Jisoo almost jumped as the alarm on her phone went off, it was seven o'clock already. Time flew so fast indeed when she was replying to emails from her IRO account. She's been delaying all the replies for the weekend rest, and there's no more excuse to put it off any longer. She'd like to keep herself as a fast-response deputy, and letting the mail rotten too long in the inbox would make her seem unprofessional, so she spent the next hour and a half after Baekhyun left her alone in her office doing her job properly.
Most of the incoming emails were a request for either students' exchange program and research associate applications or invitations and notifications for an international conference. She forwarded the emails to the respective faculties and scrolled down to some conference invitations, somewhere in Europe would be preferable so she could add a few more days of leaving for a leisure trip. It's been almost three years since the last time she had a real vacation and she'd been yearning to have another short getaway from these busy days. Unfortunately, she didn't find something interesting and forwarded them all to the faculty administration offices and the student board so they could distribute the information to the whole campus.
She turned off the PC after making sure all emails were replied to and immediately prepared herself for the date. Jisoo was a little doubtful if this was called a blind date because the essence of a blind date was supposed to be a date with a person one had not previously met. Jisoo had met Yixing before, she thought it would be only fair if it was called just a dinner. A dinner date.
And for a date that she had nothing to lose, she felt a little nervous for some reason, but she had no idea why.
She wouldn't deny that there's a small part of her expecting the meeting today. There's something mysterious in this Zhang Yixing guy from their last interaction that made her want to see him in person. Maybe because she'd like to see how different he was, apart from his nationality, from the other guys she had met. Jisoo had seen a little preview of Zhang Yixing from his speaking style at the conference, and she was expecting if there was anything else that would attract more of her attention⁠—besides that appealing dimple on his right cheek.
It's a good thing that they got to meet on Seorae. The restaurant was thankfully still within a reachable distance from the campus so she didn't have to spend too much time getting there. It's just one station away by subway and another ten minute's walk, and she enjoyed her short trip to the said famous restaurant in the city.
"Miss Kim Jisoo, glad to see you again." the receptionist greeted her with an eloquent familiarity.
This was the thing about Seorae, as one of the oldest restaurants in Seoul, they were very loyal not only to their customer but also to their employees. The receptionist was a woman in her thirty went by the name Song Songhee, and she had been working there for years as long as she could recall. The woman was maybe in her early twenties when Jisoo stepped her feet here for the first time. Now she looked a bit older, and even though she hadn't been visiting for a long time, the woman still recognized her.
"Are you here with the family?" she asked again out of courtesy, to which Jisoo replied with a shake of her head.
"No, I'm meeting Zhang Yixing. I suppose you have a reservation under his name?"
A knowing smile bloomed on her face as she told her that the said person had arrived about fifteen minutes ago, which surprised her. Jisoo didn't think that the Yixing guy would be there early too when they were supposed to meet half an hour later. Since her mother said he was such a busy man, she expected that he would be late or something. Now that he was here already at a much earlier time, Jisoo couldn't help thinking if the guy just merely had nothing to do or if he was expecting this meeting as much as she did.
"Let me use the restroom first." she excused herself and followed the host to show her the way. She stood by the sink and watched her reflection in the mirror once she got in. She hoped Yixing wouldn't mind her lack of preparation for the meeting since it came rather at the last minute and she didn't get any time to go home and change her clothes with a more proper dress. She still wore her working outfits with a white shirt and dark beige dress pants, and at least it's still formally presentable.
She took off her coat and folded her long-sleeved shirt upward, then washed her hands. She then put on her lipstick and used the same lipstick on her cheek to put more color on it. She brushed her hair and let it loose to hide the lethargy on her face, and when she thought she was ready to go, she walked out of the restroom. The host waved her arm, showing her the way to their private dining room with the tatami floor, and her heartbeat racing rapidly when they reached the front of the room. A pair of shoes was already arranged on a shelf beside the door.
Jisoo took a deep breath and blew it out silently as the host shifted the door and invited her inside.
A man's back welcomed her in the open room of her vision. The first thing that had caught her attention as he had his suit jacket off and was on his white shirt and plaid dark gray vest, seemed quite busy talking to someone with his cellphone. But as he was aware of her arrival, he turned around and stretched his arm to let her sit. Yixing paused for a second when their eyes met, he awkwardly pointed his cellphone with his forefinger to ask for non-verbal permission to finish the call. Jisoo nodded her head twice as an affirmation before she sat down on one of the available cushions. Yixing turned his back on her, looked out of the window, and continued conversing in Mandarin.
