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Chapter 2

Onew thought that it felt like his insides were churning.  It was their first day of shooting and they had just finished up their individual shots, showing the two waiting for their partner to show up.  They had Lex wandering around the streets of Seoul with a hastily scrawled address clenched in hand as she tried to track down her new husband. 

Onew had the easier job of just having to sit tight and wait for his wife to find him.

She had just made it over to him and they had shared their fake shocked expressions when the PD cut the take. 

“We gotta change tapes!” Someone shouted from behind the camera.  Onew looked up and squinted against the sun that was starting to turn down behind the camera crew.  Lex started swinging her arms, clapping them in front of her before swinging them back behind her to almost meet behind her back, and looking around them with a curious kind of glance.

She might be older than him by a year, but it seemed like sometimes she could act like a five year old and right now she looked like a child told to wait for a second as her mother ran in the store to fetch something. 

It was their first day of filming for the show and Onew couldn’t believe that it was going so well.  They had gotten their skeleton script, a selection of topics for them to bring up if nothing flowed, and Lex had taken one look at it, quirked her eyebrow, which Onew noticed she did a lot, and tossed it to the side without reading past the first page. 

“We’ll be fine.” She’d said calmly.

And they had been – mostly. 

Their meeting had been in a park.  Onew stood on top of one of the swings, moving gently in the light breeze looking around when the crunch of sand and the squeak of rubber soled sneakers alerted him to someone behind him.

Being Onew, he promptly fell off of the swing and landed on his , sending a small cloud of sand up around him. 

Lex was so shocked that she spoke in English as she fell to her knees beside him, “Are you okay?” with one hand rubbing behind Onew’s head and the other placed on his shoulder as he righted himself. 

The genuine concern on her face threw him though.  It didn’t look like an act, she’d really been worried.  Next time, he thought, I’ll warn her if I want to do some prat falls ahead of time. 

“Uh-huh…yeah,” Onew responded in slower English while plastering his big smile on to his face, “I’m fine, just a klutz.” he continued in Korean. 

She rolled her eyes and him and stood, offering her hand as leverage to help him up. 

“That’s just fine, two massive klutzes together in one relationship – I can’t see where this could possibly go wrong.” She said with a laugh in her voice. 

She pulled her hand back once Onew was stable on his feet.  She was surprisingly strong and had pulled him up easily; maybe the rumors of her abs and her physical fitness weren’t too far off of the mark. 

“Um…” Onew wiped his hands against his pant leg.  “So…uh…hi?” Onew clenched his teeth as he smiled, god that was lame.

She laughed with a forced exhale from , turning slightly away before bringing her head back around.  “Hi.” She said with a little sarcasm attached.  “So, I guess we…”

“Are hitched?” Onew finished.

The first hour or so may have been a little awkward, but they had never filmed with each other before either.  The PD just let the tape roll, capturing everything that was said.

“Al – lex – zan – dre – ah,” Lex laughed slightly, repeating the pronunciation of her full name for Onew as they walked along the park path. 

“Al – lex – jan – dre – ah,” Onew tried again.

She smiled and let out a little laugh, “Close enough I guess.”

Onew stopped them where they were walking along the sidewalk, placing one gloved hand on her shoulder and puller her to a stop.  “No, I think I should be able to get my wife’s name right.”

Her eyes flew wide for a second; it was the most natural sounding reference to her as his wife that they had heard yet, before returning to normal.  It was almost so fast that Onew might have thought that he had made it up.  He could already picture the airing of this in his head.  They would repeat the scene a couple of times, adding in echo effects and writing the words across the screen with little pink hearts dotted around the edges. 

“Alright,” she nodded; trying to hold in her laugh but the air escaped her through her nose, creating puffs in the chilly air. “It’s Zan, not Jan.  It’s a common mistake in English pronunciation by Koreans since the ‘z’ sound does not exist in Hangul.”  She pulled her lips back and point at her teeth that were sitting closed and started a buzzing sound by blowing air swiftly through.  “Alex – ZAN – dria.” She emphasized. 

Onew pulled back his teeth and tried the buzzing.  It felt weird in his mouth, almost like an itch.  “ZZZZZZ, ZZZZZZ, ZZZZZ…zan…zandria…Alexandria.”  Onew suddenly brightened up like a kid in a candy store.  “I got it, right?!”  He was jumping up and down and holding Lex’s hands, making her have to jump right along with him.

She laughed with him and he thought she looked very pretty with the pink tinge to her cheeks and nose.  “You got it!”

“Alexzandria Green!”  He emphasized the odd sound saying her whole name.

