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“I’ve changed.”
It wasn’t entirely true. Or maybe it was, but in a way too complicated to explain. He couldn’t talk about Yejoon, about that night. About the first time he had felt seen without shame.
COLLECTION: ASTRAL WEEKS
pair: leeknow x oc
genre: AU, (kind of) coming of age
words: 13k
warnings: mature content (mdni), cheating, age gap (both consenting adults), internalised homophobia
notes: when I first came up with the plots for the collection, this was the one I couldn't wait to write. however, for months I couldn't find the right words to get started. a few weeks ago, I finally found them, and from that moment on, I couldn't stop until I was done. it usually takes me forever to write the first draft, but this one only took me three or four days. I even considered calling in sick to work just so I could keep writing. after almost three weeks of editing, it's finally ready! it's been a long time since I've felt this inspired, and I'm really happy with what I've created. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did! ܸ.ˬ.ܸ if you'd like, please share your thoughts, I'd really appreciate it. ݁ ⟡ ݁ .
“Yejoon.”
The name hung in the afternoon air, suspended between the low hum of the air conditioning and the muffled shuffle of footsteps in the corridor. Minho stilled, the tip of his pen hovering over the medical chart he had been filling in. Mr Park hadn’t spoken for days, only shallow breaths and vacant looks. He slept most of the time now. Minho had been surprised to find him awake when he’d entered the room that morning.
He turned towards the old man and set the chart down on the empty bedside cabinet. Bending slightly, he rested a hand on his forearm, thin beneath the cotton of his pyjamas, careful not to startle him.
“Mr Park?” he said gently. “Is everything alright?”
“Yejoon,” the old man repeated, eyes clouded with sleep and medication. “You’re here.”
Minho smiled, the smile he had perfected over years of work, carefully measured, designed to reassure and offer nothing more. He tightened his fingers just slightly around the frail arm. He had lived through this moment before. Lived through it many times. It had been repeating itself for months. Each time it left the same residue behind. Not sadness. Not quite. Something closer to compassion edged with anger. Something he had never found the right word for.
Mr Park was dying, and moments of clarity were becoming rarer. Minho could have told him the truth. Could have said that his name wasn’t Yejoon, that he was Minho, his nurse. That he had been caring for him for the past two years, in the care home where Mr Park had lived for more than five. He could have watched panic seize what little strength the old man had left. Instead, he chose to play along.
“I’m here,” he murmured quietly. “Don’t worry.”
Mr Park seemed to exhale in relief. His thin lips curved into something resembling a smile, barely there, but enough. Minho watched as sleep claimed him again, eyelids lowering slowly, and only then loosened his hold.
He picked up the chart and finished noting the last details before placing it at the foot of the bed, where it always went. Movements automatic now, repeated so often they had become choreography. He moved towards the door and opened it quietly. But he stopped when he heard the faint rustle of sheets behind him. He turned. Mr Park was looking at him.
“Yejoon,” he whispered, voice reduced to little more than breath. “Forgive me.” Then his eyes closed again.
Minho stood there a moment longer before closing the door behind him. He returned to the nurses’ station and dropped into one of the worn chairs. His shift had only just begun, and already he found himself counting the hours until he could go home. He watched the clock hands inch forward with suffocating slowness and let out a long, controlled breath.
He was about to stand when the door opened abruptly behind him. In the reflection of the window overlooking the small garden, he saw a slight figure enter the room. Outside, a handful of residents were gathered around the granite table for afternoon tea, watched over by a couple of nurses.
“Coffee?” a woman’s voice asked.
Minho turned and offered Myungok a polite smile. She returned it easily, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening.
He sat back down and waited while she set a steaming mug in front of him. He sighed again, barely noticing.
“Oh, Minho,” she laughed, taking the seat beside him. “You’ve only just started and you’re already sighing? At this rate you’ll run out of breath before the end of your shift.”
He pulled his mouth into a thin smile but said nothing. He attempted a sip; it was far too hot. He drew back with an involuntary grimace that made her chuckle.
“He called me Yejoon again,” he said after a while.
“Who?” Myungok leaned slightly closer. “Mr Park?”
Minho nodded. “I think he’s forgotten me.”
She laughed softly. “Impossible. You’re still his favourite. When you’re not around, he’s much more restless.”
Minho lifted the mug again to hide the smile threatening to surface. “Do you know who this Yejoon is?” he asked.
Myungok nodded, a trace of foam still on her upper lip. “His son.”
Minho’s eyebrows rose slightly. “His son?” he repeated, surprised. “I didn’t know he had one. He never mentioned him. Not even when he was well.”
She made a vague gesture with her hand before reaching for a napkin. “It’s a sore subject for Mr Park,” she explained. “I don’t know what happened between them, but I don’t think they’re on good terms.”
Now that she mentioned it, Minho realised he had never seen anyone visit Mr Park in the two years he’d worked there. No one at Christmas. No one for his birthday. He had always been alone. And yet he had never complained about it. Minho had simply assumed there was no one. That he and his wife, who had died many years ago, had never had children.
“He said something strange earlier,” Minho went on after a pause. “He asked me to forgive him.”
“For what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just ‘forgive me’,” he said. “Maybe he was delirious.”
Myungok smiled at him again, that expression she had learned from working too long in close proximity to endings. “Maybe.”
“Do you think we should contact him? This Yejoon, I mean.” He spoke as though she hadn’t responded. “It’s obvious he’s dying. Mr Park, I mean. Shouldn’t we let his son know? Even if they’re not close…”
She nodded slowly. “We have an emergency contact number on file, but I’m afraid it may no longer be active. From what I understand, the son lives abroad.”
Minho’s expression tightened.
“You’ve grown attached to that old man, haven’t you?”
He let out a small, embarrassed laugh and shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He raised the mug once more and took a long sip. The coffee had gone cold.
The hallway light flicked on automatically above his head, harsh and unforgiving. He slipped off his shoes, steadying himself against the wall, and dragged his rucksack down the corridor before dropping it wherever it landed. He yawned loudly, not bothering to cover his mouth, filling the flat with sound.
There was nothing Minho disliked more than the morning shift. Waking before dawn. Leaving the house when the sun was barely visible between the buildings. That dull, dragging exhaustion that clung to him for the rest of the day. Once home, he was capable of very little. He would lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling for hours, as though waiting for it to collapse on top of him. Only when darkness settled fully, when he could no longer make out the shapes of the furniture, did he begin to feel vaguely present again.
That day did not seem inclined to be any different. He shuffled to the sofa, pushed his trousers down and let them fall to the floor before collapsing face-down. He exhaled into the cushion, warm with his own breath, then rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. Was there a stain above him, or was it just his imagination?
He closed his eyes and let his thoughts blur. He did not think of anything. He may even have drifted off. He only became aware again when he felt a distant vibration, muffled, as though coming from another galaxy. Slowly, he sat up, elbows resting on his knees, hands threaded through his hair to support the weight of his head. He stared at the trousers on the floor. Rubbed his eyes. Stood with a quiet groan. He retrieved his phone from the pocket and looked at the screen. The light hit him full in the face and he squinted before the name came into focus.
Hyunwoo.
His thumb trembled slightly before he opened the message. Minho sat back down, spine straight, rigid. He tilted his head from side to side until his neck clicked.
Are you alive or do I need to report you missing?
He read it once. Twice. A third time. Then he placed the phone beside him and let himself fall back against the sofa, eyes returning to the ceiling. He half closed them.
Hyunwoo. On that very sofa. Those sharp eyes looking at him the way Minho had always wanted to be looked at, with want, with urgency. Hands marked by cuts and calluses brushing over him with a gentleness that did not match the rest of him. Lips warm and insistent against his own. Softer than Minho had allowed himself to imagine during the months he had pretended not to think about it.
He opened his eyes abruptly and shook his head. He stood, ignoring the still-lit phone beside him. He would not reply. There was no reason to.
In the kitchen, he filled the kettle and searched the cupboards for the tea bags his mother had brought during her last visit. She had said they would help him sleep. When he found them, tucked behind a jar of unopened jam, the water was already boiling. He poured it slowly into a mug and watched the steam rise.
The images began to circle again.
Hyunwoo above him. That crooked smile. That loud, rough laugh. The way he had held him afterwards, as if Minho had been more than just a body to touch.
Minho clenched his jaw and shook his head again. He mustn’t think about it. He couldn’t.
He pulled the tea bag out too soon, abruptly, not allowing it time to brew properly. He needed something else to fill his head. Different images. Anything that would take him away from that night.
His cats, still living with his parents. He had wanted to bring them with him, but his shifts kept him away from home too long. They would have suffered. Myungok, close to retirement, telling him about the small house in the countryside she and her husband had bought. A place with a wide garden where her grandchildren could play safely. Mr Park, fading slowly, steadily. Barely recognising him now, yet never forgetting to smile. The new name he had given him.
Yejoon.
It had been a week since Minho had discovered he existed. He had tried to ignore the curiosity that had settled under his skin, tried to continue as he always had. Since starting this job, he had made it a rule not to interfere in matters that were not his own.
He had seen countless people beg for forgiveness at the edge of death. He had felt his chest tighten watching them lie alone in hospital beds, waiting for someone to relieve them of burdens they had carried for decades. But he also knew it was not right to force the living to forgive the dying. Not everyone was good. Not everyone deserved redemption. It was not his place to decide what was right.
And yet this time he had not managed to restrain himself. He had asked questions. Quietly at first. Then more insistently. To colleagues. To reception staff. To other residents willing to talk. Even to Mr Park, in the rare moments when his mind was clear enough to remember.
One night, during a particularly quiet shift, he had sat in Mr Park’s room, on the chair the old man had not used for months and which no one else ever occupied. He had watched him sleep, his body trembling faintly beneath the blankets. Minho had taken his phone from his pocket and stared at the screen for a long moment before typing the few details he had into the search bar.
Park Yejoon. Berlin. University. Professor.
It had been easier than expected. The third result led to the Freie Universität Berlin website. Scrolling down, he found the name listed among faculty members.
Park Yejoon. Researcher. Professor of History.
The first thing Minho had thought, looking at the photograph beside the name, was how much he resembled Mr Park. The same downward tilt at the eyes. The same aquiline nose. The same thin lips and restrained smile. Only fuller hair. Softer cheeks. The picture must have been old; he looked younger than Minho had imagined. There was no doubt.
He took a sip of tea. It was still too hot and tasted of almost nothing, but he swallowed it anyway.
Back in the living room, he set the mug on the dining table and picked up his phone. No new notifications.
He reopened the browser. The university page was still there. He scrolled back to the top, then down again slowly until he reached Yejoon’s profile. He studied the photograph once more. Yes. There was no doubt.
He inhaled deeply and clicked on the email address. He wrote. Deleted. Wrote again. Deleted again. Rewrote. He kept at it for what felt like hours. Then, when his flat had fallen completely into darkness, he pressed send.
Park Yejoon looked exactly as he had in the photograph.
Minho had expected someone older. A face more deeply lined, perhaps streaks of grey threading through his hair. Someone closer to Mr Park than to the man in that faculty portrait. Instead, the man sitting opposite him could not have been much past forty. He wore a white linen shirt, the sleeves neatly rolled to mid-forearm. His arms were folded across his chest. A simple gold wedding band on his left hand and a leather-strapped watch were his only accessories.
Perhaps it was the fact that he was a university professor. Or perhaps it was the stillness of his expression, almost impassive, that unsettled him. Without quite meaning to, Minho found himself lowering his gaze, hands planted firmly on his knees.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, trying to mask the agitation in his voice. He gave a brief bow, automatic, almost misplaced in a space as informal as this one.
Yejoon inclined his head and leaned forward. For a second Minho thought he was returning the gesture, but instead he reached for the coffee cup in front of him.
The care home café was quiet. Afternoon light streamed through the windows, filling the room with a pale warmth. Apart from them, only an elderly woman sat with her daughter, and a few members of staff were on break nearby.
“I hope the journey wasn’t too difficult,” Minho continued, unsure how to proceed. “I imagine it was rather long.”
Yejoon gave a small nod. “It was fine,” he replied, his voice low and resonant. “A few screaming children, but one has to factor those in when travelling.”
Minho nodded politely, though he did not entirely share the sentiment. He cleared his throat, feeling the tension creep up the back of his neck. “I imagine you were surprised to receive my email, Mr Park,” he began, choosing each word carefully.
“Yejoon, please,” the man interrupted gently, lifting a hand. “There’s no need to be so formal.”
Minho looked at him for a moment too long, caught off guard. “As I was saying,” he resumed, “I imagine you were surprised.”
The soft clink of porcelain against a saucer broke the silence. “I realise it may have been unprofessional of me,” he went on, “but recently Mr Park… your father began asking for you.”
Yejoon tilted his head slightly and folded his arms again. “For me?”
“Yes,” Minho replied. “Most of the time he isn’t lucid. I believe he has convinced himself that I am you.”
For a brief second, something like disbelief crossed Yejoon’s face. Then he let out a short laugh, quickly subdued. He shifted in his seat and took another sip of coffee, longer than necessary.
He said nothing. Minho took it as permission to continue. “The doctor has informed us that Mr Park’s condition has deteriorated significantly,” he explained, searching for a balance between professionalism and gentleness. “It isn’t my practice to contact family members directly, especially when I’m aware that it may not be… welcome.”
He paused again, lifting his eyes to gauge Yejoon’s reaction. The man merely gave a faint nod.
“But I thought that perhaps he had something important to say to you,” Minho finished, this time forcing himself to maintain eye contact. “And that it was only right to let you know.”
“Thank you,” Yejoon said, with a calmness that felt almost rehearsed. “I admit your email took me by surprise. At first I considered ignoring it. But it also gave me an opportunity to stop and think.”
Minho offered a tentative smile. Even now, sitting across from him, he could not shake the lingering sensation of waiting, as though their meeting had not quite begun yet.
The reply to his email had arrived several days later, from a private address. Formal. Almost impersonal. Thanking him for the information and informing him of Yejoon’s intention to return to Korea in three weeks’ time. During those weeks Minho had lived in a kind of suspended state. He had prepared meticulously for the meeting. Reread Mr Park’s medical file repeatedly so as not to be caught unprepared if questions arose. He had even asked Myungok for advice: what tone to adopt, which words to avoid, where and when to meet. More than anything, he had hoped that Mr Park’s condition would remain stable long enough for his son to arrive.
Yet despite all that preparation, the fear of rejection had never truly left him.
“It’s been more than ten years since my father and I last saw one another,” Yejoon said, turning his gaze towards the garden outside the window. “I thought I would never want to see him again. Evidently, I was wrong.”
Minho wanted to respond, but found no adequate words. So he remained silent.
“And there are matters to sort out,” Yejoon continued, running a hand through his thick dark hair. “Administrative things I knew nothing about. In any case, I would have had to come back eventually. You were right to write.”
This time, his smile was easier. Minho returned it, more shyly.
“I only ask for a little more time,” Yejoon added before Minho could speak. “Time to readjust to this part of the world. As I said, I’ve been away for over a decade.”
Minho nodded. They both stood slowly. Yejoon extended a hand; Minho took it carefully, their grip light, almost formal. They exchanged another small bow.
“Thank you again,” Yejoon said, before turning to leave.
Minho watched him for a moment. “Thank you,” he murmured to himself, as Yejoon disappeared through the café doors.
There was a crack in the wall, just beside Mr Park’s room.
Minho had never noticed it before. But now, standing in the corridor with nothing to do but wait, he could see it clearly. It began at the ceiling and ran halfway down the wall, thin as a thread.
Forty-three minutes had passed since Yejoon had gone into that room. Forty-three minutes during which Minho had devised every plausible excuse to knock and remain inside, to observe, to listen. Check an IV. Straighten the sheets. Bring water. He had even wished, absurdly, that he might turn into a fly and slip in unnoticed.
Yejoon had appeared without warning, two days after their meeting in the café. He had left no phone number, nor asked for Minho’s. Email had been the only way to reach him. Minho had decided to respect his wish, to wait, to grant him the time he had asked for. Even as, with each passing day, anxiety carved out more space inside him. What if he did not return? What if he chose not to see his father at all?
It should not have mattered. And yet every time Minho saw Mr Park lying in his bed, his son’s name forever poised on his lips, something shifted inside him. He hoped it was not too late.
His shift had ended. He had been changing in the staff room when Myungok walked in without knocking, apparently unbothered to find him half-dressed, and informed him that Yejoon had arrived. Minho had dressed hurriedly and gone up to the second floor. But when he reached the room, the door was closed.
He did not even know why he remained there, waiting. His task ended with the email. He had done what he set out to do: inform the son, allow the father the chance to see him. The outcome was none of his concern.
And yet he stayed until the door opened.
Yejoon lifted his head and met his gaze. He seemed surprised to find him there in civilian clothes, as though seeing him without his uniform momentarily unsettled him. Then he offered a faint, almost embarrassed smile and walked towards him.
In that instant, Minho realised he had nothing prepared to say.
“You’re still here,” Yejoon observed. “Your colleagues told me you’d already left.”
Minho ran a hand through his hair. “I was about to go home, but they told me you were here…”
Yejoon gave a small, almost indulgent nod and began walking towards the lift. Minho followed without thinking, keeping what he considered a reasonable distance.
“I’m sorry you stayed longer than you needed to just to wait for me,” Yejoon said, pressing the button for the ground floor. Minho was about to respond, but Yejoon lifted a hand slightly, forestalling him. “If it’s not inconvenient, though, would you mind staying a little longer?”
They stepped into the lift together. Minho found himself staring at the back of Yejoon’s shirt.
“Has something happened to Mr Park?” he asked, unable to stop himself.
Yejoon did not answer directly. He turned slightly. “I just need some advice,” he said. “And… I think you’re the right person to ask.”
Minho nodded, uncertain. His stomach tightened. They waited in silence until the lift gave a soft jolt at the ground floor and the doors slid open. They walked slowly towards the entrance.
“I could get you something in the café,” Minho offered, noticing Yejoon heading for the exit.
“If you don’t mind,” Yejoon said. “I’d rather leave this place.”
Minho nodded again, mechanically. Swallowing felt difficult. What had happened in that room? What had they said to each other? Had Mr Park been lucid enough to recognise him? Had he managed to apologise? He searched Yejoon’s face for clues. There was no visible trace of emotion. No tears. No anger. Was he relieved? Disappointed? Sad? Minho could not tell.
“There’s a bar at the end of the street,” he said, indicating a side road to the left.
Yejoon checked the time on his watch and looked back at him. “Is it too early to start drinking?”
Minho blinked, caught off guard. “I… I’m not sure,” he stammered. “I don’t think there are strict hours for…”
Yejoon was already walking in the direction Minho had indicated, hands slipping into his pockets. Minho hesitated only a moment before following.
They sat at a small table by the window, traffic crawling past outside. Yejoon ordered two beers. Minho did not object. Perhaps a little alcohol would help him as well.
“Did it go all right?” he ventured when the waiter set the glasses down.
Yejoon took a long sip and smiled, but not in response to the question. “I spoke to the doctor,” he said, wiping his lower lip with his thumb. “He explained my father’s condition. There’s nothing to be done, is there?”
Minho watched a bead of condensation slide down the side of his glass, tracing an uneven line.
“There is a treatment,” he said, slipping back into a more professional tone. “But given Mr Park’s overall condition, full remission would be unlikely. He’s elderly. The therapy would be invasive. Recovery would be… extremely difficult.”
Yejoon nodded. For a moment he said nothing, lost in thought. “He mentioned the possibility of transferring him to… what did he call it? An hospice? For palliative care.”
Minho’s throat felt dry. He took a sip of beer but barely managed to swallow it. He had had this conversation too many times in recent months. He had discussed it at length with the doctor. And yet each time he found himself wishing for another option.
“I wanted your opinion,” Yejoon continued. “You know his situation better than I do.”
Minho drew in a slow breath. “Given the circumstances,” he said carefully, “it would be the most appropriate course. Especially for him. To keep him as comfortable as possible.”
Yejoon let out a short, almost bitter laugh. “I felt sorry for him,” he admitted, leaning back in his chair. “Seeing him there. Not even strong enough to sit up.”
Minho said nothing, staring into his glass.
“It’s strange,” Yejoon went on, as though speaking more to himself than to Minho. “My parents had me late. My father was always the oldest among the other fathers. And yet he was the most energetic. The loudest one at school matches. Who would have imagined it would end like this?”
Minho looked up at him. He wanted to ask a hundred questions. What Mr Park had been like when he was young. What kind of man. What kind of father. But he held back. It was obvious Yejoon was not here to revisit the past. “Were you able to talk?” he asked instead. In truth, it was the only thing he really wanted to know.
Yejoon shook his head. “He wasn’t very present.”
Minho lowered his gaze. “That happens more often now, I’m afraid.”
Yejoon shrugged, as though discarding the entire conversation. He drained his beer in one go, stood abruptly, and adjusted his shirt. He checked his watch again.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” he said with a faint smile. “Thank you for your help.”
Minho sank back into his chair. His glass still half full in front of him.
Minho wasn’t entirely sure why he had agreed.
The day before, he had received another email from Yejoon. The tone had been the same as always, polite, detached. He was asking whether Minho might be available to help him with one of the many practical matters he needed to deal with.
Minho could have said no. In fact, he probably should have. It was not part of his job. He had no obligation to involve himself in family affairs that did not concern him. He and Yejoon were certainly not friends. He owed him nothing. And yet he had not hesitated. He had not paused to consider what was appropriate. He had replied within minutes, perhaps with a willingness that bordered on excessive.
Now he was behind the wheel of his car, hands tight on the steering wheel. Yejoon sat beside him, gaze fixed out of the window. They were driving towards a house in the countryside Minho had never seen, to deal with matters that were not his to manage.
“It should be here, on the right,” Yejoon said suddenly, leaning forward to point towards a dirt track.
The GPS had failed them as soon as they had left the main road and entered the narrow lanes of a small hillside village. From then on, they had relied on the blurred remnants of Yejoon’s childhood memories. “I haven’t been here in nearly thirty years,” he had said earlier. Before I was even born, Minho had thought.
The house stood surrounded by overgrown greenery, the garden thick with weeds that had not been cut in at least a year. It had a red roof and large modern windows that clashed awkwardly with the cracks in the walls and the old wicker chairs abandoned beneath a plastic awning. A satellite dish and an external boiler were the only signs that someone had lived there in recent years.
“It belonged to my grandparents,” Yejoon had explained during the drive. “When they died, my father and his sister inherited it. For a long time they rented it out to a local family. But after they moved out a few years ago, it’s mostly stood empty. Apart from the occasional weekend when someone felt like escaping to the countryside.”
Minho had nodded to show he was listening, eyes on the road.
“My aunt passed away last year,” Yejoon had continued. “My cousin would like to sell the house. But because of my father’s condition, she’s never been able to obtain his consent. Technically, half of the proceeds belong to him.”
He had paused briefly. “I doubt he’d object. He was never sentimental about things like this. But legally, he’s no longer capable of making decisions.”
At that point, Minho had braked sharply to avoid a stray dog that had darted across the road, and the conversation had fallen away.
“And you?” Minho asked now, once they had parked. He stepped out of the car and closed the door gently. “Are you all right with selling it?”
Yejoon turned towards him, the house at his back. He shrugged. “I have good memories of this place,” he said. His gaze drifted past Minho’s shoulder towards the driveway. “When I came back and spoke to my cousin, for a moment I thought about buying it myself. Paying her share and restoring it.”
Minho waited, saying nothing.
“My husband and I have often talked about buying a place in Korea,” Yejoon added, almost casually. “Just as an excuse to come back.”
Minho froze. The words reached him a fraction too late.
My husband.
He felt his lips part slightly. Yejoon was still looking at him, eyebrows faintly raised, as though he had noticed the hesitation. Minho cleared his throat and looked away, stepping closer to the house as if studying the façade.
“But then I thought about it properly,” Yejoon went on. “And it would just be a waste of money.”
He unlocked the door and they went inside. The air was stale, heavy with a faintly sweet smell Minho could not quite place. Dust. Old wood. Damp. Yejoon moved quickly to open the large windows, letting fresh air in.
The furniture was solid and old-fashioned, dark sideboards, a long low table, sofas and armchairs with wooden arms. All coated in a thick layer of dust.
“The family who lived here after my grandparents weren’t particularly well-off,” Yejoon said, running his fingers along the back of a chair. “They kept all the furniture. In a way I’m glad. Almost nothing has changed since I was last here.”
Minho watched him move through the space with surprising familiarity. It was striking, he thought, how time never truly erased memory.
He found himself imagining a much younger version of Yejoon, a child running through these rooms, laughing. He imagined Mr Park too, younger and strong, smoking on the patio, so like the Yejoon standing before him now. He wondered whether either of them could ever have imagined that thirty years later they would no longer be speaking.
“There should be some boxes in the wardrobe in the bedroom,” Yejoon said, opening a door to the right and stepping inside.
Minho followed quietly, almost on tiptoe, as if afraid to disturb a past that was not his. He found Yejoon kneeling in front of an open wardrobe, pulling out a couple of cardboard boxes marked by time and damp. Minho knelt beside him. Inside were smaller boxes, carefully wrapped in old Christmas paper. Each bore a label with neatly written dates.
Yejoon picked one up and opened it. Minho saw him smile. “My grandmother was meticulous. Almost obsessive,” he said, touching a stack of documents. “When I was little it drove me mad. I wasn’t allowed to touch anything without putting it back exactly where it belonged. But now I’m grateful.”
Minho opened another box slowly. Photographs. Receipts. Papers folded with near-maniacal precision. “What exactly are you looking for?” he asked.
There was no immediate answer. Minho looked up. Yejoon was smiling faintly to himself, a small binder open in his hands. He was looking at old photographs. Minho leaned closer, curious. Yejoon startled slightly at the sudden proximity, then laughed, embarrassed, and angled the photographs so Minho could see.
“That’s my cousin,” he said, pointing to a girl in a pale blue hanbok, no older than ten. “And that’s me with my mother.” A baby in the arms of a woman with voluminous eighties hair.
Yejoon turned another page and stopped at a photograph of a group of men in military uniform, all smiling. Minho recognised Mr Park immediately. His smile was more restrained than the others’, almost shy, but he looked undeniably happy. In that photograph, he was identical to Yejoon.
“You look very alike,” Minho found himself saying.
He heard Yejoon exhale softly. “I know,” he said with a quiet laugh. He stared at the image for a moment longer. “Sometimes I wonder how two people can look so similar and yet be so different.”
Minho did not answer straight away. He shifted back to the other boxes, arranging them chronologically across the floor. “Are you looking for something specific?” he tried again, without looking at him.
Yejoon seemed to pull himself back to the present. He replaced the photographs and smiled at Minho. “I’ve been thinking about what the doctor said. About the hospice,” he said. “I think it’s the best solution.”
“I think so too,” Minho replied.
“And all of this,” Yejoon continued, gesturing at the boxes scattered around them. “Won’t matter once he’s gone. My cousin asked me to sort through everything. Keep what’s important. Get rid of the rest.”
He opened another box and paused. “But I’m not sure what counts as important,” he admitted, almost sheepishly. “I thought you might help me.”
Minho waited until Yejoon looked at him again. “Of course,” he said.
Yejoon nodded but did not immediately return to the boxes. He remained still, hands resting on his thighs. “I don’t hate my father,” he said suddenly. “Even if it might seem that way. I don’t. Truly.”
“I never thought you did,” Minho said gently. “And even if you did, there would be nothing wrong with that.”
Yejoon looked at him, surprised. “You think so?”
Minho nodded. “I don’t believe we’re obliged to love our parents,” he said quietly. “Giving us life doesn’t automatically make them good people.”
Yejoon lowered his head and smiled sadly. “Our society would collapse if everyone thought like you.”
Minho laughed softly. “Perhaps. But it’s true. We’re not required to care for people who’ve hurt us.”
Yejoon let himself fall backwards onto the floor among the open boxes, arms spread, staring at the ceiling. “Do you have a difficult relationship with your parents as well?”
“No,” Minho replied. “Quite the opposite. But I’ve seen many situations like this in my work.”
Yejoon gave a small nod but said nothing.
“People are afraid of death,” Minho continued. “Afraid of what might be waiting for them. So they think back over everything they’ve done wrong. All the harm they’ve caused. And they hope to be forgiven, so they can leave with a lighter heart.”
He glanced at Yejoon. When he saw no reaction, he went on. “But it isn’t the responsibility of those who remain to carry that weight for them. Forgiveness shouldn’t be assumed.”
“If that’s what you believe,” Yejoon said, sitting up again, “why did you write to me?”
Minho began stacking the boxes simply to keep his hands occupied. “Because I think everyone deserves the chance to try,” he answered. “To make amends. To apologise. It’s up to the other person to decide whether to forgive. And whatever that decision is, it has to be respected.”
Yejoon was silent for a moment. Then he stood slowly and picked up one of the piles Minho had arranged. “Shall we start taking these to the car?”
“Minho,” Mr Park called. “Could you help me?”
Minho looked up at him. He was sitting upright in bed, picking at the lunch Minho had just arranged on the tray table. He seemed better that day. There was a clarity in his gaze Minho had not seen in some time. He did not know how long that moment of lucidity would last, but he had learned to accept them for what they were: rare intervals of light in an otherwise clouded world.
“I’m thirsty,” the old man continued, gesturing faintly towards the small bottle on the tray. Minho had already loosened the cap, but perhaps he feared he would not have the strength to pour it himself.
Minho stepped closer and poured some water into the glass. He helped him lift it to his lips and waited while he drank before placing it carefully back on the tray. “Do you need anything else?” he asked gently.
Mr Park shook his head. “No, thank you.”
Minho remained by the bed for a few moments longer, just in case he changed his mind. It happened often. He watched him: the uncertain movements, the food chewed slowly and swallowed with difficulty. He thought of what his son had said, how he had described him as energetic, strong. The young man in uniform smiling in that photograph. Minho had only ever known him like this: already ill, his mind drifting in and out of reach. It was difficult to reconcile that image with Yejoon’s memories.
“I don’t want any more,” Mr Park complained suddenly, pulling Minho from his thoughts. “I can’t.”
“You should try a little,” Minho encouraged. “You’ve barely eaten for days.”
Mr Park grimaced and pushed the plate away with a tired but decisive gesture. “Enough.”
Minho did not insist. He gathered the almost untouched tray and turned towards the door.
“Minho,” the old man called again. “Has he been here?”
Minho paused. For a few seconds he stood still, unsure how to respond. Then he walked back, set the tray down on the bedside table and asked quietly, “Who do you mean?”
“My son. Yejoon.”
Minho held his breath. Did he truly remember their meeting?
“Yes,” he said at last. “A few days ago.”
Mr Park exhaled, almost in relief, and leaned back against the pillows. “I thought I’d dreamt it,” he murmured. “I can’t remember what we said.”
Minho pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It was just the two of you.”
Mr Park’s expression tightened slightly. “I need to apologise,” he whispered, his breath already growing shallow. Speaking for too long exhausted him now.
Minho opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
He knew he was straying beyond his role. He was only a nurse. His responsibility was to monitor symptoms, administer medication, check vital signs. Not to mend fractures that had split open decades ago.
And yet for days he had been unable to stop thinking about his last conversation with Yejoon.
My husband.
Yejoon was gay. Married to a man. Minho had replayed those two words again and again. Spoken so simply. So naturally. As though there were nothing extraordinary in them at all.
Minho was not naïve. He had spent days wondering what could have driven father and son apart for more than ten years. What wound had Mr Park inflicted that had pushed Yejoon to move across continents and sever all contact? After what Yejoon had said, the answer seemed obvious. And it hurt in a strange, muted way.
The thought had not left him since. Looking at the frail man in the bed, he found himself wondering what Mr Park would think of him, of Minho, if he too were to admit the truth. If he found the courage to say aloud what he truly was. The idea that Mr Park might reject him saddened him. But it did not surprise him.
Minho knew the cruelty of the world. The cruelty of the society he lived in. He was not ready to feel that rejection on his own skin. That was why he had remained silent all his life. Why he had accepted solitude. Just as Mr Park had.
“I’m sure he’ll come and see you again,” Minho said finally, offering a small smile.
“Who?” Mr Park asked, his gaze already unfocused.
Minho exhaled softly. A brief moment of clarity, already gone.
Minho should not have been there, in a hotel room with a man he had known for only a few weeks.
He had found Yejoon sitting on one of the benches in the care home garden, looking towards the entrance as though waiting for someone. That someone, evidently, was him. Minho had watched him rise and walk over, slow but purposeful. Without meaning to, he had found himself holding his breath.
“Have you come to see your father?” he had asked, adjusting the strap of his rucksack.
Yejoon had not replied. He had simply fallen into step beside him, silent. For reasons he could not explain, Minho had not protested.
Only once they had passed through the gate did Yejoon turn to him, tone light, almost cheerful. “What do you like to do in your spare time?”
Minho had stopped walking, staring at him. “Sorry?”
Yejoon had laughed softly at his expression. “I’ve done nothing these past few days but run from one place to another,” he said. “I meant to take a day to enjoy the city. Then I realised I don’t really know it any more.”
Minho said nothing. He wondered how much had truly changed in ten years. Was the country so different from the one Yejoon had left?
“I was hoping you might give me a few recommendations,” Yejoon added, resuming his pace.
Minho followed. “I don’t do much, to be honest. Work and sleep. I box sometimes, but I haven’t trained in a while.”
“Boxing,” Yejoon repeated thoughtfully. “I suspect that’s not quite my thing.”
Minho laughed but did not argue.
They walked all the way down the slope to the main road where Minho usually caught the bus home. His plan for the afternoon had been simple: return to his flat and stare at the ceiling until evening. The morning shift had exhausted him. But for some reason, he let the bus pull away without him and continued walking beside Yejoon.
They talked as they drifted into smaller streets away from the traffic. Now and then Minho pointed out restaurants he liked, bars where he met friends. Other times, it was Yejoon's turn to revisit places he had been to in the past. Bars that had now become convenience stores or fast-fashion chains, old flats belonging to friends who, like him, no longer lived there. Only when they stumbled upon a pub Yejoon had frequented during university, apparently still run by the same owners, did they finally stop.
“It’s strange,” Yejoon said after a long swallow of beer. “Seeing how much has changed in such a short time.”
“Has it?” Minho asked, more at ease now. “It seems the same to me.”
Yejoon shook his head, his gaze faintly distant. “It’s hard to notice change when you’re inside the aquarium,” he said. “It’s like ageing. You think you’re exactly the same, and then one day you wake up, look in the mirror, and find your first grey hair. It’s been there for months. You just never paid attention.”
“Do you miss it?” Minho asked. “Living here, I mean.”
“No,” Yejoon replied with disarming certainty. “I missed people. Friends. The food, sometimes. But I knew almost immediately after I left that this part of the world wasn’t made for me. For people like me.”
Minho did not press. They changed the subject, and the hours slipped past unnoticed. He learned that Yejoon had moved after obtaining a position as a doctoral student at the university where he now taught. He did not mention why he had chosen one so far away.
At first, Germany had only been meant for his studies. But during that time he had met Mathias, who would later become his husband. The ease with which he said it left Minho breathless. He noticed the way Yejoon watched him as he spoke, as though checking for hostility, measuring whether he could be trusted. Minho had smiled, gently, in reassurance.
Yejoon had done most of the talking. Yet there were still so many things Minho wanted to ask. When the owner informed them the pub was closing, it had felt natural, almost inevitable, to accept Yejoon’s invitation to continue the evening at his hotel.
And so now Minho stood in a sixth-floor room, a beer from a minimarket in his hand, looking out at the buildings opposite, most windows dark. He checked the time. Past two.
“Can I ask you something?” he said at last.
He had debated whether to speak. Perhaps it was the alcohol lending him courage. Or perhaps it was the fear that if he did not ask now, he never would.
Yejoon nodded. “Of course.”
“The reason you don’t speak to your father,” Minho began carefully. “Is it because… you’re attracted to men?”
Yejoon did not seem surprised. He did not stiffen or look away. He simply sat down on the sofa opposite the bed and placed his beer on the glass table. Some of it spilled and spread across the surface, but he did not notice.
“There were many things my father and I never agreed on,” he said, eyes bright. “But he always forgave me. Everything, except this.”
Minho stayed still.
“The fact that I loved people of my own sex,” Yejoon continued. “That was something he could never understand. Or accept.”
Minho moved away from the window, set his beer down beside Yejoon’s, and sat next to him.
“I’m sorry,” Yejoon went on with a bitter smile. “I don’t want to ruin the image you have of him. I can see how fond you are of him. He’s not a bad man. But he’s a man of old principles. Like many of his generation. There are things he simply cannot conceive of.”
“You don’t have to excuse him,” Minho said quietly.
Yejoon gave a short, strained laugh. “But it’s the truth. This society doesn’t allow difference. It doesn’t tolerate what falls outside its boundaries. My father is the perfect product of the world that shaped him.”
“I’m sorry,” Minho whispered, inching closer. He wanted to take his hand but stopped himself. “I’m sorry it turned out that way.”
“There’s one thing my father and I are terribly alike in,” Yejoon said, as though he had not heard. “We don’t know how to face our problems.”
Minho frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”
“It took me nearly thirty years to admit to my parents that I was gay,” Yejoon said, letting his head fall back against the edge of the bed. “You probably imagine he shouted. Threw me out. Something dramatic.”
He paused. “He didn’t. He simply started ignoring me. As though I were a problem that shouldn’t exist.”
Minho opened his mouth, then closed it. There were no words that could soften that.
“And I wasn’t any better,” Yejoon continued. “I already had plans to move to Berlin. I’d been accepted. For more than ten years, all I’ve done is run. I ran from my family, from my friends, because I was afraid of their judgement.”
Minho sensed there was more.
“When my doctorate was nearly finished,” Yejoon went on, voice tightening, “I asked Mathias to marry me. So I could stay in Germany. So I wouldn’t have to come back here.”
He drew a breath, his face twisting slightly, as though speaking hurt.
“And even now I’m running,” he murmured. “Your email arrived at exactly the right moment.”
Minho blinked. “My email?”
Yejoon turned to him, offering a sad smile. “Mathias wants to start a family. To adopt,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s what I want. I started wondering if I rushed into marriage. When you wrote to me, it felt like the perfect excuse to leave. To run again. I promised him I’d think about it. That I’d come back with an answer. But now I feel suspended between two places. I don’t want to return. But I don’t want to stay here either.”
Minho moved closer until their knees touched. He placed a hand on Yejoon’s arm, fingers closing gently, the same way he did with his father, so as not to startle him.
“Yejoon…”
“I’m sorry,” Yejoon interrupted, trying to stand. Minho stopped him. “I’m rambling. You can’t possibly understand…”
Minho tightened his grip slightly. “I do,” he said, voice low.
