gia

MARTIN

For me , for me ! @lowkeonho

martin is horrible at surprises and y/n is horrible at waiting. their anniversary, seemingly forgotten, ends in a break up! martin knows that not everyone deserves a second chance…unless it’s him 😅 now his one focus is getting the love of his life back. but in order to do that, they both have to put their prides away, which is a lot harder than you would think.

martin x femreader

Attracted to u @ig-gigi

CORTIS goes to the melbourne pink pantheress concert where coincidentally famous dancer Y/n L/n happens to be a backup dancer in. since pink is notorious for being a k-pop fan she invites CORTIS backstage after one of the staff spotted the 5 members, well. . . the rest is history.

#SNEAK DISSERS? THATS THAT SHI I DONT LIKE @kaikaikoi

your ex's girlfriend is getting too comfortable sneak dissing you on public platforms, you and your bsf decide to take matters into your own hands

scammer boy @juh00n

you knew not to buy from just any reseller, but you never imagined you’d get scammed by someone who goes to school with you!

true romance @yuahnfen

after releasing a song about your celebrity crush for your new album, you go viral all over social media. In an interview, you confess the song was about Martin ( a few other songs too..) a renowned producer and artist, resulting in you getting swept in a sea of dating rumours with him. Some of his parasocial fans might be mad, but, hey at least you’re getting your cash. What happens when he asks you to feature on his song? it's nothing more than work, right?

solo artist!martin x solo artist!fem!reader

ayy trynna get myself sum guitars fine shyt! @goyangireels

having had a crush on martin edwards for some time, y/n decides it's time to catch his attention by finding someone to teach her guitar

martin edwards x fem!reader

live accident @illriize

yn is a famous korean singer based in L.A, and martin and juhoon are her biggest fans. what they don’t know is that she is secretly a big cortis fan as well. during their instagram live she accidentally joins it on her official account, leaving comments which cause them to freak out.

idol!martin x popstar!yn x idol!juhoon

paper hearts @nooriiz

martin does nothing but pass notes in class to cure his boredom, soon one day he believes he has found his longtime pen pal. or the one where martin is down bad…

fine shyt hmu @reinxoxz

texts between y/n and her moot whom she has a fat friend crush on but is too shy to interact with him 🤧

niche! Y/n x niche! Martin

kill all men...(except him) @juhooniesdoll

in which Martin tries his hardest to win over the reader…except she hates men.

he loves you in every outfit @eu4mi

martin genuinely loves how girly and true to yourself you are, a true lover boy at heart.

________

JAMES

my exclusive monchhichi @cheeskeik

reader has a mini obsession with monchhichis and absolutely freaked out when she found one of her exclusive one gone.

undevided attention @flwrhui

you have a crush on your little brother's friend but for some reason, keonho is oddly possessive over him

james x f!rdr ft. lil bro!keonho

thrifting!!@ijustchokeonacaii

down bad @cnndles

your bsf, james, is incredibly down bad for you. you don’t care much, you even find it kinda cute..

mr captain @crtisbambi

the ice hockey captain fell for the coaches daughter

personal fav !

the art of wanting @zombilit

james knows that he loves you, but he isn’t sure if you love him back. he also knows that he doesn’t want to be in a relationship where it’s only him putting effort in, so he decides that it’s best you guys take a break. now that he’s out of your life, you begin to realize just how important he was to you.

now playing...jealous by nick jonas @bamb1bgirl

james' long time admirer, yuna (oc), starts getting closer to another guy?

i met my bias at a jackson wang party @flwrhui

when your best friend convinces forces you to attend a party, you don't expect to meet your bias in the most inconvenient way possible

personal fav !

heart beat @aesprn

After Music Bank's messy game, James' celebrity crush gets exposed, and suddenly you can't keep your eyes off of him. But the fans can't keep their eyes off the both of you

rapper's gf? wife! @i-kai

a look into the married life of you, a supermodel, and james, a rapper.

famous!james x famous!reader

so you think I'm pretty ? @eu4mi

james would do everything and anything for his cute and pretty girlfriend.

pure hatred @ig-gigi

The 6th member of new jeans Y/n L/n, or rather mostly known as just Y/n, has an unexplainable hatred for the group CORTIS . . . No one knows why, and no one will ever know, she claims. James has zero idea who she is or might’ve been other than a member of her group. How will the hatred end ───Will it end?

________

JUHOON

Who knows ? @cheeskeik

juhoon and reader were in a relationship way before debuting, but they slowly faded away from eachother thinking the other fell out of love when in reality they were both busy preparing their debuts. unexpectedly, they meet again at a concert of both their favourite singer.

idol!juhoon x illit!reader

Drop dead @fixqn

idol! kim juhoon x jungkook sister! reader

do i miss him ? @lemongularly

fatal attempts of getting ur ex to come back… but still gotta be chill about it

ex!kimjuhoon x larp!reader, runitback?😳

ugg wearing c*nt! @camouflawdd

getting scouted in the middle of nowhere france for hybe x morevision’s new survival show was supposed to be the start of a dream. instead, it left her with a reputation she never asked for, earning her the nickname “manon’s lazier sister” despite all her hard work. now, months after debuting in the company’s first co-ed group ‘idle’, she’s become one of k-pop’s most talked-about stars. with fans who adore her, antis who can’t stand her, and a smile that never seems to fade, the last thing she needs is to keep running into the one person she thought she’d left in the past—kim juhoon.

she ain't my baby @reinxoxz

this generation’s most known nepo baby and rising top model, y/n l/n, gets caught attending several CORTIS events, which is strange, because even though she did work with idols as a former child model, everyone and their mothers know she doesn’t even fw Kpop like that. But she definitely fw an idol she met when she was 10 years old, to the point where she uses her daddy’s money to follow him everywhere 📸

idol! Juhoon x nepo baby/model! Y/n

live accident @illriize

yn is a famous korean singer based in L.A, and martin and juhoon are her biggest fans. what they don’t know is that she is secretly a big cortis fan as well. during their instagram live she accidentally joins it on her official account, leaving comments which cause them to freak out.

idol!martin x popstar!yn x idol!juhoon

coincidence ? i think not @ramenweemz

in which the five friends encounter the "weird" girl in school; from manifestations to tarot cards, yn has got it all & the universe on her side. your unlikely friendship with the five blooms, however juhoon refuses to believe any of your "weird" crap until coincidences happen.

witchy!fem yn x nerd!juhoon

personal fav !

holy hairball @i-kai

lebron and savannah, stephen and ayesha, juhoon and you..? that was always the prophecy your boyfriend and you had since you were 6, but puberty changes people and so it did for the two of you.

after having an epiphany over the summer, juhoon was ready to change things and win you back. unfortunately for him, things aren’t the same as when you were in kindergarten and being yours meant stepping up his game.

xoxo @eub11ss

Hello upper east siders, the bitch is back. You thought you could get all sneaky behind my back and never get caught at all? Poor you. This time it seems I have managed to evoke fire between two sworn best friends. Who knows, if you are next?

nepobaby!juhoon x nepobaby!reader

personal fav !

when we pop out ?? @onmymac10

like most of the other students in your school, youve taken quite the liking towards the drummer of your school’s band. but unlike everyone else, he surprisingly says yes-to your totally impulse text asking him to date you.

________

SEONGHYEON

lil sis got a bf ?! @backonmyswag

seonghyeon's little sister gets her first bf and big brother is kind of skeptical about it.

part time idol + full time fan @jjura

The star Seonghyeon has crushed upon since her early days in the entertainment industry now debuts as an idol under the same company as him.

idol!seonghyeon x fem!reader

break up with your girlfriend , I'm bored @reinxoxz

you're lwk in love with your lwk taken hb😹🏆

better distraction @yuuniversezx

when your situationship makes you feel like you'll never be seen, but his best friend proves that thought otherwise.

boy with the blushing cheeks @azywhwa

your cute regular finally asks you out.

eom seonghyeon x bakery worker ! fem ! reader

keonho's guardian angel & devil @demiurqe

everyone either has a guardian angel or guardian devil. what keonho has is a guardian devil named seonghyeon sitting on his left shoulder whose favorite thing to do is annoy the lovely guardian angel (you) that sits on his right.

or guardian devil!seonghyeon x guardian angel! reader babysits the worst kid on earth: keonho (17), who sent his former guardian angel (juhoon) to the psych ward.

guardian devil!seonghyeon x guardian angel!reader

personal fav !

buy from @ cortisthrifts ! @demiurqe

wanting to buy vivienne westwood clothes, your best friend sends you a thrift shop account on instagram under the name of “corthrifts". you buy from them but it seems like the admin of the account (seonghyeon) has taken a liking to you.

thrift shop owner seonghyeon x femreader

acai @lemongularly

your cafe just added a new food in the menu, and its killing you. while you’re miserable about it, can’t say the same to the rest

acaicrazy!eom seonghyeon x cafeworker! reader

barista boyfriend @dolliriuo

your so called 'manager' of the café you work at just so happens to be the same age as you

loser 'manager' ! seonghyeon x employee ! reader

cupcake @crtisbambi

your crush went private on everything, so that just means one thing. start a fake cupcake business to stalk him obviously

god , i love the way you look at me @cookienjeanz

Seonghyeon got clipped for looking at you now you’re getting shipped with him but you don’t like him. (Idk what this is)

eom Seonghyeon x KATSEYE 7th member reader

________

KEONHO

cupid 101 @yzniingz

the ive members are taking their cupid concept a little too seriously

idol!keonho x ive member f!reader

#ihatemybf! @jebi-won

you finally bagged the man of your dreams after all that time spent chasing him. your relationship was fine until it wasn’t. location turned off, texts being left on read, and even cheating rumors. you try to get out of the relationship but you just can’t, and it turns into a messy cycle you keep getting pulled back into. until you meet keonho, fell in love at first sight. that would’ve been perfect except you already have a boyfriend. will you stay with your boyfriend or go through drama just to get with keonho?

personal fav !

the puppy love cafe @fshionalien

with it being summer break, keonho and the others find random things to do. whether it be an escape room, art session, etc. it just is happens when going to this one spot in particular, the new puppy cafe to be exact, he finds interest in a certain person who shows them around the place. that person being you!

customer keonho x employee reader

mission : get her back @carisd

as members of two of the biggest idol groups in the industry, their relationship was falling apart. no matter how packed her schedule was as a KATSEYE member, y/n always made time for him. yet every time she needed him, he was too busy, too distracted, or simply not there. after months of feeling unloved and forgotten, y/n finally reached her breaking point and ended their relationship. keonho was left devastated, by the time he realized how much he had taken her for granted, it was already too late. now, with y/n keeping her distance and their careers constantly putting them in each other's orbit, keonho is determined to get his girl back.

