I Need Romance 3: Episode 8

by girlfriday

If I didn’t already love Sweet Potato, this is the episode that would’ve done me in. It’s one thing to just pine after the woman you love, but another thing entirely to lead her by the hand and help her be the best version of herself, even if that means encouraging her to follow her heart away from you.

 
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Linus’ Blanket – “Late Love” for the I Need Romance 3 OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 8: “It’s a relief that you learned how to cry again”

At the office, Joo-yeon feels another sharp pain in her chest, which tellingly happens right when Tae-yoon walks by. She’s too out of touch to make the obvious connection, of course, and just takes another pill for indigestion.

But then her thoughts float back to what Wan said to her last night, about the pain being caused by heartache because she likes someone. He tells her that he knows it sounds a little preposterous that she doesn’t even know her own heart, but says it’s understandable why she became that way—she spends most of her life at work, and work is not a place where you need a heart.

She had asked about the person she supposedly likes, but he didn’t give away any answers, telling her it was important she found out for herself. She ponders it now, and can only think of Wan and the kiss.

She admits that it is cofortable and warm to be around him, and yes, the un-comfortable thing could be attraction, and she does have fun when they’re together. But she shakes the idea out of her head and refuses to believe that he’s the man she likes.

At home, Wan chuckles to himself guessing that right about now she’s racking her brain trying to find the answer and probably looking in the wrong place, and then two seconds later she sends him a text: “Don’t misinterpret things! I don’t like you!”

He laughs and then sends her a cute reply that makes her smile, nudging her to think about it some more because she does like him, and probably already misses him even though she saw him this morning.

Tae-yoon notes her cute expression while she’s texting Wan, and asks her to have dinner tonight so they can talk work. She can hardly contain her smile.

But when they head down together, she turns the corner and discovers Se-ryung standing there, and immediately turns around to try and lead Tae-yoon away. Ha. It doesn’t work because Se-ryung sees them, and she inserts herself into the dinner.

When the awkward threesome arrives at the restaurant, it goes from bad to worse when Tae-yoon helps Se-ryung take her coat off, and she’s wearing the exact same dress that Joo-yeon is wearing. Ha, it’s infuriating, but funny.

Tae-yoon steps away to take a call, and Se-ryung gets in a dig that all those years spent imitating her and copying her style must’ve paid off. Gaaaaaah. Se-ryung asks why she turned around earlier when she saw her in the lobby, and Joo-yeon wonders herself why she did that.

She says it’s because she really doesn’t like her. Se-ryung: “Because I’m better than you.” Joo-yeon: “No, because you try to put everyone under your feet.” Joo-yeon realizes it now, that all those years they were friends Se-ryung just wanted someone next to her who made her shine.

Joo-yeon says that’s why she stole First Love Rocker, because she couldn’t stand someone overlooking her. Se-ryung rolls her eyes that they’re still talking about the twelve-year-old incident, but Joo-yeon tells her she still doesn’t get it—it’s not about the guy, but because she considered her a friend.

Joo-yeon: “I didn’t know it until now, but I was never once a friend to you. That’s why you were able to do that.” That seems to shake Se-ryung, but she very quickly plasters a fake smile on her face when Tae-yoon comes back to the table, and tells him that Joo-yeon was just leaving.

That makes Joo-yeon seethe, but she narrates that she learned in the workplace that the person who has more masks is the winner. She plasters on a smile and asks pleasantly why she’s lying, making Se-ryung sound like the petty girlfriend trying to get rid of her, when they came here to talk about work. Nicely played.

Woo-young and Hee-jae are the last ones in the office as usual, and they both sit there stealing nervous glances at the other, trying to think of casual ways to suggest a drink after work without it sounding like a date.

They type messages and delete them over and over, and finally Woo-young loses his nerve and leaves abruptly. But then he ends up waiting till she comes out anyway, and tries to offer her a ride home.

She hesitates, so he goes too far in the opposite direction by insisting that he’s trying to make things less uncomfortable between them, and if she chooses not to get in the car, he’ll think it’s because she likes him.

Of course as soon as he walks away, he regrets the lose-lose situation he just put himself in, wondering if he’s supposed to be sad if she gets in the car. Pfft, didn’t think it through, did you? Still, when she joins him he breaks into a big smile.

After dinner, Joo-yeon has to stand there on the curb and watch Se-ryung and Tae-yoon leave together, and she mutters that he didn’t even offer her a ride. She comes home and immediately starts looking for Wan, and when she can’t find him, she calls to tell him to hurry home.

She doesn’t know he’s taking a bubble bath in the next room, and admits she had a crappy day and wants to vent, so he gets her to say “I miss you” so that he’ll come home in ten minutes.

She complies, and then he tells her he’s in the bathroom. What, you’re not having her meet you in the bathroom? You’re doing this all wrong.

