Nari recognised the bar from a photograph she had seen on the messenger. At the time, she had only picked up on the photograph at all because of how extraordinarily drunk Jumin appeared to be on the far left. He denied any such thing, of course, and proclaimed that it was a bad angle on some days and terrible lighting on others.
Even so, she couldn't escape how uncommonly strange it was to actually be there. She had walked the entirety of the bar at least twice without so much as touching her drink, quietly gleeful that the Jumin of several years ago had walked there too, ignorant that only a few years from then he would be engaged.
"At this rate, you'll wear holes in the carpet," Jumin smirked as she returned to their booth.
They had arranged to meet V at seven o'clock that evening and he strolled in at five minutes past the hour in a woollen scarf and thick gloves. Since the success of his eye surgery, he had returned to photography in full force and spent many a night out in the cold with his camera, taking picture after picture of the sunset.
"You're going to run out of skyline if you're not careful," Jumin said once over a measure of port, to which V nudged Nari more than a little bit boisterously and responded that if that ever proved to be the case, he would buy a boat and start taking pictures of the sea.
She was reminded of the first time she had ever embraced V, back at that first RFA party. She had known only the minimum of what to expect from anyone with the exception of Jumin, who was not only late, but arrived through a back door. To say she had been nervous was putting it mildly and, even though everyone was extraordinarily kind to her, her hands shook nonetheless and she stumbled over her words.
But then there was V; V with his gentle smile and soothing words.
"I almost feel like I'm drowning," she said, to which he lifted her hands and massaged the knuckles.
"Oh, nonsense," he said. "I can't see so well...but in that dress I almost had you pegged for a mermaid, and everyone knows they can't drown."
"It's good to see you both!" He said, shaking Jumin's hand and dragging him into a hug, before pushing him aside and cradling Nari with a chaste kiss to the forehead. "It's been too long."
"You always say that," said Jumin as V flagged down a bartender. "And yet it's always me sending out the invitations. Why is that?"
"You know everyone's schedule," V shrugged.
"How's your new exhibit coming along?" She asked as she took her seat once again. "You said you were about halfway done the last time we spoke."
"Three quarters now," he said, slipping off his scarf as he sat down next to her. "2.15am."
Inspired by his brush with blindness, V's latest exhibit was called 'Before the Dawn' and demonstrated the transition from night to sunrise in a variety of locations. He had been searching for the perfect shots for months with mixed success and she was more than a little bit curious about what the final result would look like. According to V, he wanted to inspire the same mixed emotions that he had felt after his surgery.
At Jumin's insistence, he moved into one of the guest bedrooms for his recovery. She took command of his care and it was with a smirk that she placed her own gift in front of him: a bottle of brandy decorated with the sigil of a mermaid. It was difficult not to laugh out loud at her own bad joke, which she counted as the real gift.
"A fine gift," he said. "I'll treasure it."
She spent a lot of time with him in those few weeks, making soups and brandy snaps as well as chatting about RFA matters. She got to see the very first photograph he'd ever taken: a blurry shot of a six year old Jumin in somebody's attic.
"2.15am?" Jumin squinted. "What happens at 2:15am?"
"Nothing good," said V, "evidently."
"We were hoping to talk with you about…" She had planned to go in for the kill, but it was harder than she thought. "...spending more time together."
V paused from taking a sip of his drink and glanced around the table.
"An interesting choice of location, considering."
It was only six words, but Nari knew almost instantly that they were not meant for her.
V and Jumin's secret history was something she loved so dearly about them. A single phrase, a song on the radio, so many things that meant next to nothing to her conjured entire sagas for them. Until recently, she had been sure that such things had not mattered; in all of the time that V had stayed with them, their dear friendship had always been evident, but never to the point that she felt excluded.
Truthfully, those weeks were the inspiration for her wanting to attempt such a feat in the bedroom. Night after night she had perched on the couch in their apartment, sandwiched in between both men as they turned the pages of dusty photo albums.
"This must be boring for you, princess," Jumin commented once and she immediately shook her head.
She did not know exactly how to explain that when they described the story behind each photo, she practically bubbled over with warmth. The thought that she had crossed over into their inner sanctum and shared their secrets bordered on breathtaking.
"Is...there something wrong with this bar?" She asked.
Something must have happened when they visited before. A story they had not told her yet.
"Not at all," said V. "Jumin, might we speak a moment?"
Nari said nothing of the fact that one statement all but counterbalanced the other, nor did she ask to go with them as they left the table. Instead she snatched her phone from her bag with shaking hands and loaded up the set of photographs she had saved from the messenger. It seemed to take forever to find the one from years ago where Jumin, V and Rika sat seemingly half drunk in the same bar, but the moment she found it, she took a sip of her drink and examined it closely.
