While preparing dinner, I just so happened to lift my head and see Tiffany peacefully napping on the couch. A smile formed on my face as I set the knife in my hands onto the cutting board in front of me and grabbed a jacket from the coatrack, admiring Tiffany’s serene sleeping expression for a brief moment before draping the makeshift blanket over her body. I couldn’t blame her for being sleepy; we did just touchdown in America the previous day, after all. Being that I traveled from America to Korea and vice versa as often as I did, I was much more accustomed to adjusting to jet lag than the previously landlocked Tiffany, although I would be lying if I said I wasn’t the tiniest bit exhausted.

              After I finished making the stew, I filled two bowls and set them on the dining table, placing a pair of chopsticks on each bowl, then quietly walking over to the living room on the couch Tiffany was sleeping on. What started as me telling myself I would just go over and gently wake Tiffany up turned into prolonged observation. In my defense, I couldn’t really be blamed: for someone who always called me her ‘angel’, her sleeping face certainly resembled one.

              It was only after my hand, for some reason, found it necessary to touch her beautiful, full eyelashes that she woke up. “TaeTae?” she said upon making eye contact with me, using her husky—and needlessly y—just-woke-up voice.

              “Dinner’s ready,” I told her, the smile that I just discovered was on my face widening at the sight of Tiffany’s sleepy behavior.

              “Hm? Oh, why didn’t you wake me up so I could help you?”

              “Well, I didn’t want to wake you,” I replied innocently.

              Tiffany’s ‘mad’ expression mellowed, eventually breaking out into a smile. “Ah, I can’t get mad at you,” she said in a defeated manner, sitting up from the couch and stretching. “Oh wow, it smells good,” she said as I stood up, extending my hand to Tiffany, which turned out to be unnecessary as she had already gotten up. “What’s up? Did you just want to hold hands?”

              “Oh, are we talking in English now?”

              Tiffany giggled at my reply. “Your accent is so cute,” she commented.

              I frowned and turned away. “If you’re going to be like that, I’ll just keep speaking Korean,” I pouted, switching back to Korean.

              A gasp escaped my lips as I felt Tiffany press herself—…herself against my back, her hands wrapping around my sides, covering my stomach area. “Aw, don’t say that. I like it,” she said softly into my ear. My whole body shivered, a jolt of electricity running down my spine; was this what living with Tiffany was going to be like? How many months—how many days would I last before I’m hospitalized for having a heart attack?

              “Fine,” I acquiesced, “no fair though, how come you don’t have an accent?”

              Tiffany let me go, following me to the dining table. “Well I had a few English-speaking customers at the bar and whatnot; plus, we still learned English in Korea, don’t you remember?”

              I scoffed, not willing to admit that I had, indeed, temporarily forgotten that fact. “Of course I do, but that was a few years ago.”

              “Well maybe I don’t have an accent, but my English is probably pretty bad right now. You should teach me,” she offered as we both sat down.

              I almost laughed at the suggestion. “I should teach you? Can I? I doubt I’m qualified.”

              Tiffany pondered the thought for a bit, tapping her lips with the chopsticks. “I don’t know, I think it would be pretty hot: you wearing black thin-framed glasses, a navy-blue short-sleeve polo with the first few buttons haphazardly undone, a light grey pencil skirt that barely covers the middle of your upper thigh.” I felt myself turn more and more red as she went deeper into her fantasy, and totally not because I was imaging Tiffany in the attire she was describing. “And whenever I would disobey me, you would bend me over the desk and punish me with your straight, wooden ruler.”

              “W-Why would you plan on being disobedient?” I stammered out a reply, my face burning up, and not just because of the steaming bowl of stew sitting in front of me. There was just something about Tiffany’s English; I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I had a feeling I would have to retrain my emotions to refrain from reacting to Tiffany’s teasing in this other language.

              Tiffany smirked. “Maybe because I want you to punish me?”