She smiled, pulling away but holding onto one hand and pulling him back down the path again.  “Now I just need to get you to know my middle name.”  She had a wicked grin.

“You have another name?”  He asked, looking completely surprised and slightly alarmed. 

“Two actually,” she smiled; looking like it was nothing, “at least if you count my Confirmation name, and my mother usually does.”

“Confirmation?”  Onew sounded out the word slowly.  She had said it in English and he hadn’t heard it before that he could recall. 

“I’m Catholic…or at least I was raised Catholic.”  Onew nodded for her to continue, thinking that this was going to be a boring episode for the viewers but he really didn’t care, he was genuinely curious.  Besides, they could always edit this out of the broadcast.  “Catholics have to undergo a process called Confirmation to become an adult in the eyes of the church and a full member of the faith.  You have to take classes and undergo earlier sacraments like Baptism, Communion, Reconciliation – um, that’s your first confession – anyway, you have to take a Saint’s name when you are Confirmed.  I took Joan.”

“Joan?”  Onew’s forehead scrunched, “like Joan of Arc?” 

She smiled, “Exactly.”

“So your full name is?”

“Alexandria Elizabeth Joan Green.”

Onew stopped for a moment, and shook his head.  “That’s way too long.”

She smiled and nodded, “I think so too, and that’s why I go by ‘Lex.’  It’s so much easier.”

Onew nodded fervently, “I like Lex, you should keep it.”

“I intended to.”  The shadow was back again, ghosting over her features for a moment before she tightened her face into a wide smile, which it seemed she tended to do when she was nervous or realized that she was drifting.  Onew wondered why she did that, but that was a question for when the cameras were off. 

*****

“So how does this work exactly?”  Onew asked as his microphone was adjusted by a technician. 

“It’s the confessional.  We ask you questions about the relationship and you answer them.  Simple enough.”  The PD answered from behind the camera.

The room was plain, dark draped walls would allow for the sole focus to be on Onew.  He sat in the lone chair and squinted momentarily as his eyes adjusted to the bright light shining directly on the chair. 

“Well, I’m ready whenever you are.”

“Alright…cameras rolling?”

“Rolling.”

“And here we go.”

A scriptwriter sat next to the PD, and was ready with the questions.  Some were standard, “Do you think she’s pretty?” or “Were you expecting Lex to be your bride?” or “Do you think she likes you?” 

And then some others were strange or he just didn’t have a prepared answered for. 

“How do you think your family is going to react?”

Onew almost jumped back, startled by the question.  “Um…I’m not sure what you’re asking?”

“To a white girl for a bride.”

Onew was startled.  He knew that the show wanted to play up the inter-racial stuff, but this was a bit bold.  The wording in itself was a bit rude.  He hadn’t been prepared for them to be so forward about it. 

“Um…th-they haven’t really said anything but I don’t see why it would be a problem…” he trailed off.

“But they don’t think it’s odd?  You with a white woman?”

They’re angling for discord he realized.  Suddenly he felt really bad for Lex.  They were speaking behind her back, about her, on national television.  And the writer didn’t exactly seem to be trying to get nice fluffy responses. 

Well he wasn’t going to give them what they want.

“I don’t see why they would.  Lex is a great girl.  She’s funny and smart and caring.  She tries her hardest to get by in a country that judges her from the second that they lay eyes on her.”  He could see the faces of the PD and the writer coloring and he was proud of himself.  “I think that they’ll be impressed with her just like I am.” Onew shook his head for effect, really getting into it now for the first time since they started filming the show, “I don’t know if I could do it.  I don’t think I could live in a country where the xenophobia is so strong, but she does it with a smile on her face.  She’s really brave in my opinion and I hope that that is what my family sees in her.”

In his head he was smirking at the looks on the PD and writer’s faces.  It’s as though they wanted him to throw Lex under the bus.  Onew was hit with the sudden sobering thought, if the people who pay Lex money to appear on their shows try and treat her like this, what must everyone else behave like? 

For the first time, Onew found himself glad that he had agreed to do this show.  He was worried about what might have happened to Lex should she have been paired up with someone else.  They might have tried to turn her into a joke, or worse yet, a scapegoat for every trouble a Korean has ever had with a foreigner.  Well, he wasn’t going to let them do that.

His previous thoughts about blowing this whole thing intentionally flitted right out of his head.  He wasn’t going to let them belittle her, and he was going to take full advantage of the opportunity they had unwittingly given him. 

‘Jokes on them,’ he thought, slightly smug as them wrapped up the interview.  ‘I’m not playing this their way.’ And he slipped off his mic, leaving it on the chair behind him and walked out of the room, signaling to his manager to go.