He comes out and gets to tease her about missing him, and tells her to come up to his room with a glass of water if she wants to talk. Ha, he’s loving this.

She comes up while he’s still in the middle of getting dressed, and averts her eyes. Wan: “If you’ve seen everything there is to see, come in.”

He asks what’s on her mind, and then she remembers that she had that horrible dinner with Se-ryung and Tae-yoon, and collapses on the bed with a sigh. She asks how Wan became friends with Se-ryung, and he tells her about meeting her in New York when he did the music for a fashion show.

I love that he’s just holding her hand as they talk. She demands to know what men see in her, because she just doesn’t get it, and wonders how on earth someone as normal as Tae-yoon sunbae could like her.

Saying the words aloud finally clicks her feelings into place, and she gets up with a start. Damn, the look on his face when he knows she’s figured it out, and as she pulls away…

She realizes now that it’s Tae-yoon she likes, and looks over at Wan: “Did you know?” She knows the answer before he even says it. “You knew.” She asks what she’s supposed to do now, and he tells her to just do what her heart tells her to.

Wan: “Go where your heart leads. Do what you want. Go where you want. Go as far as you can go.” Could you be more perfect?

She says it’s too late, and he tells her to stop calculating everything. “How long are you going to live not knowing your own heart?” She doesn’t see how it’s not complicated, not that she knows how to turn off her brain anyway.

So Wan just does what he does best, and shows her by example: “I love you.” She brushes his hand away and calls him crazy, and he adds, “Because I don’t calculate.”

Woo-young takes the long way home and drops Hee-jae off, but she shrinks back when her boyfriend arrives just ahead of her. She picks a fight with him for coming here instead of studying, and he asks what she’s going to do if he fails the civil service exam this year.

Without hesitating, she says she’ll break up with him. He’s heartbroken that she’d leave him if they had to make a modest living like her parents, while she counters that he knows nothing of the real world.

This time he’s the one to pull the trigger and suggests they break up now, since they already know their dreams of the future are so vastly different. She’s shocked, but she doesn’t go after him. And when he steps outside, he locks eyes with Woo-young, still sitting in his car outside.

Joo-yeon sits in her room and thinks of Wan’s simple confession of love and narrates: “Some love is so frank, and other love is endlessly painful. Whether a brand new love or an old love, the pain and the complications are the same.”

Min-jung sits in bed ignoring Min-seok’s calls for their standing date, and he waits and waits with jewelry and flowers, but she never calls. Joo-yeon (voiceover): “Other love ends without ever beginning. Your feelings never get conveyed, and even when you try, they don’t reach the other person.”

As Wan sighs at a picture of Little Joo-yeon, she narrates, “Perhaps in love, nobody can ever be an adult.” She looks in the mirror and complains that love is useless and berates herself for liking Tae-yoon of all people.

Tae-yoon reluctantly drops Se-ryung off at the office, sad about the fact that she has work when he wants to spend the night together. But then as other men file in chatting about how much they’re looking forward to their poker game, Tae-yoon’s face hardens.

She tells him it’s a regular game with business contacts and investors that she has to do for work, but he just shuts down, realizing that she hasn’t changed at all and will never put him first in her life. Well clearly you haven’t changed either.

She says this is who she is, having expected him to be a little more open-minded knowing that, and wonders why he’s dating her again if he distrusts her so. He says he was wrong for expecting her to change, and says she’ll always be looking elsewhere and making him uneasy, and breaks up with her.

As he drinks at home, he flashes back to the day she brought him his betta fish. She has the matching girlfriend, and explains that they have to live alone because they’ll fight. He jokes that she brought him a fish that’s just like her, and calls them sad for having to live apart.

Joo-yeon and her team complain about having to come to Se-ryung’s home ground (she lives in a hotel, which Joo-yeon says was always Se-ryung’s lifelong goal), but the two teams meet there for a strategy session on launching an online shopping mall.

This time they’re prepared not to let Se-ryung’s team get the upper hand, and use signals to take a break so they can regroup and present the best idea. They lie that they’re going for a run, and then sit down in the pool area to strategize.

Tae-yoon joins them to hear their ideas, and adds that it’s been raining for thirty minutes, which makes their excuse a little flimsy. Woo-young glances over at the pool and jumps right in, saying that they’ll just have to get wet now. One by one they jump into the pool as Tae-yoon laughs from the sidelines, and then they return to the meeting with Se-ryung’s team none the wiser.

The next day Se-ryung stops by to give Tae-yoon the tickets to the musical that they had been planning to see, and says that it was just a fight but they can recover, and that she’ll be waiting for him there.

She drops in on Wan at the studio and apologizes for being a bad friend lately, and he jokes that she must’ve broken up with her boyfriend. He’s surprised when she’s silent, and realizes it’s true.

