30. Jae
Chapter thirty
Jae
The terminal at LAX at six in the morning looks like every film set about people fleeing places they’d rather burn down than leave.
High ceilings, neutral beige, and that specific fluorescent hum designed to make everyone feel half-feverish.
The windows along the perimeter catch the gray edge of dawn, washing the polished tile in flat, pale sheets that do nothing to help the collective hangover of the departure lounge.
My shoulder bag digs into the muscle between my neck and collarbone, heavy with the dead weight of vet pharmacology texts I told myself I’d study over winter break in Seoul.
Amiyah rolls my carry-on beside me. The wheels hiss over the grout with that low, rhythmic squeak every piece of airport luggage develops after four days of being dragged across campus. The sound follows us like a metronome.
An overhead announcement crackles, tinny and unintelligible—something about a gate change three concourses away.
Nobody reacts. Terminal behavior is its own brand of catatonia: the blank-eyed shuffle, the thousand-yard stare into the middle distance, the posture of people who have surrendered to the fact that they are currently nowhere, heading somewhere that won’t feel real for another fourteen hours.
Amiyah walks beside me in a cream dress that hits just above the knee.
The fabric is soft and unstructured, draped with the kind of calculated carelessness that means she spent twenty minutes in front of her mirror this morning debating footwear.
Her hair is slicked back into a low, tight ponytail secured with a thin pink headband that catches the overhead glare.
She smells incredible—that familiar, dangerous hint of warmth clinging to her skin that she only ever breaks out on days that matter.
She doesn’t think I notice. I notice every breath.
“Your luggage organization is truly something to behold,” she says, tipping the handle of my carry-on sideways to inspect the bulging front pocket. “Three weeks in Los Angeles and you packed what looks like the contents of an entire REI.”
“Combat boots are necessary.”
“Combat boots for a trip to your parents’ house?”
“I have standards.”
“You have hoarding tendencies.” She shakes her head, but the corner of her mouth twitches. “And your packing strategy is a disaster. I found one of my missing cardigans balled up right in the middle of your carry-on.”
“That’s circumstantial.”
“It’s cashmere, Jae. You don't accidentally mistake it for a sock.”
I smile, slow and entirely unapologetic, shifting my weight against the luggage handle. “It smelled like you. Seemed like a waste to leave it in Los Angeles.”
Amiyah freezes, a tiny hitch catching in her breath before she narrows her eyes at me. But the flush creeping up the back of her neck gives her away, bright and sudden against the collar of her dress.
“You’re incorrigible,” she mutters, turning back around. But she doesn't drop her shoulders, and the corner of her mouth gives away the exact opposite of annoyance.
We hit the coffee kiosk near the security checkpoint.
The line is six deep, all of them clutching boarding passes and staring at their screens with the glazed intensity of people running on fumes.
Amiyah surveys the menu above the counter, her expression sliding through a rapid sequence of disgust that lands somewhere between clinical offense and personal betrayal.
“This is criminal,” she mutters, her voice low and sharp. “Ten-fifty for water that’s looked at a coffee bean and gotten scared. That’s daylight robbery.”
“You don’t have to buy it.”
“I’m buying it because the alternative is watching you drink battery acid from a vending machine and then listening to you whine about your stomach for the next fourteen hours.
” She steps into line with the grim determination of someone approaching a root canal.
“I’m doing this for selfish reasons. Your gastrointestinal distress is tedious. ”
I stand right behind her—close enough that the heat radiating off her back cuts straight through the soft jersey of her dress. Her ponytail is so smooth it looks painted on. I track the tiny, near-invisible freckles along the nape of her neck: three on the left, two clustered on the right.
The barista calls her forward. Amiyah orders a large dark roast, no room, and pays with a crisp twenty pulled straight from the sleek leather clutch hanging off her shoulder, waiting for her change.
The barista hands over the paper cup and her coins.
Amiyah takes one sip, her face collapsing into a look of profound, personal devastation.
“Unacceptable,” she mutters, shoving the cup into my chest. “That’s a hate crime in a paper sleeve.”
I take a sip. It tastes like someone boiled a pencil and strained it through a gym sock. “It’s fine.”
“You’re lying, and I know it because your left eyebrow just did that thing.”
“My eyebrow does not do a thing.”
“It twitches upward when you’re being polite instead of honest.” She reaches up, tapping the space above my brow with her index finger. “Right there. Telltale tell.”
I catch her wrist before she can pull away.
Her skin is hot, the thin silver chain biting cold against my palm.
She doesn’t flinch. For three suspended heartbeats, amid the chaotic roar of the terminal, my hand circling her pulse and her eyes locked onto mine, the whole damn building could cave in and I wouldn't even notice.
I let go first. She tucks her hand against her hip, and we keep walking.
The security checkpoint looms ahead, roped-off lanes snaking toward the scanners. The crowd thickens. The air smells like cheap cologne, stale upholstery, and anxiety.
I am memorizing her. Not the broad strokes—anyone can look at a face and see a face—but the precise, involuntary things she does when she thinks she’s off-camera.
The hitch in her breath right before she catches me staring.
The way the tip of her nose wrinkles when the terminal air hits her wrong, like she’s mentally filing a complaint against the entire airport authority.
The tiny, defensive tuck of her chin when she’s hiding a laugh.
I am cataloging her down to the cellular level, hoarding every twitch and micro-expression because I know down to the exact second how much distance is about to bleed between us, and the math of it tastes like copper and rot in the back of my throat.
This isn’t the routine ache of skipping town on a place you’ve outgrown.