Yejoon turned towards him, eyes widening. “You…”
Minho did not let him finish. He took Yejoon’s face in his hands and pressed his lips to his.
Minho realised what he had done only when he pulled away from him.
For a moment he hovered there, suspended, his lips still only a breath from Yejoon’s, their breathing tangled together. His heart was hammering, too fast, too loud. So loud he was certain the other man could feel it.
Yejoon was looking at him. Minho couldn’t tell which emotion was moving across his face. Curiosity? Disapproval? Disappointment? Anger? Perhaps a fragment of all of them. But there was something else too. A flicker. A hesitation Minho feared might harden into rejection. He saw Yejoon part his lips, as though about to speak.
Minho didn’t give him the chance.
He couldn’t let the fragile bubble they’d stumbled into burst. If Yejoon spoke, the moment would dissolve. Words would bring everything else rushing back in: Berlin, Mathias, the ring on his finger, the weight of guilt. And with them would vanish that sudden, feral courage Minho wasn’t sure he would ever find again.
He leaned forward and kissed him again. Harder this time. Hungrier. His hands rose to frame Yejoon’s face once more, thumbs pressing lightly against his cheekbones. His mouth moved with an urgency that wasn’t only desire, it was the need to be seen, to be recognised, to be chosen.
The kiss deepened. Their tongues brushed, tentative at first, then surer. Minho felt Yejoon’s breathing grow uneven, a hand lifting and hovering uncertainly before settling against his hip.
That touch made him tremble.
It wasn’t just skin against fabric. It was the consent within it. The decision to stay.
He slid his fingers into Yejoon’s hair and drew him closer still, as though letting go even for a second would make everything disappear. Yejoon’s hands gripped his shirt, fists tightening in the fabric. Minho pushed him back against the sofa. He was afraid to stop, even to breathe. Because he knew that if he allowed himself a moment of clarity, he would realise what he was doing, and he would stop.
His hands travelled down Yejoon’s neck, over warm skin, across his chest. He felt the rapid pulse beneath his fingertips, the unsteady breath. His fingers caught the hem of the polo shirt and tugged it upwards with an impatience he couldn’t control. He was moving too fast, he knew. But slowing down would mean thinking, and thinking was impossible.
Yejoon pulled back just long enough to let the shirt be removed. When it fell to the floor, Minho bent over him again, tracing an uncertain line of kisses along his neck, lower, to his collarbone. He tasted salt on his skin, soap mingled with something warmer, more intimate. It made his head spin.
His fingers found Yejoon’s belt. They trembled slightly as he undid it. He forced his movements to appear steady, controlled. He didn’t want Yejoon to sense how out of his depth he was, how natural and unfamiliar it felt all at once. He eased the trousers and underwear down more slowly this time.
Then he knelt between his legs.
For a moment he looked up. Yejoon was watching him. His chest rose and fell unevenly, his eyes fixed on Minho. There was surprise there, yes. But desire too. And something more complicated, a subtle tension, as though he were still measuring the boundary they were crossing.
Minho lowered his head before he could think.
The first touch was uncertain, almost shy. He closed his eyes, trying to quiet the noise in his mind. With Hyunwoo it had been different. Hyunwoo had led, in the dark, swift and decisive. Minho had never really had to learn. He had never had to choose.
Now it was his turn.
He used his mouth slowly, trying to recall sensations rather than technique. The taste was vivid, alive. He wondered if he was doing it right, if this was what Yejoon truly wanted. Doubt thudded in his temples, but he didn’t stop. He let himself be guided by Yejoon’s reactions, by the smallest shift, every held breath.
He felt fingers slide into his hair. Not forcing. Not pulling. Simply holding him there. The contact made his heartbeat ache in his chest.
He found a rhythm. Gradually he felt Yejoon give way. The grip in his hair tightened, fingers curling and uncurling as though seeking purchase.
A low, broken groan. “Fuck…”
Something opened inside Minho’s chest. Relief. Want. A flicker of pride that made him shake. Yejoon’s breathing deepened, roughened. Minho understood. He moved with more confidence, guided by the shared rhythm, by the unconscious lift of Yejoon’s hips.
He pulled Minho up and kissed him hard, as if he needed him closer, needed to erase all distance. Their hands moved urgently now, less hesitant. Minho’s shirt was stripped away, then his trousers. Every gesture was hurried and inevitable at once.
Minho couldn’t think any more. Not about Mr Park. Not about the care home. Not about what could go wrong. There was only the heat of Yejoon’s skin against his, the weight of his body, the sound of their breathing weaving together.
They stumbled towards the bed, nearly laughing against each other’s mouths, a fleeting break in the tension, before falling onto the mattress together.
Minho found himself above him, their bare bodies pressed together. He paused for a second. Yejoon’s chest rose beneath him, hair falling over his forehead, his gaze open and steady.
It was all unbearably beautiful.
He bent to kiss him again, slower now. His hands slid down Yejoon’s chest to his hips, exploring with a mix of desire and the need to prove himself. He wanted to continue. To lead. To show he knew what he was doing.
But something fractured.
The question hit him without warning. What now? With Hyunwoo it had been different; rushed, confused, Hyunwoo taking control before he could hesitate. Minho had never had to choose the next step. Never had to expose himself like this.
Panic rose quietly but fiercely. His hands stilled. His breathing changed, shorter now, uneven, not with desire but with fear. He was about to sleep with a married man. A man with an entire life on the other side of the world. Who was he to step into that space? And what if he didn’t know how? What if he proved clumsy, inexperienced?
He was too far inside his own head. Too aware of every gesture, every hesitation. The more he tried to appear sure, the more exposed he felt. Yejoon’s body was beneath him, warm, real, present. And Minho felt suddenly distant, frozen.
Was this truly who he was?
Yejoon noticed. His hands settled at Minho’s waist, steady, grounding. There was no impatience in his touch. Gently he guided him onto his side, the movement slow, reassuring, as though telling him he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Then he followed, positioning himself behind him.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered against Minho’s shoulder.
His voice was different now. Lower. Softer. No judgement. No urgency. Only a tenderness that loosened something inside Minho’s chest.
Yejoon pressed a kiss between his shoulder blades, then lower. His hands moved over Minho’s hips slowly, deliberately, as though they had all the time in the world. As though nothing needed proving.
He reached towards the bedside table. Minho heard the soft click of a cap. Then Yejoon’s fingers returned to him, patient, careful, exploring with a gentleness that was almost disarming. The first touch made him tense. It was really happening.
“Breathe,” Yejoon murmured against his skin.
Minho obeyed.
He drew in a slow breath, trying to release the tightness in his muscles. Yejoon’s fingers moved with care, never forcing. The initial discomfort made him stiffen, but it wasn’t unbearable. It was a boundary shifting gradually. An unfamiliar pressure that, with time, ceased to feel entirely foreign.
When Yejoon moved into him, Minho clutched the fabric of a pillow beside him. It hurt. But not in a way he wanted to escape. It was a pain that anchored him, that forced him to remain inside his own body. It told him: this is you.
Yejoon stilled almost immediately. A hand slid along his back, drawing slow circles, a reminder that he could stop at any moment.
“Is this alright?” he whispered.
Minho nodded, unable to form words.
Yejoon moved again, carefully. Deeper this time. The pain softened gradually, transforming into something broader, fuller. A sensation spreading from the centre of him outward, splintering his thoughts.
There was no room left for fear. Only the rhythm they found together. Slow at first, then steadier. Minho moved with him almost without thinking, hips responding instinctively. It didn’t feel forced. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt inevitable.
A hand slid around his body, brushing against his manhood. The contact drew a muffled sound from him into the pillow, uncontrolled. It was too much, the feeling of being filled, touched, seen, wanted all at once. Each movement seemed to reach something deep within him, something he had never dared to name.
“You’re perfect,” Yejoon whispered against his shoulder.
The word struck him like a current. Perfect. No one had ever said that to him like that. No one had ever looked at him in such vulnerability and made him feel there was nothing to correct.
The tension built, rising, unbearable. A pressure spreading through him, erasing everything else. He couldn’t hold back. He let go with a muffled sound, his body tightening.
Behind him, Yejoon stiffened, breath breaking against his skin. For a moment they remained still, joined, Yejoon’s chest rising and falling against his back.
Then slowly, he withdrew. Minho rolled onto his side, exhausted. He had never felt so emptied and so full at the same time.
Yejoon lay beside him and slipped an arm around his waist. His warmth was steady, reassuring. Minho closed his eyes.
And he understood. With a clarity that was almost painful. This was who he was. Not a mistake. Not an accident. Not a deviation.
For the first time in his life, he did not feel the need to hide.
“I’ve never told anyone.”
Yejoon switched off the hairdryer even though his hair was still damp. He must have caught Minho’s reflection in the mirror. He turned. “Did you say something?”
Minho was still sitting in the bed where he had woken that morning. For a brief second, when he had surfaced from sleep, he’d been afraid he was alone. Then his senses had sharpened and he’d heard the rush of water from the shower. When Yejoon finally came out of the bathroom they hadn’t said anything, only exchanged a smile. Minho had understood there was no room for awkwardness.
He had stayed there, naked beneath the sheet. He could have dressed and left, ended it neatly, pretended none of it had happened. But something unresolved still hung in the air, something he needed to let go of.
“I’ve never told anyone,” he repeated, adjusting the pillow behind his back.
“Told anyone what?” Yejoon asked, setting the hairdryer down before coming closer. He sat on the edge of the bed, his hand brushing lightly through Minho’s hair.
Minho swallowed. “That I’m gay.”
Yejoon smiled and touched his cheek gently. “And how do you feel, now you’ve said it?” he asked, a trace of teasing in his voice. “Better?”
Minho pushed his hand away, laughing softly. “Maybe. A bit.”
They looked at each other for a moment without speaking. Minho expected him to stand up again, to go back to drying his hair. Instead Yejoon kept watching him, body angled slightly towards him, as though weighing his words.
“Can I ask you something a bit personal?” he said at last.
Minho nodded.
“Was it your… first time?” Yejoon asked. “With a man, I mean.”
“No,” Minho admitted. He hesitated, then added, “There’s someone I… someone I’m interested in. We’ve… well.”
Yejoon tilted his head, smiling faintly. He wasn’t mocking him. There was something almost tender in the way he looked at him. For the first time Minho felt the difference in their ages with uncomfortable clarity. He hadn’t truly noticed it before, but now, confessing his foolish crush, he felt like an awkward boy.
“Oh, really?” Yejoon prompted lightly.
Minho nodded, cheeks burning. He lowered his eyes, unable to suppress the embarrassed smile. “Yes. But I think I ruined it. I… I got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of admitting what I am,” Minho said, drawing his knees to his chest and hiding his face against them. “I always thought there was no need. That I could just live on my own. Without ever having to say anything out loud.”
He coughed, trying to steady his voice. “Maybe that’s what drew me to your father,” he added quietly.
He couldn’t see Yejoon’s face, but he imagined the surprise there. “My father?”
“Yes.” Minho nodded. “The fact that he didn’t seem to suffer from being alone. A lot of people, when they move into a care home, begin to complain. Even if they’re surrounded by others all the time. Sometimes they feel abandoned. Sometimes they’re grieving the people who are gone. Eventually they start to feel the loneliness.”
He paused, thinking. “But your father never complained. Not once. I thought… maybe we were alike in that way.”
He felt the mattress dip as Yejoon lay back. When Minho looked up, he found him stretched out on the crumpled sheets, arms open, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“You know, Minho,” he said slowly, “there are so many things I regret. So many things I would do differently if I could go back.”
He hesitated, as if afraid of choosing the wrong words. “But I’ve never regretted admitting who I am. Not once.” His voice grew firmer. “Running away wasn’t the right way to handle it. I should have stayed. I should have been braver. But I couldn’t go on living the way I had before, hiding, pretending to be someone else. It was eating me alive.”
He rested the back of his hand against his forehead. “If I hadn’t told my parents I was gay, I don’t think I would have had the courage to date a man in Germany either. I would have lived in constant fear that someone would find out somehow.”
Minho lay down beside him, careful not to touch him. He looked up at the ceiling too, as he had done so many times before. But for the first time in a long while, he hoped it wouldn’t collapse.
“You don’t have to shout it to the world,” Yejoon continued. “Not if you’re not ready. But don’t bury it inside yourself. Don’t deny yourself the chance to be happy.”
Minho let the words settle. Then, quietly, “Are you happy? Despite everything?”
“It may sound absurd, given the circumstances,” Yejoon said, his voice trembling slightly, “but I love Mathias. I truly love him. I’m happy with him. Happy with the life we’ve built, despite everything. I don’t regret marrying him. I don’t regret the choices I made.”
His eyes widened, as if holding back tears. “But when you’ve spent your whole life running, it’s hard to stop. Even when you don’t need to any more.”
Minho turned onto his side, propping himself up on one arm to look at him directly. “I think you’re much braver than you give yourself credit for,” he said, surprised by his own certainty. “You built a life that makes you happy and you protected it. It’s normal to be afraid that a child might change everything.”
Yejoon reached up and ruffled his hair. “You should listen to yourself more often,” he said with a soft laugh. “If you followed your own advice, you’d already have the answers you’re looking for.”
Minho grumbled and dropped against his chest, fingers gripping the edge of his T-shirt. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “About last night. I shouldn’t have.”
Yejoon made him lift his head and look at him. “Don’t apologise,” he said firmly, though his smile was gentle. “Let’s pretend it never happened.”
Minho knew he would never be able to pretend that night hadn’t happened. He would never forget it. But he nodded anyway.
“Are you still here?” Myungok asked when she found him in the café. She sat down opposite him, still in uniform, a steaming coffee in her hands.
Minho only looked up after a moment, then nodded. His shift had ended more than an hour earlier, yet he hadn’t gone home. “Yejoon… I mean, Mr Park’s son came to see him,” he explained, turning the empty teacup between his fingers. “He said he wanted to speak to me. I’m waiting.”
Myungok gave a small nod, studying him. “I heard they’re transferring Mr Park to another facility in the next few days,” she said carefully. “How are you feeling?”
Minho shrugged. “I’m fine,” he replied. “They don’t come here to get better.”
“Minho…” she began, reaching across the table to place her hand over his.
He offered her a faint smile. “Really. Don’t worry.”
She sighed. “You’re impossibly stubborn,” she muttered, getting to her feet and picking up her coffee. “I’d better get back to work. See you tomorrow.”
“Are we on together?” he asked.
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is that a problem?” she teased.
Minho laughed and shook his head. “Not at all.”
He watched her leave the café, then drew in a slow breath.
Yejoon had appeared that morning as he always did, without warning. For a moment Minho had thought he’d done it deliberately, to avoid running into him. Instead he had seen him walking down the corridor towards him while Minho was clearing the lunch trays into the trolley.
“Hello,” Yejoon had said, wearing that same stoic, unreadable expression.
“Hi,” Minho had replied, wiping his hands against his uniform trousers.
“I came to see how my father is,” Yejoon had explained, almost apologetically. “Could we talk later?”
“My shift finishes in a few hours,” Minho had said. “If you don’t want to wait here…”
“I think I’ll still be here,” Yejoon had cut in.
Minho had simply nodded, glancing towards Mr Park’s door.
“If you’d like,” Yejoon had added, “you can come in as well.”
Minho had wanted to say yes. He had wanted to be there with them. But he knew it wasn’t right, so he shook his head and went back to work.
The hours had passed more slowly than usual. As soon as four o’clock struck, he’d hurried to the staff room, changed, and gone straight to the café, certain he would find Yejoon at one of the tables. He wasn’t there. Had he left without waiting? Had he changed his mind?
Minho had gone back upstairs and knocked on Mr Park’s door. He had waited a few seconds before stepping inside. Yejoon was still there, sitting beside his father. Neither of them was speaking. Yejoon had turned and smiled at him. His eyes had looked swollen. Had he been crying? “I’ll join you in a moment,” he had said simply.
Minho had returned to the café and ordered tea just to fill the waiting, though he didn’t want it. Another half hour passed before he saw Yejoon step through the door.
“Sorry,” Yejoon said, sitting down opposite him. “I didn’t realise how much time had passed.”
“Did it go all right?” Minho asked at once, unable to hold back. His fingers twitched against the table; his legs refused to stay still.
Yejoon didn’t answer. He only smiled, a slightly crooked smile that gave nothing away.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said carefully. “Going back to Germany. I’ve sorted the most urgent matters. My cousin will handle the rest. She’ll be the contact person from now on, if anything happens.”
Minho nodded to show he understood.
“And I wanted to thank you,” Yejoon went on, more hesitant now, as if the words cost him something. “For everything you’ve done. For taking care of my father. And for caring about him… in my place.”
Minho looked away. His eyes burned; his throat tightened. He forced himself not to give in to it. “I was just doing my job,” he managed, his voice unsteady.
“It’s funny,” Yejoon continued, trying to lighten the mood. “For months he called you by my name. And now that I was there in front of him, he didn’t stop talking about you.”
Minho let out a soft laugh, trying to push back the strange feeling rising inside him. He didn’t reply.
“He said, ‘Minho, if you see Yejoon, ask him to forgive me.’” He spoke the words quietly, as though they were meant for Minho alone, a secret to remain between the two of them.
Minho stared at him, startled and, unexpectedly, glad. Glad that, in his own way, Mr Park had managed to pass on the message he had been carrying for months. Perhaps for more than ten years. He wanted to ask whether Yejoon had forgiven him. Whether he ever could. But what Yejoon said next answered the question without his having to ask it.
“I probably won’t come back,” Yejoon said, lowering his gaze briefly. “If anything happens, I’ve asked my cousin to contact you.”
Minho gave a small nod. “Of course. Thank you.”
There were no embraces. No promises. Yejoon offered him one last smile before standing. “Thank you.”
Minho watched him disappear beyond the café doors and, somewhere deep inside, knew he would never see him again.
Minho could have gone home as he always did after a morning shift. Instead, he left his rucksack by the door and picked up the gym bag he had packed the night before.
He didn’t think too much about it. If he had, he would have found a thousand excuses to postpone it. Tomorrow. Next week. Never. He walked out without looking back.
The gym was twenty minutes from his flat, tucked away in the basement of an anonymous building. Minho had discovered it by chance years earlier, walking past and hearing the dull thud of fists hitting heavy bags. He had stepped inside out of curiosity and never really left.
He went down the stairs and pushed open the door. The smell hit him immediately: sweat, rubber, disinfectant. A familiar scent he had missed more than he cared to admit.
“Lee Minho!”
He turned. One of the trainers came towards him with a wide grin and clapped him so hard on the shoulder that he nearly lost his balance.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “We thought you’d moved away without telling us.”
“I had to cover shifts for some colleagues,” Minho lied with a smile. “Didn’t have time.”
“For months?” someone else chimed in. “They must pay you well for overtime.”
Minho laughed but didn’t answer. He dropped his bag in the changing room and headed back out. There were about ten people training, some on the bags, others sparring in the ring. He tried to focus on wrapping his hands, but his eyes kept roaming the room.
And then he saw him.
Hyunwoo was at a bag, punching with almost brutal precision. He wore only shorts and a tank top soaked through with sweat. The muscles in his arms tightened with every strike. Minho watched him for a second too long before looking away.
Hyunwoo hadn’t looked up. Hadn’t greeted him. Not even a nod.
Minho tightened his wrapped fists and stepped up to an empty bag. He began to punch: jab, cross, hook. His rhythm was rusty, his movements less fluid than before. But the dull ache spreading from his knuckles up his arms was strangely comforting. It was something real. Something solid.
He didn’t look at Hyunwoo. Or at least he tried not to. But every now and then, between combinations, his gaze slipped back to him. Hyunwoo kept training as though Minho didn’t exist.
Twenty minutes passed. Minho was about to give up, perhaps coming here had been a mistake, when he saw Hyunwoo step away from the bag and head towards the changing rooms. He didn’t think. He pulled off his gloves, let them fall to the floor, and followed.
The changing room was empty apart from them. Hyunwoo stood in front of his locker, tank top already off, a bottle of water in his hand. He turned when he heard Minho come in.
“You’ve got some nerve showing your face here after all this time,” he said flatly.
Minho closed the door behind him. “Hyunwoo, I…”
“I’m not interested in listening,” Hyunwoo cut in, slamming the locker shut. “I don’t care.”
Minho stepped closer. Hyunwoo instinctively took a step back. But Minho didn’t stop. He cupped his face and kissed him.
For a moment, it felt like the first time. Months earlier, in that same changing room after a particularly intense session. They had been alone. Hyunwoo had looked at him in a way Minho had never forgotten, and then, without a word, had kissed him. It had been quick, desperate, full of something neither of them had known how to name.
But this time was different. Hyunwoo shoved him away hard.
“Have you lost your mind?” he hissed, glancing around to make sure they were alone. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry,” Minho said, breathless. “I was wrong. I was scared.”
Hyunwoo laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Scared,” he repeated. “You disappeared without saying a word. You couldn’t even be bothered to reply to a few stupid messages. And now you come back and apologise? What exactly do you want from me?”
Minho lowered his gaze. The words caught in his throat, but he forced them out. “I’ve always been afraid to admit the truth,” he said quietly. “To be… to be what I am. When we were together that time, I…”
He faltered, searching for the right words. “I panicked. I thought that if I kept seeing you, sooner or later someone would find out. And I wasn’t ready.”
“And now you suddenly are?” Hyunwoo asked, arms folded across his chest. “What’s changed?”
Minho looked up at him. “I have,” he said simply. “I’ve changed.”
It wasn’t entirely true. Or maybe it was, but in a way too complicated to explain. He couldn’t talk about Yejoon, about that night. About the first time he had felt seen without shame. He couldn’t speak of Mr Park, of the realisation that living hidden meant dying alone. But something inside him had shifted. Something had cracked open.
“I know I messed up,” he continued. “I know I hurt you. But I’m ready now. To take a step forward. To really try. If you…”
His voice trembled slightly. “If you still want to.”
Hyunwoo held his gaze for a long moment. His eyes were hard, wary. “And how do I know you won’t run again?” he asked. “That in a week you won’t stop answering messages and disappear?”
“You don’t,” Minho admitted. “You can only trust me.”
“Trust you,” Hyunwoo echoed, almost scoffing. “Easy to say.”
“I know.”
A long silence settled between them. Minho could hear his own heartbeat, loud in his ears. Then, slowly, Hyunwoo exhaled and ran a hand through his damp hair.
“Fine,” he said at last, his voice quieter. “But don’t expect everything to go back to how it was. You can’t vanish for months and then return like nothing happened.”
“I know,” he repeated.
“And if you disappear again,” Hyunwoo went on, pointing a finger at his chest, “don’t come looking for me. Understood?”
Minho nodded. “Understood.”
Hyunwoo watched him a moment longer, then turned and reopened his locker. He pulled out a clean T-shirt and slung it over his shoulder. “I’m going to shower,” he said without looking at him. “Wait outside, if you want.”
Minho stepped out of the changing room. He went back into the gym, picked up his gloves, said goodbye to the others. Told them he’d be back soon, and meant it this time.
When Hyunwoo came out, hair still damp, Minho was leaning against the wall outside the gym. Hyunwoo stopped in front of him.
“Want to grab something?” he asked, with studied casualness.
“Yes,” Minho replied.
They walked side by side for several minutes in silence. They didn’t touch. They didn’t look at each other. But something hung in the air between them, something different from before.
Minho thought of Mr Park, of Yejoon, of everything that had happened in the past few weeks. He thought of how often he had been afraid; afraid of being seen, judged, rejected. And for the first time, he felt that fear, though not entirely gone, had grown smaller. Manageable.
He didn’t know what would happen with Hyunwoo. Perhaps they would work. Perhaps they wouldn’t. But at least this time he was trying. This time he wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t running.
And perhaps, he thought as Hyunwoo cast him a brief, almost imperceptible sideways glance, perhaps that was already enough.
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon.
Yejoon’s cousin went straight to the point: Mr Park had taken a turn for the worse. He didn’t have much time left.
Minho dropped everything and went to the hospice.
Mr Park looked frailer than he remembered. His body almost swallowed by the blankets, his face hollowed, his skin grey. Minho pulled the chair closer to the bed and took his hand.
Mr Park opened his eyes slowly. It took him a few seconds to focus. When he saw Minho, he managed a faint smile.
“Yejoon,” he whispered.
Something tightened painfully in Minho’s chest. He nodded, unable to speak.
“You came,” Mr Park said, his voice barely audible. He paused, as if searching for air. “Forgive me.”
Tears slid silently down Minho’s cheeks. He clasped the old man’s hand between both of his and leaned closer.
He knew he shouldn’t do it. But he did. He drew a breath and said, softly, “I forgive you.”
Fanfic is a great way to practice self-indulgence while writing. It doesn’t even have to be good, it just exists purely for your pleasure, be a little freak about it. Worry about quality and what other people think when it comes to works you intend to publish in a formal setting
“It [The Lord of the Rings] is finished, if still partly unrevised, and is, I suppose, in a condition which a reader could read, if he did not wilt at the sight of it…now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien to Sir Stanley Unwin, 24 February 1950. Reprinted in The Fall of Gondolin
(via thebookwormunderground)
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Perhaps it was his subconscious holding him back. Because he didn’t want her to be fine. Not without him. Because without her, he wasn’t fine at all.
COLLECTION: ASTRAL WEEKS
pair: han x oc
genre: AU, angst, tragic romance
words: 12k
warnings: toxic relationship, mention of substance abuse, mature content (mdni)
notes: this summer I was on a drive with my dad while listening to van morrison. when I noticed that the astral weeks album had only eight songs, the wheels in my brain started turning. at the time I was writing something else but got a bit stuck, so I needed a new challenge. I wanted to write something short, inspired by the songs in the album. in the end, I wrote over 10k words only for this one, because writing short stories is not in my blood. I hope you will enjoy this one and, if you want, let me know what you think ⋆˙⟡
For a moment, he thought time had stopped.
The same fringe, always cut too short, the same oval frames of those ridiculous glasses she wore without really needing them, the same dark tattoos standing out against the pale skin of her right arm.
And yet more than a year had passed since they had last seen each other. A year made of silences, of sleepless nights, of messages never sent.
The closer she came, the more Jisung began to notice the marks of time. A new piercing in her eyebrow, another above her upper lip, right at the centre of her Cupid’s bow. A new tattoo: the stylised face of a Greek statue, surrounded by planets and stars. Every new detail carried with it a fresh awareness, proof of how she had gone on living without him. The Nara standing in front of him felt achingly familiar, and yet she no longer belonged to him.
There had been a time when, if someone had asked, he would have been able to explain the hidden meaning behind each of her tattoos, the reason for every impulsive decision she made. He could tell the precise shade of her mood from the way she lit a cigarette or from the rhythm of her fingers tapping against a table.
Now, instead, he found himself on the opposite side: he was the one who had to ask questions, who had to fill in the gaps, who had to start again from scratch. And he found it hard to accept.
She was the first to notice him, in the half-light of that run-down bar that smelled of cheap alcohol and the cloying sweetness of electronic cigarette vapour people stubbornly insisted on smoking indoors. The neon sign on the wall, a stylised portrait of Che Guevara, cast faint shadows across her face. Sitting in one of the worn leather armchairs, she smiled at him without a trace of surprise. As if she had expected to see him there, after all that time. As if she herself had arranged it.
She got to her feet without bothering to say goodbye to the people she had been talking to. Jisung watched her, frozen in a stillness that did not belong to him, his breath caught somewhere between his throat and his chest. He couldn’t move, not even a single step. As if, all at once, he were no longer in control of his own body.
“I’ve just finished telling Sungeun that this evening needed a twist,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse, resting a hand on his arm. Her fingers tightened just a little, as though to make sure he was really there and not just a figment of her imagination. “I didn’t expect my wishes to come true quite so quickly.”
He managed a small smile. Was he happy to see her? In that exact moment, he couldn’t have answered. But he knew he should have been. Because he had hoped for this meeting. For more than a year, he had spent his evenings glancing around, waiting for her to appear out of nowhere. Like the first time they had met. Like that very night. He had lived in expectation of chance, of an accidental return. His own wishes, too, had been granted. And yet now that she was actually there, he no longer knew how to act. He felt paralysed, exhilarated and terrified all at once. His imagination had never gone any further than this.
“I was actually about to head home,” he admitted.
His empty glass lay on the sticky bar counter, next to a napkin on which he had scribbled something he could no longer remember. The colleagues he had gone out with that evening to shake off the day’s tension had just left, heading for another bar, another round, another headache. Anything to avoid going home to angry wives and screaming children. They had invited him to join them, but he had refused. He had no wife or children waiting for him. Only the quiet of his empty flat.
He knew he shouldn’t have turned them down. He was the newest arrival, and he knew exactly what the consequences would be. The next day at the office, piles and piles of paperwork would be waiting to welcome him. But he didn’t care. He just wanted to go home.
But now that Nara was standing in front of him, with her eyes always slightly glazed, he knew his evening was going to turn out very differently from what he had planned.
He watched her shake her head, an amused expression playing across her face. Her fingers tightened even more around his arm, her thumb tracing small circles through the fabric of his shirt, and he felt the warmth sink all the way into his bones.
“I don’t think so,” she said, laughing. “You’re staying with me.”
Jisung looked at her for a moment, then nodded slightly. Not because he wanted to stay, not because he had suddenly forgotten the pain she had caused him, but because he couldn’t imagine a way to refuse her.
He had never been able to say no to her. He hadn’t then, and he never would be.
Jisung watched Nara light a cigarette. Her back hunched, one hand wrapped around the lighter, the other raised to shield the flame from a wind that wasn’t there, while her lips closed around the small white cylinder, smudging it with lipstick. It had always been the one thing he hated about her: the way she lit her cigarettes. Because for a brief instant, it was as if she changed. Curled in on herself, she lost all her beauty.
But then she was reborn. She blew the smoke upwards and smiled at him, and everything fell back into place.
“Want one?” she asked, holding out the already-open packet.
A year earlier, Jisung wouldn’t have hesitated; he would have had his own pack in his back pocket. Instead, he shook his head slightly. “I’ve quit.”
Nara tilted her head, her eyes narrowing just a fraction, as if she were trying to decide whether he was lying. “Really?”
He shrugged, as though it didn’t matter. “I was ill, a while back,” he said. “I’d drunk too much, stayed out all night, and the next morning I woke up with my throat on fire and a high fever. I was stuck in bed for a week. I quit after that.” He left out the fact that it had been her who’d driven him to lose himself in the crowded streets of Itaewon, zigzagging aimlessly, without a jacket, in the December cold.
Nara laughed, even though there was nothing funny about it. Her laugh sounded too loud, too sharp. She took a step closer and curled her fingers around the hem of his shirt. Jisung felt his body stiffen for a moment. He didn’t move, his hands shoved into his pockets, his gaze fixed on the entrance to the bar, crowded with people chatting between one drag of smoke and the next.
“I should quit too,” she said, her eyes fixed on the cigarette still between her fingers. Jisung expected her to drop it on the ground, even though it was barely half-finished. He’d seen her do it countless times. Instead, Nara brought it back to her lips, inhaled slowly, and blew a cloud of smoke straight into his face. There was something provocative in the gesture, something that didn’t quite sit right with him. But then she laughed, and he found himself laughing too, without really knowing why.
“You look good, Han Jisung,” she said after a brief silence. She stepped closer again; the hand still gripping his shirt lifted to reach his face and rest against his cheek.
Jisung closed his eyes. His body reacted before he had time to realise what was happening, leaning into her palm as he let out a soft sigh. How much he had missed her touch. How much he had missed everything about her. He wanted nothing more than for that moment to last for the rest of eternity. Nothing else.
“Now it’s your turn to tell me you think I look good too,” Nara said. She laughed again, but this time Jisung didn’t join in.
She pulled away and began to spin on the spot, like a child wearing her first princess dress. He saw her stop, sway slightly, and try to make her way back to him on unsteady steps, her head spinning. Jisung caught her by the arm and guided her back to his side. Where, for him, she would always belong.
“I think you look good too,” he said at last. He knew it was what she wanted to hear, and yet something inside him hesitated to believe it. Because now that he was looking at her more closely, he could see the dark circles beneath her make-up, the tension around her mouth that no smile could quite erase. Perhaps it was his subconscious holding him back. Because he didn’t want her to be fine. Not without him. Because without her, he wasn’t fine at all.
He watched her, hoping to catch some detail, some crack, something that would tell him that for her too the past year had been nothing but a string of wasted days, nights spent choking back sobs, forced smiles meant to convince everyone else that she was fine.
But she kept smiling at him, with the same ease as always. Like the girl he had met for the first time more than three years earlier, on the other side of a Gangnam nightclub they had both ended up in by mistake, dragged there by friends and recklessness. The same girl whose gaze he had caught amid the strobe lights, and who had woken up in his bed the next morning. The same girl he had professed to love less than a week later, with a simplicity that had astonished even himself. The same girl who, out of the blue, had abandoned him more than a year earlier, vanishing from his life as if she had never existed. As if everything they had shared had been nothing more than a mistake to be erased.
He saw her shiver, even though it wasn’t cold. A strange sense of unease ran down Jisung’s spine, but he brushed it aside before it could take shape. Nara stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one. Immediately. Without giving herself even a moment’s pause. Again, that brief instant in which she changed into someone Jisung didn’t recognise. Her hands were shaking. Then she straightened and turned back to him. She took his hand.
“Shall we go?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Somewhere.”
Jisung looked at her for a moment. “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to your friends?”
Nara burst out laughing. “They’re not my friends.”
Jisung didn’t reply. He tightened his grip around her hand and let himself be pulled along, as always.
There was nothing romantic about that night.
There was no snow like the time of their first Christmas together, when they had walked for hours after missing the last underground train, laughing at every stupid thing, the cold nipping at their skin and their minds blurred by alcohol and exhaustion. Nor was there the stifling heat of that summer when they had taken the last train to Busan, only to fall asleep on the beach as the sky slowly began to lighten, damp sand creeping into their clothes.
That night had nothing special about it.
The smell of fried food drifting from the restaurant at the start of the street still hung in the warm air, mingling with the evening’s humidity, while the streetlights cast uneven shadows across the worn asphalt. The sound of a television leaked out from the open windows of the flats lining the road, the clamour of the nightlife district now nothing more than a distant echo. An ordinary night, suspended between spring and summer. Nothing more.
And yet Jisung had the distinct feeling he had lived that night before.
The further they moved into the narrow uphill streets, the more that sense of familiarity began to take shape. The bar on the corner, its warm lights illuminating the few small tables lined up against the wall and the fridge packed with canned beers from all over the world. The restaurant with the wooden veranda and the old advertising poster for a soju brand, featuring Lee Hyori, coquettish in low-rise trousers and a glittering top, now faded, a relic of the early 2000s. And those steep steps leading up to her parents’ flat.
The very steps where they had once sat for hours after he had walked her home, unable to find the strength to part. The same steps Jisung had climbed countless times at the beginning of their relationship, when Nara had still lived there and he had had to sneak in through her bedroom window to avoid being discovered.
It had been years since Jisung had been in that area. It hadn’t even happened by chance.
He stopped, out of breath from the climb. Nara, a few steps ahead, only noticed his absence once she reached the top. He saw her turn back to say something, but when she didn’t find him, she began to look around, disoriented. Then their eyes met again and she smiled once more, and Jisung had the distinct sensation that his heart might burst out of his chest.
Nara retraced her steps and reached him. “You’re a bit out of shape, Han Jisung.”
He smiled, embarrassed, trying to hide how winded he was. It was true, but he didn’t want to show it. He ran a hand through his hair, as if to buy himself time. “I was just thinking…”
Nara stepped closer again. It was always like this with her: one step forward, two steps back. She circled him, as if examining something curious, then stopped in front of him again. “About what?”
“About all the times I had to climb these steps to walk you home,” he said, nodding towards the staircase.
Nara turned in the same direction. Jisung watched her, trying to catch something in her expression, a sign, a flicker that might betray an unspoken thought. But she seemed almost distracted, as if part of her were already somewhere else. Her eyes drifted without settling on anything in particular, her jaw clenched. Where was she, in that moment? What was she thinking? And why was he afraid to ask? She kept scratching the back of her hand, at first lightly, then with an almost involuntary insistence, as if something had bitten her. Her fingers moved relentlessly over the reddening skin. It was a small gesture, and yet it was enough to make him uneasy.
“I didn’t even realise I’d taken this route,” she said. “Force of habit, I suppose…”
Jisung suddenly felt his shoulders grow heavy, as if the full weight of the evening had come crashing down on him all at once. What had he been expecting, really? Had he truly believed she had led him there for a specific reason? Had he hoped that she, too, was looking for something, an excuse to go back, even if only for a moment? He realised, bitterly, just how naïve he had been.
“Now that I think about it, I haven’t been round here in ages,” she went on, smiling at him again with that lightness that always disarmed him.
Jisung raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Really?”
She nodded, laughing softly. She began circling him again, unable to stay still. Like a spinning top gone mad. “Why would I?”
“I thought you might’ve gone back to your parents’ after…”
“After we broke up?” she finished for him. For a brief moment, her smile turned sad, and Jisung felt hope stir again. “No. You know what they’re like. My parents and I aren’t compatible. We’ve never really got on,” she added with a shrug.
Jisung said nothing. He remembered little to nothing about Nara’s parents. The only time he had met them, he’d been so hungover he could barely speak. He had spent the night at her place in secret, too exhausted and intoxicated to make the journey home. But instead of waking at dawn and slipping out of the window as he usually did, he had fallen asleep again. Nara’s mother had discovered them when she went to wake her daughter. A brief, awkward encounter that had left him with a sense of shame he could never quite shake. Barely two weeks later, Jisung had found a flat of his own and Nara had moved in with him. He hadn’t seen her parents again since.
“And where do you live now?” he asked, falling back into step beside her. Nara had already started climbing again, as if staying still in one place for too long were unbearable.
“A bit here, a bit there… depending on who can put me up,” she replied simply.
Jisung wondered whether she was telling the truth, or whether she was choosing only the easiest part to share. For a moment, he considered pressing her, asking whether she had a place she could call home, whether there was anyone looking after her, whether she was really all right. But he decided not to push it. He had the sense that the answer, whatever it was, would hurt.
“I feel a bit guilty,” she said suddenly, turning around and continuing to walk backwards, heedless of any obstacles.
“About what?”
“About all the times I made you come all this way just to walk me home,” she said lightly, as if she were talking about something trivial.
“It never bothered me,” he replied without hesitation. “I just wanted to spend as much time with you as possible.”
