Flowers Are Bait

Lee-yeon could feel goosebumps all over her body as she held back a scream. “No, this can’t be!” she exclaimed. She was beginning to see the reality of the situation, but she refused to believe it. It wasn’t right.

Kwon Chae-woo pressed a hand to his head and held it as if he had a headache. “What the f*ck?” he grumbled. He looked like he was about to pass out. He kept moving his head like he was trying to clear something from his vision but couldn’t.

“Just rest and calm down,” Lee-yeon told him. “You aren’t yourself right now. This isn’t right. This isn’t you. It just can’t be.” She bit her nails anxiously and tasted the dirt that had gathered underneath.

Kwon Chae-woo paled as he turned to face her. Lee-yeon could hear him mumbling under his breath. “You…” he groaned as his eyes began to close. Lee-yeon reached out to cover his eyes and he slowly began to succumb to sleep. He flitted in and out of consciousness for a moment before falling asleep completely.

His knees buckled as they gave in, and he collapsed into Lee-yeon’s arms. She tried her best to hold him up and keep him from hitting his head on anything as he fell.

“We’ll meet again,” she whispered to him in a trembling voice. “We’ll meet again, and you’ll go back to being my husband.”

***

A rescue team arrived not long after that and they managed to make the situation easier to deal with. When Lee-yeon heard their helicopter and saw the orange vests wade through the mud, she expected to feel relieved. But she felt nothing.

As they placed her on a stretcher and brought her to the bottom of the mountain, her mind was completely blank.

The second tournament had been canceled because of the landslide but, luckily, there were no casualties. The Forest Agency was busy handling the situation and most of the members were running around to make sure that everything was okay.

Lee-yeon could do nothing but watch Kwon Chae-woo and feel herself fall into despair.

A member of the rescue team opened the ambulance door for Lee-yeon and asked her, “Are you coming?”

Even if she knew that she should, Lee-yeon couldn’t seem to get her body to move. She simply stood there, covered in mud, as the rescue member walked to her with a worried look.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Lee-yeon didn’t know how to answer. Her mind was racing and yet it was also completely still. What had just happened? What went wrong?

She remembered Kwon Chae-woo’s voice when he had asked her who she was. It was cold and sharp. He seemed distant, like he didn’t know who she was at all. He wasn’t the man that she knew he was.

The way he had looked at her made her feel like she was falling off a cliff. It crushed her. He had looked at her as if she was nothing to him and it had hurt her more than she could ever imagine. She couldn’t find it in herself to get into the ambulance out of fear that he would look at her like that again.

Maybe she had grown too familiar with the way he loved her, the way he seemed to worship her. The way he had looked at her was a splash of cold water in the face of the marriage they had both held dear.

The voice of the rescue team member snapped her out of her thoughts. “Hello?”

“Oh, sorry! Yes, of course,” Lee-yeon said as she stepped into the ambulance and sat down beside her unconscious husband.

She was in charge of keeping him safe. Although she didn’t feel ready for that responsibility, she knew that it was one she would have to accept. She wanted him back so that she could get to know the parts of him that were yet to be discovered. She wanted him back because she valued the love he had given so much.

“Please come back,” she said to him quietly. “Kwon Chae-woo, please come back to me.”

The door of the ambulance closed.

***

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” the doctor said. “His wound will heal and he will regain his consciousness soon.”

Lee-yeon nodded as she glanced at Kwon Chae-woo’s body on the hospital bed. “Thank you,” she told the doctor.

He nodded at her and left her alone in the room with her husband’s sleeping body. As soon as he was gone, Lee-yeon collapsed onto the floor.

When they arrived at the hospital, the doctor had taken Kwon Chae-woo to the mortuary. As he was in a vegetative state, they needed to have him washed and handled carefully.

While they examined him, they showed Lee-yeon to the VIP room to take a shower and wash away all the dirt on her body. She threw her muddy clothes away and changed into a hospital gown. When she was done, she found Kwon Chae-woo lying perfectly still on his bed.