While Alex was spending time with Jung-Hyun, another heroine in his backstory was having difficulties of her own. Currently, Park Hae-won was sitting in her living room with a cup of coffee in her hands. Her husband had just woken up, despite the fact that it was already past noon, and he was immediately scrambling for a cup of coffee so that he could sober himself up.
However, what he found was that there had only been enough coffee made for his wife. When he realized this, he could not help but snap at the woman, especially since he was groggy, and quite possibly still a little intoxicated.
“Hey woman! Where is the rest of the coffee!?!”
Hae-won continued to read the magazine in her hands without giving her husband’s words any thought. Until he began to speak louder, and with a more irritable tone in his voice.
“Did you not hear me? Where is the coffee?”
There was a cold tone in Hae-won’s voice, as if she was not the slightest bit interested in entertaining her husband, nor did she even look in his direction as she told him the truth.
“If you want coffee, you can make it yourself!”
This only caused the man to growl as he pulled out the coffee beans and began to grind them until they were suitable for making a cup of espresso. Meanwhile, the couple’s daughter sat at the kitchen table eating some breakfast while reading from one of her many college textbooks.
In between paragraphs, she was glancing towards both of her parents. Min-Ji sighed and shook her head. Things had been getting worse between her parents for some time now, and now matter how much she tried to fix it, nothing seemed to work.
Eventually, the coffee was made, and Hae-won’s husband sat down at the table next to his daughter. It was only now that he realized there was breakfast to be eaten, which he was quick to ask the girl about.
“Hey Min-Ji? Where did you get that?”
Min-Ji had a timid tone in her voice, as she looked over to her mother who was seemingly disinterested in the conversation. Before meekly speaking her thoughts about the matter.
“M… Mom made it for me….”
The man simply gazed over at his wife with disbelief before asking the immediate question which came to his mind.
“And you didn’t make any for me?”
This caused Hae-won to simply scoff, as she pointed out the reason why she was neglecting her wifely duties.
“If you are going to waste all of our money on gambling, to the point where I have to get a second job just to pay the bills, then don’t expect me to cook and clean for you. Besides, it is about time that I head out for work. You can make breakfast yourself. Or you can go hungry for the day. I really don’t care…”
After saying this, Hae-won placed down her magazine, and adorned the hat she was supposed to wear as a part of her new uniform, before grabbing hold of the keys and driving to her new job. As she did so, she felt utterly humiliated due to the fact that she was completely overqualified for this kind of work.
—
Alex spent much of the morning in bed with Jung-Hyun. The woman had gone out of her way to serve him breakfast in bed, and he was enjoying every moment of the special treatment she gave him as his new “mommy”. Though he realized soon enough that he had to get to the MMA gym. And thus, he kissed the woman goodbye before driving off to practice for the evening.
Once Alex was finished with his daily exercises, he was actually quite hungry, and rather than wait until he could get home to eat some of his women’s home cooking. He decided to stop at a local fast food place. Alex was a man who enjoyed fast food, and thus when he approached the window to pay, he was actually quite stunned at what he saw.
Standing in the window was none other than his physics professor, the mature beauty Park Hae-won. Alex did not know how to react to this, and when the woman saw one of her students sitting in a luxurious sports car at the drive through of her second job, she could not help but flush in embarrassment.
Before she could even say anything, Alex wore a serious expression on his face as he informed the woman of what he was going to do.
“I’m going to pull around front, take fifteen minutes off to have a smoke with me…”
Even though there was a line of cars waiting for their food, Hae-won could not help but obey Alex’s commands. She may not smoke herself, but right now she really felt like she could use such a pick me up. Thus, after paying for his food, and receiving it, Alex did as he said, and pulled around front into the parking lot. Where he began to munch on his fries, waiting for Hae-won to arrive.
It took her a few minutes to convince her manager to let her go, but in the end, Hae-won exited the front doors, where she gazed upon Alex with an anxious expression on her pretty face. There were a million things she wanted to say to her student, but none of them escaped her lips.
Ultimately, it was Alex who spoke up after lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag from it. Hae-won was so stressed that she did not even care about the implications of her actions. And after Alex had taken his turn, she ripped the cigarette out of his hands, and took a long drag herself, so much so that she ended up coughing.
