Chapter 45 #2
“Jihoon, I’m tired. I don’t want to do this. Remember? That’s what you said.” My voice took on a sharp edge as his words came back to me with sudden, unbidden clarity.
“‘We’re just making this harder than it should be. It’s too much. I don’t want this anymore.’ Those are your words.”
He just nodded, like he was ready to accept whatever I threw at him, and somehow that just pissed me off more.
“For fuck’s sake, Jihoon. What do you want me to say? I don’t understand why you’re here. We’re done, please leave.”
“I need you to understand.”
“I don’t know if I can hear you say those words to me again!” I wailed, only to slap a hand over my mouth as soon as the words escaped.
He moved like he was going to get up, reaching for me as if he couldn’t help himself, but I shoved my hand out to ward him off, and he settled back down, gripping his thighs. It looked like it hurt.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
I paused. “What are you talking about?”
He took a breath, and it felt like the whole world inhaled with him.
“I was being blackmailed. They knew about you. They had photos of you – of us. They were clear, and you were identifiable in them all.”
The world exhaled, and suddenly my lungs were too empty. I staggered, and went down on one knee, gasping.
He was at my side in a second, reaching for me as if I was drowning. I didn’t try to push him away, I just held on, barely registering that this was the first time in more than three years that I’d touched him.
I allowed myself to slump against him, briefly indulging in the warm expanse of his chest, even as I felt the stiff material of his suit against my face.
I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself, and then I pulled away, putting enough space between our bodies that I no longer felt the pull between us.
“Tell me everything.” I balled my hands into fists, feeling the way my nails dug into my palms.
“Okay,” he agreed quickly.
He sat back on his heels, watching me warily, as though I might bolt. I wanted to. I didn’t want to hear anything that broke my view of the world, because I’d spent so long gluing it back into place. Now though, I was barely holding myself together.
But I also needed to know why my future had derailed. I owed it to myself to find out if… if I could forgive him. And me. For every way I’d blamed myself.
“It was just before Halloween” he said, reaching for one of my hands and rubbing soft circles into my skin until I unclenched it. I didn’t pull away.
“She heard me talking to Minjae after practice. We were talking about you.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy expression. It was the kind of smile you wear when you remember a mistake so big it changed your whole life, and you can’t help wondering how things might have been different.
“I was talking about the plans I wanted to make, so you could come home.”
The way he said ‘home’ made my heart clench, because it didn’t sound like he meant Korea. It sounded like he meant him.
“After Jae left, she came into the studio. That’s when I knew you were right about everything.”
I frowned and pulled my hand out of his to hold it up, a barrier between us.
“Wait, stop. Who’s ‘she’, and right about what?”
“Park Hana.”
I had to put my hand on the floor to steady myself as the words slammed into me.
“She showed me pictures she had. You were in all of them.”
I closed my eyes as a wave of vertigo crested over me.
“Describe them,” I said faintly, opening my eyes just in time to watch his expression morph into something…
Sad.
He sighed, reached for me again, but pulled back at the last second.
“The photos from the Christmas ball,” he said. “The shoes you wore, they didn’t cover your tattoo.”
I frowned and looked down at my foot, the vines and flowers so clear even in the dim light.
“She had other pictures of you when your foot was bare. Your tattoo… the photos matched.”
“That’s not enough proof,” I said, needing to put effort into the words to get them past my numb lips.
It felt like I was being pushed closer and closer to a cliff, and at the bottom lay the jagged shards of having the world suddenly know exactly who I was.
I shivered, rubbing my arms, noting with some detachment the goosebumps that pebbled my skin.
Jihoon shook his head, looking down at his hands. “There were more. Many more. That time in Myeongdong…”
The rain photo. Where Jihoon had been caught clearly in the arms of a dark-haired woman, who we’d believed hadn’t been identifiable. Stones slipped into my stomach, weighing me down, and drawing me closer to the cliff’s edge.
“She has photos from different angles. Your face... It’s clear.”
The visual his words drew felt like a blow to my gut.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed, holding a hand to my forehead, feeling myself sway.
Jihoon reached for me again, grasping my elbows, not to hold me up, but to provide strength. My world was tilting, or I was.
“There were more,” he said quietly. “She must have been collecting them. I think–I think she knew who you were to me for a long time.”
As if my mind had tugged at a loose thread, a memory suddenly pulled tight. I remembered a time Hana and I had sat together together after a long day of work. I had pulled my my shoe and sock off to massage my aching feet. Hana had seen my tattoo. I knew she had. I’d caught her staring at it.
I made a sound that was halfway between a groan and an expletive as I leaned back, righting myself.
The hand I pressed to my chest was some attempt to calm my racing heart, and to keep the pieces of myself together, even as I felt them slip away.
The parts of myself I had built up over the past three years.
A life, an identity, now at risk of exposure for a life I didn’t have anymore.
