Sunshine POV
It was a Tuesday evening.
I was at my kitchen table with a case study open and a cup of tea going cold beside it when my phone buzzed.
Kael: Open your door.
I stared at the message. Read it again.
Then I was already moving.
I opened the door.
He was standing in the corridor.
Twelve months of cities and stages and hotel rooms and he was standing right there in my corridor with a bag over one shoulder and his hair slightly longer than when he left and looking at me like the twelve months had been very long and were now very over.
I didn't say anything.
Neither did he.
I walked forward and he dropped the bag and met me halfway and kissed me.
Not gently. Not carefully.
Like someone who had been waiting a year. Like someone who had carried something in his jacket pocket across twelve countries and multiple time zones and finally made it home.
I held onto him and kissed him back and my hands were in his hair and his were around my waist pulling me closer and the corridor light was too bright and neither of us cared at all.
When we finally pulled back we were both slightly out of breath.
"Hi," I managed.
"Hi," he said.
We looked at each other.
Then I laughed. Surprised and overwhelmed and so relieved I didn't know what to do with it.
He pulled me back in. Arms tight. Face against my hair.
"I missed you," he said quietly.
"I know," I said against his shoulder. "I missed you too."
We stayed like that for a long moment in my doorway.
Just holding on.
Just home.
We ate takeout on the floor because that was where we ended up.
Containers between us. His jacket over the back of my chair. My case study pushed to the side. The city outside going about its business completely unbothered.
He looked around my apartment properly for the first time in a year.
Found the cactus on the windowsill.
Looked at me.
"Jae-won," I said before he could ask.
He pressed his lips together very hard.
"He looks healthy," he said finally.
"I watered him every three days."
"Of course you did."
We ate and talked and somewhere in the middle of it his hand found mine across the takeout containers and stayed there.
Not romantic. Not performed. Just there.
Like it belonged.
After a while he said, "Come somewhere with me."
"Now?" I looked at the takeout containers. "It's nearly 10PM."
"I know what time it is."
"Kael you just flew—"
"Sunshine."
That tone.
I looked at him.
His eyes were steady. That particular certainty he wore when something mattered.
I put on my shoes.
He drove us out of the city.
I didn't ask where. I just watched Seoul thin out through the window and felt the air change and somewhere along the way I heard the ocean before I saw it.
He parked and we walked down to the beach.
The sand was dark and cool under my feet. The Han Sea stretched out in front of us, black and endless and moving quietly in the way that water moved at night like it had nowhere to be.
There was nobody else here.
Just the water. Just the sound of it. Just us.
I stood at the edge where the sand met the tide and looked out.
I turned to look at him.
He was standing a few steps behind me. Hands in his jacket pockets. Looking at me with that expression I had been looking at for almost two years across desks and boardroom tables and phone screens.
But different now.
Something more open in it. More certain.
He took one hand out of his pocket.
And I saw it.
The ring caught the moonlight. A thin gold band. Simple and perfect and exactly what I would have chosen if anyone had ever thought to ask me.
Then slowly — without a word — he went down on one knee.
Right there on the dark sand with the ocean moving quietly behind him and the moonlight on his face and twelve countries and one year and everything we had survived sitting between us.
He looked up at me.
His whole face completely unguarded. No performance. No Kael Devereaux.
Just Kim Jae-won.
"I fell in love with you in an office in Seoul," he said. "I watched you reorganise my entire life and refuse to be intimidated by any part of it." He paused. "I carried this across twelve countries because there was only one kind of place I wanted to ask you."
The ocean moved.
The wind was quiet.
"Somewhere real," he said softly. "Just us."
His eyes held mine.
"Sunshine Reyes. Will you stay?"
Not will you marry me.
Will you stay.
The question underneath every question he had ever asked.
My eyes were burning. The ocean was blurring slightly at the edges. I was absolutely going to cry on this beach.
"Yes," I said.
Simple. The only word there was.
He slid the ring onto my finger.
And then he pulled me in and I went and he kissed me with the sound of the ocean around us and his arms around me and one year of video calls and case studies and a cactus named Jae-won sitting between us like evidence of something that had never stopped being real.
When we pulled back I was crying. Properly. Embarrassingly.
He wiped my face with his thumb.
"You said you wouldn't cry," he said.
"I didn't say that."
"You were thinking it."
"I was not—"
He kissed me again.
I let him.
Because some arguments were worth losing.
We stayed on that beach for a long time.
His arms around me from behind. My hands on his. The ocean moving quietly in front of us going about its beautiful indifferent life.
"First in your cohort," he said quietly against my hair. "Future lawyer. My fiancée."
Fiancée.
I looked at the ring on my finger catching the moonlight.
"Kim Jae-won," I said.
"Hm."
"You are impossibly sentimental for someone whose entire brand is being nonchalant."
I felt him smile against my hair.
"Don't tell anyone," he said.
"Your secret is safe with me," I said.
And we stood there.
Above the sound of the waves.
Above everything that had brought us here.
Together.
Finally.
Completely.
**END OF CHAPTER 31**