Nara stopped short and let him catch up with her. In a sudden impulse, she looped her arms around his neck, hiding her face in the hollow of his shoulder. Jisung, instinctively, wrapped his arms around her. She felt thinner than he remembered. But her arms around him were real, as was her warm breath against his neck, and for a moment Jisung allowed himself to believe that everything could go back to the way it had been. When her scent washed over him, he held her even tighter.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Jisung wanted to reply, to tell her it didn’t matter, but Nara pulled away all at once. She laughed again and started walking as if nothing had happened. The words died in his throat.
Jisung said nothing, a sudden emptiness opening up in his chest. That ‘I’m sorry’ hung suspended between them. What exactly was she apologising for? For all the times he’d had to walk her home? Or was there something more behind her words? Was she sorry for leaving him? For coming back? He clenched his fists and followed her. Because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
Jisung didn’t need to ask where she had been or what she had done. He already knew.
He had seen that transformation too many times not to recognise it: the restlessness melting away in the blink of an eye, her shoulders finally relaxing, her gaze no longer chasing something invisible and beginning simply to drift. The euphoria. The dilated pupils. That dangerous feeling of being invincible.
He had felt it too.
He knew that sensation all too well; he had lived it countless times with her, until he had confused that fleeting euphoria with happiness.
Now, instead, she was keeping him at a distance, as though he had never been part of that world she herself had dragged him into years before.
He should have felt disappointed, perhaps. Or angry. Instead, he felt only a sense of emptiness, an inexplicable nostalgia that almost made him nauseous. The feeling of having been shut out of something that had once belonged to him.
Jisung didn’t know the club they had ended up in, and yet it felt as though he had already been there. Identical to all the others, a parallel universe where time dissolved into bass that made his chest vibrate and strobe lights that reshaped the faces around him. Bodies moving like a single creature with a beating heart, heat rising towards ceilings that were sometimes too high, sometimes too low, and the soles of shoes sticking to a floor slick with spilt alcohol and grime.
Once, that had been his world. Their world.
Nara had turned to him as soon as they went in. She came closer and spoke into his ear, her voice barely audible over the deafening music. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Wait here.”
Jisung nodded, because he knew exactly where she was going. Only a year earlier she would have taken him by the hand and brought him with her, without even asking. Instead, he watched her disappear alone into the crowd, swallowed by shadows and flickering lights. He leaned against the bar, ordered a drink, and waited.
When Nara came back, she was different. Her shoulders lighter, her smile wider. She walked towards him with dancing steps, indifferent to the people bumping into her from every side, as if nothing could really touch her.
“What are you doing, hiding now?” he asked when she was close enough.
She stopped, tilting her head slightly without losing that smile that was too wide, almost manic, distorting her face. For a moment, just a moment, something passed through her eyes. Then she burst out laughing. “Why, do you want some?” she asked, with a hint of mockery in her voice.
Jisung didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. Did he want to? Not exactly. One part of him, the part he had learned to live with over the past year, was telling him no. But another part, the one that reminded him of who he had been, hesitated.
Nara didn’t give him time to decide. Her fingers closed around his wrist and she dragged him towards the centre of the dance floor. The unfamiliar bodies around them pressed in, a cage of heat that swallowed them whole. She turned and began to move in time with the music.
Jisung stayed still for a moment, rigid, aware of every centimetre between them. Then she smiled again and he gave in. He closed his eyes and let himself be pulled along.
“Tell me you’ve stopped,” he heard her shout over the music.
Jisung opened his eyes and looked at her without saying anything.
“Tell me you’ve stopped,” Nara repeated, her eyes wide and shining. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled him closer. “Tell me you’ve stopped with all that shit.”
He nodded, and she kissed him before he could say anything. Her lips were warm and insistent, with a bitter taste he recognised at once. A frantic kiss, almost wrong. Too fast, too intense.
Jisung responded. He held her close, almost roughly, as if afraid she might run away again, dissolve into the lights and the music at any moment.
He remembered the first time Nara had taken him to a place like that. It had been barely a month after they first met. She had taken his hand naturally and said, “Come on, I’ll show you something.” At first, Jisung had felt out of place. He had always tried to stay on the edges of things. But Nara had given him no choice: she dragged him into the middle of the dance floor, put something into his hand and said, “Trust me.”
And he had trusted her.
The nights had blurred into one another. Different clubs, but always the same; faces that changed and yet merged together. They danced until dawn, until their legs could no longer hold them up, and then they went outside and discovered it was already day, that the world had gone on without them.
Jisung had loved that sense of suspension. That feeling of no longer belonging to reality but to something larger and undefined. With Nara, everything seemed possible. Even flying.
After she left, Jisung kept going back to those places. Every Friday, every Saturday, sometimes even during the week. Always the same clubs, always with the same illusion of spotting her somewhere in the crowd. He scanned every face that passed in front of him, looking for her in strangers who had nothing of her.
At first he went alone. Then he began to accept invitations from strangers, friends of friends, anyone who wanted to go out. Because it was easier that way. Because staying sober meant feeling the full weight of the emptiness she had left behind. Because without her, that artificial happiness was the only kind of happiness he could manage to feel.
But something had changed with time. The evenings had begun to blur together, the faces to repeat themselves. He could no longer remember who he had spoken to, what he had done, where he had woken up. One morning he realised he wasn’t looking for Nara at all. He was only trying to relive the same sensations he had felt with her, to rebuild that euphoria in order to fill her absence. But with every awakening, that emptiness grew larger, deeper. If he went on like that, it would swallow him whole.
He had stopped after that night in Itaewon. He had woken up feverish, his body punishing him for everything he had put it through. And as he lay in bed, trembling and alone, he had asked himself what he was doing. And for whom.
There had been no sudden revelation, no conscious decision. Simply, when the fever had gone down, he had understood that the world he had always shared with Nara no longer belonged to him. Perhaps it had never truly belonged to him at all.
Without her, he no longer even felt the need to alter his state of mind. He didn’t want to feel happy if that happiness was fake. He didn’t want to forget if forgetting meant losing even what little beauty had remained. Since then, he had wanted only to stay there, in that suspended limbo. Even if it hurt.
He watched her as she danced, lost in her solitary euphoria. Her hands raised towards the ceiling, her head thrown back, her body swaying without control. She was beautiful in that moment. But unreachable.
He realised that she was still part of that world and couldn’t get out of it. He was watching her from the outside. He had crossed the boundary and no longer knew how to go back.
And yet, for that night, he could pretend. He could pretend that time had never passed, that they were still those same reckless kids from three years earlier. That there was still hope for them.
He closed his eyes and let the music carry him. He allowed himself that illusion for a few more hours.
When he opened them again, Nara was staring at him. The smile was still there, but there was something different in her eyes. Something Jisung couldn’t grasp.
She moved closer, resting her forehead against his. “I’m bored,” she said. “Let’s go.”
And Jisung nodded, because it was the only answer he had.
The flat was exactly as Nara remembered it.
Jisung realised this the moment he switched on the light and saw her gaze settle on every surface, linger on every corner. The chipped mug he had never brought himself to throw away, the purple velvet cushion on the sofa they had bought together at a second-hand market, the succulents he remembered to water once every two months.
He hadn’t changed anything. He hadn’t thrown anything away. As if he had convinced himself that sooner or later she would come back, and would want to find everything exactly as it had been.
But now that she was really there, Jisung noticed the mess. Dirty cups piled in the sink, jackets abandoned on the sofa, takeaway containers still waiting on the balcony to be thrown out. He ran a hand through his hair, embarrassed.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said with an uncertain smile. “I didn’t know that… I wasn’t expecting…”
Nara didn’t seem to hear him. She had moved closer to the wall where, years earlier, she herself had hung the faded polaroids, her fingers brushing the edge of one photograph in particular. The one taken in Busan, their faces too pale, their eyes closed from the flash that had caught them by surprise.
“You kept them,” she murmured, almost to herself.
Jisung didn’t answer straight away. He simply nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him.
Nara moved towards the sofa and let herself fall back against it. She closed her eyes for a moment, her head tipped back, and Jisung had the impression that she was trying to imprint everything into her memory. Or perhaps, on the contrary, she was trying to empty her mind.
“I thought you’d thrown them away,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“No.”
“Why?” she asked calmly.
Jisung didn’t know how to answer. Why should he have? Why should he have erased every trace of her when he had never really stopped thinking about her? But he didn’t say any of that. He just shrugged, even though she couldn’t see him.
Nara opened her eyes and fixed them on him. There was something in her gaze that Jisung couldn’t decipher. Then she smiled and held out her hand.
“Come here,” she said.
Jisung stepped closer, his heart beginning to beat faster in his chest. He sat down beside her, leaving a small space between them, even though every fibre of his body wanted to erase it completely.
Nara was the first to move. She shifted closer until their legs touched. Then she placed a hand on his knee, her fingers tracing small circles through the fabric of his trousers.
“I missed you,” she said again, as if it were the only thing she knew how to say.
Jisung swallowed. “I missed you too.”
She leaned in, her face only centimetres from his. Jisung could feel her breath, warm and uneven. He could see every detail of her face: the smudged eyeshadow, her slightly cracked lips, her eyes shining with a light that wasn’t entirely natural.
But he didn’t care. Not in that moment. All he could see was Nara, finally there, finally his again.
She kissed him softly, almost hesitantly. Her lips gentle against his. He returned the kiss, one hand rising to cup her cheek, the other finding her hips.
Nara shifted, straddling him with a fluid movement. Her arms circled his neck, her fingers threading into his hair. The kiss deepened, charged with a hunger that tasted of absence, as if they were trying to make up for all the lost time in a single moment.
Jisung felt the warmth of her body against his, the familiar weight anchoring him to the sofa. His hands slipped under her shirt, his fingers slowly tracing the curve of her back. Her skin was warm, almost too warm, and when he noticed Nara trembling slightly, he hesitated. From the cold? From desire? He didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
Nara pulled away from the kiss for a moment, breathless. She looked at him and, for an instant, just an instant, Jisung saw something that resembled sadness. Then she smiled, and the thought vanished.
She stood up suddenly, taking his hand and leading him through the flat. Jisung followed her, his eyes fixed on her back, on the way her hair fell over her shoulders.
The bedroom was in complete chaos. Clothes piled on the chair, books scattered across the bedside table, the bed still unmade. But Nara didn’t seem to notice. She turned towards him and her hands found the hem of his shirt, unbuttoning it with quick, impatient, almost frantic movements.
Jisung let her. He watched her, trying to memorise every detail: the way she bit her lower lip when she concentrated, the small crease that formed between her eyebrows. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her.
When his shirt fell to the floor, Nara placed her hands on his chest. Her fingers traced the lines of his tattoos, his muscles, slid down his stomach, and stopped at his belt. She looked at him, waiting for a sign.
Jisung nodded.
She smiled and began to undo his belt. Jisung closed his eyes for a moment, trying to steady his breathing. When he opened them again when no longer felt her hands on him, he saw that Nara had already pulled off her top, revealing her black bra and the pale skin he knew so well. A new tattoo caught his attention: a carnival mask drawn along her ribs.
He moved closer to her, letting his hands slide down her hips until they reached the buttons of her jeans. He undid them slowly and Nara let him without a word. When the jeans fell to the floor, she stepped back and sat down on the bed, her gaze fixed on him.
Jisung joined her, kneeling in front of her. His hands slid along her thighs, feeling the shivers that ran across her skin. He leaned forward and kissed her knee, then slowly moved up along the inside of her thigh. Nara gasped, her hands clutching the sheets.
“Jisung,” she whispered, barely audible.
He stopped and looked up at her. “What?”
“Nothing. Keep going.”
And he did, his lips following a slow, deliberate path over her skin, his hands holding her steady while her body reacted to every movement. When he reached the edge of her underwear, he stopped and looked at her again. She nodded, and he removed it slowly.
Nara was trembling, shaken by small, uncontrollable shivers. Jisung noticed and grew worried. “Are you cold?”
“No,” she replied, her voice tight. “I’m fine. Please, keep going.”
And he did, because he couldn’t say no to her. Because he wanted to give her everything she asked for. His lips brushed the inside of her thigh, then moved higher, and Nara moaned softly, her head falling back.
Jisung lost himself in her. In her taste, in the way her body responded to every touch, every kiss. Nara’s hands threaded into his hair, her fingers tightening whenever he did something that made her gasp.
When he felt her nearing the edge, he stopped. Nara opened her eyes, confused, almost offended. “Why did you stop?”
Jisung didn’t answer. He stood up, pulling off his trousers and boxers. Then he lay down beside her and drew her to him. Nara settled over him, her legs on either side of his hips, her gaze locked with his.
For a moment they stayed like that, motionless, their ragged breathing filling the silence. Then Nara lowered herself slowly and Jisung closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the intensity of the sensation.
It felt like coming home. Like finding a part of himself he had thought lost forever. They moved together in a rhythm that needed no words, a language their bodies remembered even though their minds had tried to forget.
Jisung kept his hands on her hips, guiding her, while she leaned on his chest. Her face was a mask of concentration, her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open. She was beautiful. She was perfect.
At one point, Nara opened her eyes and looked at him. There was something in that look Jisung didn’t recognise, something that resembled desperation. But then she leaned forward and kissed him with a force that stole his breath, and the thought vanished again.
They moved faster now, their bodies meeting with an urgency that was almost violent. Jisung felt Nara trembling above him, felt her moans grow sharper, more desperate. His hands slid along her back, feeling the sweat on her skin.
When they reached the peak, Nara collapsed against him, her face buried in the hollow of his neck. Jisung held her close, one hand stroking her hair, the other drawing small circles on her back.
They stayed like that for what felt like an eternity. Their breathing slowly calmed, their heartbeats returning to normal. Jisung felt her weight on him, the warmth of her body, and thought there was nowhere else in the world he would rather be.
“I love you,” he whispered, without even realising he had said it.
Nara didn’t answer. Jisung felt something wet against his neck, but when he shifted to look at her, she had already turned away, her back to him.
“Nara?”
“I’m tired,” she murmured. “Let’s sleep.”
Jisung hesitated for a moment, then nodded. He moved beside her, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her close. She let him, without protest, but her body was rigid, tense.
Jisung noticed, but chose to ignore it. He chose to believe it was only exhaustion. He chose to believe everything would be all right.
He buried his face in her hair, breathing in her scent. It had changed, he realised. There was something else now, something sharper, more bitter. But it didn’t matter. It was her. It was Nara.
He thought about how right everything felt in that moment. As if all the pieces of his life had finally fallen back into place. As if the past year had been nothing more than a bad dream he had finally woken from.
He thought about the future. About having breakfast together the next morning, about taking her out to dinner in the days that followed, about starting again from the beginning.
He thought that perhaps, at last, his love would be enough.
Nara shifted slightly in his arms, a small jolt as if she were falling into a dream. Jisung held her tighter, almost afraid she might disappear again. But she was there. She was real. She was his.
He closed his eyes, his heart full of a happiness he hadn’t felt in more than a year. He fell asleep with a smile on his lips, convinced that in the morning their new life together would begin.
He found her sitting on the sofa, curled up against the armrest as if she were trying to take up as little space as possible. Her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. She kept scratching her right forearm, her nails leaving red marks on her skin. A mechanical movement, almost unconscious.
Nara was crying without making a sound.
Jisung stopped in the doorway, still dazed with sleep. He had woken abruptly with the sudden feeling of being alone. The empty bed had made him jump up and rush into the living room, just to make sure the night before had not been a dream, a mere hallucination. The light of dawn filtered through the curtains, dull and grey.
“Nara?” he called, cautiously.
She flinched. She turned slightly, her eyes red and swollen, last night’s make-up smeared beneath them. She looked at him for a second, an expression of near disgust on her face, then turned back to stare at the wall in front of her.
Jisung came closer and sat beside her on the sofa. Not too close, as if afraid of frightening her. “What’s wrong?” he asked softly. “Can’t you sleep?”
Nara didn’t answer. She kept scratching herself, her fingers moving faster and faster. Jisung reached out to stop her, but she pulled away.
“Nara, talk to me,” he pleaded.
She shook her head. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, leaving a dark streak of mascara on her cheek. “I shouldn’t have come back,” she said, her voice so low it seemed about to break.
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have,” she repeated, then laughed, a strangled sound that seemed almost as if it didn’t belong to her. “Fuck, I’m so stupid.”
Jisung tilted his head, frowning. “What are you talking about?”
Nara jumped to her feet, as if she could no longer stay still. She began pacing back and forth across the small living room, her arms wrapped around herself. Her hands kept moving: scratching, clutching, digging into her skin with her nails as if she wanted to tear it away.
“Look at this place,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the walls around them. “It’s all exactly the same as before.”
Jisung stared at her, confused. “So?”
“So nothing has changed!” she said, her voice louder, sharper, almost hysterical. “As if… as if I’d never left.”
Jisung ran a hand through his hair nervously. He couldn’t understand. He had fallen asleep certain that when he woke up everything would finally make sense. That they would start living again as if the past year had never existed. That they would take their life back.
“Why should I have changed anything?” he said, almost stubbornly. “In the end, you came back. You’re here.”
“I shouldn’t have,” Nara shook her head violently. “It was a mistake. All of this… last night…” She turned towards him, her eyes full of tears she was desperately trying to hold back. “It was a mistake.”
The words hit him like a slap.
For a moment, Jisung couldn’t breathe. His legs gave way and he had to lean against the back of the sofa to keep from collapsing. Just a few hours earlier they had been together. A few hours earlier she had smiled at him, kissed him, fallen asleep in his arms. And now she stood there in front of him, calling all of it a mistake.
He stood up as well and took a step towards her. “How can you say that? Last night…”
“Last night shouldn’t have happened,” Nara interrupted, stepping back. “I…” She stopped, her hands visibly shaking. “I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Be with me?” Jisung asked. There was no anger in his voice. Only confusion. Disorientation.
She didn’t answer. She turned to face the window. Jisung saw her trembling, her body shaken by small shivers she couldn’t control.
“When you got that job a year ago… do you remember what you told me?” Nara asked suddenly, her voice lower, as if trying to hold on to a calm that no longer belonged to her. She wiped her face again, but the tears kept falling. “You started talking about the future. About saving money. About finding a bigger flat.”
Jisung took another step towards her, hoping she wouldn’t retreat again. “Yes. I wanted to build something with you.”
“And I watched you…” she murmured, then turned back to him. There was something broken in her eyes. “I listened to you talking about all those things, but I couldn’t see myself in any of them.”
“What do you mean?” he pressed, more and more confused.
“I mean that every time you talked about the future, all I could see was…” She raised a hand to her mouth, choking back another sob. “All I could see was how lost you had become. Because of me.”
Jisung shook his head. “That’s not true…”
“Yes, it is,” she snapped. “You ended up in that shit just to stay with me. Just to follow me.” Her words now spilled out faster, almost overlapping. “And the more I looked at you, the more I saw that you were destroying yourself, and I… I couldn’t even look at you anymore.”
“Then why did you leave without saying anything?” he insisted, his voice breaking. “Why didn’t you tell me all this? We could have talked about it, we could have found a…”
“Because if I had told you the truth, you would have tried to convince me to stay,” Nara said, looking straight into his eyes. “And I didn’t want to be convinced. You wanted to save yourself, Jisung. And I had no intention of doing the same.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
Jisung stared at her, trying to understand, to put the pieces together. But the more he tried, the less sense it made. “So what does all this mean, exactly?” he asked at last.
“Why didn’t you just ignore me when you saw me? Why did you drag me around all night if you didn’t want anything to do with me?”
Nara lowered her gaze and started scratching her forearm again. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She shrugged slightly. “It’s the only one I have.”
Jisung stepped towards her, his hands lifting instinctively. His voice cracked.
“We can try again. Things are different now. I have a stable job, I can help you, we can…”
“No,” she cut him off sharply. “No, Jisung.”
“Why not? We can…”
“Because I can’t, damn it!” Nara exploded, spinning towards him. “Why can’t you understand that I can’t be what you’re asking me to be? I can’t… I don’t know how.”
“Be what?” he pressed, panic rising in his voice.
“Be the person you want me to be,” she whispered, as if afraid of the words themselves. Tears streamed down her face and this time she didn’t try to stop them. “The one with a normal job, a normal life, a normal future. I don’t…” She stopped again, her body trembling more and more. “I don’t even know how to do that.”
Jisung looked at her, something cracking inside him. He was losing her again. She was slipping through his fingers again. “We can learn together…”
“No!” she shouted, throwing her arms out in a violent gesture. “Don’t you see me, Jisung? Look at me.”
And he did.
He saw the bloodshot eyes, the pupils still too wide in the cruel light of dawn. He saw the deep circles no make-up could hide anymore. He saw the pale, almost grey skin. He saw the trembling hands, the arms covered in red marks where she had scratched herself all night. He saw her body too thin, her tense posture, her gaze unable to stay still.
He saw someone he no longer recognised.
“Do you see me now? Do you really see me?” Nara said, her voice calmer now. Almost resigned. “This is who I am.”
Jisung shook his head, desperately trying to hold on to something. “But I… I can help you. We can…”
“No,” Nara repeated. She turned and walked towards the door. “You can’t.”
She began gathering her things in a rush. The jacket thrown over the chair. The shoes by the door. Frenzied, disordered movements.
“What are you doing?” Jisung asked, his voice trembling.
“I’m leaving.”
“Nara, wait…”
“I can’t stay, don’t you understand?” she sighed, exhausted. She slipped her shoes on without tying them. “I can’t. Please don’t ask me again.”
Jisung shook his head and followed her, almost tripping over his own feet. He lifted a hand in front of her, but didn’t touch her, as if he no longer had the right to stop her. “Please, let’s talk about this.”
She pushed his hand aside and went to the door. She opened it with a rough, desperate movement.
“Nara…”
She stopped for a moment on the threshold, her back to him. Jisung waited for her to turn around, to say something, anything.
But she walked out without looking back.
The door closed with a dull sound that echoed through the empty flat. Jisung stood still, his hand still stretched towards a space that no longer existed. He stared at the closed door, as if it might open again at any moment. As if she might come back. As if this were only a moment of passing panic.
But the door stayed shut.
For a long moment, Jisung couldn’t move. His legs barely held him up, his breathing shallow and uneven. He looked around. The flat was exactly as it had always been. The photos on the wall. The purple cushion. The chipped mug on the table. Everything the same. Everything in its place.
Everything empty.
Jisung closed his eyes, trying to summon the feeling from a few hours earlier: the warmth of her body, her scent, the certainty that everything would be all right. But he couldn’t. It was as if that night already belonged to someone else, to a version of himself that no longer existed.
He sat down on the sofa, in the same place where she had been curled up only moments before. His hands were shaking.
He looked at the photographs on the wall. Their smiling faces, trapped in moments that seemed to belong to another life.
For the first time since seeing her again, he allowed himself to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the person in those photos no longer existed.
And perhaps she had never existed in the way he had believed.
The pile of documents on his desk seemed to have multiplied since the last time Jisung had looked at it.
He hadn’t managed to sleep at all after Nara left. His body felt heavy, as if someone were sitting on his shoulders, pushing him down with all their weight. His eyes burned every time he blinked. And yet he had gone to work anyway, because staying in that flat, lying helpless in the bed where she had been just hours earlier…
No.
He picked up the first document and stared at it. The words crawled across the page like frantic ants. He tried to focus. Nothing. Emptiness. Just the sound of his breath, too fast, and the relentless pounding of blood in his temples.
I shouldn’t have come back.
He clenched his teeth and forced his gaze back onto the page. He read the first line. Then read it again. And again. The words fell apart before his eyes: numbers, dates, meaningless sentences, words arranged only to fill space. What was he supposed to be checking? He couldn’t even remember anymore. Why was he there, in that bleak office on the tenth floor of a soulless skyscraper? He couldn’t even recall how he had got there.
He ran a hand over his face. His fingers were trembling. Around him the office was alive. Voices, laughter, the sound of the coffee machine in the room next door. Everything too sharp, too normal. As if the world hadn’t just split in two.
It was a mistake.
The document slipped from his fingers and fell into the narrow space between his body and the desk, landing on his knees. He picked it up and placed it back on top of the pile. He took another one, but the result was the same. He couldn’t concentrate for more than a few seconds.
He closed his eyes, resting his elbows on the desk and hiding his face in his hands. He saw her, her eyes swollen from crying, her fingers scratching at her arm without stopping, as if trying to dig something out from beneath her skin. He opened his eyes sharply, as though he could banish the image by force. In front of him again: the bare desk, the documents waiting to be filed, the neon light buzzing above his head. He sighed.
His gaze drifted to the landline phone beside his computer. For one second, just one, his hand moved towards it in a mechanical gesture, then stopped mid-air. What would he have done? Nara had changed her number. When she left the first time, she had erased every way of reaching her. As if he had never existed.
As if the two of them had never existed.
He took a sip of coffee, now cold. He couldn’t even remember when, or where, he had got it.
A colleague passed by and said something to him. Jisung nodded without having understood a single word. And every time he closed his eyes, even for the briefest blink, she came back, curled up on the sofa, crying as if something inside her were breaking apart.
Or maybe it was him who was breaking.
Time passed without him noticing. When he finally looked at the clock, it was already midday. How was that possible? It felt as though he had arrived only five minutes earlier.
“Coming to lunch?”
Jisung looked up. One of the colleagues he had gone out with the night before, the one with the loud laugh. He would have preferred to stay where he was. He would have preferred not to eat at all. He wasn’t hungry. But he nodded anyway, because being alone with his thoughts, with nothing to distract him, felt even worse.
The canteen was crowded and noisy, but he barely noticed. Once he sat down at the table with his team, he began pushing the food around his plate, unable to eat even a single bite. His stomach had completely closed in on itself.
“Hey, you alright?” someone asked. “You look like a zombie.”
Laughter burst out around him. Jisung forced a tired smile. “Rough night.”
“Oh, right,” the colleague went on. “I thought someone had died.”
More laughter followed. Jisung joined in, but his laugh sounded off, almost jarring. He lifted his gaze from the plate and saw his boss staring at him from the other side of the table. He wasn’t laughing. He was just watching him with an expression of pure disapproval.
Jisung immediately looked away, pretending not to notice, and went back to staring at his plate. Nausea surged up his throat without warning. The fork slipped from his fingers. He picked it up with shaking hands and stood abruptly.
He went back to the office and dropped into his chair. He switched his computer back on and searched through one of the many folders on his desktop for a document he needed to print. He opened it, sent it to print, and stood up to go to the printer.
Nothing.
He stopped halfway there and turned back. There was nothing in the print queue. He hadn’t clicked anything. He sighed and sat down again. Tried once more, then returned to the printer.
You wanted to save yourself. I had no intention of doing the same.
He leaned against the printer, his hands pressed against the plastic edge. His legs suddenly felt weak. The world seemed to spin wildly around him.
She had never really wanted him. Not once. Not in the way he had wanted her.
And he had believed it. He had believed every word, every smile. So much so that he had built a future on it, a future that existed only in his head.
He picked up the still-warm pages and slowly returned to his desk. He sat down heavily and stared at the documents without really seeing them.
Daegu.
The thought came out of nowhere. Daegu, two years earlier. A job offer that had appeared almost out of thin air, helped along by one of his university professors. A real salary. Real prospects. A concrete chance to step out of that suspended life. And he had turned it down, just because Nara would never have moved. Because Seoul was the only place she could stand to be.
She had chosen for both of them. And, as always, Jisung had gone along with it, incapable of saying no.
But had she ever chosen him?
And that time she had disappeared for three days, Jisung roaming the city like a madman, hoping to find her safe and alive. He had called everyone: friends, acquaintances, even her parents. He had imagined the worst. Then she had come back, her eyes glassy, the exhaustion of someone who hadn’t slept for days etched into her face. Jisung hadn’t got angry. He had just held her, without asking a single question. Maybe because he was afraid of the answers. Maybe because he already knew he wouldn’t like them.
He drummed his fingers nervously against the desk. His heart was beating too fast, too hard.
He had loved her. God, how he had loved her. And how he still loved her. Enough to do anything to keep her with him. Enough to give up entire parts of his own life without even realising it.
And she, instead, had left again.
So selfish.
The thought struck him suddenly, sharply, so unexpected it almost knocked the breath out of him.
Immediately, a strange sense of guilt took hold. No. He shouldn’t think that. Not of her. Not of the woman he had loved for so many years. A fragile woman. A woman who was unwell.
But it was the truth. She was selfish. She had come back out of necessity, because she needed a place to stay, someone beside her. Not because she wanted him, but because she needed someone willing to give her what she wanted. Without conditions. Without questions. And he had been there, ready to indulge her, just as he always had.
And she had left again.
He looked at the documents in front of him. One, two, three. He stacked them on top of each other, pretending there was some logic to it. He moved them, then put them back. His hands moved without purpose, driven only by the need not to stay still.
He thought back over the past year, the succession of days that had all unfolded in the same way: waking up, going to work, coming home. A routine that had solidified day after day without him even noticing. He had thought that only emptiness filled his life, the emptiness Nara had left behind.
But now, for the first time, he found himself thinking that maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was simply the first time in years that anxiety hadn’t been constantly gnawing at his stomach. The first time he hadn’t spent entire nights chasing a feeling that had never truly satisfied him. Altering his state of mind just to feel on the same level as the only person he truly cared about, just to endlessly meet her needs. The first time he had breathed without feeling suffocated.
He had believed that quiet was absence. Lack. Emptiness.
Now he understood that maybe it was just peace.
With Nara, it had always been all or nothing. Euphoria or the abyss. Black or white. And in either extreme, there had never been a moment of peace.
And he had thought that was love.
He felt anger swell inside him, hotter, denser, almost suffocating. It pressed against his chest like a weight he could no longer contain. It wasn’t fair.
Another colleague passed by and said something. Jisung nodded again, without understanding a word.
He checked the clock. Four in the afternoon. Where the hell had the time gone?
Can’t you see me?
He had finally seen her. And the person standing in front of him was no longer the woman he remembered, no longer the one he had sworn to love.
The office began to empty. One by one, his colleagues said goodbye and wished him a good evening. Some teased him about all the work he still had to do; others tried to invite him out for a drink, with little success. Jisung ignored them. He didn’t care if he had to stay in that office for hours longer. He didn’t want to go home. What had once been a small shrine to their love now made him feel nauseous, repulsed.
He picked up a document. Moved it. Picked up another. Stacked it on top. Then another. And another.
When he looked up again, the office was almost empty. Outside, it was dark. How much time had passed?
He stood up, his legs stiff, his back aching. Papers were scattered across the desk. He gathered them, trying to organise them with nervous movements.
I had no intention of doing the same.
Some sheets slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor. He bent to pick them up, but his hands were shaking too badly to grip them. He grabbed them all at once, crumpling them, then slammed them down on the desk. The sound exploded in the silence.
A colleague flinched and turned towards him, startled. Jisung noticed that the few people still there were staring at him in surprise.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice tight. “I’m sorry.”
No one said anything. They turned back to their screens as if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t falling apart in front of them.
Jisung stood still, his hands planted on the desk. His eyes burned, his throat closed, his chest heavy as stone.
He turned away. Walked across the office without looking at anyone and reached the bathroom. He pushed the door open and locked himself inside.
Silence.
He leaned against the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw someone he didn’t recognise. Red eyes. Deep, dark circles. Pale skin.
The first sob escaped before he could stop it, choked, almost a gasp. Then another. And then he couldn’t stop.
He slid down against the wall, his head in his hands. And he cried. He cried for everything: for her, for himself, for everything they had been through, for everything they would never have. For the years wasted. For the wrong choices. For a love that had never been enough.
He cried until there was nothing left.
He saw her again while walking home from work, by chance.
She was standing outside a bar Jisung didn’t know, though he had noticed it before along the way. He watched her light a cigarette: her back hunched, one hand cupped around the lighter and the other raised to shield the flame. The same gesture Jisung had always hated. That brief instant in which she became something less beautiful.
Then she straightened, blew the smoke upwards, and smiled.
But not at him.
Jisung stopped on the other side of the street. Nara was surrounded by a group of people he had never seen before, drinks in hand, laughter dissolving into the noise of traffic. But she was speaking to only one man. Young, dark hair, leather jacket. The same kind of person Nara had always been drawn to. The same kind of person Jisung himself had once been.
He watched her laugh at something the man said. Her hand rested on his arm, her fingers tightening slightly. He noticed the way she leaned forward when she spoke, as though what she was saying were the most important thing in the world.
Jisung knew that language. He had seen it directed at him hundreds of times. He had thought it was special. He had thought it meant something.
Now he understood that it was simply the way Nara searched. She searched for someone who would say yes. Someone who would make her feel seen, important, necessary. It didn’t matter who they were. What mattered was that they were willing to give.
And Jisung had given everything.
He watched her bring the cigarette to her lips, inhale, exhale the smoke to the side. The man said something and she laughed again, shaking her head. Then she turned towards the group, said something that made everyone laugh. But after a moment she turned back to the man, her gaze fixed on him.
Jisung felt something tighten in his chest. Not pain. Not anger. Just a distant sadness, like looking at something through fogged glass.
He knew how it would go. The man would follow her. He would say yes to everything she asked. He would think he could save her, change her, be different from the others. And for a while, perhaps, he would be happy. Perhaps he would even believe it was love.
And then Nara would leave. Because that was what she did. She was searching for something she couldn’t find in anyone, not even in herself. And she would keep searching, slipping, getting lost. Again and again.
Jisung knew it. And he knew that she knew it too.
But there was nothing he could do.
Nara laughed again, her head thrown back, and for a moment Jisung really saw her. Not the girl he had fallen in love with. Not the one in the photos on the wall that he had finally thrown away. But the person she was now. Someone trapped in a cycle she couldn’t break. Someone sliding downward, slowly, inevitably.
And he could no longer follow her.
For the first time since he had met her, Jisung felt the absence of that pull. That voice inside him that had always told him to run to her, to say yes, to give one more chance. It wasn’t there anymore. Or maybe it was, but so faint that he could finally ignore it.
If she had turned around in that moment. If she had seen him. If she had smiled at him and asked him to stay, to follow her, to give her one more night, one more chance…
I don’t know, Jisung thought. And then, more clearly: No.
Not with anger. Not with pain. Just no.
Nara said something to the man, then turned to go back inside the bar. The group followed her, laughter and voices fading behind the closing door. The man hesitated for a moment, looking at the cigarette Nara had dropped on the ground, still burning. Then he followed her inside.
Jisung remained still for another moment, watching the closed door. Then he turned and started walking again.
He didn’t look back.
The bar was crowded that evening. Jisung was sitting at a table with his colleagues, an almost empty beer in front of him. Someone was telling a story he’d already heard, but he laughed anyway when everyone else did.
He glanced around absent-mindedly. The crowd moving between tables, faces lit by soft lights, laughter breaking out here and there.
And then he stopped.
He wasn’t looking for her.
When had he stopped? He didn’t know. Maybe weeks earlier. Maybe that very evening. Or maybe it had happened gradually, so slowly that he hadn’t even noticed.
One of his colleagues asked if he wanted another round. Jisung nodded, smiling.
For the first time in months, he didn’t feel that weight on his chest. There was just him, there, in that moment.
➺ astral weeks (coming soon)
After the death of his grandfather, Chan returns to the places of his childhood, where he met his first love. He finds himself trapped between the success he has built and the happiness he has let go.
➺ beside you
All his life, Minho has hidden a part of himself from everyone. But when a son returns home to say goodbye to his dying father, a night of vulnerability shows him that it's never too late to learn to accept and be yourself.
➺ sweet thing (coming soon)
Only one week after everything ends, Felix meets someone who helps him forget the pain. But when the past comes knocking at the door, they must both choose whether to believe that love can arrive at the wrong time or that every moment is the right one when it is real.
➺ cyprus avenue (coming soon)
Seungmin has always lived by his own principles, until she enters his life with her designer clothes and promises of a better life. But wealth comes at a price, and he will discover too late that he has paid with his soul.
➺ the way young lovers do (coming soon)
Jeongin thought that a summer in the countryside would be a kind of exile, until he meets her and she shows him that the world can be full of wonder. And when, at the end of summer, he must say goodbye to her, he carries with him the certainty that some loves do not need forever.
➺ madame george (coming soon)
Changbin is stuck in a life that doesn't satisfy him, until one night he sees Madame George: magnificent, mysterious, perfect. But it is only when he meets her again behind the counter of a convenience store, without make-up or glitter, that he understands what it really means to be seen.
➺ ballerina (coming soon)
On the stage of a night club, she dances as if trying to break free from her chains. Hyunjin wants to save her, but learns in the most painful way that sometimes love is not enough, and that the most beautiful people are the ones you cannot keep.
➺ slim slow slider
Jisung had searched for her for over a year, everywhere, until one night she reappears as if nothing had happened. They spend the night revisiting what they had been, but when dawn comes, Jisung learns that letting go is the only way to save himself.
Hi, I noticed your story has conflict in it, and I was wondering why you didn't just write people who are right doing everything correctly with a note saying "I enthusiastically co-sign everything in this story"? Must be some kind of mistake haha
In that moment, there was no future. No promise, no guarantee. Only each other. And the desperate, fragile hope that surrendering to these feelings might mean something more.
notes: not sure how I ended up here, but after years of being a casual fan I recently really got into skz and eventually wrote this. for the first time in years I feel the need to share something, so here we are ⋆˙⟡ will this be the only thing I write or is my writer's block finally gone? who knows •ᴗ• but I hope you will like it as much I liked writing it ♥︎
January 2022
Nami loves winter. The icy air burning her lungs with every breath. The city muted. The darkness that wraps around her when she leaves the house in the morning and returns at night. The warmth of her apartment welcoming her back. The first snowfall and the half-melted snowmen spotted along the street the next day. Everything seems to move slowly, as if everyone is trying to walk more carefully to avoid slipping on the icy sidewalks.
That day, the atelier was quiet, the last class having ended just a short while ago. The windowpanes were fogged up with condensation, and the smell of oil paints still lingered in the air. Most of her students were already on their way home, bundled up in thick coats and long wool scarves. Mrs. Kim, one of the oldest in the group, had given her a bag of mandarins. "Make sure you eat them! They’ll keep you from getting sick." Nami had tried to refuse, but every attempt had been futile. She looked at the bag, now sitting on a piece of furniture by the door, and smiled.
She went back to cleaning the brushes left in the long ceramic sink and sighed. It was the part she hated the most, cleaning up. Only after turning off the tap did she hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor.
It was Hyunjin. He’d been coming to the atelier for a while now, ever since Yoobin, one of the founders, had met him at a friend’s gallery opening. He seemed genuinely interested in painting. And as a painter, he wasn’t bad; better than a lot of other celebrities Nami had seen take up art and claim to be true artists after only a few months. She liked him, Hyunjin. He was kind, a little dreamy, with a strange kind of sincerity she hadn’t quite figured out yet. Sometimes when he spoke, he’d trail off mid-sentence and laugh at his own thoughts.