#weindat @itsactuallylina

keonho sees you in wonhee’s tweet and realizes he #needsthat

subscribed to you ! @juh00n

yn never meant to become a content creator. It all started the summer before freshman year when she and her friends were bored out of their minds. she still remembers the way sui jumped out of her seat, sending louis ice cream straight to the ground, after she had suggested they start a youtube channel. looking back, it was one of the best decisions she'd ever made. over the years, their channel became more than just a hobby, it was something they built together. so when yn returns from summer break only to find out a group of boys from her school started their own channel, she isn't exactly thrilled. their videos, editing style, even their overall concept was WAY too similar to hers. convinced they’re nothing more than a cheap copy, she’d determined to be better than them. but between school and online drama, her messy relationships, and one annoyingly persistent boy, she soon realizes the biggest challenge might not be protecting her channel, but figuring out why she can’t stop thinking about him.

media trained @flirticsm

keonho x katseye fem reader

🇲🇽papi vs oppa🇰🇷 @bananagirl222

After Mexico won the game with South Korea you go to your boyfriends house to comfort him while he mopes and acts like you won the game.. ⚽️

personal fav!

its feminine intuition @loveqnai

when keonho accidentally hits you at a music event and fails to realise, he messages you to apologise. one misunderstanding leads to animosity between the maknaes of both the groups. eventually, both groups join forces to get their stubborn youngest ones together.

ahn keonho x KATSEYE 7th member reader

weirdo but I'm real tho ! @lowkeonho

keonho (grounded) attempts to communicate with seonghyeon (not grounded) via student gmail. a few wrong numbers entered leads to him flirting with y/n (stranger) through an email thread! what could go wrong hahaha (a lot)

nonidol!keonho x fem!reader

personal fav !

________

Monday arrived the way Monday always does — with a slight sense of inevitability and the faint impression that you made better decisions at an earlier point in the week when you had more optimism.

You were at Lighthouse Coffee at eight fifty-five, which was earlier than you'd intended, and you were going to blame it on the fact that you'd woken up at six and hadn't been able to go back to sleep, which was entirely coincidental. You ordered your iced coffee and found a table near the window.

He came in just after nine, baseball cap and sunglasses, and you saw the exact moment he spotted you — a small, involuntary smile before he made himself look normal again.

He got his oat milk latte. He came to the table and sat down across from you without asking if the seat was taken.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," you said.

"You're early."

"You're late."

"By two minutes."

"I know," you said. "Two minutes."

He took off the sunglasses. You noticed he did this here — the café was small and relatively private and the other patrons, most of them with laptops and very focused expressions, did not appear to be paying him attention. Whether that was genuine or Los Angeles politeness, you couldn't tell.

"Good weekend?" he asked.

"My grandmother tried to rearrange her furniture because she was bored," you said. "I spent about three hours convincing her she couldn't do it herself. Eventually I rearranged it for her. It looks the same as before."

"Did she notice?"

"She said it felt different, which I think she meant as a compliment."

He was smiling. "Your grandmother sounds like a lot."

"She is. She's great." You took a small sip of your drink. "Good weekend for you?"

"Recording," he said. "Saturday and Sunday in the studio. Which is good, I need the time, there's just—" he made a gesture that somehow conveyed the particular exhaustion of creative work. "There's this one song that isn't working and I can't figure out why. Like it's all there technically but something's off."

"What's off about it?"

He considered. "It sounds like something I would have written a year ago. But I'm not who I was a year ago."

"So the song's too old," you said. "Or you outgrew it before you finished it."

He pointed at you. "Yeah. Exactly."

"So finish a different version of it. As you are now."

"I've tried. It keeps wanting to be the old version."

"Then maybe it just isn't the song yet," you said. "Some things aren't ready to be finished. You might have to let it sit."

He looked at you with an expression you couldn't quite read. "That's either very wise or very annoying advice."

"Probably both," you laughed. "I say things and sometimes they're both."

He laughed, that slightly surprised laugh again, the one you seemed to keep pulling out of him.

You stayed for an hour and a half. The conversation moved in the way good conversations do. You talked about his hometown, your first year at university and the lake you'd done your field research on.You talked about what kind of music you actually liked (a lot of stuff, some pop, some folk, a lot of things that were hard to categorize) and what kind of music he listened to when he wasn't making it (mostly old stuff, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, early Springsteen).

"Springsteen?" you said.

"Springsteen," he said firmly. "The Nebraska album specifically."

"That's a choice."

"He's writing about working class America and grief and failure and it's—" he gestured again. "It's real. It's not produced into oblivion. It sounds like a person made it."

"Does your music sound like a person made it?"

A pause. "I'm working on it."

You liked that answer too.

When you left, he walked you to the Subaru again. It seemed to be becoming a thing. You didn't mention it. Neither did he.

At the car, you said: "Same time Wednesday?"

And the way he looked at you, just for a second, before he composed himself back into something more neutral, was something you kept filed away in the back of your mind.

"Yeah," he said. "Wednesday."

By Wednesday, the unofficial arrangement was established: Lighthouse Coffee, nine o'clock, twice a week. You hadn't named it anything specific in your head and you weren’t going to name it anything. It was just coffee with a person, a person who happened to be famous, in a city you'd be leaving at the end of summer. That was all.

You told Isa about it on the condition that she wouldn’t put any of it on Twitter.

Isa crossed her heart. Then, thirty minutes later:

You sent Isa more than ten texts in a row, all variations on ISA, and she responded to all of them with heart emojis.

In retrospect, you genuinely should have anticipated this.

On the second Wednesday, you arrived at Lighthouse Coffee at eight fifty-eight to find Isa already there, at a table in the back, wearing sunglasses indoors and a hat that was, if anything, more conspicuous than no hat, staring at the door over the top of her iced drink.

"What," you said.

"I followed your location," Isa said.

"I should turn that off."

"Please don't."

You sat down across from her. "Isa."

"I just wanted to see," Isa said. "I'm not going to be weird about it. I'm going to be completely normal."

"That sentence should terrify both of us."

"YN, I've been a fan of his for two years. I have never once acted inappropriately. I have never shown up at someone's house or waited outside a venue without a ticket. I just want to—" she took a breath. "I want to be in the same room as him. Just once. And then I'll be normal forever."

You looked at your sister. Isa's expression was doing something complicated — she was clearly vibrating internally but her face was working hard to look reasonable. You thought about what Isa had said about last year, about the friend group stuff and the anxiety and the music helping.

"Okay," you said.

"Wait, really?"

"If he comes in, which he might not—"

"He will."

"If he comes in," you continued firmly, "you will act like a person. No screaming, no photos. Just let me handle the introduction. Yes?"

Isa's eyes were enormous. "Yes. Yes, absolutely. I promise."

"Isa, I need you to really mean that."

"I really mean it. I really, really mean it." She reached across the table and grabbed your hand. "YN. You know me. I'm not that person. I just — I want to meet him, actually meet him. Not just stare at him from twenty feet away."

"Okay," you said again.

He came in at 9:03, and you watched Isa see him.

To your sister's genuine credit, she didn't scream. Her grip on her drink tightened to white-knuckle levels, she exhaled very slowly through her nose, and her eyes got very bright, but she held it together. Martin spotted you, started to walk over, saw the other person at the table, and did a subtle but unmistakable recalibration — his expression going slightly more careful, the way it did when he wasn't sure what he was walking into.

You met his eyes and tried to telegraph this is my sister and she is fine, I promise, which was a lot to put in a look but you apparently pulled it off because he came over.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey. Martin, this is my sister Isa. Isa, Martin."

A pause. Isa unclasped her hand from her drink and held it out. "Hi," she said, and her voice was surprisingly steady. "I'm a huge fan of your music."

He looked at her hand for a second, and then shook it. "Thanks," he said, and you could hear him try to find the register between kind and not-too-familiar.

"The new album is — I've heard the singles and I just think—" Isa stopped herself. "Sorry. You don't need to hear my opinions. I just wanted to say that."

He looked at her more carefully. "No, I — what do you think?"

Isa blinked. "What?"

"Of the singles. You started to say something."

"Oh." Isa straightened slightly. "I think 'RedRed' is going to be the one that gets played everywhere and it's good, but I think 'Blue Lips' is the one that's actually going to matter. Like in twenty years when people talk about this album."

A genuine pause. He looked at Isa with a different quality of attention. "That's — yeah. That's actually a really good read."

"'Blue Lips is about your training period, right?"

Something moved across his face — quick and real and not performed. "Yeah," he said. "It is."

“I listened to that song probably sixty times in the week after. So. Thank you for that one."

There was a moment. You watched your sister and this famous person she'd been devoted to for two years have thirty seconds of actual human connection, and it looked completely different from what you'd expected, which was some kind of fan-meets-idol transaction. It just looked like two people.

Martin sat down with you. He and Isa talked for a while — she asked him smart questions about the album, the kind that came from someone who'd actually been paying attention, and he answered them like she was worth answering, which he clearly did not always do, based on some of the interview clips you had accidentally watched while sitting in the same room as Isa.

At one point Isa said, "Can I take a photo?" and Martin glanced at you, and you shrugged.

"Sure." 

Isa took one careful, non-screaming selfie with him, and that was it.

After an hour, you and him walked to the Subaru while Isa went to find a bookstore she'd seen down the street, texting furiously.

"Your sister's cool," he said.

"She really is," you said. "She just… she loves things really hard. Always has."

"That's not a bad thing."

 "No. It's mostly a great thing. It just also means when things hurt, they really hurt her."

He nodded. You'd reached the car. He leaned against it, hands in his pockets, looking up the street in the way he did when he was thinking something he wasn't sure how to say.

"The song," he said. "The one that wasn't working."

"Yeah?"

"I worked on it last night. I think I figured out what was wrong." He looked at you. "I was trying to say something the way I thought it should be said. Instead of just saying it."

"Did you fix it?"

"I think so," he said. "Yeah. I think it's done."

"Good," you said.

"It kind of sounds like a conversation," he said.

You looked at him. He was looking back, and there was something in his expression that was not quite the usual careful neutral, something more like an opening. Like a door, left ajar. You looked at the door and decided you weren't ready to go through it.