"I'm sorry, it was the office," Yixing said as soon as he finished his call about a minute or two later.
"Shouldn't it be off office hour now?" she questioned casually, taking a glance at her watch at the same time.
"Uh, it's the Beijing office. We have an hour ahead at different times, so..." Yixing raised his brow to clarify her question and Jisoo just nodded with apprehension. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, not that she was demanding any answer though. But Yixing seemed not to really get the joke idea, so she just let it slide.
He sat across her, and they took a moment of silence only to look at each other as if appreciating what sat in front of them respectively. The funny thing was, how they had this same expression as if they shared the same situation despite the different stories. Yixing looked exhausted, he was pale and was looking at her with eyes half-lidded and an eye bag under his eyes and Jisoo was sure even with the make-up on, she just looked identical. As if they realized this, they both burst into laughter. Jisoo didn't miss the mighty dimple making its appearance as Yixing dropped his head and pinched his brow for the irony.
"Rough day?" he asked as he looked up to meet her eyes again.
"You have no idea," Jisoo replied to him, she started chuckling to herself and Yixing mimicked her gesture.
"How many days haven't you been sleeping?" it's Jisoo's turn to ask.
"Um," Yixing scratched his head, "I did have some sleep, but it's just about two or three hours a day this week."
She had her jaw dropped hearing his answer, how could someone survive not having enough sleep for that long? Even Jisoo who slept all day last Sunday was still feeling so tired, she just couldn't understand how he did that. "You should've had more sleep," she commented in concern. No, she couldn't believe that she just pampered him with her concern when it was not actually her business. Was it even proper to tell him what to do?
But she did recall that Yixing had been looking tired at their first meeting, she watched him keep pinching his nose bridge and strive to open his eyes during her lecture she almost thought her lecture was too boring. But he looked worse today, if she hadn't known better she would probably have been worried the whole evening that Yixing would pass out anytime.
"I will, I will." he nodded. "It's just that, on the 30th of this month the company will launch our new premium jet fuel formula, and Air France will have the first fly with it. I just can't sleep, it's too important."
Jisoo was sympathetic to him. She didn't know this man that much, but with that call that he took when it was the off-working hour, and now this, she could see that he was a hard worker, more to that, a perfectionist one. And she had a mixed feeling about this, to be honest; on the one hand, she loved hard-working men because it showed their passion for what they liked. But at the same time, she saw this as something conflictual. Because if one day this relationship worked for them, somehow she could see this as one of the potential causes of their problems. She once read in a university journal that sleep deprivation might negatively affect one's mental abilities and emotional state. An individual might feel more impatient or prone to mood swings. It could also compromise decision-making processes and creativity.
Like, okay, she might be exaggerating right now, but imagine having a boyfriend with worse mood swings than a girl in her period. Her male cousin was always acting rash and terribly annoying when he was tired and drowsy, and this guy before her looked like that adamant type who would sacrifice his previous sleep only to get his perfect work done. Well, it's not like they're going to be in a relationship though, Jisoo decided to stop thinking about it in an instant.
She had this bad habit of being judgemental. Maybe it's because her experience with Baekhyun made her more conscientious in analyzing a potential dating partner. She used to be very naive and gullible with Baekhyun. She thought all men were just like her father, who was loving and loyal, and anything but a disappointment. She believed everything when he said that he liked her so much, she trusted him when he said that she was going to be his only one and that he was going to wait for her to return to him after she finished her studies. She gave him her heart only to have it broken into pieces when he decided to leave her for someone else. She didn't want to feel that pain again, so maybe this was her defense mechanism in protecting herself from a likely experience. She just had no interest in wasting her time on a relationship she knew that wasn't going to work.
She hoped she was being hyperbolic right now.
"Anyway, what do you want to have for dinner?" Yixing inquired as the waiter offered them the menu.
"I'll have what you order. I love everything they have here, anything will be fine," she assured him. Like seriously, Seorae had been like her family's second dining room since she was a kid, she was familiar with their cook like it was her home food and she told him that.
"Well, you're right. Seorae is indeed legit."
Jisoo nodded her head in agreement and her smile automatically showed up as he gave out the same gesture. As they had another quiet moment, Jisoo spotted a bouquet laid beside him. She tilted her head to see it more clearly and put a question to it,
"Is that for me?" she asked even though the answer was obvious.
"Oh, right. It's for you."
Yixing handed her the bouquet of lily-stem looking of small white petals flowers with a golden-yellow cup at its center. She wasn't a flower person, so she had no idea what flowers they were. But she had to admit that she loved them, they were beautiful and smelled just nice. They're just that type of flowers you would like to grow in your backyard, she thought.
