Loved You First (Jenlisa) COMPLETED

2

Lalisa Manoban felt strange as she drove through the streets of Daegu. Perhaps she should have prepared herself more. It was home, but it wasn't. So familiar, yet so much had changed at the same time.

Her old high school had an electronic marquee now. The hardware store looked to have been remodeled, and then there were the sidewalks through the center of town. They'd been repaved and had kind of a winding quality to them now. A nice touch. She studied the faces of the people she passed, recognizing many and some not at all.

It looked great, she thought, the place. She'd known Daegu practically her entire life and though it felt different, it was still close to her heart. Still hers.

But this wasn't going to be easy, the whole being back thing. There had been a reason she'd stayed away for so long, and the weight of that sadness now sat heavily upon her heart. She'd avoided it for as long as she possibly could. Declining invitations, evading family gatherings, and ignoring phone messages. She'd exhausted every tactic in her arsenal, and it was time to face what lay ahead.

But this time when she pulled into the driveway, there would be no Seulgi to hug her until they both fell to the ground outside of their parents' home. She wouldn't be there to tease her mercilessly or call her "kiddo."

They wouldn't spend hours together on the old soccer field knocking the ball back and forth while they talked about every aspect of each other's life. Shooting the breeze, they'd called it, when those talks were actually so much more than that to Seulgi.

Of course, there'd been no Seulgi for years now, but Lisa had done everything she could to avoid the places she'd recognize her sister's absence the most.

And that meant Daegu.

Her phone buzzed and she clicked it to speakerphone just as she stopped at a traffic light. A line of elementary school kids was led across the crosswalk in front of her car by, wouldn't you know it, Mrs. Han, her teacher from back in the day. This was seriously the twilight zone.

"You still alive?" Her best friend, Roseanne's voice filled the car. She was in Seoul, waiting for another week to attend at the premiere of a film they'd worked on together.

Lisa sighed. "Thus far. But the day is young."

"Don't be dramatic. That's my job. Just wanted to check in on you, stroke your head from afar if that's what you need."

"I'll be fine. I'll call you when I'm settled and you can tell me about all the fashion catastrophes at the premiere."

"Will do. Wish you were here."

"Yeah, well, I don't think the studio shares that sentiment. Plus, I need some time away."

"I know, Lis. I love you more than YSL. We'll talk soon."

"We better. Bye, Rosie, love you too."

-

It was five minutes later when she took a deep breath and eased her car into the driveway of the Manoban home. As she looked up at the house she'd spent most of her childhood nestled inside, her heart thrummed nervously in her chest.

Yeah, this was gonna be rough.

Rallying, she reminded herself of all the reasons she'd come. The biggest of which was easy. She missed her family. It was her father's sixtieth birthday in a few weeks, and her mother had begged her to not let it go by without a visit. Then there was the fact that her own life was radically off-kilter. She'd spent much of the year on location shoots and hadn't seen her own apartment in months. Her love life was a joke. And then there was the fact that the studio had her banned from her own movie set when she'd shown her highly inappropriate lead actor she wasn't his personal blow up doll.