dread.
The morning light is too bright, the city too loud.
Aaron stays beside me, arms crossed, with a closed-off posture.
For a moment, I simply look at him. The man who’s been orbiting my life for years, slipping in and out of focus, whom I so foolishly tried to dismiss as ‘just sex.’ He appears to be waiting for bad news, or maybe for me to say something cruel.
“I’m sorry.”
His eyes widen a fraction, then narrow with suspicion. “About what?”
“About abruptly ending things, about being an asshole to you, about…” I run out of words, or maybe I want him to stop me from rambling, but from the looks of it, he won’t. “Everything.”
His posture softens, but only a little. “If this is a preamble for ‘let’s just be friends’, you shouldn’t have brought me up here.”
“It’s not,” I say. I don’t want just friendship, but I’m not ready to be a girlfriend either.
There is so much I still feel like I haven’t achieved, and being someone’s other half is not in the cards right now.
Ugh! I don’t know how to fix what I broke.
“I care about you, Aaron. I always have. I was just… scared. I didn’t know how to tell you back in college, and even now at thirty-two, I still don’t know how.
” I can only blurt it out, trembling and messy.
“After William, I swore I’d never let anyone make me feel that helpless again.
But you—” I hesitate, the words catching in my chest. “You make me want things I don’t know how to ask for. ”
He says nothing, just waits, posture still rigid. City air whips hair in my face, stinging my eyes, or it could be that’s just the embarrassment. Because he has yet to say anything, damn it, Demi. I swear, every time I take her advice, I always end up looking like a fool.
“I ghosted you in college because I… panicked,” I finally manage.
“I knew I was going to graduate early to intern for Parras Law, so I spent my first semester of senior year just studying, not going out. I was so fucking lonely, and then you came along. With your corny jokes and seductive smile, and it was the first time I’d felt like maybe…
life could stretch beyond textbooks and competition.
It scared the shit out of me, and instead of talking to you, I ran. ”
My hands are shaking—really, shaking. I have no idea if he’s going to start laughing, storm off, or what. He doesn’t do either. Instead, he leans against the railing, studies the skyline for a full beat, and when he speaks, I realize how long I’d been holding my breath.
“You could have just said you weren’t interested,” he says, but it’s softer than I expected. “Would’ve saved us a lot of heartbreak.”
“I was interested. I was obsessed.” Saying the word obsessed even now, makes heat press out from behind my ribcage. “We started to get too close, and my eyes were no longer on the prize but on you. I just couldn’t… admit it out loud. I wanted to spend every day with you. I practically did.”
Aaron’s mouth twitches at the corners before he looks down at his shoes.
For a moment, I almost see the twenty-year-old from the library, the one who used to leave me post-it notes with silly puns and dirty ideas he wanted to try with me in his dorm.
Those were good times—the best since I moved to America for college.