SUGAR KISS [YEONBIN] ✓

nine

This week, the individual dish is a low-key thing. No sprinting around or grabbing for ingredients in a mad dash of flour and milk and paprika. It’s just “be a chef. Cook good food. Take less than two hours. The end.” Which is exactly what I needed. To relax into the exquisite deglazing of a sauté pan and be able to appreciate the heat that blows out of the oven when I open it, not view it as a health hazard when someone yanks it open as I sprint past it.

We all needed this.

I was so glad for the moment to breathe that I didn’t even give a second thought to sabotaging Yeonjun. Not that it would have mattered; everyone knew our team would be the one losing members, not his.

Three members of my team left after the individual challenge ended. Not Taehyun or Juri, thank goodness. Not Jaehyun, either, because someone up there hates me.

That puts us at eighteen chefs. Teams are even. And I am well-rested enough from the simple challenge this week that now I can focus my energy back where it naturally wants to go: getting vengeance on Yeonjun.

I am walking the campus in the early morning fog, pondering. Tar and feather, quartering, burning all of his pants if I can find a way into his room—a number of creative solutions—when there’s a shadow beside me and a thumping on the pavement. Rhythmic puffs of breath that sound vaguely masculine. I turn.

Yeonjun is bouncing on his feet, a thick ring of sweat darkening the neckline of his shirt. He has headphones in but he pops one out to say, “Hey there, buttercup.” He smiles. A genuine smile. I can feel my fist curling at my side.

“Yeonjun.”

“Early morning communion with nature?”

He’s still bouncing, warding off that lactic acid with movement, so all his words come out short and off-pitch and wrong. “Not exactly,” I say.

I have stopped walking, apparently. I cross my arms over my chest. “What are you doing?”

He raises a single eyebrow and gestures to his entire self, hand quickly drawing my eyes to his damp face, his torso, his hips, down to his legs, which are frustratingly beautiful things. Like God assigned the sculpting of Choi Yeonjun’s calves to Michelangelo, and Michelangelo approached them with the goal of rendering David a piece of shit. I blink hard to clear that thought. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“Sullying a perfectly beautiful morning with chatter? And—oh my gosh, will you please stop the bouncing? I can barely hear what you’re saying.”

He rolls his eyes but stands still. After he’s been immobile for more than half a second, he bends over and rests his hands on his knees, breathing hard. His shirt is super loose, with those excessively deep athletic dude armholes, so when he does, they gap hard and I can see everything—his collarbone and stomach and . . . good lord, what a perfect chest.

I bite my tongue and look away. Then say, primly, while looking across the courtyard, “Who runs this early in the morning?”

“You think I should run at three in the afternoon? When it’s eight hundred degrees out and the air itself is a swamp?”

“Well,” I say.

“Well.” He cocks his head. “And who communes with nature at such an ungodly hour?”

“I told you. I wasn’t communing.”

He’s standing tall again, one hand in his hair, the other relaxed at his side. “Then what were you doing?”

“I don’t have to tell you.”

He laughs, this big, loud, shockingly genuine thing, and I’m kind of startled by it. I know I sound like a little kid. Petulant. I don’t have to tell you. But I don’t want to talk to him, not after the hell of last week, not after he started all of this in the first place. I want to not-commune with nature far away from here. Where his cocky smirk is not invading my peripheral and the smell of deodorant and sweat isn’t completely consuming my ability to form coherent words.