"What is the flowers' name?" Jisoo asked as she put the flowers on her nose again and sniffed its scent.
"It's, uh," he paused a second, as if trying to memorize the name of the flowers, "It's paperwhite daffodil."
"It's beautiful." She threw him a genuine smile and thanked him for the gift, she didn't expect that Yixing would be that type of flower man—not that it's a bad thing though. In her personal view, flowers could be tricky sometimes. Giving flowers to a woman could be such a romantic move, but it could be cliché at the same time when not a lot of thought was put into getting them.
"You know, us, the Chinese believe that daffodils symbolize new beginnings and good fortunes," Yixing informed her a moment later as if he could read her mind. Alright, he just sounded as romantic as he was. She couldn't make anything out of his words though nor where this was going. Was he saying that to wish her good fortunes in the future, or their new beginning and good fortune in the future?
No, she had no idea. And she's not interested in questioning more.
"Oh, I have something for you too." as if remembered something, Jisoo opened her bag to fish out the uni-press magazine and gave it to him. "You might want to be surprised, it comes out very good," she warned him.
Yixing took the magazine from her. The tip of his lips twitched slightly looking at the cover but he did not comment on it while he kept the small smile with his lips pursed. She watched him flipping the pages and scanning the articles seriously,
"I still find it very captivating when I think about it," Yixing proposed a moment later, and Jisoo raised her eyebrow asking for more elaboration of his words. "Like, how in the world you can make a boring Chinese history speech to be like a discussion about who Steve Rogers marries in End Game? I never saw such exuberant feedback from the audience talking about ancient history. Like, it's just, you know..."
"It's weird." Jisoo finished his words for him, and he grimaced for the right word that he, fortunately, failed to say, in case it was offending.
"Well," Jisoo had nothing to say about it because, to be honest, she had no idea what had gone right herself. It's like, she wanted to say that it's just probably she was so good at delivering the speech, but she didn't want to sound so full of herself.
She never thought of herself as someone who, like, the smartest one in the room. As a girl who started her studies at the university when she was only 14, there were so many things that she had to learn from her seniors. She was too young, too inexperienced, and too fragile. She would cry alone in her room when she couldn't understand something that the professor said during the class, she would cry when people didn't take her seriously just because she wasn't nineteen or anything near their age. There's a lot of things to cry for. But that's also the thing that made her stronger, the thing that pushed her to squeeze herself out to dry and made her a better-skilled person. Her loneliness made her a listener, and she learned how to get people's attention by talking to them with their language. She wanted to be heard, no matter what topic it was, so she learned how to talk to them the way they would understand it.
"It's just the way you present yourself, you know. It's not about, 'Hey I'm the professor, this is my thing, you just listen to me like it or not'. I'm sick of being taken less than I am just because I'm younger. Just like the way you address your opinion, this is my way to be heard." she explained.
Yixing took a moment to absorb the words she stated, he bit his lower lip while thinking and Jisoo was a bit worried that her words were somewhat too hard to apprehend since this kind of expression usually ended with the men she met on the date scratching their head, sometimes even asking what she meant to say so.
"Impressive." she heard him muttering with, what seemed like, a satisfied nod, and Jisoo couldn't hide her happy smile. He got it, thank God for not making her like an alien. "They wrote the article nicely. I could see why they're so admiring you now," he noted, he showed her some sentences to highlight his last point, making her chuckle at the word choice that Minji used to describe her.
She was glad that people thought of her in a good way. For an educator, nothing's better than to have their students appreciate what they'd done to teach them things so they could procure the proper knowledge they needed, not only academically, but also hopefully applicable in their daily lives. To have them admiring her is just a bonus.
"I think they just admire the idea of me." she corrected, "Believe me, I'll be just the same as the other professors if I were forty and boring. They see me as admiring because this is what our society looks up to for an ideal woman. They see the number of your life as someone's golden age, the younger you are, the more you rule in this battleship of competition. You know what I mean, right? Like, they expect so much from you, but not with what you have achieved with the hard work for years. It's still physical, no matter what. It's always how pretty you look with your makeup on, how slim you are, how curvy your body is, and blah blah blah. My intelligence and passion for science are just merely embellishments."
Yixing said nothing. While Jisoo spoke her mind—she had no idea why all this came out of her mouth. Damn, she always failed to resist the speech or just kept her mouth shut, this was why no men could stand talking to her. Yixing probably didn't want to hear this either.
