Chapter 12
May
“How long is the drive?”
I was curled up on the window seat in my room, phone propped up on my bent knees as I watched Jihoon pack. He was back in the apartment that he shared with the two youngest group members, but only to gather a few things. He was still living temporarily in the dorm with the whole group.
My lips quirked up as I glimpsed his bed. The black satin sheets. They reminded me of the first time I’d been in his room.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Your sheets.”
“My sheets?”
“It’s just so… textbook.”
“Textbook?”
“Yeah, it’s like you read a manual on how to decorate your bedroom. The young, hot, single guy’s manual.”
“Jagiya, I haven't been single for months.”
Jihoon sighed, and I refocused on him as he faced the screen, slumping against the dresser and making the phone shake.
“Five hours, maybe,” he said. “Less if I drive fast.”
He grinned at me, and I gave a long-suffering sigh.
“Imagine what the company will say if you get pulled over.”
“They need to catch me first.”
“Babo,” I said, sticking my tongue out.
“Baby,” he grinned proudly, “you’ve been practising.”
I shrugged. “I have to keep myself occupied, somehow.”
“By learning insults? What else have you learnt, funny girl?”
I grinned, but instead of reeling off my growing repertoire of Korean curse words, I steered our conversation back on track.
“And your grandma? Is she okay?”
The grin slid of Jihoon’s face, replaced with something softer.
“She’s excited to see me. It’s been so long. She hasn’t left the house for two weeks, which has been hard for her. She used to visit her friends every day, but she says it’s worth it to see me.”
He dragged a hand along the back of his neck, looking away from the camera, unable to disguise the faint pink creeping up his cheeks.
He had been isolating for this visit aswell, to ensure there was absolutely no risk to his Grandma. They’d both tested negative this morning, so Jihoon was finally driving from Seoul to Busan, where she lived with her son and daughter-in-law – Jihoon’s parents.
“It’s such a long drive,” I said lightly. He was going by himself, and maybe it was silly, but I couldn’t help worrying.
He nodded. “Yes, but it’s safer than flying. And there will be no press in the car with me.”
He grinned, but it was more like a grimace.
“Are they still camped outside the dorm?”
Jihoon snorted. “Yes. They have no idea about the secret entrance. They must think we never leave.”
It was simple, but kind of ingenious. On the opposite side of the building was a door that opened into a small, gated garden which led out into a narrow alley.
It looked like a private residence; it even had a house number on the gate.
But the apartment was empty, and the residents of the dorm regularly came and went through that little door.
They couldn’t always use it – they had to go out the front to keep up appearances – but for sneaking out, it was a brilliant sleight of hand
Recently, it had become necessary, as the press had grown more vitriolic since the photos of us in the rain, and at the Christmas ball, had been released.
Reactions had varied across the board. There didn’t seem to be any middle ground.
There was a huge, and vocal, group of people – fans and non-fans alike – who supported Jihoon’s right to privacy. His right to be in a relationship.
In a way, the rain photos had validated my belief that people would be more supportive of their idols dating than was commonly believed.
Unfortunately, there was an equally loud group who saw it as a betrayal. It wasn’t just that he was — or had been — in a relationship, that had quickly become the accepted narrative, it was that he hadn’t told everyone.
There was a part of me, small and dark and twisty, that was furious at their sense of ownership over him. Over all celebrities. It was an argument I would never win, and one that left me exhausted.
Watching him move around his room, it was impossible not to feel the weight of it, and I wondered, not for the first time, how he carried it.
What was more worrying though was that some had come to the conclusion the reason Jihoon wasn’t addressing the rumours was because we’d broken up, and therefore he was heartbroken.
His current, and noticeable absence from social media was being used to spin the narrative into a frenzy.
The hashtag JusticeforJoon had trended for a while, along with some very angry posts about finding the person who hurt him.
There were several video edits that had gone viral. People had pieced together clips from the press conference where he’d been outright asked if he was in a relationship. They’d edited the footage and used his words, twisting the narrative into something sad and defeated.
GVibes had such a vast backlog of footage, from fancams at award shows, airports, backstage at concerts, to their many, many variety show appearances and lives.
