Important pointers:
—every chapter will alternate between two perspectives of the two couples living together, I may later use only one chapter for one couple but for now they are combined.
—this is an alternate universe; which means:
~Gu Seung Jun is not dead.
~Ri Jeong Hyeok is not in the NK military service.
~Yoon Se-ri is not a rich heiress.
~Seo Dan has not lost the love of her life, also, does not live in NK.
—there have been some changes to the preview so I urge you all to read that again.
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Zurich, Switzerland.
Seo Dan has never felt her heart being this heavy ever before in her life. The seemingly rude woman on the outside who, albeit, possessed a heart as soft as a flower petal, could not bring herself to move from her bed on this particular Monday morning. As she dared to sneak in an extra five minutes of sleep before her alarm went off again, her mind went back to her dream.
A dream where she's twenty eight again. A dream where she is smiling. A dream where she's on a bench in Pyongyang with a sandwich in her hand, trying takeout with a man she has grown to adore. A man whose smile is as charming as his apparel. A man who is constantly brushing back his thick brown hair so it doesn't fall in his gleaming eyes. A man who has forced her to try this mediocre way of eating on a bench while she fidgets around under the uncomfortable wood of the seat she's sat on.
She wants to tell this man that this is not how she was raised, that this is not how they do it back where she comes from. She wants to tell him to get a grip and smile less for her own sake. She wants to get up and leave on the spot but she's still there, rooted to her feet.
Because she is in love with this man.
Eight years later, and she realises she is still in love with Gu Seung Jun, the man who is married to another woman probably back in South Korea.
A tear slips from her eye. She makes no effort to wipe it away for she likes the pain his memories bring to her, it's therapeutic.
Because this is the only way she can remember him.
Ri Jeong Hyeok doesn't know when sunset went by. It is only when his eyes land on the clock in the living room that he realises it is past 6 in the evening. He hasn't seen Dan the entire day, it is okay, he tells himself. They had been having problems.
Again.
She needed space and so did he.
But this time, something was different. They had gone weeks without even speaking a word to each other, not even the usual good mornings, for the matter. While it did bother him, it still didn't bother him enough to seek her out.
He starts preparing for dinner, maybe she will come downstairs on her own. If not, she will heat up the container he will put in the refrigerator for her to eat later— a mantra the couple had followed for some years now, only this year, it was proving to be repeated more and more. Careful not to get his white button down dirty, Ri Jeong Hyeok ties an apron around his waist; the one that covers his thighs from waist down. Then, he starting washing the bright bellpeppers before chopping them, careful to fold his sleeves upto his elbows beforehand.
He has a mind of his own, chopping up the vegetables and gathering the herbs and spices he'll be needing for today's pasta he plans to make. He makes sure to be as slow as possible; it gives him time to not only watch out for the food but also think about his pathetic life; a life which could've been beautiful had Yoon Se-ri been with him.
It was pitiful to even think of some other woman when you were married, but Yoon Se-ri wasn't any other woman, she was, is, and will always remain the love of his life. How can he forget the strangest way she crashed into his life— quite literally. The moments they had shared, the passionate kisses, the sexual tension-ridden eye contacts, the promises of a future together; how could anyone expect him to just move on?
When you love someone as deeply as he had loved her, there was no going back, there never was.
Another 45 minutes of dwelling on his disastrous life, Ri Jeong Hyeok is finally done. He dishes out a serving of pasta for himself, filling half of the white plate to precision before he puts the rest of the food in a plastic container and into the fridge. If Dan wanted to come, she would've have by now. There was no point in waiting for something that would never happen.
He chews his food in silence, washes down the remaining fettuccine with a glass of water. Breakfast was the only time he properly saw Dan as they both had to leave for their respective works; Ri Jeong Hyeok as a piano teacher and Dan for her cello teaching classes at the same school, a prestigious music institute in all of Switzerland. To this day, they didn't know how they had both managed to get jobs there. Around seven in the morning, both of them would come downstairs, into the kitchen and start preparing their own breakfasts after exchanging an awkward good morning.