"Songs usually do," you said.

"Yeah," he said. "Usually."

You got in the car.

The invitation came on a Thursday, casually, in the middle of a conversation about something else. You'd been telling him about a trail your neighbor had recommended, somewhere in the hills above Silver Lake, and he'd been listening with the particular quality of attention he had that made you feel like what you were saying was actually the most interesting thing happening in the world.

"—and apparently there's a view of the whole basin from up there, which I want to see before the summer's over—"

"There's a recording session tomorrow night," he said. "At the studio. If you wanted to come see — it might be boring. But you mentioned wanting to see how music gets made."

You had mentioned that. Two Wednesdays ago, somewhere in the conversation. You hadn't expected him to remember.

"I said it sounds like I'm guessing at it from the outside," you said. "I didn't say I wanted a tour."

"Do you want a tour?"

You thought about it. "Is it weird? Me being there?"

"Not weird. The engineer's cool, and it's just me and my producer. Low-key session."

"When?"

"Seven. I can text you the address."

You looked at him. "You don't have my number."

A pause. "No," he said. "I was going to ask for it."

And that was…well. That was a thing.

You gave him your number, which you were going to not overthink, and at seven PM on Friday you found yourself in a recording studio in East Hollywood, which was surprisingly unglamorous in the way that most interesting things are once you're inside them. It was a room full of equipment and cables and that particular smell of industrial carpet and years of people doing intense creative work. A man named Jerome, who was the engineer, showed you around the soundboard in a way that was clearly the routine he gave to visitors, and a man named Felix, who was the producer, was slightly suspicious of you for about forty minutes and then decided you were fine and offered you something to drink.

Martin was different here. You noticed this right away. Not performing, not on. Focused in a way that was complete and specific, running through takes with a concentration that blocked everything else out. He had a notebook on the stand next to the mic and he'd scribble in it between takes and then go again, and you could watch him, from the other side of the glass, working something out in real time.

You sat in the back on a couch that had seen better decades, and listened.

After a while, he came out between takes and sat next to you on the couch, and you showed him something on your phone — an article about the Colorado River you'd been reading — and he read it over your shoulder, and your heads were close together. He smelled like soap and something slightly warmer, and you were aware of the exact distance between his shoulder and yours.

"The reduced snowpack thing," he said. "That's—"

"That's the part that keeps me up at night," you said.

"Because it's not fixable in a normal timeframe."

"Right. Like the damage has a decades-long lag. It's already done."

"But you still want to work on it."

You thought about it. "Someone has to know how bad it is. So the people who make decisions don't get to pretend they didn't know."

He was looking at the side of your face. You could feel it.

"That's — that's what I try to do," he said. "With songs. Someone has to say the thing that other people feel but don't have words for."

"That's a better version of what I said," you said.

"It's the same thing," he said.

Felix called him back in, and he went, and you sat on the couch and told yourself very firmly that you weren’t feeling anything in particular.

The song he'd said was done — the one he'd fixed — was the last one they ran that night. He played it for you on the way out, on his phone, earbuds split between you, standing in the parking lot at eleven-thirty at night with the air finally cool and a three-quarter moon up over the rooftops.

You listened to it start to finish. It was the best thing you'd heard him do. It sounded like a conversation. It sounded like someone saying something true without deciding first whether it was the right thing to say.

When it ended, you handed him back his earbud.

"You're good," you said.

He looked at you. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," you said. "That song is really good."

"Was that an actual compliment?"

"I believe I said at the start that you'd get one when you did something genuinely admirable."

"And the song is genuinely admirable?"

"The song is genuinely admirable."

He was looking at you in the parking lot light with that expression again— the one that was trying very hard not to be an expression — and you were very aware of the fact that you were standing close together and that you had his earbud in your hand and that the moon was doing something quite attractive with the angles of his face.

"YN," he said.

"Martin," you said.

Then his phone buzzed, it was his manager and the moment went somewhere else, and you drove home in the Subaru with the windows down and the warm night air in your face.

The thing about Martin Edwards, you had discovered over three weeks of Wednesday coffees, one recording studio visit and about twelve texts, was that he was genuinely good company.

You'd expected — actually you weren't sure what you'd expected. Someone performing normalcy. Someone who was charming in the way that people who are paid to be charming are charming. Someone where the gap between the public person and the private person was so wide you'd need a bridge to cross it.

He wasn't like that.

He was quiet in the right places. He had actual opinions — strong ones, about music, about politics (he was careful but he had views), about what mattered and what didn't. He could be funny without trying to be funny, which was the only kind of funny that actually worked. He said I don't know when he didn't know things, which was rarer than it should have been in anyone nowadays.

He was also, and this was the more inconvenient piece of information, increasingly difficult to look at without your brain going to places you didn't need it to go.

You were aware this was a problem. You were also aware you'd been aware it was a problem for almost two weeks and had done precisely nothing about it because doing something about it would mean deciding what to do about it, and that’s not something you were ready for.

Your system failed on a Saturday in mid-July.

You'd gone on the hike — the one you'd been telling him about, the trail in the hills above Silver Lake. He'd asked, the previous Wednesday, if he could come, and you said yes. At seven-thirty in the morning you were at the trailhead in running shoes with water bottles and sunscreen and he was wearing that particular combination of slightly-too-nice-for-hiking and clearly-not-planning-to-care-what-he-looked-like. The trail was steeper than advertised and you went up in mostly comfortable silence, the kind that had become normal between you, punctuated by occasional observations about the landscape. The view from the top was exactly as described: the whole basin spread out below you, the city going flat and enormous in every direction, and the ocean beyond the ridge to the west shining like hammered metal, and in the other direction the San Gabriels with their surprising snowpack, and the sky a blue so specific it seemed intentional.

You stood and looked at it for a while.

"Okay," he said. "I get it."

"Get what?"

"Why people come here." He gestured at the view. "It's—" he paused. "I sometimes forget that it's actually beautiful. Under the other stuff."

"Most places are beautiful under the other stuff," you said.

He looked at you. You were looking at the view, and could feel him looking at you, which was a thing that had been increasingly happening and that you increasingly didn't redirect.

"Can I tell you something?" he said.

"Okay."

"I've been trying to figure out how to say something for about two weeks and I haven't figured it out."

You looked at him. His expression was doing something that was the opposite of careful. "What something?"

"The part where I'm—" he took a breath. "The part where I really like talking to you. And spending time with you. And it turned into something I didn't expect, when I just asked about oat milk that first morning."

You looked at him. The mountain air was cool at this elevation and he was squinting slightly against the light.

"I know it's complicated," he said. "The thing with my job and my life and all of it. And I'm not — I don't know what this is or what you'd want it to be. I just think you should know that I—" he stopped. "I like you. That's what I've been trying to say for two weeks."

Silence. The city below. The sound of something in the brush nearby, a lizard or a bird.

"Okay," you said.

"Okay?"

"I like you too," you said. "Which is more complicated than I wanted it to be."

"Why complicated?"

"Because you're—" you gestured, the same vague gesture he sometimes used. "You. And I'm me, visiting my grandmother for the summer, going back to Michigan in August, studying rivers. And you have four platinum albums."

"Those are all true things," he said. "They're also all facts about August. And it's the middle of July."

You looked at him. "Are you saying we should not think about August?"

"I'm saying I've spent a lot of time thinking about things that are far away and not enough time with what's actually here," he said. "And what's here is you. And I'm tired of talking around it."

"I don't know what this is either," you said.

"That's fine," he said. "I'm not asking for a definition."

"What are you asking for?"

He looked at you — just looked, for a moment, with that expression that had stopped trying to be neutral.

"Just this," he said. "Whatever this is."

You held his gaze. The city shimmered below you. The distance between you was about two feet and it felt both very large and very small.

"Okay," you said, for the third time.

He smiled. The real one. And you smiled back, which you did not always do unprompted, and he seemed to notice this because something in his expression shifted into something softer and more careful, the way people handle things they don't want to break.

You walked back down the trail side by side, your knuckles occasionally brushing, neither of you doing anything about it, and it was the most charged silence you could remember and also, somehow, completely comfortable.

At the trailhead, loading back into the Subaru, he was putting his water bottle in the back and you were in the driver's seat adjusting your mirror, and you both reached for the same armrest at the same time, and you laughed, and he laughed, and they were very close.

You looked at him. He looked at you. His hand was over yours on the armrest.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," you said.

He kissed you, gently, once — just a brief press of his mouth against yours, tentative and warm and not at all performed. You kissed him back, equally gentle, equally tentative.

You separated. He was looking at you with an expression of someone who wants to ask if that was okay and is fairly sure it was but wants to check.

"That was—" you started.

"Too much? Not enough?"

"No," you said. "Neither."

"Okay," he said.

"You're doing my thing," you said.

"What thing?"

"Saying okay."

"It's a good thing," he said.

"Yeah," you said. "It's not a bad thing."

You started the car. He put his seatbelt on. You drove down out of the hills with the windows down and you put on music — his, the new album singles, because they were in your playlist now and you'd stopped pretending otherwise.

At a red light on Los Feliz Boulevard, he reached over and turned the music up slightly when "JoyRide" came on.

You let him.

Your grandma knew before you even said a word.

You walked in from the hike looking the way you apparently looked, and your grandma was in the kitchen making pasta. She turned and looked at her granddaughter for approximately four seconds.

"Well," she said

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Of course you don't," she said pleasantly. "Sit down and have some water, you look sun-worn."

You sat down at the kitchen table. Outside, the afternoon was doing its golden thing, the lemon tree casting long shadows across the front yard.

"He's a good person?" she asked, not turning from the stove.

"I think so. Yes."

"You're sure?"

You thought about him in the studio, running takes until they were right. Him reading the Colorado River article over your shoulder. The way he'd said I'm not who I was a year ago about his own music. The oat milk. The way he'd said whatever this is and meant it.

"I'm mostly sure," you said.

"Mostly is enough," she said. "Certainty is overrated."

"He's famous, Grandma."

"I'm aware."

"Like. Really famous."

"I've gathered."

"And I'm leaving in six weeks."

"Also aware."

You put your chin in your hands. "Those are both big things."

"They are," she agreed. She ladled sauce over the pasta. "They're also both future things. Or things that exist outside of right now. And I've always found that right now is the part that matters."

"That's very seize-the-day of you."

"I've been seizing days for seventy-three years," she said. "I have some expertise." She brought two plates to the table and sat across from you. "My one piece of unsolicited advice."

