Chapter 5b Falling Into the Fire
Falling Into the Fire
“So… what now?” he asks again once we’re back in the front seats, the engine humming back to life.
I keep my gaze fixed on the glowing dashboard. If I look at him, whatever fragile bit of common sense I have left will evaporate.
Home. The word feels like a trap. It means facing Shin’s quiet, devastating disappointment.
“I don’t know,” I admit, my voice barely a whisper. “I just… can’t go back.”
Suho gives a slow nod, a rare softness smoothing the sharp lines of his face. “My place, then.”
The drive through the rain-slicked streets of Seoul is silent and tense. Every red light feels like an opportunity to bail, a chance to tell him to turn the car around. My brain, a professional in the field of bad decisions, runs through the Official Yoon Min-hee Guide to Self-Sabotage.
Step one: run away from your problems. Bonus points for hurting the one person who has been unconditionally kind to you.
Step two: run directly into the arms of the one person who is a guaranteed human dumpster fire.
Step three: willfully ignore the possibility that he is currently seeing someone else.
And yet, here I am, in his car, heading straight for the scene of the crime.
We pull into the underground garage of his fortress-like building in Hannam-dong, automatically tugging on masks and hoodies. In the elevator, the silence is thick enough to choke on.
He swipes his card, and the door opens to the apartment I remember—spacious, muted grays, leather furniture, and that faint, unmistakable cologne of his… mixed with something lighter. Floral.
I don’t ask. My brain, a professional conspiracy theorist when it comes to Suho, has already connected the dots.
He glances at his watch and lets out a low, frustrated groan. “Shit. I have to run for the shoot,” he says, already moving toward the door. He grabs a spare access card from a small bowl on the console and presses it into my hand. “You can crash in the bedroom if you’re tired.”
I take it, raising a brow. “You keep spares for guests?”
“You’re not a guest.” His smirk is effortless. Then he disappears into the bathroom to freshen up.
A few minutes later, the door swings open again.
“Do I look like shit? We barely slept,” he asks, ruffling his bangs.
Any creature with eyes can see he never looks like shit. Far from it. But the temptation is too strong.
“A little better than shit. Like… premium, limited-edition shit, if you will.”
His laugh echoes through the apartment, rich and booming, and for a moment, the tiredness fades from his eyes.
“I’ll be back late. You can have anything in the fridge.”
He slips on his shoes, ready to go, but glances back at me with a playful grin. “Don’t snoop.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The smirk he gives me says he doesn’t believe that for a second. Then he’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
I drift toward the living room windows, huge glass panels framing the Seoul skyline. The city still feels half-asleep, but dawn is breaking—pink and orange bleeding into the horizon.
My phone stays off in my pocket, a small, cold weight. I can’t turn it on. I’m not ready to see Shin’s name. Not yet.
Instead, I retreat to Suho’s bedroom and sink onto the bed. His pillow smells of him—a dangerous, intoxicating cocktail of warm, clean skin and that faint cedar note he’s worn for years. I breathe it in, letting it sink into me like something I shouldn’t want, but always do.
A few hours later, I wake with a pounding heart. No dreams—just that heavy, jet-lag-from-your-own-life kind of grogginess.
I make a cup of coffee and start wandering—fingers drifting over framed group photos, pausing at the scuff mark on the coffee table from a night years ago when we’d been too drunk to care, grazing the spines of his books.
Most are scripts or biographies, but one catches my eye. It’s a thick, moody-looking art book titled Los Angeles: A City in Monochrome. It’s the kind of expensive, declarative object that sits on a coffee table as a piece of decor, a statement.
I pull it from the shelf, its weight heavy in my hands. As I flip through the stark, black-and-white photos of empty freeways and palm tree silhouettes, something slips out from between the pages and flutters to the floor.
It’s a flash of jarring, unapologetic pink. An anomaly in his perfectly curated grayscale world.
I pick it up. A postcard. The front is a single, perfect sakura blossom—a cherry tree in full, brilliant bloom. The back is completely blank.
And the memory hits me, uninvited and unwelcome, an old file loading with perfect, painful clarity.
Us, years ago, crammed into a tiny practice room late at night, exhausted and giddy, whispering about a future that felt like a distant, impossible planet.
“If you weren’t an idol, what would you be?” I’d asked him.