They'd eat at the same table for the sake of simplicity (or maybe because either of them was too poised to sit on the couch with food). With their eyes focused on their plates, they'd avoid conversation, only to get up on their own as they left for the music school together. Sometimes they took his car, sometimes hers, but it had been months since they were going separately now. Even the other teachers at school could never tell they were actually married given their lack of responsiveness towards each other.
Lunch was eaten at school, in their respective offices. When they came home around four, they'd go their separate ways towards their own rooms and then, meet for dinner which was even more awkward than their breakfast together.
No one could tell they were married. If it wasn't for the rings on their fingers, or one of them awkwardly telling that they were indeed, a married couple, people didn't believe them.
Nothing about them, nothing at all, screamed married.
But it hadn't always been like this.
When they had been put together by their parents, both of them knew that the only way out of this misery was pretending so they did; faking smiles and kisses until they convinced their family members of their love but could not bring their own hearts to accept the fact.
Oh, the irony!
They had slept in the same bed for almost two years; walked hand in hand to every event, professional or personal. They had even even shared a handful of kisses but what had started out as a pushover was bound to end up in a disaster sooner or later.
There was a point when Seo Dan was in love with Ri Jeong Hyeok, she loved him more than anything else in the world but that was before another man decided to charm her socks off with his boyish grin.
Now, they were merely two strangers joined together by the label of husband and wife, hollow on the inside, bitter on the outside.
Ri Jeong Hyeok sighs. He puts the plate in the sink and scribbles a note on the upper right side of the fridge. This was how they communicated on bad days, the stupid electronic got more talk time than the humans in the vast house.
How did I manage to do this for eight years? Ri Jeong Hyeok muses.
In elegant script, he tells her he'll be going to work on his own tomorrow and that there is a new student who he has been told to teach personally. He needs be there on time, it wasn't like Dan took a huge amount of time in getting ready but he'd give anything to not have that awkward silence loom over them like a cloud of smoke. He needed to get his mind in the right direction for once.
He attached the yellow paper to the fridge with a magnet and drags himself upstairs to bed.
Don't be late Ri Jeong Hyeok, it's a big day tomorrow.
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“Eon Jin, wake up at once. You will be late for your first piano class!” Yoon Se-ri is in her natural mother gear, father and daughter know better than to mess with her at a time she is at her most aggressive. She rips off the blanket from her daughter's sleeping form, shortly proceeding to turn on all the lights in the small but cozy bedroom.
“You stay out of this!” she shouts at her husband who was just going to tell her to calm down.
Wrong move, Gu Seung Jun tells himself.
“Eon Jin! Wake up!” the clock was ticking and so was Se-riʼs patience. Having always been punctual, it irritated her to her absolute core that her daughter wasn't like her in these matters.
But then again, neither was her father.
The little girl finally sat up straight, rubbing the sleep away from her eyes as Seung Jun came to sit next to her. Having been familiar with his wife's tantrums, he knew she could be a handful, it was something he had learned the hard way. “Eomma,” he began, grasping both of the little girl's shoulders in his hands and turning to Se-ri. “We will be out in a minute. Isn't that right, Eonnie?” the little girl gave one nod, maybe still in her sleepy state.
Se-ri had always envied how Seung Junʼs parental side had been so much more affectionate than her own.
It was times like these when he intervened to tell Se-ri that it was okay, and that he got it from here. It made her wonder what would happen did he not be here one day.
What if he set up how own architecture company instead of winding for one, far away where she couldn't even reach him? It was selfish, Seri knew, to cling onto him just because her daughter liked him, even though she, in all her glory, didn't. Eight years had passed between them and in only eight weeks, she had decided that he just wasn't Ri Jeong Hyeok, her heart only belonged to him.
Finance was not a problem either. Seriʼs job as a librarian earned her enough money to take care of herself and Eon Jin. The house was given to her by her parents, all expenses paid and everything, all she had to do was make sure that money from monthly allowances and library were put to good use.
