Page 125 of You Had Me At Annyeong!
‘You love him, don’t you? Ah, c’mon. I see it. Your eyes shoot hearts every time he’s around. Think I haven’t noticed?’ Rodrigo teases.
Once upon a time, they did that for me. Sigh.
Timira bites her lip and her eyes wander about.
‘Well, go get him then, Royal Bengal Tiger!’
Timira mutters something about it being complicated and him being taken and about Rodrigo having complicated it further.
‘I’ll say it like it is, Timmy. It’s going to be a fight. But he is worth it, is he not?’
Timira stares at him with a blank look for a few seconds, then nods her head involuntarily and vigorously.
‘Run, Tim, Run!’
Rodrigo waves her goodbye and leaps over the stairs, two, three at a time.
Timira, feeling a little unsure, suddenly calls out his name.
‘Rod! Rod!’
Rodrigo halts his sprint and turns back. A good fifty metres away from Timira who is still in the stands so she has to yell.
‘Did you really follow me here? To Seoul?’
Rodrigo laughs mischievously, his eyes full of love, and shrugs.
And with that, he runs off on to the ground.
* * *
‘Timira, I love you. Will you marry me?’
Rod’s sincere gaze is threatening to pierce the screen of Mina’s ginormous television set.
Daebak! So, this is what it’s like? To love so madly that you make a fool of yourself on live TV? If it were me, I’d have said yes in the blink of an eye!
Mina is startled by her own thoughts.
What was that? Ah, I must be going crazy.
She lifts the remote to change the channel and realizes that she’s paused her live TV on Rod’s face. She stares at it for a few seconds and feels an odd tingle behind her ears making the hair on her lobes rise and her toes curl.
Oh, shit. No! This is not happening. I must be hallucinating. This cannot be real!
She jumps as her phone rings and looks disappointed to see Stephanie’s name flashing. As though she were expecting a different name, a certain someone in particular to call.
Why would he call me, though? How silly am I?!
She grimaces, looking at her phone, where Stephanie’s number is still saved as ‘Traitor’, even though she had been mollified a little by the photos of Timira and Haneul at the Diwali party at the Shilla that Stephanie had shared with her. Stephanie had been racking her brain to find a way to seek her friend’s forgiveness and had come up with no foolproof plan until those photos had fallen into her lap. An influencer friend of hers and Mina’s from their modelling days happened to be at the same party and had chanced upon Haneul and Timira. She had promptly snapped them and shared the photographs with Stephanie, snarkily asking if Mina and Haneul’s engagement was still on. Stephaniehadhad to douse that fire by cooking up a story about an Indian market outreach by SecondSkin. But she knew it was a great opportunity for her to win back her best friend’s trust.
Mina answers just as the call is about to get disconnected.
‘Wae?’
‘Are we still on for your fitting today?’
‘Fitting for what?’ she asks distractedly.
