I Need Romance 3: Episode 12

by girlfriday

Oh the battle between the things you want to say and the things you think you should say, and dealing with what actually comes out of your mouth. If only those things would line up. Everyone says something they wish they could take back in this episode, and sadly for them, there are no do-overs.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Yoo Seung-woo – “입술이 밉다 (I Hate My Lips)” [ Download ]

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EPISODE 12: “No matter what side of yourself you show, I’ll stay beside you”

After their argument in the middle of the street, Wan follows Joo-yeon ten steps behind her the rest of the way home. He sighs aloud that the kind of person who’d put her first is right by her side…but she can’t see him.

He regrets his jealous rant earlier about not wanting to lose her to Tae-yoon, realizing that she’s already upset and he just made things worse for her. “I should’ve just smiled, ‘I love you.'”

She eventually stops and tells him not to follow her, though he points out that they live together, so how could he not go in the same direction? She turns to go the other way, and he apologizes for everything, saying it was his fault.

She’s annoyed, among other things, at being mortified in front of Se-ryung and Wan. He assures her that it’s okay, and she can cry, or be embarrassed, or be anything in front of him. She wonders if he’s dumb: “I like that person!”

He gets the message and says he knows, but then when she starts to defend Tae-yoon (that it wasn’t his fault), Wan gets riled up again: “Before deciding right or wrong, you were hurt! Then he should’ve protected you first! He’s supposed to like you!”

She counters that she doesn’t need protecting, and it’s not like she’s new to Se-ryung’s manipulation. She invokes the work behavior code again, and Wan blows another fuse: “Agh, work work work work! Do people who gather for work not have hearts? Do they scoop out their hearts and leave them at home?! And why can’t you just say that you’ve been hurt when you’ve been hurt? Are you cool for pretending that you’re fine?”

Of course the rant only gets him back on her bad side, and he’s left trailing after her, asking meekly if he can come along if he stays quiet. She heads to her neighborhood bar and gives him a half-hearted warning that he’d better not come in, and he scoffs that he has pride too.

The bar unni just serves her two glasses knowing that Wan is due any minute, and Joo-yeon drinks alone for a while fully expecting Wan to come in. She stares at his empty glass and gets up to look out the window, but doesn’t see him.

He’s sitting just outside the door shivering from the cold, and gives the owner his card to request a call if Joo-yeon gets drunk. The bar unni is impressed that he’s a composer, and he says he’s rather successful, “But I’m just doing all kinds of stupid things because I like that woman.”

He heads home, where he runs into Tae-yoon lingering outside. Tae-yoon asks where Joo-yeon is, and Wan refuses to tell him. It only takes him two seconds to remember that she really likes this guy though, so he turns around to ask if Tae-yoon even likes her.

Tae-yoon wonders why Wan keeps asking that, and Wan says it’s obvious—because it’s not obvious whether he likes her or not. Tae-yoon argues that Joo-yeon is the only person who needs to know, but Wan counters, “No, the people around her should know. Love her so that the whole world knows how much she’s loved!” Aw.

Wan caves and tells Tae-yoon where she is, though when he arrives she doesn’t even look up and calls him Sweet Potato. Tae-yoon sits down and pours himself drink after drink without looking up at her.

Joo-yeon narrates: “Love is truly foolish. A moment so cold and hurtful… is all forgiven by the fact that he comes to me like this. A person in love only sees what she wants to see, hears what she wants to hear, and believes what she wants to believe. At a single word—sorry—a heart that had turned to ice, melts.”

He tells her he’s sorry, and then when she starts to cry, he reminds her that he doesn’t like it. Argh. She sniffles back her tears, and he muses that she really did stop crying, thinking maybe she listens to him too well—this isn’t work and he isn’t her boss right now.

He thinks back to Wan’s words and admits that he might be a good sunbae at work, but feels pretty pathetic as a boyfriend right now. Well, points for admitting it. Joo-yeon tells him to say it now then—why does he like her? “You haven’t said it once. Do you even like me?”