"Just one?"

"Just one. And it's this: don't manage your feelings so much that you forget to have them." She picked up her fork. "You're very good at managing things, YN. You're good at being the responsible one, the level-headed one and the one who knows where the grocery list is. And those are real gifts. But sometimes the thing to do with a feeling isn't to organize it."

You looked at your pasta. "Sometimes you just feel it."

"Sometimes you just feel it," she agreed.

A pause. The wind chimes outside did something gentle and annoying.

"He kissed me," you said.

"I know."

"How do you know?"

She simply smiled and ate her pasta.

The problem, you were discovering, with whatever-this-was with Martin, was that Martin was not actually a private person in the way that you were a private person.

You were, in most respects, completely invisible in Los Angeles. You could walk down any street in Silver Lake or Los Feliz or the Eastside in general and no one looked at you twice. You were a college student in a t-shirt and shorts, slightly freckled from running by the reservoir, carrying grocery bags and an occasionally dying phone.

Martin, despite his baseball cap and his oat milk and his general aura of wanting to be normal, was not invisible. People noticed him. In the coffee shop, where the regulars had clearly established a collective agreement to leave him alone, he was okay. On the hike, which he'd clearly chosen partly for its relative emptiness, he'd been fine. But other places — a bookstore in Los Feliz you'd wandered into on a Thursday afternoon, a farmers market on a Saturday morning, a restaurant your grandma had insisted you all go to together (She had, at this point, fully adopted Martin into the summer in a way that you found mortifying and Martin seemed to find both overwhelming and touching) — people looked.

It wasn't aggressive. LA had a different relationship with famous people. Mostly it was looks and nudges and a few phone cameras from across the room. Twice people had come over and asked for a photo, and he'd been gracious about it, warm in the professional way, and then afterward he'd have a minute of being slightly somewhere else, like a small door had closed.

You noticed this and didn't mention it until he mentioned it first.

"You go somewhere," she said. "After."

You were at the farmers market, a Tuesday, walking between the vegetable stalls with bags of tomatoes and one very impressive melon that Isa had requested. He'd just finished a brief interaction with two teenagers who'd recognized him, posed for a photo, said something kind about their excitement.

"Go somewhere?" He looked at you.

"Like internally. After the fan interaction. You're present, and then briefly less present, and then back."

He was quiet for a moment. "Is it obvious?"

"Probably not to them. You were good with them." You shifted your bag. "But I notice things."

"I know you do." He looked at the stalls. "It's not — I'm glad they care. I'm glad about the music. It's just—" he paused. "There's the thing where you go into the version of yourself that the interaction requires. And then you come back out of it. And it takes a second."

"Because you have to put on Mars," you said.

"Kind of. Yeah."

"Does it bother you?"

"Sometimes more than others." He picked up a peach from a stall, examined it, put it down. "Days like this, when I'm just trying to be a person, it—" he paused again. "It's harder to come back out."

You thought about this. "What helps?"

He looked at you. "What do you think?"

You had a feeling you knew what he was going to say and you were not going to help him say it.

"Oat milk," you said.

He laughed. "Yeah. Definitely the oat milk."

Later, in the Subaru, melon and tomatoes in the back, he reached over and held your hand on the gearshift in a way that was casual and unhurried, like it was the natural place for his hand to be, and you let him.

This was the difference, you were finding. The difference between feeling it and organizing it.

"I need you to come to this thing," Martin said.

It was a Monday morning, your usual coffee, but he'd come in with a different energy — slightly on, slightly performing, in the way that meant there was something work-adjacent in the vicinity. He'd ordered his oat milk latte and then sat down and said it right away.

"What thing," you said.

"Album preview party. Label thing. It's on Thursday." He turned his cup in his hands. "It's at a venue downtown. There'll be journalists and label people and — it's a whole thing."

"And you want me to come."

"I want you there," he said, which was a slightly different framing that you noted. "It's — those things are kind of a lot. And you're—" he stopped.

"Your anchor," you said, lightly.

"Sure."

"I was going to say good company."

"But also yes," he said. "A little."

You thought about it. It was not the kind of thing you attended. A music industry party in downtown Los Angeles, full of label people and entertainment journalists, was so far outside the texture of your normal life that you couldn't quite picture yourself in it.

You also had approximately zero appropriate clothes.

"I don't have anything to wear," you said.

"Is that a yes in principle?"

"It's a logistical concern."

He looked at you with that look. "Is it really?"

"I own hiking gear and denim," you said. "And some book club appropriate sweaters. That's my wardrobe range."

"Okay, that's—" he was trying not to laugh. "I can help with the clothes thing."

"You're not buying me clothes, Martin."

"I wasn't going to buy them, I was going to—"

"Martin."

"—suggest that my stylist—"

"Absolutely not."

"—has done this before and it's not a big—"

"I am not wearing stylist clothes to an album launch party," you said. "That is somehow the most Los Angeles sentence I've ever heard myself almost say."

He gave up on not laughing. "Okay. No stylist. But the invite stands."

You considered. Isa would lose her mind entirely. Your mom would have approximately eleven questions. Your grandma would probably know about it before you got home.

"Isa could come?" you said.

Something crossed his face — surprised and touched simultaneously. "Yeah. Of course."

"Okay then," you said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," you said. "I'll figure out the clothes."

You called your mother.

"I need to tell you something," you said.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just — there's a situation that you're going to hear about eventually and I'd rather you hear it from me."

A brief silence on the other end. Then: "YN, what have you done."

"I haven't done anything bad," you said. "I've made a friend. He's—" she stopped. "He's someone Isa knows of. From music."

"From music," your mother said, very carefully.

"He's staying in Silver Lake. We've been having coffee. A few times a week."

Another silence. Your mother was a smart woman.

"YN," your mom said. "Is it—"

"Yes," you said.

"Oh my god."

"I know."

"Does Isa—"

"Know everything. Obviously."

"Does your grandmother—"

"Know everything and is pretending she doesn't," you said. "She's been feeding him pasta."

"Oh my god," your mother said again. "YN."

"I know."

"He's very famous."

"I know."

"You're leaving in six weeks."

"I know that too."

"Are you—" your mom stopped. "Are you okay? With all of that?"

You thought about being in the parking lot of the recording studio, listening to the song. About the hike and the view of the city. About his hand on yours in the car. About your grandma's advice: don't manage your feelings so much that you forget to have them.

"Yeah," you said. "I think I am."

Your mother was quiet for a moment. "He better be good to you."

"He is," you said. "He really is."

"Okay," your mother said. She sounded, under the worry, a little like she might be smiling. "Okay. Tell me everything."

The clothes situation resolved itself via Isa, who had been waiting her entire life for this exact opportunity and had approximately five hundred opinions about what you should wear. You went to three stores in Silver Lake and one in Los Feliz, and tried on things that were outside your usual range. Isa made executive decisions, and you came home with a dress that was simple and dark blue and fit well, your one actual pair of heels, and earrings borrowed from grandma, who had, in fact, already heard about the party.

"My work is done," Isa said, surveying you in the bathroom mirror.

"You did almost none of this work," you said. "I'm wearing my own clothes."

"I curated the clothes. That's work."

"You made me try on seventeen things."

"And we found the right one! Process matters, YN." Isa straightened the strap of the dress. "You look great. You look like yourself but like the version of yourself that's going to a music industry party."

"Is that a look?"

"It is now." Isa stepped back. "He's going to die when he sees you."

"Isa."

"He is! Objectively!"

You looked at yourself in the mirror. The dress was nice. You looked, as Isa said, like yourself. Which was fine. It was what you were going for.

"Can I say one thing?" Isa said.

"No."

"Just one."

"You're going to say it anyway."

"I'm glad it's you," Isa said. "Like, I know he's my — I know how I feel about his music and everything. But I'm really glad that if this was going to happen to anyone, it happened to you. Because you'll be good to him. And you'll be real with him. And he needs that." She shrugged, a little self-conscious. "That's all I wanted to say."

You turned around and hugged your sister for a moment. "You're a good person, Isa."

"I know," Isa said into your shoulder. "Also I called dibs on the selfie with him at the party."

"I don't control the selfie situation."

"Sure you don't."

The venue was downtown, which was exactly as much as you had expected and then some. It was in a building that looked like nothing from the outside and like a magazine spread from the inside: high ceilings, low lighting, music already playing (not his album, just atmospheric) and people arranged in the careful clusters of entertainment industry events, where everyone was there to be seen and also to see who was seeing them.

You and Isa arrived at seven-thirty, which Martin had told you was the right time — not early (too eager) and not late (makes the label nervous). He'd also texted you the name of the person to ask for at the door, and there was a car situation that you'd declined because you had the Subaru and were not about to start accepting car services.

The door person found your names, and you were in.

"Oh my god," Isa said quietly, looking around.

"Don't do your face," you said.

"I'm not doing a face."

"You're doing like fifteen faces."

"I'm processing," Isa said. "This is a lot of famous people in one room."

You scanned the room. You recognized three faces from the covers of magazines. There was a DJ in the corner. There were drinks on low tables, small food things being carried around on trays. Everyone was dressed in a way that was clearly calculated to look uncalculated.

You found Martin before he found you, which you attributed to the fact that you were looking for him while he was, apparently, trying to extract himself from a conversation with two people in suits. He was in a dark shirt and dark jeans, no baseball cap, his hair neater than usual. He looked good. Visibly himself and also slightly not himself, in the way of someone in their professional context.

You watched him see you from across the room.

And something happened to his face. Something specific and uncalculated. The slight-too-much-control eased and the real version came through, the tired-musician-who-wants-oat-milk version, and he smiled the real smile.

He excused himself from the suits with an efficiency that you found impressive and crossed to you.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," you said.

"You look—" he stopped. Looked at you. "You look really nice."

"I own a dress," you said. "Apparently."

He laughed, low. "Isa." He turned to your sister. "Glad you could come."

Isa was clearly experiencing several emotions simultaneously and was managing all of them with, you had to admit, remarkable grace. "Thank you for having me," she said. "This is — really cool."

"Let me show you around," he said, and took your hand, naturally, as if you'd been doing this for years.

You didn't mention it. You just walked with him through the party, and he introduced you to his producer Felix (who she already knew), two people from his label who both gave you the quick evaluating look of people trying to assess the situation, and a journalist who interviewed him sometimes and who spent the whole conversation looking at you like you were a code to be cracked.

