If You Come To A Fork In The Road; Pick It Up...

It's one of those miserably hot August days she'd warned him about but that he hadn't taken as seriously as perhaps was warranted.

He's used to heat.

Milan gets oppressively hot and humid in July and August.

Muggy.

Downright muggy, even - something which makes unpleasant wearing his daily attire, even in the very lightest of Booralro wool.

But it's nothing like this.

Seoul in August is insufferable.

In Seoul's version of August, it's like someone managed to combine a blast furnace and a steam room - hot, wet, umoving air that clings to every surface and stifles every avenue of relief.

He doesn't recall much of his childhood and certainly not being routinely suffocated each summer, so he wonders if it's climate change or the price of progress - the city's multitude shiny new buildings and poured concrete.

Or just another flavor of the bad luck Seoul seems to bring him.

Though no one else seems surprised by the persistent misery that enshrouds them.

They're all grimly accepting of it in a way he simply cannot be.

Not even accepting - oblivious.

He's never more than about five minutes away from heat stroke at any given time, but he saw someone yesterday in a black fucking peacoat, out for a walk at the height of the day like none of this was happening.

Nam Joon Sung continues to show up in that horrid beige 1980s shell he favors and thick knitted vests over long sleeved button down shirts.

His erstwhile co-counsel, who usually strikes him as only slightly less crazy, seems to be splitting the difference - no outer layers but still in her usual well-tailored suits.

This week's, though, he's noticed, are made of fresco wools and light tweeds, and her usual knit turtlenecks and crisply ironed button-downs have been replaced by lighter-weight camisoles in fabrics that breathe.

Not that he looks.

Well, he looks, of course, but he's always been something of a clotheshorse and anyway there's a socio-geo-meteorological phenomenon unfolding around him that requires research.

Today, however, she seems to have been at last overcome.

She'd stood suddenly thirty minutes ago and yanked each arm free of her blazer in a huff before tossing at the old hat rack of her father's that stands beside the supply closet door.

He'd eyed the poor thing for as long as he could, hanging there haphazardly, its soft-napped fabric wrinkling steadily and untidily, until he couldn't stand it anymore and rose to go and put it on a proper hanger.

On the way back is when he'd encountered his first...problem.

Distraction, really.

She was wearing silk.

Which, and yes, true, he has that...thing about women in silk that makes his fingers fucking itch.

But this isn't that kind of silk.

It's wholesome.

Appropriate.

Tame.

A simple cream-colored shell with a pretty drape and a high neckline with two little mother-of-pearl mock buttons at its collar.

But.

It's sleeveless.

Her arms are bare.

And he realizes on his way back to his desk- and hopefully quickly enough that she doesn't notice him doing it - that he's never seen this much skin before.

Though his footsteps stutter as he's retreating.

She makes a judgmental, affronted noise, and for a moment he feels his soul try to escape his body at the notion of a rare slip of his being caught.

Until he realizes it's his fastidiousness she's playing at seeming affronted by and not...

He hazards a glance her way to receive - gratefully - her overdone eyeroll.

And then uses it as cover to look once more.

They're toned, her arms.

Wiry but strong.

That's all he's stuck on here, yes.

All he's looking to confirm.

And only because she claims like she does so often - vigorously and vociferously - that strength training is a waste of time. That all she does is alternate jogging days with aerial yoga.

He trains his attention onto the desk he's returning to.

Though the image is seared, now, into his mind and is refusing to be so easily stifled.

Pretty shoulders that make a graceful curve from her neck to beneath the silk. The place where they emerge again, pale, creamy skin, stretching taut where it hugs a well defined deltoid and dips in at the little curve between it and her bicep.

The flex of her brachialis, straining as she'd reached forward for a pen.

He clenches his jaw and sits again, determined to lose sight of it all by drowning his eyes back in the a real estate ownership database she's 'assigned' him to comb through this afternoon.

It works.

For ten minutes.

Which is when she makes an anguished noise and rises again suddenly, stalking off in the direction of her coat, still on the hat rack but hanging, now, from where he'd arranged it on the hanger.

He expects her to yank it free and shrug back into it.

Stomp out of the office and come return in ten minutes with two cans of chemically-laden, semi-medicinal drinks from the shitty little convenience store across the plaza.

Pretend to offer him one she must know he'll refuse, and then drink both herself.

But she bypasses the coat and disappears through the door of the supply closet.

