Chapter 8 #2
“Can we talk outside?” Cal suddenly asked, putting down the grill tongs.
If he didn't act quickly, Lia was going to find out about everything over grilled meat and perilla leaves, and he did not think this was a conversation to have over grilled meat, perilla leaves and a gallery of little brothers.
“Me?” Siwan asked.
“No, her.” Cal pointed at Lia with pursed lips and Lia blinked back at him with a ssam already in her mouth.
“Me?”
“You.” Cal nodded. Dongyeon looked up at him as if to ask what was happening, and Cal nudged his head in the direction of the door, a signal that he wasn’t going far. “Let’s talk outside.”
The autumn night was warm as Cal and Lia headed outside together. Lia pulled her jacket closer around her body as the wind whipped at them. Cal tipped his baseball cap lower over his eyes and pressed his scarf closer to his mouth.
“Where are we going?” She asked him, squinting from behind her glasses.
“Uh—over there.” Cal nudged his head in the direction of a children’s park that was conveniently one street crossing away.
Neither of them really spoke as they walked.
Cal was unsure what was going through Lia’s head, and he was wondering how the hell he was going to tell her this.
He was never great at details, he was always a big picture, broad strokes kind of guy.
But sometimes you had to put on your big boy pants and get through it.
The park was surrounded by a perimeter of trees, the leaves all in darkened shades of orange and yellow, swaying gently in the cool night breeze. The leaves crunched under their feet as they walked, and it felt like the kind of night that could stretch into forever. Like you never wanted it to end.
They reached the swing set, and Cal smiled when he noticed the bounce in Lia’s step as she sat on one of the swings, rocking forward, backward, forward.
“I listened to Blue Springs again,” Lia announced suddenly, giving him the name of the band’s last album before the hiatus, their first after military service, the last that had Bomseok.
“It sounds so different from the band’s first songs.
I think I didn’t really understand how much you were hurting in that music until now. ”
“I was surprised the company let us release that,” Cal admitted. “I was all angry and resentful. It was the middle of the pandemic, and I knew our music couldn’t be Bolt of Blue forever. We needed to grow, we needed to change. And I thought an album about toxic love was the right way to go.”
“But you didn’t recognize yourself after,” Lia said, her gaze seemingly far, far away. Cal moved to her and waited for her nod before he stepped closer. She shivered.
He held the chains of the swing so she wouldn’t kick him in the face, then crouched down so he could pull his scarf from his neck to place around hers. Her fingertips were cold, so he crouched down in front of her and rubbed her palms with his, blowing gently.
“That’s…not very pandemic-friendly,” Lia said suddenly, and Cal paused his ministrations, because he just realized what he was doing, how close he was.
Suddenly, he could smell her perfume, something green and fresh, could see the stitches on her jacket, the individual strands of yarn on his scarf.
His breath caught in his chest, and he looked up.
Just enough to see her eyes, clearer than anything.
Just enough for his palms to sweat and his nerves to get the better of him. Him, the lead singer of a band.
“Oh,” he said, letting her go. “Sorry, I don’t—”
“It’s okay, I have sanitizer in the restaurant, I didn’t—”
“But the scarf, did it—?”
She touched the scarf, burying her nose under it as she kind of nuzzled into the fabric. Cal wondered if there was such a thing as an indirect neck nuzzle, because he could feel it on his skin, a prickling warmth he wished was real.
“You wanted to tell me something,” Lia reminded him, all serious. Cal took the empty swing next to her, suddenly all out of courage, but so full of willingness that he didn’t know what to say. “We’re friends, right? You can tell me anything.”
Right. They were friends. And he wanted her to know how much it meant to him that she was here, that they had become friends.
“I wrote those songs because I was trying to get rid of everything Bomseok liked about me. He didn’t get to have CoBOLT Cal, Leader Cal. Not after we broke up.”
Why did he start there?
“Oh.” Lia blinked, and clearly, she hadn’t expected him to say that. To be fair, Cal hadn’t expected to either. But in his minimal experience with this, coming out was best done when you felt it was right, when you felt safe enough to say it out loud. “You were together. Like really together.”