What was she missing? She had always laughed at Jumin's elusiveness about that photograph, but now...now she wondered if there was more to his constant dismissal of it. Enough for V to guess their motivations within a matter of minutes of sitting down at the table.
Wait
She stared down at Rika's smiling face, at V's brooding expression and Jumin looking as if he was about to sneeze. Suddenly, not only did she feel as if the truth had been in front of her the whole time, but that she had been entirely excluded from the same inner sanctum that had once brought her so much joy.
V and Jumin were gone for almost twenty minutes and when they returned Jumin announced that it was time to go.
"Go? Go where?"
Nari said nothing of the fact that V had just arrived and she had yet to learn if he had given an answer.
"Just a brief detour," said V.
Ordinarily she might have joked at his evasiveness, but at that point she doubted even she would find it funny. As it happened, the address that Jumin handed over to his driver was V's own apartment.
Why are we going there? She wondered as Driver Kim opened up the passenger side door for her. What did they talk about while they were gone?
She almost wished that she had followed the pair of them out to eavesdrop, even if she did consider such behaviour deplorable. Whatever they had talked about had left a strange atmosphere lingering over both of them and she could sense it even as she sat between them in the car. The warmth usually present as V rested an album or a novel across her lap and Jumin turned the pages had dissipated, leaving only silence.
Jumin's acceptance of her request had been smooth...immediate. What if V was reviled in ways that he had not been? What if she had destroyed everything she wanted to be a part of?
And then there was her other suspicion. She was not able to view the photograph from years before with both of them present, nor could she ask them about it with Driver Kim in earshot, but there was one question that burned on her lips. A single enquiry that could, possibly, set everything straight or complicate things further depending on the answer.
Nari remembered the first time she set foot in V's apartment, back when his doctor discharged him completely. He had thanked the pair of them for their hospitality during his recovery and invited them over for an afternoon tea once he was settled back in.
'Settled in' was a strange way to put it, though. Even though she knew it had been his permanent address for years and he had physically been living there for a number of weeks, the place gave off no hint of him. When he lived with them, it had been easy to sense his presence, whether from the warm scent of pipe smoke drifting in from the balcony, the tartan blanket he wrapped around his legs while reading and the pipe smoke and bergamot scent that seemed to permanently linger about his person.
He gave her a book of poetry that day, even though she and Jumin had both insisted that they needed no repayment.
"I insist," said V, turning to a page he had bookmarked. "Look...this one made me think of you."
Perhaps it was because she knew Jumin was so extraordinarily possessive and yet he did not seem to mind. Perhaps it was because the poem was about a mermaid swimming under a moonlit sky. She did not know the reason, but she blushed a bright pink and kept the book in her bedside drawer, reaching for that singular poem when she wanted to remember the way her skin had tingled and Jumin pulled the emergency brake in the elevator as they left to return home.
"Ju-" She was cut off when he crushed his lips against hers in a kiss that sent her knees out from under her.
Was he jealous? Sometimes it was hard to tell.
"Listen," she said, breaking away just enough so that she didn't risk bashing her head on the wall of the elevator. "About what happened...if you're uncomfortable…"
"Why would you assume such a thing?" He said, leaning over to plant a kiss on her jaw. "You are a most beautiful woman and it would be…." Nari gasped as she felt his teeth against her exposed skin "...offensive...if such elegance went unrecognised."
"Oh...okay," she had said. "So long as it's not something that bothers you."
At that, Jumin laughed.
"V can throw as much poetry as he wants your way, so long as he remembers you're the future Mrs Han."
Nari learned something quite fascinating about Jumin that day. That singular quality she had passed off as plain and simple possessiveness for well over a year actually ran a good deal more deep. In most cases, he did not relish the idea of other men touching her or receiving her affections, but the idea that she was alluring to them had something of an effect on him.
Retrospectively, she didn't know how it was she had not realised sooner. He did so love choosing the dresses she wore to meet business partners and sometimes even when she came to see him at the office. Sometimes in the afterglow of particularly good sex he would rest his head on her chest and, with a self satisfied smile, refer to her as 'Mrs Han' as if they were already married.
"Would you like me to wait here, Mr Han?" Driver Kim asked as he pulled up outside of V's place.
She realised she had spent the entire trip so caught in her own thoughts that the journey had passed her by.
"Yes," said Jumin, "we won't be long."
Won't we?
The fact that he was so certain only made her more anxious and she watched, practically frozen in place as V got out and reached for her hand.
"Come on, sweet thing, this way," he said.
In the time since her last visit, V had bought a vase and put up a photograph on the main chimney wall. Nari actually remembered him taking it at the last RFA party, leaning over one of the tables at the end of the night to perfectly capture the empty table.
