Chapter 7
Ihung up on Becka, telling her that I needed time to think. She protested, but I ended the call anyway.
My eyes were glued to the screen the same way you couldn’t look away from a car crash, even when you knew you should.
There were thousands of comments piling up underneath the photos of the couple in the rain – us, I tried to rationalise with myself – but I knew better than to delve into that pit of vipers.
Instead, I automatically scrolled further down the page, seeing for the first time the photos taken during the ball. That one, magical night where we’d danced under glittering chandeliers, and I’d worn a dress that looked like a storm cloud.
There were dozens of them, all obviously taken covertly, judging by the blurry quality of them. Some you could even see the edges of furniture, clothes, fingers. It wasn’t quality work, but it didn’t need to be. You could see the subjects clear enough.
One of them – the best quality photo – was the one that Hana had shown me.
Chills ran down my spine as the moment suddenly came back to me with all the clarity of a flashback.
We’d been sat in the canteen, and she had suddenly brought up that the Tabs had published photos they’d obtained from the Christmas masquerade ball ENT had hosted A ball I had attended with Jihoon.
Hana had slid her phone across the table to show a screen full of images of two people dancing closely together.
Two people who had been wearing masks, but only the identity of one of them was anonymous.
I groaned, pushing a hand into my hair. I hadn’t forgotten about the photos, I’d just been… distracted.
Was this Hana? At the time, I’d been sure it was her. I didn’t know if she was behind the Tabs but maybe she was at least a source.
Hana had worked the night of the ball. Once she’d told me, it had clicked in my mind that I had seen her that night, working in the basement admitting guests into the building. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that she’d taken photos of the event. And if she’d recognised me…
A throbbing headache was beginning in my temple, and I rubbed the spot absently as I tried to connect the dots.
Hana was kind of an asshole, but she wasn’t a storybook villain. Just because she knew, or suspected that Jihoon and I were in a relationship, didn’t prove this leak was her.
I really didn’t want it to be her. Maybe it was a misplaced sense of loyalty to the only friend I’d made in Korea.
I’d often pushed aside that knowledge, but really, she had been the only person who’d made any effort to interact with me. I don’t know if it was the language barrier, but besides Joon, there were whole days that went past where she had been the only person I had spoken to.
Maybe that was why I’d dismissed so many of her red flags. She had made me feel less like an outsider.
Now, I was wondering if she’d tolerated me because she knew something dangerous about me. About Jihoon.
The comments she’d occasionally made, the snide little asides, the side-eyes. They were all starting to take on a different shape in my mind, slotting together neatly, like a jigsaw puzzle my subconscious had been working on.
I leaned back in my chair, blowing out a breath.
Despite it all, despite the looming scandal, despite the drama… the memory of that night still filled me with warmth.
No one, and no scandal could take that from me.
Re-focusing on the photos I tried to see it from the angle of the photographer. Most of them were taken either from the side, or behind me. The subject was clearly Jihoon, rather than specifically me, which might explain why I hadn’t noticed someone taking pictures of us.
But then, hadn’t I thought I’d seen someone? I tried to think back to that night. It had been just after the confrontation with the drunk guy who’d tried to bully me into dancing with him.
But then Jihoon had appeared.
My lips curled into a smile as I remembered the way he’d so possessively come to my rescue. I’d spent the evening on the fringes of the party, watching, but apart. But then he’d asked me to dance, in front of everyone, because I was his, and he was mine.
Through the haze of warm, fuzzy memories, I remembered the moment I thought I had seen someone pointing a phone at us, right as he led me through the crowd to the dance floor. I’d dismissed it, because when I’d looked again, no one was there.
Looking at the photo of the masked stranger with her hand in Jihoon’s, I think I’d been right at the time. Someone had been pointing a phone at us.
The photos from that night were… intimate. Framed in such a way that it was clear the two people were more than friends or colleagues.
My mask – that beautiful blend of crystals, swirling metal and delicate ribbon – was firmly in place, and while my hair wasn’t such an extraordinary colour that it immediately matched with that of the wet-haired girl in the rain.
It was not such a leap to assume that the dark-haired, faceless girl in the rain was also the masked one at the ball.
It wouldn’t be difficult to believe those women were also the as yet unidentified woman from the conference room.
None of this was that unbelievable.
Honestly, the most unbelievable part of all this was that out of three separate instances of being ‘caught in the act’, none of them had clearly captured my face.
It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying, because it was either an incredible coincidence, or it was deliberate.
If it was coincidence, it was because Jihoon was the goal, not me. He was what they were after. That is what stopped it from being funny and immediately veered into being sad. Because in every instance, someone was after him.
At his uncle’s funeral.
When he was in LA.
While he was attending a work event.
When he was out on the street, like any other person. Except unlike every other person on that street, he didn’t get the right to his privacy.
How did anyone live like this?
Was it any wonder he’d had such anxiety about us going public?
My pulse thundered in my ears as a spear of anger lanced through me.
My thoughts were in turmoil, a tangled mess going too fast for me to make sense of. The birds outside were too loud. The silence in my room pressed against me like cotton wool, and I couldn’t. Fucking. Think.
Goddammit!
I pushed to my feet, feeling like a caged animal with the overwhelming need to be in motion, to do something.
But what? Frustration clawed its way up my throat and burned behind my eyes, threatening more tears.
But I didn’t want to cry, I was so sick of crying.
Frustration thrummed under my skin, a roiling culmination of emotions I’d barely contained for weeks.
I didn’t want to be dealing with yet another, fucking thing.
I didn’t have the mental bandwidth. I was full to the emotional brim.