Isa, for her part, was cool and composed and good, mostly hanging just slightly back, looking around, absorbing everything. At one point Martin leaned over to you and said, "Your sister is really holding it together."

 "You should see the inside of her brain right now."

Late in the evening, when they'd played three of the album tracks loud enough for the room and people had done the polite round of applause and the conversation had moved into the networking phase where you were less useful, you and Martin slipped out a side door onto a small outdoor terrace.

It was cooler out here, and quieter. The city was below, lights going on forever.

"How are you doing?" you asked.

"Better," he said. He'd loosened up since you'd come outside, the slight-too-much-control mostly gone. He leaned against the railing beside you. "These things are — a lot. But this one was better."

"Better because you'd just released new music or better for some other reason?"

He looked at you. "You know the answer to that."

You did. You let him say it anyway.

"Because you were here," he said. "It's different when you're here."

"That's—" you started, and then stopped.

"Too much?"

"No." You turned to face him. "I was going to say it's different for me too. Being somewhere I don't know, being the person who doesn't know anyone, it should feel worse than it does."

"But?"

"But you're not performing anything with me," you said. "You're just—"

"Martin," he said.

"Martin," you agreed.

He was looking at you with the expression that had given up on being neutral, and the party was behind a wall of glass, and the city was spread out below, and the space between you was very small.

"YN," he said, and the way he said your name—

You closed the remaining distance and kissed him. Properly this time, not the brief tentative thing in the car — this was slower and deliberate, his hand coming up to your face, your fingers curling into the front of his shirt, and the city lights and the party and the label people all becoming distant and irrelevant.

When you separated, his forehead rested against yours.

"Hi," he said, again.

"Hi."

"Okay," he said.

"Okay," you said.

You stayed on the terrace for a while longer, his arm around your shoulders and you leaning into him, looking out at the city.

"My grandmother is going to know about this before I even tell her," you said.

He laughed quietly. "She definitely already knows."

"She knows everything."

"How does she do that?"

"I have no idea," you said. "But she's never wrong."

You found out via Isa, which meant you found out very fast.

It was the following morning, Friday, just after 9, you'd just gotten back from your run and was making toast when Isa appeared in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas looking like she'd been awake for a while.

"Okay," Isa said.

You looked at her. "What."

"There are photos."

"Photos of what."

"From last night." Isa held out her phone.

You looked at the phone. There were, in fact, photos. Two of them, on what appeared to be a celebrity gossip account, tagged with the venue from last night and last night's date. They'd been taken through the glass — the terrace you'd been standing on had been visible from somewhere inside, apparently, and whoever had taken these was either a journalist or someone with a very good phone camera and very poor timing. Or very good timing, depending on your perspective.

The first one was from the beginning of the terrace sequence — you standing next to each other looking at the view, his arm not quite around you yet.

The second one was from after.

You looked at the second one for a moment. It was, objectively, a good photo. You were turned toward each other, his hand on your face, the city lights behind you. You recognized the back of your own head and your dress and the blue light from the city.

"Okay," you said.

"YN."

"I know."

"That's — that's like. Everywhere. That photo." Isa took her phone back. "It's in the DMs of every Mars fan account in the world right now."

You put your toast in the toaster. "Have you seen who I'm identified as?"

"So far it's just 'mystery woman at album preview.'" Isa's voice was careful. "But it won't—"

"Stay that way,"you said. "I know."

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know yet." You looked at the toaster. "Did Martin—"

"His publicist has probably already called him," Isa said. "These things go fast."

As if on cue, your phone buzzed.

He came over at ten-thirty, which was fast enough that you suspected he'd been nearby already. Your grandma, who was sitting on the porch with her morning tea, greeted him with the warmth of someone who had been feeding him pasta for two weeks and considered him an extension of the household.

"Martin, darling, there are eggs if you want them," she said.

"I'm good, thank you." He sat down on the porch steps. He'd come in the baseball cap again and looked tired in the way he got when he was worried about something.

You sat next to him. Isa was inside, pretending not to be watching through the kitchen window.

"My publicist called at eight in the morning," he said.

"What did they say?"

"That the photos are going around and that they can put out a statement or not, and it depends on what I want and what—" he stopped. "What you want. Because it affects you."

"What are my options?" you said.

"They can say it's nothing. Friendly, no comment. Or they can say — something else."

"What does 'something else' look like?"

"Acknowledging it. Not in detail. Just—" he looked at his hands. "Not denying it."

You thought about this. About the photos. About the woman at the party who'd spent the whole conversation trying to figure out what you were. About the accounts that were currently discussing the mystery woman. About Isa's followers, many of whom were going to have very significant feelings about this.

"Does the denial strategy work?" you asked.

"For a while. And then it doesn't."

"Because they figure out who I am anyway."

"Yeah."

You looked at the lemon tree. A hummingbird was doing something frantic near the flowers at the base of the porch.

"What do you want?" you asked.

He turned to look at you. "I don't want to be the person who — who has something good and hides it. I've done that before. With other—" he stopped. "I don't want to do that. But I also don't want to make your life more complicated than you want it to be. So this is your call."

You thought about it for a moment, about being a private person and a Michigan person and a person who studied rivers and did not generally want to be visible. You thought about the photos, and how they'd been taken without you knowing. You thought about the fact that in approximately five weeks you were going back home.

"Tell them to not deny it," you said.

He looked at you.

"If people ask directly, don't deny it," you said. "We don't need to make a whole thing. But I'm not going to be a secret."

He held your gaze. "You sure?"

"I'm sure."

He reached over and took your hand. "Okay."

"Okay," you said.

The thing that nobody tells you, you were discovering, is that being adjacent to fame has a specific texture that's different from anything you might imagine. It's not glamorous, mostly. It's not what Isa's posters would suggest.

It's phones going off at eight AM with updates from publicists. It's the specific awareness, when you go somewhere, of who might be looking. It's him checking his phone in the middle of a conversation and his expression going slightly elsewhere and then coming back.

You didn't mind most of it. You minded the parts where you could see it wearing on him.

You'd established a rhythm. Coffees on Mondays and Wednesdays. The occasional morning walk. He'd come to dinner on a Sunday and eat pasta while your grandma talked at length about her previous life and her opinions on various things, and he'd listened with genuine attention, laughed at the right moments and helped clear the plates. Isa had vibrated quietly through the entire meal and deserved a prize for it.

After dinner that Sunday, while Isa was helping your grandma with dessert, you and him had sat on the porch, and he'd said, out of nowhere:

"She told me about the music. When she thanked me, at the coffee shop. She said it got her through something hard."

"She did," you said. "Last year was tough for her."

"Does she know how—" he stopped. "How much that means to me? When someone says that?"

"I think she knows it matters. She might not know the degree."

He was quiet. "My mom—" he started, and stopped again in the way he did when he was going to say something true and making sure he wanted to say it. "My mom had a hard few years when I was in high school. Before any of this happened. She played music constantly. Like, as a coping thing. And I think about that a lot. The idea of music as something that holds you. Like it's not just — it's not just entertainment. For some people it's structural."

You thought about what you'd said to him in the parking lot of the recording studio. Someone has to know how bad it is. So the people who make decisions don't get to pretend they didn't know.

"I think you do that," you said. "With your songs."

"I try to," he said.

"Blue Lips does that," you said. "I know. I've listened to it a lot since—" you stopped.

"Since when?" he asked.

"Since the first coffee," you said.

He looked at you. "You looked me up."

"After the first coffee, in the car," you said. "I recognized you and I looked you up immediately and then denied it for a week."

"You denied it?"

"To Isa. I said I wasn't sure it was you."

"Was that convincing?"

"It was embarrassingly unconvincing," you said. "She knew immediately."

He was grinning now, the real one, and something warm moved through you the way it always did when you got that smile out of him.

"So you've been listening to my music since day one," he said.

"I've been listening to four songs since before day one," you said. "And the rest since day one."

"Which four?"

"You know which four."

"I want to hear you say it."

"JoyRide. The whistle one—"

"It's called 'Lullaby,'" he said.

"Whistle song," you said. "And ‘GO.’"

"GO," he repeated.

"It's a good song," you said.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Probably."

"What would you be doing this summer? If your grandmother hadn't broken her hip. If you'd stayed in Michigan."

You thought about it. "Research. I had a placement I had to defer. At a wetland preserve."

"Do you mind? That you deferred it?"

You looked at the garden. "I minded, at first. I was really looking forward to it." You paused. "I don't mind anymore."

"Because of the summer."

"Because of several things about the summer," you said. "Including you."

He held your gaze. "Yeah," he said. "Same."

The screen door opened and Isa appeared with two bowls of whatever was made for dessert, and the moment folded into the normal texture of the evening, and you let it, and it was enough.

It rained on a Thursday in late July, which in Los Angeles was treated as a minor natural disaster. People drove as if the concept of water on roads was entirely new to them. Your grandma’s neighbor came over specifically to discuss the rain, and they had a whole conversation about it while you listened and pretended to read.

Martin texted at noon.

His rental was in Silver Lake, which you'd suspected based on the mornings at the reservoir, and it was nicer than you'd expected and simpler than you'd expected simultaneously — a mid-century house, clean and sparse in that way of rentals that haven't been fully claimed, except for the corner of the living room that had been taken over by recording equipment, a couple notebooks and a guitar propped against the wall and the particular lived-in quality of someone who worked in their living space.

It smelled like coffee and the particular smell of a house in the rain, warm and sealed against the wet outside.

"Nice place," you said.

"It's okay," he said. "I haven't really done anything with it."

"You're not here long enough to bother."

"Yeah. You want coffee? I actually have good coffee here. Not instant, before you judge."

"I wasn't going to judge."

"You were going to judge."

"I was going to evaluate," you said.

He made coffee — a proper pour over, which you approved of, over the sink while the rain came down outside and silvered the windows — and you sat on his couch, which was large and comfortable in the way of rental couches everywhere, and the rain was companionable noise. You had your feet tucked up under you and a good cup of coffee and he was next to you showing you something on his phone.

"This one," he said. "This is the one I can't decide about."

He was playing you a rough cut — just him and a guitar and some light production, not finished. You listened. It was bare in a way that his produced stuff wasn't, more like the Nebraska album he'd talked about, and it was good in a different way.

"Don't produce it," you said.

He lowered his phone. "What?"

"Don't produce it. Whatever you're thinking about doing with it. Leave it like this."