              I huffed, diverting my attention to the meal sitting on the table. “I wouldn’t want to teach you if you just want to be disobedient. Plus, your vocabulary seems good enough as it is.”

              “That’s no fair,” she whined.

              “Eat before it gets cold,” I interrupted her.

              “Let me cook tomorrow. When in America, we should eat American food,” Tiffany proposed.

              “We didn’t get groceries for American food though,” I reminded her.

              As Tiffany recalled our grocery run earlier in the day, her face fell. “Right…”

              I laughed, making a mental note to make American food for Tiffany every now and then. I didn’t know how to make many American dishes, meaning I would probably have to look some stuff up. Where was a good starting place…?

              The next day, we went furniture shopping, something that excited Tiffany way too much; I ended up letting her choose most of the furniture, meaning we were stuck with a lot of pink, but I honestly didn’t mind. Apart from the glances that Tiffany was drawing, as was expected from someone as vibrant and attractive as her, the trip was the type of experience I always wanted to share with my significant other: it truly felt like we were settling into our own place, like we were newlyweds moving into their new house.

              We finished the rest of the stew from the previous day for dinner, me secretly looking up spaghetti recipes afterwards while Tiffany decided on the movie we would be watching via her laptop. Later that night, Tiffany excitedly informed me that both of her siblings had gotten back to her and arranged a meeting at a restaurant in the nearby mall. I was apprehensive about it at first, but Tiffany’s excitement was so overwhelming that I quickly forgot the emotion.

              Her excitement lasted well into the night, Tiffany tussling about under the covers next to me—albeit with minimal motion, perhaps as to not bother me—well after the lights went off.

              “Fany, what should I wear?”

              Tiffany, who had woken up after me and was still eating breakfast, shouted back her answer, “Don’t worry so much about it. Just be adorable like you always are.”

              “Faanny,” I whined in protest, “Seriously…”

              “I am being serious,” Tiffany replied, “They’re just my siblings. I’m not going to be wearing anything special.”

              “I don’t want to give off a bad first impression though,” I told her.

              “You could be wearing bedsheets and still give off a good impression,” she claimed, the metallic clanging from the kitchen signifying that she was done.

              “Oh, let me do the dishes!” I shouted.

              “Too late!” Tiffany sung, causing me to rush out of the room in the outfit I had hastily chosen that morning: a short-sleeved, navy-blue V-neck, and a pair of light grey shorts.

              “Move over, this is my job,” I said, running up to Tiffany and attempting to push her over.

              She looked over, a smile forming on her face. “Oh, that outfit’s perfect! You look so adorable, TaeTae!”

              “You always say that,” I said accusingly.

              Tiffany shrugged, still fighting for her spot in front of the sink, “Well it’s not my fault you’re always adorable,” she claimed, finally giving in shortly after. “Hey, how come you’re so strong?”

              “Because washing dishes is my duty,” I replied in a complete non-sequitur.

              “But if you cook and do dishes, then what’s left for me?”

              “Make money, sit there and look pretty?”

              Tiffany laughed. “I’ll try my best.”

              “You wouldn’t even need to try though; all you would need to do is to sit there normally.”

              A lapse of silence followed my cheesy statement, after which Tiffany gave me another back hug. “Are you sure that’s all you want me to do?”

              “Ah—” I shuddered, trying to distance my ear from , “Fany, I—”

              “Maybe I can pull out a special outfit for you? Or do you have your own ideas?”

              I shook my head vigorously, hoping with all my might that she wouldn’t see through the obvious lie. “Just—let me finish doing these dishes,” I told her. She eventually acquiesced, electing to sit down at the dining table to wait for me to finish. A few hours later, after adequate preparation, we set out for the mall.

              My initial expectation of her siblings, I surmised, was heavily influenced by my meeting of Sooyoung and Sunny as well as the way Tiffany acted around me, so it was a welcome thing to greet them and quickly discover that they were pretty normal.

