long story short (chaennie)

just between us, did the love affair maim you too?

title from 'all too well (10 minute version)' because the song and short film broke me and i can't stop listening to it

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Everyone kept talking about how good Chaeyoung looked in the dress.

Not Jaehyun, obviously, he hadn't been allowed to see it yet, but his mom and Chaeyoung's mom and her bridesmaids (all two of them, chosen by the mothers) couldn't stop gushing, about how pretty a picture she made, how the dress fit her like a second skin, how it transformed her lanky figure into something feminine and graceful. They looked her up and down with critical eyes and deemed her acceptable, paying specific compliment to the amount of weight she'd lost, her dedication to looking her best for the ceremony.

Chaeyoung hadn't been eating well for months.

She tried to take the compliments at face value, not look too deeply for the barbs and slights hidden so unsubtly beneath them. But every time she saw herself in the mirror, especially when she was wearing the dress, she saw none of the things that the other women found so praiseworthy. She barely recognized the person looking back at her.

Then she'd fight the urge to throw up and stop looking in the mirror for the rest of the day.

Weddings were a lot more stressful than she had imagined they would be when she was a child. Admittedly, she'd never been all that interested in weddings, only giving as much thought to them as the other little girls demanded of her. She had picked out colors (pink and green, because the other little girls found these acceptable) and tried to summon up some image of the man she would be marrying, some knight-in-shining-armor or tall-dark-and-handsome that would wait for her at the end of the aisle. She decided he would have brown hair and be strong. That seemed to appease the little girls, and she avoided having to make that image any clearer.

Jaehyun had brown hair and was undeniably strong, so she supposed that was a success. But he was also possibly the biggest reason the wedding was so stressful. He refused to lift a finger when it came to the planning, casting that responsibility squarely into the realm of "women's work". Which Chaeyoung found particularly frustrating, because he was the one who wanted this wedding to happen so quickly anyway.

Chaeyoung had been willing to wait. She always was when it came to him, to such an extent that "eager to wait" was probably a more appropriate way to phrase it. She waited for him to ask her out, waited for him to make the first moves, waited for him to propose, and was always content in the meanwhile, never wishing for the next step to come any sooner than it did.

Jaehyun, on the other hand, seemed to be allergic to waiting.

He asked her out within weeks of her moving to Seoul, sidling up to her at a football game and declaring that they were going to get milkshakes after he scored the game-winning touchdown. Chaeyoung did like milkshakes and he hadn't really phrased it as a question, so she went along with it.

He kissed her for the first time that very night. They were sitting in his car, Chaeyoung's legs sticking with sweat to the leather seats. He tasted like the chocolate milkshake he'd just finished, and that wasn't altogether entirely unpleasant. She counted three seconds in her head (those seconds feeling like quite possibly the longest seconds of her entire life) and then pulled away. He grinned victoriously and drove her home, apparently satisfied. So at least there was that.

There was one thing that she managed to get him to wait on. Chaeyoung may have stopped paying attention in church by the time she was twelve, but a solid reputation as a god-fearing Christian did have some perks. He tried to pressure her, of course, but she remained adamant that she was saving herself for marriage.