A Girl From High Society

Chapter 8

 

The tournament ended only at two o'clock, due to the fact that the fights dragged on, so Mr. Park's strict rules about the time of eating were canceled, and the guests, excited by fresh air and champagne, fell in a crowd for lunch, set at an after-hours hour. Jisoo refused to eat, citing a headache, although in fact she just needed to leave and be alone to comprehend all that she had experienced during the tournament. After telling Edward that she was going to her room to rest, Jisoo slipped out of the mansion unnoticed and, passing by the servants bustling on the lawn, cleaning chairs and garbage, passing the greenhouse, Rose's house and several outbuildings, wandered through the garden for a long time, and then went to the river bank.

The view that stretched before her was pleasing to the eye and calmed the raging nerves. Flat green fields stretched around her, and there were no people or equipment in sight anywhere, only a flock of sheep, like toys, grazing peacefully a couple of miles away on the slope of a steep hill. Jisoo found a path trodden in the thick grass and wandered along the shore, hugging herself and deeply inhaling the fresh air that smelled of wormwood and warmth.

At first, when she was alone, she wanted to call Olivia and tell her about what happened at the tournament, but then she realized that her friend would simply not understand her or, even worse, make fun of her, because, spoken out loud, IT would sound like complete nonsense, and Olivia was a rational person, and she always it was difficult to reason about things that have no scientific basis. And what would Jisoo tell her if she did? "You know, I thought I was going to relax with my boyfriend, who seemed to me the best man I've ever met, in a country mansion, and I imagined a pool, cocktails and ivy-covered terraces, and he brought me to a strange house full of painful memories and secrets, and I met a girl which makes me think about things that were unknown to me before, and excites me so much that I catch glitches in which she fights and wins for me, and in this world we are somehow connected with her, but I can't explain it logically, and let's believe that everything that's exactly what happened."

Having uttered all this long, chaotic and delusional tirade to herself, Jisoo really got angry. After all, if you sort out their communication with Rosé, it turned out that they awkwardly and stiffly met in the dining room, then quarreled in the greenhouse, then ran into each other in the pool, where they insulted each other for the second time, and nothing else physically happened, but in fact it turned out something completely different. 

Jisoo had never wanted to get to know another person as much as she wanted to get to know Rosé (even if this desire was one-sided), and the moment at the tournament convinced her that she was not alone in feeling some deep inner connection, which, although it had no name, was more real than anything with than Kim has ever encountered, not experienced in the subtleties of deep spiritual relationships. Rosé also knew when she looked at her across the lawn, and Jisoo asked herself another question that sounded in her head with Olivia's voice: did she know what?

I knew we were connected. She knew that I saw her alone among all these people.

Kim suddenly felt the heat on her cheeks and even looked around, although she was in an open field and no one could see her. It was as if she was thinking of something shameful and sinful, and if she could put it into the sounds of human speech, it would sound at least blasphemous.

Yes, I was looking at her alone and I wanted her to look only at me, too, and she somehow guessed my desire, and that was the moment.

Jisoo did not consider herself an overly romantic person. She always treated with contempt those, in her opinion, more invented, watched in the movies than real, relationships that her friends at school and institute started with such haste, and then poured out their soul to Kim on the phone or on Facebook at night, varying different arguments on the same topic — "here and love came." Two or three months later, "love" was leaving just as quickly, and Jisoo was forced to buy a bottle of whiskey and listen to the reverse outpourings on the topic "why are all guys the same".