"My label is going to say—"

"Your label wants what sells," you said. "This would sell if you left it alone because it's real. The production will make it less real."

He looked at the phone. "It's vulnerable."

"Yeah," you said.

"It's almost too—"

"Almost too," you said. "But not actually too."

He was quiet for a while, turning the phone in his hands, and you watched the rain and drank your coffee, and did not push it.

"What would you do?" he said. "If someone told you your research was too vulnerable? Like, too — exposed?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like if you wrote something about the watershed and someone said, this is too — this is too personal, it reads like you care too much, make it more neutral."

"I'd say my caring too much is what makes it true," you said.

A pause.

"Yeah," he said. "Exactly."

He put his phone down. The rain did what rain does, which was continue to rain. At some point you'd shifted on the couch, you'd ended up partly against his side, his arm around you, the earlier coffee now cold in cups on the table, and neither of you had announced this arrangement, it had just happened, but it was comfortable in a way that you'd stopped analyzing.

He was reading something on his phone — an article about something, you could see the text without reading it. You were re-reading a chapter of your book, or making a credible attempt to.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"I told my mom about you."

You looked up. He was still looking at his phone. "What did you tell her?"

"That I'd met someone. That she was smart and direct, studying rivers and visiting her grandmother."

"And?"

"And she said to make sure I didn't mess it up." He finally looked down at you. "She's very practical."

"That's good parenting," you said.

"She also said," he continued, "that the smartest thing I've ever done was watch that documentary on the plane."

You laughed — an actual, real one, the kind that came out without being called. He was grinning, the real one, and his face was very close.

"She sounds great," you said.

"She really is," he said. "She—" he paused. "She'd like you."

You held his gaze. "I'd like to meet her. If—" you stopped.

"If what?"

"If there's a world where that makes sense," you said.

"I think there might be," he said.

You looked at him. The rain. The coffee. The guitar against the wall. The notebooks full of things he was trying to say.

"Me too," you said.

He kissed you — not brief this time, not tentative, slow and warm and settled, the way things are when they've stopped being tentative, his hand in your hair and your hand on his shoulder and the rain making its noise outside and the afternoon going somewhere soft and golden even through the clouds.

When you separated, you said, with your eyes still closed: "You should keep the song the way it is."

He laughed against your temple. "I know," he said. "I know I should."

author’s note 💘: hi again 💫💫 i’m so sorry for taking so long to put out part two, but here it is! i have one more part left to put out, just to end it off, which should be out early next week 🙏 i hope you enjoy 🫶🫶

The Ln household in Michigan was buzzing with anticipation, most of which was thanks to your sister, Isa. She had been counting down the hours until your family trip to Los Angeles, her phone was filled with twitter fan account updates and the latest gossip in Hollywood. Every conversation with her within this last week always seemed to circle back to one person: Martin Edwards, more widely known as Mars. 

You’re in the doorway of your her room, arms crossed, watching as she’s sprawled across her bed surrounded by posters of Mars. His smile beams down on her from every corner, glossy and perfect, while she scrolls on her phone with an intensity you’d expect from someone engaging in a heated debate. 

“Do you even understand how huge this is Yn?” she says, eyes wide and her voice carrying that same buzzing energy that filled the house. “We're going to freaking LA. The home of Martin Edwards, of Mars. I have to meet him.” 

You roll your eyes, readjusting your position against the doorframe. “Or you could go and see his wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. It's about the same thing.” 

She glares at you, clutching her phone to her chest. “Not funny. This is fate.” 

You sigh.  As much as you hate to admit it, you love your sister, but her obsession with this Mars character is exhausting. You'd much rather spend your time doing almost anything else. Fame, to you, is just noise–loud, invasive and fake. 

From downstairs, your mom calls out another reminder to pack, prompting you to push off the doorframe and head back to your own room. You toss whatever into your suitcase without giving it much thought. 

In her room, your sister carefully folds outfits she thinks Mars may notice. “You never know,” she whispers, “This could be my chance.”

Later that night, you had settled yourself on the couch, half scrolling on TikTok, half watching whatever was playing on the TV. Your sister was sitting in an armchair opposite you, still scrolling on some random Hollywood gossip forum.

“You know he doesn’t care if you’ve memorized his coffee order, right?” you mutter.

She huffs back at you. “You’ll see Yn. When we finally meet, it’ll be perfect.”

You turn your attention back to your own phone. “Or completely humiliating”

The thing about Los Angeles, you had decided at age twelve, was that it was basically just New York but with better weather and worse priorities. You'd visited your grandma enough times growing up to form a solid opinion on this. The sun was too bright. The people were too pretty. Everyone was either trying to be famous or pretending they already were, and half the conversations you'd overheard at your grandma's neighbor's pool parties were about "projects" and "brand alignment."

You liked cooler days, coffee that was too strong, and the kind of quiet that only exists in places where people have enough going on in their actual lives that they don't need to perform having a good time.

So. Los Angeles. July. Five weeks.

Great. Absolutely perfect.

"I still can’t believe this is happening," your sister, Isa announced for what felt like the fourteenth time since you guys had boarded the plane at JFK. She was currently vibrating in her window seat, headphones around her neck, phone in both hands, scrolling through what appeared to be an Instagram account dedicated entirely to photos of him.

 You didn’t need to look to know whose account it was.

"I still can’t believe it," she says again.

"Isa."

"He literally lives there, YN. Like. He lives there."

"A lot of people live in Los Angeles. Eight million, approximately."

"Yeah but he lives there. Mars. Martin Edwards." She said the name the way other people said things like "Leonardo da Vinci" or "the cure for cancer." With absolute reverence. Like it was a gift to even have the syllables in her mouth. "We're going to be in the same city as him."

You turned a page of your book. "Cool."

"Cool?!" Isa looked at you like you’d just said something deeply offensive. "YN. He's the most famous pop star in the world right now. He has four platinum albums. His last tour sold out in six minutes. Six. I was on three different devices trying to get tickets and I still got nothing."

"I'm aware. You cried for two days."

"I wept. There's a difference." Isa tucked her legs up under her. "And his new album drops in like three weeks. While we're there. This is literally fate."

You had a lot of thoughts about the concept of fate when it came to celebrity proximity but you kept all of them to yourself. Isa was your sister and you loved her, even when she made it genuinely difficult. The Mars thing had been going on for about three years now — ever since "JoyRide" had come out and basically broken the internet and seventeen-year-old Martin Edwards from somewhere in Canada had become, overnight, the kind of famous that had its own gravitational field. The fan accounts, the stan Twitter, the merchandise, the think-pieces about what his lyrics meant, the very serious Reddit threads where people analyzed whether he was in a secret relationship based on the way he tilted his head in interviews.

You had listened to about four of his songs. They were fine. Catchy, even. You’d never say that out loud.

"The point," your mom said from across the aisle, looking up from her crossword, "is that we're going to grandma's because she broke her hip, not because of any pop stars. Yes?"

"Yes," you said.

"Obviously," Isa said, not looking up from her phone.

Your mom gave you a very specific look that translated to you are nineteen and theoretically the responsible one, please keep your sister from doing anything insane in Los Angeles. 

Your dad had stayed home with your younger brother Daniel, who was eleven and in a soccer camp that couldn't be interrupted, which meant it was just the three of you flying into LAX on a Sunday afternoon in July, descending into the brown haze of the city while Isa listened to Mars's entire discography on repeat and you tried to read your book and stare at the clouds.

Your grandma's house was in Silver Lake. It was a small yellow craftsman with a lemon tree in the front yard and wind chimes on the porch that drove your mom absolutely insane but you had always sort of loved.

Your grandma was standing in the doorway when your Uber pulled up, her right hip in a brace, a glass of white wine already in hand at four in the afternoon, her white hair in a perfect twist.

"My girls," she said, opening her arms.

You were, you had always thought, the least similar grandmother-granddaughter trio possible. Your grandma was all warmth and color and dramatics, the kind of woman who threw dinner parties and had opinions about art and had dated, at some point in the 1970s, someone mildly famous that she was always vague about. Your mom was practical and organized and approached emotion the way an engineer approaches a structural problem. And you were somewhere in the middle — you had your grandmother's tendency toward strong opinions and your mother's tendency to keep them contained, which meant you mostly just walked around with a lot of thoughts you never said out loud.

"You look wonderful ma," you told your grandmother, hugging her carefully, mindful of the hip.

"I look like I fell getting off the toilet," she said cheerfully. "But thank you. Isa, sweetheart, you've grown about six inches."

"Grandma." Isa kissed her cheek. "You have a pool."

"I have always had a pool."

"I know but, this summer you have a pool." Isa's meaning was very clearly this summer when we are in Los Angeles where Mars also lives. Your grandma looked at her with the fond incomprehension of someone who had never understood celebrity culture and had stopped trying.

"Come in, come in. I made sangria."

"Mom, it's four in the afternoon," your mom said.

"It's five somewhere," she retorted. "And also I broke my hip. I'm allowed sangria."

The house had two guest rooms and you and Isa were sharing one, which was fine, theoretically, and in practice meant that within thirty minutes of arriving you had unpacked neatly into half the dresser and Isa had covered every remaining surface with her stuff including, and you were not exaggerating, three different Mars posters that she had apparently rolled up and packed specifically to hang in the guest room.

You looked at them. Three large format photos of Martin Edwards — Mars — in various stages of concert lighting, his face all shadow and spotlight, one where he was laughing at something off-camera, one where he was mid-performance with his eyes closed, one that was apparently a magazine cover because it had writing on it that said ROLLING STONE and THE FUTURE OF POP.

Martin Edwards was, you would acknowledge privately and only to yourself, aesthetically not unpleasant to look at. He was tall, from what you could tell. Blond hair, usually a little messy. Good jaw. The kind of smile that photographed well and that you were deeply suspicious of for exactly that reason. He had the look of someone who knew he was charming and had decided to lean into it entirely, and in your experience, people who knew they were charming and leaned into it were exhausting.

You had seen exactly one interview with him, accidentally, while waiting for something else to load on YouTube. He'd been on some late night show, sitting across from the host with this very easy, very practiced sort of confidence, laughing at all the right moments, deflecting personal questions with jokes that were genuinely funny, which was the most annoying possible thing. He'd talked about his music in a way that was either very sincere or very good at seeming sincere, and you had watched for about four minutes and then closed the tab because you had things to do.

"You don't have to look at them like that," Isa said from behind you.

"I'm not looking at them like anything."

