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The Han river might be pretty at night, but it’s breathtaking in the pre-dawn hours before the city cranks into gear.
He sits on a concrete slope that leads to the water, Ri Ta between his knees with her back against his chest. It’s an otherworldly oasis here on this hard ground with just the both of them for miles and miles—and this peace and contentment he feels?
It makes his heart sing.
“I’ll make you a bet.” She says it with a laugh.
In his head, a faraway echo of a long-lost conversation comes out of nowhere, confusing him just for a moment.
Would you make a bet with me, Sir? If I win, you have to admit you do not want me to leave.
But I will win.
For a second, Doha thinks he sees another Ri Ta saying the same words, but it’s the saddest and the most anxious version of herself that he’d ever seen—
A blink or two, and that disappears.
“Wh…what?”
“I’ll make you a bet, Sir,” Ri Ta repeats with a mischievous smirk and an exaggerated emphasis on the honorific even though they’re the same age and have long transitioned to casual speech with each other. “And the stakes are high.”
The usually-dormant but competitive side of him flares to life at those fighting words.
“Whatever it is, I’ll win,” he answers lazily.
Overconfident much? Perhaps.
“We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll be on the losing end, either.” She turns in his arms, eyes alight in amusement. “I bet you, the next time we come here, we’ll be wearing matching rings. If I win the bet, you have to—”
He barely manages to rein in his laughter at that, thinking of the silver rings that he’d already been carrying around for days.
“Next time? Why not now?”
It’s her turn to stutter in confusion. “N...now? What do you mean?”
Does she really think she can beat him at this game?
Gently, he shifts her away and nods at where their belongings lie.
“Why don’t you look in my bag?”
oOo
With Doha, every minute, every second counts.
As unbalanced as he sometimes makes her feel, there’s also that rightness with him in every ordinary thing they share.
Ri Ta rushes up the stairs to put her bag down and then runs out again to the grassy area where children play, trying to shake off the absolutely ridiculous notion that he would disappear into thin air when she’s not watching and she’ll have to explain away these past few weeks as the worst ever figment of her imagination.
But he’s still there, idly sitting on a swing and turning his hand back and forth against the waning light, seemingly enraptured by the shapes the shadows his fingers make.
In the short time that she’d known him, she’s found out that he’d always been fascinated with the interplay between light and shadows, especially in the time when the sun sets and the moon rises, where both exist and cast their magical golden-purple-pink hues on everything around them.
It’s a brief but meaningful time, he’d once told her. It comes and goes so quickly, but every day, you can see it again, even if you miss it for a few days. It’s like a cycle that doesn’t end.
She understands, on some level she can’t explain. Oh, how she does understand, but there are no words she can find just yet, to tell him just how deeply she does.
Because she’s too much of the same.
Which might perhaps also explain her obsession with photography, in finding the grey, wavy areas that peek out of straight black and white lines and how her images freeze precious moments that she forgets all too easily.
Doha gets up to sit on a bench with her, then gently takes her hand in his.
“I’m having dreams,” she lightly confesses, admiring the way their fingers intertwine so naturally.
He tilts his head in curiosity. “About what?”
A nervous laugh escapes her, though she can’t bring herself to regret this topic-starter.
“Now that I think of it, it is quite embarrassing. Maybe I have an overactive imagination. Forget about it.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Her fingers move of their own accord to smooth the furrow growing between his brows and the quiet concern in his voice. As attuned and attentive as he always is towards her, it’s still going to be quite awkward telling him about the weird fantasy dreams that she’s been having of late.
What if he thinks she’s crazy? And…and isn’t this too much, too fast? Aren’t they still in the getting-to-know-you stage of dating even though it feels as though they’ve known and loved each other for a thousand years and beyond?
“You’ll think it’s nonsense.”
“If it bothers you, we should talk about it.”
Sometimes, that rational side of his is sensibly infuriating.
She hesitates, then plunges ahead. “Do you…do you remember our museum visit?”
The corners of his lips quirk up as he eyes her speculatively. “How can I forget?”
It’s one of her favourite memories of them together.
Twin pools of heat build in her cheeks. It’s when she kissed him for the first time, after all, in a move that had surprised them both. Well, probably surprised him more than her, considering the snail-worthy pace at which he’s been taking things and how she was getting a little impatient with a lack of progress on that particular front.
(He's more than caught up since then.)
It happened after their spontaneous visit to the National Museum—she’d visited quite a few times, but wandering through the ancient exhibits hand-in-hand with Doha gave the entire experience a whole new definition of hair-raising and shivery.
As he was bending over to examine the remains of the ancient weaponry used in the Three Kingdoms period exhibit, she’d given into impulse to throw her arms around him there and then, the force of which had nearly sent them both reeling into the glass case…and the howls of laughter that ensued had nearly gotten them both sent out of the museum.
They’d eventually made their way out—still giggling and leaning into each other and—
Ri Ta still can’t explain the uncharacteristic boldness that had overtaken her when she stopped them both in their tracks in front of the man-made pond, swung her arms around his neck to place a quick kiss on his lips.
She couldn’t have hoped for a better reaction after his initial shock melted and morphed into an enthusiastic response.
Especially when it went on and on—
A deliberate hand wave in front of her face cuts into that blissful memory. “Are you still there?”
She playfully swats his hand away.
“Remember the time in the museum when we read the curator’s notes and all the anecdotal tales that had been circulating about the old kingdoms? And that strange, obscure story between a general and his wife who were pledged to each other despite being from warring kingdoms?”
His gaze turns thoughtful. “Such unions were rare but they did happen.”
“I can’t get it out of my mind. I wonder what happened to them.”
“All of the records are incomplete. I guess we will never know.”
She shakes her head and ploughs onwards, unwilling to let that subject lie.
“That night, I dreamt that they were us. Living in the Silla Kingdom, hating each other as enemies, then loving each other when we couldn’t help ourselves, then dying together tragically by circumstances out of our control. It was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had.”
Bewilderment clouds his face.
“You just said ‘we’. Not ‘them’. And that sounds more like a nightmare than a dream. Or like the plot of a melo that my classmate secretly loves watching.”
“In my dream, we were them. We…I mean, whoever this couple could have been, I think they loved each other.” A sigh escapes her lips. “Just thinking about it makes me both happy and sad.”
A long pause, a quick shuffle and she suddenly finds herself on his lap.
“Aren’t you glad we’re just ordinary nobodies then?”
oOo
Slipping on a loose rock and breaking her leg because she’d been admiring her own photos would have won her an award for being the clumsiest girl in school instead of the more coveted scholarship prize she’d been hankering after.
Except that she’d fallen into the outstretched arm of her saviour—another boy from a neighbouring school, it seems—who’d kept her from breaking her leg and her precious camera.
Who also wastes no time in asking why her camera is aimed at the sky instead of their surroundings.
There’s a moment Ri Ta feels foolish for explaining the moon and the sun in the sky to him, but he gets the idea.
Calls it a pretty scene even.
The conversation trails off awkwardly after that, but for some reason they’re left still staring at each other, unable to look away.
Until a loud, deliberate cough from an annoying (but well-meaning) classmate snaps her out of it.
She tells him a hurried goodbye, leaves him still staring after her and rushes off with Unni, still flushed and flustered.
At lunch, she’s thinking about him.
At dinner as well.
And the next day and the next day after that—until Unni flings something at her in a huff and tells Ri Ta that she is actually starting to have more sympathy for stalkers.
The sheet of paper has the name of a street on it, a certain boy's name and a school.
Oh, how absurd.
She’ll probably forget all about him by tomorrow.
- Fin -