I took several deep, calming breaths, trying to rationalise this in my head.
“She really was behind the Tabs, wasn’t she?”
He nodded. “She didn’t say it, but she did not need to.”
I groaned again. I knew it. I just hadn’t wanted to be right.
It didn’t feel like there was a middle ground. Either she kept her mouth shut, presumably at some great cost, or she leaked the cache of photos, revealing my identity out for everyone to see, causing who knew how much irreparable harm.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, this incomprehensible blow, Jihoon kept talking. And somehow, it was worse.
“Jagiya… I know you hate me. But I need you to try and understand that I – I tried to do the right thing.”
His hands trembled where they held me, his fingers running back and forth as if he was trying to sooth himself by soothing me. There was a not insubstantial part of me that wanted to comfort him, but I pushed it down because I had a feeling I needed to hear him now, loud and clear.
“She blackmailed me,” he stated, like it was a precursor to whatever was coming next.
“You said that,” I said faintly.
“She didn’t want money or a promotion. Nothing like that.” He hung his head, fixing his eyes on the space between our bodies. “She demanded I end it. That was her price.”
I stared at him, unblinking for what felt like minutes.
“She… what?”
Jihoon leaned back, one arm dropping into his lap, while his other hand dragged down his face.
“It was the only thing she wanted. Me, to break up with you. I offered her anything she wanted, but she refused it all.” His jaw clenched as he studied the carpet. “I did not react well. I was angry. I said things to her I should not have.”
He shook his head, like he was berating himself for a foolish mistake, instead of having a normal, human reaction.
“I threatened her with legal action, but she laughed at me. She said she could do much worse to me – to us – if I tried that again.”
Because of course we’d already had the company look into Hana’s involvement with ENT Tabs. They’d been unable to find anything to link her to it.
“I don’t get it,” I said honestly. “I don’t understand why she would care.”
I didn’t understand why anyone would care, but I didn’t bother saying that. I’d said it enough.
Jihoon was quiet as he stared at the floor, and it allowed me the time to really study him. He was as unchanged as he was changed. His face was the same in so many ways, but harder. There were edges to him that hadn’t been there before, and I wondered what had put them there.
This time when Jihoon spoke, it was as though he’d rehearsed.
His voice was emotionless. “She told me I belonged to the fans. She told me I was putting my members at risk, because of you. She said, ‘Baek Jihoon, I’m saving you from yourself’, like she was doing me a favour,” he scoffed bitterly.
“She told me to either break up with you, or–”
He paused long enough to take a shuddering breath and drag his eyes up to mine. Even in the low light, I saw how they shone.
“She said she’d leak the photos and make the world believe you were a foreign gold digger.”
I blinked, feeling the words sink in. It wasn’t the ‘foreign’ part that made me feel queasy, it was ‘gold digger’. Such simple, little words, thrown around so easily and yet somehow they worked so effectively at painting a narrative.
In a brief moment of disassociation, I could see how it would go.
Foreigner. Famous Korean performer. Gold Digger.
I almost scoffed. The story wrote itself.
Oblivious to my inner narration, Jihoon went on.
“She said it didn’t matter if it was true or not, because it would be easy to believe it was. She said you would be hunted down. Doxed. Exposed as someone only interested in money or fame.”
Jihoon’s voice cracked, and my eyes laser-focused onto him, watching as he blinked furiously, and gripped the fabric of his trousers so tight his knuckles went pale.
But still, he continued.
“She told me that you were going to cause the group trouble. That you were ‘a problem that needed to be fixed’.”
I didn’t mean to, but a harsh laugh burst out of me a second before I slapped a hand over my mouth. Jihoon’s eyes collided with mine, and his brows furrowed.
It wasn’t funny. It was the furthest thing from funny. But his words – Hana’s words… They were a mirror to something I’d said to Jihoon right at the beginning of our relationship.
“I worry that I will be a problem for you."
Turns out I’d been right all along.
“She told me I’d lose everything. Not because of you,” he said quickly, like he thought this part made a difference, “but because it would look like I had lied to everyone. Betrayed the fans.”
He exhaled heavily, and that’s when I saw the invisible weight on his shoulders. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see the way this affected him. It had been so much easier to pretend otherwise.
“That’s why?” I asked when he didn’t continue. “You were scared she would ruin you and the group?”
It was what I’d always feared. I was unsurprised to hear it had nearly happened. I couldn’t even find it in myself to be angry, or sad, because the decision made perfect sense.
But when his eyes narrowed, I had to force myself not to squirm under his intense gaze.
“Jagi–” he swallowed the word, his eyes briefly sliding shut before refocusing on me.
“I did not make the decision for me or the members. Ky, I did it for you. You were never my problem. I was only ever going to be yours. I would be the reason your whole life fell apart. I could not allow that. It was easier not to be with you, than to destroy your life.”