At the same time, Tae-yoon invites Joo-yeon to go see the musical with him that night. Oh nooooooooes. Don’t be that guy!

She’s of course on cloud nine about it, and asks Wan which outfit she should wear. He carefully asks what Tae-yoon said when he asked her to go, and figures out that Joo-yeon knows nothing about his breakup with Se-ryung.

She calls it just a friendly after-work thing, and he sweetly helps her pick the best outfit to wear, and even offers to drop her off. It’s so cute the way he tells her not to stay out too late like a dad.

Wan happens to pass Se-ryung’s car on his way out and calls to see if it was her. She confirms that she’s headed to the very same musical, and says she’s meeting her ex there and doesn’t know if he’s going to show up or not.

It’s then that he realizes: “That bastard. He called Shing Shing out to show Oh Se-ryung.” U-turn. He races back to the theater.

Se-ryung waits through the beginning of the show, and then it sinks in that Tae-yoon isn’t coming. She gets up to leave, but on her way out she sees him a few rows back with Joo-yeon. Thankfully Joo-yeon doesn’t notice, but he does, and turns to look at her coldly.

Wan arrives just as Se-ryung is walking out, and she tells him about seeing Joo-yeon inside, wondering what she’s trying to do. He tells her that Joo-yeon has no idea that Tae-yoon brought her here to show Se-ryung, and that’s when he finally tells her that Joo-yeon is Shing Shing, the person he came back for.

Tae-yoon and Joo-yeon go out for a drink after the show, and he tells her then that he broke up with Se-ryung, and though it’s a spineless petty way to cut the cord, showing up tonight with another woman should’ve sent a clear message. Ack ack.

He at least admits that he used her, not that it makes it any better. Joo-yeon says it seemed like Se-ryung really liked him, but he brushes it off like any other breakup, insisting he’ll be fine. She recalls that he spent a year wandering the desert the first time, trying to be a good friend to him all while tamping down her broken heart.

Wan waits anxiously at home for her to return, and she heads straight to her room without a word.

He follows her in and she tells him about Tae-yoon using her tonight, and then admits that she wasn’t even mad, just hurt. Wan smiles to hear her describe what she’s feeling accurately for the first time, perhaps in years.

Her voice starts to shake: “I think I like him a lot more than I realized.” His heart sinks a little at that but he takes a step towards her, and she tells him not to come any closer. “Ever since you came, I keep crying. If I see your face, I’m going to cry again.”

But he comes closer anyway, and sits down next to her. He caresses her face and just looks at her, and without needing to say that it’s okay if she cries, the tears come spilling out the second she turns to look at him. What a lovely moment.

She sniffles them back and complains that she hates crying and she never used to cry when she was alone. She fights the urge to cry and gets up to walk away, but he stops her and holds her close.

Wan: “It’s a relief that you learned how to cry again. You can just cry in front of me.”

 
COMMENTS

One guy drops her off for her date with another man, while the other uses her as a beard to get back at his girlfriend? No contest. Okay, Tae-yoon wins back a few points for admitting that he used her, and sure he doesn’t actually know that she has feelings for him and I don’t expect him to, since she clearly hasn’t known until now either. But the fact that she went with butterflies in her stomach just to end up so deflated—it felt like a punch to the gut, and the way she was so obviously trying to hold it together and play it cool in front of him really made the moment land. Kim So-yeon is so great at this kind of thing—the more she struggled to appear fine, the more it squeezed my insides.

It’s interesting how his relationship with Se-ryung really starts to peel back some layers for Tae-yoon, who is pretty much the male version of Joo-yeon (which makes sense given that she molded herself after him in the workplace). He seems so aloof and together on the surface, but he’s clearly a mess of insecurity when it comes to Se-ryung, and now that I’ve seen them as a couple I find myself siding with her. She’s no angel but he’s got a pretty narrow idea of how she should behave, with no flexibility or room for argument. If you seriously distrust her that much, why do you even bother? I don’t disagree that she could change for the better, but I don’t see him changing either, so as far as I’m concerned, she’s the bigger person for at least putting herself out there.

Wan just gets better and better with every episode, and it’s so great to see so many dimensions to his relationship with Joo-yeon, from the bratty dongseng to the confidant, to her shoulder to cry on. There’s just an ease and comfort to their relationship, and my heart skips a beat whenever he holds her hand. It’s really his no-calculation style of romance that makes me swoon, because he’s not expecting anything in return. It says so much that he’s able to smile and cheer her on to do whatever her heart asks of her, because he cares more about the fact that she shouldn’t live her life so closed off from everyone.

That she’s found one person with whom she can completely be herself with, cry in front of, and admit her greatest failings to—well that just says it all, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not that she forgot how to cry, but that she didn’t let herself cry because she didn’t have anyone to lean on.

 
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