Nami wiped her hands on an old rag before heading toward the back room. It was one of the smaller studios, with a few easels and a couple of shelves lined along the walls. Hyunjin sat cross-legged on a stool in what looked like an uncomfortable position. In front of him, a large blank canvas. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and he was spinning a brush between his fingers. He stared at the canvas for a moment longer, then started. A single brushstroke that would soon become a flower.
Nami watched him for a few seconds without saying anything. Then her gaze shifted slightly. Sitting at one of the tables in the middle of the room was an unfamiliar figure, seemingly fast asleep, arms folded around his head to shield himself from the daylight.
Hyunjin noticed her and smiled.
“Oh, hey Nami! You done with your class already?” he asked.
Nami nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her eyes went back to the sleeping figure. His light hair fell across his forehead, a black knit beanie left carelessly on the table beside him. His face was half hidden, cheek pressed into the crook of his elbow. She vaguely recognised him. An idol, like Hyunjin. Probably a member of Stray Kids. She couldn’t recall his name at the moment.
Hyunjin followed her gaze and stifled a laugh. “He said he was bored and decided to tag along. But I think watching me paint turned out to be more boring than he expected.”
Nami let out a quiet laugh, unsure of how to respond. “Is he really asleep?”
“He does this all the time. Sleeps anywhere. Like a stray cat.”
Nami stayed by the door, suddenly feeling awkward, unsure whether to stay or leave. She looked down at her hands, fingertips still red from scrubbing brushes.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked softly.
Hyunjin turned back to her. “Tea, if there’s any.”
In the small kitchen near the entrance, Nami filled the kettle and prepared two large ceramic mugs, gifts from her students over the years. The shelves were half empty; no one had bothered to go grocery shopping before the holidays, but she managed to find a few forgotten tea bags in an old tin box. While she waited for the water to boil, she picked up a glass and stared at it for a moment longer than necessary before filling it with water.
When she returned to the studio, Hyunjin was still focused on his painting, humming a tune under his breath. Nami handed him one of the mugs without saying a word, then placed the glass of water next to the other boy. She saw him stir slightly. His eyes opened slowly, just enough to register her presence.
He studied her face for a moment, with a kind of lazy, almost impertinent slowness. Intent. Curious.
Then, lazily, he smiled.
“Thanks,” he murmured, his voice low and raspy from sleep. He looked at her for a second longer, then closed his eyes again.
Nami blinked, puzzled.
“Is he always like this?” she asked Hyunjin.
He laughed. “Oh, Minho? Don’t mind him. He’s a little weird, but mostly harmless.”
Nami sat down on the couch across from them, pulling her knees up to her chest. The tea was still too hot to drink, so she held the mug between her hands, waiting for it to cool. They didn’t talk much after that. Hyunjin kept painting. Nami looked out the window, hoping to see the snow start falling like the forecast had promised. And Minho kept sleeping.
It was still winter, and the wonder of watching snow fall from the sky had begun to wear off, giving way to a strange sense of oppression. Nami had grown used to wrapping her scarf around her neck until it covered her nose before stepping out of the subway on her way to the atelier.
She hadn’t expected to see Hyunjin again so soon. The last time they’d met, he told her he wouldn’t be able to finish his painting before New Year’s because of too many commitments. But when she opened the door, stomping her feet to shake off the snow from her shoes, she saw his coat hanging by the entrance and heard a faint sound coming from the back studio.
Nami wasn’t in a hurry. She didn’t have any lessons scheduled that day. The atelier was quiet. She poured herself a cup of tea, letting the warmth seep into her frozen hands. The pale winter sunlight streamed through the frosted windows in long, muted beams, catching the specks of dust suspended in the air.
But the first person she saw when she stepped into the studio wasn’t Hyunjin.
It was Minho.
He was sitting at one of the wooden tables, an elbow propped up against the surface, his head tilted slightly to the side as he sketched in a large sketchbook he’d clearly found on one of the shelves. His dark eyebrows were furrowed in concentration. He wore a black hoodie, slightly oversized, the sleeves haphazardly rolled up. One hand gripped a pencil, the other supported his head. He looked like a bored kid pretending to keep busy while waiting for his parents to finish work.
Hyunjin, seated in front of his painting, noticed her hesitation.
“He says he likes it here,” he murmured with an amused smile, before Nami could say anything.
Minho didn’t look up from his drawing. He didn’t seem to have noticed her arrival.
Nami slowly blinked, disoriented. She hadn’t expected to see him again. It had only been two weeks since she found him napping at the same table. Not that she’d thought about it. Not really.
She moved further into the room, heading toward a shelf that held all the brushes. The shelf was right next to where Minho sat. As she passed by him, she couldn’t help but glance down at his sketchbook.
His drawings were… unusual.
Childlike, almost deliberately so. They looked like caricatures. One had tiny legs and oversized arms. Another had a triangular head, bulging eyes, and animal ears. They were a little disturbing.
Minho noticed her presence and slowly turned his head toward her. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her, maybe for a bit too long.
Nami straightened her back once she realized how close she was standing.
“Do you like them?” he asked, his tone mischievous. As if daring her. Or maybe just testing her.
Nami tried to smile, but when she opened her mouth to answer, all that came out was a stifled laugh. “They’re… I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”
“You think they’re ugly?”
His tone wasn’t offended. If anything, it was amused. He was toying with her, waiting for a reaction.
“No,” she said slowly. “Just… different.”
He tilted his head, still smiling. “Didn’t know there were standards in art.”
Nami watched him, unsure if he was actually offended or just trying to provoke her. “There aren’t. More or less. But art does say a lot about the person who makes it.”
“And what does mine say about me?”
She looked back down at the page full of doodles. One of the figures had six fingers. Another had the body of a deformed kangaroo. She pointed to it, laughing. “That you’re weird. What is this? A kangaroo on steroids?”
“That’s Bang Chan!”
Nami blinked again, stunned. “You’re telling me these are portraits?” she asked, breaking into an incredulous laugh.
“Of course,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Nami laughed again. She couldn’t help it. The drawings were absolutely ridiculous.
“Did you draw a self-portrait too?”
“No,” Minho replied. “I’m not that self-centred.”
Nami ran her fingers along the bristles of one of the brushes she was holding. Then, before she could stop herself, she asked, “If you had to draw me, what would I look like?”
Minho looked up, this time meeting her eyes directly. The mischievous glint he’d had until then disappeared for a second. He studied her as if looking through a telescope, lingering on every detail of her face. Nami turned her head slightly, suddenly uncomfortable. As the silence dragged on, she regretted asking such a stupid question. But before she could tell him to forget it, he answered.
“Like a cat,” he said finally. “With a huge mouth.”
Nami parted her lips, surprised. She tried to find something to say, maybe to complain, but he cut her off, still watching her.
“I like cats,” he murmured. “I like them a lot.”
It was such a strange thing to say and to be told. His tone was soft, sincere. It made what he’d just said sound like the sweetest compliment.
Nami didn’t reply right away. She stood there, brushes still in hand, watching him return to his sketchbook, the pencil scratching lightly at the page.
He really is strange, she thought.
Not in a bad way. Just… different.
February 2022
The rain fell in a fine, steady drizzle, almost silent, but persistent enough to dampen the ends of her scarf. Nami hunched her shoulders slightly and walked faster as she turned the corner toward the atelier. The street was mostly empty. Only a middle-aged man stood there, busy lifting the shutter of his hardware store. The city still felt half-asleep, disturbed only by the occasional passing car and the soft hiss of tires gliding over the wet pavement. Her fingers were numb from the cold despite remembering to wear gloves.
She wasn’t expecting to see anyone. It was too early for most of the students and even her colleagues. But as she reached the entrance, she stopped short.
Someone was already there.
He was standing calmly under the awning, leaning casually against the wall, eyes glued to his phone screen. A black beanie pulled low over his forehead, a white mask covering the lower half of his face. But the jacket gave him away: an old winter puffer that reached past his knees, with a poorly mended tear on the left shoulder.
“Minho-ssi?” she called.
He turned sharply; eyes just visible over the mask. They narrowed just enough for her to know he was smiling.
“I’m bored,” he said, his voice muffled. “All my friends are busy.”
A short silence followed, filled only by the sound of rain falling softly around them.
“Is Hyunjin here too?” she asked, flicking some droplets off her coat sleeve with a quick motion.
He tilted his head, studying her face. “Do you want him to be?”
The question caught Nami off guard. She wasn’t sure how to respond. It wasn’t about Hyunjin. She wasn’t interested. Not like that, at least. She’d just assumed Minho was there to keep him company, like the other times. It seemed like the most logical explanation, considering he’d never shown much interest in painting, unlike his friend.
“No,” she replied at last, typing in the code to unlock the door. “It’s fine. Come in.”
Inside, the air was dry and carried a faint metallic scent. Minho followed her to the small kitchen. He moved quietly, almost cautiously, like he knew he wasn’t really supposed to be there.
Nami filled the kettle and gestured toward the cups stacked on one of the shelves. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and sat in one of the chairs near the entryway, his gaze drifting to the window.
Several minutes passed in silence, broken only by the sound of the water coming to a boil. Nami handed him a cup of tea. Minho took it with both hands, as if it were something fragile.
“Can I stay here today?” he asked, eyes fixed on the street outside.
She looked at him, uncertain. She didn’t mind, not really, but the question still lingered oddly in her mind. She glanced at the clock near the entrance. Her senior students’ class was about to start.
“Sure,” she said eventually, walking back into the kitchen to pour tea into her own cup. Then a thought struck her. She turned back toward him.
“If you’re bored… I might have something for you to do.”
Minho turned his head, eyes narrowing slightly before he brought the cup to his lips. The tea must have still been too hot; he flinched a little, like he’d burnt his mouth, and shot her a look like it was somehow her fault. “Should I be worried?”
“It’s an offer you can’t refuse. You just have to sit. That’s all,” she replied, laughing.
“Sitting? Sounds like a trap.”
But fifteen minutes later, that’s exactly what he was doing. Sitting on a wooden stool, arms folded awkwardly, facing a semicircle of elderly students who were watching him with amused interest. One of them, Mrs. Yoo, had already started sketching, her pencil gliding over the paper with impressive speed.
“He looks uncomfortable,” she whispered to the person beside her, who chuckled in agreement.
Minho sighed, stretched out his legs, and slumped his shoulders in an exaggerated display of misery.
“This is not what I signed up for,” he complained under his breath.
Nami stifled a laugh, trying not to draw attention.
“Don’t move.”
He muttered something under his breath, but stayed put. His expression turned into an exaggerated pout, which made Mrs. Yoo giggle to herself.
From the side of the room, Nami tried to focus on her students. But her eyes kept drifting back to Minho. There was something oddly captivating about the way he sat there; half amused, half resigned, yet somehow graceful even in his stillness. The attention didn’t seem to bother him; he just looked vaguely perplexed. As if he wasn’t used to being observed like that. Or maybe he was just curious about the whole bizarre situation.
Nami found herself watching him longer than she meant to. She realised she was smiling. Shaking her head, she resumed walking around the room, focusing on the students’ sketches slowly taking shape.
Minho was a mystery. He kept showing up without warning, completely unpredictable. He didn’t try to impress anyone, didn’t seek attention. And yet, that made him even harder to ignore.
Nami still didn’t understand what he was doing there.
But she didn’t really want to tell him to leave, either.
The rain hadn’t stopped falling until late afternoon.
It kept hitting the windows of the atelier, a steady rhythm that echoed through the old building.
Minho was still there. He hadn’t said much after the lesson with the senior students. He had simply stayed, expecting nothing, claiming no one’s attention. From time to time, he wandered around the studio, poking through shelves and forgotten objects left behind by students, or rested his chin on his hand as he stared out the window. Eventually, he settled on the couch, hugging one of the cushions.
At first, Nami had been curious about what he would do, but at some point, she stopped paying attention. He was just there, that was all. Around noon, she left the atelier to cross the street and buy lunch from the corner shop. Without giving it much thought, she picked up an extra gimbap. She handed it to him wrapped in foil.
He didn’t thank her. He simply unwrapped it and began eating as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if it were owed to him.
The pale afternoon light filtered in through the grey sky, making everything inside the studio appear duller. Nami sat in the classroom where she usually taught, facing an easel set in one corner. She had pulled out a canvas she’d been working on for days, a birthday gift for her older brother. It was an idealized scene: two children, a boy and a girl, standing in a field of flowers in every colour, their chubby faces turned toward one another. She had based it on an old photograph she’d found at her grandparents’ house, but most of the details came from her imagination.
She was stuck on the boy’s face. She couldn’t manage to capture it in a way that satisfied her. His expression always looked too harsh, too lifeless, too defined. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t grasp what. She furrowed her brow and tried again, attempting to add shadows under the eyes and soften the curve of the cheek.
Behind her, Minho’s voice broke the silence. “Who is it?”
Nami turned slightly. “Who?”
He nodded toward the canvas from where he lay, stretched out on his side on the couch. “The boy.”
“My brother,” she answered.
There was a pause. Then he said, “You must not like him very much.”
Nami turned fully to face him, her back now to the painting. “Why?”
Minho’s voice was nonchalant. “He’s ugly. Or is that really what he looks like?”
Nami looked back at her painting. She pressed her lips together until they turned white. “No… he looks like me. More or less.”
“Then he can’t be that ugly.”
Nami rolled her eyes, ignoring the joke. Her gaze returned to the boy’s face, still unsatisfied with what she saw. It didn’t look like her brother. Or maybe it did. Maybe, deep down, that was how she saw him. And she didn’t want that to be true.
She took more paint with her brush, more out of habit than because she knew what to do. Her mind began to drift.
She loved her brother. She really did. But there had always been something between them that never fully healed. As a child, he had often been sick: too sick to play, too tired to throw tantrums. Their parents had watched over him like shadows, always attentive, always anxious. And in the midst of it all, Nami had learned to shrink. To wait her turn.
When she was six, she remembered very clearly thinking that if she had been the one who was sick, maybe they would’ve paid more attention to her. That twisted, unpleasant thought had never fully left her.
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Would you be upset if someone gave you this painting as a gift?”
“Is it for your brother?”
Nami hesitated for a moment. “Yes.”
“Then yes. I’d be offended.”
Nami let out a laugh, surprised by his bluntness. “It’s just that… we never did anything like that together. Not when we were little. He couldn’t play, not really. Not like other kids. We mostly spent time together in waiting rooms. I think this is what I always wanted to have with him.”
Minho said nothing. She looked over at him. His eyes were closed again, one arm behind his head.
Nami pressed her lips together again, suddenly embarrassed. Maybe she’d said too much. Maybe she was just talking to herself. Maybe she just needed someone to listen, and he happened to be there.
“Never mind,” she whispered to herself. “I’ll paint it again.”
Minho lifted his head slightly, glancing at the painting. Then he laid back down. “You’d better. Because that one really sucks.”
She threw a paint-stained rag at him. He caught it without even looking and dropped it beside him with a smile.
Outside, the rain kept falling. The afternoon was turning into dusk. Inside, the atelier was quiet. Minho didn’t say another word.
And for a while, silence kept them company.
When Nami started tidying up the brushes, the room was immersed in complete silence.
The last class of the day had ended ten minutes earlier, and the students had left, closing the door behind them. She moved slowly, careful not to drop anything.
Minho was still sitting at the back of the room, in one of the chairs near the door, legs apart and fingers busy scrolling through his phone. He gave the impression he could sit like that forever, unconcerned about the passing of time. Nami glanced at him briefly, observing the relaxed curve of his shoulders, the way his eyes lit up when something caught his attention.
Then, as she was heading toward the adjacent room, his voice broke the silence.
“Do you want to go get a drink?” he suddenly asked.
His tone was casual, low, like he had just asked the most ordinary question. And really, there was nothing wrong with what he’d said. Nami stopped, turning slightly toward him.
“Just the two of us?”
He looked up from his phone to meet her gaze. He blinked once, then again, and again, faster each time. “Why? Do you think that’s strange?”
Nami hesitated, tightening her grip slightly on the brushes still in her hands. “No… just unexpected.”
Minho slipped the phone into the back pocket of his jeans and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “What do you mean, unexpected?”
Nami didn’t have a clear answer to that question, just a tangle of incoherent thoughts in her head: Why had he come that day? Why had he stayed so long? Did he like the atmosphere, the people at the studio, the silence? Or was it something else entirely? She couldn’t tell. He was always like that, unreadable.
“I just… I don’t know, I didn’t think you’d want to,” she finally replied, stumbling a bit. “I thought you were waiting for someone, like Hyunjin.”
Minho raised his eyebrows. “Hyunjin? Why would I be waiting for him?”
“I don’t know. It makes sense. You’re friends. He comes to the studio. And you don’t paint.”
Minho stood up, stretching his arms before stifling a yawn. “Well, I felt like coming here today. And now I feel like having a drink. That’s all.”
Outside, the air smelled of wet asphalt. It had stopped raining, but a light mist made the surrounding buildings look less defined. Minho slipped on his coat, then adjusted his cap and mask with the ease of someone who had done it thousands of times. It was only then that Nami remembered she was standing in front of a celebrity; someone famous, someone people might recognize in the street.
At the studio, Minho acted normal. Maybe normal wasn’t the right word to describe him. But it was easy to forget he was an idol. She felt her chest tighten for a moment.
The pub was quiet, hidden down a side street at the end of the block. A familiar place for Nami, somewhere she often went with colleagues. Minho looked around with the curiosity of someone entering for the first time. They found a secluded table in a corner, mostly hidden behind a row of coats sloppily hung along the wall. It felt private enough.
They ordered drinks. Nami got a beer. Minho did the same. For the first few minutes, neither of them spoke much. The low-volume music blended with the murmur of other customers. Nami took a long sip, glancing around. He slouched lower in his seat, silently watching the condensation slide down his glass.
But after a while, the silence began to unravel. They started talking, first about simple, mundane topics. The weather. How the rain had made everything feel a little gloomier in recent days. Nami told him how one of her students had accidentally taken her umbrella and forgotten to return it.
Minho laughed more freely. He had a dry, almost staccato laugh, the kind that came straight from the throat.
“A lot of weird things must happen in that place,” he said.
“You have no idea. One time I found a student trying to paint with soy sauce. The smell lingered in that room for weeks,” she recalled.
They moved on to other topics. Minho told her about a weekend on Jeju Island with some high school friends, where nothing seemed to go right. After landing, they found out all their luggage had been lost, the hotel had never received their reservation, and they ended up spending the whole night on the beach. Nami told him about her first years at university and all the part-time jobs she had to take before landing the one at the atelier; from cashier at a supermarket to art teacher at a preschool for wealthy families.
Nami realised she was watching him a little too much. His features were both sharp and delicate. His bluntness never came across as mean, and he paid attention to every little detail. And when she found herself looking at him for a second too long, his gaze caught her red handed.
“Are you thinking of drawing me?” he asked mockingly.
Nami blinked, then let out a short laugh. “No. I don’t like drawing beautiful things.”
He tilted his head slightly. “Why not?”
“They’re boring,” she replied.
“So you’re saying I’m boring?”
Nami rested her chin on the palm of her hand and smiled. “Your personality makes up for your boring handsomeness.”
Minho froze for half a second, then reached for the glass in front of him, as if trying to shift the attention away from his face and the blush that was beginning to creep from the tips of his ears. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment.”
“It is.”
Minho smiled, an almost childlike smile, before quickly recovering and hiding behind a smirk.
They talked until their glasses were empty. Then they ordered another round and talked some more.
It wasn’t a date, not exactly. But it didn’t feel like just two friends hanging out, either.
There was something strange lingering in the air between them.
Something uncertain, but real.
A few days later, Hyunjin found some time to stop by the atelier. His painting was completely dry by then, and he was afraid it might get damaged. Or, at least, that’s what he told Nami, though to her it felt more like an excuse.
When he arrived, the atelier was enveloped in quiet. Nami was sitting at one of the long tables in one of the main rooms, earbuds in her ears, focused on a small canvas in front of her. Her eyebrows were furrowed, a paintbrush gripped in her right hand. The sleeves of her sweater were rolled up to mid-forearm.
Hyunjin walked over and cleared his throat to get her attention.
She looked up and jumped slightly, startled by his sudden presence, then pulled out her earbuds. “Oh, hey. You came to pick up your painting?”
“Yeah,” he replied, smiling. “Didn’t want to leave it here too long.”
He stepped closer, curious to see what she was working on. “Is it for uni?”
“It’s part of my thesis project,” she answered, leaning back in her chair. “But I’ve only just started…”
“It’s really nice,” he said sincerely. He paused, as if weighing whether or not to continue. “Minho told me he came by the other day.”
Nami looked at him, cautious. “Yeah, he stayed the whole day. Why?”
Hyunjin shrugged and let his shoulders fall casually. “I think he likes you.”
She studied him for a moment before turning her gaze back to her canvas, gently brushing away a speck of dust that had settled on it.
“Minho’s not the kind of person who likes being around people,” Hyunjin went on. “He has, like, two friends outside the group. So I think it means something if he decides to spend his day off here.”
Nami let out a breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle. “Maybe he just likes this place because it’s quiet.”
Hyunjin pulled a face. “This atelier’s not exactly the definition of quiet when the senior classes are in session. Especially when there’s fresh gossip.”
Nami smiled at the thought of her older students. “They can be a bit noisy,” she admitted.
“A bit?” Hyunjin echoed, rummaging for some plastic to wrap his painting in. Then he turned back to her, this time with a more serious expression. “Just… don’t ignore it, okay? Minho’s not the type to do things just for the sake of it. If he comes here, there’s a reason.”
Nami didn’t answer, she just nodded.
She watched him wrap up his painting and carefully tuck it under one arm. Nami raised a hand to wave goodbye, then slipped her earbuds back in and returned to her project. But for the first time that day, she found it hard to focus.
Nami was arranging some paintbrushes for that Wednesday morning’s class when the door swung open. She didn’t need to look up to know who had just walked in. There was a sort of lazy rhythm to the way he moved, like he was never in a rush.
“There you are again,” she said simply, glancing over her shoulder with a faint smile.
Minho pulled down his mask as he walked into the room. “Good morning to you too.”
“You’re early. Class doesn’t start for another twenty minutes,” she replied playfully.
Minho shrugged, dropping into one of the armchairs. “Rehearsal got cancelled this morning. I didn’t have anything else to do.”
Nami raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. She was starting to get used to his vague excuses, the way he appeared out of nowhere as if the wind had carried him in by mistake.
That day, he stayed longer than usual. He sat watching her give instructions to her students, as if she were being tested. From time to time, she noticed him nodding at her comments. Other times, he dozed off while she explained more complex concepts.
After the class ended and the students had already walked out the door, Nami found him sitting at one of the tables with a sketchbook resting on his knees.
“What are those supposed to be?” she asked, appearing behind him.
“Fish,” he replied, as if it were obvious.
“They look like crooked fingers…”
Minho smiled. “It’s my way of expressing creativity.”
She shook her head, holding back a laugh. “Well, it’s… fascinating.”
He looked at her, his expression completely unreadable. “You’re fascinating.”
Nami blinked. She felt her face flush and turned her gaze away. “Sometimes you say strange things.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not true.”
The following week, Minho showed up just as Nami was closing the atelier, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat.
“I wasn’t expecting you today,” she said, surprised.
“I wasn’t planning on coming, actually,” he replied, starting to walk beside her.
They ended up sitting at one of the plastic tables outside the convenience store at the end of the street. It wasn’t exactly dinner, just a gimbap roll to share and two cans of coffee. The street was so quiet it felt like they were the last people left in the entire universe.
“What do you do when you’re not here?” she asked, snapping apart her chopsticks before starting to eat.
He chewed slowly, thinking. “I sleep. I dance. I go to vocal lessons. I hang out with Jisung.”
“Interesting.”
“And I visit my cats, sometimes,” he added cheerfully.
“And you have no interest in learning how to paint?” she asked.
Minho raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I don’t know, you come to the atelier a lot. Or maybe you like it because it’s a quiet place,” she wondered.
“Or maybe because you’re there,” Minho interrupted.
Nami opened her mouth to say something, but closed it a moment later. His tone didn’t let her tell whether he was joking or not.
He didn’t say anything else, kept eating as if he hadn’t spoken at all.
March 2022
By early March, Minho had become a constant. Sometimes Hyunjin would arrive with him and paint in silence, but most of the time he came alone. He would stretch out on the couch, eyes glued to his phone. Sometimes, Nami wouldn’t speak to him for hours. She’d just let him be, as if his presence didn’t matter. And yet, when he wasn’t there, his absence was deeply felt.
One rainy Tuesday, he didn’t show up.
Nami kept glancing at the entrance door, trying not to hope for his arrival. Her eyes kept drifting to the clock hanging in the hall. She checked the hallway during breaks between lessons, convincing herself it was just to stretch her legs.
That evening, as she walked home with her umbrella tilted against the drafts of wind, she thought about him. They had never exchanged phone numbers. She had no way of reaching him, and she realised that his absence weighed on her.
Minho was like a stray cat: he showed up on his own time, lingered when it suited him, vanished when it didn’t.
And Nami didn’t know if she would ever get used to that.
It was a Friday night like so many others, the air still cold but with a hint of spring. The streets of Itaewon buzzed with boisterous groups of friends, couples arm in arm, foreigners mixing Korean and English, and the occasional tourists navigating the alleys with wide-eyed wonder. Nami walked a few steps behind her friends, her hands tucked into a light coat. The familiar sound of their laughter echoed through the muffled music spilling from the bars along the street. They had all had a bit too much to drink. Yoojin was recounting yet another disastrous Tinder date, while Hyemi, clinging to her arm to keep her balance, was gasping for breath between laughs. And with each increasingly absurd detail, her laughter grew louder.
"At one point he says he doesn’t eat carbs, you know, to maintain his figure. Then orders another bowl of rice!" Yoojin went on, shaking her head in disbelief.
"No way!" shrieked Hyemi, nearly bumping into a bollard she hadn’t noticed. "You’re making this up."
"I wish I were, I swear!"
Minkyu slowed his pace to walk alongside Nami, taking a long sip from his beer can and laughing. “You should’ve told him you had a sudden case of explosive diarrhoea and run for your life.”
As they rounded the corner onto the main street, a massive LED screen lit up the night sky. The familiar faces of Stray Kids appeared in high definition, announcing the release of their new album, Oddinary. Nami’s steps slowed without her realising. Her gaze lingered on the third figure, sitting on a pile of concrete bricks: Minho, his brown hair styled to reveal part of his forehead, an intense gaze, porcelain skin, and a silver earring gleaming against black clothing.
“Oh?” Hyemi stopped the moment she noticed Nami had fallen behind. She raised an eyebrow. “Seen someone you know?” she slurred.
Yoojin followed her gaze and smirked. “Well, would you look at that!”
Nami snapped out of it, feeling her cheeks burn. “I was just looking…”
“Sure, sure,” Minkyu chimed in. “You were just admiring the design, huh?”
“Please don’t start…” Nami pleaded, but her friends were already circling her like sharks.
Yoojin gave her a playful shoulder bump. “Come on, admit it. You like him!”
Nami wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck, wishing she could disappear into it. They were teasing her, but without malice. It wasn’t the first time. A few weeks back, Nami had made the mistake of mentioning him a bit too often, and her friends had immediately picked up on it, starting to suspect her feelings for that strange guy who had started frequenting her workplace in recent months. They were right; she did like him. But it felt like if she admitted it out loud, something would change.
“Yeah, maybe,” she murmured. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Which, in the language of us mere mortals, means you totally like him,” said Hyemi, looping her arm through hers. “You should see your face when you talk about him!”
“And he’s so handsome,” added Yoojin. “It’s almost annoying, how good-looking he is. How are you supposed to resist a face like that?”
“Yeah, but he’s still kinda weird,” Minkyu cut in. He’d met Minho once and had been surprised by his bluntness and odd behaviour. “A little… I don’t know how to explain it…”
“He’s not that weird,” Nami defended him quickly, almost too quickly. Too defensively. She realised it the moment the words left her mouth.
“Ooh, look at her!” Yoojin teased with a singsong tone. “Already rushing to his defence. You’re totally smitten!”
“You’re hopeless, Nami,” added Hyemi in agreement.
“But be careful,” Minkyu interrupted again. “He’s still a celebrity. He doesn’t live in our world.”
Nami nodded slowly. Her friends’ laughter faded for a moment. Her gaze drifted back to the LED screen. Minho looked like someone else up there, almost otherworldly. Not the same boy who complained about his tea being too bitter or doodled ridiculous animals in his sketchbook.
“You’re right,” she replied quietly. “Sometimes I forget. That he’s famous, I mean.”
The group started walking again. Her friends resumed chatting around her, a new story, more laughter. But Nami stayed a few steps behind, her mind somewhere else.
She looked at the giant screen one last time before turning her head away.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” she said, mostly to herself. “He probably doesn’t even like me…”
It was just past ten in the evening when Nami heard the familiar sound of the atelier’s front door opening. She didn’t look up right away, too focused on finishing her work, but the clinking of cans knocking against each other caught her attention.
Minho appeared in the doorway, dressed entirely in black, slightly hunched from the cold, a beanie on his head and his mask pulled down to his chin. He lifted a plastic bag in front of him in greeting.
“I brought some beer,” he said.
Nami blinked, surprised. “Minho-ssi, it’s been a while since you came by.”
Minho didn’t answer immediately. He sat down at one of the tables and pulled out two beer cans, opening one for himself. He looked tired, his eyes puffier than usual, hair messy. He took a long sip, and finally said: “All these rehearsals are killing me.”
Nami gave a short laugh and went back to her painting. He stayed quiet for a few seconds. Only the sound of her pencil moving against the canvas and the occasional clink of his can on the table filled the space. Then, “Why are you always so polite with me?”
Nami looked up again, tilting her head. “What do you mean?”
“You always call me Minho-ssi,” he explained. “You always speak so formally.”
“Well,” she began cautiously. “You’re older than me.”
“Really?”
She nodded, brushing her bangs aside. “I’m the same age as Hyunjin.”
Minho let out a brief, tired laugh. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
She paused, then set her pencil down beside her. “So can I speak more informally? Can I call you oppa?”
He didn’t look at her, but Nami saw the tips of his ears turn red. “Yeah, if you want. It’s not like we’re strangers.”
Nami stood and walked over to him, picking up the second beer. “So what are we, then? Drinking buddies?”
Minho looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. “Maybe.”
Nami smiled but avoided meeting his eyes. She opened the can slowly, hoping it wouldn’t spill. “Is that why you came tonight? To drink?”
He shrugged. “Not exactly. I won’t be able to come for a while, so…”
Nami looked at him again, understanding what he meant without him needing to finish the sentence: he didn’t want her to think he had disappeared because he didn’t want to see her anymore. He’d just be too busy.
“Are promotions really that hectic?” she asked.
Minho nodded, leaning back in his chair. “My next day off is in a month.”
“That’s insane,” she exclaimed.
“It is,” he agreed. “But I enjoy it, most of the time. Makes me appreciate the little free time I do have.”
She nodded, taking a sip from her can. “What do you like to do? Besides coming here, I mean.”
He gave a faint smile. “I cook. Hang out with friends. Or I usually go camping.”
Nami’s eyes lit up. “Really? I go pretty often too.”
Minho looked surprised. “Really?”
“Yeah, I always go with my friends. We go hiking and usually stay out for a night or two,” she explained with a smile, more at ease. “We have more in common than I thought.”
He rolled the can between his hands. “We should go together sometime.”
Nami narrowed her eyes, puzzled. “The two of us?”
He shrugged again. “Why not? We both enjoy it.”
Nami stayed silent for a moment, trying to suppress a smile. “Yeah. We could go one weekend…”
“I’ve got Music Core on the weekends. You know, as an MC.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you were a presenter too,” she murmured.
It was Minho’s turn to squint at her, feigning hurt. “Do you know anything about me at all?”
She laughed. “No, not really.”
“Anyway, I was serious,” he continued more calmly. “Let’s go camping. Sometime. Maybe next month.”
She raised her can and tapped it lightly against his. “Deal.”
May 2022
It was a Thursday afternoon, warm enough to leave the atelier windows open to let in some air. Nami was in her usual spot, elbows raised and fingers stained with graphite. Her hair was tied in a low ponytail, and she wore a paint-splattered apron over a white blouse that had already looked wrinkled before she’d even put it on. She was trying to figure out how to finish her painting, the last one in the series she had created for her thesis project. She hadn’t slept well the night before, tossing and turning with thoughts she didn’t want to have, and now it was hard to concentrate.
The sound of the front door opening brought her back to reality. She glanced briefly toward the hallway. Then a voice caught her attention.
“Hi.”
She looked up.
Minho was standing in the doorway, like so many times before, lit by the sunlight that made his figure look almost angelic. He wore a light windbreaker over a grey hoodie, loose-fitting pants, and well-worn hiking shoes.
“You’re here,” she whispered, caught off guard by how happy she was to see him again.
He walked over casually, letting the door close behind him on its own. “I brought you some coffee.”
Nami stood up slowly and took the paper cup he handed her, careful not to let their fingers touch. “Thanks. That’s really kind of you.”
He shrugged as if it was no big deal. “I was thinking of going camping,” he said, glancing at the canvases left behind by the students. “Wanted to know if you’d like to come.”
Nami frowned. “Now?”
He nodded. “I can’t stay overnight, but I found a spot nearby. I didn’t plan on staying out late, I have to wake up early tomorrow. But we could grab something for dinner, maybe have a barbecue.”
Nami stared at him, unsure how to respond. Her first instinct was to say no. Not because she didn’t want to go, quite the opposite. She had been waiting for this moment for over a month. She had even dreamed of it. But now that it was here, she found herself hesitating.
“I have class later,” she said, avoiding his gaze.
Minho tilted his head slightly, a faint amused smile curling at the corners of his lips, like he always did when he didn’t believe her. “Really?”
Nami hesitated again. “No. I mean, not really. It’s just…”
“If it’s because you don’t have the right clothes,” he interrupted gently, nodding toward her blouse. “I have a spare sweater in the car. You can borrow it.”
Nami nodded, but didn’t respond.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
She sighed. “I don’t know. I got used to not seeing you anymore…”
Minho stepped closer and leaned over the table, resting one hand on it. He smiled. “I figured. But we said we’d go, didn’t we?”
Nami nodded again. She remembered the conversation they had the last time they saw each other. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”
His expression shifted, a mix of regret and amusement. “Do I seem like the kind of guy who doesn’t keep promises?”
“No,” she admitted, before smiling. “I know you were busy.”
Minho pulled a chair over, turned it around and sat with his arms resting on the back. “But?”
“But it’s still weird,” she continued, embarrassed. “Seeing your face everywhere. On TV, on social media. It’s like you disappeared to another planet.”
Minho lowered his gaze to his shoes. “Maybe. But I still prefer this world.”
Nami didn’t know what to say to that, so she stayed quiet.
Then he added, gently, as if speaking to a child, “Come. Take a half-day break for me.”
She studied his face, trying to read between the lines of that usual enigmatic expression of his.
“Alright,” she finally gave in. “But I need to clean up first. Give me five minutes.”
Minho smiled. “I’ll wait in the car.”
Nami watched him walk out of the room, her heart refusing to calm its pounding in her chest. She looked at the coffee she still held in her hands, and smiled.
They arrived at the campsite a little after five in the evening. The sun was still warm, but a chill was already creeping into the air. The sky above them was almost cloudless, and the leaves on the surrounding trees trembled slightly. Even though they were only a few kilometres from the city, it felt like they had stepped into a parallel world.
Nami got out of the car and raised her arms above her head to stretch. Minho didn’t say much. He opened the car’s trunk and began pulling out the equipment and supplies they had picked up along the way. They hadn’t talked much during the drive. He had asked if she wanted to choose the music, but she declined, so a generic playlist of Japanese songs had filled the silence between them. Nami watched him as he took out a cooler and a small foldable grill.
“So,” she said after a moment, trying to break the ice and dispel the awkwardness lingering in the air. “How did the promotions go?”
Minho looked up, brushing a strand of hair from his forehead with a tilt of his head. “It was intense,” he said, then paused. “I’ve never been so busy, honestly. But I’m still happy. It means things are going well.”
Nami walked over to him and helped set up the small table. “I saw some videos of the concert,” she said, keeping her tone deliberately casual. “There were so many people.”
Minho blinked a few times, staring at her. “You watched the concert?”
She shrugged. “Some clips popped up in my feed. I didn’t exactly go looking for them. But yeah.”
Minho’s expression relaxed, as if he found it amusing. “If I had invited you,” he asked in a whisper. “Would you have come?”
Nami hesitated. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, bending down to set up the grill. “I always thought you didn’t like our music. But now I’m not so sure.”
She thought for a moment. “Maybe. I probably would’ve come. I’m not a fan, to be honest. Your music is a bit too aggressive for my taste. But from the videos, it looked like you put on a great show.”
Minho nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said after a beat. “For not inviting you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “There’s always next time.”
They focused on preparing dinner: organizing the meat into small containers, skewering vegetables, setting up the grill, and starting the fire. Nami opened a can of beer and handed another to Minho. He shook his head.
“I have to drive,” he said with a faint smile.
“Right,” she replied. “Responsible person.”
As the fire got going, the smell of meat began to rise into the evening air. They sat near the grill, just far enough to avoid the smoke.
“Oh,” said Minho suddenly, sneaking a glance in her direction. “Did your brother like the painting? The one you gave him for his birthday.”
Nami smiled faintly. “I think so. He hung it in the living room. Or maybe he did it just because I painted it. I never managed to fix his face. He didn’t seem offended, though. Or maybe he just didn’t show it.”
“He must really love you,” Minho said, laughing. “To accept such a terrifying portrait.”
Nami took another sip. “He definitely loves me more than I love him.”
Minho turned slightly to look at her. His expression was calm, his eyes glowing in the firelight. When she turned to meet his gaze, he didn’t look away. There was a tenderness there Nami had never seen before.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” he said.
Nami blinked. It was the first time he had said something like that to her. His tone, so gentle, caught her off guard.
“No,” she eventually replied. “I’m not. I was a nightmare as a kid. A real troublemaker. I was always angry. Constant tantrums no one knew how to deal with. My parents were already stressed because of my brother, and I definitely didn’t make things easier. Quite the opposite.”
“You were just a kid.”
“Still,” she mumbled.
Minho shook his head. “I really can’t picture it. You being angry. It’s a strange image.”
Nami laughed. “Why?”
“You’re always so calm,” he replied. “Almost too much.”