Tae-yoon: “I like you, Shin Joo-yeon.” He laughs that she’s just like every other woman when she’s dating, and when she prods for the reasons, he says he likes her because she’s comfortable and secure.

He reminds her that he’s already told her in the past that he finds her pretty and lovable, and likes it when she smiles. He pulls a chair over to his side and gestures for her to sit next to him, and cutely asks for a kiss on the cheek if she’s forgiven him. He settles for putting his arm around her as they drink.

She asks how he knew where she was, and he says that the man she lives with told him. She corrects his wording, and says that Wan is like a brother to her. Ouch.

Wan wonders why she isn’t home yet, and snuggles the giraffe as he pouts that they’re taking too long. He gets up with a start and panics, “They’re not… going to stay out all night?”

Across town Min-seok does stay up all night, trying to solve the riddle of Min-jung’s mystery mail. He can’t figure it out, until it finally clicks that maybe, just maybe… she’s pregnant with his child.

He rings her doorbell in the middle of the night and knocks until she gets out of bed and opens the door, and charges in to look for the letter. He finds it along with books on babies, and freaks out: “Are you pregnant? Is it mine?”

She tells him it isn’t his, but he doesn’t believe her, and asks how she could make decisions like this without him. He reminds her that they both said they didn’t want marriage and kids, but stops when he sees that he’s made her cry.

She says she understands that he’s just been hit with lightning, but so has she, and at least he gets to walk away. He’s the one to argue that he doesn’t just get to walk away, because he’s the father.

He’s angry that she thinks she can just decide all this without him, and was planning on having the child without so much as letting him know. She tells him she won’t ever ask anything of him, but he says whether or not they have the baby, they have to decide together.

Suddenly he stops mid-sentence and looks down at her stomach: “How many months along are you? Did our baby hear that?” Ha, that is crazy adorable.

She tells him the baby is the size of a peanut, so it can’t hear things, even though as soon as he leaves she tells Baby they’ll live perfectly well just the two of them.

Tae-yoon walks Joo-yeon to her door and asks if she doesn’t want to come over to his place. She says she fought with Wan so she needs to go home, and Tae-yoon admits that Wan bothers him. She smiles, flattered that he’s jealous.

She comes home and calls out to Wan, but his room is empty and she deflates. She texts him to hurry home and that she’s going to wait in his room until he’s back, though she doesn’t know that his phone is sitting downstairs on the coffee table.

She plops down on his bed to wait for him there, and I will die laughing if they sleep in each other’s beds waiting for the other.

Yuuup, in the morning, Wan stirs awake in Joo-yeon’s bed, still spooning the giraffe. Mid-yawn it suddenly dawns on him what this means, and his voice cracks, “She didn’t come home?!”

He stomps around the house spitting this rapid-fire self-berating monologue about how he shouldn’t have told Tae-yoon about that bar, and he’s running around doing all manner of truly idiotic things. This is why I get called Sweet Potato. I’m not a love messenger. It’s not like you get a reward in this life for being nice!

He refuses to accept it and his brain nearly explodes thinking about her sleeping over at Tae-yoon’s place. But then he finds his phone, filled with texts from a worried Joo-yeon who’s waiting in his room. Instant happy. It’s so cute.

He runs up, and then melts when he finds her sleeping in his bed. He jumps in and wraps his arms around her, insisting she sleep for just ten more minutes. She complains but goes right back to sleep, and then he gets to spoon her instead. Way better than the giraffe.

Hee-jae excitedly gets ready for work the next morning and waits for Woo-young to pick her up. But her boyfriend arrives first, to end things for good. She assumes that he didn’t even tell her about passing the exam because he always intended to dump her and move on up.

He argues that his job status was more important to her than he was as a person, and that she doesn’t know how to be happy with herself because she’s always letting other people be the gauge for how she ought to live. Is it wrong that I agree with him? She strikes me as rather shallow.

But she finally shows some depth when she talks to Woo-young, and admits that her ex was right about her—she just went to college and got a job and worked hard, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. She wants to get married and buy a house, but she doesn’t know the reason for any of it, and when someone asks her what her dream is, she has absolutely no idea.

