2. Jae
Chapter two
Jae
The last note of the song hangs in the air for maybe half a second before the entire arena swallows it whole.
Twenty thousand voices do what twenty thousand voices do, which is become one enormous, stupid, beautiful wall of sound, and my body clocks out and autopilot clocks in, and I am already walking.
The stage lights are hot enough to fry an egg on my forehead, which, honestly, would be more interesting than whatever my face is doing right now.
Smiling.
That’s the word.
I’m smiling the smile that is not exactly fake, but not exactly mine either. It’s Kai’s smile. Kai’s jaw, Kai’s dimples, Kai’s bright-eyed wonder at the screaming masses who love him because he’s perfect and uncomplicated and exactly what they paid for.
There is no gap, no moment where the performance ends and the person begins. The performance ends and the machinery takes over, and I am somewhere inside it, not quite driving.
I wave.
I bow.
I blow kisses.
I wonder if they’d still be screaming like that if they knew the real me.
As soon as I’m behind stage there are hands.
Hands everywhere—and I mean this in a literal fucking sense.
A stylist reaches for the microphone before my fingers have fully uncurled from it.
My manager is suddenly at my left shoulder, Korean coming out of him at a velocity that stops being language somewhere around the second syllable.
Someone shoves a water bottle against my chest and my hand closes around it by reflex, the plastic cold and slick with condensation.
The backstage corridor stretches ahead of us, narrow and poorly lit and vibrating with the aftershocks of the show—screams still bleeding through concrete, and the stage crew is already dismantling the riser behind me.
My manager’s mouth keeps moving.
Something about the after-party, something about the label executives who flew in from Seoul just to watch me exist under stage lights for two hours, something about tomorrow’s schedule, which to me, sounds like a problem for tomorrow me and now right now me.
I nod, throwing my hand up in acknowledgement, “?, ???. ??? ?? ?? ? ?? ???? ?????. ?? ?? ?? ? ?????.” (“Yes, yes. But I am not worried about that tonight. Tonight, I rest.”)
The dressing room door appears and it’s like sipping water after being stuck in a dry desert heat. I open it and step inside, letting the door close behind me with a soft click.
Silence.
Not real silence—the arena is still screaming through the walls, muffled and distant like a city heard from underwater—but the kind of silence that happens when a door closes between you and everything that wants something from you.
I stand there for a moment. Just stand. The water bottle is still in my hand, so I twist the cap off and take a drink, my peripheral catching a half-eaten convenience store onigiri sitting on its paper wrapper. The rice has gone dry at the edges.
It was gross anyways.
My costume weighs approximately as much as a small country.
White and silver, structured at the shoulders with internal boning that digs into my collarbones after the first hour, embroidered down the sleeves in a pattern that looks like frozen lightning in photographs and feels like wearing chainmail against bare skin.
It hangs on me now like something I borrowed from a person I actively dislike, and the person is me, and I still dislike him.
I plop down in the chair at the vanity and take a deep breath. Time to get out of this get up.
I start with the wig because the wig has to go first. Always first. My fingers find the lace edge at my hairline, work underneath it until the adhesive pulls and it finally gives way.
There’s a sting, familiar and dull, the kind of pain your body stops registering as noteworthy after the fiftieth time.
The lace peels back in a slow crescent, and then the whole thing comes free in one piece—bleach-blonde hair, styled with the kind of precision that requires three people and approximately an hour, now sitting in my hands like something from a cheap horror flick.
I set it on its foam head on the counter, its face painted to resemble my own.
For a moment, I just look at it. A symbol of Kai Ryu.
The name on the ticket stubs, the face on the billboards, the person twenty thousand people just screamed for.
He sits on the counter with empty eyes and perfect hair, and I sit here with my own dark hair flattened to my skull with sweat, the roots damp and clinging to my forehead.
The difference between us is approximately two millimeters of lace and several million dollars in marketing.
I roll my neck.
Something pops.