“I learned to channel the anger,” she explained. “Mostly into my drawings. My grandmother was the first to notice. One day she bought me one of those colouring books, and for the first time I sat still the whole time; no screaming, no crying. She made me draw every day, for hours and hours. She even convinced my parents to send me to art school. They weren’t thrilled, they thought it was a waste of time, but they were so desperate they eventually gave in.”
Minho nodded. “And what were your drawings like back then?”
“Weird,” she said, laughing. “Faceless people, purple-skinned figures, animals with human features. My parents were convinced I needed a psychologist.”
“Then they haven’t changed much. Your drawings are still weird,” he said teasingly.
“Thanks.”
“No, I don’t mean it in a bad way.” he laughed. “Being weird is a compliment.”
“You’re right,” Nami murmured. “I like weird things.”
She turned her gaze toward the sky, her face flushed. The sun was slowly setting, and she was grateful for it.
Minho flipped the meat on the grill. “Me too.”
The ride back was quiet, and yet not silent. They kept talking, but without the energy that had always defined their conversations. Nami had rested her head against the window, watching the road ahead to avoid fixing her gaze on Minho. They drifted from one trivial topic to another: the taste of the sauce Minho had used, the burnt skewer they’d forgotten on the fire, the smell of smoke still clinging to their clothes. Minho drove with one hand on the wheel, occasionally adjusting the radio volume with the other. He didn’t tease her like he usually did. He didn’t interrupt or provoke her. Instead, he looked at her with curiosity, smiling now and then. Not his usual smug grin, but a different one. Warmer. Almost affectionate.
Nami kept talking, watching the streetlamps pass by her side, her own reflection briefly appearing in the glass before vanishing again. Something had changed between them. She couldn't have said how or when it had happened, but she could feel that it had.
A warmth was spreading through her chest, one that had nothing to do with the fire or the beer. It was different. A warmth she was sure she had never felt before, as if her body were trying to send her a signal, as if it had already understood something her mind had not yet grasped, or didn’t want to. It felt like all her senses had awakened. Everything seemed amplified. Even the silence had shape, had weight. And she longed to hold on to that new sensation, even if it scared her a little.
They pulled up in front of her building just after nine. The street was quiet, the air colder, though not as crisp as it had been in the countryside. Nami slowly unbuckled her seatbelt, not quite ready to get out. Her hand rested on the door handle.
“Thanks,” she whispered. “For the dinner. And the ride. And… for everything else.”
Minho nodded. “It was fun. I’m glad you came.”
Nami opened the door and stepped out. She lingered for a moment, unsure of what to do. She could have just said goodbye and walked away. But something held her back.
“Goodnight,” he said, his voice slightly muffled.
Nami nodded and took a step toward her building. Then she turned back toward the car.
“Minho,” she called.
He had just shifted into reverse. He looked up, confused. “Yeah?”
She stepped a little closer. Her chest was tightening more and more, her mouth dry as if she hadn’t had water in days. It was as if her body had completely taken over.
“I…” she began, and then, without finishing the sentence, she leaned through the open window and kissed him.
It was brief. Full of hesitation. Her lips brushed his for just a second, long enough to feel the warmth of his skin. She pulled back almost immediately, blinking several times, stunned by her own boldness.
But what shocked her even more was his expression.
He looked stunned. Almost disturbed. Disgusted, even. His mouth opened slightly, as if he was about to say something, but no words came out. His eyebrows furrowed. There was no confusion in his gaze. Only embarrassment.
Nami’s hands started to tremble.
“I…” she tried, but the words caught in her throat. “I didn’t mean to… I thought that…”
She couldn’t finish. She could barely breathe.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stepping back quickly. “I’m so sorry.”
Minho didn’t say a word. He just watched her with an unreadable expression.
She turned and hurried away. She just wanted to disappear. The door was too heavy. Her fingers were still trembling. She punched the code into the entrance keypad twice before the door finally opened.
She didn’t look back. Not even when she heard Minho’s car pulling away.
June 2022
June arrived quietly, with longer days and heavier silences. Minho hadn’t come back to the atelier, and Nami knew exactly why: he was on tour, performing overseas. She had seen some videos online; cheering crowds, strobe lights, Minho dancing with the expression of someone who knows they are exactly where they’re meant to be. The space between them had become something Nami could now measure.
Hyunjin had stopped by once, unannounced, just before leaving for Japan. He stayed less than twenty minutes. They didn’t talk about Minho. She hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t made any jokes, as if they had silently agreed not to.
More than once, Nami had thought about asking for Minho’s number. Her hand had hovered over her phone, her mind racing through all the possible outcomes. But in the end, she chose to remain silent. Not being able to contact him was a form of indulgence toward herself. What if she messaged him and he didn’t respond? What if the silence was deliberate, intentional? It was better not to know. At that moment, she felt uncertainty was sweeter than the certainty of rejection.
She tried not to think about it too much. She tried to focus on her work, on the thesis project she would soon have to turn in, on keeping both her hands and her mind constantly busy. But the thoughts crept in anyway. They always did.
When her brother’s health took another turn for the worse and he was hospitalised for tests, everything else faded into background noise. She went to see him at the hospital one gloomy afternoon, bringing a bag of fresh fruit and some takeaway coffee, which he said he didn’t need but accepted anyway. The corridors smelled of disinfectant. His room was small, with a view of the parking lot. He shared it with a man in his fifties, who was currently at the cafeteria with some visiting relatives.
Taejoon looked worse than usual. Pale, thin, yet still smiling. His hair was a mess, his voice hoarse.
“You look like you haven’t slept much,” he said, watching her sit at the foot of the bed. As if she were the one who was ill.
“I haven’t,” she replied, beginning to slowly peel an orange. “It’s been hard lately.”
He nodded, watching her fingers move deftly. “Something’s wrong.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement.
Nami didn’t answer right away. She placed a slice of orange on the tray beside the bed and wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Can I ask you something? Even if it’s weird?”
“Of course.”
She hesitated. “If you kiss someone and they look at you like… they’re disgusted, it obviously means they don’t like you, right?”
Nami saw him blink, puzzled. “What?”
“I mean, if you like someone and they kiss you, you kiss them back. Right?” she asked carefully.
Taejoon laughed, but stopped as soon as he saw the pitiful expression on her face. “Well, yeah. Most likely. That seems pretty normal.”
Nami let out a groan and buried her face in her hands, but said nothing.
Since his sister didn’t seem ready to go on, Taejoon continued, “Did you kiss someone?”
“Yeah.” she cried. “And he looked at me like I’d spat in his face.”
“Some people find that hot. Spitting, I mean.”
Nami didn’t laugh. She kept staring at the floor.
“And who the hell is this guy?” he continued. “Should I go find him and teach him a lesson?”
She let out a tired laugh and shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s not even in Seoul. He left on tour. He’s a singer. I don’t even have his phone number.”
Taejoon adjusted himself, trying to sit straighter against the hospital’s uncomfortable pillow. “Wait, a singer? Seriously?”
“Yeah, an idol. He showed up at the atelier one day and kept coming back unannounced for months, talking to me, staying late. I thought there was something between us… but apparently, I just imagined it.”
Taejoon was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You didn’t imagine it. You’re not crazy.”
Nami lowered her head even more. “I kissed him. Outside my apartment. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with this weird expression. And then he left. It was really humiliating.”
“Oh my God,” her brother murmured. “He seriously didn’t say anything? Just walked away?”
Nami nodded. “I keep thinking about how stupid I was. About how I persuaded myself he liked me. I thought he looked at me differently. But maybe that’s just how he looks at everyone. Maybe it was just me wanting him to feel the same, projecting my feelings, and that’s why I saw things that weren’t real.”
Taejoon opened his mouth to reply, but a sudden coughing fit stopped him. Nami stood up at once, placing a hand on his shoulder. Then she reached for the emergency button.
“You okay?” she asked.
He raised a hand, waving it quickly in front of him to show he was fine. “I’m okay. It happens sometimes.”
“You don’t look okay. The nurse is coming.”
Nami sat back down in the chair beside the bed.
“Sorry,” she said. “You’re already not feeling well, and here I am burdening you with my stupid drama. As if any of it mattered…”
He reached out and gently took her hand. “It matters to you. So it matters to me.”
Nami didn’t answer. She simply nodded and looked away, squeezing his hand a little tighter. A thought flashed through her mind, one she instantly regretted: if she were the one who was sick, she wouldn’t be this kind. She’d make sure all the attention was on her. She’d be selfish and bitter. But her brother kept smiling at her, listening to her. He was truly too kind. And that only made her feel worse.
The nurse arrived moments later, checked that everything was alright, and gave him a glass of water, like it was the universal cure for all his problems. He accepted it without complaint, briefly closing his eyes after swallowing.
Nami stayed a little longer, mostly in silence. She peeled another orange, this time more slowly, watching Taejoon fall asleep. The steady rhythm of his breathing calmed her, though he still looked far too weak.
She still felt a strange ache in her chest, but in that room, it seemed irrelevant. Her thoughts about Minho now seemed ridiculous. But they weren’t completely gone.
She looked one last time at her brother’s sleeping face and got up, gently placing a hand on his cheek. She decided not to wake him and quietly left.
June 2023
The café was full of people, every table taken, and a constant flow of customers kept coming in and out to order takeaway coffee, dragging in the warm air of that early summer day. Some customers sat hunched over, eyes fixed on their laptops, while others chatted with friends. The air conditioning was too strong, forcing Nami to wrap a scarf around her neck.
She was sitting at a table in the corner with Yoojin, Hyemi, and Minkyu, all of them already halfway through their iced Americanos. They had met up spontaneously in the late afternoon, none of them ready to go home. The table was sticky, and the music a bit too loud, but none of it really mattered. For a few hours, it was as if they had gone back in time to a few years earlier, when they were all still in university, sneaking out of the studio to hide out in the nearest café and spend hours chatting instead of working on their respective projects.
Hyemi was scrolling her finger across her phone screen, sighing dramatically. “It’s unbelievable,” she groaned. “My entire feed is full of couples vacationing in Europe. Okay, we get it. You’re in love and rich. No need to plaster your happiness all over social media.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re single and jealous,” Minkyu replied, sipping through his straw and raising an eyebrow.
“You’re single too!” she exclaimed bitterly.
“By choice,” he answered calmly. “Unlike you, I don’t fall for the first guy I meet on the street.”
Yoojin chuckled and quickly hid her smile behind her glass, taking a long sip. Nami smiled faintly, resting her chin on her palm. She wasn’t really listening. The night before, she’d stayed up late working on a new painting commissioned by a client. That morning, she’d received an email from a small brand interested in collaborating with her. But the exhaustion she’d been carrying around lately hadn’t even allowed her to feel happy about that small achievement.
Then, suddenly, she felt Hyemi tapping her arm. “Oh my God, look!”
On the café’s television, fixed high above the counter, another music video had started. Nami followed Hyemi’s pointing finger, looked up at the screen, and there he was.
Minho.
His hair was darker than she remembered, but still with a purplish tint. His gaze sharp, his expression serious. The chatter in the café covered the music, but she could still imagine it. She knew their style by now. Minho moved with an intensity that made it impossible to look away.
“Oh,” Yoojin said in surprise. “Isn’t that…”
“That’s him,” Hyemi cut in, almost gleeful.
Nami didn’t reply. As soon as Minho disappeared from the screen, she looked away.
“Anyway,” Hyemi continued undeterred, lowering her voice. “I’ve been thinking about it. About what happened with Minho, I mean. And I’ve come to a conclusion: he’s gay.”
Minkyu let out a shocked laugh. “You say that every time a cute guy doesn’t give you attention.”
“No, I’m serious this time,” she insisted, leaning in even closer. “After… well, after what happened, we talked about it, remember? And right after, my phone started filling up with posts and news about him. Articles. Videos. You name it. You know our phones listen to us. And trust me. That guy is anything but straight.”
“Are you sure?” Yoojin asked. Her tone wasn’t judgmental, just curious. “I wouldn’t be surprised, but I thought he really liked Nami.”
“I told you he was a weird guy,” said Minkyu.
“Guys, please stop,” Nami murmured, eyes fixed on the table. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But don’t you think it would be better?” Hyemi asked, unbothered. “If he was gay, I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it would mean the problem wasn’t you.” she replied with nonchalance. “He didn’t reject you because it was you, he just… doesn’t like women in general. Wouldn’t that be a relief?”
“You shouldn’t go around guessing people’s sexuality,” Minkyu interjected. “It’s not okay.”
“Oh, cut it out with that woke crap.” sighed Hyemi. “I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
The others fell silent. On the television screen, the video was replaced by an ad before moving on to the next one.
Nami didn’t look up. She stirred her now-watery coffee slowly, making the remaining ice clink against the sides of the glass. She felt a strange sensation in her chest. Not the same one she’d felt the year before. But it still made her uneasy.
Could what Hyemi said be true?
It would explain a lot. Especially the look on his face after she kissed him.
Over the months, she had convinced herself that Minho had come to the atelier just to see her. But what if he had only wanted to find a place to escape to, a quiet space where no one cared who he was? A place where he could go unnoticed. Maybe Nami had misunderstood everything. Had mistaken the attention he gave her for attraction. His wanting to be around her for desire. And then she kissed him. And maybe he hadn’t gotten angry, but had simply been disappointed.
Nami bit her lip and pressed her thumb to the rim of her glass. A sudden wave of guilt crashed over her.
“Anyway,” Hyemi said, stretching her arms above her head. “Let’s go somewhere else. It’s too noisy in here, my ears are ringing.”
They gathered their bags. As they stood, Yoojin gently touched Nami’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said softly. “You okay?”
Nami nodded but didn’t smile. “Yeah, I’m just tired. Don’t worry.”
Outside, the air felt heavier than it had a few hours earlier, even though the temperature had dropped a bit. Her skin was sticky under her cotton T-shirt, and the sun hit her right in the eyes.
She didn’t know if Minho was gay. And she didn’t care. It was one of the many questions she would never have an answer to. Like why he’d shown up at the atelier. Or why he kept coming back.
But a voice inside her kept asking the same question.
Had he thought about her at all, in the past year?
Nami would never know. But she hoped he had. Even just once. That would be enough.
February 2024
The gallery was small but well lit, tucked between a flower shop and a boutique. Outside, the air was still cold, but inside, the space was warm. The only background sounds were the guests' conversations and the occasional clink of glasses. People were scattered in small groups, intently studying the paintings on the walls while nodding thoughtfully.
Nami stood near one of the walls, holding a glass of wine, finishing up a conversation with a freelance journalist from an art blog. She was wearing a dark blue dress her brother had gifted her, which swayed with her every movement. She regretted not finding the time to stop by the hairdresser, as her bangs kept falling into her eyes. Despite trying to appear calm, her heart was racing, part excitement from seeing so many people, part anxiety over their judgment. Everything seemed to be going well; the guests appeared interested in her work, though she hadn’t yet had a chance to talk with them personally. Only her former professor had come by before the event started to congratulate her and share his thoughts on her paintings. Nami had nearly burst into tears.
When the interview ended, Nami gave a polite bow and thanked the journalist. As she watched her head toward the food table, she inhaled and exhaled deeply, as if she'd been holding her breath until that very moment. She walked slowly through the room, smiling each time she passed a new group of guests. Her parents had already left, but some friends were still there: Yoojin stood by the drink table, engaged in conversation with a photographer they knew, while Hyemi was posing in front of one of the larger paintings, directing Minkyu on the best angles for photos.
She was halfway to the buffet when Nami noticed Hyunjin.
He was leaning against the wall, his usual relaxed demeanour making it seem like he was never out of place, idly swirling a glass of wine in his hands. He nodded politely as someone tried to explain their interpretation to him, but his eyes lit up the moment they met Nami’s.
“Nami,” he said with a broad smile, pushing off the wall with one shoulder to approach her. “This is incredible! Your paintings are wonderful.”
She smiled, happy at his words. “Thank you. I didn’t know you were in Seoul.”
“Just for a bit,” he replied. “I’m leaving for Milan in a few days. But I was free tonight, saw your post on Instagram, and thought I’d stop by.”
Nami nodded, glad to see him again. But her gaze soon shifted past him. She recognised him immediately.
Minho.
He was just a few steps away, studying a series of paintings depicting the atelier. His back was straight, hands tucked into his trouser pockets. His frame looked broader than she remembered. His hair was darker, neatly cut at the sides. He seemed stronger, like he’d been training relentlessly, and yet there was something dimmed about him. When she finally saw his eyes, they lacked their old mischief. He looked more mature, more grown-up, but also much more tired.
She approached him hesitantly and stopped a few steps away.
Minho didn’t turn. His eyes remained fixed on the paintings.
“I didn’t know you got a cat,” he said suddenly, his voice low and calm.
“We didn’t,” she replied after a brief pause.
He smiled, almost to himself. “That's a shame. Cats are nice.”
Nami looked at the canvas in front of him: a sunlit corner of the studio, a ginger tabby prowling near a stack of books and open paint tubes. She remembered painting it almost absentmindedly, instinctively. The space had felt too empty.
They stood in silence, side by side. A couple nearby burst into laughter before drifting away again.
“Congratulations, by the way,” Minho finally said, turning slightly toward her. “I don’t know much about art, but your paintings… they’re beautiful. All of them.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “And thanks for coming.”
Minho shrugged. “When Hyunjin told me about the vernissage, I thought I’d come too. Didn’t have much else going on. Didn’t expect to see so many cats, though.”
Nami smiled faintly.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Good. Very busy,” he replied, glancing up at the spotlights on the ceiling. “I started boxing.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, still smiling. “Are you still working at the atelier?” he asked, gesturing toward the paintings with a nod.
“Not anymore. I got a job as an assistant at my old university. I don’t want to become a professor, but the pay’s good and I have lots of time to paint. But I still go to the atelier a lot. Yoojin lets me use one of the rooms. So whenever I can, I go.”
“Sounds like things are going well.”
“Yeah, I’d say so.” she replied. “I’m… lucky.”
Minho nodded slowly. Then silence fell again.
Nami lowered her gaze to her glass, tracing the rim with her finger.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered then.
He turned. “For what?”
This time, Nami looked him straight in the eye. “For what happened… you know, the last time we saw each other. I never had the chance to properly apologise.”
He shook his head. “You did. That night. You apologised. Twice.”
“I know, but I mean really apologise. I didn’t mean to…”
Minho truly looked at her for the first time. His gaze was gentle. “There’s nothing to apologise for.”
He seemed to hesitate, as if he wanted to say more. Nami said nothing, hoping he would go on. But nothing came. She watched him glance around until his eyes landed on Hyunjin, who was near the entrance hugging Yoojin goodbye. “We have to get up early tomorrow, so I should probably grab Hyunjin and head home.”
“Of course. Thanks again for coming. It really meant a lot.”
He lingered for a moment, then offered her a crooked smile. There was something familiar in that expression. Something nostalgic.
“It was nice seeing you again,” he said.
Nami hesitated. She wanted to hug him. Just once. Just to be sure he was real, that she hadn’t imagined him. But her body was frozen.
So she simply raised a hand in farewell.
Minho nodded, gave a brief bow, and turned, walking toward Hyunjin.
Nami watched them leave. Then she turned back to the paintings.
One of the cats curled up on the windowsill seemed to be staring at her. Nami smiled faintly, shook her head, and walked away.
March 2024
Are you at the atelier?
A moment later:
It’s Minho, by the way.
Nami stared at her phone screen and came to a halt. A strange feeling made her take a deep breath, somewhere between surprise and something unfamiliar she couldn’t quite name. She hadn’t expected to hear from him again. Not so soon. Maybe not ever.
Her reply came instinctively:
I was thinking of going after class.
She looked at her message for a second, regretting how quickly she had replied. It seemed too eager. She was eager, in truth. But that didn’t make her any less embarrassed.
His response came just as fast:
I’ll wait for you there.
That day, Nami took the shortcut. Normally, she liked walking along one of the backstreets behind the subway station, stopping for takeaway coffee at the bakery across from the second-hand clothing shop. But now she practically ran. By the time she reached the atelier, she was out of breath.
Inside, the atmosphere was calm, as always. She opened the door to her studio and found him there, sitting on the couch by the window, busy checking messages on his phone.
Minho looked up the moment he heard her enter, and for a second, it felt like she had been thrown back in time. And yet everything had changed. His hair was nearly black now. His body looked more solid, his shoulders broader. And most of all, his gaze. It seemed duller, somehow.
Nami said nothing. She simply took a step forward, took off her coat, and draped it over the back of one of the chairs. Then she sat down in her usual spot on her stool and looked at him.
He smiled.
“I was hoping to see the cats,” he said.
She smiled too, amused by the comment. “Told you, we don’t have any.”
“That's a shame.”
Minho looked around again, this time more slowly, as if trying to memorise all the small changes that had been made to this once-familiar space. When his eyes landed on her again, he looked at her differently, more directly. “So why did you paint them?”
Nami didn’t answer right away. She reached for a brush and played with the bristles out of habit.
“You once told me I remind you of a cat,” she eventually said. “They’re self-portraits.”
It was a lie, but she would never have the courage to admit the truth.
He smirked. “They don’t have big mouths, though.”
She shrugged.
For a while, neither of them spoke. She began arranging her materials without any particular hurry. Minho stayed where he was, never looking away. It was strange. She was used to seeing him wander aimlessly whenever he came here, barely paying attention to her. That day, he didn’t move. He watched her as if she were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
“Would it bother you if I came here now and then?” he asked suddenly.
Nami turned toward him. “You’ve never asked before.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, avoiding her gaze. “I know. I thought… maybe I wasn’t allowed anymore.”
There was a moment of silence. In that moment, he seemed younger somehow, like a child. Or maybe just more vulnerable.
“I like being here,” he added in almost a whisper. “I missed it. But I get it if you don’t want me to come.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to?” she asked, surprised.
Minho hesitated. Then said, “I feel like you hate me.”
Her heart skipped a beat. She stepped away from the easel, moving closer to him without thinking. “Why? I don’t… Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know, it’s just a feeling. The way things ended, you know. I don’t know.”
“Minho, I don’t hate you,” she stated with certainty. “I’ve never hated you.”
He let out a breath of relief, and for a moment, his whole body seemed to relax.
Nami looked at him. His eyes wavered, as if he wanted to say more. But he didn’t.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
He hesitated. “Yeah. Why?”
She tilted her head. “You seem… I don’t know. Different.”
A smile appeared on his face, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
Nami decided to let it go. “Are you bored? Is that why you came here?”
“You want to make me pose again?” he teased, raising an eyebrow slightly. “I’m even more handsome now, so I doubt you’d want to draw me.”
“Yeah, your face is still boringly pretty.”
Minho laughed, and this time, it was real. Loud and unfiltered.
Nami smiled and felt her shoulders loosen. She hadn’t realised how tense she’d been until that moment.
Maybe, she thought, this was what Minho needed. A space where he didn’t have to explain anything. Where he could just exist.
And she realised, she was more than happy to be the person who could offer that to him.
It was late afternoon when Minho reappeared at the atelier. Spring sunlight filtered through the windows. Nami was finishing an initial underpainting when she heard the door open.
“You’re early,” she said, without turning around.
“You sound disappointed.”
She glanced over her shoulder. He was wearing a cap and a long beige coat, trying not to attract attention as always. But there was something in his eyes that made her frown.
“No, just surprised,” she replied. “I thought you were busy with preparations for the fan meeting.”
Minho dropped his backpack by the couch before collapsing onto it with a groan, exhausted. “Don’t remind me. It’s this weekend. We’ve been rehearsing for four days straight. It’s always so chaotic and loud, sometimes I can’t even hear myself think.”
“But you like it, right? What you do, I mean,” Nami asked. She tried to keep her tone neutral, but she could barely hide her curiosity. “I mean… two years ago it didn’t seem to bother you this much.”
He shrugged, his eyes following her movements as she painted. “Yeah, it was… different.”
“Different how?”
Minho let his head fall back, eyes half-closed. “Back then, I knew why I was doing it. I had a clear goal. Now I just do it because I have to.”
Nami glanced at him, concerned. “Maybe you’re just tired.”
He nodded. “Maybe.”
There was a pause.
“I really missed this place,” he murmured after a while.
She didn’t respond, but something in her stomach started to ache. She quietly wondered what had happened to him over the past two years, during all the time they hadn’t seen each other. Because this wasn’t the Minho she knew, only his shadow.
April 2024
They were sitting on the couch, sipping coffee Minho had bought before arriving. The nervousness of seeing him again had slowly faded with each of his visits, though it hadn’t disappeared completely. Nami let her gaze drift to Minho’s hands. She noticed cuts and bruises on his knuckles. She had to resist the urge to reach out and touch his wounds.
“Did you go train?” she asked him.
“Yeah, last night.”
“Teach me a few moves,” she said with a laugh.
He turned to look at her, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Are you serious?”
Nami nodded. “I need a break. I’ve been sitting all day, I feel like I need to move a little.”
They cleared a space in the centre of the room, pushing the tables to the walls. Minho stood in front of her, a bit taller than she remembered, or maybe it was just his posture.
“Okay, keep your hands up. No, not like that. Like this…” Minho stepped closer, adjusting her arms into the right position. “Keep your chin down. Elbows in. You’re fighting, not trying to hug your opponent.”
She widened her eyes in concentration and followed his instructions. “I don’t know how you do this. My arms already hurt.”
“That’s because you’re too tense. You need to relax. Come on, try throwing a punch.”
She did. Then tried again.
“Pretty embarrassing,” he commented, laughing. “Try again.”
“You’re a terrible coach.”
On the fifth try, her punch landed on his shoulder. Not hard, but enough to make him flinch.
“Ouch,” he said, blinking a few times like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry! Did I actually hit you? Did I hurt you?”
Nami dropped her stance and stepped forward instinctively. She reached out before she could stop herself. Her fingers brushed his arm, gently, as if checking to make sure she hadn’t left a bruise. Only after a moment did she realise what she was doing. Her breath caught in her throat.
He looked at her without blinking.
She pulled away.
“You’re fine,” she said quickly, turning her back to him.
Minho laughed and settled back on the couch. Nami walked over to one of the shelves, muttering complaints about how poorly the brushes were organised. She pretended she hadn’t felt the warmth of his body, hadn’t seen the way he looked at her.
That day, Minho stayed a little longer, but neither of them brought it up again.
A week later, they found themselves at the pub near the atelier. They’d been drinking for about an hour, sitting in their usual corner. It had started drizzling outside, but from inside, they hadn’t noticed yet.
Nami was holding a half-full glass of beer in her hands. She hadn’t eaten and felt warmth in her cheeks. She wasn’t drunk, but her arms felt lighter, her shoulders more relaxed. And even though her thoughts were beginning to blur into a hazy tangle, they kept circling around just one thing: Minho, sitting across from her, laughing at something she’d said. He had one elbow resting on the table, holding his beer with the other hand.
She was struck by how easily they had fallen back into old habits. As if the time apart had never existed. As if nearly two years hadn’t passed without those ridiculous exchanges, without the comfort of their shared silences. A faint thread of tension still occasionally passed through her when their eyes met and neither of them found the strength to look away first. What they had wasn’t friendship, not exactly. But it wasn’t love either. It was something in between, a kind of limbo with no clear way out. And Nami was afraid. Afraid that if she reached out to him, if she tried to get closer again, he would disappear. So she made do with that strange relationship and all their unspoken words.
She leaned forward slightly, letting her eyes wander over his face. If she had been more sober, she wouldn’t have dared to be so bold. Minho noticed and lowered his head, smiling in that shy, almost awkward way he had started adopting lately. That sweetness was new. Two years ago, Minho had been charming, mysterious, always a little untouchable. Now there was something more delicate in the way he looked away, in the way he smiled.
Her gaze traced his features, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Then she noticed a detail she had always missed.
“You have a mole here,” she said suddenly, voicing her thoughts out loud. Her words hung in the air, as if someone else had said them. Before she could stop herself, her finger rose and gently touched the side of his nose. “I’d never noticed it before.”
Minho blinked, surprised. The touch was brief, almost imperceptible, but it made him sit up straighter. He looked at her for a moment with an unreadable expression. Nami could see in his eyes that he was trying to process what had just happened, as if that innocent gesture meant something he hadn’t yet figured out how to name.
Then, softly, he said, “Do it again.”
Nami hesitated, her eyebrows lifting slightly in surprise. She reached out again, this time more slowly, brushing her fingertip against the mole just above the curve of his nostril. Her hand lingered for another second. He smiled again, this time with a hint of mischief, and looked away, almost embarrassed by his own request.
“My mom has the same mole,” he murmured.
“Do you look like her?” she asked.
Minho nodded. “They say I’m her exact copy.”
“Then she must be a beautiful woman.”
He laughed, more relaxed now. “Yeah, she is.”
For a while, they sat in that silence. It was comfortable. The pub’s background music filled the space, and the smell of fried food drifted in for a moment before fading again. Then Minho leaned forward, resting his head briefly on his folded arms on the table. A small sigh escaped him, like he was trying to let go of something heavy.
His hand reached out and found hers.
He didn’t hold it, not exactly. He simply took her index finger between his and began to play with it, lifting and lowering it rhythmically. It should have felt strange. But it didn’t. It felt completely natural, as if they had always done it. She didn’t pull her hand away. She let him do it.
She looked at his hand, and her heartbeat slowed to match its rhythm.
And yet, that feeling came back, that ache in her chest. Worry.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Minho?” she asked softly.
He didn’t look up. “I’m just tired.”
“You said you slept twelve hours.”
“Yeah,” he admitted, almost reluctantly. “But I only got three hours of sleep over the last few days.”
Nami tilted her head slightly, studying him. His face was dull with fatigue, the shadows under his eyes deeper than usual. “Is it really that hard? Your job, I mean.”
He stayed quiet for a long time.
“It’s just that… it used to be fun,” he said finally, lifting his head a little. “It still is. I mean… yeah, no, it is. Being tired is a good thing. I just wish… I don’t even know.”
He looked at her, and whatever he saw made him pause again. His gaze lingered for a moment, uncertain. Then he gave a small, genuine smile. “Why do you worry about me so much?”
“Because I like you,” Nami admitted simply, the words slipping out before she could catch them.
Minho blinked rapidly, then looked down at their hands. His ears turned suddenly red. He didn’t speak for a while, as if trying to figure out what to do with that truth.
“Is it weird that I like the fact that you worry about me?” he asked in a whisper, his voice unsure.
Nami laughed. “My brother would probably say there are people who find that hot. Like, sexually.”
Minho’s ears flushed even redder and he looked like he was about to burst into laughter, but something in his expression shifted suddenly, as if an idea had just occurred to him. He straightened up, but didn’t let go of Nami’s hand.
“Oh, your brother!” he said, smiling smugly. “How’s he doing?”
“Good,” she replied, amused by the obvious attempt to change the subject. “He found himself a girlfriend. She’s nice.”
“I’m glad.”
The conversation drifted again, and then again, one, two more times. It felt like it would never end. They talked about their families, a new show Nami had started but wasn’t sure she liked, the anime Minho wanted to start but hadn’t had time for yet. Their hands remained together on the table, his fingers still playing with hers, like he never wanted to stop.
She didn’t move. Not once. Not even when she felt the need to go to the bathroom.
She knew that moment would end.
But she let it be enough.
May 2024
May was drawing to a close when Nami saw Minho again. The weeks had passed slowly, a succession of interminable mornings, long afternoons spent grading papers, and drunken evenings with friends, punctuated by occasional messages from Minho and filtered glimpses of his life through Instagram. Stray Kids had been in New York to attend the Met Gala, and a flood of event photos had taken over her feed. Minho had even flown to London for a Gucci event, his name now listed alongside internationally renowned celebrities. He’d sent her a blurry picture of himself in a grey suit, likely taken back at the hotel. In secret, Nami had searched for other photos from the event and saved one of Minho standing next to Paul Mescal.
They had stayed in touch, just enough not to disappear completely from each other’s lives. Minho often sent her random pictures or embarrassing moments of the other members, without any captions. Occasionally, she’d wake up to a string of voice messages from a drunken Minho. He never said anything meaningful, but Nami would replay them just to hear the sound of his laugh. She’d reply with simple phrases, laughter, and photos of stray cats that had started to hang around her house. It gave her the illusion of continuity.
So when he texted her saying he had a day off and planned to stop by the atelier, Nami found herself both sighing in relief and holding her breath in anticipation at the thought of seeing him again.
But as she made her way down the narrow hallway toward her studio, she hesitated. Minho’s unmistakable laugh echoed faintly from inside, but it was overlapped by another voice, more animated and unfamiliar. For a moment, Nami wondered if it was Hyunjin. But the tone was different. More childlike, quicker. Nami paused in front of the door, then slowly pushed it open.
Inside, Minho was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a sketchbook resting on his thighs. Next to him was another guy, hunched over his own sketchbook, laughing at a poorly drawn doodle. Their heads were close together. There was an obvious intimacy in how they interacted.
Nami recognised him immediately. Han Jisung. One of the members of Stray Kids. The one Minho talked about most often. His roommate. His closest friend.
Finding him there, in the space Nami had always considered hers and Minho’s, was like coming home and finding a thief rifling through all your drawers, looking for hidden jewellery. She felt betrayed. That room had held their silences, their glances, their quiet. It was as if their bubble had suddenly burst. For Minho, perhaps it was just another room. But for Nami, it had been a refuge, a place where the complicated feelings that bound them could exist without consequence.
Minho looked up and his expression lit up cheerfully. “Oh, Nami, you’re here!”
She tried to smile but knew she hadn’t succeeded.
“This is Jisung,” Minho continued, pointing to his friend. “He was curious to see the atelier, so he came with me today.”
“Nice to meet you,” Nami said, her voice devoid of any emotion.
“Nice to meet you too,” Jisung replied, smiling timidly, cautiously. He didn’t try to fill the silence. He simply bowed his head again and returned to his sketchbook, his posture slightly hunched, as if he had already sensed her displeasure.
Nami walked past them, her hands gripping the strap of her bag. She let it drop onto the stool with a dull, almost aggressive thud. The boys’ laughter resumed behind her, as if she weren’t there. As if she were just another piece of furniture.
That place had become sacred to her. A quiet space where she and Minho could meet halfway. It was their grey area, where they didn’t need labels. They weren’t friends, or lovers, or anything else. They were just themselves, their silences and nonsense conversations. No one else had ever truly belonged to that space.
So finding someone else there didn’t just feel wrong, it felt like a betrayal. Minho had brought someone into something she hadn’t even realised she had claimed until it had been violated. She looked at the couch where they used to sit, at the brush shelf he had once reorganised just to tease her, and everything suddenly felt off. As if her memories were less real now, overwritten by this new person who laughed too loudly and acted too familiarly. She hadn’t realised how much she needed that room to be theirs, and theirs alone.
The afternoon dragged on slowly, thick with invisible tension. Nami tried to paint, but couldn’t focus. Behind her, the two boys kept drawing, laughing at their weird doodles, talking about things only they could understand, conversations Nami couldn’t take part in. Sometimes Jisung would fall silent when he sensed she was looking at him. She tried not to stare too directly. But she couldn’t hide her disapproval, either.
Toward evening, Minho approached her. “We were thinking of getting something to eat. Want to come with us?”
Nami barely turned to look at him.
“There’s this place nearby,” he went on. “Jisung and I go there a lot.”
She didn’t respond right away.
“My treat,” Minho added with a faint smile.
Nami gave the barest nod.
The restaurant felt almost stifling compared to the cool evening air. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air. Minho and Jisung sat naturally at a quiet corner table after greeting a couple of the waiters. Nami took a seat across from them in silence, arms crossed tightly over her chest.
Jisung noticed. In fact, he’d noticed everything. He seemed hesitant to speak whenever Nami looked at him. His voice would soften, he barely finished his sentences. But Minho didn’t seem to notice. He was relaxed, at ease.
Nami tried to join their conversation. She asked a few questions about their trip to the U.S. But it was obvious from her tone that she didn’t really care. She wasn’t even listening to their answers. She was watching them. Watching the way Minho looked at Jisung. Not just fondly. With a familiarity, a deep ease that only comes with truly knowing someone.
Hyemi’s words echoed in her mind: he’s gay.
Nami hadn’t cared. She had told herself it didn’t matter.
But in that moment, watching Minho lean in toward Jisung, laughing, she felt something bloom bitterly in her chest. Something she’d felt before. The same feeling she’d felt as a child, forced to stand on the side-lines while her brother received all their parents’ attention. That feeling of exclusion that made her want to scream. That sense of always being the one left out. She knew her feelings were irrational, but she couldn’t stop them.
When they finished eating, Minho got up to pay. Nami and Jisung remained seated in silence. He glanced at her, then looked down at the table again.
“It’s really nice,” he said after a brief pause. “The atelier, I mean. I get why Minho always wants to go there. It’s very… peaceful. I really liked it.”
Nami didn’t answer right away. She looked at him for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then, in a low voice, she said, “Please don’t come again.”
Jisung froze, his eyes wide and her words hanging between them. He opened his mouth slightly, but couldn’t speak.
She didn’t repeat herself. But she didn’t try to soften the blow, either. She simply looked away, as if she hadn’t said anything at all.
June 2024
It was a humid, hot Wednesday. Nami heard a knock at the half-open door of the office she shared with two other assistants. She had been hunched for hours over a pile of essays she needed to grade, twirling a red pencil between her fingers, her focus repeatedly broken by the buzz of the university’s air conditioning and the distant sound of drilling from the construction site across the street. Her eyes felt dry, her mind dulled by monotony and sleepless nights. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Her colleagues were both out for lunch.
When she looked up, her breath caught in her throat.
Minho was standing in the doorway.
He wore a cap pulled low over his forehead, and a black mask covered most of his face. But his eyes were unmistakable; large, dark, hesitant. The shock of seeing him there, on campus, in her office, made it almost impossible to breathe. Her heart kicked into motion at a sudden, confusing speed, somewhere between alarm and hope.
“Minho?” she said, standing up so abruptly that her chair banged loudly against the cabinet behind her. She rushed to the door and grabbed a sleeve of his shirt to pull him inside, shutting the door quickly behind them. “What are you doing here? Are you out of your mind? Someone could recognise you.”
He let her pull him in without resistance, his gaze slowly moving around the cramped room.
“You weren’t answering my texts,” he said simply, as if that explained everything.
He sat at her desk like it was his own. He picked up a small ceramic frog Nami kept near her monitor and turned it over in his hands, his thumb brushing across the tiny raised black eyes.
“I’ve been busy,” she said. Her voice was flat, but her hands trembled slightly as she crossed them over her chest.
Minho took off his mask with one hand, placing it on her desk. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” she replied. She paused, then added, “I told you, I’ve been busy. I barely check my phone.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
The silence that followed was tense, like something could snap with a single wrong word. Nami didn’t move. The longer he stared at her, the more she felt something inside her begin to crack.