"You're doing your face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a face, YN, everyone has a face, and yours right now is the one you make when you're about to say something judgmental and you're deciding whether to say it or not."

You turned around. "I was going to say that three posters seems like a lot for a guest room we're sharing."

"It could be four," Isa said pleasantly. "I have a fourth one rolled up."

"Please don't put up the fourth one."

"Then don't make the face about the first three."

You sat down on your bed. Outside, through the window, you could see the backyard — the garden, the pool, the old olive tree in the corner. The light was that particular golden California afternoon light that you hated to admit was genuinely beautiful. A mockingbird was doing something complicated and aggressive in the olive tree.

"I'm not judging," you said, slightly more gently. "I just don't really get it."

Isa sat on the other bed, cross-legged, her phone finally face-down for once. "I know you don't."

"It's not a bad thing. I just—" you searched for words. "He's a person you don't know. Who doesn't know you exist. And you've organized a significant portion of your life around him."

"So?" Isa's chin tilted up in that particular way that meant she was about to get philosophical about a pop star. "People organize their lives around things they love. You organized your life around environmental science and hiking and being in book clubs with people twice your age."

"The book club members are very interesting."

"My point is that loving something isn't embarrassing just because it's a celebrity. His music makes me feel things. His interviews are actually really smart. And he's good, YN. Like genuinely talented. You'd know that if you'd listened to more than like two songs."

"Four songs," you said.

Isa blinked. "You've listened to four of his songs?"

"They're not bad," you said. Which was the most you were willing to give.

Isa stared at you for a long moment and then, slowly, broke into a grin. "Which ones?"

"JoyRide. The one about fashion or whatever. Um. Go? And..." she thought about it. "The one with the whistling in it."

"'Lullaby.'" Isa looked like she might cry, but in a good way. "That one's about finding peace and staying close to friends when life gets stressful."

"I know."

"You know what it's about?"

"I looked it up," you said, and went to get your book before this conversation could evolve any further.

The first week was, genuinely, pretty nice.

Your job for the summer was officially to help your grandma while her hip healed — accompanying her to physical therapy three times a week, doing the grocery shopping, making sure she wasn't overdoing it (her definition of "overdoing it" and the doctor's were very different). Your mom was working remotely for most of it and would head back to Michigan after two weeks, leaving you in charge.

Which was fine. You liked your grandmother. You liked the Yellow House, as you'd always called it. You liked the Silver Lake neighborhood, which was walkable in a way that most of LA wasn't, full of coffee shops and bookstores and little restaurants where you could sit outside. You found a farmer's market three blocks away that happened every Tuesday and Thursday. You found a library that had a good section on California ecology. You started running along the reservoir in the mornings before it got too hot.

Isa, for her part, was managing the fan account she ran for Mars and had made friends with almost twenty other people online who were also in LA for the summer and were also fans, and they had a group chat and were apparently planning to stake out various locations where Mars had been spotted previously.

You found this mildly concerning and deeply unsurprising.

"You're not actually going to like… camp outside his house," you said over breakfast.

"We don't know where his house is. Obviously."

"Obviously."

"There's a coffee place in Los Feliz where he's been photographed like four times," Isa said, pouring approximately half a bottle of maple syrup onto her pancakes. "We're going to go hang out there a few times and just see."

You thought about this. "And if he does show up?"

"And then I die," Isa said simply.

"That's not—"

"Figuratively, Yn."

"I know what you meant."

"I would just. It would just be really amazing." Isa was quiet for a second, which was unusual enough that you looked up from your coffee. Your sister's expression had gone soft in the way it did when she was being genuine instead of performative. "I know it's silly to you. I know you think it's embarrassing. But he's been — like his music got me through some stuff. Last year when everything was really hard with the friend group drama and I was really anxious all the time. I'd just put on his albums and it helped. So." She shrugged, aiming for casual and not quite landing it.

You felt something shift a little. "I don't think it's embarrassing," you said, more carefully. "I think—" you paused. "I think I don't fully understand it. But I don't think it's embarrassing."

Isa looked at you for a second. "High praise from you."

"I have a lot of praise. I keep it curated."

Isa laughed, and threw a piece of pancake at you, and the moment passed.

It was your Grandma's physical therapist, a cheerful woman named Diane who had exactly the kind of boundless optimism that you found exhausting in the morning, who recommended the coffee place.

"Oh, Lighthouse Coffee? In Los Feliz? Amazing. Their lavender latte is life-changing. Tell them Diane sent you, they'll know who I am."

Your grandma, sitting on the examination table, had looked at you with the expression of someone who is about to send you on an errand you don't fully want to run. "Yn, darling, you could pick me up one of those? I'd kill for a good lavender latte."

Which was how you found herself, on a Wednesday morning at nine-thirty, driving her ancient Subaru down into Los Feliz, the windows down because the AC was iffy, wearing denim cutoffs and an old hiking t-shirt and your hair in a bun that had started the day in better shape than it currently was in.

Isa had mentioned Lighthouse Coffee. You had made a note of this and immediately filed it under things I am pretending I don't know because showing up at a coffee place Isa had specifically identified as a Mars-sighting location was, on some level, embarrassing, and you had standards about that kind of thing.

And yet. Here you were.

The coffee place was a small corner shop on a quiet street, the kind that had exposed brick and reclaimed wood, very small succulents on every table and an extremely long menu on a chalkboard. There was a line. You got in it, pulled out your phone, and started reading an article about wetland restoration in the Sacramento Delta.

You were three people from the front when the door behind you opened and a gust of warm outside air came in. The person directly behind you said, quietly and under their breath, "Oh, thank god."

You glanced back automatically.

The person behind you was a tall guy in a baseball cap pulled low and sunglasses and a plain gray t-shirt, carrying what appeared to be a mostly-dead phone and wearing the particular expression of someone who has been awake for too long and needs caffeine more than they have ever needed anything. He was looking at the line in front of him with what could only be described as profound relief that it wasn't longer.

You looked back at your phone.

You were two people from the front when he said, from behind you, "Sorry — do you know if they have oat milk?"

You turned. He was looking at the menu, tilting his head to read it. The sunglasses were too big for his face, slightly. You could see the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth. Something nagged at you.

"I think so," you said. "The menu says alternative milks available. So probably."

"Cool." He exhaled. "Cool, thank you. Sorry, I'm not — I haven't been awake long enough to process things like menus."

"When did you wake up?"

"About forty-five minutes ago."

"And you got dressed and drove here in forty-five minutes?"

"I woke up because I was out of coffee," he said. "I consider it a survival mission."

You almost smiled. "You drove a car with no caffeine in your system?"

"Technically I walked. I'm staying not far from here." He paused. "You from LA?"

"Michigan," you said. "Visiting my grandmother."

"Oh." A pause. "How's that going?"

"She broke her hip."

"Yikes. Sorry."

"She's fine. She's very —" you searched for the word. "Resilient. And also apparently her physical therapist loves this place, so."

"Yeah, it's good," he said. "I've been here a few times."

You turned back to the front of the line because you were next. You ordered grandma's lavender latte, and then, because you'd been awake since six-thirty running along the reservoir and was now driving around Los Angeles doing errands, an iced coffee for yourself, and stepped aside to wait.

The guy in the baseball cap stepped up to the counter. You heard him order — oat milk latte, double shot, and could you also do a side of whatever that pastry is in the case — and then he came to stand beside you at the pickup end of the counter, and there was a moment of that particular silence that happens between strangers who have been making conversation and aren't sure if they should continue.

"I'm YN," you said.

"Martin," he said.

You shook his hand. "Nice to meet you, Martin."

"You too." He leaned against the counter. He was tall, you noticed. And the jaw was — there was something about the jaw that was still nagging at you in a way you couldn't quite identify. "So what do you do back in Michigan?"

"I'm in school. Environmental science."

"Oh nice. What kind of environmental science?"

"I want to work on watershed restoration, eventually. Or policy. I haven't fully decided yet."

"That's cool," he said, and he actually sounded like he meant it, which was unexpected enough that you looked at him more directly. "I feel like everybody's environmental science interest is like, solar panels or whatever, and watershed stuff is more, it's important but like, less Instagram-friendly?"

"Exactly," you said. "Rivers don't really trend on social media. But they're kind of the whole thing. Like fundamentally."

"Yeah." He nodded. He'd pushed the sunglasses up onto his head, and you could see his eyes now — dark brown, and honestly a little bloodshot in the way of someone who definitely hadn't been sleeping properly. He had a small scar through one eyebrow. "I read a thing about the Colorado River last year. Like the water crisis thing. It's—"

"Yeah," you said. "Yeah, that one's bad."

"There's a whole documentary about it. I watched it on a plane somewhere. Couldn't stop thinking about it for like a week."

"What do you do?" you asked.

A brief pause. Something moved across his face, just for a second, and then it was gone. "Music," he said.

"Like, music music? Or—"

"I'm a musician," he said.

"That's cool. What kind?"

"Pop, I guess. Mostly."

"Are you good?"

He blinked. Then he laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of him. "I mean I think so? Some people think so."

"Some people think lots of things," you said. "I'm asking if you think you're good."

"I think, yeah." He seemed to consider it. "I think I'm genuinely good at it. Not the best. But good."

"Okay," you said. "That's a good answer."

"What would the bad answer have been?"

"Fake modesty," you said. "Like 'oh, I don't know, I just do my best.' Or the other direction, where you're like, 'yeah I'm incredible.' Both of those are red flags."

He stared at you. "You're very direct."

"I've been told that."

"Is that a Michigan thing?"

"It might be a me thing," you said.

Your lavender latte was ready. And then his oat milk latte with the pastry. They gathered their orders and there was a brief, slightly awkward moment at the door where they both reached for it at the same time and then laughed, and he held it for you, and you walked out into the Los Angeles morning.

He fell into step beside you, which you hadn't expected.

"Which way are you parked?" he asked.

"Up the block. The gray Subaru with the bumper sticker about tide pools."

"I'm that direction anyway."

You walked. The street was quiet in that mid-morning way, the serious breakfast crowd gone and the lunch crowd not yet arrived. A dog walker passed with what appeared to be six dogs of wildly varying sizes.

"Do you miss it? Michigan?" he asked.

"Not yet," you said. "Ask me in two weeks."

"Fair." He looked over at you. The baseball cap was casting a shadow over most of his face and you had, you were realizing, managed to have an entire conversation with someone without really seeing them clearly, which was either impressive or an indication that you needed more sleep. "It's weird being away from home for a while."

