Chapter Five
Five
Welcome to CA Alexander Kim!
SARANGHAE ALEXANDER KIM!
MARRY ME, DR. SONG
USA LOVES JEONG JINWON
I blink in disbelief, feeling like I’m floating outside of myself as I stare at these cryptic signs, trying to figure out what any of them mean.
Finally, with my heart hammering in my chest, I wheel my suitcase behind a pillar and do what I probably should have done in the lobby of the hotel last night, before he carried me into his bed, before we had drinks in the bar, before I even followed him upstairs to shower.
I google Alexander Kim.
And holy shit.
My phone’s browser immediately fills with photos and links to articles, interviews, fan sites in Korean and English. Photographs of him in Seoul, in London, in New York. And then, I see one image in particular and register that I am the world’s biggest idiot.
Yes, maybe I recognized him because he’s Sunny’s brother and my first crush, but that wasn’t the only reason his face was familiar to me. And the reason I felt like I’d just seen him was because I had. His face is on promotional posters in probably every other tube stop in London.
BBC exec coming here for meetings with American networks?
That’s shockingly close, actually.
I fall back against the pillar, deflating. I am astoundingly stupid.
It’s called The West Midlands.
If I could find a way to make the floor of LAX open up and eat me, I would.
In the background, pulsing frantically in time with my heartbeat, the crowd begins to chant, Alexander Kim! Alexander Kim!
The roar grows louder and then the entire terminal explodes into screams as four men in black suits step through with Alec just behind them.
His security team keeps the crowd away with arms outstretched, creating a path to pass through to, I assume, a car idling at the curb.
But Alec stops short, gaping in surprise at the scene waiting for him.
Sure, he was able to move around Seattle largely unnoticed, but had he forgotten the way Los Angeles loves its celebrities?
With a winning smile, he accepts a few items to sign, pauses briefly for a couple of photos, and then tries to press his way through the crowd.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in place in an empty stretch of floor about thirty feet from where he’s surrounded, realizing that I spent the night with a man I really should have recognized for the right reasons; realizing I’m apparently so deep in my journalism niche that I didn’t recognize one of Korea’s, London’s—and now the world’s—biggest stars; realizing Alec could have told me a hundred times who he was but didn’t even try, didn’t bother to share that part of himself with me while I went on and on about my job and Spence and—
And I’d wanted to thank him for being real.
While I stare at this man whose face and mouth and body I kissed and touched and took pleasure in, I register this is exactly what he meant this morning.
This will sound weird, and you’ll understand it later.
I mean it when I agree this was exactly what I needed.
I’m really happy to be here with you.
Exactly how it was last night.
Whatever happens after this, I want you to promise to remember that.
Okay?
Well, how nice for him that he got to have exactly what he needed, exactly how he wanted it.
I figured out who he is, I text Eden. There was a huge crowd waiting for him at the airport.
Good God, I bet she could have told me if it had even occurred to me to tell her his name.
Wait, what?? Who is he???
His name is Alexander Kim.
She replies immediately, a string of incoherent letters and symbols as if she’s just crashed her hands down on a keyboard.
I look up from my phone as Alec’s head turns and he gazes out in disbelief into the distance, scanning the size of the crowd.
Our eyes meet. Betrayed, embarrassed tears rush up my throat, burning my eyes, and I break away first—just as his mouth forms the shape of my name—turning and exiting the doors just behind me.
My frantic rabbit-hole internet searching does nothing to calm me down on the congested drive home. I can’t even reply to Eden’s increasingly hysterical texts, because I’m apparently intent on punishing myself with how big an idiot I am.
For example: I knew he moved from London to Seoul when he was twenty-two, but I didn’t know that he’d been scouted on the street there, hired by a management company, trained in acting, and cast at twenty-five in a romantic comedy about a group of professional skateboarders.
His character, the street-smart second male lead, fell in love with the daughter of a chaebol family.
(“Do you still skateboard?” I’d asked him in the bar, to which he’d only replied, “Really?” with a flat expression of disbelief that I can now, of course, translate.)
His second role was in a fantasy drama where he played a ghost that can only touch the woman he loves when she dreams about him. To get her to dream about him he—wait for it—plays the piano.