              It was fascinating to see essentially a more reserved, male version of Tiffany in her older brother. When we arrived, the two siblings were already seated at a table inside the restaurant, a woman wearing what appeared to be business attire and a man in casual clothing.

              When Tiffany and I stepped in and the two siblings made eye contact with her, the woman’s eyes bulged out of her socket one moment and was out of her seat, running into Tiffany the next. “Oh my god, oh my god, its really you,” she cried, Tiffany’s eyes welling up with tears as well. I just smiled, briefly glancing over at Tiffany’s brother to see a similar smile on his face, a faint glistening in his eyes. “Stephanie—no, I’m sorry, Tiffany,” she quickly corrected herself, “I missed you so much, oh my god I can’t believe it’s actually you...”

              “I missed you too,” she replied, lifting her head and noticing her brother still standing at the table the two had occupied previously. “Leo, get over here!”

              “You two are making such a scene, stop blocking the entrance,” he replied, the feigning of annoyance in his voice completely given away by the smile on his face.

              “You must be Taeyeon, then!” the older woman said, turning to me as we made our way over to the table, “I’m Michelle, thank you so much for taking care of my baby sister,” she said, pulling me into an embrace before I could respond.

              “O-Oh, no, it’s Tiffany who has been taking care of me,” I replied, startled at the sudden action.

              “Ok that’s enough Michelle, no need to hug her for that long,” Tiffany insisted, pulling her away.

              “Aww, are you getting jealous?” she said, taking her own seat and grinning at Tiffany.

              “We didn’t come here so that you could take advantage of Taeyeon’s good nature. I know you can’t really help but want to hug her, but you’ll just have to find a way,” Tiffany declared as the two of us took our own seats.

              “Nice to see you back in the States, Tiffany,” Leo continued right after, then turning and offering a friendly smile to me, “And it’s nice to meet you too, Taeyeon; thanks for being there for Tiffany.”

              “It’s nice to meet you too,” I greeted in kind, bowing as much as I could while still seated. From just the quick interaction, contrary to their attire, Michelle seemed the goofy, friendly one while Leo the more serious, yet caring one. This analysis proved to more or less be true, Michelle constantly teasing Tiffany about being able to find a girlfriend and Leo being the one who ended up paying the bills.

              After the meal, we spent a few hours at a nearby arcade as well as roaming the mall, visiting various shops under the pretext of Tiffany’s siblings wanting to buy Tiffany ‘welcome home’ gifts before I decided to head back by myself, giving the excuse that I suddenly remembered an email I needed to send to a professor. Tiffany was hesitant to let me go, but after some convincing, and perhaps partially due to her desire to spend time with the siblings that she hasn’t seen in many years, we temporarily parted ways.

              On the way home, I made sure to quickly pick up a few ingredients for a spaghetti recipe I discovered the previous day and got straight to work. Just to ensure I was doing everything correctly, I grabbed Tiffany’s laptop, which happened to be closest to the kitchen, and looked up the recipe on Google. However, when I fat- the ‘c’ in ‘how to cook spaghetti sauce’, something I had only speculated in the past came to light. I really didn’t want to believe that I was seeing things correctly, but it was undeniable: the first result in the autofill queries box, highlighted in purple, read “how to deal with depression”.

              It was painful to read those words, but still, my curiosity got the better of me, unable to stop myself from going down to that search result and pressing ‘enter’. Seeing the resulting webpage caused me to audibly gasp, one hand covering my mouth while the other hand scrolled down to confirm that every single link on the page was highlighted in purple. Scared but still curious, I clicked the ‘next’ button … again … and again … and again … it wasn’t until the eighth page that I was finally greeted with an unopened link, by which point the displayed articles were so far from the prompt that I wondered why they even showed up as a search result for that query.