My right temple throbs with a headache that started during the second chorus of the third song and has been politely escalating ever since, the kind of headache that lives in the space behind your eye and reminds you it exists every time you move your jaw.
I reach for the cotton pads and micellar water.
The foundation sucks, but this damn eyeliner is its own kind of hell.
I press a soaked pad against my cheekbone and watch foundation bleed into white cotton.
Slowly but surely, my real skin begins to emerge in patches.
My eyes have the kind of dark circles that scream exhaustion from a life I didn’t choose.
My parents chose this life for me.
Well, more like handed it to me the way you hand a kid a plate of food they didn’t ask for and expect them to say thank you and eat every bite.
They own Crown & Throne Records, the biggest Korean-American music empire in the industry.
They met each other in Los Angeles when my father was visiting America on a business trip.
My mother had the business expertise to match his artistic genius, and together, they built Crown and Throne Records out of nothing but love, ruthlessness, and raw ambition.
And me?
I’m just the lucky heir who happened to be born with a decent voice and enough charisma to fill stadiums.
Lucky me.
My little sister eats this kind of lifestyle up. She adores the attention it brings, the brand deals, the red carpets, the way people’s eyes widen when they realize who her last name belongs to—it’s just not exactly what I have in mind for my future.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for everything my parents have done for us.
I am.
I swear I am.
But gratitude and suffocation can coexist in the same body. They don’t cancel each other out, they just make it harder to breathe, and right now, suffocation is winning by a landslide.
It’s something my parents ultimately in their own way tried to protect me from.
Giving me the stage name of Kai Ryu rather than using my given name.
They thought it would help keep the paparazzi at bay, help me keep a shred of myself, a little pocket of identity that wasn’t for sale, but it just created another version of me I have to maintain.
I peel the last of the eyeliner off and blink at myself in the mirror. Without the makeup, without the wig, without the costume, I’m just a guy. A guy with a headache, dark circles, and a dream of being…normal.
A sigh escapes me as I sweep my hand through my hair, my wig watching me from its foam throne.
I pick up my phone and stare at the calendar because self-harm comes in many forms. The next three months are red bars and exclamation points: brand collab, radio, variety show where they make me pretend I like spicy food on live TV like that’s a personality, award ceremony rehearsal, award ceremony dress rehearsal, award ceremony post-show photo call, rinse, repeat, die.
My thumb hovers over my manager’s name. I don’t call. I text, because it’s easier to be a disappointment in writing.
Me: ???? ??? ??? ?????. ?? ? ????? ???? ????. ??? ?? ??? ?????. ?????.(Migraine. Going back to the hotel. No after-party tonight. Please push meetings to tomorrow afternoon. Sorry.)
Three typing dots appear. Disappear. Then reappear again with the wrath of a thousand paper cuts.
Captain Chaos: ???? ??????.(We will send med team.)
I type back before my brain can overthink it.
Me: ???? ?? ???. ?? ?? ???. ???.(No med team. Just sleep. Please.)
Captain Chaos: ?????. ??? ?? ?? 9?? ???(Veloura) ???? ??? ?? ?? ??? ?? ????. ??? ??? ????.(Fine. But you have a conference meeting with the executives at Veloura at nine in the morning regarding your brand collab. No excuses.)
Gahhh! 9 AM. On a morning after a two-hour performance that left me feeling like I’d been run over by a truck and then reverse-parked on.
Cool. Fantastic. I love this for me.
I type back a thumbs up because sometimes compliance is the most aggressive form of resistance, and then I lock my phone and drop it in front of me.
I need a goddamn vacation.
Not the kind where I’m flown to Bali and photographed poolside for a magazine spread that reads “Kai Ryu Recharges His Batteries” in thirty-six-point font.
Not the kind where my manager books a private villa and then fills the itinerary with sponsored content shoots disguised as leisure.
I need a real break. A chance to breathe without a camera in my face or a microphone under my chin.
I need a chance to just be…me.
And damn it, after this tour, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.