Woo-young is almost a better friend than a love interest, because he reminds her that she’s learned more than most people their age through her relationship, and then asks if she wants to go to the roof to swear at her ex-boyfriend.

The rumor spreads throughout the company that Tae-yoon launched the new brand just to create a partnership with his girlfriend Se-ryung. He calls Joo-yeon into his office and she’s the first to tell him not to pay attention to the rumors.

He hands her a pair of earrings and warns her not to let Hee-jae have these, and then adds that she hasn’t told him that she likes him either. She’s too embarrassed to say it, but tells him via text and he smiles and hugs his phone. Okay, that was cute.

They both get called to the boss’s office, and Joo-yeon gets promoted to the New Brand Director. Tae-yoon’s boss wonders how he can be so calm and confident about Joo-yeon’s promotion, but he isn’t ruffled, which frankly worries me more.

Her team toasts her new position, along with Se-ryung and her crew. The frenemies exchange barbed compliments and remain somewhat civil, that is until Se-ryung announces that she’s going to quit the project all of a sudden.

Her assistant panics, especially because the lawyers just informed them that it’d be a huge financial loss for them to quit now.

Joo-yeon goes straight to Wan’s studio and paces as she says she needs to find a way to crush Se-ryung in retaliation. He thinks that she’s not seeing Se-ryung clearly, because that wasn’t a rational move, but an emotional one—she’s loved and lost and is lashing out.

Joo-yeon doesn’t get it, and Wan points out that she’s broken up with boyfriends without much consequence because she wasn’t in love with them, while Se-ryung is hitting rock bottom.

He says math-wise it seems as though when two people break up they should just be two separate people, but love sends you back to zero, not one whole person. He urges her to think about Se-ryung’s pain just a little.

Meanwhile Se-ryung tells her staff that she doesn’t intend on quitting at all, and just wanted to make Joo-yeon come begging for her to stay.

Back at the studio, Wan points out that he’s packing up his things because he’s done producing the idols and had a showcase today, which Joo-yeon forgot all about. He sighs that success is useless if she doesn’t care to share it with him, and she offers to do anything to make it up to him: “Do you want a present? Tell me what you want.”

He says there are lots of things he wants, but starts with going home. They grab a blanket and sit out on the steps to wait for shooting stars, which she thinks is a pretty lame present.

He asks if she’s cold and says he has a way to warm her up: “Trust me and try closing your eyes.” She does, and he leans in for a kiss. She kisses him right back as the stars come down.

They kiss all the way up the stairs and he carries her into his room. And then he’s shirtless, and on top of her, and is it getting hot in here?

But then… *THUNK*

We cut right back to them sitting in the studio, with Joo-yeon asking what it is he wants to do. Sexy times weren’t even real? That’s just mean.

I know, I know, my brain was telling me that this development wasn’t logical and way too speedy, but damn if I wasn’t swooning six ways to Sunday anyway.

Joo-yeon: “What?” Wan grins like a fool, and then says now isn’t the time, but she should know he hasn’t given up. And then he just asks for celebratory ramyun.

Min-seok waits outside Min-jung’s door and asks to talk, promising that it’ll be the last time he bothers her. He says he’s thought about it from all sides, and he can’t marry her and he honestly doesn’t want a child because he hates kids.

He offers to support her financially, but that’s all he can do, and says he’ll be the one to move out. He says he picked up something for her that his mom ate while pregnant with him in the winter, and she opens the package to find strawberries.

She cries as she eats them, reminding herself that she wasn’t expecting anything from him. Still, she can’t help but feel disappointed.

Tae-yoon gifts Joo-yeon with a new nameplate for her new desk, and when he hears about Se-ryung wanting out of the contract, he offers to go talk to her. Joo-yeon wants to handle it on her own, and he tells her that Se-ryung is bluffing because it doesn’t make financial sense for her company to break the contract.

Joo-yeon meets her for drinks and ponders how to handle it—does she try empathy and honesty, and hope that Se-ryung returns with sincerity of her own? She considers trying it Wan’s way, and then Woo-young texts her to say that the other potential designers fell through, so Se-ryung is their best bet.