There was no shortage of footage of times where Jihoon looked less than cheerful, even during events where he’d been positively gleeful every other second than the one they’d managed to capture.
These clips were rearranged, visually manipulated and paired with sad backing tracks. Add in some creative lighting, and the overall impression was that he was heartbroken.
Watching the edits, even I could concede it was a compelling argument.
On the one hand, it had provided an unintended boon to his profile, resulting in a surge of renewed interest towards his solo projects, but on the other hand, it had resulted in a lot of online hate towards the mystery girl. Me.
Almost overnight, I had become a sort of bogeyman, the very embodiment of heartbreak and malicious female intent.
Theories were wild; going anywhere from the idea that I was a gold-digging whore, to a spoiled chaebol princess. A villain in every scenario.
One particularly imaginative theory was that I had been in a love triangle between Jihoon and Woojin, which would explain their alleged rivalry last year. A rivalry that had been so well-hidden that not even Jihoon or Woojin had been aware of it.
But the real problem was that Jihoon wasn’t addressing any of it, and his silence was being seen as a confirmation.
Every time I considered bringing it up, I couldn’t bring myself to, because I knew why.
Part of it was because he’d been advised by his management not to acknowledge it, but another part ran deeper. Entrenched in trauma that he didn’t want to admit to.
I knew in my gut that when his fans sent condolence wreaths to be mounted outside the dorms to grieve his broken heart that all he saw were the funeral wreaths the anti-fans had sent to his Grandmother’s house when his uncle and aunt had died.
Wreaths with his name on them. I knew he was remembering how they’d chanted that he should have died, instead.
I knew he remembered how the reporters had harassed his family.
How could anyone move on from that?
I felt a pang of guilt that I wasn’t there with him. The feeling of being pulled in two opposite directions achingly familiar.
I took a breath, and tried to draw myself back in, to push aside the memory of seeing those wreaths outside the dorms.
The reason Jihoon had stopped going out the front door.
I refocused on the screen, dragging myself back to the present.
“Have you heard anything more about–about Hana?” I was reluctant to say her name. It felt too much like invoking bad luck.
Jihoon paused, his hands clutching a shirt in one hand, a pair of socks in the other.
He took a deep breath before he tossed the shirt behind him into the open bag on his bed.
He was facing the camera, but his gaze was somewhere else.
He tossed the balled up pair of socks between his hands.
The question seemed to expand between us.
“They spoke to her,” he finally said. “She denied everything.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“They asked her about the website, the Tabs, but she insisted she was just a fan of the site and had nothing to do with it.”
I nodded, because obviously she wouldn’t admit to something like that.
“What about the photo of you and Lee Hyejin?” I forced a degree of levity into my words, and from the slight pinch of his eyebrows, it looked like Jihoon noticed.
“She denied taking the photo, but did admit she’d seen it.”
Seen it? She’d bloody waved it in my face!
Jihoon continued talking, oblivious to my internal frustration. “She blamed it on a person who no longer works for the company, but would not say who.”
“That’s such bollocks!” I burst out, causing my phone to slip off my knee. I grasped for it, only just catching it before it tumbled to the floor. “Sorry,” I muttered.
Jihoon shrugged. “There’s nothing else to be done.”
I paused, running his words back in my mind. “Nothing? How can there be nothing?”
“She was asked to turn her phone over. They found nothing on it.”
“Nothing?” I felt stuck on that word, because how could there be nothing when I’d seen the photo myself?
“She must have the pictures backed up somewhere else,” I wondered aloud.
“It does not matter if she does,” he said, scoffing as he dragged a hand down his face, and for the first time I saw the strain in the lines around his eyes, the unhappy pinch of his mouth. He wasn’t nearly as calm as he was pretending to be.
“The company cannot take her personal computer, and without evidence, the police will do nothing. Without proof the company cannot even fire her.”
“But she knows about you and me,” I protested weakly. At least, I was pretty sure she did.
“It’s her word against ours,” he sighed. “Anything she might say would just be another rumour, and I think there’s enough of those right now.”
“That’s whats been bugging me,” I admitted. “Why hasn’t she said anything? She could have easily put my name on the Tabs, or anywhere else. Why hasn’t she?”
He sighed again, and it made me feel like an asshole for even bringing it up.