You Had Me at Goodbye

The Next Encounter

"Where were you?"

Lisa is sitting face-to-face with Chaeyoung who is rarely seen wearing a look as annoyed as she is at the moment. How can she not? Lisa left the party without telling her, she still does not know the person whom she left the party with, and the woman in front of her still has the audacity to grin as if she did not just make the living saints in her scattered in panic.

Lisa enjoys this sight of troubled Chaeyoung a bit too much though. The ever-so-carefree woman is annoyed and she cannot be bothered about it because as of the moment, there is no sight—practically nothing at all—that can interrupt her euphoric state of mind; not even the rarely fuming best friend in front of her. She does not know how or why but she just cannot care less. Little does she know that the credit for the bursting dopamine in her system should go to none other than a certain brunette who possesses the brightest feline eyes she cannot refuse to be immersed in.

"Is this alright?" Lisa carefully asked Jennie who just handed the menu over to the waiter attending their table before he brought their orders to the kitchen.

"Why is it not?" The one questioned shifted her glance towards the curious eyes before her, replying with one of her eyebrows cocking in uncertainty, not quite grasping the idea of Lisa's question.

"I mean you went to a party with someone and now you're spending your night with me instead, whom is not the someone you went to the party with."

Jennie's face switched in a grimace, clearly, she just realised that she did go to a party with someone whose existence she was aware of but seemed to let the entire presence of that very someone slip off her mind the moment she invited Lisa for dinner.

"O—Oh yeah. That! I—uh—I've texted him so it's okay."

Was it?

Lisa missed the unsettled discomfort on Jennie's face. After all, Jennie was better at playing human; the role with expressions, emotions, and all those Lisa found unnecessary to toy with. Lisa was just not as good, considering how the honesty glazing her face seemed to be permanently tattooed on her features. She could not lie for her life and she thought everybody else walked down the same path as she did. So she settled with Jennie's obvious lie—on the okay part at least.

"For someone extraordinary, you're really simple," Jennie claimed. The way Lisa's face was presented the way it was—as if Jennie did not just tell an obvious lie and Lisa did not just accept it as it was—made Jennie want to keep the woman in her pocket and protect her from the mad world they lived in.

Lisa was just too precious in her eyes.

It took her three hours. Only three hours to be deeply impressed by the woman. She would never have guessed that the stranger who held her favourite childhood storybook in her hands was a surgeon. An absorbing one while she was at it. Lisa did not know—not that Jennie wanted her to know—how their talks during their trip from Manchester to London were one of the best conversations Jennie had ever made with someone.

Visiting her parents' house in Manchester was not an easy trip to make. Little did Lisa know, it was Jennie's first time going back to her parents' house after the tragic tragedy that took them away from her and she could not control how she was supposed to feel about it because her heart was all heavy and cloudy when she got into the train until the stranger she met, who then sat in front of her told her that it was okay to grieve but it was more important to smile because it was all for the right reasons.

Nobody had ever told her so.

Everybody she knew as colleagues to her parents and strangers to her had been tip-toeing around her. The only thing they had been asking her was if she was okay when it was clear that she was not. They gave her words she did not need—words uttered in order to comfort them instead of her. As if by asking the question enough time would make her feel okay and somehow ease her mind. The more she was asked the question, the more she wondered whether they asked so to comfort her or to comfort themselves and Jennie did not need to question that in her consciousness neither did she want that in her conscience. There were thousands of probably thoughtless words of 'condolences' and none of those ever comforted her until the stranger in front of her appeared and she wondered where the woman had been all along.