OH, THEY'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!
Sighing annoyed, I walked to my place, refusing to look at his annoying face. "It offends me that you all think I would really hurt a pregnant woman. Especially when she's pregnant with my niece," I said loudly, so everyone in the long table could hear me.
"I'm sorry to intrude, Miss Elizabeth-Freya," one of the guests, also Korean, but looking older enough to be my father, began. "But I don't get it. Don't you have a good relationship with Miss Marie-Estella? She always spoke good things about you to us. Her and Mister Dean."
"What's your name, sir?"
"Choi Dong-hyuk," so he must be from the asshole's family.
A nod, "Well, Sir Choi Dong-hyuk, me and Marie have a bad history. Before marrying my brother, we studied together in school, and she used to bully me," then I gave a look to my siblings who had suddenly turned pale, "all of my siblings did, actually. Dean was the only kind of clean one. So, I was heavily against her and Dean getting married, for obvious reasons."
His eyes widened, "You were bullied?"
I smirked, "Oh, yes. The only people who didn't bully me in the family were my grandparents. But that aside, now I'm good with Marie. We were in my dad's library talking about everything. She was, and I was listening and countering some things," I looked at her and she nodded smiling. "Now we are good." The poor man seemed dumbfounded, he probably had no idea. "Where are my grandparents?"
"They went to put the kids to sleep," to my surprise the answer came from Choi Jung-won, and I cringed right away. "Is my voice so unpleasant?"
I glared at him, "Oh, no. Your voice isn't. Now everything that comes out of it is." Then I gave him a vicious smile. "And how do you know that?"
"After you left, I stayed with them. Until they went up with all the kids, even the one-year-olds."
Greeting my teeth, I tried to hold his stare, "Don't get so close to my grandparents. You are going to poison them with your stupidity. Maybe even with your bipolar tendencies," okay, I confess I'm doing that to piss him off, but I can't help it. He started it.
"They loved me, it can't be helped. And if they haven't gotten your narcissistic tendencies from spending so much time with the likes of you, I bet staying with me won't do them any harm," is he for real?
I heard one of the guests fake coughing and both of us glared at the woman who seemed around mom's age, and she flinched. But then gulped and turned her gaze to me. "So, hm, Miss Elizabeth-Freya," I stopped her.
"Just Freya."
"Then, Miss Freya, I'm Choi Da-hee, Jung-won's aunt. I'm interested in you since I heard that you used to be a champion of ice-skating competitions," how does she knows that?
I side-looked Marie and she avoided my eyes, proving my suspicious that it was her. "Yes, Miss Choi Da-hee. I used to indeed. However it was only when I was 13 to 15 years old, in the partners category. But I stopped competing when I left the UK and went to the US to study in the MIT."
"Oh, so you ice-skated with a partner? Who was he? You need to have a lot of chemistry with someone to ice-skate together, no? Because you have to make people feel the emotion from you, and it's a hard job if you don't have that."
I felt uncomfortable, again, thinking about that boy, and took a sip of the wine they served, feeling all the stares on me. "He was an exchange student two years older than me, coincidentally, also from South Korea. His name was Rhys Choi, and we only worked well while ice-skating."
She seemed amused, "Oh, really? That sounds adorable. But what do you mean that it only worked while practicing and performing? Was he a bad person?"
"No!" My answer came way too fast and I cursed myself when Dean chuckled. "I mean, no. No, he wasn't a bad person."
"I remember him," Marie said, bringing the attention to herself. "He was a year older than me, two years older than her. We all had math, physics and chemistry together, and they were the smartest kids in the entire school. It was a show every class we had together, because they would discuss the subjects alone and almost fight because of it. And as Freya has a crave for always being right, they would discuss quite vividly. When you saw that, it was hard to believe that they had such a good chemistry in the ice. They seemed to be about to kill each other at every second."
"Like she said," I agreed. "But I didn't really hate him!"
"You didn't?" Choi Jung-won exclaimed mocking me.
I clenched my teeth, "This doesn't concern you, so shut up." Then I turned to the woman, "Like I said, I didn't hate him. I just liked to discuss in class. However, the boy was clearly disgusted by me. When we weren't in the ice, Rhys Choi avoided me as if my mere presence would make him evaporate."
"Maybe he was shy?" She ponded.
"No. That absolutely wasn't it. If you saw him, you would be able to tell just by his body language that he clearly hated my guts. I think he didn't know how to deal with our discussions in class."
"He probably thought you hated him," grandma Scarlett said, as she came inside with the others. "You were always terrible at expressing those bottled emotions of yours," then she smiled and turned to Da-hee. "I blame her parents, but even now she struggles with her feelings. And it was way worse before."
Grandma Alice agreed, "It was infuriating to see how she refused to express herself. She always tended to hide everything until she exploded."
I drank the rest of my glass of wine, feeling extremely uncomfortable, and when I looked up, Choi Jung-won had his hawk eyes on me. "Let's not talk about this. It's annoying."
Another woman, around the age of Da-hee, turned to me, "Okay. I'm curious about how it was to go to the MIT at 15. What did you study there exactly? No one was able to explain it to me when I asked," she sulked. "I'm Choi Sun-mi, also Jung-won's aunt."
Why are they so interested in me? "Well, I went to the MIT to study electrical engineering and later I got my Master degrees in electrical engineering and physics," she arched her eyebrows surprised. "And although there was a thing or two that I missed when I left, it was the best thing I ever did in my life. I was away from my family, had been emancipated, and was having my best life."
"How so?" She leaned forward.