He laughed bitterly, because it felt inadequate to describe the mass that Ji Bomseok had occupied in his being, and the parts of Cal that he’d taken away when he left.
“Five years. He was my first for a lot of things, helped me come to terms with being bisexual, and for the longest time I…I didn’t feel so lonely, being the leader of the band, because he was with me. ”
The tightness in his chest eased as he said it, and it was mostly because he hadn’t said that to anyone out loud, ever.
The correct, media-training agency-approved thing to say was that Bomseok had been integral to CoBOLT and their image, their music.
But it was more accurate to say that Bomseok had done all that so Cal could be himself.
“You loved him.”
“I did.” He nodded. “Not enough, I suppose.”
“You miss him?”
Cal shrugged. “I miss him like I miss weekday anime, or the calamansi juice they used to sell at the school canteen. Things that I can’t get back.
” Cal had already given up that chance. He didn’t regret it, choosing this over what Bomseok was offering—a different life, somewhere else together, but without music.
But what did they have, Cal had wondered, without music?
“I’ve accepted that we had to go our own ways.
He’s much happier now, I think. Based on what Soobin told me. ”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And that you had to hide it,” Lia said. “It would have been great, seeing you guys happy together.”
“I appreciate that,” he admitted, even if they both knew it would probably have completely changed everything for the band, for himself and Bomseok.
That the industry was cruel was already a given, but the depth of that cruelty had literally taken the lives of good people.
Idols and actors his age who saw no other choice but to take their own lives because the industry took their choices away from them.
People he’d known and worked with, reduced to a headline because how dare they need support!
When the actors (usually male) who committed literal crimes got only a little slap on the wrist and, after a teary press conference, were allowed to continue business as usual.
It terrified them both at first, and it had not been the greatest place to start a relationship.
But it happened anyway. It had grown and run its course to the point that he could say it out loud to Lia and not feel like the world was going to crash around him.
Siwan and Soobin knew too, as did their managers.
But Cal felt no rush in telling the rest of the world, mostly because he wasn’t ready to.
God, he’d been in this industry way too long.
“That’s not what Siwan and Soobin were saying at the restaurant though,” Lia pointed out, keen as ever. Cal laughed, because he realized that he hadn’t planned to come here and…come out to her. But he did know he felt better for having done it.
“So you do know Korean.” He realized.
“I don’t, I swear,” Lia promised, shaking her head. “But I heard ‘fan’, ‘album’ and ‘??’.”
“You didn’t get ‘??,’ but you get ‘??.’” Because perilla leaves was certainly the harder vocabulary term than “cool!”
“I prioritized food for my vocabulary.” She giggled. “I imagine that’s what foreigners hear when they hear us Manila people speak Taglish.”
“?? ??.” Cal shrugged, launching himself forward, then back on the swing. “All the languages in my head are making halo halo na.”
Lia laughed and let him swing a little bit more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a swing, and it was no easy feat to keep himself steady, what with his long legs and all.
“Huy, Cal,” she said, and Cal slowed down to face her.
The nearby streetlight was just bright enough that he could see the way her eyes softened.
“Before we completely change the subject. Thank you for telling me about Bomseok. I know it’s not the same, at all, but…
it’s nice. Knowing that someone else understands how hard it is, to be left behind.
To leave. To miss someone who felt like they knew you.
Especially when that person was so important to you before. ”
“Just growing up things.” Cal smiled wanly at her, and she nodded like she knew exactly what he meant.
And he didn’t doubt that. He reached over to squeeze her hand for a second, putting in it all his gratitude and love, all the words he didn’t have.
She squeezed it back, and he felt his world shrink into this moment, to just them on these swings with nothing else.
Cal watched her for a moment, enjoying the moment where she freely let herself be swung up, then back. The unguarded smile on her face made him hope it was because she felt she could be unguarded around him, too.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he said finally. “About me being your ex-bias. About me singing about things like ‘forever’ and love, but feeling like all the things I’ve ever loved are too fragile and breakable for me.”