Jiyong had almost kissed Dara when no one else was in the room. Or had she almost kissed him? The thought had him elated, but also not sure what his next move was. If things were not fake, they needed to agree on that. Verbally. And what did that mean for the lie they’d told his family?

He was overthinking things. Dara didn’t do that. She lived in the moment while he worried about consequences and intent. As if to push the point home, he looked at her from across the table, and she tossed a celery stick at him.

He picked it up off his lap and lobbed it into the trash can ten feet away without looking. It was a skill he’d perfected as a teenager.

Dara fanned herself in feigned awe, coaxing an embarrassed smile out of him, no matter how hard he fought to keep a straight face. It was impossible to feel cool around her for more than two seconds. She threw him off kilter, while still accepting him the way he was. Accepting his family. It made her quite an attractive and intimidating package, all wrapped in one.

He wished he would have just asked her out like a normal person. He would have still felt out of his depth, but at least they wouldn’t be stuck in this dumb lie where he questioned everything they said and did, wondering if any of it meant anything.

Maybe she hadn’t wanted to kiss him at all, but felt obligated to play along. Or she was fine with kissing him, but only for fun. There was that overthinking again. He finished his turkey sandwich and stood up to clear his plate. Dara was done too, so he took her plate as well and brought them to the kitchen.

Hanbin, Hayi, and Dami arrived just as they finished cleaning up lunch, and the whole group got to work putting up the massive artificial tree, freeing it from the beat up cardboard box it lived in most of the year. Soohyuk and Jiyong pushed the couches out of the way while Mom and Dami got out the lights and ornaments.

Dara pulled out her phone and some Christmas music. Then she began spreading out the flattened branches, working her way methodically around the tree. Hayi, who had been standing back looking a little lost, went to join her.

“She’s a gem, this one,” Mom nudged Jiyong with her elbow. “I really like Dara.”

“Me too.” Jiyong sighed a little too despondently.

Mom’s eyebrows dipped. “I sense a ‘but’ at the end of that.”

“But … we’ll see.”

She didn’t pry further, for which he was grateful. He untangled the strings of lights while Hanbin tested them out and started winding them around the tree.

Dami handed Jiyong a pile of ugly Christmas ornaments from his elementary school years, the ones with a badly cut circle around his school photo glued to a pine cone or a star made from craft sticks. He tried to casually tuck those in the back of the tree, but Dara came over to investigate.

“What are you doing back here? Hiding ugly ornaments?”

“Doesn’t everybody do that?” he asked, hiding the two he had left in the crook of his elbow.

Dara peeked over his arm and plucked one out. “Oh, Jiyong. This is adorable. You can’t hide this back here.” She reached for the one he’d placed deep in the tree, but he was faster. Except the tree shook, and while he was grabbing that one, Dara reached in and stole the other ornament from under his arm.

The resulting scuffle turned into a tickle fight, and the ornaments went flying. So did the tree. Jiyong grabbed the tree and righted it before the whole thing fell over.

“Are you two okay back there?” Dami asked, doubled over with laughter.

Jiyong’s face burned as he turned to see all eyes on them. Everyone looked so happy for him. Well, Soohyuk looked sort of nauseated at the same time, but that begrudging, atta boy, was there too. His mom was practically awash in happy tears.

It suddenly felt like pressure. It was a rare thing for Jiyong to be the fun-loving center of attention. And it was all because of Dara. She was this burst of joy who made everything better, except she wasn’t really his.

+++

Dara could tell the stress of the situation was weighing on Jiyong. She didn’t totally understand it, but she felt for him all the same. Not everyone could be an actor. So, after the decorating wound down and Dami and Hayi had finished showing off their Black Friday finds, Dara suggested a walk. She took Jiyong’s hand and dragged him outside before anyone else could invite themselves along. His family no doubt assumed they wanted some time to themselves. It wasn’t exactly a wrong assumption.

As soon as they were clear of the windows, she dropped his hand and picked up the pace, looking around their family farm with real curiosity. Having grown up mostly in tiny apartments, open space like this was a foreign concept. The dogs whined from the chain link pen where they’d been banished. Hayi was still afraid of them, so Hanbin had corralled the dogs as soon as they arrived. Dara stopped to pet each one, even though she was rewarded with slobber.

Then she headed toward the modular mountains of hay. They were under what she’d describe as a giant carport: open, but with protection from the rain. She ran her hand over one of the bales, noting the sage green alfalfa leaves in tiny tear drop shapes. Naively, she’d always pictured straw the way they showed it in story books, golden and stick straight.

Jiyong leaned against the haystacks with her. The hay dwarfed them both by at least twenty feet.

“How do you stack it that high?” she asked. The answer was tractors, of course, but she hadn’t seen one up close or paid much attention on the rare occasion when she passed one on the road. They were suddenly more interesting knowing it might be Jiyong in the driver’s seat.

“Come here, and I’ll show you.”

She followed him over to another of their giant carports where the different tractors were parked in neat rows. Jiyong pointed out each one, explaining the process, from the wide tractor that mowed the hay, to the baler that took the swept up piles and turned them into bales. Last of all was the wagon that picked up each bale and stacked them against its giant forklifts. It was a far cry from the pioneer days of Laura Ingalls stomping down hay with her dad.

“Do you want to go for a tractor ride?” Jiyong looked a little embarrassed at offering. If he only knew how much she’d been hoping he’d ask. Like a little kid, she’d been dying to scramble up to the seat at the top the moment she saw them.

“Which one?” she asked.

“Let’s take the backhoe, and we’ll take care of a spot where the irrigation isn’t flowing down the way it should.” He climbed up first, and then hesitated as he looked at the one seat – basically an invitation for her to sit on top of him.

She scramb