Boss, It's My First Time Being Your Resident - Chapter 62

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 62. It Was Love

“Hey, Shim U-seop! If you’re not the crown prince, who is?”

Just through high school, he’d been called “the beggar’s bastard”—but at Medical School, the nickname had transformed into “the crown prince.”

His classmates seemed to regard him as the son of some mid-sized conglomerate.

Third-degree black belt in Judo, fourth-degree in Taekwondo. A brilliant mind that never missed the top spot in class.
A fine home, an expensive car, impeccable manners and handsome features.
Fluent foreign language skills besides—they poured out extravagant praise, calling him the ideal groom of his era.

They never would have known.
None of it belonged to him. It all belonged to Ju Beom-min.

Within the glittering shell that wrapped around him, there was not a single thing that bore the name Shim U-seop.

In exchange for monitoring and protecting Ju A-gang from the innermost circle, he received full financial backing from Ju Beom-min—tuition at an expensive medical school, all the costs of maintaining appearances.

That was his life.
A pitiful existence sustained by guilt, eating away at him.

It had started as surveillance, pure and simple.
Money tangled with money. The relationship between employer and employee.

Though he’d accepted Ju Beom-min’s proposal because of the money, somewhere along the way his heart had begun to sting whenever he saw A-gang.

Was it that day?

It was not long after he’d begun the task Ju Beom-min had entrusted to him.

A day when there was a supplementary class.
The moment he heard that A-gang, his group partner, hadn’t eaten because her father was unwell, he stopped dead in his tracks, bought rice porridge, and turned toward her single-room apartment.

She entered that damp, musty room without the slightest hesitation. Then she simply plopped down on the floor and began spooning porridge into her father’s mouth.

So unpretentious, so pure—it was unbelievable she was a conglomerate heiress. That was who Ju A-gang was.

The moment he witnessed her laughing with her father, speaking to him with such tenderness, radiant with a purity that seemed almost spotless—his heart had sunk.

‘Ju A-gang, you were treating me with genuine sincerity.
How could you be so completely unguarded, accepting me as a friend like this?
To someone this vile, this money-obsessed, this wretched.’

For the first time, he felt desire.

The profane wish to become not a tool of Ju Beom-min, but the man at A-gang’s side.

To gaze upon the same horizon with her each day, to walk the same roads, to breathe the same air, to share every season with her—that cowardly yearning.

***

“You’re not my friend.”

U-seop spoke quietly to A-gang, who stood dazed in the middle of the corridor.

A-gang’s hands trembled faintly as she clenched and unclenched them, fighting to compose her expression.

“It started with money. But it wasn’t money—it was you, Ju A-gang.”

Damn it.
He’d never meant to confess like this, not in this way.

He’d wanted to wait until the right moment, somewhere more fitting, when he’d become a far more impressive man, then tell her with confidence.

U-seop met her gaze directly.

“Ju A-gang. Since the moment I met you, my whole world felt broken. Even when I ate something delicious, if you weren’t beside me, it tasted like sand. Even when I watched a funny movie that made everyone laugh, if you weren’t laughing, I couldn’t enjoy it at all. There were nights I couldn’t sleep, but my mind was so full of you I didn’t even notice being tired.”

His tongue had gone dry. His lips parched.
Though he moistened them over and over, the burning yearning had left even his lungs withered and cracked.

“I’ve asked myself a thousand times if I had any right to love you. But I couldn’t stop. Every time you smiled at me, I kept harboring this wretched hope.”
“…….”
“I know it’s an excuse, but for someone as worthless as me to stay at your side, this was the only path. The only way to protect you as you deserve, to gaze upon you freely.”

A throbbing ache bloomed somewhere in his chest.

It felt like his heart was being crushed beneath a heavy stone.

And yet, at the same time, he felt liberation. Freedom from that suffocating guilt that had crushed him for ten years.

“It was love.”

In that moment, A-gang’s eyes widened.

Was it shock? Confusion? Or the miracle of affirmation she’d been longing for?

U-seop didn’t want to miss a single fleeting change in her eyes.

“Ju A-gang. My confession came too late. But I want to be the man at your side, not your friend.”
“U-seop…….”

A-gang wiped the tears streaming down her cheeks with her sleeve and stared at U-seop intently.

Her eyes—which had been dull and wet with sorrow just moments before—began to brighten with life.

She could sense it instinctively.

Her eyes held him in their gaze, but the burning vitality that filled them was directed elsewhere.

“I don’t think I can, U-seop.”

A-gang’s voice trembled, thin as a thread.

“I don’t think I can accept your confession.”

A-gang’s gaze drifted toward the corridor as she murmured.

“I’m just like you. Food isn’t delicious. Things that should be funny aren’t funny. Even scary things—I don’t know if I’m scared anymore. I can’t sleep, but I’m not tired.”
“…….”
“If these strange feelings are what love is… then I think I’ve felt it too. For someone.”

A-gang gripped her chest tightly, as if she’d just understood something for the first time.

The expression of someone who’d found their way through a thick fog.

And then she began to run toward something.

She never looked back. Ju A-gang did not.

***

“Even if the whole world were in grayscale, you alone remained vivid.”

It had been an unexpected answer.

U-seop’s earnest confession had become a mirror. And A-gang beheld her own heart reflected within it.

Shim U-seop, who said the whole world had broken.

Those strange symptoms he suffered from—they bore such an uncanny resemblance to her own condition….

Every strange feeling she’d harbored since the moment she first saw Ha Tae-heon finally had a name.

Her heart felt ready to burst.
Not just warm—it blazed like a sun burning at full fury.

Why was the Main Building Central Corridor so impossibly long today?
No matter how fast she ran, the end never came into view.

He’d been a man who caught the eye at first glance.
The moment she took him in, the whole world seemed to stop.

Beyond that dangerous first impression—the one where she’d mistaken him for a gangster—she couldn’t help but grow curious about him.

What kind of life had he lived? Why did he have such cold eyes?
How had he come to choose a life of drawing blades?

When she’d encountered him again at Sein University, not as a gangster but as a Fellow, he emanated an oppressive presence that was beyond approach.

The distance they’d closed by one span on Cheongwha Mountain that night had felt like it widened again to circle the entire earth.

Rather than warming to her as a junior, he’d drawn a cold line, calling her a guest. Disappointment welled up in her, and a stubborn defiance bloomed.

With So-dam’s strange interpretation added to the mix, her misunderstanding of him deepened.

He occupied her thoughts all day.
He filled her mind all night.

Even as she backed away from him, anxious to put distance between them, paradoxically, the moment he drew his own line, his cold retreating figure made her heart ache for reasons she couldn’t name.

Why did she long for him more the further she ran? Why did he loom larger in her vision the more she fled?

It was all contradiction.

These complex, intricate emotions—thousands of pieces layered upon each other—were something she’d never felt before….

A-gang closed her eyes slowly, then opened them.

***

The semi-transparent screen door slid open slowly.
With today’s shoot complete and the camera crew gone, the Trauma Center was quiet.

A-gang rushed in, breathless, searching desperately for Ha Tae-heon.

“Instructor A-gang, what’s with the sprint mode today?”

“He went into an emergency pelvic fracture operation a while ago—should be out soon.”
“Which room number?”
“Room 8. Why?”
“Thank you!”

The sound of her sandals striking the floor echoed through the quiet corridor in rhythm with her heartbeat.

A-gang clutched her chest—ready to burst—and pushed wide the door to the Staff Changing Room across the way.

“This is the men’s changing room. First, let’s—”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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