He watches, puzzling at her objective, since all he's seen in that room is three dead printers, a rotary-dial phone, and shelves of dusty accordion files from a decade or more ago, arranged in an order only Nam Joo Sung can discern.

Unfortunately, her retreat affords him a brief glimpse of another pretty button at the nape of her neck.

Which gathers together shiny fabric beneath the low knot she's tied her hair up.

Which is just above an opening he wouldn't have expected to span quite so far down her back, given the almost matronly cut of the front neckline.

Which, when she reaches her arms overhead to stretch her neck, gapes a little.

As does he.

He huffs out a breath of disgust with himself and refocuses on the list of liens on his screen.

This deflection doesn't last long, though, as there's a quiet crash, another, and then the sound of protracted struggling.

It takes him a few seconds longer than it normally would to rise to help.

He ignores the reasons why and buttons his coat on his way to triage.

At least he'll look pulled together and polite.

Innocent.

He plays that well.

Not so much with her these days, but -

And then she nearly collides with him, exiting the door just as he arrives to it, grappling with her hold on the yellowed old plastic base of an oversized desk fan.

His hands take it from hers, and he raises his eyebrows - where?.

She answers it with a tilt of her chin in the direction of her desk over his left shoulder - over there.

"It swivels," she adds, as she steps back to give him room to turn with the enormous thing. "Or it used to, anyway. It's seven hundred years old and probably broken. Abeoji would never buy anything new or throw anything out that had even the hope of redemption."

He smiles at the man's memory and the fond chagrin in her tone, even as the electrical cord slurps free to nearly trip him up as he moves.

He sets it on the corner of her desk that's closest to his.

"I'm going to pass out if we can't get some air moving in here," she adds from heat behind him, sounding suddenly defensive. "Aren't you hot?"

"No," he answers, not because it's true but because it's weird, still, to be on the same page as her as often as they are.

Weird and...

"You're sweating," she counters, as he carefully sets the thing down. "Right along your hairline."

A fingertip begins to draw itself along the top of his collar, and he nearly jumps at the sensation.

"You're making me haul things around when it's 40°C outside and in," he cuts back, trying to sound sullen and not so... "Is there an outlet somewhere?"

His answer is the cord being snapped free from his hands.

He sighs inwardly at the way he chose petulance as cover and then goes back to his desk.

Sits and watches her kick both shoes off her feet and drop to her knees on the floor.

When she's halfway under her desk, he pulls his pocket square free and dabs quickly at his neck and brow.

He just manages to fold it tidily and restow it before she shimmies back out from underneath as the fan's motor begins to spool up.

"Aish," she snaps, as the gale scatters every which way the top dozen or so papers sitting in front of it in an open folder.

He rises again and helps her retrieve each.

The fan, proving her prediction, is not rotating, so he checks its base for knobs or buttons as she moves the folder and re-rights the pile.

"I'm telling you, it's probably broken," she says, putting one of Yu Chan's glass ashtrays on top of the stack. "If there was even a scintilla of utility left in something, he'd never toss it out. Even though he had the mechanical aptitude of a pigeon. No offense..."

He ignore the jab - he's not fucking friends with a bird - but stops looking, because he's flipped and turned all the controls there are and has decided she's right.

He trains the fan a little more squarely towards her sea and moves to lean against the corner of her desk - preen a little, because he's been selfless and chivalrous.

When she takes her seat and swivels to face him, he nearly chokes.

And then lace.

And this time, it's not the sheen of the pretty cream fabric or the soft skin or strong muscles that does him in.

It's satin.

Fuck, and not even very much of it, just a scant little bit, but what he does see is Guipure and fine-boned and translucent and delicate and soft and with a tiny little bow where it meets the errant strap drooped down around her arm.

Oh.

And it is blood fucking red.

It is quiet for way, way, way too long after that, and it takes nearly every ounce of his usually unflagging self-control to force his eyes away from where they stuck to meet hers.

As must be what disappears where he cannot see.

His mouth goes instantly dry.

When he does, she looks...amused?

Confused?

Disgusted?

Triumphant?

Fuck, he can't tell.

"I'm fine," he says, even as the pulse hammering in his ears screams that he's anything but.

"You're not really going to stand there and pretend you don't think it's hot," she says, grinning as the chair's back creaks while she settles deeper into it.

The strap hanging at her deltoid slip a little further down.