When I read this one, I audibly groan, earning an odd look in the rearview mirror from my Lyft driver.
I now know that when Alec turned twenty-eight he took a break from acting for his compulsory military service.
His comeback was in a science-fiction-themed drama that received mixed reviews, but he followed it up with an indie film, A Quiet Devastation, which turned into an unexpected hit throughout Asia and for which he won nearly all of the main pan-Asian drama awards that year.
After that, he landed the role as Jeong Jinwon in My Lucky Year, which is apparently the highest-rated Korean drama of all time.
Now he’s in his third season as Dr. Minjoon Song in BBC’s hit series The West Midlands.
The Hollywood Reporter conveniently explains that the upcoming season focuses on the stoic Dr. Song’s story arc and his uncharacteristically wild tumble into love with a woman he meets when she crashes into his car during a blizzard.
Sweet Jesus.
He was rumored to be dating his current costar, a French actress who, even if they both deny it and I believe that they really aren’t romantically involved, is so beautiful that I want to punch my own face.
Searching for information about the two of them together—a type of personal Google search I never in a million years thought I would do—leads me to a string of gifs of kissing scenes, scenes so hot they make me both turned on and mildly queasy, and are understandably setting the worlds of both K-dramas and BBC fangirls on fire.
In one gif, Alec pulls away from a scorching kiss and rises up on his knees to take his shirt off.
In the back seat of the car, I watch it on a loop approximately seventeen thousand times.
His abdomen is like a beautifully symmetrical rock garden, for fuck’s sake, and there are so many links to YouTube edits of the scene that I have to put my phone down and cup my hands over my face.
When we pull up in front of my building, Eden is standing outside, shouting at me before I’m even out of the car.
I catch a fair bit of what she’s yelling while I pull my bag from the trunk—“How did you not know it was Alexander Fucking Kim? Why did you not text me his name the second you went into his room?”—but with the Alec-induced chaos in my head, and going on only a paltry handful of hours of sleep, I can’t walk and listen to her freaking out at the same time.
I really need to go upstairs, climb into my bed, and sleep for a hundred days.
Unfortunately, neither Eden nor my deadlines are going to let me do this.
Every time I spoke to my editor, Billy, when I was in London, he grew more and more invested in the Jupiter story.
He wants five hundred words but is willing to stretch it to an almost unheard-of fifteen hundred if I can, as he puts it, “break a bottle over my head with this one.”
Eden follows me into my room and sits on my bed. “Start at the beginning.”
I push my suitcase into the corner and decide to ignore it for now. Maybe forever. “E, I have a ton of work to do.”
“Ten minutes,” she says. “I just need ten minutes. I mean, you could have called me in the car to save time.”
“I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the Lyft driver.”
“No,” she counters, seeing straight through me, “you had to google the fuck out of him.”
This is the one person who has known me at my best and worst. She was my college roommate, my postcollege roommate, my post-Spence roommate, and the only person in our circle of friends who never clicked with Spence, who warned me against moving in with him—I don’t trust him, George, she’d said, and I’m not sure how he’ll fuck it up, but I’m worried he will.
She’s the one who took my side and suggested the five who sided with Spence in the split “needed cult deprogramming.”
Eden Enger has seen me heartbroken crumpled and rock-concert high and has never judged me for any of it. But right now, she’s about to judge my complete obliviousness. I’m just going to have to absorb what’s coming.
“Fine.” I sit down at the edge of the mattress and fall onto my back. “Get it off your chest.”
“Gigi Ross,” she growls. “How did you not know who you were fucking? Alexander Kim’s shirtless promo still from Quiet Devastation was my computer background for, like, six months.”
“I was living with Spence,” I remind her. “I didn’t see it.”
“Alexander Kim’s face has to be all over London!”
I nod. “Practically every tube stop. He’s everywhere.
I have no good excuse, I just—” I drag my hands over my face.
“I wasn’t tuned into the television world.
All I was thinking about was this tiny handful of terrible people in the nightclub world.
Be glad I didn’t come across him when I was there, and trust me, I feel stupid enough without your help. ”