Since their last encounter at the atelier, something inside her had broken. They had spent weeks, months, trying to mend their relationship. She had convinced herself that their strange friendship was enough, that she could go on like that without ever letting it become something more serious. But it wasn’t true. She couldn’t keep pretending that it didn’t hurt to be near him and always feel like she was waiting for something he would never be able to give.
She walked over to the opposite desk, her colleague’s, and sat down. Being farther from him seemed like the only way she could breathe.
Minho looked at her. He said nothing.
“Can I ask you something?” she finally said. Her voice trembled.
He nodded.
“Do… do you like men?”
His eyes widened slightly, his hands stopped playing with the frog. For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then a faint, tentative smile flickered across his lips.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never really thought about it. But I think I do.”
Nami felt her chest tighten. Then, suddenly, an unexpected wave of anger hit her. She wasn’t angry that Minho might be gay. She didn’t care about that. She was angry at herself. In that moment, she realised just how much she had unconsciously hoped he wasn’t. Hopes that now proved useless.
Then he added, quickly, in a low voice, “But I like women too.”
Her breath caught again. He avoided her gaze. He kept his eyes fixed on the frog, starting to rub its belly as if trying to remove a stain. His embarrassment was obvious, as though that confession had drained all his energy.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “If there’s someone I like, it doesn’t matter if they’re a boy or a girl. You know what I mean?”
She should have felt relieved. Those words should have loosened the knot she had carried in her stomach for weeks, months. Instead, the knot tightened. Her stomach twisted, her thoughts racing faster than her heartbeat, aware that even that explanation wasn’t enough to calm her. If anything, it made things worse, because it wasn’t about labels anymore. It was about her. Her voice faltered with frustration, disappointment, and the pain of not being wanted back.
“It’s me, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, finally looking her in the eyes. His voice was calm.
“I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” she cut in. “But I don’t think I can be your friend. I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice was barely audible.
“It’s not… Nami, I…”
“Don’t worry,” she said, forcing herself to keep speaking. “You don’t have to say anything. I understand. But I don’t think I can go on, whatever it is that’s between us. I’m sorry.”
She took a deep breath. Her chest ached, but her eyes remained dry. “I know you like going to the atelier. You can still go, if you want. It’s yours too. But I’d rather we didn’t see each other anymore. Do you understand?”
She looked at him, really looked. His face was serious, and there was something in his eyes, maybe pain, confusion, guilt. For a moment, she considered taking her words back. Pretending it was all a joke. But she didn’t. Because she also saw something else. That familiar hesitation. The same one he had after she kissed him. The same look that had made her feel like a mistake.
He opened his mouth. Closed it again. No words came. His lips pressed together, his gaze once again fixed on the little frog in his hands, as if hoping it could answer for him.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
Then she walked out of the room.
Nami had spent the past few days wrapped in silence. A deeper, suffocating silence. The kind that allowed cruel truths to rise up forcefully in her mind, truths she wasn’t ready to face. She had cried for hours in the university bathrooms, only to shed no more tears afterward. Her entire body ached, as if the pain had seeped into her bones.
So when she returned home that evening and entered the lobby of her apartment complex, her breath caught when she saw him sitting on the floor by the mailboxes, his face hidden by a cap and a mask. For a moment, the world stopped spinning. Her knees buckled.
He stood as soon as he saw her, as though he had been waiting an eternity. Her first instinct was to ignore him, pretend she hadn’t seen him, get into the elevator and lock herself inside her apartment. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t have the strength.
But something in the way he looked at her made her hesitate.
She opened her mouth, not even knowing what to say, but he spoke first, his voice low and grave.
“I know I shouldn’t be here,” he said, his eyes scanning her face for something to hold onto. “But listen. I… I really…”
He faltered, the rest of the sentence dissolving silently into the air. Nami’s heart pounded in her chest.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked after a moment, once she was sure she could speak without betraying any emotion.
He just nodded.
He followed her through the lobby, their footsteps echoing in the quiet. In the lift, neither of them spoke. Nami couldn’t find the courage to look at him. She couldn’t bear the weight of his presence beside her.
Inside her apartment, Minho hesitated at the threshold. He stayed by the entrance like a guest who knew he wasn’t welcome. The space was small: a small living room with a kitchenette, a hallway leading to the bathroom and bedroom. The air smelled stale, mixed with the scent of a candle she had lit the night before.
“You can sit wherever,” she said, putting down her bag with calculated slowness.
He removed his shoes but remained standing, his gaze wandering through the room as if trying to memorise every detail of this unfamiliar space. The messy stacks of books, a dying plant by the window, a few photos taped to the wall.
“Do you want something to drink?” Nami asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.
He shook his head. “No.”
Nami sighed, sat at the kitchen table, and clasped her hands to keep them from shaking. Minho didn’t move, his posture tense, as if unsure how to act.
Before she could speak, he broke the silence.
“I want to go back to the atelier,” he said in a whisper, barely audible, like he was ashamed of his own words. Like a student who knew he was giving the wrong answer. “With you.”
She closed her eyes. “That’s selfish.”
“I know,” he replied immediately, not trying to defend himself.
“Well, I can’t. I really can’t do it.”
“Why not?” His voice rose; not in anger, but in desperation.
“You know why.”
Minho ran a hand through his hair in frustration. He seemed to be fighting with himself, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.
Her patience snapped. “If you have nothing to say, then leave.”
“It’s just that…”
“Please, Minho. Go. Now.”
His voice cracked. He took a step forward. “Don’t push me away. Please, don’t.”
Nami felt a wave of anger rise within her. “You’re the one who kept me at arm’s length all this time! I told you I have feelings for you, that being your friend hurts. So why do you keep dragging me into this mess?”
“Because I can’t do this anymore!” he shouted. “This life… I can’t take it anymore.”
She stared at him, stunned by his outburst. Minho didn’t cry, but his shoulders began to tremble, his breath coming short.
“I have no choice in what I do,” he said, his voice cracking. “I only follow orders. Even when I have the chance to choose, someone always tells me I should’ve done it differently. This life used to be fun, but now it feels like I don’t own any of it.”
There was bitterness in his voice that surprised her.
“But when I’m with you,” he continued, his eyes pleading, “I forget all that. With you, I can be myself. And I need that. I need you. Even if it’s selfish.”
Nami felt a pang in her chest. Her body moved before she could think. She crossed the room and gently cupped his cheek, forcing him to look at her.
“I’m sorry you feel this way,” she said. “I really am. And I wish I could fix it. But we can’t be friends anymore. Not like this. It hurts too much.”
He looked at her, desperate. “I like you, Nami. I really do.”
“Liar.”
“No, I mean it,” he whispered. “I’ve liked you for years. I swear.”
Her heart tightened in her chest. “Then why did you look so disgusted when I kissed you?”
“I wasn’t disgusted. Just surprised, that’s all.”
“But you never came back,” she said.
“I was scared,” he replied.
“So if I kissed you now, you’d be happy?”
“Nami, don’t…”
But she did it anyway. She rose on her toes and kissed him, soft, hesitant. He didn’t pull away, but when she stepped back, his expression wasn’t happy. It was sad.
“You don’t like me at all,” she whispered.
“That’s not true.”
“Then prove it.”
Something in him changed. His gaze grew more serious, more determined. Like he had finally surrendered. He stepped forward and kissed her again, this time deeper, more urgent. Real. His lips crashed onto hers with unexpected force, driven by years of silence, longing, and waiting.
They stumbled backward blindly. Her hands tangled in his hair, his fingers gripping the hem of her blouse like he needed something to hold onto. Their breaths grew ragged and uneven, the silence of the room filled with gasps and desperate kisses. His lips travelled along her jaw, brushing her skin, down to her neck, his breath warm against the frantic beats of her heart.
His hands slipped beneath her shirt, slow but deliberate. She gasped, surprised by how deeply she had craved that touch. Her skin burned beneath his palms as he explored her waist, the curve of her ribs, just beneath her bra. And yet, even in that frenzy, he hesitated.
Then he stopped entirely. Looked at her like he was afraid she’d vanish at any second. Nami felt his hands tremble.
She took his face in her hands. “It’s okay. If you don’t want to, we can stop.”
He didn’t respond.
“Please. Talk to me,” she pleaded.
“I’m not good with words,” he whispered.
“And I can’t read your mind.”
He sighed, then paused, the weight of unspoken words thick in the air. He looked away, as if searching for someone to give him permission.
“Even if you could read my mind,” he began, his voice cracking slightly, “I don’t think you’d understand.”
Another pause. Longer, more painful. He let go of her and clenched his fists. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.
“My feelings for you… they’re the only thing I can control,” he admitted. “I don’t have control over anything else but this. If I keep them in check, everything will be fine. I won’t ruin anything between us.”
Nami felt her heart clench. His honesty was raw, sharp, like a wound freshly reopened. He wasn’t just afraid to let go. He was afraid of what she might see if he did.
She smiled, even though her throat was tight and her chest ached. “You’re safe with me. You don’t have to be afraid.”
“What if you stop liking me?”
She kissed him again. That was her answer.
This time, he surrendered completely. Their kisses deepened. They clung to each other as if trying to erase all the months of silence, all the missed moments. One kiss turned into two, then three, until they lost count. Their clothes were discarded with no ceremony, left on the floor.
When he touched her again, Nami gasped. Skin to skin, his fingers traced the sensitive lines of her body. The moan that escaped her lips broke something in him. His body tensed, his breath came faster.
He pushed her back until she collided with the kitchen table. Her breath hitched as his body pressed against hers. His warmth, the touch of his hands; it was overwhelming. With his eyes, Minho asked one last time for her permission, for reassurance. She nodded, breathless.
Her fingers found the scar on his stomach. She traced it slowly, and his breath caught. Then his lips found her breasts, first softly, then with growing hunger. She gasped, her head falling back, spine arching, fingers knotted again in his hair.
There was no time to think. No clarity. Only instinct. He undid his belt, and she tried to help, both of them moving with urgency. When he finally entered her, they both gasped, overwhelmed.
Their bodies moved together on the table, the hard, cold surface making everything feel even more real. They held each other tightly, movements hurried and messy, but full of need.
Nami clung to him, her legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him closer with desperate need. Her body arched with every thrust. She moaned his name, over and over. Not softly, but with force, urgency. His voice, usually calm and controlled, was now raw and cracked.
None of this had been planned. They had dived headfirst into something messy, something that had been consuming them from within. As if everything they had kept under control had suddenly exploded and neither of them knew how to stop. His grip on her was tight but uncertain, his palms trembling against her sweat-slicked skin.
When she met his eyes, she saw only him, stripped of any mask.
In that moment, there was no future. No promise, no guarantee. Only each other. And the desperate, fragile hope that surrendering to these feelings might mean something more.
It was almost three in the morning, but neither of them could sleep. The apartment was immersed in darkness except for the faint light coming from the kitchen. In the silence, you could hear the distant sound of cars speeding down the main road.
Minho sat on the floor, his back against the couch, a bowl of instant ramen balanced on his knees. The chopsticks clinked against the styrofoam as he slurped the noodles, chewing absentmindedly. His t-shirt was wrinkled, and his hair was messy and still damp from the shower. He looked tired, but his features seemed softer.
Nami was lying on the couch behind him, curled up under a thin blanket, her face resting on her forearm. She watched him eat in silence, a small smile curling her lips. There was something oddly comforting about the scene: his bare feet on the rug, the way he kept blowing on the ramen before each bite, even though it had already cooled.
“Stop it,” she suddenly heard him mumble, mouth still full.
She widened her eyes, caught off guard. “Stop what?”
He swallowed. “You're staring at me.”
Nami chuckled softly. “Sorry,” she whispered warmly. “I’m just happy.”
Minho let out a short laugh, trying to hide how her words embarrassed him. He looked down at the now nearly empty bowl and mumbled, “What a weirdo.”
He finished the last bite, set the bowl aside, and slowly slid down to the floor. With a soft groan, he lay on his back, arms crossed behind his head.
After a moment, Nami slid off the couch and joined him on the floor. She lay down beside him, shoulder to shoulder, their bodies parallel, eyes turned toward the ceiling as if it could provide answers to all the questions lingering in their minds.
For a while, there was only silence.
“I’m sorry I got mad earlier,” she finally said.
Minho slowly turned his head to look at her. His expression was unreadable in the dim light. “Don’t worry,” he replied. Then he hesitated, his lips parting as if he wanted to say more. But he didn’t speak.
She nudged him lightly with her elbow. “You can talk to me, you know? I don’t judge.”
He nodded faintly. Another pause. Then he shifted position, turning onto his side so he could rest his head on her stomach. She inhaled, surprised, but didn’t oppose. She adjusted slightly. Her fingers found his hair and began stroking it slowly.
“I already know you're weird,” she said at last, a smirk playing on her lips.
Minho let out a brief, embarrassed laugh, muffled against her pyjama fabric. “And you like me anyway?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she replied. “You’re weird, but you’re a good person, Minho.”
Minho sighed deeply and didn’t speak for a moment. “I’ve always wanted to live my life simply. Even though I’m a celebrity.”
Her fingers paused for a moment, then resumed their slow rhythm.
“But I don’t think my brain is wired as everyone else’s.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He moved again, turning his gaze back toward the ceiling. “I don’t know when it started. At first, people told me I was special, praised me for being different, for expressing myself freely, for not being afraid to seem weird. It made me feel like I had something to offer. But then that became a problem. People started acting like I was too much. Too different.”
He exhaled sharply. “All the rules that never used to bother me now feel like chains. I keep trying to fit into a mould that’s too small for me.”
“Do you feel trapped?” she asked gently.
He didn’t answer right away. Then continued, “I feel like I could do so much more, but I’m not allowed to. Like being myself makes other people uncomfortable. So I try to hold back. But every time I do, it feels like I lose a part of myself forever.”
Nami felt her heart clench again at his words. She took his hand and intertwined her fingers with his.
“I’m sorry they make you feel this way,” she murmured.
He shrugged. “I don’t blame them. But it’s still frustrating.”
They fell silent again. She kept stroking his hair, occasionally brushing his temple with her thumb. He seemed calmer, his breathing steady.
“Can I come back to the atelier?” he asked suddenly, still looking at the ceiling.
She giggled. “Of course, but only if you come alone.”
“No Jisung?”
“Only Hyunjin is allowed,” she replied in mock sternness.
He laughed, and she felt the vibration travel through her skin.
“Jealous?” he teased.
“Yes.”
A surprised laugh escaped his lips. “You’re not even trying to deny it.”
“Why should I? It’s the truth.”
They both laughed. After that, neither spoke. They remained lying there, fingers entwined, bodies close, eyes still on the ceiling. They didn’t talk about what had happened. They didn’t put any labels on it. They just shared the quiet.
But Nami’s mind began to wander. Would anything really change between them? They couldn’t go back to how things were before. And that scared her.
What if he pulled away again? What if the world outside that room, outside the atelier, claimed him once more, taking him away from her again? She tightened her grip on his hand. It was warm. His presence was there, tangible.
Minho sat up slowly. He turned toward her slightly and looked at her. Not with the same intensity as a few hours earlier. But with gentleness, with affection. With the eyes of someone who sees something precious in front of them. He leaned down and kissed her. A short kiss, too short. Then he laid his head back on her stomach, grabbing her hand to make her resume stroking his hair.
Nami laughed. He hadn’t given her an answer. He hadn’t said anything. And yet it felt like he had. She closed her eyes and sighed, content.
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Sure, he was young. Almost classically handsome. But what truly mattered in that moment was that he was famous. Famous enough to draw the attention of everyone within ten metres. His presence alone would keep people at bay.
He was the perfect repellent. No man would dare approach her with Kim Seungmin at her side.
She would use him as a shield, whether he liked it or not.
pair: idol!seungmin x chaebol!oc
genre: enemies to lovers, (sort of) fake dating, smut
words: 21k
notes: I started writing this fic nearly four months ago and abandoned it after writing 90% of it because my brain decided to sabotage me, as always. however, I still kept thinking about this story and eventually decided to finish it so I could finally focus on something else. I reread and rewrote this hundreds of times, so I'm not sure it makes sense anymore. but I really hope it does! •⩊• anyways, I hope you'll like it ♡
The place Yoonsuk had chosen for their meet-up was one of those venues designed solely to make people feel important for no apparent reason. Seungmin followed his cousin inside, tugging the brim of his cap down over his eyes. They lingered at the entrance, but didn’t have to wait long before one of the waiters approached them with a determined yet unhurried stride, giving a polite nod to suggest they should follow him.
Seungmin didn’t like places like that. Oversized designer lamps hung from the ceiling, casting a soft, moody light; uncomfortable sofas made from coarse fabric; tables far too small to be practical; and behind the bar, a wall stacked to the ceiling with dusty bottles.
Truth be told, Seungmin didn’t like most venues, unless they allowed him to blend in without drawing attention. But he’d had no choice but to accept the invitation, he had long since run out of excuses. He’d been given a couple of days off, and apart from visiting his parents, he had nothing planned. It had been his mother who’d called Yoonsuk, using the excuse of needing to discuss a birthday gift for some uncle Seungmin didn’t know, and was fairly sure didn’t even exist. “Yes, he’s here,” he’d heard her say on the phone. “Of course he wants to go out, he’s bored stiff!”
Seungmin had shot her a sideways glance to make it clear he had absolutely no intention of getting off the sofa that day. But it had been no use. Within minutes, he’d received a message from his cousin.
Choi Yoonsuk, two years older and born with a natural talent for social interaction that Seungmin had never developed, raised a hand in greeting towards four guys he appeared to know just enough to ask a few polite questions and wish them a pleasant evening. It came effortlessly to him, he didn’t even need to try. He had a job in finance, carried himself with quiet confidence, and wore Italian leather shoes. He was, without a doubt, the cousin his parents preferred: conservative with a hint of modern flair, always polite but undeniably charismatic, serious at work but still good company.
“You hate me a bit for dragging you here, don’t you?” Yoonsuk said as they walked past the bar.
“Not yet,” Seungmin replied, hands stuffed into his trouser pockets.
Yoonsuk laughed and clapped a hand on his shoulder, steering him forward.
“Thanks for coming, anyway.”
Seungmin wasn’t sure why he was there, hadn’t even considered that there might be some ulterior motive behind his cousin’s invitation. But the moment he heard those words, he couldn’t help but start to worry.
~
Her first mistake had been arriving early. That wasn’t like her. She usually preferred to make her entrance with calculated precision, neither too punctual nor fashionably late. Being a little late, just slightly, gave her the illusion of control: not the one waiting, but the one to be waited for. It gave her time to observe, to assess the situation and decide how best to behave. A subtle difference, but one she considered essential.
Miok was seated with Sooyeon and Yoonmi at a table near the large windows overlooking a corner of Gangnam unfamiliar to most. She held a wine glass delicately between her fingers, taking small sips from time to time; her legs crossed at the ankles, just as she'd been taught since childhood. Years of etiquette classes and long family dinners had shaped her posture into something as elegant as it was austere.
Her parents hadn’t even tried to be discreet. She’d figured out their plan over a week ago, the moment her mother first mentioned Yoonsuk.
“He’s just come back from London. They’ve transferred him to Seoul,” she’d said with feigned nonchalance.
Her older brothers had already fulfilled their duty: two weddings, one official engagement; each one a business arrangement dressed up as true love. Now it was her turn. A member of the respectable Choi family would suit their purposes perfectly. That was her parents’ goal: someone respectable, someone they could boast about in their social circles and at formal dinners.
Miok had decided to play along. She’d agreed to attend this so-called friendly gathering, really just a disguised matchmaking attempt, simply to keep them quiet for a while. She’d learnt that pretending to obey often brought greater freedom. That was why she didn’t rebel openly. If she nodded and smiled just enough to please them, she’d come out on top in the end. As always.
“The evening hasn’t even started and you already want to go home, don’t you?” teased Sooyeon, stirring the ice in her drink with deliberate slowness.
“It’s just that I don’t understand why they keep insisting,” Miok replied, referring to her parents, before taking another sip of wine. “I’m not an investment.”
“Well, to be fair to them, you are quite the valuable asset,” Yoonmi joked.
The three of them laughed, keeping their voices at an appropriate volume and covering their mouths with their hands.
Then Miok saw them walk in.
~
Seungmin approached the table where the three girls were sitting, prompting an immediate and unintentional shift in atmosphere. Though simply dressed in a dark jumper and jeans, he had a presence that was hard to ignore. He didn’t carry the arrogance of someone who expected attention; rather, the quiet confidence of someone who knew he’d get it anyway. And from the look on his face, that attention seemed more of an inconvenience than anything else.
When their eyes met, something in their expressions stiffened. As though their bodies had already sensed the mutual dislike that was about to form. Neither of them smiled.
“Miok,” exclaimed Yoonsuk, opening his arms slightly. He seemed torn between a hug and a polite bow, settling at last for a brief, courteous nod. “It’s been ages!”
“Almost three years,” she replied, smiling with measured ease, the kind of smile she’d seen her mother wear since childhood, one she’d learnt to adopt whenever the situation demanded it.
Seungmin watched her, trying not to make it obvious, but he still caught her attention.
“Ah,” said Yoonsuk, noticing Miok’s gaze settle on the other boy. She caught a glimpse of his self-satisfied smile, as if getting her to notice Seungmin had been the plan all along. “This is my cousin, Seungmin.”
He raised a hand in greeting, a gesture the three girls found almost rude. “Hi.”
“Stray Kids, right?” asked Yoonmi, breezy and wide-eyed. Miok saw her twisting a strand of hair around her finger. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
He shrugged. “So they say.”
Yoonmi laughed, even though it wasn’t particularly funny.
Yoonsuk and Seungmin took the seats next to the girls, and Miok adjusted herself in hers, resisting the temptation to cross her arms. They ordered a bottle of wine, then another, as if the alcohol might help make everything feel a little more natural. Two of Yoonsuk’s friends joined them after half an hour, laughing too loudly, and the space around the table suddenly felt far too cramped.
As the wine kept flowing, the conversation grew livelier. The conversation bounced between them with the ease typical of people who barely knew one another. They talked mostly about work. But despite the rising noise, Miok couldn’t help but notice Seungmin’s consistent silence.
It wasn’t shyness. It wasn’t the awkward discomfort of someone unsure what to say, nor the embarrassment of feeling out of place. It simply seemed like he had no desire to speak, as though someone had glued his lips shut. His eyes stayed low, fixed on his glass, and when he did lift them, it was more to scrutinise than to observe.
When people asked him questions, his replies were monosyllabic or limited to a nod. “Yeah.” “Maybe.” “Don’t know.” He never returned anyone’s interest. He let the conversation wash over him.
“You’re not much of a talker, are you?” Miok asked after her third glass. Her tone made her irritation clear.
He tilted his head slightly, as if debating whether to answer. “Do you always open with accusations, or is that saved for special occasions?”
Miok shrugged. “It was just an observation.”
He raised his eyebrows but didn’t look directly at her. “If you say so. Sounded more like criticism to me.”
“I’m just trying to be polite.”
A kind of smirk appeared on his face. “You’re not very good at it.”
Miok leaned back against her chair and let out a short, incredulous laugh. “If you planned to spend the whole evening in silence, you could’ve just stayed home.” His refusal to mask his discomfort irritated her. She didn’t want to be there either, but at least she was playing along. Smiling, pretending to be interested in what others were saying. But him? Not even trying. And that annoyed her more than she cared to admit.
Seungmin opened his mouth to reply, but Yoonsuk quickly cut in, visibly flustered, and changed the subject. He asked about her parents, about her brother Minseok, whom he’d gone to university with. It had been Yoonsuk who’d introduced him to his fiancée, he added proudly.
“He’s good-looking, though,” said Yoonmi about twenty minutes later, reapplying a clear lip gloss while checking her reflection in the bar’s bathroom mirror.
“Who? Yoonsuk?” asked Sooyeon, drying her hands.
“No, Seungmin,” Yoonmi answered, giggling a moment later.
Miok turned to look at her. “Are you serious?”
Yoonmi gave a little shrug and laughed again, covering her mouth with her hand. “He’s a bit shy, but you can’t deny he’s good-looking.”
Miok didn’t reply. She simply shook her head and left the bathroom.
Back at the table, Seungmin was drinking his wine as if it were poison. He looked up and met Miok’s gaze.
“Back already?” he asked.
Miok sat down. “Did you miss me?”
“No, I was enjoying the peace. I’d hoped it might last a bit longer.”
Miok leaned in slightly. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Unpleasant.”
Seungmin let out a short, sardonic laugh. As if pleased by his own ability to irritate. But once again, Yoonsuk jumped in before he could reply.
By the end of the evening, Seungmin was the first to get up.
“Good luck with your new job,” he said to Yoonmi, who looked surprised. He hadn’t seemed to be listening when she’d spoken about it. In fact, he’d seemed completely lost in his own thoughts the whole night, glancing around aimlessly and constantly bouncing his leg.
To Miok, he offered only a nod.
She gave a brief bow before turning back to talk to Yoonsuk. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Seungmin walk out of the venue.
And in that moment, she sincerely hoped she’d never see him again.
The way Yoonsuk had furnished his flat made it difficult to get any real sense of his personality. Metal-framed shelves decorated with eye-catching art catalogues, deliberately arranged; a worn-looking The Godfather poster hanging in the entrance; a black leather sofa that didn’t exactly invite anyone to sit down. On the marble countertop of the kitchen island, trays of overly European appetisers had been carefully laid out. An ambient music playlist played softly in the background, fitting for this sort of event, which felt less like a birthday party and more like a start-up networking night.
Miok had arrived right on time, accompanied by Sooyeon. Her brother Minseok, arm-in-arm with his fiancée, was already there, lingering in a corner by the window with old university friends. Miok had brought a bottle of fine wine, an impersonal gift, but one Yoonsuk would undoubtedly appreciate.
The birthday boy welcomed them with the ease of someone who had hosted many such gatherings. He accepted the wine with an almost exaggerated bow before handing it off to the first person who passed by, instructing them to put it in the kitchen.
“Welcome,” he said with a sly smile.
Since their last meeting, she and Yoonsuk hadn’t had many opportunities to see each other. But they had kept in touch. Whenever their work schedules allowed, they met for quick coffee breaks. There was no attraction between them. No romantic feelings. But Miok had decided that keeping him in her life was a useful way to keep her parents in check. Every time she mentioned his name, her mother’s eyes would light up.
She was certain she’d never call Yoonsuk a friend. Too much of a dandy, too opportunistic. But spending time in his company had turned out to be more entertaining than she’d expected. So, when he messaged her with an invitation to his birthday, Miok had accepted without hesitation.
She exhaled slowly before stepping into the crowd.
Sooyeon, far more at ease in these sorts of settings, had already drifted off to greet a group of people Miok vaguely recognised but couldn’t bring herself to care about. She joined her brother and greeted his friends with measured politeness, accepting a glass of prosecco. Then she took a moment to scan the room, quietly observing the people moving through the large living area.
When she didn’t see him, she turned, and smiled.
~
Seungmin arrived around eleven, visibly exhausted. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a leather jacket which, though clearly expensive, looked out of place among the sea of starched shirts and faded polo tops. He pulled off his cap and tried to fix his hair, still damp from the shower. Rehearsals had run longer than expected, partly his fault, and he’d considered more than once just staying home.
He handed Yoonsuk a small black box without even looking at him. Then, in a low voice, he muttered, “What’s she doing here?”
She’d been one of the first people he’d seen upon entering. Lee Miok.
Yoonsuk followed his gaze but didn’t react. He simply shrugged. “Why do you care? Just ignore her.”
Seungmin sighed but said nothing more. He checked once more where she was, then walked off in the opposite direction, determined to follow his cousin’s advice.
~
But Yoonsuk’s flat, spacious as it was, didn’t leave much room to manoeuvre. They ran into each other in the kitchen. Seungmin had gone to grab another beer and found her sitting at the counter, gaze lost somewhere in the crowd. He ignored her, pretending she wasn’t even there.
“You again,” she said, not even bothering to look at him.
Seungmin turned this time. “Unfortunately.”
There was a short pause.
“Didn’t have you down as the type for these sorts of things,” she added, picking up the glass she’d left beside her. She didn’t drink from it, though.
“These sorts of things? It’s a birthday party. For my cousin, no less. Why wouldn’t I come?” he replied, shutting the fridge door. “Didn’t know you two had become friends.”
“We’re not,” she said flatly. “We’re just useful to each other.”
Seungmin looked at her. Really looked. She wasn’t beautiful, not in the conventional sense. Short hair, a small oval face, eyes wide and just slightly too far apart. There was no real harmony in her features, and yet nothing seemed out of place either.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then someone nearby called Miok’s name, and someone else patted Seungmin on the back in greeting.
They drifted apart again. She went back to discussing a recent exhibition with a friend, he ended up talking to one of his cousin’s colleagues about the upcoming baseball season. They didn’t speak again that evening, but they remained in each other’s orbit.
Whenever she laughed, he noticed. Each time he headed to the kitchen for another drink, her gaze followed him.
At the end of the night, sitting in the back seat of the taxi on his way home, eyes fixed on the lights of the high-rises lining the road, Seungmin had to accept the bitter truth that he’d forgotten everything he’d said that evening, except for the few brief exchanges he’d had with her.
Miok, once back in her flat, stood in front of the large bathroom mirror, staring at her bare face. She touched her cheek. She could still feel Seungmin’s eyes on her, as if they’d never really left.
Seungmin hadn’t planned on attending the event. In truth, he hadn’t planned on doing anything at all. After returning from Japan, he’d been looking forward to spending a few rare days off doing absolutely nothing, the kind of days spent in pyjamas, mindlessly scrolling through his phone with not a single thought in his head and avoiding all human interaction.
But then his mother had called and more or less forced him. “We never see you,” she’d said in that tone of hers; half pleading, half reproachful. “And make sure you dress properly,” his sister’s voice had chimed in sternly in the background.
So, just a few hours later, he found himself sitting in the back seat of his parents’ car, like he had as a child, stiff in a midnight-blue suit.
“It’s some sort of charity evening,” his sister had explained, “hosted by the Lee family.”
“You know, the pharmaceutical company,” she added, as though that might help Seungmin figure out who she was talking about. “They’ve got this foundation that supposedly funds cultural events, but in practice it’s mostly a way to evade taxes.”
Seungmin had laughed, and their mother had scolded them both, eyeing them through the rear-view mirror. The rest of the journey passed in silence.
The gallery was the kind of place that, had it not been for the paintings on the walls and sculptures dotted here and there, might have faintly resembled a hospital. Bare concrete walls, resin flooring, wide spiral staircases connecting the floors. Seungmin followed his family in silence, already regretting giving in to his mother’s pressure. His hands were shoved into his trouser pockets and his head slightly bowed.
Then he saw her.
Miok stood ahead of him. She was wearing a forest-green dress, nothing extravagant, but far more elegant than anything he’d seen her in before. She was speaking to an elderly couple, smiling with that sort of polite friendliness that made it clear she wasn’t talking to them out of genuine interest, but out of obligation. Professional, poised. And that was when Seungmin finally realised who she was. Lee Miok. The Lee Foundation. The ones with the pharmaceutical company. A wry smile crept across his lips. It couldn't be otherwise.
“Do you know her?” his sister asked, noticing her brother’s gaze fixed on the unfamiliar girl.
“Not really,” he replied, quickly looking away. “She’s a friend of Yoonsuk’s. Sort of.”
His sister didn’t press any further, but the smug smile that appeared on her face was enough to make her younger brother roll his eyes.
~
Her heels were starting to hurt. She’d been on her feet for over two hours, weaving between one canvas and the next to make sure everything was running smoothly while also making polite conversation with the guests. But above all, trying to avoid being caught alone by her mother.
Her parents, having finally accepted that love would never blossom between her and Yoonsuk, had moved on to plan B: introducing her to an endless string of eligible bachelors from high society in the hope that at least one might win her over.
She and Yoonsuk had stayed in touch even after his birthday party, but after yet another orchestrated dinner to appease their respective families, it had become painfully clear there was no real interest between them. Her mother’s patience had officially run out.
So far, plan B had been a complete disaster. All the men she’d been introduced to were respectable, certainly, but overly polished. They flaunted expensive watches and tailored suits, and gave her compliments as though reading from a badly written script. One of them had even praised her for the “articulate” way she spoke. Miok had barely stopped herself from laughing in his face.
From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother approaching once more, this time with a man who looked like he’d lived through the 1997 financial crisis and hadn’t laughed since. Her stomach turned. She needed an escape route.
Then she saw him.
Seungmin was lingering near the bar, an expression of pure apathy on his face. He looked deeply bored, perhaps even irritated, as if he’d been dragged there against his will. Which, all things considered, was probably the case.
Miok smiled, satisfied.
Sure, he was young. Almost classically handsome. But what truly mattered in that moment was that he was famous. Famous enough to draw the attention of everyone within ten metres. His presence alone would keep people at bay.
He was the perfect repellent. No man would dare approach her with Kim Seungmin at her side.
She would use him as a shield, whether he liked it or not.
She walked up to him with purposeful strides.
“If anyone asks,” she said, her voice low but firm. “I’m here with you.”
He looked down at her, raising an eyebrow.
“Why would I say something like that?”
“To help me.”
“I’ve got no intention of doing that.”
“Oh, don’t be a prick, Seungmin.”
He seemed slightly taken aback by her sudden familiarity. Miok glanced back at the crowd until her gaze landed on her mother and the man beside her. Seungmin followed her eyes. And seemed to understand.
“What exactly am I supposed to do?”
“Just smile and nod occasionally. Pretend you enjoy my company.”
He attempted a smile, but the result was more of a pained grimace.
“Maybe don’t smile at all,” she muttered, reaching out to lightly touch his arm. He recoiled instantly, as if burned.
“Don’t push your luck,” he said.
“Come on,” she replied, somewhere between a laugh and a plea. “Just for a few minutes. Until my mum goes away. Please be a good boy, Seungmin.”
He tilted his head slightly, a mischievous smirk curling at the corners of his mouth.
“And if I don’t?”
“You’ll go to hell.”
“Well, hell sounds far more appealing than spending time with you.”
Miok rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Stop acting like a brat.”
A short laugh escaped Seungmin’s lips. He leaned in slightly. “You’re the one acting like a spoiled little girl. Should I call grandpa and tell him you’re still single?”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, turning her back to him. “I’ll find someone else.”
Almost without thinking, Seungmin reached out and gently caught her arm just above the elbow.
“Fine,” he muttered. “I’ll help you. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. This event is bloody boring.”
Miok smiled again, triumphant. She lifted a hand and ruffled his hair. “Good boy.”
They stayed together for a while, not too long, just long enough for the people around them to notice. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. They didn’t speak much, simply sipped their drinks and pretended to laugh, watching the steady flow of guests drifting around them.
When her mother finally disappeared upstairs, Miok turned to Seungmin. “Well. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he replied with heavy sarcasm.
She walked away. He simply watched her go.
When his sister asked him at the end of the night whether he’d enjoyed himself, he just shrugged.
The restaurant was quiet. Miok sat opposite her mother, back straight and a neatly folded linen napkin resting on her lap.
Her mother was halfway through a barely dressed salad. She cut the lettuce leaves with calculated precision, so she wouldn’t have to open her mouth too wide, chewing slowly and nodding happily. Then she placed her cutlery beside the plate and dabbed at her lips with the napkin. She took a sip of water and lifted her gaze to her daughter.
Every week, Miok received a message from her mother inviting her to lunch at one of the many trendy restaurants recommended by her tennis club friends. Healthy food, meagre portions, outrageous prices. But the food was of little importance. During those lunches, Miok lost her appetite. Because the real reason her mother invited her weekly was not a simple desire to spend time together, but rather to make sure her daughter wasn’t straying too far from the path they had laid out for her.
They mostly talked about work. After all, besides being her mother, she was also, in a way, her boss. They discussed emerging artists, pieces they might acquire for their collection, events they could sponsor. Her mother didn’t care much for the artistic side, she left that to Miok. What mattered was that, at the end of the day, their reputation remained untarnished.
But from the look on her mother’s face, Miok knew she was about to start a conversation far removed from professional matters. Her mother cleared her throat and said, almost too casually, “Who was that boy you were talking to the other night?”
Miok took a sip of water to buy time. “The other night?”
“Yes. I saw you two by the bar. You seemed… comfortable.”
Miok shrugged. “Oh. That was Yoonsuk’s cousin. Kim Seungmin.”
“Ah,” her mother said, as if she didn’t already know the answer. “He’s a celebrity, isn’t he? A singer or something like that.”
Her words hung in the air, almost like an accusation.
Miok nodded, trying to keep her expression neutral. “Yes, he’s part of a group.”
A small, almost imperceptible sound slipped from her mother’s lips. She dabbed again at the corners of her mouth even though she hadn’t resumed eating. “I hope you’re not taking someone like that in serious consideration.”
Miok had to stop herself from laughing in her face. “What kind of person would that be?”
“Someone whose life is constantly on display online. Always travelling the world like a nomad. Always in front of the cameras. That’s no life for someone like you.”
Miok set down the glass she was still holding. “And what kind of person am I, exactly?”
Her mother blinked slowly. She was getting annoyed but didn’t want to show it. “You know what I mean.”
Miok smiled at her. She knew. She knew how much her mother despised celebrities. She remembered clearly what she once said after reading about yet another scandal splashed across the tabloids: they only bring trouble. A life exposed to the public like a cheap soap opera.
Miok could have simply agreed, reassuring her that there was nothing between her and Seungmin and never would be. She could have steered the conversation back to work. But she felt something stirring beneath her skin. It wasn’t anger. More frustration. Or simply tiredness.
She imagined her mother’s reaction if she confessed she was seeing Seungmin. The shocked look she would try to hide.
It was an idea as terrible as it was amusing.
Miok was not reckless, she never had been. She’d always got what she wanted not by rebelling or throwing tantrums, but by pulling strings like a puppeteer, convincing everyone that what she wanted was exactly what they wanted too. She had pursued the studies she wanted, attended the university of her choice, promising to work for the family foundation. A promise she intended to keep only a little longer. She wore the dresses her mother gave her to the important events. She knew how to hold conversations with the right people. She behaved as expected so no one would suspect she was plotting behind their backs.
But lately, something had changed. Her parents were more than satisfied with her career, even though they were initially disappointed she hadn’t joined the family business like her brothers. Now it was time to focus on her private life. Her family expected her to date someone suitable. Someone from her own world. Someone who wouldn’t damage their reputation.
But what if she started seeing someone her parents would never accept? A name too exposed, too far from their universe. Seungmin was perfect. No privacy, no control. Too many eyes on him, too many fans, too many unknowns.
