Chapter Text
1) A Dream Within A Dream
Sichuan peppers always reminded her of someone she couldn’t actually remember. She loved her hotpot, was proud of her skills to make the perfectly steamed bao buns but there was something missing. And she couldn’t figure out what it exactly was.
Chongqing seemed like a vague memory and although Li YueChan remembered a few things about her early days in China, she remembered very little. However, somewhere in her memories lay a boy – a boy who had rabbit teeth, a boy whose cheeks resembled bao buns, a boy who didn’t fear the burning taste of the Sichuan peppers. She knew that it was that very boy who had once drawn a very rough stick figure of the girl in the moon, the actual YueChan, for her one day when she had fallen off of his bicycle and cried her eyes out. Now if only she could give the boy with a blurry face a name.
She had turned 26 recently. Even if such a boy had existed in her life once, he was now buried under the debris of time. What YueChan remembered was her life in the United States. She remembered how difficult it was for her to survive in school during her initial years. Call it stereotyping or what you may, she was a straight A student all her life. And that’s how she got into Harvard School of Design – through sheer hardwork, coupled with her brilliance and her love for buildings and architecture. By the time she graduated college, she was invited to work for Keller real estate – a company that owned the architecture firm she was now a part of. Thereafter she was sent to work in the European branch – in Prague and her life long dream of someday visiting Europe turned into reality. The only downside – the visit turned out to be longer than she would have liked it to be. But then again, that was where she met the silver lining to her darkest clouds – Yoo Taeyang.
For the first 25 years of her life, words like “romance” , “love” or even “crush” were foreign to her. But Yoo Taeyang was the embodiment of his name. He was the sun she couldn’t look away from, his smile being literal sunshine that could light up the room he walked into. The freelance photographer (and also a part time model, of course for The Keller group) was everything she was not. Spontaneous, funny, wild and brave. He was her age , a few months older, but given his antics, he was a bit childish, and endearingly so. They were, however, like Taeyang liked to say ‘bestest friends’. But that was enough for Yue, atleast for now. Maybe someday things would be better, maybe someday he would like the way she did. That someday would definitely happen someday.
But Yoo Taeyang had chiseled cheeks, his cheekbones could cut through steel perhaps. He had perfectly aligned teeth. He could tolerate spice but wasn’t fond of it. He appreciated art and hence drawing crooked stick figures was not his style. And for the love of God, he did not speak in Mandarin, especially not in the Chongqinghua. Taeyang was....Taeyang. But the boy – the bao boy, and her early years in Chongqing they seemed like a dream within a dream.