Shownu

“Are you alright?” I asked her.

“Um… I am. I’m just tired, is all.”

“I’m sure,” I said and lay my head down on her lap. “But… just my head for a while.”

“Sure,” she said and started to run her hand through my hair. She looked stressed but… I didn’t want her to feel like I was babying her. 1

“Are you sleepy?”

“Not really. I mean… I’m exhausted but I don’t feel like sleeping or doing anything. This is great.”

“Yeah?” I enquired. It was cute that she felt this way.

“Yeah, Hyun Woo.”

“What’s the plan tomorrow?” I asked her.

“Well… I have to work on a few cases.”

Our days seemed to get longer and longer and we rarely got to meet as much as we did before. Sometimes, we met more in court or at the police station than we did personally. Although, we never really hid the fact that we were dating, she was too professional and called me Police Officer Sohn in public.

The next morning, she left my place to go to work and felt a weird distance between the two of us. Granted, we’d only been going out for about three and a half months now, but it didn’t seem like that too often. Last week, a colleague of mine had found out about us. Of course, we never hid it but he wasn’t meant to find out the way he did. We were making out right outside my apartment door on a night that he decided would be an amazing time to visit me. Anyway, she went inside and he asked me (pretty loudly) why I was dating a lawyer who was so much older than me. I sent him on his merry way with a “don’t talk about my personal life and don’t talk about her like that” but since then, I felt a distance that I’d been too scared to bring up.

So, when she came back from work that evening, I was sitting casually on my couch reading the newspaper. She sat down next to me, still dressed in work clothes and she just groaned. I tried not to baby her too much but it didn’t work.

“How was work?”

“I am quitting.”

“Sure you are. It’s not like you say that to me every bloody week,” I muttered, wrapping arm around her shoulders. “What happened?”

“Cops. Cops happened. They confiscated so much data from us and we weren’t even wrong to keep it. So, we had to file a motion to get it back from them but by then the prosecution had gotten a nice, good look at it… ugh.”

“Well, damn.”

“Anyway, I am sure that we’re going to lose.”

“But the case seems solid?”

“I know… but, the element of surprise was sort of what we were counting on and it isn’t on our side anymore. It’s fine. We’ll work something out eventually.”

“Tell me, I thought you were sort of an HR Manager?”

“I am,” she said, sounding every bit as annoyed as I would expect her to.

“Okay,” I murmured and kissed her forehead.

“I’ll go take a shower.”

“Okay, I washed your clothes yesterday. They’re with mine, in the…” I looked down at her and she was giving me this incredulous look. “What?”

“You washed… my clothes…?”

“Yes? Why is that surprising?”

“I don’t… Well, I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“I know you didn’t but… I was washing mine any way and I decided to wash yours as well.”

She paused for a bit before nodding and getting up. “Thank you.”

I didn’t know why she seemed so surprised but then again, I wasn’t going to ask. I loved her but we hadn’t really told each other yet, you know, face to face.

I started reading the paper again and realized that a case that I’d been investigating made it to the news. There was mostly surface information about the case on there but it was nice to see the lack of speculation and wild theorizing that usually accompanied cases like these. It had been a disaster just to be on scene. The case hadn’t yet made it to my every day memories or my dreams so I hoped to have a bit of time before I would be completely consumed by the gore.

“Um… did you already make food?” She asked me. I lowered the newspaper to see her standing near the kitchen with a towel in her hand, her hair was wet, still barely reaching her shoulders, and she was wearing one of shirts that I usually lent her when she stayed nights. “Um... yeah,” I said. “I kinda assumed that you’d come over. You know… long day, you wouldn’t have the energy to cook,” I mumbled.

“You’re silly. What if I hadn’t come over?”

“Um… more food for my fridge?” I joked.

She laughed before sitting down at the table. “So… um… what about your colleague?”

“Which one?” I said, feigning ignorance.

“The one who saw us that night,” she said, getting straigh