She is a swirl of ruby red and a dash of sparkling diamonds as she descends into the ballroom, her tall stilettos that slam against the marble floor piercing the dull atmosphere. She’s all dolled up from head to toe: her lips the same shade as her dress, long lashes brushing butterfly kisses against her cheeks as she blinks, long brown locks curled meticulously with not a single strand out of place.
Under normal circumstances, Jennie would have been ecstatic with the situation she is in right now.
(So why, oh why, is the characteristic grin that is so Jennie absent from her lips today?)
The answer is simple and yet complicated all at once, and she supposes that describes her relationship with the man who had stolen her heart all those years ago. (The man who has kept some of its shattered pieces as a souvenir. But an eye for an eye, she muses as slim fingers fuss over the broken shards of his own heart.)
It’s been five years since she last saw him—five years since she had left him without a single word—and she thinks that today, finally, she’s ready to let him go. She just needs to see him once more; needs to see with her own eyes that he’s coping just fine without her, just like how she’s supposed to be coping just fine without him. She thinks that ideally, the last image of him that she’d want to see and keep locked in her heart till her dying days is that of his mischievous smirk, one that she had always secretly thought was more adorable than threatening. It’s the one she fell in love with, after all—the one that, against all odds, had managed to ground her when she was never built to understand the concept of gravity. But she doubts she’ll get her wish, because unlike her, his poker face is nothing short of perfect.
Heels grate against marble as she makes her way to the back room, where all the gambling men can be found. The stakes are high for a place as prestigious as this, and so she’s brought with her a million won worth of poker chips to buy a spot at the poker table. The identities of the men are hidden by masks of different shapes and sizes that trigger different emotions—fear, curiosity—in the hearts of others. (Jennie herself has never thought too much about hiding her identity—she couldn’t care less about what anyone else thinks, all she cares about is him—and so she relies on a flimsy mask that sits just above her nose with the sole purpose of blending in.) But despite the four other masked men seated around the table, Jennie would still be able to pick him out in an instant, because she knows her Tae like she knows how to hack past a flimsy security system.
The dealer starts shuffling the all too familiar deck, and whilst others are assessing their opponents, Jennie only has eyes for Taehyung. And when the game starts all too quickly, she doesn’t even pick up the two cards she’s dealt with before she decides to fold. It’s a lost cause to attempt to win a poker game against Taehyung, after all—when she had brought a million won with her, she came with the intention of leaving empty handed that night.
Instead, her eyes feast on his plump lips, and she remembers a time when she had brought him to a skating rink knowing full well that he couldn’t skate to save his life. (It’s unfair, after all, for someone to be good at everything. There had to be something Taehyung absolutely sucked at, and this, this was it.) She remembers the feel of his fingers intertwined with hers as she guides him along the ice, remembers moving just fast enough so he isn’t able to keep up and falls, instead, right on top of her. And she remembers confessing that this had been her plan all along; not to teach him how to skate—just like her father did her when she was this high—but to end up in this exact position, just so he was within a close enough proximity for her to shower his face with light kisses.
She stares at the hills and valleys of his knuckles as his fingers clench the cards he so adores, and she is taken back to a time when she had patiently humoured him as he taught her about the rules of poker. Clearly, she had not been paying attention, and had instead been enraptured by how passionate he was in making sure she understood it, had adored how he wanted so much to bring her into his world, when she wasn’t built to be entrapped in just one world. She remembers nodding at random times as he talks, just so he’d think she was actually listening, and then she’d proceed to brush the tip of her nose lovingly against his cheeks or the nape of his neck, and he’d laugh and chastise her because he was ticklish.
And lastly, she glances at his eyes, and she remembers a time when she was foolish enough to disappoint him. She remembers how she nonsensically dedicated the bare minimum of her time to him even though to her, every moment spent in his arms was a treasure. She remembers how his eyes would twitch—so slightly, you’d miss it if you didn’t know what to look for—when she told him she was leaving to spend time with her other friends. But then he’d put on a brave smile and told her to leave, and that he’d be right here when she decided to come back. She remembers knowing that this wasn’t a sincere smile, because the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes were absent, just as they usually were when she did something he didn’t approve of. (And still, she turned around and didn’t look back.) She had taken his love and their time together for granted, but if she knew then what she knew now, she would have spent every waking moment in his arms just so she’d live today with a little less regret. (But she supposes that is the story of her life.)
And when she thinks she’s finally ready to let him go—but who is she kidding, she will never be ready for this moment—she goes all in without even looking at her cards, and even before the community cards are drawn. In fact, she doesn’t even wait for everyone else to make a call before standing up, and then she at the door. But Jennie halts just before she gets to the door—right beside the seat in which he proudly sits—and she angles her head just slightly to take in and memorise his features for the last time because she’s greedy, and it is just like her to take what she wants. Desperate fingers dart out with the intention of memorising the smooth texture of his face once more, but she knows that she’s asking for too much. So her fingers hover just millimetres from his face, and then just as she had come in, in a swirl of ruby red, she’s gone.