"I'll get straight to business," he said, taking a seat on one of the stools at the breakfast bar behind him. "In the interests of transparency, I think that you should have all of the facts."
"Facts?"
She glanced from V to Jumin.
"What's going on?"
"Several years ago, I got an invitation to the bar we were just at," said Jumin. "From Rika."
"Rika?"
Now there was a bad omen if ever there was one and the resignation was almost definitely written across her face, for V chuckled.
"Look, I know what you're thinking…"
"If you're about to tell me there's another cult and we all need to be... virgins or something-"
"Rika and I had been discussing threesomes too."
All things considered, she would have preferred the cult. Nari had suspected something similar, but hearing it from the horse's mouth somehow only made it seem more surreal.
"I...what."
"She didn't like the idea of another woman in bed with us," said V, "so in the end we approached Jumin."
"You…" Nari turned to Jumin. " Really ?"
"They did," said Jumin.
Suddenly all she could think about was the hours they had spent sitting in front of a presentations board. Jumin could have mentioned it then, but he hadn't. Even when they had decided upon V as their third and made plans to go and meet him, he had not said anything.
"I don't understand," said Nari.
"As far as I see it," said Jumin, "there was nothing to tell."
"I think," said V, "that you guys have a lot to talk about and considering the weight of what we are discussing here, maybe you two should sleep on it."
"I think you're right," she said, sounding more upset than she felt.
No, scratch that, sounding exactly as upset as she felt.
She remained composed as she said goodbye to V, wrapping her arms around his middle and sinking into the warmth of his arms. She thought she kept up the illusion well, but clearly not, for Jumin pulled the emergency brakes almost as soon as the lift started moving.
"Listen," he said, and almost immediately her eyes blurred with tears.
"We'll talk later," she said.
He moved to cradle her in his arms, to hold her, but she shrugged off his embrace.
"No," she said, even though she wanted nothing more than to bury her face in his chest.
God, she felt like such a fool. How long had she waited to ask him? How long had she worried over his reaction? She didn't believe herself to be entitled to his every secret, but knowing they had that sort of history might have been useful earlier. She couldn't think of any reason for him to keep such a secret unless deep down he was less than enthusiastic about a reenactment and cared more for pleasing her than being true to himself.
It was the longest car journey of her life. Nari sat up front with Driver Kim, who did not question her, but was more than a little perplexed by her tear stained face.
Her first pit stop upon returning to their apartment was the bedroom, where she undressed and kicked off her heels. Earlier that evening, she had expected it would end in sex and she laughed miserably at her cheerful naivety as she saw her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
He told her once that he loved her because she saw his tangled threads; that she saw and appreciated every intricacy of who he was and her feelings never wavered. She wondered at that, knowing now of the possibility that he had shielded himself from her.
She leaned against the shower wall, only interrupted from her thoughts by the sound of tapping to the glass. She turned to the source and saw Jumin standing against the sink.
"Nari...".
"I'm fine," she said, turning away. "I'll be out in a minute."
"Nari."
She squeezed her eyes shut and leaned her head against the tiles before taking a deep breath and turning back.
"Yes, Jumin?"
"You forgot to switch on the water."
She blinked. Took in the bone dry tiles.
"We really do need to talk," he said. "Can I come in?"
She considered it for a moment and then motioned for him to come inside with a single turn of her head. Within moments, he'd undressed and stepped inside. He switched on the water and she turned to wrap her arms around his waist automatically. Their usual routine, when they had not made it as far as the bed. He reached down to cup her face and in that moment, she was tempted to stand there forever, his lips grazing her forehead as the water soaked them both.
"Why didn't you tell me?" She said. "I don't understand."
"There was nothing to tell," he said. "I said no."
"You…"
"V thinks I've been unfair to you," he said. "I think that he lets his emotions rule his head at the best of times, but this is one of the instances where we agree. You couldn't have known the significance of the bar and I'm sorry for that."
"You said no. Why? V is your best friend and Rika…"
She hesitated before acknowledging what she knew as fact. Jumin's expression was grave, though, and she wondered if perhaps she had gone a step too far.
"It," he said, visibly searching for the words, "it wasn't only Rika I loved."
It took several minutes for her head to stop spinning.
"You're upset," he said, moving to switch off the water.
"No," she said. "No not at all, I-"
Off his expression, she sighed.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"It never came up in conversation."
Jumin squeezed his hair dry and reached for the shower door, though made no further attempt to fill the silence.
"Jumin, you're not…ashamed about this… are you?"
She wanted to say that she loved him. That she would love him no matter what. In the end, however, she settled for reaching out for his hand.
"This is just another thread. It's something else I love you for," she said, linking her fingers with his. "Please don't push me away."
Ultimately, he didn't say anything. From the way he squeezed her hand, however, he didn't have to.