She closes her phone and then counters Se-ryung’s bluff with one of her own, and says that they’ve found someone new to work with. It leaves Se-ryung fuming.

Joo-yeon calls Tae-yoon to say that she might’ve played it badly, and if Se-ryung isn’t actually struggling to buy herself out of the contract financially, it could backfire on her. He thinks Se-ryung will be calling them back in no time, and suggests a movie date.

Wan and Joo-yeon arrive home at the same time, and he catches up to her on the steps. She plops down in the street and sighs that she thinks she won… but it doesn’t feel good like it used to.

She says she thought about doing it his nice way, but thought she’d never beat Se-ryung that way, so she just played it her way. Though now she wonders why winning doesn’t feel as awesome as it did before. “It feels like I was wrong, for some reason.”

Wan (voiceover): Ever since I came back to you, it felt like I was always seeing two of you—the bright and innocent you from a very long time ago, and the present you. I had hoped that you would be the same as the Shing Shing I had known and loved.

But now I realize that that was my selfish desire. Because the more I bring up the past you, you wear that guilty face like you’re doing now. So I’ve decided to fold my selfish desire and just accept you as you are.

He pets her on the head and tells her it’s okay. She asks hesitantly if he’s really not going to scold at her. But he says it’s okay: “No matter what side of yourself you show, I’ll stay beside you.”

He stretches out his arms for a hug, and she smiles and jumps for him to carry her, along with a giggly squeal. It’s the cutest thing.

It also happens right when Tae-yoon walks up to pick her up for their date, which they don’t notice. Wan puts her down and she looks up into his eyes, and then they finally notice Tae-yoon standing there with a dongseng-my-foot look on his face.

 
COMMENTS

If Tae-yoon’s jealousy is what it takes for Joo-yeon to open her eyes to the fact that she doesn’t act like Wan is just a dongseng, then bring on the jealousy. I know she says she likes Tae-yoon, and I do believe her. But when your boyfriend asks you over and you choose to go home to Sweet Potato, then fall asleep in his bed waiting for him and spend the morning spooning, he is not just a dongseng. Obviously we knew she’d need some help figuring this out, but there’s an added appeal in the idea that Tae-yoon might inadvertently help open her eyes to the fact that she kinda sorta maybe accidentally ended up with two boyfriends.

Tae-yoon softened a little in this episode, and okay, he may not be the world’s worst boyfriend ever. But despite Se-ryung’s intention to be hurtful, I agree with her assessment of his relationship with Joo-yeon—he’s with her because she’s easy and safe, and not at all complicated and difficult for him. He was burned badly by Se-ryung whom he could never control, and just wants an easy relationship (and if he can control her as a contender at work at the same time, then he wins both ways). Maybe that’s not evil, but it’s also not love. It already hurts when she swoons at his every word and he doesn’t have the same emotional stakes in their relationship, and I know she has to get there in her own time, but part of me just wants to reach in there and rip that band-aid off before she falls even harder.

On the other hand, clearly pain is good for Wan, because he’s doing a lot of growing up while he waits for Joo-yeon. For all his complaining, he still sends Tae-yoon to the bar because that’s what Joo-yeon would want, and he even comes around to the realization that trying to change her might also be making her unhappy. Wanting to make someone the best version of herself is great, but he’s also been spending all this time and energy trying to make a project out of her based on his idea of who she should be. It comes from a sincere place, but it’s also one-sided, and doesn’t take into account the person she’s become in the seventeen years that he wasn’t around. Wan’s biggest obstacle is his first love, because Joo-yeon is no longer that little girl, and if he’s going to love her in the present, he has to accept her as she is in the present.

It’s simplistic, but the contrast between Tae-yoon (Don’t cry. You’re pretty when you smile) and Wan (It’s okay, you can cry. You can be any version of yourself, and I’ll be here) in this episode says it all. Top that with loving her for who she is in the here and now, and you get all the fantasy sequences you want. Right? That’s how this works, right?

 
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