If she hinted that she was seeing him, her parents might realise the real risk of losing control over her. And the moment Miok presented them with a more appropriate figure, someone who fit within their acceptable parameters, they would sigh with relief. They might even let her choose, convinced they’d avoided the worst.
The idea amused her. It made her feel in control. Of the situation. Of her own life.
“We’re not dating,” she finally replied. “But he is… a pleasant person.”
“Oh?” was her mother’s only response. Miok saw her frown, clearly irritated.
And that reaction was enough. Miok said no more. She didn’t need to lie. It was enough to plant a seed and let her mother’s imagination run wild.
The brunch was taking place on the terrace of a hotel near Cheongdam, large white parasols shielding the guests from the early spring sun. That day, Miok arrived late.
That kind of brunch, which was little more than a poorly disguised networking event, wasn’t for her. The same faces, the same conversations repeated endlessly. Everyone forced smiles, posing for photos as if they were genuine friends, with the sole purpose of posting them on their social profiles and boasting about a fake social life.
It had been Yoonsuk who invited her, but Miok wasn’t keen on enduring hours of chatter with fake CEOs and influencers all dressed the same, as if wearing a uniform. It was Yoonmi who had persuaded her. She had turned up at her place unannounced, forcing her out of bed. “You have to show yourself once in a while, or they’ll think you’re irrelevant.” Which didn’t matter in the slightest to Miok. But her friend wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Now she stood under the sun, sunglasses firmly perched on her nose, surveying the terrace with a detached air. Then, to her great surprise, her eyes landed on a familiar figure she hadn’t expected to see.
Seungmin.
He stood near the bar, as usual, like someone who had stumbled into the wrong event and didn’t know how to leave without drawing attention. As always, his style clashed with the rest of the setting: a short-sleeved striped shirt tucked into a pair of baggy jeans. His hair was swept back messily, a pair of sunglasses twisting between his fingers.
Miok didn’t hesitate for a second. She made her way over to him and stood beside him, looking up.
Seungmin immediately noticed her presence but didn’t acknowledge her. “Got something on my face?” he finally asked, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.
She tilted her head, pretending to inspect his face. She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “No.”
“Then why do you keep staring at me? Actually, why are you here?”
“I want people to see us together,” she said, as if it were obvious.
There was a brief pause.
“Together?” Seungmin repeated, as if checking he’d understood correctly.
She nodded. Her smile was enigmatic, almost a smug grin.
Seungmin turned fully to face her. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing you need to worry about. You just have to play along…”
A sceptical look crossed his face. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Lee Miok.”
She chuckled. “Alright, but don’t get worked up. I might have… hinted to my mother that we’re seeing each other.”
Seungmin narrowed his eyes and raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“A little white lie, to mess with her a bit.”
He didn’t seem impressed by her explanation. “Not funny. I’d never go out with someone like you.”
It was her turn to raise her eyebrows, mockingly offended. “Why not? I’m a catch, you know.”
He laughed dryly but said no more.
“Do you hate me so much that even the idea of going out with me annoys you?” Miok asked, still smiling. She didn’t care what he thought of her.
He sighed, pressing his fingers to his temples. “I’m not in a position to let baseless gossip about my private life spread…”
Miok laughed. She noticed his shoulders tense slightly. “That’s why my mother can’t stand you.”
He frowned, increasingly confused. “What do you mean? I don’t even know her…”
“Well, not you personally. The idea of you. What you represent. Being a celebrity. Your life constantly under the spotlight. No privacy, no dignity.”
Seungmin let out an ironic laugh. “Wonderful. Now I feel used.”
“Isn’t that what your career is about? Being used?” Miok shot back, too quickly. Her words came out sharper than she intended.
Seungmin’s face darkened immediately. He no longer seemed annoyed, but rather hurt.
For a moment, Miok thought about apologising but hesitated. Perhaps out of pride or simple embarrassment. Instead, she said, “Anyway, stick around for a few minutes. I’m sure someone’s already telling my mother.”
He sighed again. “You’re incredible.” Then he walked away.
She followed him, trotting happily.
“You’re really annoying, you know that?” he muttered, without turning around.
“Come on, Seungmin…”
“I need a drink.”
She laughed, giving him a gentle nudge with her elbow. “This round’s on me.”
He said nothing. Sighed once more.
But he didn’t walk away.
The dim lighting and dark walls made it difficult to distinguish faces in the shadows. Everything had gone well. He had let the camera flashes dazzle him, posed with carefully practiced nonchalance in front of the lenses, said the right things without seeming too nervous. Now all that was left was to go home. He was waiting for his manager to return from the bathroom so they could finally leave.
Attending these kinds of events alone was new to him, but he was slowly getting used to it. He hadn’t realised the importance of the other members until he found himself in a room full of people with no one to rely on, no one to fill the awkward silences.
The guests were still chatting and sipping from their champagne flutes. The music, a syncopated rhythm with heavy bass, played softly in the background. Seungmin couldn’t stay still, despite his tired legs. His gaze was fixed on the wall in front of him, where bottles of Chanel perfume were displayed, but his mind was somewhere else entirely. He barely registered what was happening around him, almost missing Hoshi, who passed by and wished him a good evening. Seungmin managed a polite nod before the other left the room. Everything blurred into the background.
His thoughts kept returning to the phone call he’d received that afternoon.
“Are you really seeing her?” his sister had asked, cutting straight to the point. Her tone was light, but it still put Seungmin on alert. What was she talking about?
“With who?”
“Lee Miok,” she replied, lowering her voice as if she’d just said a swear word she was ashamed of. Or maybe she simply didn’t want those around her to hear. “Mum found out from one of her friends. Apparently, someone saw you together and says you’re dating. Is it true?”
He felt something tighten in his throat. Not anger, not embarrassment. Something he couldn’t name.
“That’s not true. I don’t even talk to her,” he answered, trying to keep his tone neutral.
“Well, someone must have started that rumour,” his sister said. “Maybe it was her?”
He felt the blood boil in his veins.
He had been clear: he couldn’t allow rumours about his private life to spread. Especially about his love life. He didn’t like people talking about him, especially if what was said wasn’t true. The thought that Miok had crossed a line despite his warnings, that she had disrupted his private life without his consent, made him feel exposed. In a way he couldn’t bear.
His entire life outside work was a delicate structure he had carefully built over the years. The same routine, the same old friends, the same kind of tea after breakfast. Everything was calculated and organised down to the smallest detail. Life in the spotlight was chaotic by nature: unpredictable interviews, technical issues during performances, sometimes inhuman schedules, the fickle attention of the public. For that reason, in his private sphere, he cultivated peace, routine. Stability. He didn’t fear change; he hated it when it arrived unannounced.
And Miok, with her high-society manners and the air of someone who always gets whatever she wants, had entered his story like an unforeseen plot twist. Like there had been a sudden hole in the script. The boundaries he had spent years defining had been redrawn without his permission.
Then someone tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
He turned, already annoyed before seeing who it was.
“Seungmin,” a familiar voice, too clear, too sugary.
He blinked, trying to remember who the girl in front of him was.
“Yoonmi,” she offered with a smile, trying to hide her disappointment at not being recognised. “We met a few months ago, at a party with your cousin.”
“Right,” he replied, cordial but distant.
She was radiant in an ivory strapless dress, her hair falling in perfectly styled waves over her shoulders. She leaned slightly forward towards him, striking a well-practised pose.
“You look tired,” she teased. “Can’t wait to get home, huh?”
He smiled and looked around again. She lingered beside him.
“You’re friends with Lee Miok, right?” Seungmin asked abruptly, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
The question seemed to catch her off guard. She shifted position, raising her eyebrows.
“Yes, I think you could say that,” she answered cautiously. “Why?”
“Could you give me her number?”
There was a pause. Her eyes scanned his face as if trying to read something in his expression.
“Oh?” she said, feigning surprise. “Don’t you already have it?”
“No,” he said firmly. “We’re not that close.”
She pursed her lips to suppress a smile, clearly pleased. “Last time I saw you two together, you looked rather cosy. I must have been mistaken, then.”
He sighed slowly. “Believe me, we’re not.”
Yoonmi smiled, then covered her lips with a hand. Without another word, she pulled out her phone from her bag, searched her contacts, and then handed it to Seungmin.
“Here,” she said. “This is her number.”
He pulled out his own phone and quickly typed in the number without bothering to double-check. “Thanks.”
She lingered again.
When he looked at her, she smiled once more.
“Aren’t you going to ask for my number too?”
The tearoom at the MMCA was quieter than she had expected. Afternoon light filtered through the large windows, casting long shadows over the pale wooden tables. A soft murmur of voices gently broke the silence. A couple of tourists sat a few tables away, speaking a language Miok didn’t recognise, while an elderly man silently browsed through the exhibition catalogue.
She was seated by one of the windows, so she could take in the view, fingers wrapped around a porcelain cup of red berry tea. Opposite her, Yuna was checking something on her phone. She wore red lipstick, intricate rose gold earrings, and a simple linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Even in her minimalism, she looked like an important person, or someone on the verge of becoming one. Miok looked at her with pride but also a touch of envy.
They had met in New York, at university, and from the start, Miok had known Yuna was going to go far. Unlike Miok’s family, Yuna’s didn’t have the means to support her. She lacked the right connections. But Yuna had passion, boldness, and courage. And a bit of luck. She’d applied for a simple internship, but a few months later a colleague retired and Yuna was offered the position. An opportunity she had obviously not let slip by.
“They want someone young, who knows the contemporary artists currently in vogue,” Yuna said, finally looking up from her phone. “And who can write in both Korean and English without making the texts sound like they were translated by Papago. That’s why I thought of you.”
Miok gave a faint smile. Those words should have encouraged her; they should have pleased her, but instead, they weighed heavily on her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she murmured, stirring her tea with the teaspoon. “If I could, I’d accept in a heartbeat. But I don’t know if I can afford to.”
Yuna nodded slowly. She knew all about Miok’s situation, they’d known each other for years by now. “You mean financially? Or emotionally?”
“Both.”
She thought back to her parents’ expressions a few days earlier, when she’d joined them for breakfast. She hadn’t mentioned the possibility of working at the museum but had told them she was meeting Yuna. Just as friends, to stay in touch. Her mother had pressed her lips together and glanced at her father, who had simply continued reading the news on his tablet. But Miok hadn’t missed how he’d wrinkled his nose in disapproval. They’d said nothing, but their silence had been unmistakable. The kind of silence that sounded more like a warning.
They’d only allowed her to study art history because, somehow, it would fit into the family project. The Foundation would be hers. With her pedigree, her NYU degree, and her network of curators and critics, she would bring legitimacy to the Foundation. Her role had always been, and only ever been, to elevate their image. Nothing more. Working for a museum, no matter how important, would bring them no benefit, no profit. On the contrary, it would almost be shameful.
She knew the job Yuna was offering wasn’t well paid. If she wanted to reach the top, she’d have to start at the bottom, work hard. Nothing would be handed to her on a silver platter as it had been so far. Her parents wouldn’t accept it.
But she was so tired. Tired of gala evenings. Tired of patrons who couldn’t tell an oil painting from a watercolour. Tired of pretending that art could be measured in tax deductions. Tired of seeing exhibitions reduced to mere backdrops for cocktail parties.
She wanted to be surrounded by people who cared as much as she did. She wanted to rediscover her passion for what she did.
“I just have to think it through,” she said. “If I were to accept, it could be a problem for my parents.”
Yuna’s expression didn’t change. “And would that be so terrible?”
Miok looked at her with tired eyes. “Everything I have, I have because I’m their daughter. There’s no denying it. If I abandoned the Foundation to work here, with you, they’d see it as an insult. They could take everything away from me if they wanted. Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t want to lose their support. I don’t know if I’m capable of living a life without all these privileges. But at the same time, I don’t want to live under their constant control anymore…”
Yuna raised her cup. “Then build a new one. A real life.”
Before Miok could reply, her phone began to vibrate against the table. She glanced at the screen.
Unknown number.
She decided to answer anyway. It could be someone important.
“Hello?”
“Mum just asked me about you,” said a voice. She recognised it immediately.
Seungmin.
No greeting. No hesitation.
“Is she already planning our wedding?” Miok asked neutrally, her eyes on Yuna, who was now watching her with curiosity.
“That’s not funny.”
There was tension in his voice. Controlled but unmistakable.
“You need to tell your mother we’re not seeing each other. Immediately,” he added.
Miok let out a brief laugh, throwing her head back.
“Don’t worry,” she said simply.
She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t tell him how her mother had started looking at her; with worry, disapproval, as if Miok was choosing to sabotage herself out of sheer spite. As if seeing her with calm, precise, responsible Seungmin was an act of extreme rebellion. As if he were a criminal. And that thought only amused her.
What had surprised her most, though, wasn’t her mother’s reaction. It was her own reaction to that reaction. The more her mother worried, the more Miok wanted to keep up the charade.
“Is there anything else?” she asked lightly.
There was a pause on the other end. Just a faint sigh.
“No,” he answered. “That’s it.”
He hung up. Miok set the phone aside, and turned back to look at Yuna, a perplexed expression on her face.
Miok just shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
They had arrived in New York on the third of May. The schedule was intense, as expected: fittings, interviews, rehearsals, content creation. They didn’t have a single moment to themselves.
Dinner came late, and the room service boy had apologised at least three times. Seungmin sat at the small table in the hotel room, the tray of food placed between him and Changbin. Burgers and chips. Not the healthiest meal, but it was exactly what they both needed.
At first, they ate in silence, the only background noise coming from a sitcom on the TV, one neither of them recognised. Then Seungmin’s phone vibrated once. Then again. A series of short, insistent buzzes against the glass table. Not loud, but enough to interrupt the moment.
Changbin squinted, leaning forward to glance at the screen.
“Who’s Lee Miok?”
Seungmin, who had just stood up to go to the bathroom, almost tripped over his own feet. He turned slowly, deliberately, to hide his surprise.
“Why?”
Changbin nodded towards the phone, which continued to light up with each new notification.
“She keeps messaging you.”
With a silent sigh, Seungmin returned to his seat, picked up the phone and stared at the screen. All the messages were from Miok. She was clearly trying to get his attention, probably to force a response. She must have been with his mother.
“So, who is she?” Changbin asked again, this time with even more curiosity as he chewed on a chip.
“No one,” Seungmin muttered, sinking back into his chair. “Just someone who keeps bothering me.”
Changbin raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you tell the company then? If someone keeps bothering you?”
“Oh, no,” Seungmin replied quickly. “It’s not that kind of situation. She’s not a fan. She’s… a friend of my cousin’s. Or maybe not even that. I met her through my cousin and now she won’t leave me alone.”
“Sounds serious,” said Changbin with a smirk. “She’s got a crush on you?”
Seungmin speared a chip with his fork, staring at it instead of eating.
“No. Definitely not.”
“Then why does she keep texting you?”
“It’s a long story,” he replied. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter.”
Changbin resumed eating, though he kept glancing at Seungmin, who was still holding his phone, his thumbs brushing the screen without typing anything.
“Is she pretty?” Changbin asked after a while.
Seungmin didn’t look up. “Not really.”
“So she’s not pretty and she annoys you… and yet you’re still staring at her messages. Something doesn’t add up.”
“Don’t start. It’s not what you think.”
“Let me see her.”
“No.”
“Oh, come on,” said Changbin, raising his voice in protest. “Just a photo. What’s the harm?”
When Seungmin didn’t answer, Changbin leaned in, closing the space between them. The food tray wobbled dangerously as he threw an arm around Seungmin’s neck and pulled him into a headlock, laughing.
“Alright, alright!” Seungmin protested, laughing despite himself. “Let me go! I can’t breathe!”
He tapped on Miok’s contact and brought up her profile photo. He held the phone at a distance so Changbin couldn’t grab it.
Changbin leaned closer, still clinging to his shoulders.
“Oh, come on, Seungmin. She’s cute.”
“She’s not,” Seungmin replied automatically.
“She is.”
Seungmin looked again. It was the same photo he’d seen before. A neutral background, her hair longer than it was now, chin slightly raised, an unreadable but confident expression. A professional headshot. Cold, distant. He’d seen it countless times, but had never really looked at it.
She is quite pretty.
He blinked. Swallowed. Locked the phone without another word.
“She’s not,” he said again, this time more quietly.
Changbin laughed.
“If she bothers you that much, why don’t you block her?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is,” Changbin countered, amused. But when he saw his friend remain silent, he added, “Do whatever you want. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
Seungmin didn’t respond. He picked up another chip, more out of habit than actual hunger, and turned to the TV. Laughter echoed from the screen. Beside him, the phone lit up again with another message.
He didn’t reply.
Not yet.
~
He should’ve been happy. Thrilled, even. The Met Gala. A proper dream. The kind of thing you imagine while staring at your bedroom ceiling. It should’ve been a moment of celebration, a milestone in their career, something they’d talk about for years to come. And he was sure they would, but not for the reasons he’d hoped. Now, lying on the stiff hotel bed, Seungmin felt the heat rising beneath his skin.
The evening had been exhausting.
The photographers had been aggressive, shouting at them like animals, hurling comments as if convinced they wouldn’t understand. But they had. The words had reached their ears loud and clear. The magic of the evening, the anticipation he’d carried for that long-awaited moment, vanished in an instant. Nothing had gone to plan. Seungmin had felt things slipping out of his control.
But he had smiled the entire time, of course. They all had. It was their job. It was what they’d been trained to do.
Hours later, the night finally behind him, his tux draped over a chair and his make-up wiped away, Seungmin lay in bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. The sheets were too heavy, the pillow too firm. His jaw ached from how tightly he’d been clenching it all evening. He got up and showered again, hoping the hot water would soothe the irritation spreading through his body. It didn’t.
He went back to bed. Closed his eyes. Turned. Rolled over. Sighed.
Unlocked his phone.
Dozens of unread messages he didn’t have the energy to go through. He tapped the first conversation at the top.
Miok.
He read through their old messages, scrolling slowly. Stared at her name. Then, without thinking, almost as if his fingers had acted without his brain, he hit the call button.
The phone rang once before he ended the call, suddenly aware of what he’d just done.
“Idiot,” he muttered, letting the phone drop onto his chest. He rubbed his face with a hand, exhaling deeply.
But barely two minutes later, the phone began to vibrate.
Miok’s name appeared on the screen.
He hesitated. Then answered.
“Sorry,” he said immediately, his voice slightly hoarse. “Wrong call.”
There was a small pause. Then her amused voice replied, “I figured.”
He closed his eyes.
“Yeah, don’t worry. I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“Why would I worry?” she asked, laughing.
“You shouldn’t,” he replied quickly. “I… misspoke. It’s been a long day.”
“How did it go?”
“What?”
“The Met Gala.”
He let out a short, bitter laugh.
“And how do you know about that?”
“Oh, come on, it’s the Met Gala! My feed’s full of pictures from the event.”
“Right,” he sighed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. “It went well. I suppose.”
“Oh, you sound like you had a blast,” she replied sarcastically, still laughing.
“I mean, it was nice. Really. Just not how I imagined it.”
“Didn’t live up to expectations?”
“Not quite,” he murmured, rubbing his face again, frustration creeping in. “I don’t know.”
She waited, not trying to fill the silence.
“It was just flashing cameras and noise,” he went on. “People shouting over each other. Being pushed from one place to another, one interview to the next. I feel like I had an out-of-body experience. My body was there, but my mind wasn’t.”
She was silent for a few seconds.
“That’s a bummer,” she said eventually. Her tone had softened. It sounded more sincere. “I’m sorry it went that way.”
“It’s fine. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because you called me,” she said simply.
Seungmin swallowed. “Right.”
Then she added, “You looked good though. If that helps.”
She couldn’t see him, but Seungmin frowned all the same. “What?”
“I saw your photos,” she said. “I didn’t go looking for them. They just popped up while I was checking the outfits.”
Seungmin said nothing.
“You looked good,” Miok repeated. “Not the best. But definitely not the worst.”
“Thanks, I guess. So, who was the best, then?”
“Out of the eight of you? The one in white. Felix, right?”
“Yeah, Felix.”
“He looked like a prince from a fairy tale.”
Seungmin sighed. “Yeah, Felix is handsome.”
“So are you,” she replied, still in that teasing, amused tone. “Your problem is that you’re grumpy and annoying. Kills the effect.”
Seungmin laughed. For real, this time. Maybe he was just too tired to hold it in.
Silence followed, not the awkward kind, but the kind that felt easy.
Then, gently, she said, “You should go to sleep, Seungmin.”
“Yeah. I should.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
She laughed again. “It’s three in the afternoon here. But thanks anyway. Sleep well.”
He smiled into the darkness. “Thanks.”
He didn’t hang up straight away. Neither did she. But eventually, the call ended. He wasn’t sure who had hung up first.
He didn’t fall asleep immediately.
But the silence didn’t feel quite so hostile anymore.
The music throbbed low and steady in the club. Dim lights bathed the room in amber tones, reflecting off glass tables and polished mirrors. It was late, well past midnight, and the crowd had begun to thin out, leaving behind empty glasses and a few stubborn customers unwilling to call it a night.
Miok was sitting on one of the velvet sofas tucked into a corner of the venue, Yoonsuk beside her, legs crossed and a half-finished gin and tonic in hand. Sooyeon, just a few steps away, was chatting with someone she’d met that night, occasionally breaking into laughter that rang just above the music.
Yoonsuk, cheeks flushed and eyes slightly glazed, leaned lazily forward, letting one arm drape over the backrest behind her. He glanced at her phone’s lit-up screen, watching her fingers tap rapidly across it.
“You’re texting Seungmin, aren’t you?” he asked with a half-smirk, his words slightly slurred.
Miok didn’t even look up. “Maybe.”
He chuckled, the ice in his glass clinking softly. “You’ve been messaging him all evening. Are you sure there’s nothing going on between you two?”
She sighed and set her phone face down on the table. “No. Not really. There’s nothing going on. Not like that.”
Yoonsuk slowly turned to face her, leaning in so close she had to lean back. “Not like that?”
She placed a hand on his chest and gently pushed him away. “If you must know, I’m using him to keep my mum off my back.”
“You’re using him?” he repeated, wearing an expression so baffled it made her laugh.
“Yes. You know what my mum’s like. Once she realised nothing was going to happen between you and me, she started introducing me to this parade of bachelors, hoping one of them would win me over. But they were all worse than the last. And then one evening she saw me talking to Seungmin, and made it abundantly clear she’d never approve of me dating him. Not that there’s anything wrong with Seungmin. He’s a decent guy. A bit odd, but still decent. But, you know, he’s a celebrity. And celebrities are nothing but trouble.”
Yoonsuk stared at her without blinking. He said nothing, as if he needed a few more seconds to process what she’d just told him.
“So I let her believe we’re seeing each other. That’s all,” she added at last.
“And does my cousin know about this?”
Miok nodded casually, sipping her drink. “Yes. More or less. He’s not thrilled about it. But I don’t really care.”
Yoonsuk leaned back against the sofa, eyebrows furrowed in concern. “Wow,” he said. “You’re actually… ruthless.”
“It’s harmless,” she said quickly, suddenly defensive. “It’s just a game. That’s all.”
He stared at her for a moment, then slowly shook his head. His usual joking tone was gone. “Miok,” he said, suddenly sober. “You said it yourself. Seungmin’s a good guy. He might be a bit harsh sometimes. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have feelings.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cut in, irritated by the sudden mood shift. She’d come out to have fun, not get lectured by someone she didn’t even really consider a friend.
“Seungmin’s never been good at showing his emotions. He bottles everything up, hides behind sarcastic jokes and crap banter. He’s not someone who gets attached easily,” he went on, downing the rest of his drink in one gulp.
“I think you’re overthinking it,” she replied sharply. “He doesn’t even like me. I doubt there’s any risk of him getting attached.” She laughed, a sound that came out almost bitter.
“He wouldn’t be replying to your messages if that were true,” he said firmly. “Just… be careful. His life’s already messy enough, he doesn’t need someone making it worse.”
Miok stood up abruptly. She hadn’t finished her drink, but she felt the need to order another. “God, you’re so dramatic,” she muttered. “Being unbearable must run in the family.”
Yoonsuk let out a dry laugh. But he said nothing more. He didn’t need to. Miok walked away briskly, but no amount of distance could shake the strange tightness in her stomach.
She noticed him the moment she walked into the room.
The party wasn’t particularly crowded. It had that air of forced sophistication she knew all too well: dim lighting, bland jazz tracks no one truly appreciated, cocktails with exotic names made with unnecessary theatrics. Some of Yoonmi’s friends had invited her, people with too much money and not a care in the world. She had only accepted after one of them had mentioned knowing a famous gallery owner she’d been hoping to meet for some time.
What she hadn’t expected, however, was to see Seungmin.
He stood next to Yoonsuk, dressed better than usual. Not flashy, just more refined, a collared jumper, properly fitting jeans, hair slicked back. For a long moment, she stared at him from across the room before he even noticed she was there.
“What’s going on between you two?” Yoonmi asked, appearing at her side and handing her a glass of wine.
Miok didn’t turn to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“You and Seungmin,” she clarified. “You’ve been texting, haven’t you?”
Miok finally turned to her friend, surprised. “How do you know?”
“Oh, we bumped into each other at an event,” Yoonmi said, unable to hide a smile. “He asked for your number, so I assumed he’d messaged you.”
Miok nodded, turning her gaze back to the boy across the room. It had never occurred to her how Seungmin had got her number. She’d assumed he’d asked Yoonsuk. The fact that Yoonmi had given it to him without asking first annoyed her, but she let it slide. “Yeah, we’ve been texting. Sort of,” she said nonchalantly. “But not for the reasons you think.”
She didn’t see her expression, but Miok sensed Yoonmi shifting closer. “And what reasons would those be?”
Miok didn’t answer right away. She watched Seungmin, tense beside his cousin. “I’m working on something,” she said at last. “And I need him. That’s all.”
Yoonmi looked doubtful. Miok saw her shake her head. “I don’t get you,” she said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t think twice about going for him.”
Miok didn’t respond. Seungmin had finally spotted her. And he didn’t look pleased to see her. His expression held irritation, but also something else. Resignation. As if, deep down, he’d expected her to show up. Or perhaps even hoped she would.
She walked over to him calmly, making a point not to look like she was in a rush.
“I swear this wasn’t planned!” she laughed before he could speak.
“Yeah, right,” he muttered. “Pure coincidence.”
They fell into silence. She looked at him longer than she meant to. He was different that evening. More polished than usual, more distant. He resembled the celebrity she’d seen online. But he also couldn’t hide his discomfort at being there, at a party where he didn’t know how to behave. Where he didn’t belong.
“You must have a thing for this sort of thing,” she said finally.
He gave her an annoyed look. Then sighed. “What the hell are you on about now?”
“Being used, I mean,” she replied lightly, sipping her drink. “It seems to happen to you a lot.”
He frowned. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” she said, still smiling. “Just that your cousin’s rather clever. He invites you to these events, makes sure everyone sees you, and then fades into the background while basking in reflected glory. I think it’s brilliant.”
Seungmin laughed, but it was short and joyless. “That’s rich, coming from you. Weren’t you the first one to use my name for your own gain?”
Miok recalled Yoonsuk’s words from a few nights earlier and smiled to herself. Remembered how he’d practically scolded her, warned her to be careful, when he wasn’t acting all that differently himself. What a hypocrite. “Oh, I’m not judging,” she finally replied. “It’s admirable.”
He shook his head and headed towards the bar without another word. She followed.
“Are you planning to follow me all night?”
She didn’t reply. Just smiled, slightly amused. Bumping into him at an event and hovering near the bar had become something of a ritual for them. She’d lost count of how many times it had happened. A scene that kept repeating itself, but she wasn’t tired of it yet.
He ordered a beer, took a sip. Then his gaze drifted past her shoulder, into the crowd, with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
She turned slightly, following his line of sight until she spotted a boy holding up his phone, apparently in their direction. But then she realised he was just showing something to the person next to him. They were both laughing. Still, it unsettled Seungmin enough to make him pull away from the crowd.
She found him a few metres away, hidden behind a large fake plant.
“It must be hard,” she said.
“What?”
“Always feeling watched. Not knowing if someone’s taking a photo or just checking their phone. Always having to be careful about how you act.”
He glanced at her. “You should know how that feels. Your life’s not so different from mine, in that sense.”
She laughed. “You think so?”
“Yes,” he replied with certainty. “You act like you’re always one step ahead. Like you’re playing everyone. But you’re not.”
“Oh no?” she said, tilting her head slightly.
Seungmin stared at her. His voice was calm, but his tone hit hard. “Isn’t your life still basically controlled by your parents?”
Miok held her breath slightly. She hadn’t expected that. She swallowed, trying not to show it had affected her. But her fingers gripped the stem of her glass tightly. He noticed. And she knew he had.
“I’m working on it,” she said flatly. “That’s why I need you.”
“You assume too much; that I’ll go along with your stupid game.”
“Funny, you don’t seem too bothered by the rumours about us,” she replied, smiling again. “Maybe you don’t mind them as much as you let on.”
He scoffed. “Bullshit.”
“Bullshit, is it? I don’t think so.”
Miok moved closer, as if approaching a skittish dog that might bolt at any moment. Her fingers brushed the fabric of his sleeve, a barely-there touch, but enough. He didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, but she sensed him stiffen, just slightly. His expression remained unreadable, composed and mildly sulky as always. She noticed how hard he was trying to stay in control, how just letting her near him felt like a concession. He didn’t push her away like he had that time at the Foundation. That gave her a strange sense of power.
“You act like a spoiled child,” she said softly, low enough that no one else could hear. “But in the end, you always do as you’re told.”
His eyes narrowed. She gently pinched his cheek, like one would a toddler. He swatted her hand away with a sharp gesture.
“If you say so,” he muttered, turning and walking off.
A strange warmth bloomed in her chest. She wasn’t supposed to care. But as she watched him walk away, she found it unusually difficult to look elsewhere.
He hadn’t said he would be coming that day. When she saw him walk into her office, without warning, without even knocking, her first thought was that someone must have told on her. Her father wasn’t the type to waste his time on courtesy visits. It was always her who went to him. Never the other way around.
“I didn’t know you were stopping by,” she said, rising from the desk chair where she’d been sitting for hours.
The man looked around without replying. He stayed silent for so long that Miok found herself counting the seconds. He was wearing a charcoal grey suit, the one reserved for important occasions. He must have been on his way back from a board meeting. He didn’t seem particularly annoyed or agitated, but Miok had never been good at reading his emotions.
Eventually, he spoke. “I was thinking of giving your brother a painting, for his wedding.”
Miok looked at him blankly. “A painting?”
“Something to hang in the new house, once they move in. Something meaningful, but not too heavy or eye-catching.” He paused, then added, “I want you to choose it. You surely know more about these things than I do.”
Miok nodded. “Alright. I’ll do some research.”
He didn’t thank her. He continued to glance around, as if he were seeing the space for the first time. And in fact, Miok couldn’t remember the last time he’d visited her. He might never have actually been inside her office before now.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked, her tone carefully neutral.
He stepped closer to the desk and sat down in the chair she had only just vacated, without so much as asking permission. “Do you enjoy working here?”
The question caught Miok off guard. She knew her father, this wasn’t just casual small talk. There was always a hidden motive behind his words. She stared at him for a moment, uncertain. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Really?” he replied, as if addressing one of his employees. “Are you truly satisfied with this job?”
Miok took a slow breath. She couldn’t tell what he was getting at. Perhaps someone had actually said something. But who? The only person who knew about the MMCA offer was Yuna. It couldn’t be that her parents had found out. Could it?
“Yes,” she lied, smiling faintly. “I find it very stimulating.”
“Then why haven’t I received anything about the new projects yet?” he asked, leaning slightly forward.
She opened her mouth to answer but couldn’t find the words. She bought herself some time. “I’m working on a proposal for next quarter, but I’m still waiting for some responses from…”
He interrupted her with a wave of his hand. He didn’t believe her. He knew they were just excuses. He leaned back in the chair, maintaining that impersonal attitude, as if he were conducting an interview with a stranger, not his own daughter.
“I only hope your lack of focus isn’t due to that boy you’ve been seeing. The singer.”
Miok’s heart skipped a beat, not from surprise, but from the way her father had said those words. She opened her mouth to respond, but he raised his hand again to silence her.
“I know you’re not a foolish girl, Miok. And I’m not saying I disapprove. I know his parents, they’re respectable people. But you have responsibilities. To your family. To your mother, in particular. We’ve never let you want anything, have we?”
We’ve never let you want anything. It was a phrase she’d heard a thousand times, always used to make her feel guilty. Every word delivered with the calm certainty of someone who believes himself unquestionably right.
“Don’t cause her this disappointment,” he continued. “I think you already know, but your mother is very worried.”
“She doesn’t have any reason to be,” Miok said, though her voice was barely audible.
Her father stood. He adjusted his jacket slowly, smoothing the creases with his hands. “I want you to think about it carefully. Whatever it is you’re planning to do.”
“I’m not planning to do anything,” she replied, a little too quickly.
He paused for a moment, as if giving her the chance to hear her own words echo back at her. Then he smiled, that thin-lipped expression she had always despised. “Every choice carries consequences. Keep that in mind.”
He turned to leave but stopped at the door. “I expect a proposal for the painting soon. I’m sure you’ll make the right choice. As always.”
When the door closed behind him, Miok remained seated for a few minutes without moving. Her hands resting on her knees, her head bowed. She hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath the entire time.
The air that evening was warm, but not stifling. A light breeze slipped through the hedges surrounding the garden, making the candle flames on the table flicker. The scent of jasmine and grilled meat hung in the air. There was no music, only the constant hum of voices from those seated around him, conversations he couldn’t quite catch, except for the occasional word spoken with more emphasis than the rest. It was nearly midnight, but no one seemed in any rush to leave, lulled by the early summer night.
Seungmin sat at one end of the table, a nearly full glass of wine in his hand, wearing a linen shirt he’d felt embarrassed to unbutton. On the surface, he appeared relaxed, as if perfectly at ease in this strange setting. But the tight line of his jaw and the faint crease between his brows told another story. He’d arrived late, dragged along by Yoonsuk with the promise of good food and fresh air. After a long day of rehearsals, he’d thought it might be just what he needed.
Miok was sitting next to him.
She had been one of the first people he saw upon arriving. She was seated opposite Sooyeon, her back perfectly straight. She wasn’t speaking, just listening, her gaze fixed on the centre of the table. The usual attentive, unreadable expression. She hadn’t said much since he arrived, in fact, she’d barely looked at him at all, offering only a polite nod and a brief smile before turning her attention back to Sooyeon.
And yet, she hadn’t moved, not even when others had begun to get up with glasses in hand, strolling through the garden and gathering in smaller groups. She had remained where she was, motionless.
Seungmin kept pretending to check his phone, scrolling through notifications he’d already read, but his eyes kept drifting back to her. To the way their elbows brushed occasionally when she reached for her glass. To the way she tilted her head forward, letting her hair fall across her face. Her silence irritated him. Maybe because he couldn’t understand why she was ignoring him. Or maybe because that silence made him feel strangely uneasy, out of place.
Or maybe simply because he couldn’t seem to ignore her tonight.
He took a long sip of wine, then said, in a serious tone, “Well, they’ve seen us together now. I’m sure your mother’s already pulling her hair out.”
Miok didn’t look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on one of the candles in the middle of the table, as though afraid the flame might reach the floral centrepiece and set it alight.
“You can go to your friends,” he added, feigning a yawn. “You’re getting on my nerves.”
“I don’t feel like it,” she replied simply.
Her words made him turn to look at her.
The candlelight cast a soft glow on her cheekbone. There was something unreadable in the way she stared ahead, unmoving. He was used to her calculated ease, her composed gestures, never out of place. But tonight there was something different. Something slightly off that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
She was beautiful.
The thought hit him without warning. But he shook it off at once. Not the time.
He was about to say something, then bit the inside of his cheek and stayed silent. He looked at the wine left in his glass, then back at her. His throat suddenly felt dry.
His leg had started bouncing restlessly beneath the table without him noticing. He’d been sitting too long. Miok’s hand moved, calm and deliberate, and pressed lightly on his knee.
Seungmin froze instantly.
It wasn’t a heavy touch, just the weight of her hand resting there for a second, maybe two. But it unsettled him. The warmth of her fingers seemed to seep into his bones. He cleared his throat, coughed once or twice. As if trying to warn her off. But when she withdrew her hand, he almost frowned, as though its absence had left behind something hollow, something that annoyed him.
He finished his wine in a single go, faster than he meant to, and poured himself another glass.
Maybe it was the wine. Or the exhaustion. Or the way she kept ignoring him while somehow still being acutely aware of him. It was driving him mad.
He could have stood up, walked away. Even gone home if he’d wanted to. But it was as if he were glued to that chair.
It had always been her who sought his attention. Not out of real interest, of course. But she was the one who used to reach out, speak to him first, send him messages nearly every day. Maybe she didn’t need him anymore. Maybe she’d finally sorted things out with her parents. Maybe she’d found someone else, someone her mother actually approved of. She had no reason now to keep talking to him. So why hadn’t she left? Why was she still sitting there, staring straight ahead, saying nothing? And why did he care so much, when until tonight he’d sworn he wanted nothing to do with her?
The conversation around them grew louder. Yoonsuk was retelling a story Seungmin had heard a thousand times, but it still drew laughter from those who hadn’t. Someone stood to stretch their legs before dessert arrived. A waiter brought over new bottles of wine and refilled their glasses with elegant precision. Seungmin didn’t even notice.
His eyes had drifted to Miok’s legs, crossed neatly under the table, the hem of her skirt brushing her thigh.
He wasn’t thinking, the alcohol had fogged his brain. Or maybe he was thinking too much.
He wanted a reaction. Her stillness irked him.
His hand moved on its own. He let his fingers brush her knee, tracing the shape slowly, then went further. With the backs of his knuckles, he lightly grazed the line of her thigh. Slowly. Deliberately.
Miok didn’t move.
He stole a glance at her face. She was still looking ahead, but her lips had parted slightly, her breathing slower, deeper. There was a tension in her eyes he hadn’t seen before. When she finally turned to face him, her look was sharp. Annoyed, but not exactly angry.
“Stop it,” she murmured, barely audible.
But she still didn’t pull away.
He didn’t stop. Not right away. His fingers moved higher, brushing the inside of her thigh, nearing the edge of her skirt. A smug smile crept across his face, just enough to show her he knew exactly what he was doing, and that he meant to provoke her.
Then, catching him completely off guard, her hand was in his hair, tugging just enough to make him jolt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, voice low but stern.
He looked at her, breath caught in his throat.
“Nothing,” he said, unable to hide a flicker of amusement that made her nose wrinkle in distaste.
Miok studied him. Her hand didn’t let go. “Stop it,” she repeated.