Alex smirked when she saw this, before asking what the hell was going on with the woman.
“Doctor Park… I know this probably isn’t my place, but do you mind telling me why a woman of your intellect is flipping burgers? I mean, I don’t want to sound like an ass, but isn’t this where you keep telling me I will end up if I don’t take your lectures seriously? Yet here you are working at a fast-food joint and bumming cigarettes off of your student. Don’t you have any shame?”
Hae-won gripped the hem of her skirt with an incredibly embarrassed expression on her face. She could not even look Alex in the eyes, as she took a puff from the cigarette once more, before expressing her thoughts on the matter with an incredibly timid tone in her voice.
“I need the money, alright….”
Alex was stunned to hear this. Hae-won was a professor at an accredited university. Surely her financial situation shouldn’t be that poor? Not only that, but she was also married to another professor. How could they be struggling so much? He was quick to pose a question to the woman as he took another drag from his cigarette.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Hae-won bit her lip and shook her head. She did not want to go into her personal life with one of her students. And seeing how she was not willing to talk, Alex simply sighed heavily before asking a single question unrelated to the current conversation.
“How much?”
The woman looked at Alex with confusion on her pretty face. She had no idea what he meant and was quick to speak of these thoughts.
“I’m sorry? I don’t understand?”
Alex wore a serious expression on his handsome face as he clarified what he had meant with his previous statement.
“How much do you need to get out of debt and pay your current bills?”
This question completely shocked the woman, as she never thought anybody would ever ask her this. She honestly did not know how to respond, but her mind was racing at a mile a minute, and thus she had actually spoken the truth before she realized it.
“A hundred thousand… USD….”
Alex did not immediately react to this, instead he took a long drag from his cigarette before stamping it out under his feet. He then reached into his wallet and pulled out a stack of one hundred-dollar bills, which he handed to the woman, much to her immediate surprise. Before she could even reject the offer, Alex spoke once more.
“Alright, so that’s ten, and I’ll wire the rest to your account later tonight. What’s your account info?”
The woman gazed in disbelief at the money in her hands. Did this man seriously carry around ten thousand dollars in his wallet, as if it were mere pocket money? Just how wealthy was he? She was about to ask when she realized that Alex had said he was going to wire the rest of the money to her account, which immediately caused her to freak out.
“No, you can’t!”
Alex was quite perplexed by this response and was quick to put his foot down.
“I can’t? No offense, Doctor Park, but you can’t tell me what to do outside of class. Consider it a gift, for being so patient with me. After all, I’m not exactly the best student…”
However, Hae-won quickly shook her head. She bit her tongue, not wanting to reveal the real reason why she didn’t want to accept the money, but ultimately sighed heavily before telling Alex the truth.
“I mean, you can’t wire me the money… Because I have a joint account with my husband, and he will waste it all on gambling before I can even pay off one tenth of our debt…”
Alex stared at the woman in complete and total disbelief. No wonder she was so far into debt, her husband was a worthless sack of shit. A gambling addiction? That was an easy way to just throw away money into a never ending pit of despair. He shook his head and sighed heavily, before confirming he would take care of the problem.
“Alright, I get it. Just text me the information of your creditors, and I’ll solve it. Use what I just gave you to get through the month. And if I were you, I would hide it from your husband…. And you really should quit this job. I’m not going to lie.
As hot as you look in that uniform, it honestly doesn’t suit a sophisticated and intelligent woman like yourself….”
After saying this, Alex climbed back into his sports car and drove off, leaving the woman stunned in silence with a fat stack of cash in her hands. She quickly counted the money to make sure it was real, and sure enough, there were ten thousand dollars in her hands.
Hae-Won honestly could not believe that the student she had so commonly berated for being a nuisance in her life would just bail her out of her debts on a whim.
And then she realized that this young man had just called her hot… This caused Hae-won to flush red in embarrassment. She wondered how a young, and attractive man like Alex could think an old lady like herself was anything close to sexy. One thing was certain, this act of selflessness had immediately caused the woman’s affection towards Alex to leap by over thirty points.
—
Thank you for reading my novel, if you wish to read a more serious story with an intricate plot, and complex world building, as well as a decent sized harem, and a few smut chapters. Please check out my two other novels: Tyranny of Steel, and Interstellar Age.