helllsh:
[ ♔ ——— He’s sitting on the other side of the bed, cigarette ash floating down onto his bare chest. It singes against his skin but it hardly registers in his mind. She’s managed to distract him from the sting and an eyebrow raises as he shifts in her direction. “Funny, considering you look like that and I look like this. That’s the difference between half a million and whatever you see on your paychecks. It looks like you’ve never seen more than five hundred let alone five hundred thousand. There a reason for that?” He gives her a pointed look and he isn’t sure whether he’s caught her in a lie or whether this is something akin to dramatics on her behalf.
Jaehwa doesn’t make a habit of listening to people when they talk unless it’s something he cares about and it’s not often that he can be made to care. He’s rather aloof when it comes to retaining information like what people do for a living or if they have some deadly disease that will kill them in a month. He made the assumption she hadn’t seen money because she didn’t look like money. He’s still making that assumption now. Something about it is outright classist. Status drawing a line between the two of them. He was slumming it really, but the slums had considerably less women who cared about his latest stock investments or who he ate dinner with on the weekends. She doesn’t care about those things. Or something. He doesn’t really know.
She listened to his words without really paying much attention to it, letting herself stay as she was, head under the pillow. If he meant to offend her or not, it just rolled off her like any other comments because she was used to that. This was what she was aiming for anyway, when she left everything behind and jumped out of her window. Almost breaking her arm in the process, but she was sixteen and more than a little bit stupid she could be forgiven that.
Still she felt she had to do something, react in any other way than to just let it roll off her. Like a jolt of pride to who she'd been, who he was talking to as if the other her had never existed. When she still lingered, clearly so, somewhere in a far corner of the life she had now. She woke up sometimes with the need to pull out the only picture of her family she had from under her bed and wondering with a frown if she'd made the right choice. All his comment did was just bring back all of that to the surface. So all she did was roll onto her side, settling the pillow under her cheek as she found herself kicking voluntarily roughly so against his side so he'd hopefully fall off the bed, or just get a really bad bruise.
Don't insult my family name, she didn't say but felt as strong as the kick she'd just given him. "If there is any reason at all behind that, you don't fucking need to concern yourself with it. What do you even think you look like?"