Those words finally unfroze his father too.
“Phantom! You do not talk to your grandmother this way!” his father said, slamming his hand on the table.
“Why the fuck is she here?” Phantom roared back at his father, at the entire table. “It’s not safe. She shouldn’t be here! She shouldn’t—”
“Hak-kan!”
This time the sharp rebuke came from me, not his grandma.
Everyone, including Phantom, turned to stare at me.
Relationships.
They always happened to me, not the other way around.
It had been so easy—so easy for me to believe that he was just done with me. That I had been nothing but a pawn in his game of business.
But for the first time in my life, I pushed aside all that low self-esteem, my fears of not being good enough. I batted away all of my doubts and stepped forward to a man with no idea of how he would receive me.
“Hak-kan, stop yelling at them,” I said to him. “This is between you and me.”
He shook his head, still refusing to meet my eyes. “There’s no you and me. Not anymore. I told you—”
“Stop lying!” I snarled, my voice as vicious as his had been when he demanded to know why I was there. “You said we weren’t that couple.”
“I…” His concrete slab face quaked but then re-hardened. “That wasn’t for real. You knew that from the start.”
Wow.
He wasn’t moving, but he was throwing haymakers. Punching my shaky ego in all the right places. I had to stop for a moment and gather my wind after that direct hit.
But the thing was, he’d made one crucial mistake with me during the month we’d been together.
He’d complimented me and insisted I was worthy. He’d treated me like a goddess, in and out of bed, chipping away at my insecurities until I began to see myself the way he did.
So no, I wasn’t going to let that hit knock me out.
I started toward him with my fist curled at my sides, determined to fight. For him. For us!
The expression on my face must have scared him.
He backed away as if I was the huge mafia villain, not him.
But I kept on advancing, refusing to let him get away this time. And his back hit the wall behind him before he could escape.
Just like mine did that night in my brownstone.
“Let me in!” I demanded, remembering how scared I’d been of everything that night. Of him. Of me. Of the tornado of passion whipping around us.
I remembered, and I reached for his cheek to soothe him. To show him it was okay to let me back in. But he caught my hand with both of his before I could.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” he said, his voice angry and full of threat. “You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”
He was so strong. I couldn’t move my hand. But that was alright. I had the other one. And I brought it up to the left slab of his concrete face.
“Hak-kan,” I whispered, caressing his cheek. I chased the eyes that refused to meet mine.
“I miss you,” I said when I finally caught them. “I miss you so much.”
He was so big, so much stronger than me. He could have just pushed me away, given another command to his brother to drive me home, and left it there.
But he didn’t do that.
So I said it again.
“Let me in,” I pleaded with everything I had at my avail. My words, my eyes, my entire heart. “I miss you so much.”
He shook his head as stubbornly as he had before I actually managed to lay a physical hand on him.
But then, his face, all that hard concrete…it gave out.
“Fuck, I missed you too,” he said on a rough expulsion of air.
He shoved my hand off his cheek, only so that he could pull me into his arms right before his whole body collapsed around me. He was a resolute monument coming down in an earthquake of emotion.
“I missed you too,” he told me again, kissing my neck, my ear, the back of my jaw—any piece of skin he could get while keeping me wrapped up in his tight hug.
Meeting parents had always been a thing for me. I get embarrassed so easily, and the relationship milestone always made me self-conscious.
But here we were, two people, holding on to each other as we waited for the storm to pass. And yes, his family was probably staring, but for once, I didn’t care about what anyone else thought of me.
I was exactly where I’d been longing to be for all those terrible weeks since Christmas.
Back in Hak-kan’s arms.
23
So Jake didn’t drive me home.
Instead, Hak-kan and I ended up with plates of food balanced on our laps in his childhood bedroom—which had been preserved in all of its turn-of-the-century glory as a shrine to the Wu-Tang Clan, Biggie Smalls, Black Star, DMX, and…well, individual members of the Wu-Tang Clan.