              Speculating from what little evidence I had gathered and actually seeing such evidence brought rise to completely different feelings. Whereas before, I had the benefit of doubting my own observations and analysis, now it felt more clear cut and dry: it was conceivable that there might be another explanation for this—like maybe Tiffany was researching such symptoms because of a character in a drama she was watching that she was heavily invested in was starting to act in such a way—but to go to the lengths that Tiffany evidently went to spoke to the kind of desperation that could only be explained by something that ailed her frequently and personally.

              Should I just ask Tiffany about this? I didn’t want a misunderstanding to happen from this, but it felt insensitive to just ask about. Then again, was there a good way to talk about such a topic? Probably not, unless I was just unaware of something, which of course was certainly possible. But no matter how I thought about it, this wasn’t just something I felt I could just sleep on: I wanted to get to the bottom of this, if not for my own curiosity, for a better understanding of the kinds of troubles my girlfriend experienced.

              I mused the topic while preparing our dinner, and by the time Tiffany came back home, it was just about done. “Did you have fun?” I asked, the sound of the door closing following shortly after.

              “Yeah, we also ended up—wait, are you cooking?” Tiffany quickly clambered into the kitchen.

              “Yeah, I thought we could have some spaghetti for dinner today. It’s as you said, we should eat American food when in America,” I replied.

              “Aw Taeyeon, aren’t you just the best wife material or what?” Tiffany gushed, hugging me in excitement. “We should just get married already.”

              I chuckled, unsure of how to respond. “What else did you do after I left?” I inquired, electing to overlook her declaration.

              “Well, I bought some clothes for both of us, including a set of matching pajamas and couple shirts. Do you want to check them out? I put them on the couch in the living room,” she said, slighting away the kitchen.

              “Let’s eat first, this is almost done,” I told her, motioning towards the spaghetti. Right now definitely didn’t seem like the right time; with how much excitement Tiffany was showing, there was no way I could just put a damper onto the atmosphere by asking such a somber question.

              “What’s wrong, TaeTae?”

              “Hm?”

              Her question caught me off guard. My worry must have shown on my face because Tiffany’s face instantly morphed into a worried one, her reaching for my hand, gently the back of it.

              “You look like you’re thinking about something,” she explained.

              I smiled, partially in awe of Tiffany’s ever-present ability to read me and partially in relief that she just provided me an easy way to transition into the topic. “How can you always tell what I’m thinking so easily?”

              Tiffany smiled proudly at this. “Of course I would pay attention to my crush! We spent a lot of time together as children, and you used to be quite vocal about your feelings, so I quickly learned what your different facial expressions meant. Those memories were so precious to me that I found it pretty easy to remember everything I learned, which thankfully translated perfectly to the present, since you hardly changed from then to now.”

              “Hey, I’ve gotten taller at least!” I protested.

              Tiffany laughed, patting my head. “Yet your face is still that of a baby’s, and sometimes, your interests as well.” Tiffany paused briefly, interjecting before I could open my mouth to defend myself. “So what was it that you were thinking about?”

              I pursed my lips, almost forgetting about that somehow. “I was just wondering—” no, stop this, Taeyeon. No need to skirt around the topic, just say what’s on my mind. “Do you—is your mental health ok?”

              Tiffany bit her lower lip, something of a mixture of an expectant and a surprised expression on her face. “How did you find out?”

              I looked away, a sudden rush of guilt washing over me. Tiffany didn’t try to hide that search query, but it still felt like something I shouldn’t have seen; while she did give me the password to her laptop, it didn’t mean I had exclusive rights to view everything on it. I snuck a peek at Tiffany, but as always, she was smiling warmly at me, not a hint of anger or disappointment anywhere on her face. This gave me the confidence to answer. “Well, there were two—no, three things, I guess. Back in Korea, I saw you waiting for me at a restaurant but your facial expression looked really empty, and then from that I thought about it a bit and realized that, because of everything that happened to you, it was pretty understandable that you would get depression. After that, just now, I used your laptop to make sure I was doing the recipe correctly and accidentally discovered that you looked up ways to help yourself out of it.”