"You're not from LA?"

"No. I’m Canadian." A pause. "I don't get back as often as I'd like."

"What's keeping you here?"

"Work," he said. "There's always something. Recording, promotion, shows. It's—" he paused again. "It's good. I like it. I just sometimes wish I could—" he didn't finish the sentence, shrugging instead.

"Just be a person?" you said.

He looked at you. "Yeah. Exactly."

You’d reached the Subaru. You unlocked it, and the jingle of the keys in the dry morning air felt suddenly loud.

"Well," you said.

"Well." He was looking at you with an expression you couldn't quite read, behind those stupid sunglasses that he'd pushed back down over his eyes. "It was nice talking to you, YN."

"You too, Martin." You got in the car, put the lattes in the cupholder, started the engine. Through the window you saw him lift a hand in a small wave, and you nodded back, and drove away.

You were a block and a half down the road before it hit you.

You pulled over. Sat very still. Looked at the lavender latte.

Martin.

Tall. Blond hair. That jaw.

"No," you said out loud.

You pulled out your phone. Opened Instagram. Typed in the first thing that came to mind.

You stared at this photo for a long, silent moment.

"Absolutely not," you said.

You put the car back in drive and drove home. You gave grandma her lavender latte and said, "How was PT?" and listened to twenty minutes about Diane's very interesting weekend, and said nothing to anyone about what had just happened.

At no point did you stop thinking about it.

That night, you sat on the edge of the pool with your feet in the water while grandma sat in a lounge chair nearby with a glass of wine and listened to the whole story.

Your grandma was the best possible audience for a story. She listened with full attention, asked the right questions, and never once made you feel like you'd done something embarrassing. She also did not scream like Isa had done, an actual scream, upon hearing the full account, that had sent the neighbors' cat fleeing off the fence.

"So he just," your grandma said, when you had finished, "walked with you to your car."

"For like half a block."

"And you talked about rivers."

"And handshakes and Michigan."

She was quiet for a moment, swirling her wine. The evening air was warm and smelled like lavender from somewhere in the neighbor's yard, and the pool lights were on, making wobbly blue patterns on the bottom.

"Did you like him?" She asked.

"I didn't know who he was," you said.

"That's not what I asked."

You put your feet deeper in the water. "He was... easy to talk to. Which I didn't expect. I thought, I mean, I didn't think anything, I didn't know who he was. But looking back, someone that famous, you'd expect a certain kind of... performance. But he was just. Tired. Normal. Wanted oat milk."

She smiled. "He sounds like a person."

"I know. That's the weird part."

"Why is that weird?"

You looked at the pool, thinking about Isa's posters. "Because in Isa's version of him, he's this like elevated thing. He's Mars, not Martin. And I met Martin. And Martin is just a person who's tired and wants coffee and thinks about the Colorado River."

"Isa's version of him isn't necessarily wrong," she said. "It's just partial. Most people are bigger and smaller than their reputation, depending on the angle you're looking from."

"That's very wise."

"I have a broken hip, not a broken brain." she took a sip of her wine. "Are you going back to the coffee shop?"

"No," you said.

She nodded in the way that meant she had filed this answer away under things that will turn out not to be true.

"Grandma."

"What?"

"Stop doing that with your face."

"I'm not doing anything with my face. I'm simply enjoying the evening." She looked up at the sky, which had gone that particular deep blue of a Los Angeles evening, the light pollution softening the stars to a gentle blur. "He sounds like he was nice."

"He was fine," you said. "He was just… A person."

"Well," said she, "sometimes that's the most interesting thing someone can be."

You had a system for your mornings in Silver Lake: alarm at six-fifteen, coffee (instant, made in the kitchen before anyone else was awake), running shoes on, out the door by six-thirty for a forty-minute run along the reservoir before it got too hot and too crowded. Then shower, then breakfast, then whatever the day required.

On Friday morning, the day was supposed to require a grocery run, picking up grandma's prescription, and then a completely normal and Mars-free afternoon.

The grocery run was fine. The pharmacy was fine. On the way back, you took a slightly different route because you'd read that there was a stretch of Silver Lake Boulevard with a good view of the reservoir from the sidewalk and you wanted to see it, and you were a nineteen-year-old in a new city and looking at things was free.

The view was genuinely good — the water flat and softly painted by the morning light, the hills on the far side patchy with scrub and the occasional palm. You'd stopped to take a photo, your reusable grocery bags hanging off one arm, and was standing, looking at your phone when someone said, behind her:

"Good view, right?"

You turned.

Martin, Mars, was standing about three feet away, in running clothes this time, no sunglasses, earbuds in one ear and the other earbud dangling, a light sweat on him like he'd been running for a while. He was looking at you with an expression that was halfway between surprise and something else.

"Oh," he said. "Michigan."

"Canada," you said, automatically.

He blinked. Then he seemed to realize what you meant and laughed. "Yeah. Canada."

"You run here?"

"When I'm in town. It's — yeah." He looked out at the reservoir. "It's one of the things I like about this neighborhood. It feels less like LA."

"That seems like a weird reason to like it," you said. "If you hate LA so much, why do you live here?"

"I don't hate it," he said, a little too quickly, and then said, "I have a complicated relationship with it."

"What does that mean?"

He fell into step beside you without either of you really deciding this was happening. You were going vaguely in the direction of grandma's house; he seemed to be going in no particular direction.

"It means," he said, "that LA gave me a lot of what I wanted and also takes a lot of things I didn't know I needed."

"That's either very deep or complete nonsense," you said.

"It might be both," he said. "I say things like that in interviews sometimes and people write about how profound I am and I'm just like. I'm just talking."

"You've noticed that you sound profound and you're not sure you are," you said.

"Kind of, yeah."

"That's more self-aware than most people."

"Is that a compliment?" he asked.

"It's an observation."

He was grinning now — a real one, not the stage one from the Rolling Stone cover on Isa's wall. It was slightly crooked and did something a little annoying to the overall picture of his face. "You don't do compliments much, do you."

"I do them when they're warranted."

"What would I have to do to get an actual compliment from you?"

"Something genuinely admirable," you said.

"No pressure," he said.

You’d reached a bench overlooking the reservoir. You sat down because your grocery bags were heavy and your arms were tired. He sat down too, not too close, looking out at the water.

"You're here visiting your grandmother," he said. It was half a question.

"Yeah. She's got a house in Silver Lake. I'm staying through August."

"The whole summer?"

"The whole summer."

A small pause. A bird of some kind cut across the surface of the reservoir and disappeared.

"I'm here through the end of August too," he said. "Album stuff."

"Right. The new album."

He glanced at you. "You know about the new album?"

"My sister is a fan," you said. "A very significant fan."

"Oh." Something shifted in his expression — a slight careful quality came into it. "Is she."

"She has three posters of you in our shared room," you said. "I'm living with your face times three."

He made a face that was between amused and mortified. "That's."

"It's fine," you said. "She's very excited you're in LA."

"Does she know you—"

"Talked to you?" you considered. "Yeah. I told her."

"And?"

"She screamed."

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize for her," you said. "She's excited. It's okay. She's a genuinely good person who has a lot of feelings about your music."

He was quiet for a moment. "That's — I never know what to do with that. The fan thing. I appreciate it, like, I know it's because the music means something to them, and that means a lot. It's just—"

"It's weird when people love a version of you that you didn't make," you said.

He looked at you.

"The Mars thing," you said. "It's not really you. It's a character. Or a name. Or something. And people love that thing. But you're Martin, who wants oat milk and has complicated feelings about Los Angeles and apparently knows about watershed restoration."

"I don't know about watershed restoration," he said. "I watched one documentary."

"Still. It's a different person than the one on Isa's posters."

He was quiet. Looking at the reservoir.

"Yeah," he said, finally. "That's — yeah."

You stood up, resettling the grocery bags. "I have to get back. These bags are going to leave marks on my arms."

He stood too. "I'll walk with you."

You almost said you don't have to, but stopped yourself, because you didn't actually mind.

You walked. He was easy to walk with, he didn't fill silence with noise, which was something you valued enormously in a person. You talked a little: you asked what the album was called (still deciding), he asked what your grandmother was like (a force of nature with a fondness for sangria and wind chimes), you asked if he'd grown up in a small town (yes, very small, very different from here).

At the corner of your street, you stopped.

"This is me," you said.

"Cool." He looked up the street — the yellow house was visible from here, the lemon tree in front, the porch with its wind chimes. "Nice house."

"It's my grandmother's."

"Still nice."

You looked at him. In the morning light without the sunglasses and without the baseball cap, he looked younger and more tired and more like a person and less like the photograph on the Rolling Stone cover. The scar through his eyebrow was more visible. There was ink on his right wrist — you couldn't tell what.

"You're going to be at that coffee shop again," you said. It wasn't really a question.

"Probably," he said. "I go there most mornings."

"Okay," you said.

"Is that—" he stopped.

"It's fine," you said. "I'm just noting it."

"I could," he said, and then stopped again, in that way people do when they're not sure if they're about to say something stupid. "If you wanted coffee again. At some point."

"Are you asking if you can buy me coffee," you said.

"I think I'm asking if we could be in the same coffee shop at the same time on purpose," he said. "Which is technically different."

"Technically."

"I just think you're interesting to talk to," he said, and he said it straightforwardly, without the sort of shine on it that would have made you suspicious. "And I don't get to talk to a lot of people who don't know — who aren't—" he gestured vaguely at himself.

"Who aren't a fan," you said.

"Yeah."

You looked at him for a moment. His eyes were a very dark brown and were, in fact, slightly bloodshot again, which you found oddly humanizing.

"Monday morning," you said. "I can be there at nine."

He smiled. The real one again. "Nine works."

You turned and walked up the street toward the yellow house, not looking back, and you were about eighty percent sure this was a normal thing to have agreed to and twenty percent something else entirely that you weren't going to examine right now.

Grandma was on the porch.

Of course she was.

"Is that who I think it is?" she said, squinting down the street.

You glanced back. He was already gone around the corner.

"No," you said.

Her expression said everything.

"He was just walking the same direction," you said. "We live in the same neighborhood."

"Of course."

"Grandma."

"I said of course." She picked up her tea. "Come have breakfast, darling. You can tell me about the watershed."

author’s note 🩵: i had a few days off of school so i was able to get quite a bit done 🙏 i have most of the next part typed out so hopefully it’ll be out in the next few days too 💘