"Sorry, I'm blabbering." she dropped her down and looked at her nails instead, thinking how she must start keeping her mind to herself. She didn't want him to think of her as a preacher.
She meant like, one thing she could see from this meeting was that she liked Yixing. Even though this date wouldn't probably work for them, she still wanted to keep him as a friend. And driving him away with her excessive reflection was the last thing she wanted to do tonight.
"It's fine." Yixing started to laugh inaudibly and hid it behind his hand in his mouth. "Your blabbering is adorable. And now that you've mentioned it, I start to think the same way as you do. You're so persuasive."
"Thank you, I'll take that as a compliment." she grinned and thanked him for, she had no idea what for. But to hear that from someone else, a man especially, it's just so comforting.
"IT IS a compliment." Yixing emphasized, "I understand your insecurity. I know it's not easy to be you, to have people expecting so much from you. It's burdensome because, in the end, it makes you feel the need to satisfy them, but no matter how hard you try and you've done this, you still feel it's not enough and that's the problem, isn't that?"
Jisoo nodded seconding his words. She felt exactly just what he said, but there was something that told her Yixing wasn't only talking about her. It was about him too. Did it mean that they had the same problem here?
"But I think you still need to give yourself more credit. I mean, in my mind, I think you're admirable. Not because of the color of your lipstick or the way you bat your eyes unconsciously; you've inspired me since the first time I listened to your lecture. I personally think that what you did with your passions makes you admirable."
Jisoo had no slightest idea what to say about that. She never heard someone say something like that to her, something that was not a peacock speech. He seemed genuine with what he said and she couldn't hide her blush anymore.
"But you're right, I'm surprised. Your students write a great article, it's marvelous." Yixing showed her the article about him. He then put the page with his picture to the side of his face, "Tell me, which version of me is better?" he asked, which she replied immediately without too much thinking.
"He is." she pointed to the one in the picture and made him laugh louder.
The conversation flew smoothly and naturally from there. They talked about Seorae and how they got to know the restaurant for the first time, he told her that the men's restroom near the front desk smelled so nice with its musky aromatic scented candles and he was wondering where he could find one to light at home. He set an alarm to remind them to ask the receptionist later when they left since he always forgot to do that the other times. She diverted her attention when she heard another knock on the door to have the host serve their meals on the table. Yixing only glanced at them before he got back to reading the magazine while Jisoo conversed a small talk with the server about the food.
"The Gyeoja-naengchae is on the house." The young server informed them as she put a plate of cold salad with spicy mustard sauce in front of Yixing, who thanked her instantly, and another one in front of her. She informed them all the food's names that she put on the table, and while Jisoo watched her serve Yixing's orders she caught Yixing was watching her instead.
She turned her head to meet his eyes and she decided to have some kind of staring battle when he didn't look away. His smile lingered on his face, and Jisoo couldn't help but compare him with her previous dates. He wasn't unlike those other men who were too shy to even look at her, or overly confident whose gaze would make her uncomfortable. Yixing was confident, the way he looked at her explained it all.
This could sound cliché, but when people said the eyes were the windows of the soul, it would describe him the best. All she could think about Yixing's eyes since the first time she caught his gaze at the conference was that he was good at making eye contact. His eyes simply told her things about him that his words might not. But the thing about them was, it was not about telling her whether he was happy, indifferent, or simply disinterested by the way he looked at her, or whether his smile was genuine or not by the little crinkles at the corner of his lips. It’s about the click that went off in her consciousness as if he was saying “I see you seeing me see you” and “You see me seeing you see me”.
"So, tell me how you end up here." Jisoo inquired when she decided to break off the staring battle after the waiter left.
Yixing shook his head, "Not now. It's a story for another day." he said as he held the chopstick and eyed the food to pick which one to eat first.
"Eat."
Jisoo tilted her head and held the chopsticks with her right hand. Another day, he said? Did that mean it wouldn't be their last meeting?
Yixing moved his eyes to reach hers again, and she felt shivers running down her spine without warning.
Geez, those eyes, the kind of which would drown you into their vortex and make love with him even only with his eyes seemed to be more than enough. Ironically, those were the same eyes that would tell you the terrible reality that the light from their soul no longer shone when a relationship was to end. This kind of communication was a thing that she had only read in a textbook since the beholder of those eyes only did that with people he was willing to let know him intimately because of the inherent risk. Should she be nervous? or should she be excited?
Because the real question was, did Yixing do that to her only, or did he let all women see him how he saw them with that look in his eyes?
He was so tricky.
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