He’d been quiet for a long time, staring at the ceiling. “Normal,” he’d finally said. “I’d live in Los Angeles, near my dad. I’d have a small house. With a cherry tree in the backyard.” He’d looked at me then, a rare, unguarded softness in his eyes. “And you’d be there.”
I had laughed, a sound that was probably a little too loud, a little too brittle. I’d told him we were too wild for that kind of quiet, domestic dream.
And just like that, the cynical, world-weary director in my head yells, ‘Cut!’
The scene is too sweet. Too sentimental. It belongs in a different movie, a different life. That version of us—the one who whispered about picket fences and cherry trees—never existed. He was a fantasy, a character in a script we never got to write.
It’s a dangerous thought, a piece of sentimental malware that has no place in the operating system of our current, chaotic reality.
I shove the postcard back between the moody, monochrome pages and slide the book back onto the shelf, closing the cover on a life we were never allowed to have.
Yeah. No. I’ve fallen for that daydream one too many times. I’m a grown-up now. I know better than to choke on that kind of empty hope again.
I curl up on the couch, knees tucked in. My phone sits facedown beside me. I don’t dare turn it over. I know Shin is looking for me; the thought presses against my ribs like a weight.
Eventually, I take a deep breath and unlock it. The screen is an avalanche of notifications I don’t have the energy for. I ignore them all—except one.
From Suho: I know you won’t eat unless someone nags you. My assistant left food at the door.
A small, tired smile tugs at my lips. Cute. But I’m not hungry.
Instead, I open a new message and send a single, guilt-ridden text to Shin: Don’t worry about me. Then I shove the phone between the couch cushions as if it’s radioactive and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The silence in the apartment is deafening. I pace for a while, drumming my fingers on the back of the sofa, wondering how to kill time while avoiding the two landmines in the room: my phone and the TV. The last thing I need is to stumble onto a gossip channel and see my own face.
I decide to take a long bath, sinking into the kind of bone-deep, flower-scented warmth that promises to temporarily erase my thoughts. Bliss.
When I’m done, I find one of Suho’s hoodies in his closet and pull it on. It swallows me whole, the sleeves hanging past my fingertips, the hem falling to my mid-thighs.
I run my hands over the broad shoulders of the hoodie, thinking about how those same shoulders once got him ripped apart in netizen forums for being too “bulky,” too “tall” to debut.
In a perfectly manufactured K-pop group, you can’t have one member towering over the others like a misplaced bodyguard. I remember the ridiculous diet they put him on, how he had to lose so much muscle just to fit their perfect, manufactured mold.
Now, only the scent of him remains on the oversized fabric that engulfs me. I feel like a ghost wearing a ghost’s clothes, haunting a life that isn’t even mine.
My eyes land on the clock on the wall. 4 p.m. My phone is still in timeout. The TV is off-limits. And a single, profound, and deeply philosophical thought hits me: Great. What do people even do all day without the internet or screens?
I drift back to the window, feeling like a caged bird as I watch the city move on without me. All those people down there, just… living. Walking freely, minding their own business, not being mobbed by paparazzi—they have no idea how lucky they are.
Finally, I crack the front door just enough to peek through. A plastic bag dangles from the knob, a silent, edible offering.
The scent hits me even through the plastic—rich, familiar sesame oil and the sharp tang of kimchi cutting through the quiet hallway air.
It’s probably cold by now, but that doesn’t stop it from being a deeply inconvenient and delicious-smelling complication to my plan of professionally sulking for the rest of the afternoon.
I glance down the hallway like a criminal about to commit a heist, then snatch the bag inside.
Inside: kimbap, a small container of kimchi, and—because Suho apparently thinks I’m five years old—a banana milk.
I laugh under my breath, unpack the package, eat two slices of kimbap, polish off the kimchi, and down the banana milk in three gulps.
What now?
I drift back to his bookshelf, but instead of a novel, I pull down the analog camera resting near the edge.
I raise it to the window and snap a few random pictures of the tall buildings just across the street.
The shutter clicks with a quiet, satisfying finality, capturing a slice of this stolen, temporary moment.
I get so lost reviewing the random shots I’ve taken on the camera screen that I don’t notice the doorknob turning until it’s too late.
Suho steps in, carrying the weariness of someone who’s been working under hot lights for hours. He kicks off his shoes, spots me by the shelf with the camera still in my hand, and quirks a tired half-smile.
“You’ve made yourself at home,” he says, voice low and amused. “Good. I like that.”