Seungmin withdrew his hand, just as entertained as he was disappointed. Then she added, without removing her fingers from his nape. “Good boy.”
A flush rose instantly to the tips of his ears. She finally let go.
He leaned back in his chair, hands clasped in his lap. His gaze fixed on the hedges across from them, the leaves swaying gently in the wind. His mouth felt dry again, but he drank only to silence the thoughts buzzing in his head like mad bees.
Minutes passed. They didn’t speak. Someone handed him a plate of dessert, but he ignored it.
“You alright?” he found himself asking her, without meaning to.
She didn’t look at him. Just nodded, curtly. “It’s nothing.”
He didn’t push it.
But his hand found her knee again. This time, his fingers didn’t wander, they simply tapped out a rhythm stuck in his head.
And this time, she didn’t tell him to stop.
~
In the past few months, nothing had changed, and yet everything had begun to shift in an irrevocable way.
She had spent countless nights in silence, pacing back and forth along the perimeter of her living room, the city’s glittering skyline reflected in the tall windows.
The offer from the MMCA seemed like the perfect escape route. Freedom. A life she could finally claim as her own, far from her family’s stranglehold. She should have grabbed that opportunity with both hands. She should have been happy. But instead, she felt as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff: to move forward and reach her goal meant risking the loss of all the privileges she’d always taken for granted. Her job, with all its benefits. Her apartment, paid for by her parents. Her circle of friends, the sons and daughters of her parents’ friends and colleagues. Her life.
None of it truly belonged to her. And she had always known that. But she had always believed that, if she played her cards right, she could have everything she wanted without having to give anything up. But to get what she really wanted now, she couldn’t skirt around the obstacle anymore.
Her parents had always been clear: they would support her as long as she worked for the family, as long as she married the right man, as long as she behaved appropriately. They could take everything back. And they would. No ifs or buts.
She had thought she’d built something for herself, on her own. But now she realised that without her parents, she’d have nothing. No status. No friends. No influential contacts. No home. She would no longer have control over anything.
Nothing except Seungmin.
That was what she kept telling herself. That at least with him, she could assert control. That she could use him without consequence. He complained, told her to stop with her lies, and yet he always did what she asked. He always replied when she messaged him, as if he were waiting. He hadn’t even made an effort to have the rumours about their relationship shut down. And she liked it, the way he made her feel. But even that illusion had begun to crack.
It had started with something small.
The way his fingers had brushed her leg that night, under the table, surrounded by people who might have seen.
His touch had been light, almost casual. But it had travelled through her like lightning in a clear sky. Sudden. Almost stealthy.
It hadn’t been part of the plan. It hadn’t been her idea. It had been a way for Seungmin to rebel. And she couldn’t allow that. Not now. Not when everything else was already slipping out of her hands.
She needed to remind him who held the reins of whatever this was. So later, as the evening wound down and the conversations began to fade, she went looking for him. She hadn’t seen him in over half an hour, he’d abruptly left to join Yoonsuk and his friends. She found him alone, wandering through the garden with his eyes lifted to the sky, though there wasn’t a single star in sight.
That’s when she walked towards him, deliberate, silent. They were alone, hidden from the others, the light coming from the villa casting soft shadows across their faces.
“You were bold,” she said, breaking the silence, her voice neutral, but sharp enough to make his shoulders tense.
He turned to face her, then frowned slightly. “What?”
“At the table. When you touched my leg.”
Seungmin hesitated. A pause filled only by the faint sound of laughter somewhere in the distance. He didn’t answer.
“Why did you do it?”
His eyes met hers for a brief second. “I don’t know,” he said at last. He shrugged, as though it didn’t matter. “I wanted to.”
Too casual. Too thoughtless. Miok narrowed her eyes, almost annoyed.
“Because you wanted to?” she echoed, her tone laced with a hint of mockery. “That’s it?”
“I thought you wouldn’t mind,” he replied, looking back up at the sky. “Seeing as you want everyone to believe we’re seeing each other.”
Miok stepped closer, stopping just one pace from him. “Do you want to touch me again?”
His mouth opened in surprise, as if she’d completely caught him off guard. “What?”
She took his hand. Lifted it. Guided it to her cheek, then downwards, over her jaw, along her neck, stopping just shy of the swell of her breast.
“Miok,” he said, voice low and uncertain. “What are you doing?”
She looked at him. And saw something she hadn’t expected. Surprise. Disorientation. Confusion. But also something else. Something deeper. Desire, perhaps. She smiled, satisfied.
“Do you want me?”
His breath caught. His hand, still held in hers, moved of its own accord, grazing her skin, his palm now cupping her cheek. He leaned in, his lips brushing hers. But just before he could kiss her, she whispered,
“Then say please.”
He froze.
“What?”
Her lips brushed his again, a provocation.
“If you want me, say please.”
He hesitated, puzzled. Looked at her, as if trying to work out whether she was mocking him. “Forget it.”
So she kissed him. Without hesitation, without warning. Deep. Almost rough. Seungmin responded instinctively. His hands stayed on her face, as if, in contrast to a moment earlier, he was too shy to go further. Miok found it adorable. Almost sweet.
She pulled away with the same intensity with which she’d kissed him. Took his hand. With quiet urgency, she led him inside the house, through empty corridors, slipping into the nearest guest bathroom. She locked the door behind them, pushed him against the wall, and kissed him again. This time her fingers slid beneath his shirt, grazing his skin.
He let out a low, desperate sound when her hips met his. And Miok felt it: how much he wanted her, how much power she held in that moment. She felt in control again, like she hadn’t in weeks. This moment belonged to her. This boy was entirely under her power. He was hers.
In a life where everything else had been dictated by strict rules, inherited, handed down, Seungmin was the one thing she had taken. No one had handed him to her on a silver platter. He hadn’t been assigned. She had chosen him, and she could control him.
So when her hips moved against his again and Seungmin let out another moan, her lips curled into a pleased smile.
“Say please,” she whispered into his ear, her breath warm.
He shuddered. She felt it.
“Say it.”
Seungmin swallowed hard. His voice cracked. “Please.”
That was enough.
She dropped to her knees in front of him, her eyes never leaving his. There was a flicker in her gaze, something that made him swallow again before she even touched him. Her fingers undid his trousers with steady, deliberate movements. She parted her lips and took him into her mouth, slow and purposeful.
He jolted, caught off guard by the intensity of it. His head thudded back against the wall. One hand instinctively tangled in her hair.
A moan escaped his lips, echoing faintly in the small, almost claustrophobic room. She moved with intent, her mouth warm, her rhythm controlled. Slow at first, then more insistent, more knowing. She heard the curse that slipped from his mouth, felt the tremors beginning to build in his thighs.
He was falling apart. And she watched him, carefully.
Just as the tension reached its breaking point, she stopped. Abruptly. Without explanation. She stayed on her knees, amused, as he stared down at her, stunned.
“You’re such a bitch,” he muttered.
She laughed, standing up slowly and taking his jaw in her hand. Her eyes sparkled.
“If you want more,” she said, brushing his lips.“Say please.”
This time, he smiled. As if he’d been expecting it. As if it no longer bothered him. As if he liked it.
He pulled her towards him. Kissed her again. “Please.”
That was all she needed. She pushed him gently until he sank to the floor. Lifted her skirt. With one hand on his chest to hold him still, she sank down onto him in one smooth, claiming motion. Her breath caught, sharp and involuntary. She let the sensation settle inside her. Then she began to move. Slow at first, deliberate, as if testing the limits of her power. Every movement was precise, a rhythm she set and he had to follow.
He moaned, the sound deep from his gut, and his fingers dug into her hips as if trying to anchor himself. Her movements grew more urgent. He buried his face in her shoulder.
“Don’t come yet,” she said.
His breath hitched. He clung to her.
“Fuck,” he whispered, trying to hold back, his face twisted in effort.
“Please,” he gasped, the word slipping from his mouth before he could stop it. “Please.”
She kissed him again, open-mouthed, unrestrained, and let go. Release hit her like a slow, consuming wave. Her body tensed. She trembled as it coursed through her. She clung to his shoulders, panting.
Only then, once she’d taken what she wanted, she whispered, “Now it’s your turn.”
And he didn’t need to be told twice. He let go. His whole body arched up into her, his breathing shallow and ragged as he clung to her like she was the only thing keeping him grounded.
She smiled, then whispered, satisfied, “Good boy.”
June and July had swept Seungmin up in a whirlwind, tossing him from one stage to another, from city to city, through strobe lights, applause and the frenzied screams of fans. From Milan to London, then Chicago. He had danced, sung, smiled for the cameras, but no matter how many time zones he crossed, one thought refused to leave him.
Miok.
He had tried to hate her with every fibre of his being. She was overbearing, bossy, and far too good with words. She made decisions for both of them, never asked for permission, never apologised. And yet, when she had touched him that night as though she owned every inch of his body, he hadn’t felt as shaken as he had expected to.
He had braced for vulnerability, for confusion, even discomfort. But instead, something inside him had remained completely still. A terrifying sensation, and yet oddly peaceful. She had taken full control, and rather than resist, he had let himself fall into her, as though his resistance had only ever been a game he never truly wanted to win.
Still, for weeks he had promised himself not to call her. Maybe out of pride, or sheer stubbornness. Not while the tour offered the perfect distractions: endless rehearsals, dawn alarms for airport transfers, intercontinental flights, interviews, the rush of performing, the physical exhaustion that hit him after every show. He’d let it all shield him. But in the quiet moments, in departure lounges, trying to focus on a film, or staring at hotel ceilings before falling asleep, she was there. Always.
So, when the plane landed at Incheon, the early August humidity clinging to his skin, he didn’t even pause to think. He just called her. No greeting. No pleasantries. Just her address.
She opened the door of her flat as though she had always known he’d come back. She smiled like she’d just won a bet. They barely made it to the sofa. Then the bed. Then again. And again.
They found their rhythm. His days were filled with choreographies and recording sessions, his nights full of her. A craving he couldn’t shake. He tried to convince himself it was just sex. But every time he left, something inside him broke.
Because it wasn’t just physical. Not when she looked at him like that: vulnerable, sharp, and tired all at once. Not when she said cruel things with a tremor in her voice she didn’t know how to hide.
One night, their legs tangled in the sheets, he flipped her over, grabbed her wrists and pinned them above her head. A suggestion of pressure. Just enough to reverse the dynamic.
She froze. Instantly.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, startled by her reaction.
“No. It’s nothing.”
He didn’t let go. “Tell me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Her eyes locked onto his, defiant. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
He let her go immediately. “Sorry,” he whispered.
She brushed her fingers against his temple. “Keep going.”
Seungmin hesitated, then lowered his face to hers and smiled. “Say please.”
For a moment, she became a stranger. Like a frightened child trying not to show it, trying to muster courage. He saw her part her lips, then close them again.
Then her expression shifted. The mask returned.
“Be a good boy, Seungmin, will you?” she whispered, lifting her hips to meet his.
He obeyed. Because when she spoke to him like that, she always got what she wanted.
The night before the tour began, they were lying side by side in her bed, skin still warm, sheets tangled at their feet. The air conditioning brushed over them. He saw her shiver.
Seungmin spoke first. “Does your mum actually hate me?”
Miok didn’t look at him. “I told you. It’s not about you. She just doesn’t like celebrities.”
“So, hypothetically,” he said with a half-smile. “If I ever met her, do you think she could like me? As a person, I mean.”
She turned her head towards him. “Why would you ever meet her?”
“I said hypothetically.”
There was a pause.
“She might like you,” she admitted at last. “If you weren’t a singer. You come from a good family. You’re polite. Handsome. If you had a respectable job, she might like you.”
He smiled and turned towards her. Propped himself up on one elbow and kissed the tip of her nose. “So, let’s say we started dating. For real. She’d never accept me, would she? Even if she liked me as a person.”
“That’ll never happen. Us, I mean. Dating.”
Something shifted in his expression. He pouted, like a child. “Why not?”
“We don’t actually like each other.”
He laughed, more to cover his disappointment than out of amusement. “Then what’s this?”
She traced the lines of his face with a finger, slow and deliberate. “I’m just using you.”
The words hit him like a bucket of ice water. Not because he didn’t know. But because despite everything, she kept repeating them, over and over, as if trying to convince herself as much as him. But her voice betrayed her: too calm, too controlled. It was obvious she was lying.
He bent down, his mouth brushing against her throat. He kissed her neck, slow and deliberate, until he felt her pulse quicken.
“Stop it, Seungmin,” she said. “You should go. It’s getting late.”
He didn’t stop. His mouth moved lower, tracing her collarbone, the curve of her breast, pausing where her pulse throbbed beneath thin skin. He moved further down, kissing her ribs, her stomach, lingering as he felt her squirm beneath him. Miok let out a sound, barely audible, and shifted restlessly. She parted her legs slightly, an involuntary invitation he answered by brushing his lips against her hipbone, anchoring her with one hand as she leaned towards him, suspended between anticipation and surrender.
“You do like me,” he murmured, smiling.
“I just like having sex.”
“With me.”
Miok opened her mouth to protest, to tell him he was arrogant, full of himself, completely wrong, but the words died in her throat the moment his mouth found her. His tongue moved between her folds with a slow, deliberate pressure that stole her breath. Her hands reached for the sheets, clutching them tightly as her back arched sharply. Her thighs trembled, instinctively trying to close. A cry broke from her throat, helpless and loud, as heat surged through her in waves. Every thought dissolved in the space between them, chased away by the ruthless precision of his mouth, the way he devoured her like he had something to prove. Like he already knew she wouldn’t be able to stop him, not when he touched her like that.
“You’re such an arsehole,” she hissed.
“Just say you like me,” he said again, voice muffled. “Because I like you, Miok.”
She turned her face to the side, jaw clenched, hands gripping the sheets tighter. He didn’t stop. His tongue moved with agonising precision, relentless, circling and pressing until her hips lifted off the bed in a desperate, involuntary rhythm. Miok bit her lip hard, trying to stifle the moans threatening to escape. Her legs clamped around his shoulders, her thighs trembling violently as she unravelled beneath his mouth, a broken cry of his name echoing in the room.
When he finally pulled away, she stared at him, her face flushed, expression unreadable.
“Please don’t like me, Seungmin,” she pleaded.
And this time, he had no clever reply. No sarcastic remark. He stayed silent, curling up beside her. Because that was a promise he knew he couldn’t keep.
~
Seungmin had fallen asleep beside her, his breath soft against the pillow. Miok lay on her side, hair still damp from the shower, watching him in the dim light. He looked younger in his sleep, more like a boy than a man: eyebrows relaxed, lips slightly parted, lashes casting shadows across his cheeks. But what caught her attention wasn’t his face. That she knew well. It was his body.
He was thinner. His collarbones jutted out, his wrists looked too slender, his ribs were visible at his sternum beneath pale skin. She knew the past few months had been relentless, just as the upcoming tour would be. The schedule, the travelling, the pressure. And yet there he was, asleep in her bed as if it were the only place he could truly rest.
She pushed the thought away. Coldly. No. She couldn’t afford that. She couldn’t become that kind of person. The kind who cares. Who looks after someone. She couldn’t lose control. Not when control was the only thing she had left. At first, Seungmin had been a tool to deceive her mother. Now, he was her buffer against collapse. A comfort she allowed herself because he made her feel strong.
She knew that if she kept looking at him, she’d feel dangerously close to him, so she sat up and shook his shoulder. “Go home,” she said flatly. “You can’t sleep here.”
He groaned, face pressed into the pillow. “Come on, it takes me almost an hour to get home.”
“I don’t care.”
She grabbed his shirt and trousers off the floor and tossed them at him.
He didn’t move. Stayed where he was.
“I’m not leaving.”
“I don’t want you in my flat.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t,” she said too quickly, her words a defence mechanism. Her voice betrayed her again. Uncertain. Shaky. And the moment her mouth snapped shut, she felt it: control slipping through her fingers like water. The way he stood his ground, the way he looked at her, forced her to take a deep breath, as though she’d suddenly forgotten how to breathe. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. This was her game. Her rules.
She spun on her heels and walked to the front door, yanking it open with too much force. “Leave.”
He followed but stopped in the middle of the living room. Stared at her, motionless. Jaw clenched, chest rising and falling as though restraining words he knew he’d regret.
Still, he didn’t argue. Didn’t raise his voice.
He got dressed in silence. Didn’t look at her, not once. Grabbed his backpack and walked to the door. He didn’t slam it. Didn’t linger.
“You’re such a bitch,” was all he said.
And then he was gone.
Miok stood there for a long time after the door shut, staring at the space he had just occupied, her heart pounding. She didn’t cry. She didn’t open the door to run after him. She simply slid down to the floor, her hands trembling in her lap, and repeated to herself that she didn’t need him.
Miok was spiraling.
The phone call had come that morning, brief and devastating. Yuna’s voice on the other end had sounded polite, composed, almost too calm. She had reminded her that the offer still stood. That they were still willing to consider her, if she was still interested. But they couldn’t wait much longer. A few more days at most. The position needed to be filled. They really needed someone extra, right now.
Miok had thanked her, trying to stay calm. She’d replied that she still needed some time to think, to reflect properly. And she did. Or at least, that’s what she’d believed. But the more the hours passed, the more she realised she wasn’t thinking at all, she was just falling apart. Her mind had become a spinning top, mad and uncontrollable, flying in every direction with no logic.
If she turned it down, nothing would change. Her life would stay exactly as it was: comfortable, cushioned, and entirely subject to the will of her family. She would keep the penthouse overlooking the Han River, the limitless credit cards, the invitations to exclusive events she barely cared about, the ability to buy whatever she wanted without checking her bank balance at the end of the month. No challenges, no hardship. She would remain the perfect daughter, her parents’ daughter. The flawless product.
If she accepted, all of it would be taken from her. Everything would change. She’d have to leave behind the life she had always known; her privileges, her safety net. She’d be on her own for the first time in her life. Without protection. But also free. Free to choose for herself. And most of all, she would finally have the chance to become someone else.
Perhaps even herself.
The thought tightened her chest. Because despite the fear, something dangerous was beginning to bloom inside her, something that felt dangerously close to hope. A feeling she’d never allowed herself to experience. She could build a new life, completely different from the one her parents had spoon-fed her since birth. A life that was hers. Not inherited. Not coordinated. Hers.
She could choose the people she wanted around her.
She could go out with Seungmin without worrying about her mother’s disappointment, if she wanted to.
She shook her head, as if to push that thought away. No. She shouldn’t be thinking about him. Not when her mind was just a chaotic mess of fogged-up thoughts.
Later that evening, she sat across from Sooyeon and Yoonmi in a restaurant as flashy as it was sterile, picking at a salad she didn’t want. She’d lost her appetite hours ago. Her head was just noise, swirling with imagined futures and possible regrets. She hadn’t even noticed her leg was shaking beneath the table.
She set her fork down. “Would you still be my friends if I weren’t me?”
Sooyeon blinked slowly, confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean me as my parents’ daughter.”
Sooyeon tilted her head, furrowing her brow slightly. “Well, your life would probably be different, and maybe we wouldn’t have ended up in the same class, so… probably not?”
“No, I mean…” Miok exhaled sharply, frustrated by her own inability to articulate what she meant. “If we had met anyway, but my parents weren’t who they are. Say I was the daughter of office workers, or… I don’t know. Just anyone else. Would you still be my friends?”
Yoonmi shrugged, clearly bored of the whole conversation. “Middle-class kids can’t afford our school.”
Miok stared at her. “Oh God,” she sighed, lowering her gaze to her half-full plate. “You do know what I mean, don’t you? Are we… are we actually friends?”
There was a pause. A silence thick with discomfort.
Sooyeon and Yoonmi exchanged a quick glance, one of those silent conversations girls like them had been trained in since they were small. Miok knew it well, that language, and it didn’t take her long to guess what they were thinking.
“Have you gone mad?” Sooyeon asked, lightly, trying to mask the unease with a smile.
“Yes,” Miok murmured. “Maybe I have.”
She speared a piece of lettuce and forced herself to eat it. It tasted of nothing.
They weren’t truly friends. Not in the way she had secretly envied in other people. She liked Sooyeon and Yoonmi. They were familiar. Part of the architecture of her life. But their friendship had been arranged, not chosen. Their mothers had introduced them before they could even write their names or count to ten, hoping their futures would align.
They’d gone to the same schools, learned to play the same instrument, spent summers at the same international camps. But what did they really know about each other? What secrets had they ever dared to share? Had Miok ever cried in front of them or told them anything that mattered?
She wasn’t so sure.
“You’ve been acting weird lately,” Yoonmi said, narrowing her eyes. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry.”
“Is it because of that boy?”
Miok looked up, surprised. “What boy?”
Yoonmi smiled, almost mockingly. “You know who. Kim Seungmin. Ever since you started seeing him, you’ve been acting strange.”
She didn’t answer right away. She had tried to ignore it, to reduce him to something insignificant; a distraction, a pastime, a way to keep control. She used to be good at that. At using people, moving them like puppets. But Seungmin didn’t cooperate. He was unpredictable. Disarmingly honest. He said things he wasn’t supposed to say. He told her he liked her. He made her feel wanted, not for her image or her name, but for who she was.
He should have hated her. She was cruel, calculating, despicable. A manipulative bitch, even. And yet, somehow, he didn’t. He looked at her like she was a person. Not someone’s daughter. Not a trophy. A person.
“No,” she finally said in a quiet voice. “There’s nothing between us.”
“So you’re not seeing each other?”
Miok met Yoonmi’s gaze again, ignoring the glint in her eyes. “No, we’re not seeing each other.”
But the words came out uncertain, like a truth she had already stopped believing in.
It was the end of August, and the air had grown unbearably stifling even after the sun had dipped below the horizon. The first two concerts of the tour were over, and the next ones were scheduled for the end of the week. In theory, Seungmin ought to have been resting: sleeping in, avoiding any strain, protecting his voice. But resting was out of the question when Miok kept ignoring him.
She hadn’t replied to his messages, nor returned his calls. And he’d found himself pacing his flat like a caged animal, phone in hand, rereading the last message from days earlier as if it contained some secret code he had yet to decipher. Felix had watched him for a few minutes, visibly concerned, before retreating to his room.
Eventually, he had caved and rang Yoonsuk.
“Are you up to anything these next few days?” he’d asked, trying and failing to sound casual.
He had heard Yoonsuk sigh, as if he already knew exactly where this was going. “There’s some sort of party tomorrow. Sooyeon mentioned it, so there’s a good chance Miok will be there.”
“Can I come too?”
Yoonsuk had hesitated. “Sure, if you really want,” he’d said. “Not exactly your scene, but…” He’d left the sentence hanging, then ended the call.
It wasn’t exactly an invitation, but Seungmin decided it would have to do.
The venue was on the second-to-top floor of a vast skyscraper, with one of those terraces boasting a view grand enough to justify the overpriced cocktails. People floated between groups with drinks in hand, their conversations never quite sparking, always following the same slow, languid rhythm. Seungmin didn’t bother trying to blend in. He’d arrived early. Miok wasn’t there yet. So he waited.
Wandering the space was easier than standing still. He focused on the rhythm of his own footsteps, trying to relax, to avoid thinking about the tight knot at the pit of his stomach. Then a hand brushed his arm, stopping him, and a voice softly called his name.
He turned. Yoonmi. A too-tight smile painted across her face; a gust of vanilla perfume, almost sickly sweet, washed over him as she gave a polite little bow. Seungmin took a step back.
“Are you looking for Miok?” she asked after a string of empty pleasantries to which he’d responded coolly. He hadn’t come there for her and had no interest in anything she had to say. Useless small talk that would lead nowhere. But that question caught his attention, and from the satisfied way Yoonmi was looking at him, she seemed to have noticed that too.
He stared at her. “Yes.”
“Why?” she asked, tilting her head in a deliberately frivolous, almost childlike way.
“I need to talk to her,” he replied simply.
Yoonmi looked vaguely amused. “Honestly, I don’t think she likes you very much.”
His gaze narrowed, his expression suddenly harder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just being nosy, really. The other day I asked if there was something going on between you two, if you were seeing each other, but she said no,” she said, flicking her hair over her shoulders with a sharp movement. Her shoulders were so angular they almost looked artificial. Seungmin wondered if she’d had something done to make them that way. “I don’t think she needs you anymore.”
Seungmin stayed silent, absorbing her words. She leaned forward slightly, close enough for the cold rim of her glass to brush against his forearm. He flinched at the sudden chill.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time on someone like her,” Yoonmi added after a pause.
Seungmin’s expression darkened further. “Aren’t you two supposed to be friends?”
“Yes, sort of,” she replied with a sigh, as if the thought annoyed her somehow. “I’m not sure she sees me that way, though. She only lives for herself. Doesn’t care about anyone else. I like her, but… well, you know what she’s like. Everything depends on whether you’re useful to her. As long as she needs you, everything’s fine. But the moment she gets what she wants, she’ll throw you away without a second thought.”
Seungmin couldn’t quite figure out what her real aim was. If it was to make him think less of Miok, she had failed. He only felt pity. Pity for Miok, forced to move through a world filled with people who didn’t think twice about speaking behind the backs of those they called friends. And he wanted to say something, to tell Yoonmi she was wrong. But he stopped listening before she could finish her sentence, because from the corner of his eye, he saw her walk in. Miok. And she was staring at them with that usual composed expression she always wore, barely concealing an irritation Seungmin had learned to recognise but never quite knew how to read.
He didn’t hesitate. He headed straight for her, ignoring Yoonmi’s protests.
“Why are you here?” she asked the moment he reached her.
“Yoonsuk invited me,” he replied.
Miok looked around. “I don’t see him.”
Seungmin shook his head, more out of frustration than as an actual answer. “Maybe he’ll show up later.”
The conversation stalled for a few seconds. She folded her arms across her chest, raising her eyebrows slightly. Seungmin had come to that party for one reason only: to see her. To speak to her, even if only for a few minutes. Nothing more. He’d spent days imagining how their encounter might go, what to say, what tone to use, how to carry himself. But now that she was right there in front of him, in the flesh, he couldn’t seem to find the right words.
What was it he actually wanted to say? What was he hoping for? Did he want to convince her to come back to him, to change her mind? Or did he just need a sign that she wasn’t erasing him completely, that somewhere deep down she still needed him? He didn’t know. The only thing he was sure of was that he couldn’t leave without knowing for certain that she wouldn’t vanish from his life for good.
Maybe he hadn’t come to win her back. Because, despite everything, being without Miok felt more unbearable than any other outcome.
“Why were you talking to her?” she said suddenly, breaking the silence.
“To who?”
“To Yoonmi,” she replied through clenched teeth.
Seungmin turned to look back in the direction he’d come from. Yoonmi had joined a nearby group but was still sneaking glances their way, not even trying to be subtle about it.
“Oh… she approached me first. I barely listened to half of what she said,” he replied.
“She was flirting with you,” said Miok, her voice flat. “I think she’s got a crush on you. Or she wants people to think she does.”
“So what?” he said. “I’m not interested.”
Miok let out a nervous laugh. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“Made sure I saw you with her,” Miok said, as if it were obvious. “You did it to get under my skin.”
It was Seungmin’s turn to laugh, bewildered. He looked at her. On the surface, nothing seemed off. But if he paid closer attention, he could see how anxious she was; the way her fingers kept pinching the skin on her elbow, the way her voice faltered just before the end of each sentence.
“She was the one who came up to me, I was just being polite,” he said, nearly annoyed. “I’m not the kind of person who plays stupid games.”
Miok’s gaze turned darker, sharper. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh for God’s sake, it doesn’t mean anything!” he exclaimed, perhaps a bit too loudly.
Miok glanced around, as if checking to see whether anyone was watching them. It was obvious she was holding back, keeping a lid on her emotions just to avoid making a scene. But Seungmin didn’t know how to break the stalemate. They weren’t getting anywhere, not like this. Not when she seemed constantly on guard, bracing for a blow that might never come.
“I don’t understand why you’re ignoring me,” he said at last, stepping closer to draw her attention back to him.
“I wonder why…” she replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Could you stop being a bitch for just one second?”
She snapped her head up, as if to scold him. “Why? I don’t even know why you came here. Isn’t it obvious I don’t want to talk to you? Why can’t you just accept that?”
Seungmin sighed. “You can’t avoid me forever.”
She gave a bitter smirk. “Yes, I can. If I want to.”
“But do you really want to?”
Miok didn’t reply. She turned away without another word and walked off. Not in anger, but with calculated composure. As if she’d rehearsed the scene a hundred times. And somehow, that made it worse. The way she moved, as if nothing could touch her, as if none of it mattered, made Seungmin clench his fists until his nails dug into his palms. Her apparent calm only highlighted the chaos inside him. He decided to follow her, slipping into the corridor that led to the lift.
“Miok!” he called, sharply.
She stopped in her tracks and turned; her expression so cold it almost stripped her of all humanity. “Can you tell me what exactly it is that you want from me?”
He didn’t answer but held her gaze.
“Whatever it is,” she went on, “I can’t give it to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t be part of the plan anymore,” she said at last, almost resigned. “You’re a risk I can’t afford. I can’t feel anything for you.”
He let out a laugh. A nervous, almost hysterical laugh. Painful. “Because your parents don’t approve? Because I’m not some fucking CEO of a multinational?”
“No, it has nothing to do with them,” she shot back, more sharply now. “It’s me. I’m the one who doesn’t want you.”
“Why?” he pressed, stepping closer again. His hands were shaking. “What exactly are you so afraid of?”
And with those words, something cracked. Until that moment, Seungmin had felt like he was witnessing an internal war, her relentless fight to suppress every emotion, every flicker of weakness. But for the first time since he’d known her, Seungmin saw Miok truly fall apart.
~
Miok collapsed, as if something inside her had broken. It wasn’t a theatrical gesture. She sank to the floor as though, all of a sudden, nothing was holding her up anymore; her knees folding beneath her, hands covering her face, fingers pressed into her skin, her eyes beginning to burn, though she hadn’t yet started crying. A strangled sound escaped her throat, somewhere between a held breath and a stifled moan. Her body trembled slightly, as if it were trying with all its might to resist the emotion that was threatening to overwhelm her.
Seungmin had always seen her as someone who held herself together, constantly in control. Even in moments when he’d glimpsed some vulnerability in her expression, Miok had always seemed protected by a carefully constructed barrier, designed to keep the world at bay. But now, there was none of that. And in this sudden moment of fragility, perhaps Seungmin saw her for the first time. The real Miok.
He called her name, quietly, almost uncertain. It came out as a whisper, as if he were afraid of frightening her.
She didn’t respond. She didn’t lower her hands from her face, as if the very idea of being seen in that state was unbearable. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled. “Everything’s slipping out of my hands, Seungmin.”
He hesitated before taking a step forward.
“I could lose everything, do you understand?” she went on. Her voice broke, as though she no longer had the strength to continue. “And you... you come here, expecting to be a part of my life, as if it wasn’t already complicated enough.”
It wasn’t what Seungmin had expected to hear. She couldn’t see him, but his expression changed, grew more serious, more tense. “What are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer right away. She just tried to catch her breath, tried to calm the rhythm of it, which had grown shallow and rapid. Her gaze was fixed on her feet, her shoulders tense. Seungmin crouched down in front of her and gently took hold of her wrists, his hands warm, his touch light. He moved hers away from her face, forcing her to let herself be seen.
“What are you talking about?” he repeated. His voice was firmer now, but not harsh.
Miok let him touch her. She didn’t pull away, but she still avoided his eyes. She looked up at the ceiling, as though searching there for an answer. She tried to speak, but the words tangled on her tongue. “I... I don’t...” she whispered, then closed her eyes. “Please, Seungmin. Leave me alone. I can’t do this. I really tried. But I can’t. I just can’t.”
Seungmin didn’t move. He held her wrists a little tighter, just enough for her to feel he was still there.
“Miok, please. Tell me what’s going on. You’re starting to scare me.”
She looked at him, only for a moment, as if even that glance required a huge effort. A brief contact, but enough. There was something different in Seungmin’s eyes, they were shinier, a little red at the edges. It wasn’t pity, not quite. Tenderness, maybe. An uncomfortable tenderness that she didn’t know what to do with, and that she didn’t believe she deserved.
Miok felt a pang that started in her stomach and spread across her chest. It was absurd that he was looking at her like that, right now, after everything she’d done to him. She felt she owed him an explanation. The words formed in her mouth before she even had the chance to decide whether or not to speak. And finally, she did.
“I just wanted to be independent. I wanted to be free of everything. My parents, their expectations, their stupid rules. I received an offer... a job offer, from the MMCA. And I thought maybe it was finally the right moment to... to leave the Foundation. To stop working for my parents and do something I genuinely cared about, something that gave me a sense of purpose. I thought that if I played my cards right, I could have everything I wanted, like always: the job I dreamed of and my family’s support. Without losing anything. But it’s not possible. They won’t let me choose.”
She paused, running a hand through her hair, maybe to buy herself a bit of time to organise her thoughts. Then she continued.
“And then there’s you. You were just a tool. A strategy to keep them quiet. It was all calculated. You didn’t even like me, you found me annoying. There was no risk, because there was no way you’d get attached. But then you started saying strange things. That you liked me. Me, who only used you for my own ends. Me, who’s nothing but selfish. I didn’t push you away when I should have, I kept you close because it made me feel better. I didn’t think for a second about how you might be feeling, and now I feel like shit. Because you don’t deserve that.”
Only after she’d finished, breathless now, did she dare look up. And what she saw disarmed her. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, and he didn’t try to hide them. There was no sadness in his eyes, only frustration. Miok stood up abruptly, almost angry.
“Why the hell are you crying?”
He stood as well. Wiped his face with the back of his hand, almost embarrassed. “Because you’re talking absolute rubbish.”
She shook her head, pressing her lips tightly together. “It’s true. Without them, without my parents, I have nothing. I am nothing.”
“Then start building something. From nothing!” he burst out. “What exactly are you afraid of losing? That world, the one you live in, you don’t even like it.”
Miok tried to reply, but he cut her off before she could speak.
“What would you actually miss?” he pressed. “The parties you find dull and pointless? The friends who don’t think twice about slagging you off behind your back? Your family, who won’t let you live your life? Who expect you to marry someone just to protect their image? Tell me, Miok. Are you really afraid of losing all that?”
She stared at him. The tears finally began to fall, and she didn’t even notice. She’d almost forgotten what crying felt like. It was like a new sensation. She didn’t try to stop them. “And what if I fail?” she asked, with a sincerity that made Seungmin realise she wasn’t pretending anymore. That the girl in front of him was the one Miok had spent a lifetime hiding. “What if I end up in a situation I can’t... I don’t know how to handle?”
Seungmin placed his hands on her arms, as if afraid she might collapse again. His expression had softened.
“I’m scared,” she said again, more quietly. “Scared that the job might go badly. That I’ll fail. That I’ll have to go back with my tail between my legs. Admit my parents were right all along. That without them, I can’t do anything.”
She looked at him and stepped closer, grabbing a fold of his T-shirt and holding onto it between her fingers. “And I’m scared to admit that I like you too, Seungmin. That I don’t just need you for convenience. But I’m not sure I can give you that kind of power over me. If I did, I really wouldn’t know what to do.”
“It’s not about having everything under control,” he said. “No one does. And I know it’s hard, I struggle with that too. But we have to learn to live with it. With the fear of messing up.”
She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. Her gaze dropped to her hands, clutching his shirt tighter now, her thumbs brushing against the skin of his stomach.
“I don’t want to have control over you, Miok,” he went on, letting his hands fall from her arms to rest at his sides. Her grip on his shirt tightened even more, as if to keep him from pulling away. “I just want to be with you. In spite of everything.”
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. New tears welled up in her red-rimmed eyes. “And what if I ruin everything?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Then it means that’s how it was meant to be.”
Miok rested her forehead against his chest and let out a sigh. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Seungmin wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. She could hear the fast but steady rhythm of his heart. As ridiculous as it was, it calmed her.
“You can do it,” he whispered, brushing her hair with his lips. “We can.”
It was late by the time he finally landed, and he didn’t bother stopping by his place first. The flight from Tokyo had left him sore and slightly dazed, but it didn’t matter. Not when he was finally going to see her again after weeks apart.
He rang the doorbell twice before the door opened and she appeared in front of him. She blinked a few times, surprised, before breaking into a smile.
“Well,” he said, once inside the flat. “This is a big change.”
She raised an eyebrow, folding her arms across her chest and leaning a shoulder against the wall. “You don’t like it?”
“No, I do,” he replied, letting the door close behind him. “It suits you more, somehow. It feels more yours.”
For a while, she didn’t say anything. She just tilted her head slightly, a faint, amused smile on her lips. It wasn’t the flat they used to meet in, the one with open spaces and clean, austere lines. This one was small, intimate. Warm. There were art catalogues stacked on the floor next to an old sofa, and mugs left in the sink. A drying rack had been abandoned by the window, waiting to be put away.
Seungmin dropped his backpack next to the little kitchen and, without warning, leaned in and kissed her.
“What are you doing?” she asked, laughing against his lips.
“I missed you.”
She paused for a moment, as if the statement had caught her completely off guard. Then she smiled, placing the palm of her hand against his chest to steady him. “I missed you too. But you must be exhausted. Why don’t you sit down? Do you want a cup of tea? Or are you hungry? Did they feed you on the plane?”
He didn’t answer. He kissed her again, slower this time, then his lips wandered to her neck and her laughter melted into a soft sigh.
“Seungmin…”
“Please,” he murmured, his mouth warm against her skin. “I’ve missed you so much.”
She was still smiling when he guided her toward the bedroom. They undressed without rush, without urgency. His shirt, her shorts, fell along the way. They were down to their underwear when he knelt, brushing his lips against her stomach. His fingers slid beneath the fabric of her panties, teasing her until she gasped.
He stopped.
“Why did you stop?” she asked, breathless.
A sly smile curled his lips. “If you want me to keep going,” he said, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Say please.”
She let out a soft groan, then gave in with a laugh. “Please.”
That was enough. He touched her slowly, deliberately; his fingers stroked and pressed, coaxing gentle moans from her lips. He kissed her thighs, her stomach, her breasts, until she trembled beneath him.
When he kissed her again, she reached for him, sliding her hand beneath the waistband of his briefs. He was hard against her, and Miok didn’t hesitate.
“I need you,” she whispered.
He kissed her mouth, intoxicated by her touch. “You know what you have to say.”
She looked at him, this time without a smile. Without teasing.
“I love you.”
He froze, just for a second. But those words, spoken plainly but not lightly, hit him harder than he’d expected. Her eyes were on his, clear and sincere.
“I love you,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He lined himself up and she welcomed him, eager. There was no game this time, no resistance, only them. They moved together, and for the first time there was no control, no distance, no need to pretend.