Chapter 3 GET BEHIND ME
As she slid the phone back into her clutch, a tech sprinted toward her, panic in his eyes. “The LED wall just froze,” he hissed. “If we switch to the backup, the sponsor loop will restart from the top, I need someone to stall the auctioneer for sixty seconds.”
Lora didn’t think. She just moved.
She threaded to the edge of the stage and caught the auctioneer’s eye as he crowed over bidder paddles. She flashed one finger one minute then turned, scanning. Where was…
“Ms. Kim.” He was already at her shoulder, as if conjured from the space she’d left. “What do you need?”
“We need a sixty second stall,” she said, breathless. “A charming stall.”
The smile that slid across his face was nothing like the public one. “Charming I can do.”
He stepped onto the edge of the stage, and without stealing the auctioneer’s thunder, he became an interlude—warm, brief, human. He told a story about the first charity gala he’d attended as a boy, how he’d learned not to bid by scratching his nose. The room laughed. He asked the violinist her name, let the audience applaud her. He lifted a glass from a passing tray and toasted the staff…“the ones who keep the magic invisible.”
Lora watched him hold a room without clenching it. By the forty second mark, the LED wall blinked back to life. She touched her earpiece. “We’re green.”
He met her eyes, mid-sentence, and somehow folded the ending to land on time. Applause rippled again. He stepped back down, brushed by her as if it were the most natural corridor to walk.
“Charming enough?” he asked, low.
“Dangerously,” she said before her good sense could gag her.
He laughed again, the private one and for a heartbeat, the ballroom wasn’t a ballroom; it was a dawn riverbank and a girl breathing air for the first time.
“Director,” Pearl jacket cut in, “your car is ready to take you to the after event.”
He didn’t look away from Lora when he said, “Five minutes.”
Pearl jacket hesitated, then nodded and retreated.
They drifted toward the balcony doors where the night waited on the other side of glass. When the latch clicked and the city’s cool breath spilled in, Lora almost sighed with it. Outside, Seoul glittered under a new rain—slick streets, red taillights like embers. The hum of the party dulled, replaced by distant traffic and the hush of falling water.
“Better,” he said, loosening his tie a fraction, as if the sky itself had unbuttoned him. He leaned his forearms on the balcony rail and looked out at the city.
Lora hovered a respectful half-step away. Being alone with him felt like balancing on a bridge—solid underfoot, dizzying over the edge.
“Do you always work this hard?” he asked without looking at her.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She considered. Not the answer with bullet points about ambition and career paths. The true one. “Because I don’t want to be invisible again.”
He turned his head. In the ambient city light, his features softened…less statue, more man. “Again?”
“I used to be…” She groped for a word that wasn’t a knife. “Different.”
He was silent a moment. The rain stitched a quiet curtain around them. “You’re not invisible now,” he said.
The line should have been a cheap compliment. It wasn’t. Something about the unadorned way he said it pulled breath from her. She looked away first, focus snagging on the wet shimmer of the streetlamps.
“You asked earlier if we’d met,” she heard herself say. Careful, careful. “I thought you looked… familiar.”
“And now?”
“Now I think memory is tricky.” Coward, she scolded herself, and also: smart. Not here. Not like this. Don’t risk sounding like a story you made up to get his attention.
He didn’t push. He straightened and rolled his shoulders once, an elegant animal shaking rain from its coat. “I’m glad you were on this event, Ms. Kim.”
“Lora,” she said, and felt the tremor of her audacity. “Please. Bolt Lora.”
His mouth curved. “Lora.” Her name lingered in the air like steam. “Then you must call me Zack, or we’ll both be formal forever.”
“I…” She startled at the intimacy of his given name on offer. “I don’t think your mother would approve.”
He laughed, a bright quick thing that felt like a hand on her shoulder steadying her over ice. “She wouldn’t. But she doesn’t have to approve everything.”
Lora made herself look at him, full on, as if looking might teach her the truth she’d been chasing for five years. Up close like this, he was impossibly familiar and disarmingly new. The mole—she couldn’t see his back; the barrier of a suit and time and dignity stood between her and that confirmation. But something in her insisted, stubborn as tide: it’s him.
He took something from his jacket,an embossed card and held it between two fingers. “If your firm ever needs a direct line for coordination, use this,” he said. “It’ll save you from negotiating with five people to fix a thirty second problem.”
Lora accepted it. The card was heavy, the letters pressed deep. Simon Zack. A personal number. Her thumb found the raised edge of the logo and rested there as if it were a heartbeat.
“Thank you,” she said, meaning more than logistics.
“A small investment,” he said lightly. “You make my world run smoother; I repay the favor.”