“Unnie…”

She turned around from gazing outside the window, with a smile as radiant as the sun illuminating her highlights.

“Yes?”

“Did anyone tell you how beautiful you are before?”

Her lips parted slightly in surprise, but shyness quickly took over as she glanced down at her own folded hands with flushed cheeks.

“Kkura-ya, did you understand what you just said?”

The sweetness in her voice hastened Sakura’s heartbeat. She moved closer and placed her hand on top of those hands, causing her to look up and meet her eyes again.

“Of course, Unnie. I’m not practicing my Korean. I mean what I said.” 

Seeing those lush lips part again did it this time. Sakura leaned forward to them with a force that she never thought she could muster. They both closed their eyes in anticipation of what’s to come.

Except she couldn’t feel anything.

She opened her eyes again in a gasp, but instead of warm rays of sunlight, she’s greeted by a cool, gray ceiling.

“F--k it..” she pounced up from her bed and buried her face in her palms.

-------------------------

Sakura doesn’t have many things she regrets in life, but this has got to be one of them. What makes the dream she had this morning pathetic is that it felt so real. No...actually it was real, up to the point when she got questioned by her unnie if she was just joking around in their Korean tutoring session. She sometimes wondered if things would really be that different even if she did admit that she meant it, instead of doubling back on quoting this out of a phrase book.

“What kind of cheesy phrasebook did you pick that up from--” She recalls her Unnie chuckles that rung uncomfortably in her eardrums. “Is it ‘Korean pickup lines’ you found in your on-sale guidebook at the airport?”

Anyway, it will do good if she has one of those books handy right now. It has been 7 years since she spent that fateful summer holiday in Seoul, meeting the crush that she could not quite forget.

The ‘what if she confessed’ dream pops up every so often but has soon faded away as time does its little trick of piling new memories and problems on top of each other. Even if her heart stops thinking about love, her mind has been rushing full speed ahead, with school, entrance exams, rivalries and richness that accompanies being a grand-daughter of the Miyawaki family’s patriarch. It was the reason that caused her father to take her to Seoul 7 years ago when he thought he might take on the growth of the Korean business so that he could rival his older brother, Sakura’s uncle and first-born who had the default right to inherit the shipping and trading conglomerate. It was also the reason that this move did not happen in the end as he was able to make a damaging blow by uncovering a scandal of her incompetent uncle, enough to snatch his position and cohort of followers in Tokyo, the heart of the empire instead. Now that the 2nd generation has all grown up, Sakura is instructed to go back to Korea again to check on the growing influence of her cousin, Miyawaki Suguru, a rising star from the disgraced branch of the first-born’s family.

Perhaps that’s why that long-lost feelin