Seri puffed out her cheeks before narrowing her eyes at the cheeky pair— they had always made a fantastic team against her.
“Breakfast on the go. We need to be there in 10 minutes.” she gave her hair an elegant flip before disappearing out the bedroom door. While Seung Jun helped Eon Jin getting ready, on the other side of the house, Seri popped a Xanax in her mouth, swallowing it without water like she had for the past few months now. Her hands were shaking and her mind was haywire. Every time she was with her daughter, she managed to fuck up. The girl just didn't seem to like her as much as she liked Seung Jun, but she couldn't blame him, he was an absolutely amazing father figure to her; from tending to her oddest needs of having a blueberry muffin in the middle of the night to sleeping with her when she felt like “monsters are coming for me, appa!” he never did protest, come to think of it, if it wasn't for him, Seri was sure she would've ended in giving up her daughter for adoption.
She wasn't a bad mother, no, she just didn't know how to be one.
Having grown up in such a loveless family of brothers who breathed down her neck at all times and a step mother who never considered her own, the whole idea of family seemed foreign to her. When you came from a family like that of Seri, you did not know what was right and what was wrong. Truth be told, Seri herself did not know what she was doing taking care of a seven year old child with a man she didn't even love, but all she knew was, that this was all she had now.
She was still trying to figure out motherhood.
The last person she had loved was long gone now, and he wasn't coming back. It was better to stick to the people she currently had.
Not one day passed by when she didn't think of him.
How was he?
Is he happy with his marriage to Seo Dan?
Where was he right now? North Korea or somewhere else?
Was he still in military? Was he still captain?
Sadly, she never answers to hundreds of similar questions like these. All she got was Gu Seung Jun putting a ring on her when her parents fixed a date and boom, just like that, everything else went downhill from there.
“Okay, we're ready.” Gu Seung Jun breaks her train of thoughts. When Seri turns to look at him, his blue shirt is drenched in water but he has the biggest smile on his face. It makes Seri briefly wonder why she never fell for him, even though he was tall, handsome and quite possibly, had every quality a woman desired in a man. “Oh, I slipped.” he tells her when he sees her observing him.
But the cheeky giggle he shares with her daughter makes her think otherwise.
Thankfully, Seri had picked out her clothes the night before, it was a relief to see her little girl in a cute pink top with white polka dots and white capri pants with little bows ties at the ends. Seri quickly brushed her waist length hair and put a headband over her head, smoothing her hair as she did so.
While Seung Jun ran to their room to get a change of clothes, Seri looked at her watch, they had three minutes, they were never going to make it in time. The set of three finally dashed towards their car when the only male emegerged from the room, now dressed in a salmon pink half sleeved T to tackle the Swiss Summer.
Just when Seri turned on the ignition, Eon Jin closed the space between Seung Junʼs ear and her mouth. “Are you going to tell Eomma about the pretty lady in your wallet?”
He really needed to be careful around her. She was so sharp and witty, like her mother, it was no surprise she had managed to sneak a look at his wallet when he had bribed her into getting ready, producing a piece of mint gum from his wallet to give to her.
“Let's keep this our little secret, what do you say?” his body was relaxed, but you could see the tension behind his eyes. It wasn't like Seri didn't know about his love for Dan, and him about her love for the captain, it was something they just both preferred not to talk about.
Because then, what would they tell Eon Jin?
“Okay, Appa.” a soft voice came.
Seung Jun smiled.
If only he could have had a child like Eon Jin with his Dan.
If only he could go back eight years.
In the front seat, as Seri drove like a maniac, albeit, still following traffic regulations, her own mind was preoccupied by another person.
Do you think of me as much as I think of you, Ri Jeong Hyeok-ssi?
Do you even think of me as a fraction bit of how much I think of you?
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Cliffhangers really are my thing, what do you say? Any guesses who is going to be Eon Jinʼs piano teacher? 👀 I was struggling to find a name for their daughter but then I thought nothing was more beautiful than Seriʼs real name.
I know I said I won't update this but wah! I'm really pumped so excuse me and enjoy updates while you still can.
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