It’s structural. It’s the terrifying realization that someone has moved straight into the load-bearing walls of your life—and worse, you’d rather the whole house collapse than kick them out.
I’ve never caught feelings like this. Not the girls I ditched in hotel lobbies after a set, not the rotation of models trotted out for press shoots to prove I wasn’t a complete trainwreck.
Those were transactions with expiration dates stamped on the receipt.
This is different. It’s roots. It’s invasive, stubborn, and taking up square footage I never budgeted for.
And sitting right at the base of my throat, heavy as lead: the secret.
Hyunjae Kim. Kai Ryu. Crown & Throne Records.
The global machinery my father built from a basement studio in Gangnam.
The life waiting for me in Seoul that has nothing to do with stethoscopes and everything to do with a dynasty I didn't ask to inherit. I’ve rehearsed the confession a dozen times—over coffee, in the quiet dark of my apartment, up on Mulholland.
Every version ends the same way: her face going flat, then cold, then that particular, untouchable distance of someone rewriting our entire history through a lens of fraud.
There is no clean way to detonate it. There is only the mess of the truth and the cowardice of the silence, widening every time I kiss her and swallow my real name.
We’re twenty feet from the TSA agent. Amiyah stops the suitcase with her heel, turning to face me, both hands gripping the handle, her weight shifted back.
“Your boarding pass,” she says, holding out her palm.
I pull the crumpled paper from my back pocket and hand it over. She studies it like a hostile witness, her eyes tracking the gate number, the seat assignment.
“Exit row,” she nods. “Good. Your legs are too long for coach.”
“They’re proportionate.”
“They’re offensive. You take up too much room.”
“Sorry for existing vertically.”
“Don’t apologize. Just don’t manspread into the middle seat.”
I take the pass back. Our fingers brush—a static snap of friction that shouldn’t register over the chaos of the terminal, but does. She doesn’t pull away. For a second, the armor slips. Just a fraction, but enough to let me see the raw edge underneath.
“Go,” she says softly, before the line pushes us apart. “Before the queue gets worse.”
I nod once, turning to walk off. But I only make it two steps before the math of leaving her catches up—a sudden, violent wrench in my gut that tastes like copper and makes my stomach pitch.
It’s a sickening, sour drop, like the floor has vanished beneath me.
I turn right back around, closing the distance before she can even blink, and pull her in.
I kiss her—hard, desperate, and entirely unhinged, drowning in the panic of what I’m leaving behind right there in the middle of the terminal noise.
When I pull back just a fraction, my forehead resting against hers, my voice is raw enough to splinter. “I’m going to miss you so fucking much, hotshot.”
Amiyah’s breath hitches, her fingers curling into the fabric of my jacket like she’s anchoring herself to the floor. The corners of her eyes shimmer, bright and dangerously thin.
“Don’t cry about it,” she whispers, her voice cracking around the edges. She looks like she’s about to break right along with me. Then, so quietly I almost miss it beneath the roar of the crowd: “I’m going to miss you too.”
I drag my thumb once across her cheekbone, memorizing the heat of her skin, before forcing myself to step back. “I’ll text when I land.”
She swallows hard, blinking rapidly as she forces her chin up into that familiar, stubborn tilt. “Okay. But don’t think I’ll be waiting by my phone.”
I nod, turn on my heel, and walk into the checkpoint without looking back.
If I look back, I don’t get on the plane.
If I see her standing there in that cream dress with the pink headband, looking at me like she actually knows who I am, I will drop the bag, walk back through the ropes, and spill every rotten secret I’m carrying.
And then I’ll miss my flight, and then I’ll have to face my father’s wrath and possibly his legal team with zero excuses.
So I keep moving forward.
The TSA agent takes my ID without looking up, swipes it, and waves me through to the conveyor belts.
I shed my boots, empty my pockets into a gray plastic bin—phone, wallet, keys, loose change.
My laptop goes into its own tray. My jacket follows.
I stand on the freezing industrial carpet in my socks, listening to the hollow thrum of the millimeter-wave scanner as the line shuffles forward.
On the other side, I reassemble myself. Boots laced, belt threaded, phone in hand. The post-security ritual is the closest thing modern travel has to a religious cleansing—the hurried reclamation of dignity, one article of clothing at a time.
I shoulder my bag and walk toward the gate.
Fourteen hours in the air. I drop into the exit row, stretch my legs into the empty expanse of the bulkhead, and pull the safety belt tight across my lap.
The engines spool up with a deep, structural groan that vibrates right through the aluminum frame.
We lift off over the sprawl of Los Angeles—a grid of orange sodium lights blurred by the coastal haze—and then there is nothing beneath us but an endless, featureless sheet of gray cloud over the Pacific.
I stare at the blank seat-back screen. The reflection looking back at me is hollow-eyed and unshaven, a guy running on caffeine and eight time zones of dread.
The secret feels heavier up here at thirty thousand feet than it did on the ground.
Down there, it was just a choice—a piece of biographical baggage I left packed away because I wanted one corner of my life that wasn’t audited by a board of directors.
Up here, it’s a ticking clock. Amiyah thinks she’s dating a sarcastic grad student with a complicated family and a bad sleep schedule.
She has no idea that the man holding her in airport terminals is sitting on a trust fund large enough to buy out her entire university.
The plane banks east, chasing the sun across the dateline. Below us, the ocean is dark, vast, and entirely indifferent. I close my eyes, and all I see is the exact shade of her hair against the cream fabric of her dress, waiting for me to finally stop lying.