I had left my boyfriend, the life we had been trying to make to be here with my parents, who were going through a life-changing event, during the middle of an unprecedented, global health crisis, and a dating scandal had followed me from five thousand miles away!
Despite my best efforts, I burst into hot, angry tears, because fuck! I was so mentally drained.
I still didn’t have any answers to the question of our public relationship status.
It was a can we perpetually kicked down the road, and every kick sent us closer to the kind of publicity neither of us wanted.
I didn’t want to be a secret, but nor did I necessarily want the general public knowing – or caring – who I was.
There were reasons why we had never resolved the issue.
I gave myself a moment to wallow, before I wiped my face, took several deep breaths, and did the one thing I knew would bring me comfort.
I pressed call on my phone.
He picked up almost right away.
“Jagiya,” his voice was like a balm to my frayed nerves, and I took the first deep inhale I’d felt capable of in minutes.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
I sniffled, trying to pull my emotions back in, but it was like trying to roll up a ball of wool that had rolled across the floor. I was all tangled up.
“You’ve seen the pictures?” He guessed, when I didn’t respond.
I nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see me.
“What do we do?” I eventually asked.
Jihoon sighed, but I was taken aback by how… unaffected he seemed.
“We already discussed it,” he said, “and the best response is to not make it a big deal. I will put out a public statement that it is still my wish to not discuss my private life.”
I rolled his words around in my head for a moment, but they kept catching on the ‘we’.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
I moved over to the bed and sat down on the edge, feeling my heart slow down to a more normal tempo.
“Our managers and the PR team. We talked about it this morning.”
I nodded automatically, and said, “Oh, right. Okay.”
“We are going to only say that the photos were taken last year – and again, without my consent.” He sounded pleased. His reaction was not what I’d expected.
“The PR team said that pointing out they are old photos means we can get away with not actually denying the relationship rumours.”
From his tone, it felt like he expected me to be happy. And while I could see the merit of this – I could acknowledge it was a good idea – I couldn’t help but notice that he mentioned having this… war-meeting this morning, hours ago. Without me.
Again.
I could hear him talking, but it was like background noise to the overwhelming narrative I had running through my head.
That once again, our relationship – I – was something to be denied in favour of public image, of pandering to the select few people who would react poorly to one of their idols being in a relationship.
I clenched my teeth, swallowing down the bitterness on the back of my tongue. I almost choked on the unfairness of it all.
But what made me sick was that I didn’t have a better solution.
“The team are working on finding who took the photos from Christmas,” Jihoon continued, unaware that I hadn’t been listening.
“But the websites won’t disclose the information, so we probably won’t find them.
” He sighed “It may not matter anyway, the photos have already been picked by many tabloids-”
“I think I might know who it is.” I blurted, cutting him off.
“What? Who?”
I told him about Hana. How she seemed oddly invested in the site. About how she’d dropped hints that she’d known about us. Once I started talking, it all kind of spilled out, and once the words were in the air, I could see how much I’d brushed under the rug.
Jihoon was silent for a few moments.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” He sounded… hurt?
“I only really started suspecting it recently. There was a lot happening…” I said, weakly.
“This was important, Ky.”
“Yeah, and so is everything else at the moment, Joon.” I didn’t mean to snap, but my lips seemed to close around the words like a bear trap all the same.
Jihoon sighed, and I could imagine him dragging a hand through his hair.
“I’ll talk to our team,” he said at last. “Anything else I should know?”
I took a breath. “Actually, yes. Do you remember that picture I showed you of you and Lee Hyejin getting out of the elevator?” My breath was suspended on the edge of a knife as my body tensed as I remembered the morning I’d first seen the photo.
It had been at the end of February, and the gossip site, ENT Tabs were claiming to have photos from the masked ball.
Hana was speculating on the identity of Jihoon’s ‘secret girlfriend’.
Her theory had been that it was Lee Hyejin – a member of PrettyYOUngthings – and her evidence had been to show me a picture she had taken of Jihoon and Hyejin getting out of an elevator together.
The photo had been innocent, for the most part, but I couldn’t unsee the way he had smiled down at her. The expression on his face was seared into my brain, and even now, jealousy stirred in my stomach.
There was a pause, before- “I remember.” His voice seemed to settle in the quiet of my room. A mill pond before the stone hits the surface. Of course he would remember it. I had shoved it in his face moments before all-but accusing him of cheating.
“Hana took that photo.”
The stone hit the pond.
“She did what?”
“I know, I’m sorry, I should have told you,” I blurted out.
“Why didn’t you?” The hurt that seeped into his voice made me shrink back into the pillows, but it was my own shame that weighed me down, because I absolutely should have.
“I was too angry at the time, I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Taking photos of performers while in the building was absolutely prohibited. Career-ending. The sudden realisation that I’d unconsciously chosen to protect Hana over Jihoon was sickening.
Jihoon sighed, but it was a harsh sound. “Shibal.”
I felt my cheeks burn, but I took a breath, desperate to not turn this into a fight. “Joon, I’m sorry. I really wasn’t thinking at the time, and since then… a lot’s happened.”
He hummed, and it was several moments before he spoke. “I’ll pass this onto the managers. They’ll look into it.” A pause. “Is there anything else I need to know, Ky?”
“No.” I cleared my throat, and then, “No,” I said in a clearer voice.
“Okay. I need to go.”
“Okay. I love you, Joon. I wish you were here.”
“I wish you were here,” he replied.
The call dropped, the sound splitting through me.
It felt like I was constantly trying to rebuild myself, brick-by-brick, while he seemed content to paper over the cracks.
How did it get to this?
And more importantly, how do we get past this?