The temperature, he reminds himself.

Is what she means by her question.

She scoffs.

"You sound like you're dying," she adds, eyes dropping down to trace down the column of his neck in a way that is decidedly unhelpful. "You look hot. You're sweating."

He ends his lean abruptly.

Thinks fast enough to channel his motion into turning, like he's heading to the small refrigerator around the corner from the coffee pot.

And not trying to keep her from noticing the ludicrously inappropriate and ill-timed beginnings of an erection he's now got to contend with.

"Water," he offers, weakly.

"Yes please," she answers him.

He lets his eyes close and breathes in - slowly - through his nose.

Releases it a moment later through his mouth.

How does the color not show through that cream, he wonders.

The silk is thin, its color light.

He shakes his head again free of irrelevant prurience and opens the door to retrieve the bottles.

And the red - that fucking red - is dark and vibrant and its lace is -

He opens the cap of one, and the effort douses his libidinous impulses in enough purpose that he's able to walk back her way without embarrassing himself.

When he arrives, the strap still hangs there, its red slicing a loose-looping arc around the pale of her bicep.

"I can move it, if you want," she says, suddenly, and his eyes snap instantly and guility from the pretty little taunting bow to her face.

Is this on purpose?

That same something from before is stronger but no less inscrutable and dancing across it.

Wait.

Is she testing him, then?

The woman is bombastic, sure, but also anything but uncareful.

Or crass.

Seeing if he...seeing what?

If he'd notice?

What he'd say?

What he'd do?

Whether this might be the thing to finally fucking break his -

"The fan," she supplies, somewhat pointedly, eyes sparkling as they dart around his face, and dio mio, hopes it's just confusion she's seeing there.

"We can set up a schedule," she continues. "Five minutes with it facing me, five facing you..."

See, he's an idiot.

It's as simple as that.

Her strap has fallen, he's noticed, she has not, and now he's acting bizarrely while she's wondering why.

The only thing which has made anything more complicated is that he is a fucking deviant, apparently, and has this inconvenient predisposition to...

"I'm fine," he says, as he leans across her desk to set the bottle within her reach. "It's moving air in here, which is all I need."

"Told you you were hot," she crows as he retreats, moving back to the safety of a desk that doesn't face hers.

He nearly forgets about both the heat and her clothing and manages to find seven other buildings in Seoul that Babel's had a disregarded entity acquire in the last three months.

When she appears suddenly beside him.

He's never met anyone less concerned with personal space.

She's leans, like he'd been doing, against his desk, and smugly, too.

Only she is standing much closer to him, in that way she does.

Or with whom maintaining distance is more essential.

He quickly confirms that her wardrobe is still very temptingly in the slightest state of disarray.

"You look hungry," she says, when his eyes force themselves back to hers.

Either way, something inside him strains.

And, fuck, he's questioning again whether this might be a ruse of hers.

A game she's playing at his idiotic expense.

Her eyebrows arch every so slightly higher.

He stands.

And then that something snaps.

Their eyes stay locked.

There's distance, still, between them, when he does, but not much of it.

And then his right hand moves.

Rises up the column of her arm, fingers curled around its curve but with a only hair's breadth of distance still between them.

He knows their aim.

That band of red.

But he has no fucking idea what it'll do when it arrives there.

Right it and end this inapproriate and probably unwanted flight of fancy?

Or maybe he'll just let his fingers hook themselves around it and...

There's a noise at the door, and then the familliar clattering of Cheetah's creaky old frame.

"They approved the motion for a stay," Joo Sung announces, as Cha Young turns and starts towards the room's conference table. "It's nearly afternoon - should we order in for lunch?"

"Hong Byeonhosa-nim," Joo Sung says, when Cheetah is parked and he's halfway to the table she's standing beside. "Your -"

"We were just talking about taking a break," she says, sounding much more casual than Vincenzo feels.

He tries to make a noise that resembles casual assent, watching her stop at the table, chooses, and then lift a folder at random to pretend to page through.

He pantomimes sliding something up his own arm and then politely averts his eyes.

"Oh," she says, raising her hand and turning away from him to fix it.

While looking straight at Vincenzo.

Slowly, she crooks one finger around the scarlet band, easing it slowly up her arm and then back beneath the cream-colored silk.

Her eyes stay locked on his, and for a moment, her smile is anything but inscrutable.

And then she turns away.