              Tiffany nodded. “I did have it,” she admitted after a brief period of silence, helping me pour the spaghetti into the two plates, “As you guessed, everything accumulated into it. It was partially because I went to a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with it that I decided to quit my previous job. You know, I—” her voice broke, and I quickly set my own plate down before grabbing hers, setting it down on the dining table before helping her into the seat. “—I felt like a worthless human being, you know?” She sniffled, me reaching for the nearby tissue box and offering a few tissues to her which she immediately took. Watching Tiffany in such a state twisted my lungs and squeezed my heart, but I had to be strong for her: if nothing else, this was something I could do for her. “I just barely managed to graduate from high school, I had no friends, I had no goals, my family abandoned me, I was stuck in massive debt and forced into a job where I had to put on a smile, no matter the customer, while doing … doing absolutely sinful things, and because of it, I had to throw away my religion, despite it being the only thing I felt I had throughout high school.” Her crying had subsided a little, so I took the opportunity to take a few tissues myself and gently wipe the tears streaming down her cheeks.

              “I just lived for the sake of living: I didn’t particularly enjoy anything, I never had much to look forward to, I didn’t really have the motivation to pursue anything, but I was just too scared of dying to do anything about it. Even after I quit that job and became a bartender, I still never felt much excitement in anything: Sooyoung, Sunny, and Seohyun sometimes helped, but they only provided temporary relief to the problem. I didn’t have motivation to chase anything, to have dreams, to want something, mostly because I felt like I didn’t deserve it, that I was unqualified, that … those kinds of things weren’t for someone like me.” She briefly paused, glancing at me. I shot her an encouraging smile, thankfully causing a smile to find its way back on Tiffany’s face.

              “Do you know why I call you ‘my angel’?” she asked, reaching up to cup my cheek in her warm palm. A sigh involuntarily escaped my lips, my eyes threatening to flutter shut: it just felt so natural, like her palm was made to hold me. “It wasn’t only because of how much I love your singing, or how beautiful you always are: it’s because you saved me from that emptiness. It was like, when I was reunited with you, color returned to my life. When you came into that bar and I confirmed that you were, in fact, you, I was reminded how amazing life could be and suddenly, I felt rewarded for enduring everything: God must have given me such hardships so that I could understand how blessed I am to have you and to give me the reason to never let you go. I could never be mad at you because without you, I wouldn’t have anything else.”

              When she finished, the ensuing silence didn’t feel silent at all: my head rang with her words as I processed it all. The strange thing was that I completely sympathized with her last sentence, but for a completely different reason. From the expression on Tiffany’s face, I could tell that she was being sincere and not teasing me like she normally did, which also shocked me but at the same time warmed my heart, knowing that Tiffany loved me that much. “So don’t leave me, ok? I’ll just stalk you and make all of your girlfriends’ lives miserable if you do,” she tacked on, in a playfully teasing manner.

              I laughed. “I won’t leave you, I promise. Who else could I date, anyway?” I quickly realized the problem with that statement and interjected before Tiffany could respond. “Never mind, let’s just eat dinner before it gets cold.”

              Tiffany smiled, scooting her chair closer to me. “Say ‘aah’.” I couldn’t help but smile, obliging and opening my mouth. “Seriously though, next time, I’ll cook, ok?”

              I stuck out my tongue at her after swallowing. “Not if I can beat you to it~”

One more chapter until the last one :0

Honestly, now that it’s gotten to this point, I’m a little conflicted: on one happy, I’m happy that I managed to finish another story and have availability to work on other stories, but on the other, I feel sad that it’s ending … for those that don’t know, this was actually my first story I wrote that I discontinued for some time before deciding to revamp it, so this one sorta has sentimental value to me.

Anyway, thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed :D

P.S. check out my facebook page at https://fb.me/affkesujo :D I have a fun fact about this chapter posted along with the chapter's link.